Memoirs from a JA Male

As a Japanese-born male who spent a greater part of my adult life in the United States, I’ve had a keen interest in portrayals of Japan and Asians in the American media. I believe that negative portrayals found in movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the 1960s through the more recent Rising Sun and The Joy Luck Club help maintain prejudice against Asians, particularly Asian and Asian American men.

These images have contributed to the racism I’ve experienced personally –– both the blatant kind (receiving “Jap, go home” telephone calls all night long for weeks) and the more subtle kind (a law professor insisting on calling me “Tanaka-san” while she called all the other students by their first names).

Last year, when I learned of the charges of racism against the film Lost in Translation, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, I felt compelled to defend the film in an AsianWeek opinion piece (http://news.asianweek.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=095155a7def19bbc65f99670f9c2eb60I).

I argued that to overly focus on Coppola’s film is unwise because it tends to divert attention from films that require it like the new Memoirs of a Geisha film.

This big budget Hollywood production is based on the best-selling 1997 novel in which every plot component was designed to demonize the Japanese. Professor Anne Allison of Duke University wrote that the book “inspired [readers] to see Japanese men as sexual perverts.”

I was anxious before seeing the movie: “Was the film version to be as insidious as the original novel written by a white American man?”

When I finally saw the film, my anxiety quickly turned to a sense of relief. For one thing, the filmmakers didn’t even pretend to produce a realistic film. Three Chinese actresses play the lead roles (this in itself was highly controversial in China and Japan) and when they speak English on the screen, they don’t seem at all Japanese despite their inspired performances.

The distracting music in the earlier part of the film was overused and overdone, reminiscent of the TV show Kung Fu, and was accompanied by cheap aphorism-laden narration.

The women who are the subject of this film are usually called geiko in Japan, and don’t refer to themselves as geisha, a more informal and slightly derogatory term. To that extent, the cover story in the latest issue of Japanese Newsweek is entitled “Misinformation and prejudice of the Geisha movie.”

The film also toned down the “Japanese men are sinister” message of the original novel. The creepiest and most powerful scene of the novel was edited out completely.

In the scene, Dr. Crab (the Japanese Fu Manchu invented by Arthur Golden) deflowers the heroine Sayuri and enshrines her blood in a wooden case containing “forty or fifty” vials. Instead of the imaginary, invisible face Golden tries to pass off as the face of the archetypal Japanese man, film goers see the face of a real, handsome man: that of warm, affectionate Ken Watanabe.

In hindsight, we can see why the novel was so popular. It was an elaborate Harlequin romance-like melodrama that women could read without feeling guilty because it won the politically correct seal of approval from The New York Times and was hailed by American critics as authentic and accurate.

Rather than think about the real problems facing women in America –– domestic violence, or the 10,000 enforced prostitutes brought into the U.S. each year –– the readers could feel superior and self-righteously indignant at the backward Japanese practices.

For now, I’m just relieved that the film opened to deservedly tepid reviews and that it won’t have the power to perpetuate prejudice the way the book did.

My hope is that the film offers a chance for the readers of the novel to realize that the Japan that they loved to hate so much was not a real country but (to borrow from a book title) an imaginary “Japan made in U.S.A.”