Akira Terao (寺尾 聰, Terao Akira^?, born May 18, 1947) is Japanese musician and movie actor.

Career[link]

In 1966, he debuted as a bassist of Group Sounds band, The Savage. As an actor, he debuted as Kenichi in Chikadô no taiyô made, a film directed by Kei Kumai in 1968.

As a singer, Terao was known mostly for his 1981 album Reflections (リフレクションズ^?), which sold more than one and a half million copies in Japan with the hit song "Ruby No Yubiwa" (ルビーの指環^?).

In 1985, Terao started to work with Akira Kurosawa in Ran. Five years later he appeared as "I" in Kurosawa's Dreams. He has worked with director Takashi Koizumi in After the Rain and The Professor's Beloved Equation. As for dramas, Terao has acted with Kazunari Ninomiya in Yasashii Jikan as well as in the latest Takuya Kimura-helmed drama, Change (spring 2008).

He won the award for best actor at the 47th Blue Ribbon Awards for Half a Confession.^[1]

Films[link]

• Ran, 1985
• Dreams, 1990
• Casshern, 2004
• Half a Confession, 2004
• Into The Sun, 2005
• Samayou Yaiba, 2009

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Personal[link]

Terao was born in Yokohama (Kanagawa prefecture) in Japan, son of the actor and film director Jukichi Uno. He was married to Bunjaku Han from 1973 to 1974 (ending in divorce).

References[link]

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Akira Kurosawa 黒澤 明
Born	(1910-03-23)March 23, 1910 Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan
Died	September 6, 1998(1998-09-06) (aged 88) Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Director, screenwriter, producer, editor
Years active	1936–1993
Spouse	Yōko Yaguchi (1945–1985) (her death); two children

Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明^[1], Kurosawa Akira^?, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, producer, and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films^{[note 1]} in a career spanning 57 years.

Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director in 1943, during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. Judo Saga). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films.

Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo in August 1950, and which also starred Mifune, became, on September 10, 1951, the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was subsequently released in Europe and North America. The commercial and critical success of this film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa directed approximately a film a year, including a number of highly regarded films such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). After the mid-1960s, he became much less prolific, but his later work—including his final two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards, including the Palme d'Or for Kagemusha, though more often abroad than in Japan.

In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.^[2][3] Posthumously, he was named "Asian of the Century" in the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited as "one of the [five] people who contributed most to the betterment of Asia in the past 100 years".^[4]

Life and career[link]

Childhood and youth (1910–1935)[link]

Kurosawa was born on 23 March 1910 in Ōimachi in the Ōmori district of Tokyo. His father Isamu, a member of a former samurai family from the Akita Prefecture, worked as the director of the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school, while his mother Shima came from a merchant's family living in Osaka. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with two of his siblings already grown up at the time of his birth and one deceased, leaving Kurosawa to grow up with three sisters and a brother.^[5][6]

In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu Kurosawa was open to western traditions and considered theater and motion pictures to have educational merit. He encouraged his children to watch films; young Akira viewed his first movies at the age of six.^[7] An important formative influence was his elementary school teacher Mr Tachikawa, whose progressive educational practices ignited in his young pupil first a love of drawing and then an interest in education in general.^[8] During this time, the boy also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship.^[9]

Another major childhood influence was Heigo Kurosawa, Akira's older brother by four years. In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, which devastated Tokyo, Heigo took the 13-year-old Akira to view the devastation. When the younger brother wanted to look away from the human corpses and animal carcasses scattered everywhere, Heigo forbade him to do so, instead encouraging Akira to face his fears by confronting them directly. Some commentators have suggested that this incident would influence Kurosawa's later artistic career, as the director was seldom hesitant to confront unpleasant truths in his work.^[10][11]

Heigo was academically gifted, but soon after failing to secure a place in Tokyo's foremost high school, he began to detach himself from the rest of the family, preferring to concentrate on his interest in foreign literature.^[6] In the late 1920s, Heigo became a benshi (silent film narrator) for Tokyo theaters showing foreign films, and quickly made a name for himself. Akira, who at this point planned to become a painter,^[12] moved in with him, and the two brothers became inseparable.^[13] Through Heigo, Akira devoured not only films but also theater and circus performances,^[14] while exhibiting his paintings and working for the left-wing Proletarian Artists' League. However, he was never able to make a living with his art, and, as he began to perceive most of the proletarian movement as "putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas," he lost his enthusiasm for painting.^[15]

With the increasing production of talking pictures in the early 1930s, film narrators like Heigo began to lose work, and Akira moved back in with his parents. In July 1933, Heigo committed suicide. Kurosawa has commented on the lasting sense of loss he felt at his brother's death^[16] and the chapter of his autobiography that describes it—written nearly half a century after the event—is titled, "A Story I Don't Want to Tell."^[17] Only four months later, Kurosawa's eldest brother also died, leaving Akira, at age 23, the only one of the Kurosawa brothers still living, together with his three surviving sisters.^[13][17]

Director in training (1935–1941)[link]

In 1935, the new film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P.C.L. (which later became the major studio, Toho), advertised for assistant directors. Although he had demonstrated no previous interest in film as a profession, Kurosawa submitted the required essay, which asked applicants to discuss the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese films and find ways to overcome them. His half-mocking view was that if the deficiencies were fundamental, there was no way to correct them. Kurosawa's essay earned him a call to take the follow-up exams, and director Kajirō Yamamoto, who was among the examiners, took a liking to Kurosawa and insisted that the studio hire him. The 25-year-old Kurosawa joined P.C.L. in February 1936.^[18][19]

During his five years as an assistant director, Kurosawa worked under numerous directors, but by far the most important figure in his development was Kajiro Yamamoto. Of his 24 films as A.D., he worked on 17 under Yamamoto, many of them comedies featuring the popular actor Kenichi Enomoto, known as "Enoken."^[20] Yamamoto nurtured Kurosawa's talent, promoting him directly from third assistant director to chief assistant director after a year.^[21] Kurosawa's responsibilities increased, and he worked at tasks ranging from stage construction and film development to location scouting, script polishing, rehearsals, lighting, dubbing, editing and second-unit directing.^[22] In the last of Kurosawa's films as an assistant director, Horse (Uma, 1941), Kurosawa took over most of the production, as Yamamoto was occupied with the shooting of another film.^[23]

One important piece of advice Yamamoto gave Kurosawa was that a good director needed to master screenwriting.^[24] Kurosawa soon realized that the potential earnings from his scripts were much higher than what he was paid as an assistant director.^[25] Kurosawa would later write or co-write all of his own films. He also frequently wrote screenplays for other directors. This outside scriptwriting would serve Kurosawa as a lucrative sideline lasting well into the 1960s, long after he became world-famous.^[26][27]

Wartime films and marriage (1942–1945)[link]

In the two years following the release of Horse in 1941, Kurosawa searched for a story he could use to launch his directing career. Towards the end of 1942, about a year after the beginning of Japan's war with the United States, novelist Tsuneo Tomita published his Musashi Miyamoto inspired judo novel, Sanshiro Sugata, the advertisements for which intrigued Kurosawa. He bought the book on its publication day, devoured it in one sitting, and immediately asked Toho to secure the film rights. Kurosawa's initial instinct proved correct as, within a few days, three other major Japanese studios also offered to buy the rights. Toho prevailed, and Kurosawa began pre-production on his debut work as director.^[28][29]

Shooting of Sanshiro Sugata began on location in Yokohama in December 1942. Production proceeded smoothly, but getting the completed film past the censors was an entirely different matter. The censorship considered the work too "British-American" (an accusation tantamount, at that time, to a charge of treason), and it was only through the intervention of director Yasujiro Ozu, who championed the film, that Sanshiro Sugata was finally accepted for release on March 25, 1943. (Kurosawa had just turned 33.) The movie became both a critical and commercial success. Nevertheless, the censorship office would later decide to cut out some 18 minutes of footage, much of which is now considered lost.^[30][31]

He next turned to the subject of wartime female factory workers in The Most Beautiful, a propaganda film which he shot in a semi-documentary style in early 1944. In order to coax realistic performances from his actresses, the director had them live in a real factory during the shoot, eat the factory food and call each other by their character names. He would use similar methods with his performers throughout his career.^[32][33]

During production, the actress playing the leader of the factory workers, Yōko Yaguchi, was chosen by her colleagues to present their demands to the director. She and Kurosawa were constantly at loggerheads, and it was through these arguments that the two, paradoxically, became close. They married on May 21, 1945, with Yaguchi two months pregnant (she never resumed her acting career), and the couple would remain together until her death in 1985.^[34][35] They would have two children: a son, Hisao, born December 20, 1945, who would serve as producer on some of his father's last projects, and Kazuko, born April 29, 1954, who would become a costume designer.^[36]

Shortly before his marriage, Kurosawa was pressured by the studio against his will to direct a sequel to his debut film. The often blatantly propagandistic Sanshiro Sugata Part II, which premiered in May 1945, is generally considered one of his very weakest pictures.^{[37][38][39][40][41]}

Kurosawa decided to write the script for a film that would be both censor-friendly and less expensive to produce. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, based on the Kabuki play Kanjinchō and starring the comedian Enoken, with whom Kurosawa had often worked during his assistant director days, was completed in September 1945. By this time, Japan had surrendered and the occupation of Japan had begun. The new American censors interpreted the values allegedly promoted in the picture as overly "feudal" and banned the work. (It would not be released until 1952, the year another Kurosawa film, Ikiru, was also released.) Ironically, while in production, the film had already been savaged by Japanese wartime censors as too Western and "democratic" (they particularly disliked the comic porter played by Enoken), so the movie most probably would not have seen the light of day even if the war had continued beyond its completion.^[42][43]

First postwar works (1946–1950)[link]

The war now ended, Kurosawa, absorbing the democratic ideals of the Occupation, sought to make films that would establish a new respect towards the individual and the self. The first such film, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), inspired by both the 1933 Takigawa incident and the Hotsumi Ozaki wartime spy case, criticized Japan's prewar regime for its political oppression. Atypically for the director, the heroic central character is a woman, Yukie (Setsuko Hara), born into upper-middle-class privilege, who comes to question her values in a time of political crisis. The original script had to be extensively rewritten and, because of its controversial theme (and because the protagonist was a woman), the completed work divided critics, but it nevertheless managed to win the approval of audiences, who turned variations on the film's title ("No regrets for...") into something of a postwar catchphrase.^{[44][45][46][47]}

His next film, One Wonderful Sunday premiered in July 1947 to mixed reviews. It is a relatively uncomplicated and sentimental love story dealing with an impoverished postwar couple trying to enjoy, within the devastation of postwar Tokyo, their one weekly day off. The movie bears the influence of Frank Capra, D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau.^[48][49] Another film released in 1947 with Kurosawa's involvement was the action-adventure thriller, Snow Trail, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi from Kurosawa's screenplay. It marked the debut of the intense young actor Toshirō Mifune. It was Kurosawa who, with his mentor Yamamoto, had intervened to persuade Toho to sign Mifune, during an audition in which the young man greatly impressed Kurosawa, but managed to alienate most of the other judges.^[50]

Drunken Angel is often considered the director's first major work.^{[citation needed]} Although the script, like all of Kurosawa's occupation-era works, had to go through forced rewrites due to American censorship, Kurosawa felt that this was the first film in which he was able to express himself freely. A grittily realistic story of a doctor who tries to save a gangster (yakuza) with tuberculosis, it was also the director's first film with Toshirō Mifune, who would proceed to play either the main or a major characters in all but one (Ikiru) of the director's next 16 films. While Mifune was not cast as the protagonist in Drunken Angel, his explosive performance as the gangster so dominates the drama that he shifted the focus from the title character, the alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura, who had already appeared in several Kurosawa movies. However, Kurosawa did not want to smother the young actor's immense vitality, and Mifune's rebellious character electrified audiences in much the way that Marlon Brando's defiant stance would startle American film audiences a few years later. The film premiered in Tokyo in April 1948 to rave reviews and was chosen by the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics poll as the best film of its year, the first of three Kurosawa movies to be so honored.^{[51][52][53][54]}

Kurosawa, with producer Sōjirō Motoki and fellow directors and friends Kajiro Yamamoto, Mikio Naruse and Senkichi Taniguchi, formed a new independent production unit called Film Art Association (Eiga Geijutsu Kyōkai). For this organization's debut work, and first film for Daiei studios, Kurosawa turned to a contemporary play by Kazuo Kikuta and, together with Taniguchi, adapted it for the screen. The Quiet Duel starred Toshirō Mifune as an idealistic young doctor struggling with syphilis, a deliberate attempt by Kurosawa to break the actor away from being typecast as gangsters. Released in March 1949, it was a box office success, but is generally considered one of the director's lesser achievements.^{[55][56][57][58]}

His second film of 1949, also produced by Film Art Association and released by Shintōhō, was Stray Dog. The most celebrated of Kurosawa's works^{[citation needed]} from this period, it is a detective movie (perhaps the first important Japanese film in that genre)^{[citation needed]} that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery through the story of a young detective, played by Mifune, and his obsession over his handgun, stolen by a penniless young man who proceeds to use it to rob and murder. Adapted from an unpublished novel by Kurosawa in the style of a favorite writer of his, Georges Simenon, it was the director's first collaboration with screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima, who would later help to script eight other Kurosawa films. A famous, virtually wordless sequence, lasting over eight minutes, shows the detective, disguised as an impoverished veteran, wandering the streets in search of the gun thief; it employed actual documentary footage of war-ravaged Tokyo neighborhoods shot by Kurosawa's friend, Ishirō Honda, the future director of Gojira (aka, Godzilla).^[59][60][61] The film is considered a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres.^[62]

Scandal, released by Shochiku in April 1950, was inspired by the director's personal experiences with, and anger towards, Japanese yellow journalism. The work is an ambitious mixture of courtroom drama and social problem film about free speech and personal responsibility, but even Kurosawa regarded the finished product as dramatically unfocused and unsatisfactory, and almost all critics agree.^{[63][64][65][66]}

However, it would be Kurosawa's second film of 1950, Rashomon, that would ultimately win him a whole new audience.

International recognition (1950–1958)[link]

After finishing Scandal, Kurosawa was approached by Daiei studios, which asked the director to make another film for them. Kurosawa picked a script by an aspiring young screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto. (They would eventually write nine films together.) It was based on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's experimental short story In a Grove, which recounts the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife from various different and conflicting points-of-view. Kurosawa saw potential in the script, and with Hashimoto's help, polished and expanded it and then pitched it to Daiei, who were happy to accept the project due to its low budget.^[67]

Machiko Kyō and Toshirō Mifune in a scene from Rashomon (1950).