The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema
In September 1951, 'Rashomon' won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. It wasn't Japan that pushed to enter it. Giuliana Stramigioli of Italiafilm found the movie while staying in Japan and recommended it strongly. Daiei, the studio, is said to have been reluctant, thinking it too Japanese for a Western audience. The day the world discovered Japanese cinema wasn't a day Japan chose for itself — and a channel opens from here. An honorary Academy Award followed the next year. Kenji Mizoguchi won at Venice three years running ('The Life of Oharu,' 'Ugetsu,' 'Sansho the Bailiff' — 1953 was a year with no Golden Lion awarded, so his was a Silver Lion), and 'Gate of Hell' brought home the Grand Prix at Cannes. The young critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in Paris ranked Mizoguchi above Kurosawa, and in 1966 Godard visited his grave in Kyoto to lay flowers. Yasujiro Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' was voted the greatest film ever made in Sight & Sound's 2012 directors' poll — 59 years after its release. And the channel doesn't run one way. In his autobiography 'Something Like an Autobiography,' Akira Kurosawa wrote of his admiration for John Ford, visited his set in London, and is said to have worn sunglasses and a wool cap on set from then on, in the Ford style. A genre the Western had shaped went on to teach the director who had learned from it: 'Yojimbo' was adapted without permission into 'A Fistful of Dollars,' and Toho's protest was settled just short of court, with a cut of the box office — Kurosawa is said to have become 'the master who profited from being ripped off.' The story of 'Seven Samurai' and 'The Magnificent Seven' runs longer still: it began with a $250 sale of the rights, a Tokyo court found the remake illegal in 1978, and it took until a 1993 settlement to close — eighteen years. There's a channel for actors too. Toshiro Mifune's daughter, Mika, has testified that George Lucas offered her father the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi directly, and he turned it down. The term 'Rashomon effect' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2008. A way of telling a story now carries the name of a Japanese film.