Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [74]
But to me it looked a little different. Daiei paid me 200 yen for each script. My salary at Toho was 48 yen a month, or 576 yen a year. If I wrote three scripts a year for Daiei, Toho would be making an average of 25 yen a month from me—over half my salary. So it appeared to me that Toho was not employing me for 48 yen a month, but rather that I was employing Toho for 25 yen a month. This seemed pretty strange, but I didn’t say anything about it. When an executive from Daiei later asked me if I had received my money all right, I told him very straightforwardly what had happened. He looked astounded for a moment, said, “That’s terrible!” and disappeared into the accounting office. He reemerged with 100 yen, which he handed to me directly.
From that time on, whenever I wrote a script for Daiei, we went through this rigmarole. Perhaps Toho was worried that if I received too much money I would drink too much.
As a matter of fact, I did develop a case of incipient gastric ulcers from drinking too much. So I went on a mountain-climbing expedition with Taniguchi Senkichi. After spending the whole day clambering around the peaks, I was so sleepy in the evening I could drink hardly any saké at all, so I got well right away. Once cured, I started writing another script in order to drink again.
(All this drinking had begun with Horses, We assistant directors were so busy we couldn’t drink saké with our evening meals at the inn on location because we had to rush through our dinner and start preparing for the next day’s shooting. And when we came back, everyone else was already asleep. The people who ran the inn felt so sorry for us that they always set out a serving bottle full of saké for each of us by our pillows, and they left a kettle on the hibachi coals for us to heat it up with. Every night we drank our saké in bed, with just our heads sticking out of the covers. We looked like tortoises poking our heads out of our shells, and eventually we became stewed tortoises.)
My life of writing and drinking went on like this for about a year. Then at last it was proposed that I direct my own script Daruma-dera no doitsujin (A German at Daruma Temple). But as soon as we went into pre-production, the project was abandoned because of the restrictions on film distribution. The Pacific War had begun. And at this inauspicious time my desperate battle to become a director also started in earnest.
During the Pacific War, freedom of speech became more restricted day by day in Japan. Even though my script had been selected by the production company for filming, the Ministry of the Interior’s censorship bureau rejected it. The verdict of the censors was final; there was no recourse.
Nor were the censors lax. At that time it was determined an offense to make use of the chrysanthemum crest of the imperial household, and any pattern even resembling it was proscribed. Because of this we took great care that among the costumes we used in our films there were no designs that looked like chrysanthemums. Nevertheless, one day I was summoned by the censorship bureau for using the chrysanthemum crest, and was ordered to cut an entire scene.
Thoroughly baffled, as I knew we couldn’t possibly be using anything with a chrysanthemum pattern on it, I went back to check. I found that the objectionable item was a sash with an oxcart design. I took the sash and returned to the censor’s office to show him. But he held fast. “Even if it is an oxcart in reality, since it looks like a chrysanthemum it is a chrysanthemum. Cut the scene.” The censorship bureau was unrelenting in its perverseness, so such occurrences were by no means rare.
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