Director James Mangold has claimed Japanese film influences on his Marvel comic adaptation "The Wolverine," including Akira Kurosawa's 1957 film "Kumonosu-jo (The Throne of Blood)." But the film, in which Hugh Jackman's immortal Wolverine character comes to Japan, falls in love with a local beauty and fights local baddies, has much more in common with similarly themed Hollywood movies set in this country.
One is "Blood on the Sun," the 1945 thriller starring James Cagney as an intrepid reporter for the fictitious "Tokyo Chronicle" who unmasks a secret Japanese plot for world domination. In the ensuing struggles with his Japanese adversaries (white actors in yellow-face makeup) Cagney demonstrates some slick judo moves, despite being in his mid-40s when he made the film. (Whether he was an inspiration to the seriously buff Jackman, now 44, is not known.)
Among others are the many set-in-Japan Hollywood films that feature an East-West romance, with the inevitably male star usually saying sayonara to his Japanese inamorata by the final fade-out. A standout is "Shogun," the 1980 smash-hit U.S. mini-series, later released theatrically in a shortened version in Japan, about the adventures of a shipwrecked English seaman (Richard Chamberlain) in 17th-century Japan. Yoko Shimada won international acclaim as the hero's English-speaking love interest, though her samurai-class character was derided by Japanese critics for an unseemly naked romp in the bath with her foreign lover.