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18 September, 2002
TOSHIRO MIFUNE: TOP SWORD
John Belushi, the brilliant comedian and actor of the 1970s and early '80s, is the image that many Americans have of a Japanese samurai.
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During a stretch of several years when he was one of the featured comics on the TV show "Saturday Night Live," Belushi created and reprised a satirical samurai character that he played in sketches such as "Samurai Big Man on Campus" in which he played a samurai attending college, or "Samurai Deli" where he was a server in a sandwich shop. His character was dressed in kimono, with his hair in a disheveled topknot. He spoke in guttural grunts that sort of approximated the cadence of Japanese, walked in a swagger that was half-bravery and half-bravado, and he scowled and scratched himself often.
Belushi's samurai overacted his way through each skit, being blunt and crude. He invariably lost his temper during the scene, drew his sword and either destroyed part of the set, or showing remorse, would prepare to commit hara-kiri.
I howled with laughter along with my college friends as we watched these skits, even though I knew Belushi was cementing a broad stereotype into the minds of my non-Japanese pals.
Japanese might watch Belushi's spin on Mifune and groan "baka" ("how dumb" or "foolish"), but Belushi was simply reflecting the powerful impression the intense Japanese actor had on western audiences during the 1950s and '60s, when his films won a slew of accolades outside of his country.
 John Belushi playing his samurai character on "Saturday Night Live." |
The fact of the matter is that Belushi perfectly - and even lovingly - captured the kinetic essence that Toshiro Mifune, one of the few Japanese actors whose name Americans might recognize, brought to a number of classic films in which he played a samurai.
Until recently, although I had seen him in some movies and knew that Belushi was basing his character on Mifune, I hadn't watched him in many of the classic samurai roles. I only have the DVD of "Seven Samurai," the great 1954 movie directed by Akira Kurosawa, in which Mifune plays a peasant who aspires to be a samurai warrior even as he despises them for the class inequities they represent.
So I recently borrowed a stack of movies starring Mifune from my friend John Chin, who grew up watching samurai, or "chambara" movies as a kid in San Francisco's Chinatown. In quick succession I saw the actor in "Rashomon" (1950), "Yojimbo" (1961), "Sanjuro" (1963) - all directed by Kurosawa - and the towering, epic Samurai Trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki (1954, '55 and '56) in which Mifune plays the historical master swordsman Musashi Miyamoto. At the end of this marathon, I was amazed at how Mifune was able to distill the mythology of a samurai warrior into an image so vivid that it's hard to conjure up any other face on a samurai in your mind.
Especially in concert with Kurosawa, who is far and away the best-known Japanese director outside Japan, Mifune set in stone the concept of a samurai as a lone wolf who fancies himself as a hard-hearted rapscallion but is conflicted with moral dilemmas and usually shows a softer side and ends up being a good guy.
| The samurai-cowboy link is a wonderful cultural bridge between the US and Japan. |
The actor-director duo also was able to establish the samurai genre as a corollary to Hollywood's tradition of cowboy movies. The cultural bridge was made obvious with American remakes of Kurosawa films as westerns including "Rashomon" as "The Outrage" (1964), "Seven Samurai" as "The Magnificent Seven" (1960) and "Yojimbo" as Italian director Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) starring Clint Eastwood in Mifune's mercenary role.
The closing scene of "Sanjuro," a film in which Kurosawa parodies his own genre, is a bloody, sword-wielding one-on-one showdown that echoes every gunslingers' duel, right down to the dusty, windy setting (it's always windy in Kurosawa films).
The samurai-cowboy link is a wonderful cultural bridge between the US and Japan, because both genres are popular on both sides of the Pacific, and they present an historical aspect of each country to movies audiences in the other.
But Toshiro Mifune's roles were archetypes - that's why John Belushi was able to base his comedic character so completely on Mifune's samurais. Mifune really scratched his body as if he was constantly warding off flies and mosquitoes, and scowled and swaggered in all his movies. His gruff, staccato Japanese sounded as guttural as Belushi's imitation. And his characters, whether it was the bandit in "Rashomon," the lower-class warrior wanna-be in "Seven Samurai" and the Samurai Trilogy, or the roaming samurai-for-hire in "Sanjuro" or "Yojimbo," all held audiences enraptured with their sweaty charisma and intense, explosive energy.
At any second, Mifune looked like he could pull out his sword and slash away furiously at everyone within range. But he was also prone to hysterical laughter and gleeful leaping that made him look like a little boy imitating a monkey. And, he could control his energy to subtle levels, as in "Duel at Ganryu Island," the third part of the Samurai Trilogy. In a hilarious scene, he quells a bully's threats by picking flies out of the air with his chopsticks. The man's enormous physical and emotional talent led him to act in an incredible 148 films before his death in 1997.
The amazing thing about Toshiro Mifune is that he never meant to become an actor.
Born in China to Japanese settlers, Mifune was a pilot in China during World War II, specializing in aerial photography because his father ran a photo studio. After the war, he went to Japan for the first time in his life and settled in Tokyo to look for work. One day a fellow former soldier told him a local movie studio, Toho, was looking for assistant camera operators, so he sent in an application. When he was called to the studio for an interview, he was asked to cry, and then to be angry, and then to act drunk… and he realized that his application had been misplaced into the stack for acting auditions. He was hired on the spot.
It's hard to believe he wasn't looking for an acting career when you see him in all the range of emotions he displays not only in his samurai movies, but also other films, including a handful of American films he made in the 1960s and '70s, including the 1968 film "Hell in the Pacific," 1976's "Midway" and even 1949's Steven Spielberg comedy "1941."
I also recall seeing him with Charles Bronson in a now-forgotten movie, one that combined both the Western cowboy and samurai genres, the 1971 action movie "Red Sun," in which he played a Japanese diplomat in the wild wild west.
In that one role, he physically embodied the cultural bridge between Japan and the US, and presaged Belushi's stranger-in-a-strange-land idea. Except, nobody dared laugh at Mifune.
For more information about Toshiro Mifune, you can start on the Internet with this well-don and comprehensive Web site.
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