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In 1945 Akira Kurosawa directed The Men Who Tread On the Tiger’s Tail based on famous kabuki repertoire play Kanjinchō, in its turn rooting from the Noh play Ataka. It didn’t include many difficulties in being shot, there were no big scenes but Kurosawa refused to stay within physical limitations of the play and introduced his own understanding and interpretation of material which became his innovation. The director managed to overcome censorship as the military government found the film appropriate for its ideology. Actually, the film was mostly intended to entertain and fascinate, it was something like a musical comedy. Lord Yoshitsune (the role of Shubo Nishina) together with his retainers escape from Yoritomo, Yoshitsune’s brother, who is objecting and trying to murder him. Veiled as itinerant monks, they are being traced by a noisome gatekeeper pesky (Kenichi Onomoto) whose chatting and urge to gratify and fear of death make him a reserve counterpoint for the stoic samurai. The latter only has 2 ways: dark bad-assery and vigorous laughter. The porter has reported to them that they will not be able to cross the border: Yoritomo’s courier being already there, knows their masquerade, and is fully arranged to wipe them out. At that time, the film unexpectedly stops as Kurosawa returns to a genius shot: all the samurai assembled in a semi-circle, on the rights sits the porter, hidden by branches and the mountains far in the background.
Prior to The Men Who Tread On the Tiger’s Tail, Kurosawa was originally working on The Lifted Spear. It was foreseen as his first time film. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto writes, “The last scene of the film was supposed to show the Battle of Okehazama (1560), in which the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga defeated his rival Imagawa Yoshimoto. In the last days of the war, however, no horses were available for the battle scene, and Kurosawa was forced to abandon the project at the preproduction stage. It took him thirty-five more years to show Oda Nobunaga engaged in a grand battle in Kagemusha.” (Yoshimoto, 93).
In this context Yoshimoto writes that many researchers have been wrong putting onto one ground such different terms as Japanese tradition and Japaneseness. Kurosawa was often blamed for not enough faith to the Japanese culture and ethnography, as well as national character in his films was not shown fully enough. But Jurosawa didn’t need it just to oppose to the American occupants. And when we talk of the film The Men Who Tread On the Tiger’s Tail and the tail put in its base, we see that Yoshimoto explains: the taste of the director was very much influenced by the ideology of Orientalism. His interpretation of Noh was absolutely different from that one of Kabuki because of the logic of Orientalism. He became the victim of this logic, by Yoshimoto, there was a paradox within the author himself while he showed deep interest for the traditional Japanese values but was controversial to them as well, he was criticized for that and reaction was always controversial too. One group told he was a genius, others were averted and couldn’t understand his originality.
So, the matter is Kurosawa felt a need for formal idioms to demonstrate feudal Japan as it should be. To a great extent, Kurosawa was condemned for not being “Japanese enough”, neither in style nor in content. But in Kagemusha and Ran there was a truthfully “Japanese” Kurosawa, sheered in history and piousness.

References
Yoshimoto, M. Kurosawa: film studies and Japanese cinema. Duke University Press, 2000.