AT THE END of director Takeshi Kitano's hit movie Zatoichi (2003), after the eponymous blind swordsman has cut and diced his way through a village full of mobsters and renegades, the story takes a surreal turn: the entire cast bursts into a rousing tap-dance on wooden clogs to the sound of pounding drums.
The startling finale is a melee of cultural styles - two parts old-style Broadway musical, one-part Riverdance, salted with allusions to traditional Japanese popular theatre. Listen closely and you can almost hear the sound of a new dance genre being stomped out on the stage: Nippon-tap.
Choreographed by Hideyuki Higuchi, who will bring his blend of tap, rap and theatre to Hong Kong this week, the scene is easily the most memorable in the movie and helped revive Kitano's film career after a couple of flops. It didn't do Higuchi any harm, either. 'I've been very busy,' he says.
A lithe, boyish 38-year-old, Higuchi has dancing in his blood. His Osaka-born father was a choreographer who switched to tap after falling under the spell of Hollywood's Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; his mother was a leggy, can-can dancer. Together, they opened a tap-dance studio in Tokyo.
As the only child of this fleet-footed couple, Higuchi was soon dancing himself and by 16 was already a seasoned pro, working as a teacher and choreographer. In the early 1990s, he made his way to New York to study with one of the greatest tap-dancer at the time, the late Gregory Hines.
For a young, ambitious dancer who had grown up worshipping the likes of Sammy Davis Jnr (Hines' mentor) and Henry LeTang, it was a dream start. But Higuchi says he struggled to find his own identity in the crowded Manhattan scene.