Toshiro Mifune

No discussion of chambara would be complete without mentioning Toshiro Mifune. Often described as the Japanese version of John Wayne, Mifune starred in hundreds of movies and television jidai-geki (period dramas) during his lengthy acting career.

Born in Qingdao, China, the son of a Japanese photographer had never actually lived in Japan until joining the Imperial Air Force and being stationed in Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan, during WWII. As a child, he had helped his father in his photo studio and had done some aerial photography during the war. With both parents dead and no known relatives, he headed to Tokyo after the war and applied for a job as assistant cameraman at a movie studio.

By some accident, though, Toho studio mixed up his application and Mifune was invited to audition as an actor for one of their leading directors, Akira Kurosawa. The rest is movie history. Mifune proved to be a versatile actor. He is noted for a wide range of roles in more than 120 films.

Mifune appeared in all but one of the seventeen films Kurosawa directed between 1948 and 1965, beginning with Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) in 1948, and continuing through such masterpieces as Rashoman (1950), Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), I Live in Fear (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955), Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957), The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemoru, 1960), Yojimbo (1961), High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963), and Red Beard (Akahige, 1964).

After he broke with Kurosawa in 1965, he appeared occasionally in American films, most notably the television miniseries Shogun (1980), and continued to appear in Japanese films, most successfully as the wandering samurai Yojimbo, first introduced in the Kurosawa film of that name. He died in 1997.