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context: movies > general points
Western Movies
Cinema was an international form from the start, spreading across the world with enormous speed. From the start, many foreign movies were shown in Japan - and since one language was as foreign as another, there was no great distinction made between American, French, Russian or whatever, so Gance, Lang and Eisenstein could easily find space alongside Chaplin, Lubitsch and Griffiths. These were all big influences, in many different ways, on early Japanese directors. Japan made a huge number of movies, but there were people who watched almost entirely Western films - Ozu had seen just three Japanese movies when he applied for a studio job.
It's particularly important, I think, to note that this was, eventually, not a one-way influence. Kurosawa was a big admirer of John Ford's Westerns, and two of his biggest movies were remade as westerns - and The Hidden Fortress was used as part of the basis of Lucas's first Star Wars film. A particularly clear example of ideas flowing backwards and forwards was when he took Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest (filmed in 1930 as Roadhouse Nights) and adapted the story for his late samurai/early yakuza movie, Yojimbo, his biggest hit. This was then remade by Sergio Leone, some scenes almost shot-for-shot, as A Fistfull Of Dollars, and this new approach to the Western was a big influence on US westerns...