'A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams." In the months to come, cinema will be offering plenty of cryptic oriental wisdom like this. And it will come amid scenes of elegant dismemberment and improbable sprays of blood. Because, in the realm of action movies, samurai is all the rage.
Think of Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu in Quentin Tarantino's samurai tribute Kill Bill, the first volume of which opens this week. In a few months, we'll also be able to see Tom Cruise learn the way of the eastern warrior in his epic The Last Samurai, and Japanese tough guy Takeshi Kitano swapping guns for swords in his award-winning Zatoichi.
After a long and bloody reign, the gun has fallen from favour as the action-movie weapon of choice. No one, it seems, wants to see gun movies any more. It could be a reaction to real-life gun violence, from Columbine to Iraq, or sheer boredom with the macho laziness of shoot-outs. Either way, from the historical battles of Gladiator to the magic feats of The Lord of the Rings and the swashbucklers of this summer's hit Pirates of the Caribbean, audiences have made it clear they want to see their heroes do something more athletic than pull a trigger.
But there's more than weaponry behind the samurai vogue. There is the samurai code of honour, bushido - "the way of the warrior". The west, and its movies, have always had a bizarre fascination with bushido. Based on Zen and Confucian wisdom, its seven principles - courage, honesty, courtesy, honour, compassion, loyalty and complete sincerity - are almost the opposite of everything Hollywood stands for. Perhaps that's why it appeals to elite players like Cruise, who seems to be on a personal quest to transcend his movie-star status. "Bushido is really the reason I wanted to make this film," Cruise says of The Last Samurai. "I strongly identify with those values of honour, loyalty and passion. It's a very powerful code; those are wonderful things to aspire to in life."
The Last Samurai is being talked of as Cruise's Gladiator. It is set in 1870s Japan, when the samurai's sword-based supremacy was being undermined by firearms, and its story is tailor-made for the star. Cruise's character is a disaffected American soldier brought over by the emperor to train the Japanese army in western warfare; instead he regains his purpose through his adoption by the samurai. Cruise trained for the part with samurai-like rigour: eight months learning swordfighting, hand-to-hand combat, horse riding and the Japanese language, and no doubt thumbing through samurai text Hagakure in his trailer.
Tarantino put his own actors through similarly intense training: the members of his "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad" studied Japanese, kung-fu and kenjutsu sword techniques, the latter from veteran samurai movie star Sonny Chiba. They may not be the first American movies to take in samurai influences, but Kill Bill and The Last Samurai are aiming for an authenticity that previous Hollywood visions of Japan (like Richard Chamberlain's 1980s mini-series Shogun) have lacked.
The samurai's infiltration of Hollywood has been a slow process. After the second world war, samurai values were associated with kamikaze pilots and Japan's wartime hostility. In Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda movie, Japan: Know Your Enemy, bushido is described as "the art of treachery". Since then, however, samurai movies have served as a useful bridge between the US and Japan. In fact, bearing in mind that the real samurai class was officially abolished more than 30 years before the invention of cinema, most of what the US knows about samurai it knows from the movies.
In Japan, there was no such thing as a "samurai movie" before the second world war - although it was making plenty of jidaigeki, or historical movies, and, given that samurai had been a part of society for more than 1,000 years, it would have been very difficult to leave them out. When the American occupation government took over at the end of the war, it limited production of jidaigeki, fearing that they could reignite Japanese nationalism. Especially forbidden was the depiction of samurai swords, which were closely associated with feudal loyalty.
But, by 1950, Japan's film industry had returned to normal and was starting to make an international impact. This was largely thanks to one director: Akira Kurosawa. His Rashomon opened the doors in 1950, but Seven Samurai, four years later, laid out the vocabulary of the modern samurai movie. The director was descended from a famous samurai family, and his father wore the samurai topknot when he was a boy. His seven samurai are noble, honourable, virtuous heroes. But much as Kurosawa loved the samurai, he also loved John Ford and Howard Hawks. It's debatable how authentically "Japanese" Seven Samurai is - Japanese critics certainly attacked it for being "too western". But it was a huge international hit, and Kurosawa followed it up with several more - Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress - all using his signature actor Toshiro Mifune.
What followed was a period of cross-fertilisation between westerns and samurai movies. Their heroes were similarly rootless loners, operating in similarly romanticised versions of their country's histories, with similarly black-and-white views of good and evil. Their themes and stories (and, of course, their weapons) were interchangeable. Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were remade, respectively, as The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars.
But Kurosawa's influence spread to all action genres. War films like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone rehashed Seven Samurai's themes of noble teamwork. French director Jean-Pierre Melville translated bushido to 1960s France in his noir masterpiece Le Samouraï, with Alain Delon as a solitary hitman whose samurai-like values appear pathological in 1960s Paris. In more recent times, Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai successfully fused Japanese warrior sensibilities with those of urban America. And Cartoon Network's hit series Samurai Jack has been bringing bushido to pre-school kids worldwide.
But the Hollywood product that has perpetuated samurai values more than any other is Star Wars. George Lucas is a Kurosawa devotee and has admitted borrowing plot elements from The Hidden Fortress. But there is also more than a hint of samurai about the Jedi, a noble order of warriors who spout Zen-like wisdom, follow an ancient code and fight with swords (Lucas cottoned on to the limitations of gun action well ahead of the pack). Even the word "Jedi" was inspired by Lucas hearing the word jidaigeki. And before Alec Guinness took the role, an early choice for Obi-Wan Kenobi was Mifune.
While Hollywood quietly adopted the samurai, Japan turned Kurosawa's mould into a whole genre. Pulp samurai movies were churned out in 1960s and 1970s Japan, usually recycling existing legends, historical incidents and previous samurai films. Many took as their subject Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life 17th-century folk hero. The original Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, was played by one actor, Shintaro Katsu, over dozens of movies from 1962 until 1989. As much as Kurosawa, it is these gory but populist movies that Tarantino makes reference to in Kill Bill.
By the 1980s that craze was over, and the cash-strapped Japanese film industry drifted away from the samurai into gun-toting yakuza movies. Since then, there has been little appetite for a samurai action revival. Nagisa Oshima's 1999 drama Gohatto offered an arthouse, homoerotic revision of samurai history, but Japanese youth have tended to associate samurai movies with their parents. So Kitano's update of Zatoichi, with plenty of computer-generated bloodshed, is a significant development, as was veteran director Yoji Yamada's success at the Japanese Film Academy awards last year with his Twilight Samurai. The release of Kill Bill and The Last Samurai, meanwhile, can only add momentum to Japan's samurai revival.
The question is whether Japan's domestic samurai movies will be able to compete, now that Hollywood has thrown down its guns and picked up a sword. It could be one hell of a fight but, judging by the history, it's more likely to be a fruitful collaboration.