Director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune are credited with igniting Japan’s 1950s golden age of cinema and, in part, reviving its national identity after World War II.
Kurosawa was named a national treasure and is a legend in film. Among the American disciples who considered him a sensei are Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.
But Mifune is less well known outside of his homeland of Japan. Oscar-winning, Berkeley-based filmmaker Steven Okazaki seeks to rectify that with his documentaryMifune: The Last Samurai.
Okazaki grew up in L.A. in a Japanese-American community. “Mifune’s films had a huge impression on me,” he says. “The only Asians on TV were a Chinese cook onBonanza with the braided [hair] and cap, and a Japanese housekeeper on another show. It was extraordinary to see a powerful, kick-ass Asian hero.”
Specifically, a ronin: a roving, master-less samurai, poor on resources, rich in honor, deadly with fighting skill.
Mifune had been drafted into WWII and trained young soldiers going on suicide missions. His own parents died in the war. He changed the previously stoic archetypal role with naturalistic movements, animal emotion and blazing fight choreography, like a wounded warrior.
“Mifune felt like he had been created by seismic forces from underground,” Spielberg says in the film.
The narrator, Keanu Reeves, tells us that without Mifune’s electrifying roles in Kurosawa’s 1950s and ’60s samurai films (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, 16 in all), there might be no Magnificent Seven, no “spaghetti Westerns,” and no Jedis in the Star Wars universe.
In Pulp Fiction, when Jules tells Vincent he’s going to “walk the earth… meet people, get in adventures,” he’s talking about becoming a ronin.
For a time, Mifune and Godzilla carried their country’s film industry upon their shoulders. You know Godzilla. You should meet the other titan.
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