More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.
But I have undertaken this series with the feeling that I must not be afraid of shaming myself, and that I should try telling myself the things I am always telling my juniors.
I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.
It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.
However, my contact with the movies at this age has, I feel, no relation to my later becoming a film director. I simply enjoyed the varied and pleasant stimulation added to ordinary everyday life by watching the motion-picture screen. I relished laughing, getting scared, feeling sad and being moved to tears.
When I was small, it seems that I was very weak and sickly. My father used to complain about this state of affairs in spite of the fact that “we had the yokozuna [champion sumo wrestler] Umegatani hold you in his arms when you were a baby so that you would grow strong.”
As the teacher gave his lessons, he would look over at me from time to time and say, “Akira probably won’t understand this, but …” or “This will be impossible for Akira to solve, but …” The other children would turn to look at me and snicker when he did this, but no matter how bitter I felt, he was right. Whatever the subject, it was completely incomprehensible to me. I was pained and saddened.
It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.
As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind.
“Akira, it’s true that drowning people die smiling—you were.” It made me angry, but it had seemed that way to me, too. I remembered having felt a strangely peaceful sensation just before I went under.
In the early Taishō era (1912–1926), when I started school, the word “teacher” was synonymous with “scary person.” The fact that at such a time I encountered such free and innovative education with such creative impulse behind it—that I encountered a teacher like Mr. Tachikawa at such a time—I cherish among the rarest of blessings.
(Now, don’t get angry, Kei-chan. We’re both crybabies, aren’t we? Only now you’ve become a romantic crybaby and I’m a humanist crybaby.)
I went straight to my father and begged him to enter me in Ochiai’s fencing school. He was overjoyed. I don’t know if my interest had occasioned a resurgence of the samurai blood in my father’s veins or the reawakening of his military-academy teacher’s spirit, but, whichever it was, the effect was remarkable.
My innocent request for kendō lessons had brought me a load of unexpected tasks. But I had asked for it, so there was nothing I could do.
(Years later when I read the historical novelist Yamamoto Shugoro’s Nihon fudoki [An Account of the Duties of Japanese Women], I recognized my mother in these impossibly heroic creatures, and I was deeply moved.)
During the war there was a popular song called “Father, You Were Strong” (“Chichi yo, anata wa tsuyokatta”), but I want to say “Mother, You Were Strong.”
Every time the sun shone on me in the morning, I couldn’t help thinking that from that moment on my day would begin to be like that of an ordinary child. But it wasn’t out of discontent that this feeling came to me; it was a sense of self-sufficiency and satisfaction.
I think this was the first time I ever experienced the savagery that lies in the human heart. I could never find pleasure studying under this teacher. But I acquired a determination to work so hard that this teacher would never be able to criticize me again.
Since I wanted nothing except permission to leave quickly and go to Mr. Tachikawa’s house, I applied myself with fervor to copying the teacher’s calligraphy. But you can’t love what you don’t like.
Perhaps it is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.)
“And then what?” I asked. “Her father at last understood my feeling,” claims Uekusa. “And what happened with the girl after that?” I queried. “Never saw her again, but we were just kids anyway.” I think I understand and yet I don’t.
Perhaps because I was just a child, I didn’t perceive the slightest specter of our dark militarism.
At this time of my life I did not have a great deal of enthusiasm for Japanese movies, in comparison with foreign pictures. But my interests were still those of a child.
But lately tenpura-soba doesn’t taste like it used to.
When someone is told over and over again that he’s no good at something, he loses more and more confidence and eventually does become poor at it. Conversely, if he’s told he’s good at something, his confidence builds and he actually becomes better at it. While a person is born with strengths and weaknesses as part of his heredity, they can be greatly altered by later influences.
Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Yōichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it’s precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.
This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.
They told us not to drink the water from one of our neighborhood wells. The reason was that the wall surrounding the well had some kind of strange notation written on it in white chalk. This was supposedly a Korean code indication that the well water had been poisoned. I was flabbergasted. The truth was that the strange notation was a scribble I myself had written. Seeing adults behaving like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.
I had slept like a log, and I couldn’t remember anything frightening from my dreams. This seemed so strange to me that I asked my brother how it could have come about. “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” Looking back on that excursion now, I realize that it must have been horrifying for my brother too. It had been an expedition to conquer fear.
He was a wonderful teacher. A really good teacher doesn’t seem like a teacher at all; that’s exactly how this man was.
By comparison with them, among today’s schoolteachers there are too many plain “salary-man” drudges. Or perhaps even more than salary men, there are too many bureaucrat types among those who become teachers. The kind of education these people dispense isn’t worth a damn. There’s absolutely nothing of interest in it. So it’s no wonder that students today prefer to spend their time reading comic books.
Besides these people there are many directors I revere as teachers: Shimazu Yasujirō (1897–1945), Yamanaka Sadao (1909–1938), Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujirō and Naruse Mikio. When I think about these people, I want to raise my voice in that old song: “… thanks for our teacher’s kindness, we have honored and revered.…” But none of them can hear me now.
No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language, I don’t feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it.
Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.
With the exception of rainy days, my entire summer was spent in this kind of mountain samurai’s existence.
The result of my newfound courage was climbing the waterfall tunnel, slipping and going over the falls and later diving into a whirlpool. Not very smart. But even though I pursued such foolishness, in the course of this one summer vacation this particular descendant of Abe Sadato became considerably more robust.
But when we arrived at the house where she was going visiting, she would turn to me and hand me a fifty-sen piece wrapped in paper and say, “Saraba,” a northern dialect word for “goodbye.” At that time fifty sen was a huge amount of money for a child. But it wasn’t for the money that I enjoyed escorting my aunt. It was because that word “saraba” had a charm that sent shivers down my spine. In my aunt’s way of saying it there was a great store of implicit warmth and kindness.
Aunt Togashi should have lived, judging by her general physical condition, to be about a hundred and ten years old. But a stupid doctor had a theory about extending her life span even longer by making her eat strange things like pine wood and tree roots. Because of this she died without even reaching the age of ninety.
For my part, I cannot forgive that doctor who made her eat those strange things. I’d like to stuff his mouth with pine needles.
ORDINARILY, children are supposed to spend their childhood like saplings sheltered in a greenhouse. Even if on occasion some wind or rain of the real world slips in through the cracks, a child is not supposed to be weatherbeaten in earnest by the sleet and snow.
But, as any parent in those days would have done, he said I would have to go to art school. As a lover of Cézanne and Van Gogh, I felt that such an academic approach would be a waste of time. Nor was I eager to take another entrance examination.
As the winds of the Great Depression blew across a Japan shaken to the very foundations of her economy, proletarian movements sprang up everywhere, including the field of fine art. At the other extreme was an art movement that advocated escape from the painful realities of the hard times, something that was called, in a sort of pidgin, “eroguro nan-sensu” (“erotic-grotesque nonsense”).
Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature, theater, music and film.
In matters of both film and literature I owe much to my brother’s discernment. I took special care to see every film my brother recommended. As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie he had said was good.
With my head crammed full of art, literature, theater, music and film knowledge, I continued to wander, vainly looking for a place to make use of it.
But I often wonder what would have happened if I had actually been drafted. I had failed military training in middle school, and I had no certificate of officer’s competence. There would have been no way for me to stay afloat in the Army. On top of that, if I had ever run into that Army officer who had been attached to Keika Middle School, it would surely have been the end for me. Even thinking about it now makes me shudder.
I have that officer who administered the Army physical to thank for sparing me. Or maybe I should say I have my father to thank.
There were some excellent painters in this group, but in general, rather than an artistic movement with its roots in the essentials of painting, it was a practice of putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas—a “leftist tendency” movement, as not only paintings but films of this type came to be called.
