Japan's 70-year struggle against Hollywood film stereotypes

[yuiyoshida]

TOKYO —

Over the past 70 years, when a “Japanese”—which is to say an actor representing a male Japanese—appeared in a Hollywood movie, what sort of image was he most likely to project? A pint-sized man wearing black-framed spectacles, with protuberant incisors, perhaps? Like the klutzy photographer “Yunioshi” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

Well, writes Sapio (September), such a description would not be entirely wrong. Looking back at the 70 years since the end of World War II, it would certainly be no exaggeration to say that Hollywood’s portrayals of Japanese males have been less than flattering.

Females, on the other hand, were likely to evoke the characteristics of the geisha: feminine, subservient, eager and willing to please males. Based, in part, on stories brought back to the U.S. by soldiers returning home from the military occupation of Japan.

As with Swedish actor Warner Oland and his two successors in the Honolulu detective Charlie Chan film series, and Hungarian-born Peter Lorre as Japanese secret agent Mr Moto, Caucasians made up to appear Asian dominated U.S. cinema as late as the 1960s, and with a few exceptions it was not until the rise of Bruce Lee that Asian-American actors managed to break into heroic starring roles.

Ever so gradually, however, images of Japanese began to diversify, so that by the 1970s a

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[NBachers]

1. I always thought Hell to Eternity bucked that trend

I haven't seen it in quite a few years. It's on my "To Watch" list, so I can re-explore it and see how I feel about it now. I know it's affected me quite deeply whenever I've seen it in the past, and I've always felt close with the Japanese family at the center of the movie.

If anyone else has opinions of Hell to Eternity, I'd like to read them.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053901/