Much of the film was filmed from the slum streets of post war Japan. These were filmed under chief assistant director Ishirô Honda, who had gone with camera operator Kazuo Yamada into some dangerous, even yakuza run, territory. Many of the scenes of Toshirô Mifune's character from the waist down are actually Honda standing in. In his book, Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa described Honda's role stating, "I had Honda do mainly second-unit shooting. Everyday I told what I wanted and he would go out into the ruins of postwar Tokyo to film. There are few men as honest and reliable as Honda. He faithfully brought back exactly the footage I requested, so almost everything he shot was used in the final cut of the film. I'm often told that I captured the atmosphere of postwar Japan very well in Stray Dog, and if so I owe a great deal of that success to Honda."
During the opening credits, there is footage of a panting dog. However, when American censors saw the footage, they assumed that the dog had been harmed. This run-in with American censors caused Akira Kurosawa to remark that this was the only time he wished Japan had not lost WWII.
The experience in filming was apparently so enjoyable that Akira Kurosawa recalled many of the crew offering to work through the night.
Akira Kurosawa wrote the script with Ryûzô Kikushima, a writer who had never written a script before. The two collaborated a dozen more times before having a serious fallout in 1969.
Despite being noted as one of Akira Kurosawa's most critically renowned post-war films, Ein streunender Hund (1949) was not held in such high regard by the director himself. Kurosawa has been quoted as saying that he thinks little of the film, calling it "too technical" while also remarking that it contains "all that technique and not one real thought in it."
Akira Kurosawa: [weather] The symbolic usage of weather in this movie is evident in its depiction of Japan under a sunny heatwave, making some characters anticipate the rain. The sunny weather morphs into a dark gray, cloudy sky pattern in the scene where Murakami has a feeling that something bad will happen. Near the end of the movie, when the plot starts heavily escalating, the skies unleash a big downpour.