Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [104]
However, these battle preparations were made not just to repel attacks from Shin Toho. The strikers could see that behind the scenes the management itself was pulling all the strings, and it was not inconceivable that Toho itself might employ other means to end the strike. The strikers realized that the police might be called in to force them to go back to work, and the defenses were also rigged to guard against this. As laughable as it all seems today, the employees’ daily lives were dependent on the outcome of the strike. For us directors, too, who had received our education there, our studio stages and equipment were virtually part of us, and our attachment would not be broken easily. We, too, were ready to guard them with all our might.
The Shin Toho people were probably driven by the same kind of motivation to plot the recapture of the studio. But the opposition we felt toward them was a deep and powerful emotion. In the year and a half since they had left, our antagonism toward them had become all the stronger for the hardships we went through to rebuild the studio. When still others split off from us to join them, the gulf became all the more difficult to bridge. On top of all this, when it became clear that behind Shin Toho’s actions there were ringleaders whose plan was to aid our immediate enemy, the company management, the stand-off took on the characteristics of an irreparable breach, a chasm created by an earthquake.
For me the most painful moments of this strike were when I was caught between the employees of the Toho studio and the employees of Shin Toho. I became the target in the crossfire of “Let us in!” and “Keep them out.” But among the Shin Toho employees pushing to get into the studio were a few who tried to help me. Pushing and pulling their comrades back were former members of my crew. All of these grown men were crying.
At this sight I felt an irrepressible rage welling up inside me. Far from learning from experience with their blunders in the second strike, the management were heaping more errors on top of what they had done. They were tearing to shreds the cooperating work force of precious talent we had nurtured for so long.
We are still crying with the pain of these old wounds. But for the management there was nothing painful or even irritating about these experiences. They never recognized that movies are made by a cooperative work force that is created by a union of individual human talents. They never recognized how much effort was required to bring about that union. So they were able to destroy with total equanimity everything we had worked to build. We became like the children in Buddhist limbo who have preceded their parents in death: On the banks of the River Sai they pile up stones to form little towers. But every time a tower is completed, a mean devil comes and knocks it down. It was like Sisyphus trying to push his boulder up the mountain.
The company president and the director of labor relations at this time were both men from outside who had neither understanding of nor affection for movies. The executive in charge of labor, moreover, was willing to engage in the lowest imaginable tactics to win the strike battle. At one point he fed the newspapers a story to the effect that I had been forced by the union to put certain lines of dialogue into the script I was filming. Since this statement had no basis in truth, and if it had, I could never have lifted up my head in the world as a film director again, I demanded an explanation. The response was, “Well, if you say it isn’t so, then you must be right,” and he apologized on the spot. But even though he apologized, the article had been headline news, and everyone had read it. A printed correction would be in small type and consist of no more than two or three lines. All of this had been calculated in advance, so the apology was ready and nonchalant.
In his outrage over the underhandedness of this attitude, the film director Sekigawa