Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [39]
The inspector bellowed, “That will do!” I quickly glanced at the face of the captain, standing at attention next to the inspector. He looked as if he had bitten into something that he had thought was a steamed rice cake but turned out to be horse manure. The strained relations between us continued until I graduated from middle school.
It seems to me now that this relationship constituted my second rebellious phase. I feel I concentrated all my youthful resistance on this one man. I say this because during this period I showed no antagonism toward my family or anyone else—only this Army captain received the full brunt of my hostility.
When I graduated from Keika Middle School, I was the only one in my class who failed military education. I did not receive a certificate of commissioned officer’s competence. Moreover, fearing what the captain might say to me at the graduation ceremony, I stayed home. But later when I went to pick up my diploma and passed through the school gate on my way back home, there he was lying in wait. He came after me, planting himself in my path and glaring menacingly. “Traitor!” he roared. Passers-by stopped in amazement and stared at us. But I had been prepared for a scolding from him, and I didn’t waste a moment with my response: “I have graduated from Keika Middle School. You as the military officer attached to the school no longer have the right or the responsibility to say anything to me. Finished!” His face changed several colors with the facility of a chameleon. I waved my rolled-up diploma at that face and turned my back on him. After I had gone a short distance, I turned around and looked back to see him still standing there.
A Distant Village
MY FATHER’S PEOPLE are from Akita in the northern part of Honshu. For this reason, apparently, my name is listed with the Tokyo Association of Akita Prefecture Natives. But my mother was born in Osaka, and I myself was born in the Ōmori district of Tokyo, so I really don’t have the feeling that I am a native of Akita Prefecture or that it is in any way my home.
As if Japan weren’t small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language, I don’t feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
My father’s home in the back country of Akita has been altered cruelly. In the brook that flows through the center of the village where my father was born, where once lovely grasses and flowers bloomed, there is now refuse: teacups, beer bottles, tin cans, laborers’ rubber shoes and even knee boots. Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.
When I visited the Akita countryside in my middle-school days, the people were truly simple. And it is not as if the scenery there were the most picturesque imaginable. It was ordinary enough. But at the same time it was replete with a simple beauty. To be accurate about it, the village in which my