Famously, the samurai film is Japan’s western, Akira Kurosawa is its John Ford, and the legendary figure of Miyamoto Musashi is… Jesse James? There might not be an equivalent; Musashi was a 17th-century vagabond warrior with a distinctive double-blade sword style and a philosophy to go with it. His manifesto, The Book of Five Rings , is still in print and commonly used by businessmen busy strategizing about how to annihilate the competition, while fiction about Musashi proliferates like dandelions, making him a national icon. We don’t have Western heroes like that, but Japan savors its own — particularly onscreen.
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