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Ten years ago, I completed a film on Frank Lloyd Wright that dared to suggest — and attempted to prove — that he had influenced Japanese architects as deeply as their forebears had influenced him. 

Of course, the concept of influence is a fraught one, and few artists are willing to admit to a precursor for their work. Wright himself insisted that Japan’s art and aesthetics, and not its architecture, had most inspired him. Entranced from the late 1880s with Japan’sukiyo-e woodblock prints and its refined modes of artistic expression, he extolled the “organic character” of Japanese design: “Their art was nearer to the earth and a more indigenous product of native conditions of life and work, therefore more nearly modern as I saw it, than any European civilization.”