Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [45]
In 1925, when I was in my fourth year at middle school, the first radio broadcasts in Japan began. Even if I didn’t want to hear about what was going on in society, I could not avoid it. As I mentioned earlier, this was about the time that military education was instituted in the schools, and the world became somehow hurried and cold. As I look back on my early years now, it seems the summer I spent in Akita was the last carefree time of my childhood.
But such observations may be pure sentimentality on my part. In my fourth and fifth years of middle school, when I was about sixteen, I was still fumbling around with a crystal radio set. On Sundays I would borrow my father’s pass (why he had this I don’t really know) and go to the Meguro racetrack, where I would spend the whole day looking at the horses I had loved from childhood. And my parents bought me a set of oil paints so I could go to the outskirts of Tokyo and paint the scenes of rural life I saw there. I had a pretty good time.
During these years my family moved from Koishikawa to Meguro, and from there to Ebisu, near Shibuya. Still in Tokyo, of course. Each time we moved, it was to a smaller, less well-built house. I did not understand that this meant my family’s economic situation was getting worse and worse. I still insisted that upon my graduation from middle school I intended to become a painter.
At that point I was forced to think about how I would actually make a living in my chosen profession. My father, who had always loved calligraphy, was not without sympathy for my goals—he did not oppose me. But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination. Even though I felt that I had the ability to pass the practical painting test, I was rightly not confident of my command of academic course material. I took the entrance exam and failed.
Although it was a bitter thing to have to disappoint my father, I was thus enabled to pursue my studies freely, and I was sure there would be some other way to console him. The year after I finished middle school, at the age of eighteen, I had a painting accepted for the prestigious national Nitten exhibition. My father was happy. But after that I set out on a winding path beset by wind and snow.
The Labyrinth
THE YEAR I turned eighteen, 1928, saw the mass arrest of Communist Party members in the “3–15 Incident” and the assassination of the Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin by Japanese Army officers. The following year brought the worldwide economic panic. As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, “eroguro nan-sensu” (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”).
In the midst of all this social upheaval it was impossible for me to sit quietly in front of my canvas. On top of that, the cost of canvas and painting supplies was so high that, considering the financial situation of my family, I could hardly ask them to buy me a full supply. Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature,