Once I had a disasatrous conversation with an aged Japanese colleague of my father’s. He had shown us great kindness and hospitality in Japan when we were there in 1978. He was retiring and traveling around the world to say good bye to colleagues. He expressed that the world had changed and that the old culture of Japan was dead, making it impossible for him to communicate with modern Japanese students.

I was horrified, because I had made a special effort to show him that my exposure to Japanese culture had in some way improved my life and that I had hoped that my culture would learn from the japanese as well (i give you: SUSHI! yum). So then I cited Kurosawa as a transmitter of traditional Japanese culture to the world. END OF CONVERSATION. He totally shut me down. It was, literally, tragic. We had utterly divergent views of the appropriateness and content of Kurosawa’s films.

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PBS’ Great Performances recently ran a 2-hour documentary biopic on the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

It was pretty interesting – and included some truly horrifying newsreel shots of the carnage and most especially corpses left after the great Tokyo quake and fire of the mid-1920s, in which as many died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thought to have pershed. Apparently the young Kurosawa was toured through the wreckage and stinking dead by his older brother; it’s thought to be reflected in Ran (which I love because of its’ unredeemable hopelessness about humanity).

There were some tiny excerpts from films he made during the war, too, that I found interesting.

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