er American genres from which he has drawn conceptions of character and dramatic tension. In Kurosawa's films, taken as a whole, East and West meet in a unique form. Kurosawa often adapts what would be considered a form firmly based on a sense of reality and imposes a Japanese mysticism on that form. Kurosawa builds ideas and tension through a juxtaposition of images which impose a sense of fate and even doom, depending on the film and the period in the filmmaker's life when it was made. Kurosawa is best-known in the West for his series of samurai films, and here the iconography of East and West are most firmly mixed, while in some of hi more experimental efforts, such as Do-des-ka-den, the iconography of Japan may be so heavy as to baffle most Western viewers altogether.
In some of Kurosawa's films, the American origins may be obscured. Yojimbo for instance, has many of the trappings of the American Western, from the lone stranger coming to town to the warring factions whose members kill one another off in a war
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