Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [89]
On top of the speed I promised with the script, I assured them I would need only one set. For the location shots I would make do with the imperial forest that at that time stretched right to the back gate of the studio. The company was pleased.
But it all proved to be a case of calculating the price the hide will bring before you have caught the badger. Just as things were progressing smoothly on Tiger’s Tail, Japan lost the war and the U.S. Army came to occupy the country.
It came to pass that from time to time American soldiers visited the set where I was shooting. One day a whole landing party of them converged on my set. Maybe the customs being shown in my production struck them as quaint, I don’t know. At any rate, they clicked away with their still cameras or buzzed away with 8-mm. cameras, and some even wanted to be photographed while being slashed at with a Japanese sword. Things got so out of hand I had to call a halt to the day’s shooting.
On another such occasion I was up on top of the soundstage setting up an overhead shot when a group of admirals and high-ranking commissioned officers came onto the set. They were remarkably quiet as they observed the shooting and departed, and later I found out that the movie director John Ford had been among them. It was he himself who told me this years later when I met him in London, and I was amazed. Apparently he had asked my name at the time and left a message of greeting for me. “Didn’t you receive it?” he asked. But I had of course not received it, nor did I have any idea that John Ford had ever visited a movie set of mine until that day I met him in England.
So what finally happened to Tiger’s Tail? For the answer to that question, the censors come onstage once again. When the U.S. Army moved in to occupy Japan, it immediately began crusading against Japanese militarism. Part of this crusade consisted of dismissing the censors and the judicial police.
And yet I was called in by these very same old censors. They said they had an objection to Tiger’s Tail. Even Mori Iwao, who was then Toho’s executive in charge of production, was so surprised that he summoned me to his office and said, “These people have no right to say anything at all now, so you just go there and tell them exactly what you think of them.” Mori had always been the one to handle my hot temper by saying, “Gently, now, gently,” so for him to encourage me to tell them “exactly what you think of them” must have meant he, too, had reached the limits of his patience with the censors. With my spirits thus boosted, I set out to meet them.
Indeed the censors had been driven out of their offices in the Ministry of the Interior and were regrouped in a different place. Here they were burning their official papers in big tin cans and sawing off the legs of their chairs to feed the fire. The sight of all this power reduced to such poverty almost moved me to sympathy.
Nevertheless, these diehards could not give up their pride and presumptuousness, and they lit into me with an interrogating vengeance. “Do you know what this Tiger’s Tail of yours is? It’s a distortion of one of the great Japanese classic Kabuki plays, Kanjinchō. It is a mockery of that classic.”
I am not exaggerating what they said. This was their word-for-word statement. Even if I wanted to forget what they said, I can’t. My response was this: “Tiger’s