The appearance of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) at the 1951 Venice Film Festival introduced Japan to the stage of world cinema,

establishing Kurosawa as a Japanese national director in global eyes (Horvat, 1). However, the film was received as entertainment rather than art in Japan in the 1950s, revealing a gap in Japanese versus Western worldviews after World War II. In relation, a word one can associate with Rashomon is conflict, seen not just between the characters in the film, but also within its themes, narrative structure, and its global reception. The remarkable narrative structure and visual style of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) creates an ambiguous depiction of perception and identity, a theme further exemplified by the contrasting local versus foreign reception of the film as an icon of world cinema and a historical instance.

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Despite the same event recounted in three different versions in Rashomon, it cannot be said that the film lacks coherence. Tyler likens this narrative structure (to an extent) to a simultaneous montage, where the unilateral presentation of multiple perspectives is instead presented consecutively (177). This includes the multiple perspectives in the forest and the scenes at Rashomon Gate, which frame these perspectives into cohesion at the end. Key to this is the woodcutter's presence as the central figure at Rashomon Gate, acting as a pseudo-narrator for the audience as he is the only objective witness to the events. The scenes featuring him at Rashomon Gate begin and end the film and also “introduce” each new variation of the story. Although deducing the truth is not the purpose of the film, even the woodcutter's assertion about what actually happened (which agrees mostly with the Bandit's story) cannot be trusted since he also lies about his involvement by stealing the knife. Furthermore, each rendering of the events in the forest is subtly different in terms of cinematic choices, creating a psychological distinction in the viewer’s reception of each recount (Tyler, 180). For example, as living narrators, the wife and bandit have more POV shots in their respective retellings. As a dead, passive narrator, the husband's perspective features fewer of these. By juxtaposing close-ups and POV shots during the wife's story and neutral angles during the husband's, the story is emotionally heightened by framing their individual perspectives: the wife is hysterical in her guilt and expresses so with her entire (recently-“defiled”) body, while the husband, watching everything from a distance, expresses cold detachment and silently commits suicide. At the same time, while each retelling disputes the other in terms of who committed the murder, Tyler notes that none of the retellings render the others impossible (178). As a result of this unique feature, reinforced by the psychological individualism presented by the camera, the film offers a deeper meaning than just one character lying to present themselves as the best they can be: it brings in the element of memory and perspective. Due to the psychological effect of the varied editing and framing techniques, by the conclusion of the film, the audience develops a different perspective that views the film as a cohesive exploration of memory and perception subjectivity. 

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Once Rashomon is contextualised within the socioeconomic state of Japan in the 1950s, it becomes clear why the film is considered Japanese national cinema. The world was dealing with memories of, and moving forward from, World War II at this time. As Horvat notes, Rashomon was shot two years after the Tokyo War Crimes tribunals and within a year of its release, the US-Japan Security Treaty was signed, while war criminals were being released early with US aid due to anxiety over the Cold War (5). Kurosawa was also vocal about his regret for aiding Japanese war aims, thus framingRashomon’s central act of the three main characters denying and manipulating the extent of their involvement in the rape and murder as a critique of Japanese manipulations of its involvement in WWII. At the same time, Linden presents how Rashomon depicts not just Japan's defeat in WWII, but also the 1868 Meiji Reform (398). The latter would send Japan into radical modernisation and industrialisation (i.e., "Westernisation") while WW2 brought further, horrific upheaval at the hands of Americans. As such, the samurai and his wife in Rashomon may be viewed as symbols of Japanese identity,made unstable by the invasion of the bandit, i.e. the savage West as seen by Japan. The music in the film is also distinctly Western, yet in the end certainly Japanese as the woodcutter restores “faith in humanity,” thus critiquing the Japanese for favouring rapid Westernisation over traditional Japanese identity. Furthermore, Linden adds that the film’s titular setting, Rashomon Gate, is a symbol of Japanese Imperial authority as it was the most famous gate in Kyoto, the traditional Japanese capital (398). Thus, the bleak imagery of the gate scenes—dim lighting, rain, stranded strangers, and most importantly, the commoner burning pieces of the gate for warmth—creates a portrait of the disintegration of traditional Japanese identity. However, the framing story resolves this “faith in humanity” in the end through the woodcutter’s compassionate choice of adoption, with the baby as a symbol of hope for the new generation of Japan. Paired with the samurai, wife, and bandit’s acts of lying for selfish means, both the gate and forest scenes critique Japanese society for forgetting its traditions and sense of honour. Nevertheless, considering that it is this perception of honour that leads each character to “lie” about the forest events, Kurosawa implies that while Japanese identity is based on tradition and honour, its rigidity has allowed outside forces, such as the West, to disintegrate it.

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While this nationally-contextualised reading of Rashomon seems clear with an understanding of the socioeconomic state of Japan in the 1950s, this analysis was rare in Japan at the time and absent in the West (Horvat, 3.) For Western audiences, Rashomon was a unique art film and the first instance of Japanese national cinema exported to mass audiences, marking it as a Japanese icon of world cinema. In Japan, however, Rashomon was initially promoted by the studio through a sexual angle and as a “costume drama,” which is far from the story. In fact, as Linden points out, the film is the opposite of a costume drama, which were known for enforcing the conservatism that Kurosawa critiques in Rashomon (394). The entertainment-focused promotion also represented Rashomon to Japanese audiences as a contender for Western-styles of entertainment. There are of course more connections to the west: editing techniques (e.g., wipes to represent the transition of time) and varied framing techniques to enhance the story are examples of classical Hollywood techniques; the film uses Western-style music; and most importantly, it appeared at the Venice Film Festival and stamped Japanese cinema on the world stage. Furthermore, in terms of classical Hollywood style, Russell discusses how some of Kurosawa's films are “Japanese Westerns.” (9) In Rashomon, this can be seen in the setting of the forest and the event that takes place: the forest is the equivalent of the frontier landscape in a Western, which facilitates biologically or psychologically-charged confrontations between men. Indeed, in Rashomon, the action of rape and the central conflict of two men fighting over a woman, as Tyler discusses, are representations of men reduced to their most primitive state (178). The Western influences certainly appealed to Western audiences. However, as mentioned, the reception focused on Rashomon as an art film, with its “Japaneseness” confined to Orientalism: an appreciation of the image of Japan yet without an understanding of its cultural context. On the other hand, the “Westerness” of the film, both in its production, distribution, and reception, according to both Russel and Horvat, influenced much of the dismissal of Kurosawa by Japanese critics and filmmakers as a “Japanese national filmmaker.” (Horvat, 3). Along with Japanese reception of Rashomon as simply entertainment, this presents the stark difference in Japan versus the West’s views of each other (which was poorly informed), Japan’s view of itself, and the difference in Japan versus the West in terms of postwar attitudes. In terms of the second point, Japan’s reception of Rashomon as entertainment is ironic because it ignores the film’s historical and cultural context, perpetuating the very act of ignorance of the past that the film critiques. This in turn offers insight into the third point, representing Japan’s rapid modernisation (of which meaningless entertainment is symptomatic) in the postwar period, ignoring its war atrocities and escaping the knowledge of war criminals getting early parole; while on the other hand the West turned toward an ideal, humanist worldview as represented by its reception as an exploration of the human condition. 

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In short, Rashomon is uniquely complex as a film and in its cultural perceptions. Through what Tyler defines as “multiple image painting as space art,” (177) Kurosawa presents the same event in multiple psychological perspectives using cinematography, mise-en-scene, and editing, which total into cohesion in the spectator’s mind in the end as a depiction of the subjectivity of perception. At the same time, the film is representative of the tumultuous socioeconomic state of postwar Japan and the Japanese self-view, critiquing the nation’s displacement of its past with modernisation/Westernisation. However, this was not recognised by Japanese or Western audiences: the former viewed it as entertainment and the latter as art. The former ironically reflects the action of ignorance that the film critiques, while the differing global observations overall further bring to life the film’s central theme of the subjectivity of perception. Kurosawa fantastically brings the subject of Japanese past into modern discourse, blending it with Western influences to create an intertextuality that allowed mass reception. Interestingly, while this intertextuality and conflicting nature of Kurosawa’s films initially garnered criticism against him for being anti-Japanese, it eventually would become the most influential mode of filmmaking in Japanese cinema within the coming years (Russell, 13).