Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [37]
Later, when I entered the film world, I was fortunate enough to get an excellent teacher in “Yama-san” (director Yamamoto Kajirō, 1902–1973). I also received warm encouragement from director Itami Mansaku (1900–1946) and excellent training from the superb producer Morita Nobuyoshi. Besides these people there are many directors I revere as teachers: Shimazu Yasujirō (1897–1945), Yamanaka Sadao (1909–1938), Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujirō and Naruse Mikio. When I think about these people, I want to raise my voice in that old song: “… thanks for our teacher’s kindness, we have honored and revered.…” But none of them can hear me now.
My Rebellious Phase
BEGINNING WITH my second year of middle school, following the Great Kanto Earthquake, I became an incorrigible prankster. Since the Keika Middle School building had burned down, we moved into the borrowed facilities of a technology school near Ushigome-Kagurazaka. It was at that time a night school, so the buildings were not normally in use during the day. Nevertheless, all four classes of second-year students were crammed into the auditorium instead of individual classrooms. For those assigned seats in the back of the auditorium, the teacher at the rostrum not only looked like a dwarf, but his voice was barely audible. Since my seat was among those in the rear, I was far more diligent in mischief than in studies.
A year later, even after the school was rebuilt on a site near Shirayama and my mischievous tendencies should have been subsiding, I got worse. While we were at the technology school, the pranks I pulled were fairly rudimentary and harmless. But at the new school I did some things that were downright alarming. Once I even put together all the ingredients in the formula for dynamite we had learned in chemistry class. In the laboratory I carefully filled a beer bottle with this mixture and put it on the teacher’s lectern. When he heard what it was, he turned white as a sheet, very gingerly removed the bottle from the lectern, took it outside and sank it in the pond in the school garden. For all I know, that bottle still lies sleeping peacefully on the bottom of the Keika Middle School pond.
Another time I concluded that a boy in my class who was the son of a math teacher but who himself did very poorly at math would probably get the final-exam questions ahead of time. I enlisted some of my friends and we led the boy out behind the school building. At first he insisted he knew nothing, but in the end we got every last exam question out of him. We gave them to everyone else in the class, and on the examination the whole class miraculously scored one hundred percent. However, these marks naturally aroused the teacher’s suspicions, so now it was his turn to interrogate his son. It seems he, too, got a confession, because the whole class was subjected to another exam. The result on the second exam was that the teacher’s son failed the course, and so did I.
Once a prank I knew nothing about was attributed to me. In righteous indignation, I ran over the tops of all the desks in the lecture hall wearing my spiked baseball shoes. But this was such extreme behavior that I didn’t confess to it, and I was subsequently surprised to see that my marks in conduct improved.
Toward the end of my third year in middle school, military training became part of the regular curriculum. A real Army captain was posted to our school, and things did not go well between him and me.
One day a mischief-loving friend of mine showed me a tin can he was carrying. It was packed full of gunpowder from the bullets we used in marksmanship practice, he said. He was sure it would make a wonderful noise if someone would smash it, but he couldn’t find anyone with enough courage to try it. When I suggested he go ahead and do it himself, he countered that he, too, lacked the courage and proposed, “What about you, Kuro-chan?”
Thus challenged, I could