Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Westerns

Kate: Gyousou’s taming of Ragou in Hills of Silver Ruins reminds me of bucking bronchos.

I've been watching lots of Don Matteo lately, starring Terence Hill. Terence Hill and his buddy Bud Spencer (both adopted American names) did a ton of spaghetti westerns throughout their careers. They would often have their voices dubbed by Americans because Terence Hill speaks Italian, German, and English with a slight German accent, and Spencer had an Italian accent. It got me thinking, 

Why is this genre so beloved that a couple of Italian dudes would make these movies--and be beloved for those movies?

Do Japanese enjoy American Westerns? Spaghetti Westerns?

Eugene: Akira Kurosawa took inspiration from John Ford and classic Hollywood westerns when he made Seven Samurai. Then Sergio Leone perfectly captured the essence of Kurosawa's Yojimbo in A Fistful of Dollars. That launched the spaghetti western, in which Terence Hill played a big part. Trinity Is Still My Name is the highest grossing Italian film to date.

Clint Eastwood was offered the role by Leone while he was appearing in Rawhide. The television series was a big hit in Japan at the time and Eastwood visited Japan in 1962 on a publicity tour. But Hollywood imports like Rawhide quickly gave way to Japan's own home-grown variety.

Sam Peckinpah purportedly once said, "I want to make Westerns the way Kurosawa makes Westerns." Though the western has largely vanished from broadcast television in the United States, the Japanese equivalent is alive and well in the Edo period samurai actioner, with NHK running a historical drama and at least one genre samurai series every year.

In manga and anime, Rurouni Kenshin remains one of the most popular of all time, and was recently made into a five-part live action movies series released between 2012 and 2021.

To be sure, not as alive and well as it once was. From the 1960s through the turn of the century, Abarenbo Shogun ran 831 episodes and Mito Komon lasted an astounding 1,227 epiodes on commercial television. Uzumasa Limelight is about an aging stuntman in shows like Mito Komon who increasingly finds roles hard to come by as the genre fades in popularity.