Before I ever went to Japan I watched Tokyo Story. It was the black and white image that took me to another time and place.

Probably I was already hooked at that point, but those images kept coming back in other movies and other sensations long after my first arrival. The sights and sounds of the marketplace caught in that monochrome filter.

Many people who have read Itoh’s Ghost insist that they see black and white and that Itoh’s Ghost was made for the screen. They mean the silver screen, the one that Kurosawa invented not long after the war.

There was the Occupation, yet still buried deep was the idea of the fallen samarai re-emerging.

For the Westerner it is inevitable that we mix all these things together. I have read all manner of book on Japan starting at the present and walking backward through the most labored Chinese histories, and it is that period at the end of the war, when things fell apart, and the Americans intervene, that we really grasp. And even then we mix the past with the present, the wretched samurai gangster with the American soldier, the beauty of the old Japan, its old ways and its old vendettas, with ourselves stuck right in the middle.