Lure of the east

It's hard not to feel sympathy for Lee Chi-ngai. While critics lavish attention and praise on Derek Yee Tung-shing, whose new Tokyo-set gangster drama Shinjuku Incident will probably go down as a definitive Chinese-language film about Japanese society, Lee's name is rarely mentioned these days.

This is despite him having broached similar issues more than a decade ago with Sleepless Town, a film that saw him become the first director of his generation to establish a foothold in an industry that has always held foreign filmmakers at arm's length.

Lee's ties with Japan go back even further. His 1995 hit Mack the Knife, which revolves around a renegade doctor (played by an electrifying Tony Leung Chiu-wai) forsaking prestige and wealth by setting up an illegal clinic for the urban underclass, was adapted from a Japanese manga.

To trace Lee's obsession with Japan, however, we need to return to 1987, when he was the artistic director on Cherry Blossoms, Eddie Fong Ling-ching's biopic of the Chinese writer Yu Dafu, the bulk of which was shot in Japan. Yu, who would eventually be shot by the Japanese secret police in Indonesia in 1945 for his anti-Japanese activism, spent nearly a decade studying at Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in the early 20th century.

'The film was made on a very low budget and I had to drive this truck around, with all the sets, costumes and props inside it - it was like a caravan roadshow,' he says. Already a fan of Japanese films from the 1950s and 60s, his love of the country grew when he saw rural areas untarnished by the urban malaise of Japan's largest cities.

'It's also the first time I got in touch with what I see as the real Japan. The countryside is so clean and beautiful, and the food's great. That's when the seeds of my marriage with Japanese culture were sown.'