Michel Houdiard

This book means to show that Kurosawa's humanism draws on a sense of individual experience resting upon specific family and social backgrounds as well as the observations of the surrounding social, political and cultural contexts. Kurosawa has often been libelled as a humanist and a citizen of the world, but he also constantly asserted that he was a typical Japanese man of his time. Born in 1910, at the end of the Taisho era, he made his thirty films in the Showa period, during a long twentieth-century that saw Japan tossed by major social, economic and political changes, definitely entering modernity and asserting itself as one of the greatest nations in the world.