Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. He has said that the first important influence in his life was a teacher called Tachikawa, who was progressive in his emphasis on art education for the young. This was how the young Kurosawa was introduced to art and film. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenthcentury Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narratorcommentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the directors sensibilities.In 1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew a lot about things other than movies. Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a director with Judo Saga Sanshiro Sugata, with a magnificent martialarts sequence in which two masters fight to the death in a windswept field, their flying limbs all but obscured by the tall swaying grasses. Consider the acclaim given to the similar fight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its obvious why in 1943 people began to talk about a young filmmaker with a brilliant future.

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