Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [11]
But Mr. Tachikawa did nothing so foolish. He just said, “Draw whatever you like.” Everyone took out drawing paper and colored pencils and began. I too started to draw—I don’t remember what it was I attempted to draw, but I drew with all my might. I pressed so hard the pencils broke, and then I put saliva on my fingertips and smeared the colors around, eventually ending up with my hands a variety of hues.
When we finished, Mr. Tachikawa took each student’s picture and put it up on the blackboard. He asked the class to express opinions freely on each in turn, and when it came to mine, the only response was raucous laughter. But Mr. Tachikawa turned a stern gaze on the laughing multitude and proceeded to praise my picture to the skies. I don’t remember exactly what he said. But I do seem to recall that he called special attention to the places where I had rubbed my spit-covered fingers on the colors. Then he took my picture and put three big concentric circles on it in bright red ink: the highest mark. That I remember perfectly.
From that time on, even though I still hated school, I somehow found myself hurrying to school in anticipation on the days when we had art classes. That grade of three circles had led me to enjoy drawing pictures. I drew everything. And I became really good at drawing. At the same time my marks in other subjects suddenly began to improve. By the time Mr. Tachikawa left Kuroda, I was the president of my class, wearing a little gold badge with a purple ribbon on my chest.
I have another unforgettable memory of Mr. Tachikawa during my time at Kuroda Primary School. One day—I think it was during handicrafts class—he came into the classroom carrying a huge roll of thick paper. When he opened it up and showed it to us, laid out flat, it was a map, with streets drawn on it. He then instructed us to build our own houses on these streets and make our own town. Everyone started in with great enthusiasm. Many ideas came forth, and we ended with not only each student’s own dream house, but with landscaping for tree-lined streets, ancient trees that had always been on the site and living fences of flowering vines. It was a lovely city, and it had been created by cleverly drawing out the individual personality of each child in the class. Upon completion of our project, our eyes shone, our faces glowed and we gazed proudly at our handiwork. I remember the feeling of that moment as if it were yesterday.
In the early Taishō era (1912–1926), when I started school, the word “teacher” was synonymous with “scary person.” The fact that at such a time I encountered such free and innovative education with such creative impulse behind it—that I encountered a teacher like Mr. Tachikawa at such a time—I cherish among the rarest of blessings.
There was a third hidden force that helped me grow. In my class as Kuroda there was another crybaby, a child who was worse than I. The very existence of this child was like having a mirror thrust in front of my face. I was forced to see myself objectively. I recognized that he was like me, and watching him and realizing how unacceptable his behavior was made me feel uneasy about myself. The child who resembled me and who afforded me the opportunity of seeing my own reflection, this perfect specimen of a crybaby, was named Uekusa Keinosuke, much later co-scriptwriter with me on several films. (Now, don’t get angry, Kei-chan. We’re both crybabies, aren’t we? Only now you’ve become a romantic crybaby and I’m a humanist crybaby.)
Through some kind of strange fate, Uekusa and I were joined together from childhood to adolescence. We grew like two wisteria vines, clinging and twining around each other. The details of our life in this era can be found in a novel Uekusa wrote. But Uekusa has his viewpoint and I have mine. And because people want themselves to have been a certain way, they have a disturbing tendency to convince, themselves they really were that way. Perhaps if I wrote an account of my childhood with Uekusa to be compared with the account in his novel, we would come very close