Howard French on Hollywood and Asians

Howard French, who always produces good stuff, had another piece in the International Herald Tribune on Asians and Hollywood.

The problem with "Geisha" is that it has cast the wrong Asians in its leading roles, specifically placing three major ethnic Chinese actresses in the role of geisha, one of Japan's most rarefied cultural products.

For viewers in East Asia, home to a huge slice of the human population and to several of the world's largest and most dynamic economies, Japan and China at the very top of the list, this is anything but a minor detail.

Indeed, "Geisha" has proven itself that powerful and rare catalyst, uniting armies of movie fans and online commentators in East Asia's two giants, countries more typically at each other's throats recently over matters of history and competing territorial claims.

Critics in both countries have had their reasons to complain. In China, where the word geisha is usually written with a character that means prostitute, there has been nationalist outrage that one of the country's most popular young stars, Zhang Ziyi, plays the role of Sayuri, a village girl turned geisha who becomes the love interest of a powerful Japanese man during the years of war between the two countries. The Japanese practice of employing women in occupied countries like China and Korea as sex slaves for the entertainment of its troops is still a matter of living memory, and for some Chinese moviegoers this fact alone will make the film's casting too hard to swallow.

the leaky pen commented a couple of weeks ago on the "race traitor" aspect of this issue, not touched on here by French.

If you don't think of women as property you probably won't get it, but the Chinese are outraged about their national beauty, Zhang Ziyi's, appearance in the new film Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). First there was flurry of Chinese cyber-belligerence about a clip with a sex scene supposedly showing Zhang making it, in the buff, with a Japanese man. The clip was bogus, and unfortunately there are probably not going to be any sex scenes in this film about geishas (藝伎, or Japanese courtesan) because the censors are cracking down on it hard. Nevermind that Miss Zhang had already played a nightclub hostess in Wong Kar Wai's 2046 (2004), she was half-naked with a Chinese man, HK icon Tony Leung. Now she's playing a Japanese woman having sex with a Japanese man.

Hollywood certainly has serious problems, especially with Asian women, who always know Kungfu, and Asian men, who tend to show up in technician roles. I was gratified to watch The Truman Show again the other day, and see the Asian woman there behaving exactly like everyone else. Naturally, in Weir's brilliant satire of white America's fantasies, there are no Asians in Truman's own world -- a problem France has reminded us lately, has real costs.

[Taiwan] [China] [Asia] [Japan]