Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [38]
Even before the echoes had died off the concrete walls, the Army captain, livid with rage, was upon me. I wasn’t a soldier, so he couldn’t hit me, but he dragged me off to the principal’s office. There he lambasted me with a fiery stream of reproaches. The next day my father was also summoned. I suspect that his distinguished military career had some influence at this point. I was fully prepared to be expelled from school, but I wasn’t, and no further disciplinary measures ensued.
I don’t recall that my father even scolded me very much. And although the principal was present while the Army captain reprimanded me in his office, I don’t remember the principal himself being angry with me. As I reflect on it now, it seems to me that both my father and the principal may have been opposed to compulsory military education.
Among teachers and military men there are of course exceptions to the rule, but there is a vast difference in viewpoint between the Meiji era—dominated by its elite military and business class—and the Taishō and Showa periods that followed, which were so marked by fanaticism. My father was a military man of Meiji who hated socialism. But he also reacted with horror to the murder of the internationally famous anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and others by an Army extremist in 1923, and when the assassin received no more than a ten-year sentence, my father burst out, “Madmen! What can they be thinking?”
My relations with the Army captain at Keika were very similar to my relations with the teacher who succeeded Mr. Tachikawa at Kuroda Primary School. He seemed to take great pleasure in calling on me to demonstrate everything he was trying to teach. I was never fit to be a model, and he enjoyed it when I botched something and made a fool of myself.
I thought over this situation very carefully and wrote a letter in old-fashioned Chinese-style prose in the book kept for correspondence between teachers and parents. It said something to the effect that “this child has a chest ailment, so please excuse him from carrying heavy implements like rifles.” I affixed my father’s seal to it and handed it to the Army captain. He made a dour face, but accepted its terms. From that time on, he could no longer abuse me with commands like “Target straight ahead, shoot from your knees!” or “Enemy target to your near right, lie down and shoot!”
But if a rifle was too heavy for me, a saber ought to be just right. The captain dragged me forward to be trained as a platoon leader. At my command, my whole class was supposed to spring into action. But my orders would contradict each other, or suddenly fail to emerge from my mouth, and the results were very strange. My classmates found this quite amusing, so they would march off in the wrong direction even when my commands were right, and when I did give wrong commands, they took great delight in carrying them out spectacularly. For example, when I said, “Forward, march!” they should have shouldered their rifles and moved ahead, but instead they would start walking with their rifles dragging along the ground behind them.
They were especially delighted when the whole column was marching straight for a wall. If I panicked and didn’t come out with a command to change direction immediately, they would happily plow into the wall, noisily scuffing at it with their boots. I would get out of the way and give up. No matter what the Army captain said, I would feign ignorance and say nothing. Seeing this, my classmates would all the more faithfully attempt to carry out my order and some would even try scaling the wall. The Army captain would stand there aghast until I came out with another command.
My classmates claimed that their intention was not to embarrass me, but to tease the Army captain for being such a mean-tempered fellow. They showed their