An apprehensive Tom Cruise is waiting in the half-light of a forest with a company of raw military recruits when the formidable enemy arrives. On horseback and wearing impressive helmets and armour, they emerge from the mist-shrouded trees looking like creatures from an alien world. These are samurai, Japanese warriors, and their blades soon dispatch the musket-toting infantry. All, that is, except for Cruise, who cannot make so early an exit from the film of which he is producer and star.
Like most of The Last Samurai, the scene makes for arresting cinema and intelligent eye candy. Also like most of the movie it was shot in New Zealand, as proved by those forest trees, exotically unlike anything that grows in Japanese soil. But the film-makers did feel obliged to shoot some of The Last Samurai in the country of its setting. Part was made in the castle town of Himeji, but most Japanese filming took place in the ancient city of Kyoto.
The Japanese have always looked fondly on Kyoto, seeing it through the rosy spectacles of cultural nostalgia as the living embodiment of their Golden Age. As Basho, Japan's greatest haiku poet, wrote in the 17th century: 'Even when in Kyoto, I dream of Kyoto.' Brash megalopolitan Tokyo may be the country's premier city, but in 1876, the year in which The Last Samurai opens, it had been the capital for less than a decade. Before Tokyo, Kyoto enjoyed that status for more than a millennium. For three-quarters of that time, while Kyoto was Japan's spiritual and cultural centre, Edo, as Tokyo was known, was an obscure fishing village in a swamp.
Kyoto was established in 794AD, when the great flowering of Japanese culture began. Using the Tang Chinese capital of Changan as their model, the Japanese set about creating a city of monumental splendour. Happily, traces of that splendour remain, and among the grandest examples is Kiyomizudera ('dera' meaning temple). Precariously poised on hundreds of wooden pillars and seemingly suspended in the air, the great platform of this Buddhist temple is one of the definitive sights of Kyoto. This being Japan, the sight of vast tourist throngs is equally definitive. But get there in the early morning and this place among the eastern hills on the city's edge is sublime, with no sound but that of the ancient creaking timbers underfoot and the plaintive song of an uguisu warbler.
Just as monumental is nearby Chionin, a temple whose imposing gate is Japan's largest. Chionin certainly attracted director Edward Zwick, who thought it would be perfect for The Last Samurai. Perfect, he thought, if it were fronting the imperial palace, not some temple. Then he decided the architects hadn't got the design quite right, and had built it in the wrong city. So the Chionin gate and steps seen in the film have been remodelled by computer - and shifted to Tokyo.
You don't, of course, look for historical accuracy in a Hollywood blockbuster. The last samurai of the title, played by Ken Watanabe, is based on a figure who led a rebellion in 1877, but was so obese he couldn't walk and had to be carried around in a chair. One aspect the film does convey well, however, is the 19th-century conflict between new and old, not just between uniformed troops and sword-swinging warriors, but between those who were feverishly trying to drag Japan into the modern age and those dashing samurai, who thought things were fine as they were. Such tension between the old and new has not died in Kyoto. As Japan's great cradle of culture, the city was spared American bombing during the second world war. Tokyo emerged from the conflict a desolate wasteland, while Kyoto was relatively unscathed, the sweeping roofs of its temples rising like great arks above the sea of wooden houses. Kyoto may have escaped American B-29s but it didn't escape Japanese developers. Old neighbourhoods, townhouses and lovely gardens were ripped apart to make way for generic, urban Japan. Today, parts of Kyoto achieve the singular distinction of being drearier even than Tokyo.