March 23
1910 Distinguished film director Kurosawa Akira was born in Tokyo. Classic films such as Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), Dersu Uzala (1975), and Ran (1985) are among his works. Japan Echo memorialized Kurosawa as "A Teacher of Courage." Kurosawa studied art, focusing on painting, as a teenager, but entered the film profession in the 1930s. He worked as an assistant director and began writing scenarios and screenplays and directed his first film, Sugata Sanshiro, in 1943. Kurosawa received numerous awards during his career, including Best Foreign Language Film and Lifetime Achievement awards from the American Academy of Motion Pictures. He died in 1998 -- a year after Mifune Toshiro, the famed actor who starred in several of Kurosawa's films.
The Internet Movie Database offers plots, lists of actors and other contributors to Kurosawa films, and reviews of many of his works.
A number of people have created pages commemorating Kurosawa's achievements and contributions. One of the best is Nobuji's Unofficial Akira Kurosawa Fan Page. It features Japanese posters from Kurosawa's films. Dan Kim's page promises to offer video clips of several Kurosawa films.
1935 Manchuko, the Japanese puppet state in northeastern China, purchased the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Union. Princeton University offers key frames and a video clip from the Universal Newspaper Newsreel report of Japan's 1931 seizure of Manchuria.
The Teaching about Japan website is
edited by Clayton Dube.
He welcomes your comments and suggestions.
© 2001 UCLA Center for East Asian Studies