A opinião de um crítico é que Kurosawa foi de fato influenciado pela censura, tanto japonesa quanto americana, durante o Mundial Segunda Guerra, mas essa não foi a única razão pela qual ele produziu muitas adaptações estrangeiras:
Perhaps the most significant factor in his stylistic development as a director was WWII. At the time that Kurosawa was developing his own distinctive style the censors had great power. During the war it was the Japanese who dictated content, and after it the Occupying American's [sic] had censorial control. However, his love of foreign literature and film predated this era.
Parece que o oposto da sua pergunta pode ser verdade. Kurosawa tentou lançar um filme em 1943 baseado em um romance de judô de um autor japonês, e os censores japoneses consideraram o filme muito ocidental em estilo ou conteúdo. De Wikipedia :
Shooting of Sanshiro Sugata began on location in Yokohama in December 1942. Production proceeded smoothly, but getting the completed film past the censors was an entirely different matter. The censorship considered the work too "British-American" (an accusation tantamount, at that time, to a charge of treason), and it was only through the intervention of director Yasujiro Ozu, who championed the film, that Sanshiro Sugata was finally accepted for release on March 25, 1943. (Kurosawa had just turned 33.) The movie became both a critical and commercial success. Nevertheless, the censorship office would later decide to cut out some 18 minutes of footage, much of which is now considered lost.