Budo: The Art of Killing his native Japan until he came across Arthur Davis, an American film exhibitor who ran a distribution company in Tokyo. Davis stated he funded the film out of the respect and gratitude he felt towards Japan. "The Art of Killing" won first prize at the 1978 Miami International Film Festival, but did not find an American distribution deal until 1981, when it was acquired by Crown International Pictures and received a limited release in 1982 under the title "Budo". The film eventually got a VHS release through Prism Entertainment which helped build its cult status among Japanese martial arts practitioners
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.