Akira Kurosawa Quotes

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better. Especially scientists. They may be smart, but most don't understand the heart of nature. They only invent things that, in the end, make people unhappy. Yet they're so proud of their inventions. What's worse, most people are, too. They view them as if they were miracles. They worship them. They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

The role of the artist is to not look away.

I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?

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 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.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself. [Pg.189]

I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

but ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

IT IS QUITE ENOUGH IF A HUMAN BEING HAS BUT ONE FIELD WHERE HE OR SHE IS STRONG. IF A HUMAN BEING WERE STRONG IN EVERY FIELD, IT WOULDN'T BE NICE FOR OTHER PEOPLE, WOULD IT?

In a mad world, only the mad are sane. - AKIRA KUROSAWA

Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal.

ربما كان علىّ أن أرجل إلى جزيرة نائية، حيث لا توجد أية معلومات، فلربما تمكنت مخيلتى من العمل هناك بحرية أكبر،واستطعت أن أحافظ على عقلى من التلوث، إذ ما من قصة واحدة أسمعها اليوم تشعرنى بالسعادة

Today’s youngsters will unfortunately never know the thrills we experienced dubbing movies in the era of Rashomon.

In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.

Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.

As if Japan weren't small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. 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. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. 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?

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.

This is probably true of human life everywhere - a light exterior hides a dark underside.

Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.

As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind.

But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.

Remember！That's war！You're all in one boat！He who thinks only about himeself will destroy himeself, too！ Such selfishness will not be tolerated！" 「いいか！戦とはそういうものだ！人を守ってこそ自分も守れる！己のことばかり考えるやつは己をも滅ぼすやつだ！」

In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion. When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.

I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.

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.

People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them.

They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.

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?

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.

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.

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.

Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.

There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.

But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.

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”).

The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good. (Jay Rubin)

Yoda is the lead samurai from Seven Samurai,” says Kasdan of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film. “Seven Samurai is for me the greatest film ever made and enormously influential for George. If you see Seven Samurai, you see Yoda is Shimada, the lead samurai. He’s the mentor figure who gets the whole picture.

Akira Kurosawa 黑泽明

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 because I was just a child, I didn’t perceive the slightest specter of our dark militarism.

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.

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.

Perhaps it is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.)

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.

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.

But lately tenpura-soba doesn’t taste like it used to.

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.

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.

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.

He was a wonderful teacher. A really good teacher doesn’t seem like a teacher at all; that’s exactly how this man was.

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.

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.

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.

For me to try to analyze and explain Japanese society from that point of view was therefore impossible. I simply felt the vague dissatisfactions and dislikes that Japanese society encouraged, and in order to contend with these feelings, I had joined the most radical movement I could find. Looking back on it now, my behavior seems terribly frivolous and reckless.

To put it more precisely, I used the fact that I could not contact them as an excuse to extricate myself from this painful illegal political movement. It was not a case of the leftist movement’s fever dying down; it was a case of my own leftist fever not having been a very serious one.

I had seen my brother’s name in the Cinema Palace newspaper advertisements. If I climbed back up the winding path on the hill I had just come down, I would be at his home. As I have been writing this, a poem by Nakamura Kusadato suddenly comes to mind: Coming down the winding trail, The springtime voice of the crying calf.

In one such rented attic room was a young man who made his living selling fish. Every morning he would get up before the crack of dawn and carry his tin box to the riverbank, where he bought his goods. He worked furiously for an entire month, and then at the end of the month he put on his finest clothes and went out to buy a prostitute—as if that made it all worthwhile.

I had no idea what role these popular arts of storytelling and singing would play in my future; I just enjoyed them without thinking about it.

This is probably true of human life everywhere—a light exterior hides a dark underside

This is probably true of human life everywhere—a light exterior hides a dark underside.

Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.

My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human beings lived past thirty, all they did was become uglier and meaner, so he had no intention of doing so.

So when my mother expressed her concern to me, I laughed it away, saying, “People who talk about dying don’t die.

The relative who had said “What are you doing?” when I was paralyzed at the sight of my brother’s corpse had not been able to intimidate me, but I could not forgive myself for what I had said to my mother. And how terrible the results had been for my brother. What a fool I am!

Uekusa Keinosuke has also said my personality is like that of a sunflower, so there must be some truth to the allegation that I am more sanguine than my brother was. But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.