reviews
New Perspectives on Kurosawa
Published in Nikkei Asia 12/11/2023
Olga V. Solovieva’s “The Russian Kurosawa” and David A. Conrad’s “Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan” link both famous and less well-known movies to contemporary events in Japan and the world that may have influenced them.
It has been 25 years since the death of the great film director Akira Kurosawa, yet interest in his work remains strong, and fresh insights continue to surface.
Two welcome additions to the critical studies on this renowned director are Olga V. Solovieva’s “The Russian Kurosawa” and David A. Conrad’s “Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan.” Both writers fruitfully explore how Kurosawa’s films, including samurai epics, reflect the condition of Japan when they were made.
Solovieva, a comparative literature specialist at the University of Chicago, analyses Kurosawa’s obsession with Russia, evident in several films, his autobiography and many comments made over the years. The Russia that entranced Kurosawa was not the expansionary state that fought a brutal war with Japan in 1904-1905, let alone the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It was not a place at all, but a humane literary culture constructed by a remarkable series of writers and thinkers.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Russian literature dominated the field of foreign literature in Japan. Kurosawa claimed to have read Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” 30 times and considered Fyodor Dostoevsky his favorite author. Of his films, the following are adapted from or partially inspired by Russian sources: “The Idiot” (1951, from Dostoevsky), “Ikiru” (1952, from Tolstoy), “The Lower Depths” (1955, from Maxim Gorky), “Red Beard” (1965, from Dostoevsky) and “Dersu Uzula” (1975, from Vladimir Arsenyev).
From “Ikiru”
Solovieva is a highly creative interpreter of Kurosawa’s work, occasionally excessively so, but her thorough knowledge of the source material sheds valuable new light on Kurosawa’s choices. Particularly impressive is her analysis of “The Idiot,” a little-discussed film that was severely cut by the studio, much to the director’s indignation. Sadly, the full-length version has been lost, but many powerful scenes remain, featuring bravura performances by Toshiro Mifune, Setsuko Hara and Masamune Mori, playing the members of the doomed love triangle. Properly presented, it could have been an all-time classic.
The author zeroes in on the backstory that Kurosawa puts together for Kameda, the epileptic “idiot” of the title. Mistaken for a war criminal, he was about to be executed by a firing squad when the Americans realized they had the wrong man. Apparently, such mix-ups were far from uncommon. Now he is returning to his Hokkaido home from Okinawa, where he was confined to a mental hospital.
Mifune with Setsuko Hara, murderer and murderee
The implication is that Kameda was stationed in Okinawa and participated in the horrific scenes of death, destruction and forced suicide there in the summer of 1945. This backdrop of collective war trauma differentiates the film greatly from Dostoevsky’s original.
The long shadow of Japan’s lost war lingers in other films. Solovieva believes that Kurosawa’s preceding film, “Rashomon” (1950), with its alternative narratives of guilt, may owe something to the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, which tried 28 Japanese military and political leaders for alleged war crimes. “The Lower Depths” (1957), she points out, is nominally set in Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1867), but the mise-en-scene includes a strand of barbed wire. Given Kurosawa’s minute attention to every detail of his sets, whether visible or not, that had to be reference to contemporary reality in Gorky’ story of down-and-outs living in squalor. As late as the 1970s, disabled veterans could be seen begging for alms in urban centers.
That the war experience remained an important issue for Kurosawa is obvious from “The Tunnel,” by far the strongest of the short films that make up the omnibus piece “Dreams” (1990). In a dynamic enactment of war memory, it gives us an undead platoon of soldiers marching back to our world from the caverns of oblivion.
The women demand to be given as much work as the men
More controversially, Solovieva hypothesizes that in his post-war films Kurosawa reverted to a Tolstoyan antiwar stance to atone for the propaganda film, “The Most Beautiful” (1944), that he made at the behest of the military government. There may be something to that, but Kurosawa’s propaganda effort was mild stuff compared to the racist iconography often employed by the Americans, let alone the Hitler-worship of the German director Leni Riefenstahl, to whom the author unfairly compares him.
“Dersu Uzala,” Kurosawa’s comeback film after a long period of financial problems, receives a fresh and convincing explication from Solovieva, well backed by historical Russian language sources. At the age of 65, the great director spent a year in the harsh conditions of the Soviet Far East, having been bankrolled by the USSR production outfit, Mosfilm. The film he chose to make was an adaptation of a memoir that was little known in the West but had fascinated the Russophile Kurosawa for decades.
On the face of it, the story of a Russian officer’s friendship with a simple nomadic hunter from the Goldi ethnic minority in the early years of the 20th century is an apolitical meditation on changing times. As Solovieva shows, that could never have been the case. Consciously or unconsciously, Kurosawa was telling a story of the clash of empires and the destruction of the cultures of minority groups.
Arseneyev and Dersu in the taiga
Arsenyev, the soldier who wrote the memoir on which the film is based, met Dersu and hired him as a guide when he was conducting a survey that would prepare the way for expansion of the Russian empire. Earlier in his career, Arsenyev had taken part in pacification campaigns for which he was decorated, though he never mentioned them subsequently. Solovieva quotes the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekov, who journeyed through the Russian Far East, describing Russian settlers and the military killing native people “like animals.”
Kurosawa would have known that the timespan of the events described took in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, a decisive step in Japan’s own ambitions of empire; that Japanese troops operating as part of an Allied Expeditionary Force occupied parts of the Russian Far East from 1918 to 1922; that Arsenyev was considered “pro-Japan” by the Soviet authorities and died in disgrace; that his widow was shot as a Japanese spy after a trial that lasted 10 minutes and his daughter was sent to the gulag for 10 years; and that the Soviet army crossed the Ussuri region, Dersu’s home ground, when Moscow unilaterally abrogated a peace treaty with Japan and stormed into Japan-controlled Manchuria in August 1945, ultimately taking some 600,000 military and civilian prisoners to camps in Siberia from which some never returned.
In the harsh conditions of the taiga (northern snow forest), the tall, pale-skinned Arsenyev is the pupil and Dersu, with his squat build and broad Oriental features, is the master. One lesson that he delivers is that travelers should leave some of their food and fuel behind in shelters they have used to benefit unknown others. Solovieva connects this custom with the “mutual aid” theories of Peter Kropotkin that were highly influential in Japanese anarchist circles in the early 20th century. Did Kurosawa know them and find them appealing?
The richness of Solovieva’s approach lies in the literary connections she makes. David A. Conrad sees Kurosawa through the eyes of a Japan specialist, examining all 30 of the films in chronological order and commenting on contemporary events in Japan and the world that may have influenced them.
Like Solovieva, he sometimes uses imaginative projection to give new meanings to the films. For example, he associates the supercool samurai memorably played by Mifune in “Yojimbo” (1961) with the nonaligned movement which held its first conference in the year of the film’s release. Just as the nonaligned countries sought to take a neutral stance in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so Mifune’s nameless hero views the film’s two rival gangs with equal contempt.
Yojimbo poster
Likewise, Conrad offers an unusual perspective on “The Hidden Fortress” (1958), an upbeat and entertaining film to which George Lucas paid tribute in the original “Star Wars” (1977). When the Kurosawa film appeared, Japan was well into its post-war recovery, and tourism and sightseeing were all the rage — part of a reassessment of Japanese traditions after the shock of defeat and occupation started to fade. Kurosawa pitches in with a long climactic sequence featuring a fire festival, an age-old ceremony, as well as many scenes of great natural beauty. The dappled light of the forest is sparkling and magical, not sinister, as in “Rashomon.”
The plot, later borrowed by Lucas, concerns the secret journey of a young princess to take up her rightful position on the throne of her country. Conrad links her with a real Japanese princess-to-be who was also on a journey at the time the film was made. Michiko Shoda was the modern-minded daughter of the CEO of a flour milling company. She met the emperor of Japan’s son on a tennis court and became engaged to him soon after. Their marriage in 1958 was televised and half a million people followed the wedding procession. In 1989, Princess Michiko became become Empress Consort when her husband succeeded his father as emperor.
One of the strengths of Conrad’s book is that he gives as much attention to the more obscure items in Kurosawa’s filmography as to the celebrated masterpieces. His verdict on “The Most Beautiful” is more generous than Solovieva’s: “emotional complexity gives it a staying power that propaganda rarely retains after its historical moment has passed.” He also writes perceptively about “Sanshiro Sugata” (1943) and the entertaining but often maligned “Sanshiro Sugata Part Two” (1945), two martial arts films that helped pave the way to the era of Bruce Lee.
Most impressive, though, is his analysis of the maestro’s last film, “Madadayo” (1993). Kurosawa is often said to be the “least Japanese” of the prominent Japanese directors, but his swansong was squarely aimed at his domestic audience. Foreigners may find it difficult to understand the long-lasting relationship between a cat-loving writer and his former students.
Kurosawa’s sketch of the teacher’s house
Little happens, even in the war years and the occupation, which are treated with unusual lightness. The characters drink beer, they laugh, they get older. The only tension comes when a cat goes missing. But that is exactly the point of this gentle meditation on mortality, the inevitability of change and what it means to have a good life.
Madadayo, meaning “not ready”, is the call in a children’s game of hide-and-seek, but here it means “not ready” to give up on friendship, the glories of nature and the joy of existing in this transient world in which we find ourselves.
Conrad sums it up superbly. “The old man remembers an idyllic scene from his childhood. ‘Madadayo’ says a boy as he gazes into the blazing sky that changes from pink and yellow to blue and green and finally to gold. Just off camera, Kurosawa sat motionless while the final scene of his career played out in front of him. After a period of silence, he announced ‘cut’ then stood and walked away.”
Speaking in Tongues
The artists of the Eighties acted fast. They had to: there would be no future otherwise. But in battling the retrograde Reaganite look of the System, they knew they were its bastards nonetheless.
The New Era Is a Fact
Glass instantiates a perpetual newness and eternal currency. Unlike seemingly more solid materials like steel-reinforced concrete, which unmaintained will rust away to ruin in five hundred years, glass is stable, unless it’s shattered. Perhaps because glass shows no patina, no material evidence of its past, it is the closest thing we have to a material from the future.
The Intelligent Ambiguity of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”
Published in Japan Forward 14th August 2023
An atom bomb has just been dropped on the city of Hiroshima. In a lecture room in Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project which created this new weapon, there is wild excitement. Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer stands before the crowd and pronounces it a great day for America.
Flags are waved. One woman looks almost maddened with triumph. Then the scene changes to black and white, signalling Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. The room starts to shake and there are ominous flashes and rumbles. He realises that the world has changed forever, that from now on unimaginable carnage will always be a button push away.
The movie “Oppenheimer”, which tells the story of the so-called “father of the atom bomb”, has become a huge worldwide hit. It has already earned box office receipts of over $550 million since its first screening in July, a few days before the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test that ushered in the era of nuclear weapons.
That date made it impossible for the film to open in Japan at the same time as the rest of the world, given the sombre annual commemorations of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that take place in early August, followed by the anniversary of the end of the war and the “O-Bon” festival of the dead. Yet there is nothing disrespectful of Japanese sensitivities in “Oppenheimer”.
Wisely, Nolan does not attempt to capture the devastation caused by the atom bombing through special effects or newsreel, which could indeed have appeared exploitative. Instead, he has a character recount the terrible damage done to the bodies of children and young women, leaving the audience to use its imagination.
Why has the film been so successful? One reason is that it is an outstanding example of contemporary cinematic art, superbly constructed and acted. The three hour running time zips by without longueurs. Another reason, surely, is that the issue of weapons of mass destruction, which had seemed less relevant after the end of the Cold War, is very much with us today. We are living in Oppenheimer’s world.
Oppenheimer with Einstein
The decision to drop the bomb has generated a great deal of controversy over the years. It was originally New Left academics like Gar Alperovitz who cast doubt on the justification for using nuclear weapons. Interestingly, in recent years some voices from the opposite side of the political spectrum have come to agree.
In 2020, John Denson of the libertarian Mises Institute wrote “Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial… After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor on the throne.”
Likewise, Peter Van Buren, writing last year in the conservative Spectator magazine, states that the “Hiroshima myth”- that the bomb was the only alternative to a land invasion that would have cost millions of lives – was manufactured in the late 1940s as an antidote to John Hershey’s reportage of the bomb’s human consequences.
Nolan’s film handles the issue with a great deal of nuance. On one hand, President Harry Truman declares that his advisors are certain that the Japanese will never surrender. Yet well before the bomb is dropped, one of the Los Alamos scientists comments that Japan has already lost, as if it is an obvious fact.
Oppenheimer himself is given a prescient line of dialogue in which he posits that the carnage will be so terrible that such a weapon would never be used again. M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) certainly worked during the era of superpower confrontation, but will it be as effective when weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of theocratic states, non-state actors and dictators with nothing to lose?
Oppenheimer is the figure that all the action revolves around, yet he remains hard to sympathize with or understand. Born into great wealth and privilege – he was given a 28 foot yacht for his sixteenth birthday – he had a brilliant mind. As the film shows, he was capable of reading Sanskrit and teaching himself enough Dutch in a matter of weeks to deliver a physics lecture. Well-versed in the arts and literature, he named the Trinity test in tribute to a favourite poem by John Donne.
He was also dangerously impulsive. One of the first scenes in the film has him attempting to murder his tutor at Cambridge University by means of an apple spiked with cyanide, apparently a real event. He was already severely depressed and undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis at the time. Later, we see him and his wife transferring their baby to a friend because its crying had got on their delicate nerves.
The film depicts Oppenheimer as sympathetic to communism, but a patriot at heart. When a friend at a Christmas party mentions an underground route for getting atomic secrets to Moscow, he responds “that would be treason”. Yet, it is no surprise that his security pass was withdrawn once the Cold War started. Many of his associates were card-carrying members of the American Communist Party, including his lover, his brother and his sister-in-law. Oppenheimer’s own wife was a former member.
No doubt, several would have been attracted by the emphasis on antiracism and workers’ rights, but the party was no Eurocommunist-type middle-of-the-road outfit. It danced to Stalin’s tune. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in 1939, there was no more talk about fighting fascism. “Peace” was the slogan, though members were required to support the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Poland, part of the secret deal between Stalin and Hitler. Some were also involved in underground activities, as delineated in the film’s Christmas party scene.
The process by which Oppenheimer is stripped of his security clearance in 1954 – thereby ending his career as a top government advisor – is manifestly unfair, but the script gives the bullying adversary lawyer some pointed criticism of his inconsistencies. Why, the lawyer thunders, does Oppenheimer still justify the mass killing of Japanese civilians while advocating disarmament with the Soviet Union? What does he really believe in? Oppenheimer’s response is silence.
Ambivalent testimony is given by General Leslie Groves, the man who picked Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project. When asked if he would approve Oppenheimer’s security clearance now, he answers in the negative – then adds, as an aside, that he would not give clearance to any of the other nuclear scientists on the project either.
We know now that the Manhattan Project was compromised by several Soviet-sympathizing scientists. The most notorious and the only one featured in the film is Klaus Fuchs who spent nine years in jail in Britain for espionage, then moved to East Germany where he enjoyed a long and illustrious career. Some say that included instructing Mao Zedong’s China in nuclear weapons development. History never ends.
The source book for Nolan’s film is “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Prometheus is the god who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humans. As punishment, he was chained to a rock where an eagle gnawed his liver for all eternity. Oppenheimer had it easier, spending time sailing around the Caribbean and eventually receiving an award from President Johnson.
Genius, victim, hero, fool, egotist, communist, patriot, confused soul, or all of the above – Nolan’s film leaves it up to you to make up your mind. Hopefully, Japanese audiences will have the same opportunity before too long.
How to Touch Grass
There will still be addictions, relapses, traumas, betrayals, interpersonal dramas, and sudden deaths the day after the revolution. Comrades will still let us down, and we’ll still hold grudges and harbor resentments. Parents will still be uncomprehending or oppressive or worse, and we’ll still wish that we’d never said that to her or walked away that night or gone home with him again or fought with them or failed.
Overload, Dizziness, Vertigo, Trance
I was just becoming accustomed enough to the symptoms to be able to manage them when my neurologist finally referred me to a vestibular therapist. The next day, I received a publicity email from New Directions about a forthcoming translation of Mild Vertigo, a cult novel by the Japanese writer Mieko Kanai, about “the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life.”
Outside the Museum of Literature
Solenoid’s parasites take us well over the horizon marked out by any kind of realism. In one of Cărtărescu’s odder fantasias, his narrator comes to know a librarian with a messianic vocation: to find a way to communicate with the subject of his obsession, the world of mites, on whose astonishing variety, beauty, and omnipresence at the edges of our attention he soliloquizes at length.
Careworn
Writing by adult children about the aging parents they care for — a genre likely to expand in the coming decades as the old exceed the young — is marked by a twinned consciousness. Written out of the exigencies of the present as much as those of the past, it strains to acknowledge one’s parents as people yet wants to remain true to one’s own experience of those people as parents.
Joanna Hogg’s Women
Female silence animates many of Hogg’s dramas, which follow women whose problems manifest as failures of expression: women with suppressed desires, thwarted ambitions, or a reluctance (sometimes approaching inability) to say what they mean. Hogg’s own biography featured a long period of what might be thought of as creative silence: after graduating from film school in the mid-’80s, she spent nearly two decades directing music videos and television episodes.
Malcolm on the Stand
She is cutting, wary, funny, and wise. Her style is what I wish I had instead of the chipper inner voice I’m stuck with. Nothing in Malcolm’s writing is dull or amiss unless she’s quoting somebody else. Her lines put me in mind of the painter Agnes Martin—everything so even and tight.