(1)
When a frightening scene unfolds in front of you, you should not close your eyes, but rather look at it carefully, what you will expect in your imagination may be harsher than the truth.
(2)
This is what Akira's older brother believed, who, when his city was hit by a severe earthquake in 1923, asked his younger brother to open his eyes to see the truth as it was, not to hide in his imagination, and to unleash his very sensitive feelings.
Akira Korsawa himself was born thirteen years earlier, in 1910, as the eighth son of a wealthy family, to grow up imbued with the ideas of his father, who adheres to his Japanese culture, is very open to the ideas of the West, influenced by his teacher at school Tashikawa, who was the first to train him to express what is going on inside him through drawing, and because he later joined a martial arts club, he became at a young age a young athlete and creative painter.
But he was a very sensitive character, and very affected by what is around him, recognizes a classmate at school, like him very sensitive, vulnerable, as if each of them found his guardian and twin, and the sensitivity of both friends is clearly evident if any of them is exposed to an awkward or difficult situation, they find themselves quick to cry, so they got a nickname: (The two crying children).
(3)
Seven years after the earthquake, the doctor at the military center tells him that he is physically and unfit for military service, which saves him from military call-up years later, when World War II breaks out.
One morning in 1935, he reads an advertisement in a newspaper published in Tokyo for a photography company, which includes the company's desire to hire assistant directors, who do not have any previous experience, and although Kursawa had no planning in this regard, he responded to the advertisement and went to the company to join the advertised job.
He went through several tests, during which he did not achieve an advanced level, but the famous director Kajiro Yamamoto was convinced of him, and decided to accept him, so the company agreed to do so, and in early 1936 - at the age of 25 - he got his first job in the field of film directing.
Over the next five years, our friend plays the role of assistant director in several films, in which the main director was Yamamoto, who believed in him and his talent.
This period would not have passed unnoticed for Korsawa, without changing anything in his mind or talent, so he was keen to learn everything related to his field, but to write professionally, and drew from his teacher a smart system to raise his efficiency and productivity in it, so he wrote every day a page in the script of his new film, to find himself by the end of the year had finished writing two complete films of the highest possible quality.
(4)
In 1941, he plays his last role as an assistant director with his famous teacher, and decides to move to another stage of his life, looking for a distinct script to start his career as a first director of the work, and spending two years in that search.
Shortly before these years, World War II had broken out, and the Japanese army moved as part of the Axis alliance to invade large areas of China, and many directors and filmmakers fled Japan for fear of being forced into military service, but Akira Korsawa was lucky to receive the exemption that he received a long time ago, so he stayed in Japan without worry, but film production in those years declined significantly due to the military conditions that hit the entire world.
In 1942, the Japanese novelist Tsuneo Tomita published a wonderful novel called "Shanshiro Sugata", and Korsawa was one of the first to obtain a copy of it, so he was very impressed, obtained its literary rights, and decided to turn it into a movie, becoming one of the most successful films in Japanese history.
Despite the film's cinematic and commercial success, the Japanese authorities decided to delete 18 minutes from the film according to their military policies at the time, and that ban caused 10 minutes of the film to be lost in the restored version many years later, and the filmmakers were able to recover only 8 minutes of the deleted material.
But the strange irony is that the Japanese Navy decides to honor Kursawa for the film because of its promotion of one of the famous battles of the Japanese army, but the lack of financial resources stopped the ceremony, and this great success prompted him to direct another film in 1944 about a group of Japanese workers inside a factory, and the film witnessed one of the nicest ironies in his life, as there was a sharp disagreement between him and the actress who played the role of the chief worker, and that dispute between them continued even after the end of the film, but the matter It soon turned into a friendship that dramatically turned into a marriage in May 1945.
(5)
The post-World War II years see a slow and quiet return to film production in Japan, as well as the resurgence of the encounter between Korsawa and his childhood companion, hypersensitivity and rapid crying, as they write their first films together.
Korsawa's success continues to increase and expand significantly during the following years, until he opens a film production company, and by the sixties he turns his eyes to the countries of the West and the United States as target audiences of his films, and that trend was after the production of the film "The Seven Samurai", which achieved unparalleled historical success that prompted filmmakers to quote it and produce an American version called "The Seven Greats", and that gesture opened the eyes of many American and Western filmmakers to Japanese cinema.
The decade of the seventies was the difficult period in his life; the ten years of the seventies were not successful for him, due to the almost lack of possibilities and his inability to complete the march on the same path in his own way, but the huge return was in the eighties when his productions were again linked to Hollywood, and he became working with the famous American owner of the series of films (The Godfather) Francis Ford Coppola.
The news of his return to cinema had a wide and cheerful echo in almost all countries of the world, so that the American market was delighted with his return to cinema, until the release of his strongest and most famous film "RAN", which achieved huge public success, but it was accompanied by the increasing illness of his wife and the deterioration of her health, which prompted him to move away from the atmosphere of the film's success, and get closer to his beloved wife, a long-lived companion.
By the end of the eighties and entering the nineties, he seemed to be about to end his long career; he no longer had enough energy to write and direct film, and Japanese production companies became uninterested in mass production of him, and wanted to reduce the volume directed to his films, and he no longer wanted to deal with foreign production.
Korsawa wrote a two-month film called "Dreams", and days before its release in 1990 he was invited to the Oscars in the United States, receiving an honorary award for all his film productions throughout his career, as a great culmination of his work.
Korsawa continued to write during the nineties, but at a lower pace than in the past, until 1995 when he wrote the film "The Sea is Watching", which was released in early 1996, and served as a watershed for the end of a long cinematic career, after he reached the age of 85, and he saw that he had been content with everything he produced and presented, and could not do more.
Kursawa stayed in bed in his later years, his body began to deteriorate but his mind and mind remained alert, and he spent the last months and days of his life watching television, listening to his favorite music, and on the sixth of September 1998 the curtain fell on his long life full of love of art and stories yearning for love and beauty.
His death was a sad shock to millions around the world, and his unproductive film "After the Rain" came out, and the years following his death saw the production of his unproduced films, as well as comic series written by him through his production company, which was managed by his son after him, and in 2005 - the fiftieth anniversary of his film "The Seven Samurai" - a video series version of the film was produced in his honor.
Although he passed away many years ago, many of his exquisite productions are still receiving attention, and some production companies have even taken care of remaking his old films with higher capabilities and clearer versions in honor of his long legacy.
Akira Korsawa has so far remained stuck in the memory of millions with his quiet and beauty-loving films, which accompanied viewers on a journey away from the reality that exhausts them, and they can experience - in his stories - a unique image of art and cinema that no other offers.