This year's Hawaii Film Festival included a Japanese film entitled "Dark Water"...based on the novel by Suzuki Koji, the same author of "The Ring."

I noticed that, of all the similarities between the two, the two strongest were the heavy rain and the fact that there was a little girl in both movies. The little girls also looked similar and were responsible for the torment in the film.

I don't think that the film had anything to do with a threat to Japanese culture. Producers used to novel to basically come up with their own version of the story. The novel itself is different from the film, and hopefully they'll get an English translation of the novel out soon. Maybe my Nihongo's not as good as I thought it was, but the novel was VERY different from the movie!