Akira Kurosawa Trivia
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68 free Akira Kurosawa trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 68 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Through the ruins of which 1923 disaster did Kurosawa's older brother lead him at 13, insisting he look?
The Great Kantō earthquake
The Great Kantō earthquake: when Akira turned away from the bodies, Heigo scolded him to look carefully, on the principle that a fear faced directly loses its hold.
Q 02What nickname did the perfectionist Kurosawa earn in Japan?
The Emperor
The Emperor: he would halt a shoot until every detail was right, and Seven Samurai became the most expensive Japanese film made up to that time.
Q 03What was Kurosawa's 1943 directorial debut, a judo story adapted from a Tsuneo Tomita novel?
Sanshiro Sugata
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa pounced on the novel as soon as it was published and pressed Toho to buy the film rights so that he could direct it.
Q 04Which famous director's intervention got Kurosawa's debut past Japan's wartime censors?
Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujirō Ozu championed the film as a real artistic achievement when the censors objected that it was too 'British-American' for wartime Japan.
Q 05What kind of character does Toshiro Mifune play in the postwar Tokyo drama Drunken Angel, his first Kurosawa film?
A young gangster
A young gangster: Kurosawa later admitted he struggled to stop Mifune's performance from taking the film away from its real hero, an alcoholic doctor.
Q 06Which prize did Rashomon unexpectedly win at the 1951 Venice Film Festival?
The Golden Lion
The Golden Lion, Venice's top prize, went to Rashomon in 1951; Kurosawa had not even known the film was entered, and the win opened Western cinemas to Japanese films.
Q 07Who got Rashomon entered at Venice without Kurosawa's knowledge?
An Italian distributor's agent
An Italian distributor's agent, Giuliana Stramigioli of Italiafilm, had seen and admired Rashomon and pressed a reluctant Daiei studio to send it to Venice.
Q 08Rashomon's murder-from-four-viewpoints plot comes from which writer's short story 'In a Grove'?
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's 'In a Grove' supplied the clashing testimonies; Kurosawa took only the film's title and its framing scenes from a second story of his.
Q 09What taboo did Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa break while shooting Rashomon in the forest?
Pointing the camera at the sun
Pointing the camera at the sun was a taboo of the day; Miyagawa also used mirrors to bounce sunlight onto the actors in the forest shade.
Q 10Under what structure do the woodcutter, the monk and the commoner shelter from the rain in Rashomon?
A ruined city gate
A ruined city gate, old Kyoto's Rashōmon, gives the film its name; the downpour over it was tinted with black ink because plain water did not show up on film.
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's Watanabe dies partway through the film; the rest is told in flashbacks at his wake, as colleagues puzzle over what changed him.
Q 13In Ikiru's most famous scene, Watanabe sits on a swing in the snow singing which song?
Gondola no Uta
Q 21Which film series did its creator say drew on Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress for its two bickering sidekicks?
Star Wars
Star Wars: its creator has said the two squabbling peasants became the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, and his first outline stayed closer still to Kurosawa's plot.
Q 22What does the title of Kurosawa's 1961 samurai film Yojimbo mean in English?
Bodyguard
Bodyguard: both of the town's rival bosses want to hire the rōnin as theirs, and he sells his sword to each in turn so that the two gangs destroy one another.
Q 23What does the wandering rōnin in Yojimbo look at when he invents his surname?
A mulberry field
'Gondola no Uta' (1915) urges maidens to fall in love while life is brief; Watanabe first sings it in a nightclub, and the whole room falls silent.
Q 14Who does Kambei say has really won at the end of Seven Samurai?
The farmers
The farmers: watching them sing as they plant rice beside the graves of his fallen comrades, Kambei says the hired swords have been defeated once again.
Q 15Where did Kurosawa take his two co-writers for 45 days to write Seven Samurai?
A secluded inn
A secluded inn in the resort town of Atami: each man wrote the same scene alone, the best ideas were combined, and Hideo Oguni acted as referee.
Q 16Which Pixar film have critics likened to Seven Samurai, with outsiders recruited to fight off raiders?
A Bug's Life
A Bug's Life: the ant Flik goes looking for tough warriors to see off the grasshoppers, but the fighters he brings home turn out to be out-of-work circus performers.
Q 17Throne of Blood (1957) transplants which Shakespeare play to feudal Japan?
Macbeth
Macbeth becomes the samurai Washizu; Kurosawa built the castle set high on Mount Fuji and waited there for days with his crew for fog to roll over the slopes.
Q 18The stylised acting in Throne of Blood draws heavily on which traditional Japanese theatre?
Noh
Noh runs through the whole film: Kurosawa had his two leads model their expressions on its masks, and the flute-and-drum score comes from the same theatre.
Q 19The Lower Depths (1957) adapts a play by which Russian writer, relocated to Edo-period Japan?
Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky's 1902 play keeps its stage shape on film: Kurosawa confined the action to two sets, the inside and the outside of one run-down tenement.
Q 20Kurosawa 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.
A mulberry field: he calls himself Kuwabatake, 'mulberry field', and adds a first name meaning thirty-year-old, though he admits he is nearer forty.
Q 24Which Sergio Leone film was a virtual scene-by-scene remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, prompting a successful Toho lawsuit?
A Fistful of Dollars
A Fistful of Dollars drew a letter from Kurosawa to Leone calling it 'a very fine film, but it is my film'; Toho sued, and Leone's side settled out of court.
Q 25High and Low (1963) was adapted from King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel written under which pseudonym?
Ed McBain
Ed McBain was Evan Hunter's pen name; novel and film turn on one dilemma, a rich man forced to choose between the deal of his life and a kidnapped child's ransom.
Q 26What is the single splash of colour in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low?
A plume of pink smoke
A plume of pink smoke rises when the kidnapper burns the ransom briefcases, which had been fitted with capsules for exactly that, and it leads the police to him.
Q 27Which of his films did Kurosawa make in 1965 as his last collaboration with Mifune?
Red Beard
Red Beard took two years to shoot; afterwards its star, keen to run his own productions and worn down by Kurosawa's perfectionism, never worked with him again.
Q 28Which Hollywood war epic did Kurosawa leave only weeks into filming, effectively fired by the studio?
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Tora! Tora! Tora! lost Kurosawa soon after shooting began; two other Japanese directors were brought in to film the half he had spent two years preparing.
Q 29Which British director was Kurosawa told would film the American half of his Hollywood war epic?
David Lean
David Lean was the name Kurosawa had been given; Richard Fleischer directed the American scenes instead.
Q 30Which 1970 film was Kurosawa's first in colour?
Dodesukaden
Dodesukaden (1970), shot quickly and cheaply to prove he could still work fast, was Kurosawa's first colour film; it lost money and his Club of the Four Knights production company dissolved.