Investor's Business Daily, May 11th, 2007
For Japanese icon Toshiro Mifune, the movie camera always acted as his portal to new worlds.
But his trek to stardom wasn't easy. As a war veteran in 1945, he wandered the bombed-out streets of Tokyo after Japan surrendered.
"I had nothing to eat and nowhere to go," he said in a 1985 interview on a hot summer day in his office in a Tokyo suburb. "The only thing I had was the two blankets the army gave me when I was discharged."
Then came his shot. Mifune, who taught aerial photography in World War II as a flier with the Japanese air force, heard about an opening for an assistant cameraman at a local movie studio.
Hundreds of unemployed people in the charred city applied for the job. The studio eventually called Mifune for an interview.
Ushered into a sweltering room, he saw a small man wearing a floppy white hat seated at a table.
"Laugh a little," the man ordered him.
"Laugh? What is this? I came here for a job!" Mifune shouted back.
"Then why don't you get angry a little? Pretend that you're drunk a little," the mysterious man said.
"Get angry? Get drunk? What do you take me for, a fool?" Mifune asked in real-life rage, portending his performances in over 150 films.
As luck had it, Mifune had stumbled into the wrong interview. The man with the hat was legendary director Akira Kurosawa, and he wanted actors -- not cameramen.
Mifune was hired on the spot. Thus started a glittering movie career spanning four decades.
U.S. audiences best know Mifune (1920-97) as the grizzled samurai and the stoic admiral in scores of Japanese and American films.
He vaulted to international fame by playing the swaggering bandit in Kurosawa's 1950 film "Rashomon" -- "Gate of Hell" in English.
He also played a wayward samurai in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," a 1954 movie that inspired an equally famous Hollywood Western called "The Magnificent Seven" with actor Yul Brynner.
Mifune starred in another Kurosawa epic, "The Hidden Fortress," a 1958 film that director George Lucas said provided the underlying plot for Star Wars.
Mifune is best known in the U.S. for playing the title role of the warlord Toranaga in "Shogun," the 1980 TV miniseries. His character was loosely based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the feudal lord who unified Japan in the 1600s.
By the end of his 51-year film career, Mifune had played a pivotal role in propelling the art of the Japanese cinema onto the world stage.
Mifune used more than an accidental acting audition to succeed. He capitalized on his keen visual sense, a passion for hard work and ability to identify with human suffering.
Mifune never forgot his camera skills. Once when a reporter fumbled with a 35 mm camera to shoot Mifune for a U.S. news magazine, the actor politely stopped him, telling him there wasn't enough light in the room for a photo without a flash. "I'm a photographer, you see," he said with a wink.
Photography had long been part of Mifune's life. His father ran a commercial photography shop in China, and Mifune helped out as a high school student, learning the basics of handling cameras and film.
These skills later gave Mifune an almost intuitive ability to pose and move in front of a movie camera.
"The speed of (Mifune's) movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express," Kurosawa wrote of Mifune in his autobiography. "He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor."
Mifune's knack for photography led to his wartime work in aerial photography.
But Mifune was no fan of the militarists who led the country to ruin.
When an officer told him the war was over, Mifune gleefully shouted "Banzai!" and thanked his stars that he was alive.
In a charred Tokyo rife with hunger in the years right after V-J Day, a young Mifune developed a strong sympathy for the unfortunate.
This came through in his films. He loved playing the vagabond, the gangster with moral scruples, the defiant gambler, the warrior fighting for a doomed but noble cause.
Mifune was no stranger to suffering. When the war ended, both of his parents were dead. He had no living relatives and had never lived in Japan until his repatriation at the end of the war. As the child of Japanese colonists in China, he felt like a stranger in his own land.
The medium of film let him to connect with the world in a way he couldn't as a layman.
His physical gifts stood him in good stead as an actor. A dark, handsome man, Mifune at 5 feet 9 inches was tall for a Japanese of his generation. Then there was his magnetic personality. He hurled his passion into roles so that he became the characters he portrayed.
His prowess on-screen came from hard work. He spent years studying sword fighting and the art of horseback archery to make his movie stunts seem more authentic.
Mifune also showed a humble side. He never took himself seriously, always referring to his many feats with self-deprecating humor.
Mifune was asked on a 1984 visit to New York City what he thought of U.S. newspapers calling him the "John Wayne of Japan."
He cracked a wry grin and said, "Oh ... (Wayne's) such a big star (raising his hand to dramatize the difference in height) and I'm just stardust."
Mifune said he met Wayne when he saw the American star being filmed in 1958's "The Barbarian and the Geisha."
"(Wayne) ate a big morning steak ... this big ... wow! And a bottle of Johnny Walker!" Mifune said, mimicking Wayne slugging down a bottle of Scotch. "If I did something like that ... I'd die!"
Mifune fell on hard times late in life. He had a tough time finding work after TV upstaged movies in Japan as the chief form of entertainment. Suddenly the austere film classics that Mifune made in the 1950s and 1960s were buried under an avalanche of cheap monster movies and TV game shows.
Mifune died of multiple organ failure in Mitaka, Japan. He was 77.
