Akira Kurosawa

Biography

Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910, in Ōi Town, Ebara County (now Higashi-Ōi in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo). His mother, Shima (1870–1952), came from a merchant's family in Osaka; his father, Isamu (1864–1948), was a member of a samurai family from Akita Prefecture and worked as the director of the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with two of his siblings already grown up at the time of his birth and one deceased, leaving him to grow up with three sisters and a brother. In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu was open to Western traditions, and considered theatre and cinema to have educational merit. He encouraged his children to watch films; a young Kurosawa saw his first film at age six. He attended elementary school and became close friends with Keinosuke Uekusa, while an important formative influence was his teacher Mr. Tachikawa, whose progressive educational practices ignited in him first a love of drawing and then an interest in education in general. During this time, he also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship. Another major childhood influence was Kurosawa's older brother by four years, Heigo (1906–1933). In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake and the subsequent Kantō Massacre of 1923, Heigo took the 13-year-old Kurosawa to view the devastation. When Kurosawa wanted to look away from the human and animal corpses scattered everywhere, Heigo forbade him to do so, encouraging him to instead face his fears by confronting them directly. In 1935, the new film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P.C.L. (which later became the major studio Toho), advertised for assistant director. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and screenwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), released when he was 33. Following the war, he cemented his reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan with the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which he cast the then-unknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role; the two men would then collaborate on 15 more films.