Japanese Cinema: A Personal Journey

By Peter Cowie

• Peter Cowie is a bona fide expert on international film and has published 30+ books on the subject


• His account of Japanese film includes personal encounters with the directors themselves and others icons such as Donald Richie.


• A comprehensive guide to Japanese film: from prewar films to 21st-century Japanese animation.


• Has the breadth of an introduction for the uninitiated along with perceptive analysis to impress film buffs.


• Includes individual chapters dedicated to revered directors Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others.


• Peter Cowie is a frequent collaborator with the Criterion Collection where one can view many of the films mentioned in the book.


• Japan is considered to have one of the world's premier national cinemas: for reference, the Criterion Collection hosts 221 Japanese films, surpassed only by the United States and France in quantity.


• The British Film Institute ranks Ozu's Tokyo Story and Late Spring as the 3rd and 15th greatest film of all time respectively. Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Rashomon rank 17th and 26th respectively. Distinguished film critic Roger Ebert has sited Ozu's Floating Weeds and Kurosawa's Ikiru on his 10 greatest films of all time. All 6 of which feature in this book.


• Japanese film auteurs such as Ozu and Kurosawa receive individual chapters dedicated to their oeuvre, so too does the international face of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki.


• According to UNESCO, Japan has consistently ranked as the 4th largest film-producing country, in terms of number of films produced, and 3rd, in terms of gross box office, coming in at 2.4 billion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781611729566

Book preview

1

The Samurai World

Akira Kurosawa

My enthusiasm for the work of Akira Kurosawa has its roots in my early youth, spent in the bucolic depths of Gloucestershire, in the west of England. My parents would take me to see Westerns like Shane and Bend of the River, and every so often we would visit the circus in some nearby town. From the Western, my favorite film genre, I assimilated a certain kind of morality. And from the circus stemmed my affection for clowns, enabling me to identify with the zany antics of Tahei and Matashichi in The Hidden Fortress, and of course Toshiro Mifune in his lighter, rump-scratching, rip-snorting moments in Seven Samurai.

In my undergraduate years at Cambridge University, I reveled in the opportunity to discover the profusion of films that reached the Arts Cinema in the center of town. Looking back through the reviews I wrote during that period (1959–62), I find that almost every week brought some revelation—works by Bergman, Antonioni, Resnais, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Visconti, and, among Japanese directors, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Ozu’s lone masterpiece, Tokyo Story, shone like a lighthouse, and we had at that time scant knowledge of his scores of other films. Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu was screened at London’s Academy Cinema, and the Cambridge University Film Society even found a battered 16 mm print of Kurosawa’s Those Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, which I praised in Varsity, the campus newspaper: a jewel of a film that gently parodied the Kabuki period drama, with its extravagant facial expressions, its stylized gestures, and its bizarrely-dressed players.

I encountered Kurosawa at the Indian Film Festival in New Delhi, in 1977. We exchanged a few words at a reception, where Kurosawa felt, and seemed, out of place. We were the same height (six feet two or so), but even in a brightly lit room his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses as though he wished to discourage conversation. Impassive, Kurosawa would relax the following day when we strolled around the Taj Mahal with Michelangelo Antonioni and Satyajit Ray. His films revealed a persona infinitely more sensitive than his forbidding mien suggested.¹ Beneath the sound and fury of Seven Samurai or Kagemusha dwelt a troubled soul rich in compassion for fellow human beings. In this respect, Kurosawa reminds one of Beethoven—an artist driven to express his dreams and aspirations while at the same time seeking fresh ways of shaping those concerns. Action becomes a way of exploring life, whether it be a traveling shot in the forest in Rashomon, or hectic dancing in a nightclub during Ikiru. A medieval castle looming in the mist signifies as much to Kurosawa as an image of smokestacks in Tokyo does to Ozu.

Many decades after meeting Kurosawa, while researching my book on his work for Rizzoli, I sought out the Ishihara ryokan in central Kyoto. During the final period of his career, Kurosawa stayed at this haven of tranquility in order to work on his next screenplay, writing at a plain white table provided by the ryokan. Yasujiro Ozu, Kurosawa’s senior by ten years, also enjoyed writing in a ryokan, the Chigasaki in the Shonan Bay area southwest of Tokyo. Like Ozu, Kurosawa relaxed most while drinking with close colleagues, and Ishihara-san told me that postprandial sessions would continue in Kurosawa’s suite until as late as 2 a.m.

When I arrived, Ishihara-san’s selection of slippers at the door would not fit my gangling feet. The innkeeper scurried away and returned with a pair of much larger slippers. She showed me the sole. Lo and behold, Kurosawa’s own kanji character was written thereon. After the traditional kaiseki meal served in the six-mat rooms used by Kurosawa, I lay in the darkness listening to the soft, relentless rain falling into the garden beneath the window. Was the master’s spirit abroad that night? After all, there is rain so often in Kurosawa’s films. The torrential rain in Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, the unrelenting deluge in Rashomon, the storm in Stray Dog, the drenching showers in One Wonderful Sunday or Dodes’kaden, the soft, gentle drizzle slanting through the redwoods in Dreams, or the downpour that prevents the cat from returning home in Madadayo. Snow, that other form of precipitation so familiar to the Japanese, in Kurosawa may be beneficent (as at the end of Ikiru, when Takashi Shimura is coated with it in the playground), distressing (the burial scene at the close of Dersu Uzala), or reflective of a state of mind (The Idiot, filmed in the perennially white winter of Hokkaido).

During that same visit, in 2008, I encountered Teruyo Nogami. Petite, with a mass of curly white hair and face that was almost always smiling or grimacing, Nogami-san had been Kurosawa’s script supervisor and finally production manager, on eighteen of his films, all the way from Rashomon in 1950 to Madadayo in 1993. When we met at the Toho studios in Tokyo, she told me that her autobiographical novel, Kabei: Our Mother, was being filmed by Yoji Yamada. Her father had been arrested as a communist in 1940, and was never seen again. Her mother somehow managed to earn sufficient money to bring up her two daughters in wartime Tokyo.

Nogami had a striking affinity with Katinka Faragó, who worked for Ingmar Bergman from 1954 until 1984, first as script supervisor and then as production manager. No actor, however important, ever has quite the same degree of daily confidentiality with a director as does the humble script supervisor. Nogami told me some surprising things about Kurosawa’s way of working. He had once said to her that Mizoguchi films in the studio like he would on location, but I film location settings as I would in the studio. Even in films like Rashomon or Dersu Uzala, which look as though shot in the natural woodland, Kurosawa asked his staff to collect tree branches or leaves to use them like objects on a set.²

There was no one who could be called Kurosawa’s editor, recalled Nogami-san. "He was the one, there was no one else. As early as Rashomon, Kurosawa would say, I’m shooting this material to be edited. As time passed, more and more sophisticated technology became available for editing, and he was increasingly excited. From one camera and a single mike to three cameras and three mikes, all this meant more material to be edited. He was very quick in defining what material was to be used for editing, and took covering shots only rarely. On Sanjuro, the art director made an error and some of the blood gushed out of the ground as well as from the dying man’s chest in the climactic fight, but Kurosawa said, ‘Well, I was already thinking about how to edit those shots, so I think it’ll be all right.’"³

It is all too often written that Kurosawa was the most Western of Japanese directors. Returning to his work after an interval of ten years, I was struck by Kurosawa’s fidelity to his country’s culture and traditions. There is no more perfect example of this than his very first film, Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro, 1943), and its sequel (1945) in which the traditional martial arts of Japan are exalted, while the Western sport of boxing is almost mocked. In Ikiru, the sly montage sequence at the outset of the film excoriates a bureaucracy that in effect paralyzes city government, showing how one department refers complaints to another section, another bureau, another district.

Sanshiro Sugata offers a persuasive analysis of the marriage of theory and practice in Japanese martial arts. It’s a biography of the young man who founded the judo school, which would gradually replace the jujitsu style of combat. Sugata, like many of Kurosawa’s individuals, is on a quest, conscious or unconscious, for democratic integration into society. He must let go of his self and unite his spirit with that of the gods. He must know when to be tender, and when to be magnanimous. He must learn that concentration before and during a duel is of paramount importance. Both Sanshiro Sugata and its sequel imply the struggle for survival of a feudal Japan and its martial arts in the face of American influence. Kurosawa’s ensuing film, Those Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, shot in 1945 but not presented to the Occupation forces’ censorship authority, was released only in 1952 after the departure of the Americans. Part comedy, part musical, Those Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail drew its inspiration from both Noh theater as well as kabuki. Kurosawa preferred Noh to kabuki, as the music in this film attests.

Kurosawa always took risks with the cinema. Even in a contemporary social study like Ikiru, his inventiveness is breathtaking: the decision (prompted apparently by script advisor Hideo Oguni) to kill off his hero Watanabe almost an hour before the end of the film; the brilliant introduction of traffic bedlam as Watanabe seems lost in his thoughts as he lurches through the crowded streets; and the triple close-up so beloved of Kurosawa from Sanshiro Sugata onward, with three successive shots of the portrait of Watanabe at his wake, each one larger and more imposing. At the close of Ran, he reverses the order—the blind Tsurumaru is seen on a cliff against the evening sky, first in close-shot, and then farther, and farther away.

Deep in the archives of La Biennale di Venezia, one can measure the ecstatic reaction of reviewers and public at the international premiere of Kurosawa’s Rashomon in the summer of 1951. Quite apart from the aesthetic audacity of the film itself, the screening in Venice also represented a profound political statement: Japan was returning to the festival fold after the austerity of the postwar years. Rashomon won the Golden Lion, and no one was more startled than Kurosawa himself, who did not know that his work had been submitted to the Mostra. It was like pouring water into the sleeping ears of the Japanese film industry, he wrote later.⁴ If Citizen Kane may be considered the gateway to modern cinema, then Rashomon, one decade later, opened the way to an altogether more adventurous aesthetic approach to film art. Its intricate flashback structure, its mingling of realism and illusion, and its reduction of chronology to collage were exciting in the gray, often conservative landscape of 1951. Ironically, the film met with a lukewarm reception in Japan. Some critics objected to the complexity of the screenplay, others to the language used by Mifune’s robber. Its selection for Venice was thanks to Giuliana Stramigioli, who represented Italiafilm in Japan, and caught Rashomon at an early trade screening. Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints had been more admired by the West at the start of the Meiji era, and now, as Kurosawa himself was quick to point out, it had taken a foreigner to appreciate Rashomon.

A slender stele in a children’s playground in southern Kyoto is the only remaining evidence of the austere Rashomon, which from AD 789 served as the southern gateway to the imperial capital for six centuries. Babies were often abandoned in the dark corners of the mighty gate, a fact that Kurosawa includes in his film. On the backlot of Daiei studios, Kurosawa’s crew constructed an immense set, so large and so tall that, Kurosawa noted, a complete roof would have buckled the support pillars.⁵

Rashomon was the first Japanese film to reach a large audience in the West and opened the way for the discovery of Mizoguchi and, later, Ozu. It has survived across seven decades by virtue of two distinctive virtues—its pace and its cinematography. Its form is that of a classic whodunnit. Who indeed murdered the young samurai in the sun-struck forest near Yamashina—the woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), the brigand (Toshiro Mifune), or even the ravishing bride of the victim? What impresses more than the plot is the form of this early masterpiece. Most important of all, Kazuo Miyagawa, recognized by his peers as the greatest cinematographer produced by Japan, had been working for fifteen years before joining Kurosawa’s crew on Rashomon. Miyagawa had the intuition and talent to realize Kurosawa’s determination to bring the medieval period to vivid, surging life. He set up the most elaborate tracking shots through the virgin forest around Nara, and coped with the intense rainfall at the Rashomon gate itself. In the early scenes, the camera follows the woodcutter as he hastens through the dense woodland, tracking alongside him as well as looking up at him from a lower level and gazing down at him from above. This symphony of movement, set to the urgent music of Fumio Hayasaka, reaches an abrupt and perfectly timed conclusion as the woodcutter sees a woman’s delicate headgear caught on a branch.

The film resonates with a humanism akin to that of John Ford, a director much admired by Kurosawa. In one shot the brigand rides in silhouette across a plain with clouds massing above, reminiscent of similar images in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk. The way the men at the gate discuss what to do with the abandoned baby evokes Ford’s 3 Godfathers. In earlier films like The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog, Kurosawa had developed the idea of the young learning from the old, and vice versa. This emerges once again at the end of Rashomon, when the young priest acknowledges his ignorance of life and the aging woodcutter recognizes his own prejudice and naiveté.

Rashomon is set around the tenth century, during the Heian period, with costumes, language, and behavior faithful to the period—very different to the usual run of jidaigeki films, which are usually set in the late Edo period. The film historian Tadao Sato notes the influence of Noh and also, musically, of the Spanish bolero. Contrary to traditional films in which the woman is morally submissive toward the man who controls her, this heroine sheds all her modesty and manipulates the two men, the samurai and the bandit.⁶ Kurosawa has been reproached for presenting a masculine world in which women perform a subsidiary role, but Machiko Kyo, a former revue dancer, plays the role of the raped woman with a dynamism "never encountered before among Japanese actresses in the jidaigeki genre."⁷ The tomboyish princess Yuki in The Hidden Fortress cuts a similar figure, and would inspire George Lucas when developing the personality of Princess Leia in Star Wars.

I cannot omit reference here to a film that, along with Rashomon, established the reputation of Japanese cinema in the West in the early 1950s. Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953) was the first Japanese film shot in Eastmancolor, and its resplendent costumes entranced foreign audiences more than those at home, who regarded Kinugasa’s film as a typical jidaigeki drama. Nonetheless, Gate of Hell excels by virtue of its grasp of human nature and the effect of amour fou. At the height of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans in twelfth-century Japan, Morito and his brother are beholden to different sides. Morito rescues Kesa, also played by Machiko Kyo, a lady-in-waiting who is married to the suave and powerful Wataru. Smitten by her beauty, Morito resolves to gain her love. His choleric nature betrays him. Reduced to cutting off his topknot and passing at dawn through the gate of hell in his guise as a monk, Morito is the victim of the rigid, militarist rules of the period.

Adapted from a play by Kan Kikuchi, Gate of Hell was shot by one of the greatest of all Japanese cinematographers, Kohei Sugiyama, who had photographed Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness and Crossroads in the 1920s, and then Mizoguchi’s The 47 Ronin. The action and suspense belie the stage origins of the film, notably in the sword fighting on the sands at Miyajima and the horse-racing sequence at Kamo. Every detail of leather, armor, and silken robes is impeccable, and gauze curtains give the interiors a sense of fantasy and fragility as Kesa plucks at her koto (or zither). Kinugasa’s masterpiece may be compared favorably to Hollywood and British epics of the same period, such as The Robe, Ivanhoe, or The Knights of the Round Table. The unrelenting thrust of the narrative, and the savage irony of its climax, render Gate of Hell more than just a gorgeous jewel in the postwar gloom of Japan.

Themes particular to Japanese culture can be discerned like the threads in the elaborately wrought fabric of an obi: the shame, for example, that accompanies failure in love as well as defeat in war. At the close of Gate of Hell, the warrior-antihero Morito must atone for his tragic, misguided pursuit of his love not by committing seppuku but by withdrawing to a monastery. In Rashomon, the bride who has, it seems, been raped in the forest must bow her head in shame before the tribunal investigating the incident.

Meanwhile, Akira Kurosawa was up to his knees in mud and melted snow in the Izu peninsula. He was on location for Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), which would set a new benchmark for historical epics and which looks just as fresh today in its original 207-minute version. It was at the time the most expensive production ever mounted in Japan. Shot in black-and-white, using the old 1.33 to 1 screen ratio, Seven Samurai brings the feudal era to life with fluency and a conviction never found in the Hollywood epics of the period. In Japan, artisan skills pass from generation to generation, whether it be the slicing of gold leaf or the tempering of medieval swords. The Japanese are proud of their traditions. Authenticity comes easily to their craftsmen, which is why the historical details in Seven Samurai are so impressive.

When I first saw it seven years later, the film stunned me as much by its almost nonstop, thundering soundtrack as by its rapid tracking shots through forests and alongside galloping horsemen. Each composition contains an inner dynamic, and there is an incessant contrast between the beauty of nature (barley undulating in the wind, a profusion of flowers in the forest) and the savagery of men. The numerous action sequences were often filmed in a single take, thanks to multiple camera set-ups. The actors don’t know which camera is trained on them, said Kurosawa in a later interview,