Akira Kurosawa Trivia
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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
Akira Kurosawa was born on 23 March 1910 in the Ōimachi district of Tokyo, the eighth and youngest child of Isamu Kurosawa, a former army officer.
Q 02How many feature films did Kurosawa direct across his six-decade career?
30
Kurosawa directed 30 feature films, from Sanshiro Sugata (1943) to Madadayo (1993); he also wrote screenplays for other directors, which paid better than assistant directing.
Q 03What was Kurosawa's 1943 directorial debut, a judo story adapted from a Tsuneo Tomita novel?
Sanshiro Sugata
Sanshiro Sugata (1943), adapted from Tsuneo Tomita's judo novel, was Kurosawa's first film as director; he read the novel in one sitting and had Toho secure the rights ahead of rival studios.
Q 04Which famous director's intervention got Kurosawa's debut past Japan's wartime censors?
Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujirō Ozu, sitting on the wartime censorship panel, spoke up for Sanshiro Sugata and got it approved; a 1944 re-release nonetheless cut about 17 minutes, footage that is now lost.
Q 05Which unknown actor did Kurosawa cast in Drunken Angel (1948), beginning a 16-film partnership?
Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune's explosive turn as a tubercular yakuza stole the film from its nominal hero, the alcoholic doctor; the two men went on to 15 more films together.
Q 06Which prize did Rashomon unexpectedly win at the 1951 Venice Film Festival?
The Golden Lion
Rashomon took the Golden Lion, Venice's top prize, in 1951; Kurosawa did not even know Daiei had entered the film in the festival.
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, so a ruined city gate gives the film its name; the set was built at Daiei's Kyoto studio.
Q 11Ikiru (1952) was inspired by a novella by which Russian author?
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich inspired Ikiru, in which Tokyo bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, dying of stomach cancer, pushes a children's playground through city hall.
Q 12Which member of Kurosawa's regular troupe plays the dying bureaucrat Watanabe in Ikiru?
Takashi Shimura
Takashi Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe; he had already been the alcoholic doctor in Drunken Angel (1948) and would lead the samurai as Kambei in Seven Samurai (1954).
Q 13In Ikiru's famous final image, Watanabe sits on a swing in the snow singing which song?
Gondola no Uta
Q 21Kurosawa relocated Dostoevsky's The Idiot from Russia to which part of Japan?
Hokkaido
Kurosawa set The Idiot (1951) in snowbound Sapporo, Hokkaido; Shochiku cut his 265-minute version to 166 minutes, and the full cut no longer exists.
Q 22Which 1977 blockbuster did George Lucas say was heavily influenced by The Hidden Fortress?
Star Wars
George Lucas acknowledged Star Wars (1977) borrowed from The Hidden Fortress: two squabbling peasants escorting a princess through enemy lines became the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO with Princess Leia.
Q 23What are the names of the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress?
Tahei and Matashichi
'Gondola no Uta' (1915), a song urging maidens to love before youth fades, is first sung by Watanabe in a nightclub, silencing the room; it returns on the swing as pure release.
Q 14How many days of shooting did Seven Samurai require, spread across almost a year?
148
Seven Samurai needed 148 days of shooting spread across almost a year, against a three-month schedule; it ran about three times over budget, the most expensive Japanese film made up to that time.
Q 15Where did Kurosawa take his two co-writers for 45 days to write Seven Samurai?
A secluded inn
Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni spent 45 days sequestered at a secluded inn in Atami writing the script; the three had just written Ikiru together.
Q 16Where did Seven Samurai place in the critics' section of the 2022 Sight & Sound greatest-films poll?
20th
Seven Samurai placed 20th in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll; Japanese critics polled by Kinema Junpo had earlier voted it the best Japanese film ever made.
Q 17Throne of Blood (1957) transplants which Shakespeare play to feudal Japan?
Macbeth
Macbeth's Lady was Isuzu Yamada, whom Kurosawa told to treat the play 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
Maxim Gorky's 1902 play The Lower Depths was relocated to an Edo-period tenement; Kurosawa shot it on just two confined sets to stress how trapped the characters are.
Tahei and Matashichi, the greedy, quarrelling peasants, are played by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, both veterans of Seven Samurai.
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 a virtual scene-by-scene remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, prompting a successful Toho lawsuit?
A Fistful of Dollars
Kurosawa reportedly wrote to Leone that A Fistful of Dollars was 'a very fine film, but it is my film'; Toho's suit was settled with Kurosawa receiving 15% of the worldwide gross.
Q 26High and Low (1963) was adapted from King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel written under which pseudonym?
Ed McBain
Ed McBain was the pen name Evan Hunter used for his 87th Precinct novels; King's Ransom (1959) became a film Kurosawa intended as a condemnation of kidnapping, 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 plume of pink smoke rises from an incinerator chimney where the kidnapper burns the ransom briefcases, which police had treated to give off coloured smoke; it betrays his location.
Q 28Which of his films did Kurosawa make in 1965 as his last collaboration with Mifune?
Red Beard
Red Beard (1965) was the 16th and last Kurosawa–Mifune film; the shoot ran nearly two years and left everyone exhausted, and 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!
Kurosawa was to direct the Japanese half of Tora! Tora! Tora! but was removed in December 1968 after about three weeks of shooting; Fox had him examined by doctors, who reported nervous exhaustion.
Q 30Which director was originally slated for the American half of Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor film, before Richard Fleischer?
David Lean
David Lean was the director Kurosawa believed would handle the American half; Fox replaced him with Richard Fleischer, and Kurosawa's four-hour script for his own segment was capped at 90 minutes.