Daily Inspiration Quote by John Foster

There’s an endearing lag built into this line: not a cinephile’s brag about lifelong devotion, but an architect’s quiet admission of late arrival. “Didn’t really discover” signals something more nuanced than “I hadn’t watched.” It implies prior exposure without entry - like passing a building every day and only later noticing its structure. The phrase “really discover” carries the subtext of depth, not novelty: he’s marking the moment the films stopped being an exotic genre label and became a usable set of ideas.

Context matters because yakuza cinema has long been a gateway drug for Western viewers into Japanese modernity: codes of loyalty, ritualized violence, masculine performance, and urban geometry. For an architect, that last piece is key. Classic yakuza films are obsessed with space - back alleys, cramped offices, karaoke rooms, docks, neon corridors - and with how bodies move through power. The “five or six years ago” timestamp reads like a professional turning point: a period when taste becomes research, not just leisure. Architects often raid other disciplines for mood boards and models of human behavior; yakuza films offer both, wrapped in a stylized, high-contrast urbanism.

There’s also a subtle humility that’s rare in cultural talk. Foster isn’t trying to sound expert; he’s confessing a timeline. That candor invites the listener to treat discovery as ongoing, and taste as something that’s built - revised, retrofitted - rather than inherited.