 |
UCLA Asia Institute
|
|
|
Today in Asian History 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.
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. 1956 Pakistan adopted a constitution, formally becoming an Islamic Republic. Since its 1947 independence, the country had been guided by principles laid out by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and others. Major General Iskander Mirza served as the first provisional president. The constitution was revised in 1973 and amended fifteen times by 1998. Click here to see a well-organized presentation of the constitution, amendments, and significant legislation. The Pakistan Business Network offers some historical information. The AI "Today in Asian History" page is compiled by Clayton Dube. He welcomes your comments and suggestions. Send them to <cdube@isop.ucla.edu>. Copyright © 1998-2002 by the UCLA Asia Institute. |
