One of cinema’s most enduring long-distance love affairs, Japanese samurai stories, has proved irresistible to Western film-makers for decades. The infatuation first bloomed in the 1960s, when Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces Seven Samurai and Yojimbo spawned the iconic remakes The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. Later, thinly-veiled samurai references cropped up everywhere from Star Wars to Ronin to Kill Bill. In 2003 even Tom Cruise joined a long list of sword-swinging admirers in his swashbuckling epic The Last Samurai.

But nobody has challenged the hollow historical myth-making of samurai cinema as thoroughly as Yoji Yamada. Until three years ago, this sprightly septuagenarian was barely known outside Japan, where his record-breaking Tora-san comedy series accounts for 48 of his 60-plus directing credits. However, Yamada struck a much more sombre note in 2002 with his first period piece, Twilight Samurai, a refreshingly revisionist drama that earned him awards, rave international reviews and an Oscar nomination.

Cynical, intelligent and humane, Yamada makes samurai films for people who don’t like samurai films. His latest, The Hidden Blade, is based on a novel by Shuuhei Fujisawa, whose writing also inspired Twilight Samurai. It takes place in the 1860s, at the dawn of the Meiji period, when Japan was opening up after centuries of isolationism. Although less tragic in tone than its predecessor, The Hidden Blade again features a reluctant samurai hero desperate to escape rigid military and social hierarchies to live as a humble civilian.

“Twilight Samurai is a very sad film, very pathetic,” nods Yamada, still baby-faced at 74. “In The Hidden Blade the main character is much younger than in Twilight Samurai and loses his status to become one with his lover. So it is almost a happy ending.”

In Japan, samurai films function much like westerns for US audiences, generally sacrificing historical accuracy for patriotic fantasy. Yamada’s sociological snapshots of the Wild East are comparable to the autumnal anti-westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood, in which weary warriors yearn to renounce violence and retire to domesticated calm.

“If you look at the long history of Japanese samurai films,” Yamada says, “the main theme is a samurai pulling out his sword and killing people. You can compare it to westerns in the United States — there is the same entertainment about that. In that sense samurai films are also very close to Japanese comics and manga culture. Of course there are many thousands of types of samurai film, but hardly any which depict the samurai as human beings and describe them in a very realistic way.”

This unprecedented realism is Yamada’s chief contribution to the genre. Instead of balletic sword battles, his alienated anti-heroes share banal small talk and messy love lives. When grudgingly forced to fight, they engage in long, clumsy duels before dying in agony. In the past, Yamada says, most samurai films were “full of lies”.

This forensic detail brings the characters alive in a very contemporary manner. As the old certainties of social status and feudal loyalty crumble, Yamada’s protagonists feel the ground shifting beneath them, much like the downsized office drones of 21st-century Japan.

“In my film the samurai figure goes to work every day,” Yamada nods. “There is a parallel nowadays with the salaryman who goes to work and has to obey the orders of the boss. Of course there is this parallel, especially now there is an economic crisis in Japan, with many companies rationalising their staff. I had that insecurity in mind when I made this film.”

The difference today, Yamada smiles, is that “when a company employee is restructured he can’t reach for a sword”.

But the director feels no nostalgia for the lost glory of feudal Japan. The ancient bushido honour code makes no sense today, he argues, with its emphasis on death as the ultimate career move.

The Hidden Blade is partly about the damaging first stages of globalisation in Japan, when European military methods rendered lone swordsmen redundant. But ironically, 150 years later, it is the samurai drama itself that has become globalised. In worldwide influence it is arguably one of Japan’s biggest cultural exports.

“In the context of globalisation,” Yamada says, “culture has a certain independence. It is something that can be resistant to globalisation itself. It is very important that we keep our culture, which was passed on for generations from our ancestors, and not just give it away so easily.”

Yamada is about to shoot his third samurai film, the last in a Fujisawa trilogy. But the enduring appeal of Japanese warrior culture to Western film-makers, from Sergio Leone to Quentin Tarantino, still bemuses him.

“What I heard about Kill Bill is it’s actually a film with a lot of killing, a lot of blood,” he frowns. “I feel it depicts Japanese people as being very cruel, and of course we do have a history of cruelty. But there is sensitivity and gentleness within our culture as well.”

A fistful of Western samurai homages

The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai remade as a western thriller.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Another Kurosawa copy, Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti western was based on Yojimbo from 1961.

Ronin (1998)
Named after samurai mercenaries, this thriller stars Robert De Niro.

Kill Bill (2003) Flashing blades and samurai homages help fill Tarantino’s postmodern bloodbath.

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