Akira Kurosawa’s first and last films, Sanshiro Sugata and Madadayo

In the opening moments of Akira Kurosawa’s debut feature, the camera pans down to a noisy street scene and pushes its way through as rickshaws and horse-drawn carts threaten to block its way. It turns to the left and ventures down a tiny side alley as the jaunty soundtrack is interrupted by a group of young women singing. “Where does this narrow road go?” they ask – a question that might equally be posed to Kurosawa, embarking on his 50-year journey as a filmmaker, as to the hero, Sanshiro, walking into an unfamiliar city filled with promise and opportunity.

Kurosawa had only entered the film industry by chance. He’d replied to an advert in a newspaper placed by the studio that would later become Toho, where he would spend the majority of his career. It was there he encountered his own mentor figure, Kajiro Yamamoto, for whom he served as an assistant director, mostly working on star vehicles for the popular comedian Enoken, who later played the porter in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). Kurosawa’s attempts to make his own first film were frustrated by censorship and budgetary issues until he was again struck by an advert in a newspaper, this time for an upcoming martial arts novel. The book would become the basis of his first feature, Sanshiro Sugata (1943). 

Set in the late 19th century, the resulting film anticipates a key theme in Kurosawa’s filmmaking in the central mentor-pupil relationship between the eponymous Sanshiro, a hot-headed youngster who travels to the city hoping to learn jujutsu, and the spiritually centred Yano who is the originator of the then new martial art of judo. In some ways, Sanshiro can be seen as a projection of Kurosawa himself at this point in his career: an impulsive and eager young man whose natural talents are nurtured and tempered by a more experienced father figure – Yano in the case of Sanshiro and Yamamoto in Kurosawa’s own. 

Narratively, the film follows the fairly familiar formula of a martial arts movie as a conflict develops between the traditionalist fighting style of jujutsu and that of judo, which incorporates the spiritual element that becomes central to Sanshiro’s journey to manhood. The 19th-century setting and concentration on a typically Japanese subject perhaps helped to overcome the censors’ concerns that the film did not display the kind of overtly patriotic themes normally required of a film released in 1943. Yet they did later decide to excise around 17 minutes of footage they considered problematic, while branding the film as “too British-American”. Just as with Kurosawa’s later film The Idiot (1951), which was drastically recut by its studio, intertitles were inserted filling in the missing action. 

In any case, Sanshiro Sugata was popular enough at the box office to warrant a sequel a couple of years later, albeit one much more nakedly propagandistic. Right from the very beginning of his career, Kurosawa’s expressionistic use of weather – particularly in the rolling clouds of the windswept final fight to the death between an enlightened Sanshiro and his westernised rival – is very much in evidence, along with the humanist philosophy that would come to the fore in his postwar work. 

Just as the camera had panned down in the opening moments of Sanshiro Sugata, so it pans back up at the conclusion of Madadayo as a small boy raises his head to a swirling sky of pinks and yellows. Under this surrealist sunset, it’s as if the camera is too captivated by the beauty and mystery of life to consider leaving it. 

Kurosawa had not intended the film to be his last. Despite his declining health, he continued to work on new ideas. Yet Madadayo nevertheless presents the perfect closing statement on a life and career; a poignant meditation on mortality as the narrow road nears its inevitable end.

Those swirling skies are a hallmark of a new phase in Kurosawa’s filmmaking, which had begun with the release of his first colour film, Dodes’ka-den, in 1970. After the success of Sanshiro Sugata, Kurosawa produced a series of world-renowned masterpieces, but his career began to flounder in the mid-1960s, in part because his increasingly strained relationship with his regular star Toshiro Mifune, which finally reached breaking point after the release of Red Beard in 1965. Kurosawa’s contract with Toho, where he’d spent the majority of his career, came to an end the following year, while the Japanese studio system had entered a terminal decline in the face of competition from television. 

After a project in the US failed to take off, Kurosawa was invited to work on the Japanese side of the US-Japan co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) only to be humiliatingly fired after coming into conflict with the American producers. Dodes’ka-den was intended as a kind of comeback, announcing a new beginning in Kurosawa’s career with its bold use of colour and absurdist storytelling. But the film failed at the box office and its lack of success is said to have contributed to Kurosawa’s attempt to take his own life a year later.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Kurosawa sought funding abroad, but Madadayo in many ways brings things full circle. Aimed more squarely at a domestic audience, the film was financed largely in Japan and distributed by Kurosawa’s former home studio Toho. Like Sanshiro Sugata it focuses on mentor-pupil relationships – but this time Kurosawa projected himself on to the role of the ageing professor, lovingly cared for by his former students, who insist that he has taught them “something more than German” in the course of their studies.

Inspired by the life and writings of Hyakken Uchida, Madadayo is in some ways a final departure in its broadly comic overtones, which heavily rely on complicated linguistic puns almost impossible to effectively convey within the confines of a subtitle. The untranslated title means ‘not yet’ and seems to echo Kurosawa’s own unwillingness to leave filmmaking behind, much as Uchida greets his impending mortality with good humour and resignation. A group of former students holds an annual celebration of Uchida’s life they term the ‘Not Yet Fest’, in which they rather insensitively enact his funeral as performance art. Or else they hold a giant silver plate behind his head, which is intended to symbolise the moon but also – to Uchida’s amusement – makes him look like the Buddha achieving enlightenment. 

As with many of Kurosawa’s heroes, Uchida’s chief asset, and the reason he is so loved, isn’t his wittiness and eccentricity but his childlike heart, which has a kind of purity often at odds with the world around him. A return to the more optimistic humanism of his earlier career, Madadayo’s relatively straightforward visual style, save for that dreamy final sunset sequence, lends it an elegiac quality, especially in the brief sequence of the passing seasons in which Uchida’s wife (Kyoko Kagawa) gently sweeps the autumn leaves from their tiny shack. 

A bittersweet meditation on mortality, legacy, human warmth and the joy of being alive, it’s a fitting swan song for the ageing master – no longer the hot-headed boy but the wise old professor imparting the lessons of his life to those he’ll leave behind.

Sanshiro Sugata is available on BFI Player. Madadayo screens at BFI Southbank as part of our Kurosawa season.