Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [82]
Now, when I say I like unformed people; I don’t mean I’m interested in someone who even if polished will not become a jewel. Sanshirō is material that gleams brighter and brighter the more he is polished, so in the course of the film I wanted to polish him as vigorously as I possibly could.
Higaki Gennosuke, though, is also the type of material that would become a shiny jewel if polished correctly, but people are subject to what is called destiny. This destiny lies not so much in their environment or their position in life as within their individual personality as it adapts to that environment and that position. For all the straightforward and flexible people there are who do not let their environment and position get the better of them, there are just as many proud and uncompromising people who end up being destroyed by their surroundings and status. Sugata Sanshirō represents the first group, while Higaki Gennosuke is a member of the second.
Personally, I feel that my own temperament is like Sanshirō’s, but I am strangely attracted by Higaki’s character. For this reason I portrayed Higaki’s demise with a great deal of affection. Then in Zoku Sugata Sanshirō (Sugata Sanshirō, Part II, 1945) I followed Higaki’s two brothers with close scrutiny in the same way.
The critical response to my maiden work, Sugata Sanshirō, was, on the whole, positive. In particular the general public, perhaps because they were starved for entertainment during the war, reacted to my film with feverish warmth. The Army’s strongest opinion seemed to be that my film had no more value than ice cream or a sweet cake, but the Navy’s Information Section announced that this was all right for a movie, that a movie’s entertainment value was important.
Next, although it will make me angry and be bad for my health again, I will tell you what the censors in the Ministry of the Interior said about my film. At that time the Ministry took a director’s first film as the subject of a directing test. As soon as Sugata Sanshirō was finished, it was submitted to the Interior Ministry and I had to go in for my examination. The examiners were, of course, the censors. Along with them were several already established film directors who made up the board of examiners. For my test these were to include Yama-san, Ozu Yasujirō and Tasaka Tomotaka, but Yama-san had other business and couldn’t appear. He called me to him to assure me that everything would be all right because Ozu would be there, however, and off I went like a stubborn dog to my battle with the stubborn monkey censors.
That day I walked the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior in a deep melancholy. Then I noticed two young office boys tussling in the hallway. One of them yelled, “Yama arashi!” (“Mountain storm!”) and, using Sanshirō’s special technique, threw the other to the floor. So I knew the screening of Sugata Sanshirō was over. But I was still made to wait for three hours. During that time the boy who had imitated Sanshirō brought me a cup of tea wearing a compassionate expression on his face, but that was all.
When the test finally began, it was horrible. In a room with a long table, the censors were all lined up on one side. Down at the very end were Ozu and Tasaka, and next to them an office boy. All of them, including the office boy, were drinking coffee. I was instructed to sit in the single chair on the other side that faced them all. It was really like being on trial. Naturally, no coffee appeared for me. It seems I had committed the heinous crime called Sugata Sanshirō.
The point of the censors’ argument was that almost everything in the film was “British-American.” They seemed to find the little incident of the “love scene” between Sanshirō and his rival’s daughter on the shrine stairs—the censors called this a “love scene,” but all the two did was meet each other for the first time there—to be particularly “British-American,” and they harped as if they had discovered some great oracular truth. If I listened attentively, I would fly