Films are windows and mirrors of nations; they plant images, perhaps indelible, of a country's people and personality. But the windows can be fogged by ignorance or prejudice. And the mirrors may be distorted—fun-house reflections that amount to a kind of visual libel. Often the cinematic views are those of outsiders, painting the Other with a coat of exoticism. But at times the oddest depictions are from the country itself.

No country has been the subject of so many extreme and contradictory signals as Japan, in foreign films and in its own product. The Japanese have been seen as proud warriors and shy bureaucrats, courtesans and devoted daughters, a most cultured people and the most barbaric. Western directors like Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour) and Steven Spielberg (who will achieve a Japanese trilogy if he ever adds the long-deferred Memoirs of a Geisha to 1941 and Empire of the Sun) have joined such local masters as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Nagisa Oshima in trying to define the bold, elusive Japanese psyche.

The fascination with Japan's perceived strangeness stretches from the beginning of films—when actor Sessue Hayakawa was one of the first Hollywood stars—to today. In the new Brit comedy Bridget Jones's Diary the heroine's mum blithely describes the Japanese as a "very cruel race." And if you think the Japanese cannot portray themselves as very cruel, check out Teruo Ishii's Joy of Torture films. In these two gore classics from the '60s, victims of feudal lords are roasted, splayed, beheaded, crucified and otherwise inconvenienced. These are not the only examples of cinematic exploitation and self-criticism: in many Japanese movies, a sadistic strain mixes with an almost gleeful sense of shame. It is as if filmmakers are saying, "Yes! We are the beasts your own movies told you we were."

Movies, of course, are not documentaries; and movie directors are not obliged to tell the truth about themselves or their countrymen. An American might warn foreigners about inferring too much from the gruff heroes and idiot pranksters of Hollywood pictures. A Japanese person, when asked about that nation's cinematic self-portraits, can sagely reply that it's only a movie. Most films are more eloquent about their makers' intentions than about their society's ills. And films about a foreign culture say more about local fears than about the country in front of the camera.

Long before Japan was a wartime enemy of the U.S., American movies displayed the Japanese as an alien people, with a culture as remote and, in the old phrase, inscrutable as Mars. Hayakawa was the movies' first ambassador from this remote empire. In 1915 he played an Eastern dude in Western garb in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat. All slim smiles and secret sneers, he seduces gullible Fannie Ward with a private loan; later he drops his suavity, attacking and then, gosh, branding her!

This role, however defamatory, made Hayakawa a star. Critics cheered his subtle, Zen-influenced acting, more suited to film than the broad theatrical gestures of most stars. Audiences loved his sharp good looks and the animal elegance with which he took charge of a woman. Thereafter he played nobles and villains, whom the leading lady finds instantly attractive but must ultimately renounce (unless she was played by Tsuru Aoki, another Japan-born Hollywood star who was, for 47 years, Hayakawa's wife). In a society as officially white as America in the 1910s, Hayakawa was a pioneer: the first Japanese superstar of Hollywood films. So far, alas, he is also the last.

Hayakawa's renown declined in the early '20s, and Hollywood ignored the Japanese for two decades. The war brought them back, more virulent than ever. The ad line for the 1943 film China read: "Alan Ladd and twenty girls—trapped by the rapacious Japs!" In the pow drama The Purple Heart, American airmen are tortured and executed for not ratting their pals. War movies reveled in a grim picture of the superhuman, subhuman foe—propaganda at its most lurid. As Bruce Jackson, who had been a World War II marine, wrote ironically in 1995: "Japs, as we learned from the newsreels that accompanied the double features, were fanatics who jumped up and down waving swords while screaming 'Banzai!' Japs gleefully died for Emperor Hirohito in suicidal charges against American troops or in kamikaze raids."

One foreign film industry the Japanese controlled was China's, and among its top stars was Li Xianglan, born Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Moviegoers thought her Chinese, and in wartime films she became one of the most popular actresses, as well as a popular singer. Faced with postwar treason charges and possible execution, she revealed her Japanese ancestry and was deported. But Yamaguchi's charisma soon overcame her "crimes." In the '50s she made films in Hong Kong (Bu Wancang's The Unforgettable Night) and the U.S. (King Vidor's Japanese War Bride and Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo) as well as in Japan (Kurosawa's Scandal). Later she was elected to several terms as a Liberal Democrat to Japan's parliament. Pretty dramatic, eh? No wonder her life story inspired a Tokyo musical. (So did Hayakawa's.)

As the Japanese suffered the world's hatred during the war, they earned its sympathy with the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan. The old villains were now victims; those damaged faces seized the heart with the same violent poignancy as the corpses at Auschwitz. From this collective sorrow and guilt, two genres were spawned. In the Godzilla movies, atomic blasts awaken a prehistoric monster (and he still hasn't gone back to sleep; the series continues today). There were also more serious parables of doomed romance, in which an unlikely couple represents the puniness of mankind in the smirking face of Armageddon. The glistening sand on the skin of the lovers in Hiroshima mon amour and Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes are a kind of atomic glaze—an artistic rendering of the nuclear dusting of those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the American bombings.

This notion of two against the world often recurs in the Japanese films that have won international acclaim. Nagisa Oshima's 1976 In the Realm of the Senses was banned and cheered for its explicit portrayal of a sadomasochistic affair; the lovers found sexual pleasure in pain, even to the point of mutilation and death.

After the war, outsiders' takes on Japan—the '50s flurry of Hollywood films like Sayonara (with Marlon Brando as a G.I. who loves a Japanese entertainer) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (this time with Brando as a Japanese!)—were mostly fond and sentimental. It was not until the country emerged as an economic Godzilla that Hollywood updated the old ogres with ruthless businessmen, in the film of Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun—and then changed the identity from Japanese to American, to stifle Japanese protests. This summer's big item is Pearl Harbor, and we'll bet the "enemy" is portrayed gingerly. Unlike World War II films, this epic hopes to recoup at least some of its multiquillion-dollar budget in Japan.

But for a half-century now, since Kurosawa's Rashomon triumphed at the Venice Film Festival and introduced Western audiences to the radiance of his country's film tradition, stories about the Japanese have mostly been told by the Japanese. With so much of the genuine article on tap, viewers have no need to get an image of Japan from Americans with a message or a grudge. And if the glory days of the nation's art film are gone, the export industry for filmed entertainment has never been more robust. Every kid cherishes PokEmon. Every lurker in specialized video stores knows the "violent pink" sex melodramas. Anime is everywhere. And actor-director "Beat" Takeshi Kitano is the tough guy du jour.

In his latest movie, Brother, Takeshi comes to Los Angeles to teach the boyz in the hood some killer moves. Now if he could just drive over to Beverly Hills, he might become the new century's answer to Hayakawa—a Japanese guy who can call his own shots, kill anyone who blinks and, hell, if he wants to, get the girl.

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