黒澤明と三船敏郎: 日本映画の黄金時代を創造した二人の関係Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune: The Relationship That Shaped the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

This time, I will examine the relationship between Akira Kurosawa, a representative figure of post-war Japanese cinema, and actor Toshiro Mifune, from the perspective of hospitality.

In the relationship between host and guest, as previously discussed in the context of hospitality, it is the host’s role to prepare an environment conducive to mutual growth. The guest, however, the guest must possess the skill to independently elevate themselves while fully appreciating the host’s hospitality without becoming complacent. Otherwise, the guest is cut down and that is the end of it.

In the post-war era, when everything had changed drastically, the relationship between Akira Kurosawa, a leading director of Japanese cinema, and Toshiro Mifune, a prominent actor, embodied the creation of a film culture rooted in hospitality.

A director who welcomes an adversarial guest and an actor who introduces the absence of a host—within this dynamic, Kurosawa, as the host, thoroughly crafted an equal relationship with Mifune, the guest.

One can feel that tension even in the films themselves. At the same time, to prevent the young Mifune from becoming disheartened, Kurosawa strategically placed another key actor to mediate their relationship. This actor was Takashi Shimura, an indispensable presence in Kurosawa’s films.

During an era when many directors looked down on actors, Kurosawa never demeaned them. Like a samurai duel, he regarded actors as equal partners, mutually trusting in their shared love of cinema, elevating each other, and even shaping the actors’ lives beyond the films. This was the essence of Kurosawa’s filmmaking.

Kurosawa set one trial after another for Mifune. Theirs was not the gentle relationship of a parent watching over a child but always the tense pairing of host and guest. For the young Mifune, who had known war, Kurosawa set a trial in each film so that he would stay patient and humble and not lose himself, swallowed by the changing times.

And Mifune wrestled with each trial with everything he had.

When Mifune shone as an actor in Kurosawa’s films, it was the moment a “protagonist” was generated within Kurosawa’s domain. In fact, Kurosawa stubbornly wrestled in his films to nullify the protagonist, because he knew well the unsettling problem of the modern subject in post-war Japanese society.

Mifune first appeared in a Kurosawa film in the 1948 work Drunken Angel, followed by The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog in 1949. However, during this period, Mifune was subsumed under the presence of Takashi Shimura, a highly skilled actor, and was not yet made into a protagonist at all.

Shimura, who appeared in a variety of works, possessed exceptional skills for his time, an actor who seemed to be the protagonist while nullifying the very making of a protagonist, at the highest level of the day.

In the 1950 films Scandal and Rashomon, Kurosawa refined his technique, dispersing and nullifying the vigorous spirit of Mifune, who could not escape the fate of becoming a protagonist under the expectations of post-war Japanese. He sharpened that technique in The Idiot (1951), took a breath in Ikiru (1952), in which Mifune does not appear, and finally, in Seven Samurai (1954), reached a mature technique for nullifying the very current of the age that makes protagonists.

That film became a turning point. In I Live in Fear (1955), Kurosawa honed the technique that brought Mifune to the point of becoming a protagonist. Then, as the wind of an age began in which post-war Japan, its mood of defeat behind it, started to renew itself, he sent one rival after another, by casting, against a Mifune made strong by the trials he had overcome.

It was the relationship of Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki in the age of the warrior. In every era, whether one meets a natural rival is a turning point in a life.

In Throne of Blood (1957), Mifune became a protagonist who outshone Minoru Chiaki. In The Lower Depths the same year his presence as a protagonist grew, and in The Hidden Fortress (1958) he became a protagonist who surpassed Chiaki, whom he had bested the year before.

By the end of the 1950s, Mifune and Kurosawa’s relationship had become autonomous. With that, they held the ticket into the 1960s, when circumstances changed completely. Other outstanding directors of their generation could not enter that decade.

So in 1960 he released The Bad Sleep Well. He cast a brilliant ensemble of the day’s leading actors and bound Mifune’s role to a quiet, unobtrusive performance. Within those limits, Kurosawa gave him the trial of becoming an overwhelming protagonist.

Mifune overcame this difficult trial magnificently and at last established absolute trust with Kurosawa. They moved on to Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), the first attempt to place Mifune in the position of protagonist in a samurai film.

Here Kurosawa placed Tatsuya Nakadai in the position of the stranger for Mifune. Nakadai is a supreme actor who played everything from period films to contemporary ones, and for Mifune he was a natural rival who allowed no lapse, not even for an instant.

In Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), and High and Low (1963), Mifune and Nakadai appeared together three years running, and Mifune overcame the severe trial.

Never once easing off since the war, never once growing arrogant, never losing himself: Mifune was a man of character, and Kurosawa, the host who honored him, prepared the finest stage for Mifune, who had at last completed his rite of passage. It was the masterpiece Red Beard (1965).

Mifune’s overwhelming presence in this film goes without saying.

Mifune, a guest who received the host’s hospitality and never forgot his debt, overcame every trial he was given and became, in name and in fact, Japan’s leading actor and the man of character of his age. With Red Beard, Mifune stopped appearing in Kurosawa’s works.

As a result, Mifune overcame Kurosawa’s trials and came to stand among the world’s great actors.

Today this tense relationship between director and actor has vanished from Japan, but in the 1950s, when truly wonderful films were being made, such relationships existed everywhere.