Toshiro Mifune

The Full Biography

Toshiro Mifune. Actor. The Qingdao-born, Manchuria-raised Japanese star who made a masterless samurai into a world object, then spent the rest of a life proving he was more than one director’s weather.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man in a ragged kimono, scratching, squinting into a wind, walking into a town that has already chosen its graves. The year was 1961. The picture was Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. What the still cannot show is a boy born in Qingdao in 1920 to Japanese parents, an aerial photographer in the Imperial Army, a “new face” contest he entered as a cameraman, sixteen films with Kurosawa that taught the world a Japanese cinema, and a last decade in which illness took the voice before it took the man.

He was born on April 1, 1920, in Qingdao, China, then under Japanese control, the son of Tokuzo Mifune, a photographer and importer, and Sen. The family were Methodists, a minority fact in the file. They moved to Dalian, in Manchuria, where the boy grew up speaking the Japanese of a colonial household and learning a camera from a father who made a living with one. He did not grow up in Tokyo’s theater wards. He grew up on a peninsula the empire had taken. In 1939 he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and spent the war in aerial photography, not in a cockpit with a legend attached. He has said those years were a job. They were also a delay. He was twenty-five when the war ended and the empire’s map folded up.

He went to Japan, a country he had not been raised in, and applied to Toho Studios in 1946. The story he told, and that colleagues have not contradicted, is that he meant to work as a cameraman. The studio was running a “new face” talent search. He was pushed into it. Kajiro Yamamoto, a senior director, saw the test — a young man asked to mime anger and drunkenness — and did not forget it. Senkichi Taniguchi cast him in Snow Trail (1947). Then Kurosawa, who had seen the same test, put him in Drunken Angel (1948) as a tubercular gangster opposite Takashi Shimura’s doctor. The collaboration that would define both men began as a director looking at a screen test and deciding the rage was usable.

What followed was not a lucky streak. It was a run that moved Japanese film into rooms that had not been hiring it. Stray Dog (1949). Rashomon (1950), as the bandit Tajomaru — a performance of appetite and cowardice that Venice and then the Academy treated as a new fact. The picture’s success abroad is the door the West still uses. The Idiot (1951). Then Seven Samurai (1954): Kikuchiyo, the farmer’s son pretending to the class, a sword, a death in the mud that is still a civic object. He is not the leader. He is the weather inside the company. Throne of Blood (1957) made Macbeth a lord in fog. The Hidden Fortress (1958) put him on a horse as a general in disguise; George Lucas has said the picture is in Star Wars’s debt book. The Lower Depths. The Bad Sleep Well. Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962): the ronin as a dry joke with a sword. Sergio Leone stole the plot for A Fistful of Dollars and lost a lawsuit. Clint Eastwood’s silence is, in part, Mifune’s squint translated.

High and Low (1963). Red Beard (1965), as a clinic doctor in the nineteenth century, is the last of the sixteen Kurosawa pictures. The split that followed has been told as money, as schedule, as two stubborn men. Mifune had founded Mifune Productions in 1963 and was carrying costs Kurosawa’s next projects would not wait for. Kurosawa went into the wilderness of Dodes’ka-den and a suicide attempt. They never made another film together. The break is the turn. A complete life does not pick a villain. It says: the greatest actor-director pairing in Japanese sound film ended, and both men kept working in the wreck of it.

I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him.Toshiro Mifune, on Akira Kurosawa, after the collaboration had already ended

He had already been more than the ronin. Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954–56), as Miyamoto Musashi, is a Toho monument that does not need Kurosawa’s name. Three pictures, a life of the swordsman, a popular Japan the festival circuit underfiles. Samurai Rebellion (1967), for Masaki Kobayashi, put him in a household tragedy about a clan that will not let a man keep his family — a performance of stillness after a decade of storms. He is a presence in Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom. He worked for Ishiro Honda. He worked for Masahiro Shinoda. He went abroad without becoming a souvenir: Hell in the Pacific (1968), opposite Lee Marvin, two men on an island, almost no shared language, a war picture that treats the enemy as a person. Midway (1976) used him as Admiral Yamamoto, a Hollywood war picture’s idea of the other side. In 1980 NBC’s miniseries Shōgun, as Lord Toranaga, put him in American living rooms for a week. He spoke Japanese. The subtitles did the rest. It is the part a certain American generation means when they say his name. It is not the part the film students mean. Both rooms are his.

Venice had already given him Volpi Cups — for Yojimbo, for Red Beard — before American television learned the name. He was, by the mid-1960s, the most recognizable Japanese actor on earth, a fact he used to open doors for a company and to take parts in pictures that needed a stamp. Some of those pictures are programmers. He knew the difference. He also knew a programmer paid the stable. Kurosawa’s famous sentence about him — that an ordinary actor needed ten feet of film and Mifune needed three — is the speed the West still quotes. The man himself, on a Japanese talk show in 1981, called himself an oddball accepted out of mercy, and said the first Toho job felt more like labor than like acting. Both sentences are him: the myth the directors built, and the Methodist photographer’s son who still thought of the work as carrying equipment up a mountain at three in the morning.

He married Sachiko Yoshimine in 1950. Their sons include Shiro, who became an actor. A daughter, Mika, came from a relationship with actress Mika Kitagawa. The household facts are thinner in English than the sword facts, which is a failure of the English file, not of the life. Colleagues describe a professional who did his own riding and his own falls, who drank, who could be generous on a set and impossible in a negotiation. Kurosawa, in interviews, said he was overwhelmed by the screen test and never quite got over it. Mifune, in interviews, declined to become a monument to a collaboration that had ended. He kept taking parts in Japanese television and in pictures that used the face as a stamp. Some of those pictures are not good. He knew it. He had a company to feed.

The turn, again, is 1965. Everything after Red Beard is a great actor working without the director who had made his rage a world style. A lot of Western obituaries collapse the life into those sixteen films. The Japanese file is longer: Inagaki, Kobayashi, a production company, Shōgun, a hundred credits the Criterion shelf does not always hold. Both files are required.

Shiro Mifune has kept a version of the name in the business. Friends from Toho describe a man who arrived from the continent and had to learn the studio as a foreign country. Friends from the American sets describe a professional who did not perform inscrutability for the crew. He performed the part. Then he went home. Sachiko died in 1995. The last years were already medical by then. The sword, on a wall, was a prop. The face was the country’s idea of a certain Japan. He had never been only that Japan. He had been a Methodist photographer’s son from a city that is now Chinese again.

He once told an interviewer he was not always great in pictures, but he was always true to the Japanese spirit. The sentence is easy to print on a poster. In his mouth it was a workman’s claim, closer to the three-in-the-morning equipment than to a nationalist slogan. The Methodist house in Dalian, the army darkroom, the Toho test he did not apply for — those are the rooms the spirit actually came from. The ronin is what the world bought. The laborer is what he kept insisting he had been.

The later years

The later years were a company, a miniseries, and an illness that took the mind in pieces. After Kurosawa he worked constantly, which is not the same as working well. Mifune Productions made pictures and lost money and made more pictures. He played generals, fathers, a doctor, a wanderer, the face a poster needed. In 1979 and 1980 Shōgun made him briefly as famous in the United States as Yojimbo had made him among people who went to revival houses. He received an Emmy nomination. He did not become a Hollywood star in the jacket sense. He became a man American television had hired to be a lord, and he did it without surrendering the language.

He kept a stable of horses and did his own riding into an age when insurance prefers a double. He accepted decorations at home — a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, other civic thanks — and remained, in interviews, dry about the samurai brand. He had learned the sword as a craft, the way he had learned a camera as a boy. The craft was not a soul. Alzheimer’s disease, diagnosed in the 1990s, took the craft first. He withdrew. The public appearances thinned. Sachiko’s death in 1995 removed the person who had been in the house since the Toho years. On December 24, 1997, he died in Mitaka, Tokyo, of organ failure. He was seventy-seven. The obituaries in the West led with Kurosawa. The obituaries in Japan had more titles to list.

What those last working years actually held, before the illness closed the set, was a stubborn independence. He had been the most recognizable Japanese actor on earth and had used that fact to keep a company open and to take parts in pictures that needed a stamp. Some of those stamps paid the horses. Some of them paid people who had been with him since the 1960s. He did not crawl back to Kurosawa for a seventeenth film, and Kurosawa did not ask in a way that closed the wound. They died three months apart — Kurosawa in September 1998. The culture has been trying to remarry them ever since. The lives, after 1965, were separate. A biography that refuses that fact is a poster, not a file.

He had already, before the last illness, seen the ronin become a world grammar: Leone, Eastwood, every wanderer who enters a town and tilts the odds. He knew the grammar used his face. He also knew the face had done Inagaki and Kobayashi and a week of American television. The grammar is not the whole man. The whole man is a photographer’s son who mime-raged in a Toho test and then spent fifty years deciding what else the rage could be.

After he was gone

The sixteen Kurosawa pictures are the international estate. Criterion, revival houses, film schools. Seven Samurai still teaches a company of men. Yojimbo still teaches a walk. Inagaki’s Musashi still plays at home. Shōgun was remade without him; the 1980 version still has his stillness. Shiro and the family have kept the name from becoming only a Halloween sword. Toho’s archive holds the tests.

He came out of Qingdao and Dalian, photographed a war from the air, missed a camera job, found Kurosawa, made a ronin the world could steal, broke with the man who had made him a style, built a company, played a lord on American television, and died in Tokyo in the week of Christmas. If you only remember the squint, you have the still. If you remember Manchuria, the test, Red Beard, Marvin on the island, and the last quiet, you have him.

Portrait: Eiga Sekai Publications, Inc. · Public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto / PD-US) · via Wikimedia Commons

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