Throne of Blood is one of the best-known films by Kurosawa Akira. It was highly-praised in the West but not so warmly received in Japan. The reasons given for this difference in reception are (1) it is an adaptation/version/’re-imagining’ of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2) Kurosawa used elements of noh theatre in a jidaigeki or period film, which in Japanese Cinema would traditionally have been influenced by the more populist kabuki theatre. The result is that the film ‘as a film’ has been rather obscured by the metatext about its status as Shakespeare and ‘Japaneseness’. That’s a shame because it is a great Kurosawa movie with a terrific performance by Mifune Toshiro and a wonderfully imaginative representation of time and place – forests, castles and windswept and fog-bound heathland.
The following notes have been adapted from material given out on a recent study day on Kurosawa:
This version of Macbeth is transplanted to the early part of the Sengoku period of civil wars in Japanese history (1467-1573). This assertion is partly based on the absence of firearms. These were important in the wars of the later 16th century that eventually produced the settlement of the Tokugawa Shogunate (otherwise known as the ‘Edo’ Period – Edo is the old name for Tokyo). During the long period of civil wars, the Japanese Emperor was confined to Kyoto and warlords vied for power in different provinces across Japan.
Although many Japanese filmmakers are associated with jidaigeki, these tend to be based on traditional stories that had become kabuki plays during the Edo period. Kurosawa was an innovator in staging much more historically accurate (more realistically detailed) films from the Sengoku period and the final warring period before the triumph of Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603. Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress, Kagemusha and Ran are the other Kurosawa films with this period setting.
The actions of the characters in Throne of Blood are consistent with those of the period in Japanese history – although as Stephen Prince (2003/2010) points out, the wars were perhaps not as bloody as Kurosawa makes them. But he was creating them from a 20th century perspective – informed by his own experiences of war and disaster.
Noh and kabuki
Japanese cinema developed roughly in parallel with cinema in the West and filmmakers such as Kurosawa were influenced by the Western films they saw in the 1920s. Japanese films were much more closely associated with Japan’s three traditional theatrical forms, noh, kabuki and bunraku (a form of puppet theatre) and the modern theatre associated with the contact with the West from the 1860s onwards (shinpa/shingeki).
Noh is the earliest of these forms, dating from the 14th century and is associated with drama and dance performed for the aristocracy in a refined and austere manner. Actors play heavily ‘typed’ roles and individuality is hidden behind masks. Movements are restrained and sometimes paradoxical, so that a small movement can signal a major dramatic act.
Kabuki is a later form developing in the 17th century during the Edo period and designed more as popular entertainment. In many ways, kabuki is the opposite of noh with its appeal to a popular audience in large theatres. Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (2000) suggests that noh is a classical form and kabuki is a baroque form. Kabuki has been seen as similar to Elizabethan drama in its appeal to audiences and its dealings in spectacle. (Noh is more concerned with words: actions are often ‘off-stage’). Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was kabuki rather than noh that became the source of plots for Japanese period film dramas, especially action films. The same companies who owned the early cinemas and started to make films were also engaged in promoting kabuki shows in their live theatres. Kabuki might be said to be the more ‘earthy’ Shintoist response to the Buddhist austerity of noh.
It is interesting therefore that Kurosawa chose noh rather than kabuki as a prominent aesthetic influence upon Throne of Blood. The clearest examples of this in the film are in the depictions of the witch in Cobweb Forest and the central performance of Yamada Isuzu as the Lady Macbeth character, Lady Asaji. Although Kurosawa didn’t require his actors to wear noh masks as such, he showed them appropriate masks and asked them to study the facial expressions. They also wore make-up that shaped their facial features to resemble masks. In the case of the witch, she first appears as the old lady ‘yaseonna’ and in later scenes as the mountain witch, ‘yamauba’. Yamada was shown the shakumi mask – ‘the face of beautiful middle-aged woman on the brink of madness’. Mifune as Washizu was also shown the heida mask of the warrior.
Contrasts and clashes: Mifune
The whole film is built on a rhythm of contrasting styles, moods and tones. One of these can be seen in relation to the playing of Mifune Toshiro. Mifune was Kurosawa’s leading man in most of his films between 1948 and 1965. Casting Mifune is one example of the ways in which Kurosawa innovated. As an actor, Mifune stood out in two ways. First was his sheer physical vitality. He literally ate up the screen space. Kurosawa claimed that Mifune could convey the same meaning in a third of the time that it took all other Japanese actors. He seems the least likely actor to be in a noh play – far too coarse and brutal, always seemingly teetering on the edge of breaking out into violent action. (But Kurosawa tells us he was a sensitive man of refinement.)
The second point was that Mifune’s accent was Manchurian and because he spoke as he acted – often violently – he offered a complete change to actors coached in kabuki theatre who enunciated clearly. One interesting aspect of the film is therefore the contrast between the acting styles of Yamada and Mifune in the internal scenes.
Japanese visual art: the pen and ink school
The history of Eastern painting is quite different to that of the West and up to the late 19th century, different forms of Japanese art were very popular in the domestic market. Kurosawa himself was interested in both Western painting styles and traditional Japanese modes. Stephen Prince (2010) describes this aspect of Throne of Blood:
The striking emptiness of the spaces in the film – the skies, the dense roiling fog that obscures mountains and plains – is a cinematic rendition of sumi-e composition. This style of pen-and-ink drawing leaves large portions of the picture unfilled, making this ‘emptiness’ a positive compositional (and spiritual) value. Kurosawa believed that this style of picture making resonated deeply with the Japanese, and he was eager to infuse the film with this aesthetic. (Production designer Yoshiro Muraki’s castle set was black and was built on the dark, volcanic soil of Mt. Fuji in order to heighten the sumi-e effect, the contrast of dark and light. Although based on historical sketches, the castle is not of any single period.) As a positive value, this pictorial and spiritual ‘emptiness’ is set against the human world of vanity, ambition, and violence, which Kurosawa suggests is all illusion. The Buddhist arts of Noh and sumi-e enabled him to visualise this disjunction between the hell of life as we poor creatures know it, subject to our strivings, our desires, and our will, and the cosmic order that negates them.
Contrasts and clashes 2: Camerawork and editing
Kurosawa has been highly praised by critics for several reasons – not least his command of the full panoply of the filmmakers’s art – camerawork, mise en scène, editing (which he did himself on this film) and sound design. Across his 30 films he demonstrates many different and styles and the ways in which he has absorbed and transmogrified styles from a variety of film movements.
In Throne of Blood, the film is predicated on the structure of static sequences, almost in tableau, broken up by scenes of dramatic action with a change of composition, shot size and camera movement. The great proponent of studying the formal characteristics of Japanese Cinema is Noël Burch whose controversial book on Japanese Cinema was published in 1979. (The book was controversial because of the use he put his scholarship to in terms of the politics of film studies in the 1980s.) Burch refers to the contrasting scenes in Throne of Blood (or ‘Cobweb Castle’ as he terms it in a direct translation) as ‘lyrical agitation’ on the one hand and ‘tense stasis’ on the other.
Burch also discusses Kurosawa’s debt to Eisenstein and the concept of the ‘shot-change’. In simple terms this means a style that contrasts with the invisible nature of Hollywood’s ‘continuity editing’. The shot-change celebrates the visible transition from one shot to another, possibly through deliberate ‘mismatching’ of eye-lines or as in Throne of Blood in the use of Kurosawa’s favourite device of this period, the ‘hard-edged’ fast wipe which abruptly takes us from one scene to another in the most visible way possible (cf the gradual fade out/fade in or the unobtrusive straight cut). This is one example of the way in which Kurosawa confirms the ‘artificiality’ of film, emphasising its constructedness. The use of noh acting devices is another. See too the distortion of space in the sequence of the funeral procession approaching the castle.
What does it all mean?
If we understand all these facets of the film, what do we make of Kurosawa’s approach to what is a familiar story? Stephen Prince offers us a particular reading:
The Noh masks point to a huge difference between this theatrical tradition and Shakespeare’s, one that helps give the film many of its unusual qualities. Noh is not psychologically oriented; characters are not individualised. Its characters are types – the old man, the woman, the warrior, and so on – and the plays are quite didactic, aiming to impart a lesson. Kurosawa, therefore, strips all the psychology out of Macbeth and gives us a film whose characters are Noh types and where emotions – the province of character in the drama of the West – are located here as absolute types. Emotion here isn’t an attribute of character psychology, but a formal embodiment in landscape and weather. The bleached skies, the fog, the barren plains, and characters going adrift against and within these spaces – this is where the emotion of the film resides. It is objectified within and through the world of things. As a result, the film has a definite coldness; it keeps the viewer outside the world it depicts. Kurosawa wants us to grasp the lesson, to see the folly of human behaviour, rather than to identify or empathise with the characters.
. . . If Kurosawa strips the psychology from Macbeth, he also strips out Shakespeare’s political conservatism, refusing to give us the play’s reassuring conclusion (flattering to James I) in which a just political authority triumphs. In Kurosawa’s film and worldview, the cycle of human violence never ends. Thus the film’s many circular motifs describe the real tragedy at the heart of the history that Throne of Blood dramatises. Why do people kill each other so often and through so many ages? Kurosawa had no answer to this question. But he showed us here, through the film’s chorus, its circularity, and its Buddhist aesthetics, that there may not finally be an answer within this world. The aesthetics and philosophy of Throne of Blood take us well beyond Shakespeare, and that’s why this is a great film. Its accomplishments are not beholden to another medium or artist. Kurosawa gives us his own vision, expressed with ruthless, chilling power, and it’s the totality of that vision, its sweep and its uncompromising nature, that move and terrify us and that we are so seldom privileged to see in cinema.
I confess that I don’t care much for Shakespeare. I’m sure that I am missing out, but I’m too old now to start over. It does mean, however, that I can watch Throne of Blood objectively, not worried about ‘fidelity’ to an existing text. At the same time, because I’ve seen other film versions, I know the basic story so I can focus on how the events are presented. It seems to me that Burch and Prince make persuasive arguments. Throne of Blood is certainly one of Kurosawa’s major achievements – and a film to which he would return with varying success in the later works, Kagemusha and Ran. Its strengths are in the careful structuring of the narrative, the strong and coherent visual style, the location and settings and the direction of a group of highly-skilled actors led by Mifune on top form.
In a lengthy essay on Throne of Blood, Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (2000) explores the questions about both the Shakespeare adaptation and the supposed ‘Japaneseness’ of the film in some detail, marshalling a range of theoretical ideas. I don’t have space to explore these here but I’d like to quote Yoshimoto’s conclusion which ties in nicely with some of the discussion above:
Despite its use of noh and other types of traditional Japanese art, Throne of Blood has little to do with the affirmation of Japaneseness. Nor is it an attempt to create a new national film style. Instead, Kurosawa simultaneously tries to expand the possibility of film form and re-examine the specific history and genre conventions of Japanese Cinema. Throne of Blood is a unique film made by a true innovator of cinema. (Yoshimoto, 2000:269)
Noel Burch (1979) To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press (this book is now available as a pdf on free download from the University of Michigan
Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (2000) Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Durham NC: Duke University Press
For much of his career up to 1965 Kurosawa Akira was contracted to Toho (in the latter part of this period through his own production company) but in the late 1940s, because of labour unrest at Toho, Kurosawa took his projects to other studios. Scandal was produced by Shochiku, more associated for cinephiles with the work of Ozu Yasujiro. Although often regarded as one of Kurosawa’s ‘minor’ works, Scandal has several interesting features.
Plot outline (no spoilers)
Mifune Toshiro plays Aoye Ichirô, an artist (Kurosawa’s ‘profession’ before he entered the film industry). Aoye is on holiday painting landscapes in the mountains. One day a young woman with a suitcase walks up to his painting spot. She appears to be heading for the hotel where Aoye is staying so he gives her a lift on his motorbike. At the hotel, Aoye visits the young woman’s room to see how she is settling in. Both are dressed informally and when they peer over the balcony to admire a view they hear a click – the paparazzi (or at least their predecessors in the Japanese ‘yellow press’) are at work. The young woman is a famous singer and there is a market value in an image of her and the handsome artist. Aoye then sues the scandal magazine (ironically titled ‘Amore’) which runs the photo. He chooses an unprepossessing lawyer to prosecute the case, seemingly won over by the lawyer’s sick daughter who is bed-ridden with TB. And this is where the problems begin . . .
Some critics see this film as failing because it moves into melodrama. Several of us on this site are melodrama fans, so that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It must be said, however, that Scandal offers a rather unusual combination of elements. Kurosawa sets up an interesting proposition in the first few scenes. The artist paints a picture which is not a ‘faithful reproduction’ of a landscape – but it conveys a truth (which the artist eventually finds through hard work). The photograph at the centre of the ‘scandal’ is just the opposite – an accurate rendering of a moment, but ultimately ‘untruthful’ about what is happening. This ‘mismatch’ between ‘imitation of reality’ and the truth behind an image is carried through to Aoye’s relationship with the lawyer played by Shimura Takashi and with the lawyer’s sick daughter. These relationships become the focus of the melodrama (rather than the expected relationship with the singer).
Scandal is ostensibly a ‘social protest’ film about the ‘yellow press’ (what is now usually called the tabloid press). Because information and comment had been so severely repressed in the Japanese media during the long wartime period, there was an explosion of sensational journalism in the immediate post-war period. This was clearly a social issue. Exposure of corruption was, of course, a social good, but it was accompanied by exploitation of personal problems. Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro in his book on Kurosawa and Japanese Cinema (2000) observes that Kurosawa was early in critiquing this kind of journalism and it was not followed up in Japanese Cinema until Masumura Yasuzo’s Giants and Toys in 1958 (and again by Kurosawa in The Bad Sleep Well, 1960). But Scandal also has another reference to contemporary social problems. The lawyer is poor and his daughter is seriously ill with TB – just as the Mifune character in Drunken Angel (1948). The lawyer even lives in an area with a stagnant pool as in the earlier film.
The ‘media discourse’ which the film explores is well represented in the film’s mise en scène. Kurosawa and his cinematographer Ubukata Toshio have great fun with posters, microphones, flashbulbs, cine cameras and arclights in a series of montages and set pieces, such as the court case that comprises much of the last section of the film.
The problem with the film, I think, is in how Kurosawa has fashioned a narrative around the idea of a ‘true’ man and a ‘man of imitation’ – the Mifune-Shimura axis again played in a way that sees the artist character of Mifune puzzled by the new media environment and determined to preserve his honour (and that of the singer) whereas Shimura (the lawyer) is a much more feeble character who, although he does not understand the new world is easily persuaded to abandon his honour. This is a melodrama of redemption in which Shimura becomes the centre. (There is also a true melodrama ‘villain’ in the form of the magazine owner.) The court case is linked back to the ‘truth’/’imitation’ thematic in several ways. In the lawyer’s ramshackle office there is a photo of his daughter in school uniform. he artist recognises that this is a true photo and it helps him to decide to hire the father. The father knows this truth, so when he is about to do something shameful, he turns the photo to face the wall.
The expected melodrama involving the singer doesn’t happen, instead the focus switches to the lawyer’s daughter. The singer must be present for the court case and the narrative demands the presence of another woman – almost as a chaperone. This is the artist’s model and his friend. At one point, they discuss the conventions of Western painting and the artist suggests that Japanese art can’t deal with the nude. In this sense the artist is aware of the ‘westernisation’ of Japanese culture – and when he visits the lawyer’s family at Christmas he brings a tree on his motorbike.
I was struck by some of the American responses to the film (which has now appeared on DVD in Criterion’s box sets of Kurosawa). A New York Times review by Vincent Canby from 1980 suggests that the film is a satire on the Americanisation of Japan during the Occupation and that in some ways the film seems first like a pastiche of Hollywood romcoms and then undercuts this with its change of direction. Another reviewer points us towards Sam Fuller’s films about journalism. Yamaguchi Yoshiko (like Mifune, born in Manchuria) who plays the singer later appeared in some American films as ‘Shirley Yamaguchi’ – including Sam Fuller’s Japan-set thriller House of Bamboo (1955). The courtroom scenes are similar to those in Hollywood films, although the presence of newsreel cameras makes them look more like Senate hearings. There is a suggestion that some of the courtroom procedures might be ‘new’ – perhaps as a result of reforms by the Occupation forces?
This is certainly a film worth seeing, with some excellent set pieces and a real sense of the vitality found in so many of Kurosawa’s films in this period. Perhaps it has been overshadowed only because it was made in the same year as Rashomon. One warning though – if you don’t like melodrama acting, you may find Shimura’s performance just a little ‘too much’. I prefer him in Ikiru (1952).
1960. Kurosawa Productions and Toho Studio. Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima, Eijiro Hisaiti and Akira Kurosawa. Black and white CinemaScope photography: Yazuru Aizawa. Music: Masaru Sato.
This was the first feature from Kurosawa’ own production unit. The production team includes names familiar from his other films. And the lead character is played by Toshiro Mifune: almost an alter ego for the director. The film’s plot is reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though there is no reference to this in the credits. However, Shakespeare [like the classic Russian novels] is a recurring source for Kurosawa’s films. What is interesting is that what appears to interest him are the revenge tragedies: Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear.
Nishi’s (Toshiro Mifune) father was a victim of corporate corruption. Nishi marries into the family of Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori) the Vice-President of a Land Development Corporation and a senior figure in the network of corruption. Obtaining the position as secretary to the Vice-President, Nishi proceeds to subvert the criminal network from inside. His unexpected emotional feelings for his new wife Yoshiko (Kyko Kagawa) engender similar vacillations to that of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s version. This sets up a dark, downbeat and tragic finale.
The film opens at a high-class wedding ceremony attended by leading businessmen and government officials. We are immediately plunged into a formal Japanese occasion. However, the wedding party themselves are plunged into anxiety as newspapermen and then police arrive on the trail of a corporate corruption conspiracy. There is a sharp contrast between the ritual formalism of the wedding reception and the public events being exposed. Kurosawa’s camera shows us the corporate bosses struggling to maintain a facade over their repressed anxieties whilst the newsmen act like a Greek chorus on the developing drama. This repression is powerfully visualised in one moment of the sequence. The young bride suffers from a disabled foot. This is partially hidden in the drapery of the traditional costume of a Japanese bride. However, she stumbles on entry, exposing her deformity. The visible shock that accompanies this accident presages the more dramatic shocks and exposures that follow later in the film.
Whilst the opening sequence raises a host of questions it also introduces the main characters and the theme of corruption that dominates the film. Kurosawa explained
“At last I decided to do something about corruption, because it always seemed to me that graft, bribery, etc., at the public level, is one of the worst crimes that there is. These people hide behind the facade of some great company or corporation and consequently no one knows how dreadful they really are, what awful things they do.” (In Sight and Sound, Autumn 1964).
In the film Nishi’s motives are more personal than social. As the story develops we come to find out about his history and to understand what it is that motivate his actions. We also start to realise the complicating emotions that he begins to experience. When Yoshiko stumbles at the wedding reception it is her brother Tatsuo (Tatsuya Mihashi) rather than Nishi who rushes to assist her. Later in the film when the young wife stumbles and falls at home it is Nishi himself who rushes forward to catch and carry her to her room. Tatsuo also develops conflicting emotions. He harbours guilt over the childhood accident that resulted in his sister becoming lame. He hates his father, but suspects that Nishi is not a ‘good’ husband. But he finally takes the side of Nishi.
Parallel to these personal complications are those of Nishi’s investigation and manipulation, which aim to expose the corruption and the perpetrators. He does this partly by suborning and blackmailing lower member of the conspiracy. But he also sets up dramatic occasions when he can pressurise and observe the conspiracy’s leaders. The first of these occurs at the wedding. When the ritual cake arrives it is followed by a second: an unsuspecting waiter wheels in a large reconstruction of a corporate building It is in fact a copy of a block from which one of the network, Furuya [Nishi’s father] jumped or was pushed to his death. The ambiguity over the death springs from the loyalty embedded in the system: underlings sacrifice themselves because they cannot bring themselves to expose their superiors.
Parallel examples appear later in the film. Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara), a corrupt accountant, is believed to have committed suicide. In fact he is hidden by Nishi. Wada watches his own funeral with Nishi. Dramatically the scene is accompanied by a secret recording made by Nishi of the conspirators discussing the convenient demise of Wada. A later scene in the building in which Furuya died has Shirai, (Akira Nishimura), the corrupt Contract Officer, driven mad by his competing fears of death and betrayal.
Nishi’s companion Itakura (Takeshi Kato) is a wartime friend and also a business partner. They have swapped identities so that Nishi [once Itakura] can penetrate the conspirator’s network unrecognised. In 1945 Nishi and Itakura were part of the defence at an armaments factory, now a bombed and ruined wasteland. It is here that the film reaches its conclusion. Here Nishi holds captive and interrogates Moriyama (Takashi Shimura), one of the key conspirators. However, Yoshiko mistakenly gives his secret away to her father and the conspirators set out to eliminate Nishi and safeguard their positions. Unlike the Shakespearean version there is no Fortinbras to bring in a new and accountable regime. All that Tatsuo can do is tend to his traumatised sister. Itakura [once Nishi] loses his identity and is rendered a non-person by the death of Nishi.
Whilst Shakespeare does not get an official credit Kurosawa’s version is full of references to the famous play. Apart from the dead father and the son’s efforts for revenge we have the murderous stepfather, the faithful friend and companion, the lovelorn heroine and her angry brother: we even have a suborned widow, though much less developed than Shakespeare’s Queen. Alongside these characters there is a ghost: a dramatic recreation of a murder: graves and funerals: gunplay instead of swordplay: and poisonings. What we seem to have is a Shakespearean tale reconstructed in contemporary Japan.
I found the opening of the film riveting as we watch the surface formality so typical of Japanese drama. But we also watch the hidden currents of greed, fear and revenge. The sequence sets up a series of strands of both personal and public conflict. The CinemaScope photography is exemplary as we watch the various manoeuvres by the characters. Visually the film’s conclusion provides a darker parallel, set in the disused arms factory, as Nishi and Itakura desperately seek to complete their investigations, only half aware of the trap that is closing in on them. The shattered and dismal landscape becomes a metaphor for the social chaos depicted in the film.
Unfortunately I find the drama that separates these two episodes less convincing. There are impressive set pieces: a man contemplates suicide on a smoking wasteland of stones and ash: three men walked through a labyrinth of gleaming metal, and bright lights and shadows, typical of the noir atmosphere in the film. There are secret meetings of the conspirators and the clear evidence of a Mr Big, in the shadowy background. However, the personal dramas do not achieve the same dramatic edge.
Part of the problem seems to be the motivation of Nishi. It is his suppressed emotions for his new wife that creates the vacillation that in Shakespeare springs from the character of Hamlet. But the film does not offer enough attention to the relationship to make this convincing. The female characters are mostly underdeveloped. This is a reflection of the contemporary world of business, government and the media. Thus when the high-ranking guests arrive for the reception only the male member signs the Reception Book.
But it is also that female characters are not really developed in most Kurosawa films. His films privilege male bonding rather than heterosexual couples. Despite her importance in the plot and in the relationships between the men Yoshiko is a fairly undeveloped character. And Furuya’s wife appears only to be duped in a similar fashion to Yoshiko.
Even so the film remains a dramatic and compelling story. It is beautifully composed with an evocative soundtrack. Kurosawa and his team offer distinctive stylistic tropes: like the familiar recurring cut on a wipe. The cast portrays the dark, seedy world of corruption with conviction.
(This post was sent to us by Leung Wing-Fai )
I Live in Fear, also known as Record of a Living Being, centres on Kurosawa Akira’s humanist concerns. The contemporary drama is one of the lesser-known films of the acclaimed auteur. It tells the story of a 60-year old industrialist Nakajima (played by Mifune Toshiro who was only 35 at the time) who decides to take his entire family to Brazil after the Second World War and the Bikini Incident. In 1954 the US forced the 166 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to leave their homes, and then conducted a full-scale test of an atomic bomb, which was thousand times as powerful as the explosion at Hiroshima. The Japanese fishing boat ‘Lucky Dragon’ strayed just beyond the demarcation zone resulting in all crew members being killed or suffering radiation sickness. The incident sparked a national petition (with 20 million signatures) calling for a ban on nuclear weapons.
Nakajima’s family takes him to court and tries to declare him mentally ill in order to stop him from spending the family fortune on migration to Brazil. On the other hand Nakajima believes that the nuclear threat is the madness and fails to understand why everyone else should be so complacent. The opening credit shows crowded Tokyo streets full of faceless commuters who seem orderly yet lacking in direction. It can be interpreted as a statement on the group’s lack of ability to challenge fate, which the old man’s children are all ready to accept. One of his sons tells him that there is no point worrying about the atomic bomb as they cannot do anything about it anyway. Nakajima is not only fighting the fears of nuclear destruction but the weight of the crowd represented by his numerous relatives.
One of the most striking scenes is when Nakajima hears planes flying low, and sees a flash of lightning in the sky; he rushes over to his grandson and wraps himself around the baby to protect him. His daughter is horrified and grabs the child from Nakajima. The scene sums up the old man’s motivation and the reaction of his unsympathetic family. The turning point comes when Nakajima burns down his factory to force his family to migrate, with the opposite effect; they are more convinced that he is demented. The ending is most regretful. Nakajima has been put in an asylum. One of the magistrates goes to visit him; when Nakajima sees the setting sun, he thinks that it is a nuclear explosion and shouts, “It’s burning! The earth is on fire”. The film was supposedly inspired by the death of Kurosawa’s long term colleague, the composer Hayasaka Fumio who once told the director, “The world has come to such a state that we don’t really know what is in store for us tomorrow . . . Every day there are fewer and fewer places that are safe. Soon there will be no place at all”. Hayasaka died during the filming of I Live in Fear, which explains the dark world-view. Unsurprisingly the film was too topical and dark to be successful among the Japanese public, but even now it reminds us that perhaps fear heightens the sense of being, as the two titles respectively suggest.