By the 1990s, Kurosawa had appeared onstage at the Oscars to receive a lifetime achievement award from Steven Spielberg and the aforementioned George Lucas. His legacy was secure, but at home in Japan, the international success Kurosawa achieved sometimes came with accusations that he was pandering to Western tastes. In his interview with Oshima, Kurosawa reiterated that he did not understand exactly why his films had found such appeal outside Japan, but he suspected it might have something to do with his approach to depicting the lives of his characters:

“I don’t know why people respond to my films. But I think what appeals most to the foreign audience is the fact that I’m not seeking to please them. You can sense that kind of movie right away. If you try to add appeal by playing up Japanese qualities and depict a story that Westerners will find exotic, they react very negatively. But if you, as a Japanese person, just tell a story about the concerns of Japanese people, it will appeal to people worldwide, as every country has similar concerns. I guess that’s what people find most appealing about my films. It’s no good to try to cater to the overseas market. I’ve been asked if I make special concessions to appeal to foreign audiences. It’s precisely because I do nothing of the sort that they appeal to them.”

What Kurosawa seems to be talking about here is finding universality in the specific. While critics in his lifetime may have bristled at his increasingly popular films as being “not Japanese enough,” Kurosawa simply applied the influences he had absorbed to tell stories about people having relatable experiences. His films are Japanese, but they’re not only Japanese, and that enabled them to translate across cultures.