Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune was born on April 1, 1920 in Qingdao, Shandong, China, to Japanese parents, and grew up in the Chinese city of Dalian with his parents and two siblings. In his youth, Mifune worked in the photography shop of his father Tokuzo, a commercial photographer and importer who had emigrated from northern Japan.
Tokuzo was a Methodist, and there is evidence that he was also a missionary, ministering to the ethnic Japanese Christians in Dalian.Although the young Mifune spent the first 19 years of his life in China, as a Japanese citizen he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army Aviation, where he served in the Aerial Photography (Ko-type) unit during World War II. He repatriated to Japan in 1946.
One of Mifune’s fellow performers, one of the 32 women chosen during the new faces contest, was Sachiko Yoshimine. Eight years Mifune’s junior, she came from a respected Tokyo family. They fell in love and Mifune soon proposed marriage.
Director Senkichi Taniguchi, with the help of Akira Kurosawa, convinced the Yoshimine family to allow the marriage. It took place in February 1950. In November of the same year, their first son, Shirō was born. In 1955, they had a second son, Takeshi. Mifune’s daughter Mika was born to his mistress, actress Mika Kitagawa, in 1982.
Early in the 1980s, Mifune founded an acting school, Mifune Geijutsu Gakuin. The school failed after only three years, due to mismanaged finances.
Mifune received wider audience acclaim in the West than he ever had after playing Toranaga in the 1980 TV miniseries Shogun. However, the series’ historically accurate yet blunt portrayal of the Japanese shogunate and the greatly abridged version shown in Japan meant that it was not as well received in his homeland. It deepened the rift with Kurosawa, virtually ensuring that they would not work together again.
The relationship between the two men remained ambivalent. While Kurosawa made some very uncharitable comments about Mifune’s acting, he also admitted in an interview in Interview magazine that “All the films that I made with Mifune, without him, they would not exist”. He also presented Mifune with the Kawashita award which he himself had won two years prior. They finally made something of a reconciliation in 1993 at the funeral of their friend Ishiro Honda. After making tenuous eye contact, they tearfully embraced one another, ending nearly three decades of mutual avoidance. They never collaborated again, however, nor did they have a chance to restore their friendship fully. Both died within a year of the other.
In 1992, Mifune began suffering from a serious unknown health problem. It has been variously suggested that he destroyed his health with overwork, suffered a heart attack, or experienced a stroke. For whatever reason, he abruptly retreated from public life and remained largely confined to his home, cared for by his estranged wife Sachiko. When she succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1995, Mifune’s physical and mental state began to decline rapidly.He died in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, of multiple organ failure at the age of 77.
