How Chinese/Japanese can you be?

I was thinking about Kurosawa Akira today. While film lovers outside of Japan consider Kurosawa quintessentially Japanese, he has often been called too “western” in Japan. This is not unique to Kurosawa or to Japan. Same thing happens to some of the best Chinese directors. Zhang Yimou and Wang Kar-Wai are often called “"not-Chinese-enough”" or that they make movie for foreigners. I often wonder what would these “"critics”" mean if and when they consider something “Japanese” or “Chinese” enough. For Japanese, I suppose it would be Mizoguchi Kanji and Yamada Yoji; and for Chinese, Xie Jin. These are all great directors but hardly revolutionaries. They pushed and developed the established film languages to their heights but did not get them into new realms. This is not to say they are any less great than Kurosawa or Zhang, just as Virgil is not any less great than Homer. But then, it would be equally wrong to put down the more revolutionary artists, particularly when the “new” is grown from the old with nutrients from foreign sources. Every new style of Chinese poetry came to be by incorporating foreign poetic and musical forms. And Japanese once considered literary works written in Chinese to be the only ones that deserve attention. I suspect that these people’s complaints are simply expressions of their inability to understand the films they are seeing. However pitiable that may be, ignorance and stupidity do not form any valid basis of criticism. Plus, what is considered to be "Chinese/Japanese" are more direct descendents of Russian and American film traditions than anything home grown. Now that is sadly mistaken.