‘Further, this narrative insists upon the importance of importation. While all countries incorporate culture from elsewhere - the process is called "progress" - Japan does so with a certain finality. Any definition of Japanese style has to face the fact that most Japanese are usually unable to handle anything without swiftly nationalizing it. Or, perhaps better put, the Japanese have a particular genius for assimilation and incorporation. Thus any influence - be it gagaku court dancing from medieval Korea, punck rock from modern America, the narrative patternings of European sophisticate Ernst Lubitsch, or the made-in-U.S.A. attitudes of Quentin Tarantino - is swallowed, digested, and turned into something sometimes rich, often strange, and always "Japanese". All of these choices, moreover, are purposeful: identity is, in the process, more constructed than discovered.’

A Hundred Years of Japanese Film - A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos
Donald Richie

*Takeshi Kitano como Zatoichi na capa* ^_^