American movie stars in Japanese/Overseas commercials

Land of the rising cliche
January 17, 2004

(Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, a vast improvement over earlier American films about Japan, according to local critics.)

Japan is relentlessly portrayed in films as a land of samurai swords, weird fashions and yakuza gangs. So, what do the Japanese make of it all? Motoko Rich reports.

In the climactic battle of Kill Bill Vol. 1, Quentin Tarantino's bloody revenge flick, O-Ren Ishii, the kimono-clad yakuza chieftess played by Lucy Liu, turns to Uma Thurman's blonde, blue-eyed Bride and caustically remarks: "Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords."

The Bride turns out to be pretty good with her blade, but the sentiment might well be an epigraph for this season of subtitles and samurai.

Cinemas are suddenly being overrun with images of Japan.

Tom Cruise thunders across the battlefields of Meiji Restoration Japan in The Last Samurai.

Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's portrait of alienated Americans in Tokyo, is one of the indie hits of the year.

Nearly half the action in the first volume of Kill Bill (the second appears next month), with its rapturous, over-the-top homage to yakuza, manga and other Japanese genre films, takes place in a surreal movie-land Japan, subtitles and addled accents flying.

It is not just the setting that unites these movies. They are the objects of heated debate, particularly among Asian-Americans and Japanese, about whether Hollywood's current depictions of Japan are racist, naive, well-intentioned, accurate, or all of the above.

Reservations about The Last Samurai started with reviews that castigated the movie for its stale portrayals of Japanese culture, as well as the patronising narrative of a white man teaching the rapidly modernising Japanese how to honour their past.

Meanwhile, in an unfortunate incident, a consultant retained by a party planner for the Los Angeles premiere of The Last Samurai put out a public call requesting "beautiful Asian women" willing to dress up and "mingle in character . . . to create the ambience of ancient Japan, circa 1870s".

The ad was pulled after the consultant received numerous complaints about the treatment of Asian women as attractive set-pieces - as well as the notion that all Asian women are equivalent.

In Japan, the film opened on December 6 and has met with box office enthusiasm and generally favourable reviews.

"With his pursuit of realism director Edward Zwick seeks to surmount the misunderstandings and biases made by Westerners in the past," wrote Noriki Ishitobi in the Asahi Shimbun, one of three daily newspapers in Tokyo.

Tomomi Katsuta, who writes about films for Mainichi Shimbun, another of the newspapers, said that the movie was a vast improvement over previous American attempts to portray Japan in movies such as Shogun and Rising Sun.

(Japanese talk show host Matthew Minami and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.)

He says those films were humiliating for Japanese audiences, adding: "They didn't understand Japanese culture or the customs of the Japanese."

Zwick, he says, had researched Japanese history, cast well-known Japanese actors and consulted dialogue coaches to make sure he did not confuse the casual and formal categories of Japanese speech.

Of course, Japanese audiences are relishing the opportunity to re-engage in the time-honoured moviegoing tradition of picking out a period drama's false touches: in this case, viewers have complained about anachronistic samurai battle gear, overly talkative warriors and the unlikely scenario of the emperor appearing before a foreigner.

But what seems to grate with Japanese viewers most is the movie's storybook approach to the samurai, who are depicted as unfailingly noble and pure.

In fact, the samurai myth is a fairly tarnished one in Japan, in a way that the movie's glory-filled depiction does not reflect.

Zwick acknowledges that the film simplifies Japanese history to make it accessible to a current - and Western - audience.

"The only thing one can do is hope that with a kind of immersion and some respectful understanding, that what you come up with is a distillation rather than a cliche," he says.

Star-studded Hollywood epics tend to play well in Japan. (Even Pearl Harbor, which was hardly a feelgood account of Japanese-American relations, was the second-highest grossing foreign film of its year.)

Lost in Translation will not open in Japan until May, but already the debate about the movie's stereotypes and how they will play with Japanese audiences has begun.

In one scene an aggressive prostitute tumbles into the hotel room of Bob, the washed-up movie actor played by Bill Murray. Hysterically exhorting him to rip her stockings, she manages only to instruct him to "lip them" and hilarity ensues.

In another scene, Bob looks completely lost in an appearance on a talk show as its zany host - played by Matthew Minami, who really is the host of such a show - cavorts in a Technicolor suit and dyed blond hair.

The film has won Golden Globe nominations and accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle and is widely regarded as an Oscar contender.

At the same time, filmgoers are debating whether the story uses, or even depends on, cultural mockery.

Kazuho Tsuchiya, a 33-year-old Japanese graduate student who has lived in the United States since 1997, says he liked the movie but was disappointed by some of the film's "diehard stereotypical images".

He points to the scene in which Bill Murray's character enters a full elevator and towers over all the Japanese occupants. Jokes about short Japanese men, he says, are a cheap laugh.

Ross Katz, a producer with Coppola of Lost in Translation, says he believes "Sofia's love of Japan and love of the people that she's met there is incredibly evident in the film."

He adds that the first main financier of the movie was a Japanese company, Tohokushinsha Film Corp, which is distributing the movie there.

"Literally, we recounted experiences that I think all of us had gone through in making the film," Katz says.

"When you land in a place in which you don't speak the language, and in which you don't know how to get places, there are funny, frustrating, difficult things that happen."

None of the scenes, Katz says, was "any slight to Japanese people".

Unlike its contemporaries, Kill Bill Vol. 1 makes no attempt to convey a "real" Japan. It is a pastiche, a dense layering of hip Japan-inflected references, not an attempt at verisimilitude.

In Japan, many critics praised Kill Bill for its knowing tribute to that country's B-movies.

"I think that many Japanese people understand Quentin Tarantino's aims," says Ken Sugawa, who makes promotional trailers for Wowow, a television and film production company in Tokyo.

"He wants to describe not real Japan and its culture, but the people and culture in films such as yakuza and B-action movies.

However, general Japanese audiences are not interested in what Mr Tarantino finds interesting."

Perhaps the most sensitive and well-rounded Japanese character can be found in a film far smaller than any of these three.

The Australian movie Japanese Story, which won the Australian Film Institute's best picture award, stars Toni Collette as a geologist who falls into an unlikely romance with a Japanese businessman, played by Gotaro Tsunashima, who travels to Australia to escape the obligations of work and family.

Sue Brooks, the Australian director of Japanese Story, wanted to deal with the cliches she had encountered in previous Western movies about Japan and address Australia's long-standing World War II-bred hostility toward Japan.

"It's sort of like an old sore that needed to be healed," Brooks says. "Not that we can heal it in one film, but we can give back that little bit."

But even Brooks's movie did not entirely steer clear of old archetypes: before he is humanised by his love affair with Sandy (Collette's character), Hiromitsu comes across as a cold, rational businessman - another stock image from Western depictions of Japan.

Compared to much earlier attempts to portray Japanese characters in Western movies, however, the current crop may seem downright enlightened.

During and immediately after World War II in films such as Back to Bataan, the Japanese were portrayed as "buck-toothed, glasses wearing, cruel, treacherous semi-animalistic characters", according to film historian Robert Sklar.

Today the political and economic dynamic between the two countries is less easily categorised.

In the absence of any conflict, the current spate of Japan-obsessed movies may simply represent the increasing popularity of Japanese culture in a rapidly globalising world.

- New York Times