Very creepy bad feeling.

The really good news is that this cannot diminish the actual body of work of Kurosawa that is now available to a wide audience.

Could it affect adversely his reputation? Yes, there’s a chance it could. I may not see all the possible ways things can go wrong, but it seems that this stuff would, more likely, get Kurosawa’s name back in circulation, and that this could not be a bad thing- because the possibility is that more people would hear about this guy and check out his films.

I know a guy who used to play a video game based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms-and it made him interested enough to travel to China and see the country, meet the people. I spent a rainy day hunting down an English-Chinese version of the books (a HUGE set!) in Shanghai with him.

And, I would dare say that a good 70% of students taking Japanese language at our university are led to an interest in the culture by manga and anime. For real. And I used to cringe, ‘cuz they would never know, if I asked them, about Japanese cinema. They never heard of Mizoguchi or Kobayashi. But, that’s very silly of me. After all, looking at ASCAP records of the 1930’s I probably couldn’t recognize from the titles any of the songs. Times change, tastes change, people grow and learn. It may seem astonishing to us that Kurosawa’s own family would be involved in some ridiculous marketing and bad pop reboot of Kurosawa’s ouvre-setting gemstones in crap. But, I don’t think it will matter much to Kurosawa’s actual work.

As I said, it would have been nice to have a traveling retrospective of the films with old friends like Nakadai and Nogami speaking at special venues in major metropolitan markets. Hey, and ideally, Toho would sponsor, right? They have that 7-samurai mural gracing the entrance of their studios, you would think they would have considered this.

The Japanese in the past, have been quick to sell out their culture, not giving it the respect the rest of the world gives it. With Kurosawa, they seem to be selling him out, it’s all like a bad Steam-Punk Japanese comic–which wont surprise me they make one, using Kurosawa.

I find rather disturbing.

I probably would have preferred Nakadai, Nogumi, Murakami and anybody else left from the day to be hosted and lavishly feted and respected in connection with a traveling retrospective. Something like the Nakadai retrospective in NYC this summer. (I am still kicking myself for not going).

Maybe they could do Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, and NYC or something. Not too many cities-our friends are getting older! That would have been nice.

Good luck, Akira.