When 20th Century Fox, planned "Tora! Tora! Tora!," its blockbuster por­trayal of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, it looked to Akira Kurosawa, a man whose mastery of the cinema led to his nickname "the Emperor," to direct the Japanese sequences. Yet a matter of three weeks after he began shooting the film in December 1968, Kurosawa was summarily dismissed and expelled from the studio. The tabloids trumpeted scandal: Kurosawa had himself gone mad, his associates had betrayed him, Hollywood was engaged in a conspiracy.

Now, for the first time, the truth behind the downfall and humiliation of one of cinema's greatest perfection­ists is revealed in All the Emperor's Men. Journalist Hiroshi Tasogawa probes the most sensitive questions about Kurosawa's thwarted ambition and the demons that drove him. His is a tale of a great clash of personalities, of differences in the ways of making movies, and ultimately of a clash between Japanese and American cultures.