Toshiro Mifune

Anyone asking who was Toshiro Mifune usually expects a story that begins in Japan. It does not. Mifune was born on April 1, 1920, in Qingdao, a port city on China's Shandong peninsula, where his parents, Japanese Methodists from northern Japan, had settled as part of the expatriate community ^[1]. His father, Tokuzo Mifune, ran a photography studio, and the family later moved to Dalian in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. The boy grew up around cameras, darkrooms, and portrait sittings, learning the technical side of photography as a matter of household routine ^[2].

That upbringing marked him in two ways. He did not set foot in Japan proper until he was an adult, which left him with an outsider's view of his own country, and he acquired a craftsman's skill that would soon decide the course of his life. In 1940, at the age of twenty, he was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army ^[1].

Because of his family background, the army assigned him to aerial photography, and he spent much of the war training reconnaissance photographers and processing film. Accounts of his service describe a soldier who chafed under military discipline and clashed with superiors, an experience he later recalled with bitterness ^[3]. By 1945 he was stationed in Kyushu, developing photographs of young pilots before their final missions, a duty that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Demobilized in 1946 with no home to return to in China, Mifune drifted to Tokyo looking for camera work. A wartime acquaintance suggested he apply to the photography department of the Toho film studio. Through a mix-up that has become one of the most repeated anecdotes in Japanese film history, his application landed him in a mass audition for new actors instead ^[2]. Asked to simulate anger for the judges, the exhausted, irritable veteran produced a display so raw that most of the panel wanted to reject him. The actress Hideko Takamine mentioned the striking young man to director Kajiro Yamamoto, and through Yamamoto the audition footage reached Akira Kurosawa, who later wrote that he was transfixed by the ferocity he saw ^[3].

Toho signed Mifune in 1946, and he made his screen debut the following year in Senkichi Taniguchi's mountain adventure Snow Trail, from a script by Kurosawa ^[1]. His first film for Kurosawa himself came in 1948 with Drunken Angel, in which he played a tubercular young gangster opposite Takashi Shimura's alcoholic doctor. Kurosawa had intended Shimura's role as the lead, but Mifune's volatile performance pulled the film toward him, and the director chose not to fight it ^[3].

The partnership deepened through Stray Dog (1949), where Mifune played a rookie detective hunting his stolen pistol through sweltering postwar Tokyo. Then came the film that changed everything. Rashomon (1950), with Mifune as the bandit Tajomaru, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and an honorary Academy Award, opening Western markets to Japanese cinema almost overnight ^[4]. Mifune, laughing, scratching, and swatting at flies in the role, became the face of that breakthrough.

Between 1948 and 1965 Mifune appeared in sixteen Kurosawa films, a run that critics routinely rank among the great actor-director collaborations in cinema ^[4]. In Seven Samurai (1954) he played Kikuchiyo, the farmer's son masquerading as a samurai, improvising much of the character's swagger and grief. The film became one of the most influential ever made, remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven ^[1].

The range of the collaboration is easy to underestimate. Mifune was the humane physician in The Quiet Duel (1949), a shomin-drama patriarch driven mad by fear of nuclear war in I Live in Fear (1955), a Macbeth figure pierced by arrows in Throne of Blood (1957), and a vengeful executive modeled on Hamlet in The Bad Sleep Well (1960). For The Hidden Fortress (1958) he played a general escorting a princess through enemy territory, a plot George Lucas later cited as an influence on Star Wars ^[5].

Two roles brought him the highest festival honors of his career. As the scruffy, calculating ronin Sanjuro in Yojimbo (1961), he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice; Sergio Leone's unauthorized remake, A Fistful of Dollars, launched the spaghetti Western and Clint Eastwood's stardom ^[4]. Four years later he took a second Volpi Cup for Red Beard (1965), playing a gruff nineteenth century clinic doctor. That production, which required Mifune to keep a natural beard through nearly two years of shooting and prevented him from taking other work, strained his relationship with Kurosawa. The two never made another film together, a rupture neither man ever fully explained in public ^[3].

Any list of Toshiro Mifune achievements has to reckon with what he built away from Kurosawa. In 1962 he founded Mifune Productions, one of the first star-owned production companies in Japan, and in 1963 he directed his only film, The Legacy of the 500,000 ^[1]. The company produced films and television, and in the 1970s Mifune added an acting school and a studio facility in Tokyo.

He also worked steadily with other major Japanese directors, a fact often flattened out of the Toshiro Mifune biography told abroad. For Hiroshi Inagaki he played the swordsman Musashi Miyamoto in the Samurai Trilogy (1954 to 1956), whose first installment won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the doomed retainer in Chushingura (1962) ^[1]. For Masaki Kobayashi he appeared in Samurai Rebellion (1967), and for Kihachi Okamoto he anchored the bleak swordplay films Samurai Assassin (1965) and Red Sun-era action vehicles at home and abroad.

Foreign producers pursued him from the 1960s onward. He played a Mexican bandit turned rancher in the Hollywood Western Grand Prix-era productions, a racing team owner in John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in Midway (1976), and a Japanese submarine commander in Steven Spielberg's comedy 1941 (1979) ^[6]. His widest American exposure came on television: as the daimyo Toranaga in the 1980 NBC miniseries Shogun, he reached tens of millions of viewers and earned a Golden Globe nomination ^[6]. He reportedly declined roles in later hugely successful franchises, and he spoke through interpreters on most foreign sets, memorizing English dialogue phonetically.

Mifune married the actress Sachiko Yoshimine in 1950, over the initial objections of both families; Kurosawa was among those who helped persuade her parents ^[3]. The couple had two sons, Shiro and Takeshi Mifune, and remained legally married until Sachiko's death in 1995, although they lived apart for many years after Mifune began a long relationship with the actress Mika Kitagawa, with whom he had a daughter, the actress Mika Mifune ^[2].

Off screen he bore little resemblance to the wild men he played. Colleagues and biographers describe a punctual, courteous, rather formal man who drove himself to the studio, maintained his own cars and equipment, and drank heavily in private ^[2]. He was famous among crews for arriving early and knowing everyone's name.

His discipline had limits. A 1970s attempt to run a company, a school, and an international acting career at once stretched his finances, and Mifune Productions eventually scaled back its ambitions. Friends recalled that the failures of business wounded him more than any review ^[2].

Mifune kept working through the 1980s in Japanese features, television, and international coproductions, including Kon Ichikawa's Princess from the Moon (1987) ^[1]. The parts grew smaller as his health declined, and by the early 1990s he was visibly frail. His final screen appearance came in the 1995 film Deep River, directed by Kei Kumai ^[6].

In his last years he suffered from a condition his family described as a form of dementia, and he withdrew almost entirely from public life. One late public moment became famous: at the 1990 Academy Awards ceremony honoring Kurosawa, and again at film events in Japan, the two estranged collaborators were photographed together, elderly and cordial, though they never worked together again ^[3].

Mifune died of multiple organ failure in a Tokyo hospital on December 24, 1997, at the age of 77 ^[6]. Obituaries around the world led with the same judgment: that he had been Japan's greatest film star and one of the most powerful screen actors of any country. Kurosawa, himself in fragile health, sent a message of mourning; he died nine months later.

The basic Toshiro Mifune facts, sixteen Kurosawa films, roughly 170 screen roles, two Volpi Cups, tell only part of the story. His deeper legacy is a style: a way of moving, coiled and explosive, that changed what a screen samurai looked like and gave world cinema a new model of physical acting ^[4]. Directors from Sergio Leone to George Lucas built films on characters he originated, and actors including Clint Eastwood and Denzel Washington inherited roles that began as his ^[5].

Recognition has continued long after his death. In 2015 the documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai, directed by Steven Okazaki and narrated by Keanu Reeves, surveyed his career with testimony from Spielberg, Scorsese, and surviving colleagues ^[5]. In 2016 he received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and retrospectives of the Kurosawa-Mifune films remain fixtures of repertory programming worldwide ^[6].

In Japan his image endures on another level entirely. The glowering ronin of Yojimbo has become a kind of national icon, quoted in advertising, animation, and video games. Critics still debate whether Mifune made Kurosawa's films great or the reverse; the fairest answer, offered by both men in different words, is that neither would have reached so far without the other ^[3].