Negishi as Woman with Child Hisashi Igawa as Man at the Nuclear Power Plant Chosuke Ikariya as The Demon Sachio Sakai Noriko Honma Production For the "Sunshine Through the Rain" segment, writer-director Akira Kurosawa built a near-exact replica of his childhood home; the nameplate on the gate even reads "Kurosawa". During production, Kurosawa showed the actress playing the mother a photo of his own mother, and gave her tips on how to act as her. The setting of the segment "The Blizzard" may have been inspired by Kurosawa's personal life, since he confessed to being "a devotee of mountain climbing". In "Crows", Vincent van Gogh is portrayed by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The segment features Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major ("Raindrop") by Chopin. The visual effects for this segment were provided by George Lucas and his special effects group Industrial Light & Magic. Additionally, it is the only segment in the film wherein the characters do not speak Japanese, but instead English and French. The "Village of the Watermills" segment was filmed at the Daio Wasabi farm in the Nagano Prefecture. The segment, and the film as a whole, ends with an excerpt from "In the Village", part of the Caucasian Sketches, Suite No. 1 by the Russian composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. The colorful costumes worn by the villagers during a funeral procession are based on unusual clothes that Kurosawa saw in a remote northern village in his childhood. The idea of the stone in this segment, on which passersby lay flowers, was possibly inspired by a similar stone from Kurosawa's father's home village in Akita prefecture: Near the main thoroughfare of the village stood a huge rock, and there were always cut flowers on top of it. All the children who passed by it picked wild flowers and laid them atop the stone. When I wondered why they did this and asked, the children said they didn't know. I found out later by asking one of the old men in the village. In the Battle of Boshin, a hundred years ago, someone died at that spot. Feeling sorry for him, the villagers buried him, put the stone over the grave and laid flowers on it. The flowers became a custom of the village, which the children maintained without ever knowing why.Conrad, David A. (2022). Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, 212, McFarland & Co. Critical reception Vincent Canby of The