Toshirō Mifune

Toshirō Mifune: The Wounded Beast in the Room

Akira Kurosawa had not intended to attend the Toho talent audition at all. He went because Hideko Takamine told him about a young man worth seeing, and what he found he described later in terms nobody has improved on: "a young man reeling around the room in a violent frenzy... it was as frightening as watching a wounded beast." The applicant lost the competition. Kurosawa's verdict on him was unequivocal: "I am a person rarely impressed by actors. But in the case of Mifune I was completely overwhelmed."

A Photographer's Son in Manchuria

He was born on 1 April 1920 in Seitō — present-day Qingdao — in Japanese-occupied Shandong. His father Tokuzo was a trade merchant and photographer with businesses in Qingdao and Yingkou; his mother Sen descended from a hatamoto, a high-ranking samurai official. Both parents were Methodist missionaries, part of the settlement the Japanese government encouraged in occupied China. From the age of four until he was nineteen, Mifune lived in Dalian, working in his father's photography studio. He then spent the war in the Imperial Japanese Army's aviation division, in an aerial photography unit.

He had, in other words, no connection whatever to acting. He knew cameras.

The Camera Department Was Full

In 1947, after a major strike, Toho ran a "new faces" contest to rebuild its roster. Mifune wanted the photography department; a colleague named Nenji Oyama, finding it full, submitted his résumé to the acting competition instead. Roughly four thousand applied and forty-nine were taken. At his screen test the director Kajirō Yamamoto asked him to mime anger. Mifune, drawing on the war, produced something that got him recommended straight to Senkichi Taniguchi and into his first feature, *Shin Baka Jidai*.

Sixteen Films

Kurosawa cast him in *Drunken Angel* (1948) as a tubercular young gangster in white linen — a role now credited with inaugurating the yakuza film. Over the next seventeen years they made sixteen pictures: *Stray Dog*, *Rashomon*, *Seven Samurai*, *Throne of Blood*, *The Hidden Fortress*, *The Bad Sleep Well*, *Yojimbo*, *Sanjuro*, *High and Low*, *Red Beard*.

Kurosawa repeatedly paired him with Takashi Shimura, whose talkative, grounded ordinariness gave Mifune's intensity something to break against. In *Stray Dog* the young detective shouts uselessly at a witness while Shimura's older man simply talks to her and gets what he needs. In *Seven Samurai* Mifune's Kikuchiyo — a farmer's son insisting on his right to be called a samurai — was built, Mifune said, on the behaviour of a lion. In *Yojimbo* and *Sanjuro* he created the nameless wandering ronin, a figure Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood would appropriate wholesale into the Western.

Rashomon, and the World

*Rashomon* took the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and opened Japanese cinema to the West more or less single-handedly. Mifune himself won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice twice, for *Yojimbo* in 1961 and *Red Beard* in 1965. With Hiroshi Inagaki he made twenty more films, including the *Samurai* trilogy — the first of which won an Honorary Academy Award — and *Rickshaw Man*, another Venice Golden Lion. In the Mexican production *Ánimas Trujano* (1962) he learned his entire part phonetically from Spanish language tapes; the film was nominated for an Oscar and he for a Golden Globe.

The Break

*Red Beard* (1965) ended it. Kurosawa required a real beard, grown and maintained across two years of shooting, which locked Mifune out of all other work and drove Mifune Productions — founded in 1962 — deep into debt. He had long wanted his own company and freelance freedom, which Kurosawa had discouraged. After *Red Beard* they never worked together again.

Their fortunes then diverged cruelly. Mifune stayed commercially busy; Kurosawa's output shrank, met mixed responses, and he attempted suicide. Mifune remained loyal in public, turning up to the premiere of *Kagemusha*.

The Last Samurai

The international career was substantial and mostly beneath him. *Grand Prix* (1966), *Hell in the Pacific* opposite Lee Marvin, *Red Sun*, *Midway*, Spielberg's *1941*, and finally Lord Toranaga in NBC's *Shogun* (1980), which made him a household name in America at sixty. He turned down Tiger Tanaka in *You Only Live Twice* and, according to his daughter, an offer of Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi in *Star Wars* — a film whose plot George Lucas had already lifted in part from *The Hidden Fortress*.

Colleagues remembered him as unusually generous and entirely unstarry: he learned every line without a script, catered parties for the crew, and paid for hot-spring holidays for their families. He died on 24 December 1997 in Mitaka, Tokyo, aged seventy-seven, of multiple organ failure.

Why Toshirō Is Called a Genius

The most precise claim ever made for him is Kurosawa's, and it is a technical one: Mifune could "convey in only three feet of film an emotion for which the average Japanese actor would require ten feet." That is a measurable assertion about compression — the ability to make a feeling fully legible in a fraction of the footage anyone else needed.

The gift is physical rather than intellectual, and it should be described as such. Mifune had no training, no theatrical background, and by his own account no interest in acting when he walked into Toho. What he had was a body that read at any distance. Pauline Kael put it exactly: "No actor can do more with his knees and his behind than Mifune." Critics reached reflexively for animals — a hedgehog, a padding tiger, "one of the most purely feral performances on film" — because his acting worked below language, in gait and haunch and shoulder. Audiences could identify him by a single gesture. Kurosawa's own complaint was that he was "simply too well-built... He has too much presence." Danny Peary's verdict: "For a 20-year period, there was no greater actor — dynamic or action — than Toshiro Mifune." And the range was wider than the swordplay suggests: in *High and Low* he converted all that kinetic energy into stillness, playing a contained industrialist who comes apart only twice, both times in a bathroom.

The counter-case is one Mifune made himself. "I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him," he said of Kurosawa — a startling admission from a man with more than 150 films, and an acknowledgement that the achievement was inseparable from a single director's framing. After 1965 the work calcified; without anyone to keep shifting his register he became, in Criterion's phrase, "the Last Samurai," playing versions of one role for three decades. Genius that only functions inside one collaboration is a genuinely contested kind.

Legacy

Japan gave him the Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon in 1986 and the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1993; Hollywood gave him a Walk of Fame star in 2016, nineteen years after his death. The wandering swordsman with no name, no allegiance and no past is his invention, and it travelled — through Leone to Eastwood, through *The Hidden Fortress* to *Star Wars*, into the bloodstream of global popular cinema. For most of a century, as Criterion put it, when the world pictured a Japanese man it saw Toshirō Mifune.

Achievements

• Notable work: Snow Trail
• Notable work: Drunken Angel
• Notable work: Stray Dog
• Notable work: Rashomon
• Worked as actor, film producer and film actor