case, Kitano's heroes live out a version of the old Samurai tradition, upholding traditional values in a world where values are in flux, and do so over issues of life and death.
The Samurai tradition has been a key element in Japanese films, as can be seen in the works of Akira Kurosawa, well-known in the West. Westerners, however, tend to view the samurai film as a form of Western because that is an easy way to categorize the films and because there are elements of similarity, but this comparison is not as meaningful as it might seem. The past of the Western is a frontier past as America moved toward the West, and always there is a sense of conquering the wilderness and carving out a new homeland as an underlying motif. The samurai period was different for Japan. For one thing, Japan did not have a frontier and was never that large a country. It was certainly more rural than it would become later, but neither the samurai nor the people they either served or protected were pioneers or explorers. The samurai is often equated with the Western gunfighter, but here again the differences are considerable. Being a samurai involved intensive study and was an accepted part of the social structure, actually being more a military position for a regional lord than a free-lance position as was true of the gunfighter. One way in which the samurai and the gunfighter were equatable was in terms of the moral code by which they lived. It was not that the codes were the same, but that there was a code at all and that it had such power to determine relations between men of the same breed. The samurai code and the Code of the West take on mythic proportions.
Kitano's heroes seem to live out a samurai-like code without ever identifying that they are doing so. For one thing, Kitano's heroes are not verbal and do not express themselves openly except through violent actions. Their taciturn demeanor contrasts with the violence that explodes fr...