Once I had a disasatrous conversation with an aged Japanese colleague of my father’s. He had shown us great kindness and hospitality in Japan when we were there in 1978. He was retiring and traveling around the world to say good bye to colleagues. He expressed that the world had changed and that the old culture of Japan was dead, making it impossible for him to communicate with modern Japanese students.

I was horrified, because I had made a special effort to show him that my exposure to Japanese culture had in some way improved my life and that I had hoped that my culture would learn from the japanese as well (i give you: SUSHI! yum). So then I cited Kurosawa as a transmitter of traditional Japanese culture to the world. END OF CONVERSATION. He totally shut me down. It was, literally, tragic. We had utterly divergent views of the appropriateness and content of Kurosawa’s films.

]]> Read more