Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [75]
In The San Paguita Flower there was a scene where the Japanese employees of a factory join in the celebration of a Filipino girl’s birthday. The censorship bureau found this “British-American-looking” and put me through a cross-examination. I tried asking if it was wrong to celebrate a birthday. The censor replied that it was obviously a British-American custom to celebrate birthdays, and the idea of writing a scene like that at a time like this was an outrage. But this censor, pursuing his censor’s logic, fell right into the trap of my question. At the beginning he had called into question only the use of a birthday cake, but now his argument had escalated to the point of rejecting the entire birthday celebration. Without a moment’s hesitation, I countered, “Well, then, is it wrong to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday? In Japan the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday is a national holiday, but if this is a British-American custom, then surely it must be a terrible outrage.” The censor turned ashy pale and rejected my script summarily.
At that time the censors in the Ministry of the Interior seemed to be mentally deranged. They all behaved as if they suffered from persecution complexes, sadistic tendencies and various sexual manias. They cut every single kiss scene out of foreign movies. If a woman’s knees ever appeared, they cut that scene, too. They said that such things would stimulate carnal desires.
The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: “The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.” What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls’ volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word “gate” very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.
Nevertheless, I must say the sniffing Dobermans of the censorship bureau certainly underwent a full-scale domestication at the hand of the reigning powers of the day. There is nothing more dangerous than a worthless bureaucrat who has fallen prey to the trends of the times. In the Nazi era, of course, Hitler was a madman, but if you consider people like Himmler and Eichmann behind him, you understand that it is in the subordinate positions that the geniuses of horror and insanity appear. When it comes down to the level of the jailers and operators of the concentration camps, you find beasts that exceed the power of the imagination to conceive.
I believe the wartime censors in the Ministry of the Interior constitute one example of this phenomenon. They were the people who really should have been put behind bars. I am doing my best right now to suppress the anger that makes my writing about them become violent, but just thinking about them and remembering it all makes me shudder with rage. That is how deep my hatred for them remains. Toward the end of the war I even made a pact with some of my friends: If it came to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million and every Japanese would have to commit suicide, we vowed to meet in front of the Ministry of the Interior and assassinate the censors before we took our own lives.
I must end my discussion of the censors here. I have become too excited over it, and that