Such a shame

It's such a shame those expository title screens were clumsily inserted into the thirst act of this otherwise fine film. Reading about this before viewing it I expected much more of a messy, confusing experience but really other than those pesty text screens towards the beginning, and perhaps a few instances of strange over-use of Kurosawa's famous wipe transitions (possibly to edit within individual scenes) this film feels relatively complete and is for the most part entirely comprehensible. Really it's just the first ten or so minutes that have the exposition screens. In fact if there were a way to cut those out I don't think the film's narrative would suffer one bit (except for the obvious fact that they do describe some very important background info on Kameda and Akama). Does anyone know what sort of footage was cut? I am guessing it was mainly from the beginning of the film. Were there originally flashback scenes in place of the text screens? Or other scenes from the book (which I have not read)? I wonder about the possibility of flashbacks because the film is still very long and if the exposition on the train scene and directly after the train scene were presented through filmed conversation and dialogue then why not just include those 10 or so extra minutes and have a more smooth three hour film, instead of a more jarring two hour, forty-five minute film. Any information about what was cut out of the film would be really interesting.