context: movies > directors > Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa: Japanese or Western?

One of the areas much contested in 20th C Japanese cinema, and among Western critics of same, is japaneseness. This is a tricky territory, as it depends what kind of Japaneseness you have in mind - the allegedly 'zen' calm and understatement of an Ozu, or the ability to absorb and reuse techniques and all kinds of influences from elsewhere, 'japanizing' them, for instance. This latter idea seems to me to be at the heart of the country's artistic character - Japan has always been extremely low on original inventions, but it has taken ideas and methods from elsewhere (traditionally China and Korea, more recently Europe and the US) and has blended them to produce genuinely new results. I think Kurosawa exemplifies this exceptionally well: he was a fan of Western movies - John Ford's westerns in particular - and he made two Shakespeare adaptations, transposing Macbeth and King Lear to medieval samurai settings. What he made of these sources was unmistakeably Japanese, and distinctly his own - but still close enough to the West that cowboy movies like The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars could be easily adapted from Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. I'm not interested in trying to decide who is the most Japanese director, but I find it fascinating that it's possible to make such claims for a director who took so much from, and gave so much back to, the most American of all genres, the western.

Note that is also at least as possible to make an argument that Kurosawa is one of the least Japanese of Japanese directors - indeed, I've seen this argument made more often. I love that it is possible to make such contradictory claims.

sideways: Japan and movies from the West

forwards: his actors