Histories of cinematic remakes arising between Japan and the United States have long captured the attention of both popular and scholarly audiences. Emphasis tends to rest upon the post-war reception of Japanese cinema via international film festivals and the resultant generic influences that manifested most readily between jidaigeki films (historical dramas often situated during Japan's pre-modern period prior to 1868) and Westerns. Discourses of cinematic remakes between the two nations reveal much about how their leaders and their cultural producers have addressed societal change in an increasingly transpacific context. After the Second World War, both nations converged in a manner that would mutually shape their geopolitical and ideological futures, resulting in extensive cultural crosspollination while also complicating and at times overriding regional, colonial and traumatic legacies in East Asia. In some ways, cinema was an ideal medium for both nations to engage with each other and explore new power dynamics and societal restructuring. Both Hollywood and Japan's film industry favoured genres well-suited to addressing the convergence of tradition and modernity. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the jidaigeki and the Western would develop a reciprocal relationship, particularly through cinematic remakes.

This is not to say that the genres of jidaigeki and the Western are simply interchangeable; rather, they are able to accommodate the increasingly transnational aspects of cinematic (co)production, distribution and reception that emerged after the Second World War, perhaps more adeptly than other popular genres (such as the comedy, the family melodrama and the musical, which are comparatively ‘cloistered’ in their spatial configurations). Most often, the heroes of jidaigeki films and Westerns are ‘social outsiders who restore order or help people fighting against the villains while being fully aware that their virtuous action does not allow them to reintegrate themselves in a renewed social order’ (Yoshimoto 2000, 231). As exemplified by Alan Ladd's titular gunslinger in Shane (1953) and Toshiro Mifune's titular swordslinger in Sanjuro (1962), the appeal of these characters arises from their mysterious pasts, mastery of weapons and a stoic concern for the wellbeing of the communities they briefly inhabit. A seemingly necessary violence follows these characters and what manifests through them goes beyond clearly defined morality and instead draws attention to the liminal worlds and wanderers that inhabit the spaces between periods of stability.