Akira Kurosawa was born to Isamu and Shima Kurosawa on March 23, 1910. He was the youngest of eight children born to the Kurosawas, who lived in a suburb of Tokyo. Shima Kurosawa was forty years old when Akira was born while his father was forty five. Akira Kurosawa grew up in a family which had eight children – four sons and four daughters. One of his brothers died before Akira was born, and another one had already grown up and moved away from home. One of his four sisters had also left home to start her own family before Akira was born. The second eldest sister, whom he called “Little big sister”, died after a short illness when Akira was ten years old.

Akira’s father was the director of a high school governed by the Japanese military and was a descendant from a line of former samurai. Financially, the family was above average. Isamu Kurosawa embraced the Western culture by introducing athletic programs and by taking his family to see films which, at that time, had just begun playing in Japanese theaters. Later, when the Japanese culture renounced American films, Isamu Kurosawa continued to believe that films were a positive educational experience.

In primary school, Akira was encouraged to draw by a teacher who took an interest in mentoring his talents. His elder brother, Heigo, had a profound impact on him. Heigo was very intelligent, he won several academic competitions, but he also had what was later called his cynical or dark side. In 1923, Tokyo was hit by a strong earthquake which took the lives of 100,000 people. After this event, 17-year-old Heigo and 13-year-old Akira would walk through the ruins. Corpses of humans and animals could be seen everywhere. When Akira tried to avert his eyes, Heigo urged him not to. According to Akira, this experience would later teach him that looking at frightening things can lead to overcoming fear.

Later, Heigo started a career as a narrator (benshi) in Tokyo’s cinemas. Benshi narrated silent films for the audience and were a uniquely Japanese addition to the cinematography experience. However, with the introduction of talking films, benshi were losing their jobs all across Japan. Heigo organized a benshi strike that eventually failed. Akira was also involved in the struggles between the workers and the management by writing several articles for a radical newspaper where he worked as an illustrator.

When Akira was in his early twenties, Heigo committed suicide. Four months later, Akira’s eldest brother also died, leaving Akira, aged 23, as the only survivor of the four sons.

In 1936 Akira learned of an apprenticeship program for directors organized by a major film studio, PCL (which later became known as Toho). He was hired and he started to work as assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto. After his directorial debut with Judo Saga, several of his films that followed were made under the watchful eye of the Japanese wartime government so they sometimes contained nationalistic themes. The Most Beautiful is a propaganda film about Japanese women working in a military optics factory. Judo Saga 2 is regarded as an extremely anti-American film since it depicts Japanese judo as superior to Western (American) boxing.

His first post-war film, No Regrets for Our Youth, is a critique of the old Japanese regime and centers around the wife of a left-wing dissident who is arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films dealing with contemporary Japan, most notably Drunken Angel and Stray Dog. However, he gained international fame with the film Rashomon which won him the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Kurosawa had a unique cinematic technique which he developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a distinctive look. He also used several cameras which enabled him to film an action scene from multiple angles. Another one of Kurosawa’s trademarks was the use of weather elements to emphasize the effect, for example, the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon and the final battle in Seven Samurai, the intense heat in Stray Dog, the freezing wind in Yojimbo, the snow in Ikiru, and the fog in Throne of Blood.

Because of his directorial style, he was known as “Tenno” which means “Emperor”. He was a perfectionist who spent a lot of time and effort in achieving the desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he used calligraphy ink to dye the water black in order to achieve the effect of heavy rain, and in the end used up the entire water supply of the location in creating the rainstorm. In Throne of Blood, in the final scene in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers at close range, landing within a few centimeters of Mifune’s body. In the film Ran, the entire set of the castle was built on the slopes of Mount Fuji only to be burned to the ground in the final scene.

Other stories about him include his demand that a river flow be made to run in the opposite direction in order to achieve better visual effects, and having the roof of a house removed because he felt that the roof’s presence would be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.

His perfectionism was also reflected in his approach to costumes: he felt that it would not seem authentic at all to give the actors new costumes. In order to solve this problem, he often gave the actors their costumes weeks before shooting and asked them to wear them every day in order to “bond with them”. In some cases, such as the film Seven Samurai, in which most actors portrayed poor farmers, the actors were told that by the start of the shooting their costumes should look worn and tattered.

Kurosawa did not believe that “finished” music went well with film. After choosing a musical piece to accompany his scenes, he usually had it reduced to one element (e.g., trumpets only). More finished pieces can be heard only at the end of his films.

A well-known feature of Kurosawa’s films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare’s works. Ran is based on King Lear, and Throne of Blood on Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep Well has parallels with Hamlet, but there is no confirmation that it was his primary inspiration. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian literary works, including The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths, a play by Maxim Gorky. To Live (Ikiru) was based on Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. Parts of the story from Red Beard can be found in Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted.

High and Low was based on King’s Ransom by American crime writer Ed McBain. Yojimbo was probably based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest with the addition of American Westerns, while Stray Dog was inspired by Georges Simenon’s detective novels. The American film director John Ford also had a major influence on his work.

Despite being criticised by some Japanese critics as being “too Western”, Kurosawa was also influenced by Japanese culture.

When Kurosawa went to meet John Ford, the director commonly said to have had the most influence on Kurosawa, Ford simply said: “You really like rain.” Kurosawa replied: “You’ve really been paying attention to my films.”

Red Beard marked a turning point in Kurosawa’s career more than any other. In addition to being his last film with Mifune, it was also his last black-and-white film. It was also his last film as one of the main directors within the Japanese studio system, making roughly one film per year. Kurosawa was supposed to direct a Hollywood project, Tora! Tora! Tora!, but 20^th Century Fox replaced him with Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku before it was finished. Several of his films that followed were more difficult to finance and were made at intervals of five years. The first, Dodesukaden, about a group of poor people living in a Tokyo slum, did not achieve great success.

After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films, although it was increasingly difficult to find financial resources despite his international reputation. Dersu Uzala, made in the Soviet Union and set in Siberia, was the only one of Kurosawa’s film made outside Japan and not in the Japanese language. It is about the friendship between a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter, and it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Kagemusha – Shadow Warrior, financed with the help of the director’s most famous admirers, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, is a story about a man who is called upon to replace a dying medieval Japanese lord and take over his identity after his death. The film won a Golden Palm (Palme d'Or) at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 (which it shared with Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz). Ran was the director’s version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in medieval Japan. It was by far the biggest project of Kurosawa’s late career. The film was an international success and is considered to be Kurosawa’s last masterpiece. In an interview, Kurosawa said that he believed that this was the best film he ever made.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more personal compared to his earlier works. Dreams is a series of vignettes based on his own dreams. Rhapsody in August is about memories of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and his final film, Madadayo, is about a retired teacher and his former students. Kurosawa died of a heart attack in Setagaya, Tokyo, age 88.

After the Rain is a posthumous film from 1998 directed by Kurosawa’s closest collaborator, Takashi Koizumi, produced by Kurosawa Production (Hisao Kurosawa), starring Tatsuya Nakadai and Shiro Mifune, son of Toshiro Mifune, in the lead roles. The screenplay and dialogues were written by Kurosawa himself.