I recently noticed a stack of samurai and kung fu movies sitting in my little brother’s room at our parents’ house. Duke, a martial arts enthusiast and Asian-film buff, tends to have a keen eye when it comes to quality films, despite his menial 17 years. I picked up a copy of a film titled Yojimbo and from there my mind expanded — suddenly it was exposed to a completely foreign yet simultaneously familiar framework of film.

Behind many of the elements of great cinema today, the striking, groundbreaking visions of Akira Kurosawa can be found. Yet many university students are unfamiliar with his work. As the 10th anniversary of his death approaches this fall, I decided to shed some light on his many great works.

Written and directed by Kurosawa, Yojimbo is the story of a crafty ronin (ex-samurai) who, at the toss of a stick, drifts his way through an isolated Japanese village. He becomes a key player in a village dispute and ultimately pits two gangs against each other for the greater good. This “samurai with no name” (ring any bells? Perhaps Clint Eastwood’s starring role in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western films as “The Man With No Name”?) speaks softly, but carries a big sword and a swift fist. Played by one of Kurosawa’s most commonly used actors, Toshiro Mifune, this ronin character set a standard for many performances in westerns and other dramatic action films over the next half-century.

I immediately drew references to a myriad of American films. The Kill Bill saga, with its intense sword fights and gravity-bending choreography and the aforementioned spaghetti westerns.

Inspired by the film, I dug deeper into Kurosawa’s work. His breakthrough 1950 film, Rashomon, has no direct American descendents, but it takes on a familiar story. A man is walking through the woods with his wife when a crazed, sword-wielding countryman runs into them. Soon after, the man is found dead. The tale of what happened is subsequently told from four conflicting perspectives. This is the archetype of many of the Rashomon-influenced crime dramas of today, which include the Travolta classic, Basic, The Usual Suspects and can even be seen in episodes of cartoons like Family Guy and The Simpsons (whose creative theft knows no bounds).

With my interest piqued, I found a variety of extraordinary Japanese films by Kurosawa that clearly helped pioneer Western cinema. His 1958 film, The Hidden Fortress, became the prime inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars, which has since been deemed a space-western. His 1954 action classic, The Seven Samurai, was adapted into the Steve McQueen driven Magnificent Seven. In the latter part of his career, super-fans George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped film his samurai epic Kagemusha, which was nominated for two Oscars in 1980.

As cinema grows ever more expansive, Kurosawa’s influence can be seen in all genres. He was a master of action, suspense, comedy and even film noir. The themes of his films become even more prescient as they are copied by such a variety of Western filmmakers. Even students can take a lesson from his mastery of an art.