Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [91]
Of course I am not saying that all the American censors were like him. But they all behaved toward us in a gentlemanly fashion. Not a single one among them treated us as criminals, the way the Japanese censors had.
The Japanese
AFTER THE WAR my work went smoothly again, but before I begin to write about that, I would like to look back once more at myself during the war. I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way, and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.
Because of my own conduct, I can’t very well put on self-righteous airs and criticize what happened during the war. The freedom and democracy of the post-war era were not things I had fought for and won; they were granted to me by powers beyond my own. As a result, I felt it was all the more essential for me to approach them with an earnest and humble desire to learn, and to make them my own. But most Japanese in those post-war years simply swallowed the concepts of freedom and democracy whole, waving slogans around without really knowing what they meant.
On August 15, 1945, I was summoned to the studio along with everyone else to listen to the momentous proclamation on the radio: the Emperor himself was to speak over the air waves. I will never forget the scenes I saw as I walked the streets that day. On the way from Soshigaya to the studios in Kinuta the shopping street looked fully prepared for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million. The atmosphere was tense, panicked. There were even shopowners who had taken their Japanese swords from their sheaths and sat staring at the bare blades.
However, when I walked the same route back to my home after listening to the imperial proclamation, the scene was entirely different. The people on the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. I don’t know if this represents Japanese adaptability or Japanese imbecility. In either case, I have to recognize that both these facets exist in the Japanese personality. Both facets exist within my own personality as well.
If the Emperor had not delivered his address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Soshigaya probably would have done as they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.
I felt that without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy. My first film in the postwar era, Waga seishun ni kui nashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), takes the problem of the self as its theme.
But before I go on to talk about it, I would like to say a little more about myself during the war. In wartime we were all like deaf-mutes. We could say nothing, or if we did, all we could do was to repeat in parrot fashion the tenets taught by the militarist government. In order to express ourselves, we had to find a way of doing so without touching on any social problems. This was the reason that haiku poetry enjoyed a new vogue during the war.
The doctrine of “Flowers, Birds and Suggestion in Poetry” put forth by the modern haiku poet Takahama Kyoshi was, in short, one way to avoid the censors’ teeth. We even organized a haiku club at the Toho studios. From time to time we would meet to compose poems at a Buddhist temple outside of Tokyo. The motive, however, was not simply the enjoyment of writing haiku; it was because outside of Tokyo the food situation was a little better and we could be assured of