70 free Akira Kurosawa trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Akira Kurosawa made 30 films in six decades, and this quiz walks through the lot: the judo debut that Ozu rescued from the censors, the Toho strike, Drunken Angel and the discovery of Toshiro Mifune, the Golden Lion that nobody expected for Rashomon, and the run of Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and High and Low that made him the most imitated director alive. It then follows him through the Tora! Tora! Tora! disaster, the Siberian shoot for Mosfilm, the Lucas-and-Coppola rescue of Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams and Madadayo. The easy tier covers Star Wars, A Fistful of Dollars, Macbeth and King Lear; the harder questions get into the real arrows fired at Mifune, the mulberry field, the pink smoke, the benshi brother, the composer who died mid-shoot and the Italian who smuggled Rashomon into Venice. If you have seen three Kurosawa films you will do fine; if you have seen thirty, the expert tier is for you. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Kurosawa, Mifune and the individual films, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For the source of one of his most famous stories, try our Seven Samurai quiz, and for the wider genre, our Samurai quiz.
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Q 01In what year was Akira Kurosawa born?
1910
He was the eighth and youngest child of a Tokyo family whose father came from Akita samurai stock.
Q 02How many feature films did Kurosawa direct across his six-decade career?
30
He was also a prolific screenwriter for other directors, a sideline that paid better than assistant directing.
Q 03What was Kurosawa's 1943 directorial debut, a judo story adapted from a Tsuneo Tomita novel?
Sanshiro Sugata
He bought the novel on publication day, read it in one sitting and had Toho grab the rights before three rival studios could.
Q 04Which famous director's intervention got Kurosawa's debut past Japan's wartime censors?
Yasujirō Ozu
The censors later cut 18 minutes anyway, much of which is now lost.
Q 05Which unknown actor did Kurosawa cast in Drunken Angel (1948), beginning a 16-film partnership?
Toshiro Mifune
His explosive turn as a tubercular yakuza stole the film from its nominal hero, the alcoholic doctor.
Q 06Which prize did Rashomon unexpectedly win at the 1951 Venice Film Festival?
The Golden Lion
Kurosawa didn't even know the film had been entered; an Italian distributor's representative pushed Daiei to submit it.
Q 07Who got Rashomon entered at Venice without Kurosawa's knowledge?
An Italian distributor's agent
Giuliana Stramigioli had seen and admired the film and talked Daiei into submitting it.
Q 08Rashomon's murder-from-four-viewpoints plot comes from which writer's short story 'In a Grove'?
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
The title and the gate framing story come from a different Akutagawa story altogether.
Q 09What taboo did Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa break while shooting Rashomon in the forest?
Pointing the camera at the sun
Robert Altman said he copied the sun shots into his own work the day after first seeing the film.
Q 10Under what structure do the woodcutter, the monk and the commoner shelter from the rain in Rashomon?
A ruined city gate
The Rashōmon was the great southern gate of Heian-era Kyoto; the film's set was built at Daiei's Kyoto studio.
Q 11Ikiru (1952) was based on a novella by which Russian author?
Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich became the story of a Tokyo bureaucrat with stomach cancer building a children's playground.
Q 12Which member of Kurosawa's regular troupe plays the dying bureaucrat Watanabe in Ikiru?
Takashi Shimura
He'd already played the doctor in Drunken Angel and would lead the samurai as Kambei two years later.
Q 13In Ikiru's famous final image, Watanabe sits on a swing in the snow singing which song?
Gondola no Uta
He first sings the 1915 song in a nightclub, silencing the room; it returns at the end as pure release.
Q 21Kurosawa relocated Dostoevsky's The Idiot from Russia to which part of Japan?
Hokkaido
The studio cut his 265-minute version down to 166, and the full cut no longer exists.
Q 22Which 1977 blockbuster did George Lucas say was heavily influenced by The Hidden Fortress?
Star Wars
Two squabbling peasants escorting a princess through enemy lines became two droids and a princess.
Q 23What are the names of the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress?
Tahei and Matashichi
They are played by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, both veterans of Seven Samurai.
Q 14How many days of shooting did Seven Samurai require, spread across almost a year?
148
It opened half a year late and three times over budget, then the most expensive Japanese film ever made.
Q 15Where did Kurosawa take his two co-writers for 45 days to write Seven Samurai?
A secluded inn
Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni had just written Ikiru with him; Oguni would co-write twelve of his films.
Q 16Where did Seven Samurai place in the critics' section of the 2022 Sight & Sound greatest-films poll?
20th
A 1999 poll of Japanese critics had already voted it the best Japanese film ever made.
Q 17Throne of Blood (1957) transplants which Shakespeare play to feudal Japan?
Macbeth
Kurosawa told his Lady Macbeth figure, Isuzu Yamada, to treat it as a Japanese classic rather than a European one.
Q 18How was Washizu's death scene, in which his own men turn on him, staged in Throne of Blood?
With real arrows fired by experts
Mifune reportedly waved his arms to signal the direction he'd move next so the archers could avoid him.
Q 19The stylised acting in Throne of Blood draws heavily on which traditional Japanese theatre?
Noh
Isuzu Yamada's near-motionless Lady Asaji is modelled on a Noh mask.
Q 20The Lower Depths (1957) adapts a play by which Russian writer, relocated to Edo-period Japan?
Maxim Gorky
It was shot on just two confined sets to stress how trapped the characters are.
Q 24What does the wandering rōnin in Yojimbo look at when he invents his surname?
A mulberry field
Kuwabatake means mulberry field; Sanjuro means 'thirty years old', which he admits is a rough guess.
Q 25Which Sergio Leone film was an unauthorised remake of Yojimbo, prompting a successful Toho lawsuit?
A Fistful of Dollars
Kurosawa reportedly wrote to Leone that it was a very fine film, but it was his film.
Q 26High and Low (1963) was adapted from King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel written under which pseudonym?
Ed McBain
Evan Hunter's kidnapping story became a film Kurosawa meant as a condemnation of a crime he considered among the worst.
Q 27What is the single splash of colour in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low?
A plume of pink smoke
The smoke rises from an incinerator where the kidnapper burns the marked briefcases, giving away his location.
Q 28Which of his films did Kurosawa make in 1965 as his last collaboration with Mifune?
Red Beard
The shoot ran well over a year and left everyone exhausted; why the two never worked together again was never fully explained.
Q 29Which 1970 Pearl Harbor epic did Kurosawa leave after three weeks, effectively fired by the studio?
Tora! Tora! Tora!
He was to direct the Japanese half; his American producers concluded he must be mentally ill and had him examined.
Q 30Which director was originally slated for the American half of Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor film, before Richard Fleischer?
David Lean
Kurosawa's script for his half ran over four hours; the studio then capped his segment at 90 minutes.