Japan in transnational Hollywood: industry and identity, 1985-1995

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Content i JAPAN IN TRANSNATIONAL HOLLYWOOD: INDUSTRY AND IDENTITY, 1985-1995 by Ken Provencher ______________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES)) August 2013 Copyright 2013 Ken Provencher ii DEDICATION for John iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been completed, or even fully conceived, without the support, time, and effort of its committee at the University of Southern California. Committee chair Akira Lippit, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Drew Casper, Steven Ross, and Anne McKnight are the guiding lights of this project. Whether discussing bigger questions or finer points, my committee members were inspirational in their enthusiasm for the project and its potential. I cannot imagine a better group, and consider myself lucky to have them. Research for this project involved extensive Japanese language study and frequent visits to archives in Los Angeles and Tokyo. In L.A., the staffs at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the USC Warner Bros. Archive made research feel more like pleasure than work. In Tokyo, the staffs at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum of Waseda University, the Diet Library, and the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute welcomed me without hesitation. The materials I collected and examined from all these institutions went beyond the scope of this project, and my gratitude will surely extend to future projects. My numerous Japanese language instructors kept me in a perpetual state of intensive learning. Without their direct attention and patience with my many mistakes, reference to Japanese-language materials in this project may not have been possible. In particular, I want to thank Muramatsu Chie, Sogabe Ayaka, and Hamada Hideki at Middlebury College Language School; Takeshima Nao and Takata Mitsukiyo at Doshisha University in Kyoto; Kumagai Yuka at the University of Southern California; and Ichijō Hatsue and Akazawa Toyoharu at the Yoshida Institute of Japanese Language in Tokyo. iv Financial support for overseas research and language study was made possible by a Provost’s Ph.D. Fellowship at the University of Southern California; a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State; and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. Completion of this dissertation had the support of a Louis D. Beaumont Fellowship at USC. I am grateful to those in Japan who took time to meet with me and discuss this project. Kitano Keisuke and Masuda Sachiko at Ritsumeikan University, and Saitō Ayako and Monma Takashi at Meiji Gakuin University were generous with their hours and interest. Dustin Wright and Kawaguchi Maiko were also great colleagues in Kyoto. My sincerest thanks to those filmmakers who agreed to interviews: Cellin Gluck, Garet Gluck, Warren Lewis, John Junkerman, Theo Pelletier, and Fred Raskin. There is no end to the number of stimulating films, lectures, and conversations a Critical Studies Ph.D. student can take in at the University of Southern California. Along the way I have enjoyed sharing classrooms, screening rooms, living rooms, and barrooms with Mike Dillon, Leah Aldridge, Igor Shteryenberg, Elena Bonomo, Annie Manion, Qui Ha Nguyen, Joshua Moss, Courtney White, Patty Ahn, Genevieve Yue, James Crawford, Brett Service, Casey Riffel, Eric Hoyt, Kwynn Perry, David Lerner, Kate Fortmuller, Alessandro Ago, Gregory Williamson, Kai- ting Wu, Julian Vlcan, and David Lawrence. The Critical Studies office at USC played a key role in my development and progress through the program. William Whittington, Alicia White, Linda Overholt, Kim Greene, and Jade Agua all provided much-needed support, from handling paperwork to giving career advice. I want especially to thank Drew Casper and David James for their classroom brilliance and personal generosity. v Before attending USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, I worked for several years in the books editorial division at Blackwell Publishing. It was there that I got to know, and continue to know, many wonderful people in academic film studies. Having the support and guidance of Martha Nochimson, Cynthia Lucia, and Rick Jewell helped me feel at home in the field even before I applied to various schools. Anne Friedberg, John Tobin, William Luhr, Pamela Grace, and Charles Wolfe were also crucial voices of support. Jayne Fargnoli was not only my boss at Blackwell; she was, and is, a dear friend. I knew her first as an extraordinary editor and manager, and in time as simply an extraordinary person. She was one of the first to hear me say I was interested in applying to graduate film school; her blessing was the most important to me. Other supportive colleagues and friends from my time at Blackwell have my deepest appreciation: Steve Smith, Danie Descoteaux, Ada Brunstein, Bertram Gibbs, Calvin Nelson, Beth Remmes, Nirit Simon, Elizabeth Swayze, Jeff Dean, Justin Vaughan, Tessa Harvey, Simon Eckley, and Lisa Eaton. My parents, Roland and Denise, my sisters, Carol, Dianne, and Suzanne, and my friend Amy Nuttbrock have known me long enough to know how important this work has been to me, and I am proud to be able to show it to them. To my friend John M. Coffee, who passed away in May 2012, and who I have missed every day since, I dedicate this project. Finally, my love to Thai Ha Nguyen, for whom I would cross any border. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vii Chapter 1. Collaboration Zones: Transnational Cinema and the Image of Japan, 1985-1995 1 Chapter 1 Notes 33 Chapter 2. Hands off, Hands on: The Influence and Limits of Japanese Investment in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema 37 Chapter 2 Notes 77 Chapter 3. Boys on Bicycles: The Antagonism of History in Empire of the Sun (1987) and The Last Emperor (1987) 85 Chapter 3 Notes 122 Chapter 4. One Big Gray Area: Black Rain (1989) and Kuroi ame (1989) 128 Chapter 4 Notes 169 Chapter 5. A Hole in the Swing: Provincial and Spectacular Identity in MacArthur’s Children (1984) and Mr. Baseball (1992) 175 Chapter 5 Notes 211 Chapter 6. “Don’t Fence Me In”: Transnational Excess in Rising Sun (1993) 216 Chapter 6 Notes 266 Chapter 7. Conclusion: Lost in Transnation 273 Chapter 7 Notes 284 Bibliography 286 Films Referenced 329 vii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the process of intensified merging of Hollywood and Japanese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. This process is occurring within, and in connection to, a broader context of political, social, and cultural change, specifically globalization and the ending of the Cold War. I argue that the merging of Hollywood and Japan is visible in industrial terms as well as in textual-thematic terms. Each chapter highlights a particular area of controversial collaboration between Japanese and non-Japanese—what I refer to as “collaboration zones.” Chapter 2 is a critical analysis of Japanese investments in Hollywood cinema from 1985 to 1995. Significant deals with major studios and independent producers led to the development of dozens, if not hundreds, of English- language films that were partly or entirely funded by converted yen. The chapter shows how Hollywood cinema has been absorbed and contained within a Japanese corporate vision, with mixed results. The subsequent case studies are on specific films, combining production histories, textual analyses, and reception studies. Chapter 3 looks at how the non-Japanese protagonists of Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor (both 1987) “collaborate” with Japan during World War II in order to protect their privileged sense of self. Chapter 4 examines two 1989 films titled Black Rain—one Hollywood, one Japanese—to show how they both caution against the U.S.-Japan postwar security agreement. Chapter 5 brings together the Japanese film MacArthur’s Children (1984) and the Japan/Hollywood production Mr. Baseball (1992), to highlight the films’ depiction of baseball as a utopian transnational collaboration zone that is also a competitive arena. Chapter 6 focuses on Rising Sun (1993), a film that returns to the cautionary tone of the two Black Rains, taking the marketplace of screen technology as its collaboration zone. Even viii though the film became synonymous with the term “Japan-bashing,” I argue that in the film nationalist sentiments appear as distracting rhetoric, as one more debased element of a transnational, image-obsessed culture. A concluding chapter reflects briefly on the timing of these films, and speculates how transnational Japan-Hollywood connections have altered or remained consistent from the late 1990s to the present. 1 CHAPTER 1. COLLABORATION ZONES: TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA AND THE IMAGE OF JAPAN, 1985-1995 “A love-hate relationship can last a very long time.” —Black Rain In the 1986 Paramount Pictures comedy Gung Ho, one of the earliest Hollywood films about Japan’s industrial expansion in the United States, a Japanese auto manufacturer named Assan Motors buys a car factory in a working class Pennsylvania town. Its name composed of the Japanese kanji characters for “pressure” and “hard,” Assan attempts to fashion its American employees into a Japanese-style mode of production. For comedic effect, the coldness and inflexibility of the Japanese management are contrasted with the laziness and rudeness of the American workers, who resist efforts to be molded into company men. The film resolves comedic tensions through mutual compromise: the Japanese relinquish some of their overbearing control while the Americans embrace a collectivist work ethic and appreciation for detail. Gung Ho exploits stereotypes in order to undercut them. The question remains why the original binary paradigm of Japanese efficiency-obsession versus American self-centeredness was a necessary premise. At the beginning of the film, and at the onset of bi-national conflict, both sides are under the illusion that their nationalized labor practices and identity markers are not only superior, but offer vital protection and security. Their understanding of each other’s relative strengths and weaknesses flows from a mutual antagonism and stereotyping. Those illusions shattered, the plant workers and managers reluctantly embrace the borderlessness of their industry—and of their own identities. The Japanese may be aggressors, instigating border crossings and culture 2 clashes, but what reveals itself in the tension of transnational entanglements is the overriding need to achieve profitable goals through collaborative means. A prerequisite for success is the purging of nationalism. The ambivalence of the film’s approach reflects a conflicted political and social culture regarding what appear to be newly formed bi-national relations. Mutually attracted by economic necessity, the Americans and Japanese appear strangers to one another. Polite standards of inter- communication have yet to be established. In a telling moment, the factory’s Japanese manager Kazihiro (Gedde Watanabe) faces off with Hunt Stevenson (Michael Keaton), the American workers’ liaison, over the factory’s poor performance. Kazihiro fires Hunt in front of the entire staff, and Hunt protests, “If you’re so great, how come you lost the big one?” The observing crowd falls silent, knowing that a taboo has just been shattered. Hunt opens his mouth as if to apologize, but his eyes say he is not sorry, and Kazihiro tackles him. Gung Ho’s crude amiability, its willingness to evoke the war as a comedic obstacle to international business relations, is a blunt mockery of counter-productive American nationalism. Finessing the paranoia of mid-1980s political and media rhetoric about Japan into middlebrow entertainment, the film ends with Assan’s American employees cheerfully performing Japanese- coded ritual calisthenics at the start of a workday, all in matching jumpsuits. The fact that profit motive has trumped cultural differences does not signify anti-capitalism—a critique of that motive—but a bemused awareness, and acceptance, of a capitalist center outside the U.S. Another war is being waged, but it is not between Japan and the U.S.; it is between transnational alliances and whatever stands in the way of unfettered globalization. This project takes a similar view of the industrial and thematic relationship between Hollywood and Japanese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Far from a mutually antagonistic pair 3 of economic rivals, Hollywood and Japan (and Japanese cinema) are in this period undergoing a process of intensified merging to achieve mutual, and profitable, ends. This process is occurring within, and in connection to, a broader context of political, social, and cultural change, specifically globalization and the ending of the Cold War. Mass-media accounts of Japanese industrial expansion into the U.S. and East Asia persisted in highlighting national differences. They framed “Japan, Inc.” as a monolithic force intent on driving out its economic rivals. But such accounts ignored or only gave passing consideration to the irreversible connections being formed by transnational business and cultural practices. “Japan, Inc.” may appear a formidable entity, but it did not, and arguably cannot, function within an exclusively national context. Its power is better defined by the extent and influence of its transnational connections, its ability to operate outside of Japan’s national borders (which are themselves somewhat difficult to define). The merging of Hollywood and Japan is visible both in industrial terms and in textual- thematic terms. Investing in Hollywood cinema more intensely than its own “national” cinema, Japanese companies and producers blurred the definition of “Japanese cinema” by making Hollywood cinema, in part, identifiable as Japanese—accelerating the transnationalization of the entire industry. The concept of the transnational and of transnational cinema, discussed below, occasionally conjures up in film studies and in other disciplines the fear of something vital becoming lost: dialectics and differentials, scales of power and cultural specificities. While I acknowledge those concerns, I am more concerned with what is gained in a transnational approach: an understanding of Hollywood-Japan connections that is fuller than previous studies in the field. 4 As Gung Ho illustrates, Japan’s entanglements with other nations in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly the U.S. and other East Asian countries, have stimulated the exploration of transnational subjects in Hollywood and Japanese cinema. The films under discussion here are films of and about accelerated transnationalism. Privileging, essentializing, or otherwise limiting the view of either Hollywood or Japan to a scheme of national codification (one’s view or reception of the other) is to argue the absence, irrelevance, or ineffectiveness of connections and connectivity—an almost ahistorical stance. By “connection” I do not mean harmony or equality, or an ideal structural mode. My approach to Hollywood-Japan connections of the 1980s and 1990s is not the framing of a utopia—or a dystopia—but a charting of tensions within. A clear understanding of Hollywood- Japanese connections of the 1980s and 1990s requires, to some extent, a process similar to that undergone by the confused protagonists of many of the films under discussion. The exercising workers at the Assan factory at the close of Gung Ho have not become Japanese, just as the Japanese company has not become American, though it resides in the U.S. The workers and the company have formed a problematic merge: a process motivated by capitalist profit that requires, first and foremost, a stripping away of the illusions of protection offered by nationally-coded identities and cultures. “Transnational,” as it is defined here, follows Ezra and Rowden’s in the introduction to their edited collection Transnational Cinema: “the global forces that link people of institutions across nations,” giving rise to films whose “aesthetic and narrative dynamics, and even the modes of emotional identification they elicit, reflect the impact of advanced capitalism and new media technologies as components of an increasingly interconnected world-system.” 1 The “impact” they refer to, and the effects of Hollywood-Japan connections, as I see them, are 5 measurable and substantial, and reveal both limitations and potentialities resulting from combined activities sourced in nations that, of course, still exist. As Nataša Ďurovičová states in her preface to the collected volume World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, the term “transnational” allows for the framing of “hypotheses about emergent forms” of film history that take into account “relations of unevenness and mobility.” 2 The films under discussion in the case studies below represent an “emergent” form of cinema in the 1980s and 1990s: they show Japan in terms of its problematic connection to other nations, its complicated role “in the world,” not as a self-contained entity. Japan’s symbolic relation to other nations in the films does not easily fall into the category of either friend or enemy. Tellingly, World War II is text or subtext in nearly all of the case studies. The entanglements of that conflict, fought along national lines, emerge in these contemporary films as a conjoining of elements that cannot be reversed, or resisted. Anxiety marks the characters who participate in the dramatized merging of postwar Japan with other nations—a merging that simultaneously highlights and diminishes elements of the purely national. The process of forming transnational connections, at once traumatic and necessary, is a process of gaining insight into a world governed by flows of global capital—a postwar legacy. THE SECOND SECOND WORLD WAR A 1991 New York Times article offered a critique of a group of Hollywood films, including Gung Ho, which provoked hostility among film critics and historians. The article ranked the Pearl Harbor attack alongside the 1989 purchase of New York City’s Rockefeller Center by the Mitsubishi Corporation as “seminal moments” in U.S.-Japan relations. It argued that films like Gung Ho and Black Rain (1989) reflect deep national and cultural gaps where one 6 can find the Pacific War “at the core of the encounter between Japan and America, from questions of responsibility and relative degrees of suffering to the troubling but inevitable comparisons now drawn in America between Japan’s military expansion in the 1930s and its economic domination today.” 3 The words “troubling but inevitable” indicate a measure of predictability, not only in the problematic way that Hollywood films of the 1980s and early 1990s depict Japanese “domination,” but in the films’ controversial reception in both the U.S. and Japan. Criticism in both the American and Japanese press against films like Black Rain insist that they are fundamentally American, and therefore have little to say about cross-cultural tensions beyond the sensationalist and the stereotypical. This project delimits the scope of analysis outside the strict national boundaries of the U.S. The purpose of delimitation, of extending a critical vantage point outside and across borders, is to clarify profound industrial and textual connections between Hollywood and Japanese cinema. Journalistic rhetoric on U.S.-Japan relations of the time intensified the language of conflict, with trade disputes, World War II remembrance, and hostile—or even friendly— corporate takeovers making international spectacles out of economic and cultural exchanges that seemed to favor the Japanese. But the connections formed by these exchanges, as irreversible products of globalization and transnationalization, did not warrant as much attention or analysis. By taking a more expansive view of the period, and of films about wartime and postwar Japan produced not only in Hollywood but in Europe and Japan, this project illuminates a transnational perspective on the tangled history and legacy of World War II. At a time when Hollywood films were at the height of popularity in Japan, and when Japanese investments in Hollywood cinema were at the height of activity, Hollywood, European, and Japanese films used the war as either historical period backdrop or as a symbolic precedent of contemporary conflict. 7 The point of the films, however, is not to re-engage in war via nationalist propaganda, but to re-define the war’s significance in terms of its troubling legacy. Every one of the films I discuss in the case studies below dramatizes identity struggles resulting from wartime, or postwar, transnational encounters. In Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor (both 1987), wartime Japanese aggression “perverts” the two non-Japanese protagonists, Jim and Pu yi. MacArthur’s Children (Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan, 1984), and Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1989), the two Japanese films analyzed here, show how a postwar U.S.-Japan alliance has attempted to obscure memories of the war itself. The Hollywood productions Black Rain (1989) and Rising Sun (1993), set in contemporary times, are emphatic in their tracing of transnational corruption and criminality to postwar, bi-national hypercapitalism. Finally, Mr. Baseball (1992), also set in contemporary times, takes the baseball field (as does MacArthur’s Children) as a public arena of private struggle, where the lead character’s provincial, national identity is at odds with his spectatorial identity as a player. In all of these films, World War II is identifiable as the instigator of transnational connections between former enemies who must live as allies in an endless “postwar.” Becoming allies is not the same as becoming friends, or mutual admirers. The motivation behind all of the transnational activity depicted in the films is profitable collaboration. Jim and Pu yi, privileged by their inherited identities, accept special treatment from their Japanese captors for material reward. In Kuroi ame and MacArthur’s Children, although the war has just ended at great cost to the Japanese, the potential profits to be gained from postwar alliance with the U.S. override the grief and traumatic memories of those who suffered and survived the war. Black Rain and Rising Sun both show the excesses of transnational hypercapitalism, as unfettered greed has brought Japan and the U.S. to unparalleled depths of decadence. And in Mr. Baseball, 8 the title character is exposed to, and rewarded by, the lucrative fanaticism and fetishism of baseball in Japan. In these films, mutual understanding between Japanese and non-Japanese derives from mutual exploitation and postwar opportunism. Such a jaundiced vision of international relations distinguishes this group of films from a similar cycle of Hollywood films about postwar Japan produced in the early Cold War period. Films like Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara (1957) trafficked in blatant idealization of Japanese culture. The “Cold War Orientalism” of the 1950s films, as analyzed by Christina Klein, asserted U.S. superiority in relationships of imaginary “integration” with noncommunist countries of Asia. 4 As with Jeanette Roan, Klein considers the 1950s works as products strictly for American consumption and self-glorification. 5 In contrast, I argue that U.S./Japan-themed films of the 1980s and 1990s contain visual and dramatic tensions that seem more frank, troubled, and potentially explosive. The rhetoric of international conflict, which had no place in Hollywood films about Japan during the Cold War, emerges as a standard in films produced near the end, and immediately after, the Cold War. But the purpose of that rhetoric— some of it blatantly racist—is to assert a distracting form of nationalism. For characters to gain insight into the way transnational modes of collaboration work, they have to overcome their own deficiencies of vision enabled by lingering postwar nationalism. They must discover the truth of their environment, which is no longer nationally defined. On the contrary: it is the very notion of a viable “national identity” that has emerged as the strongest barrier to perceiving, and pursuing, postwar economic development. At their best, the films under discussion here engage in nationalist rhetoric in order to expose characters who cling to wartime concepts of the Other, even in the midst of irreversible (and vaguely corrupt) postwar alliances with former enemies. 9 The excesses of the 1980s that collapsed national borders—economic, cultural, and political—provided, in part, an intensified network of industrial and cultural connection between Japanese and non-Japanese cinema. Japanese corporations and studios tightened their bonds with Hollywood production, and Japan’s image in the world appeared to be that of an unstoppable capitalist power center. In light of this, films of the 1980s and 1990s did not engage solely in the transparent idealization of Japan as “spiritual peacemaker” as seen in films produced from the 1950s through the 1970s. 6 Instead, they reflected on the ambivalence of the “global” subject. Still somewhat Orientalist, films like Black Rain and Rising Sun nevertheless have a sense of wariness and self-doubt about the legibility of nation and race. Paranoia is a consistent theme in the films, including even the lightest of them, Mr. Baseball (1992), but the films do not ultimately source the triggers of paranoia in Japan. There are forces greater, more powerful than any singular nation, that are guiding transnational developments and threatening the security of characters who stubbornly—and pointlessly—cling to a coherent national identity. In that respect, Hollywood cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has a partner in Japanese cinema, not just an investment partner but a co-creator of ambivalent and problematic reflections on Japan’s role as wartime enemy and postwar ally. The subjects of the major case studies here highlight the various ways in which the war has perpetrated an uneasy peace. Collaboration with the enemy, survivor’s guilt, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, postwar nuclear umbrella agreements, censorship, the ethics of hyper-capitalism, and the stains of corruption: all of these subjects reflect more on postwar legacy and remembrance than on the immediacy of the war itself. What makes the 1985- 1995 period remarkable is not only the simultaneous transnational emergence of these subjects but their seemingly unconscious intertextuality. Not limited to Hollywood-American products, 10 the films under discussion here engage in a form of transnational dialogue. They are a cumulative exploration of troubling memories, and meanings, of World War II and its aftermath. INDUSTRY AND TEXT This project’s transnational approach, analyzing cinema as both industry and text, does not consider the transnational approach as inherently superlative, but as most beneficial in this case. As both the Hollywood and Japanese film industries underwent changes in direction in the 1980s and 1990s, diversifying their product, consolidating their power, and seizing opportunities to capitalize on new markets and media technology, their strategies overlapped to the point of codependence. The tensions resulting from such unprecedented transactions are mirrored within the films that constitute this project’s case studies. It is important to connect the postwar concerns of the case studies with the postwar industrial backdrop of both Hollywood and Japanese cinema. Since the 1948 Paramount decree that broke up the Hollywood studio monopoly on production, distribution, and exhibition, Hollywood by necessity became increasingly dependent on foreign markets. This dependency intensified in the 1980s, just when, ironically, studios were becoming more integrated as multi- media conglomerates. After World War II, the Japanese market for Hollywood films grew into the world’s largest (outside of the States) and remained that way through the 1980s and 1990s. Residing in Hollywood’s largest foreign market with bubble-economy assets, Japanese investors collaborated with Hollywood producers in a mutual advancement of their industries’ transnationality. In basic outline, this activity reflected a vital aspect of broader U.S.-Japan postwar relations. Japan’s investing of its trade profits in U.S. securities in the 1980s helped to finance 11 U.S. debt, while the U.S. market for Japanese imports helped to buttress Japan’s export-driven manufacturing base. The U.S.-Japan security agreement, rooted in the postwar occupation period, placed ultimate military authority for Japan in American hands, and while this umbrella agreement helped to stimulate the Japanese economy, it secreted a core of international tensions that predictably flare whenever one side perceives the other is taking unfair advantage. The years 1985 to 1995 fall squarely within a zone of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Japan. 1985 was the year of the infamous “Plaza Accord”: a meeting of Japanese, American, and European finance ministers at New York City’s Plaza Hotel where an agreement was struck to manipulate dollar-yen exchange rates in the hopes of closing the vast trade deficit between Japan and the U.S. This agreement, which only affected prices, lasted ten ineffectual years until its reversal contributed to the financial crisis of 1997. 7 The year 1989 marks the end of the Cold War and the death of Emperor Hirohito, two events that shifted Japan’s political relations with the U.S. and neighboring countries of Asia in the cultural context of intensified memories of World War II. 8 These “seminal moments”—to borrow the above phrase from the New York Times—simultaneously strengthened and aggravated relations among American, East Asian, and European countries. It is the simultaneity of mutual dependence and tension that marks not only U.S.-Japan relations in the 1980s, but Hollywood-Japanese relations. In a veiled attempt to reverse the monopoly breakups mandated by the 1948 Paramount decree, and to establish solid footholds as “global” companies appealing to “global” markets, Hollywood studios in the 1980s underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions. Many of these involved foreign companies. In 1985 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased 20 th Century Fox, and then in 1989 and 1990 Sony and Matsushita bought, respectively, Columbia Pictures and MCA/Universal. Postcommunist 12 European countries stimulated markets for Hollywood film and television, albeit under largely state-controlled apparatuses. 9 But just as war remembrance and trade disputes undercut the smoothness of U.S.-Japan relations, Hollywood’s history as an “American” industry and the blatancy of Japanese investors’ economic motives undercut the smoothness of Hollywood-Japan relations. In this context of Hollywood-Japan collaboration marred by nationalistic resistance, films of the 1985-1995 period about Japan-U.S. relations have, up to now, been analyzed within exclusive zones. The films under discussion here do not have “transnational” reputations. If anything, critics and scholars invariably describe them as saturated with national difference, as foregrounding “American,” “European,” or “Japanese” concerns depending on their origins of production. Empire of the Sun places as a midlife American auteur’s grope for artistic maturity; The Last Emperor a Euro-Orientalist meditation on royal decadence; Black Rain an American- Orientalist reactionary thriller; Kuroi ame a Japanese account of traumatic victimhood; MacArthur’s Children a Japanese take on American postwar cultural influence; and Rising Sun a work of American “Japan-bashing.” Part of the problem has to do with the films’ retroactive position in relation to the concept of the transnational as it developed in the field of film studies. Released and analyzed as reflecting regionalist approaches to their transnational subject matter, these films, frequently the object of intense scrutiny and criticism in the popular press, have been so exhaustively examined as products of national-cultural bias that to argue their transnationality may appear to contradict the established “fact” of their bias. But the concept of the transnational, as I define it, serves these films extremely well. The transnational approach provides a more realistic framework in which to study the films’ multinational production and distribution practices. It also highlights the diversity of imported 13 texts and audience reactions to them that undermine national policy or notions of national identity. The “Japan” we see in these films is a place of underlying multinational tensions, an ambivalent site of struggle among and between characters of different nationalities. It defines characters as conflicted between the reality of their transnational environment and the personal identities established in their nations of origin. The protagonists of these films may self-identify as American, British, Japanese, or Manchurian, but they are stuck in places where those identities are challenged. Japan’s interaction with other nations, either in wartime or in the postwar period, results in a loosening, a de-cohering, of national identity. Just as the main characters in these films are identified across a wide range of de- cohering nationalities, the films themselves, in their staffing, funding, and distribution, have multi-national elements. Among the films under discussion, four are high-budgeted Hollywood productions, one a high-budgeted independent European production, and two relatively high- budgeted Japanese productions. These basic differences should not be ignored, but beneath those surface descriptions, national identities of the films erode. Among the four Hollywood films, two of the directors are American, one British, and the fourth Australian. The films’ locations include the United States, China, Britain, Spain, and Japan. The European production (The Last Emperor) features an Italian director, pan-European financing, and location shooting in China and Italy. All of the above films have a multinational cast and crew. The two Japanese films are less international in their credit lines and locations, but they are undoubtedly films “of the world,” circulated to Europe and the U.S. by virtue of their transnational subject matter, the reputations of their auteur-directors, and critical praise. In turn, the non-Japanese films all circulated, in some cases to major success, in Japan. 14 As products made, distributed, and received internationally, these films need not be forced, but simply fall, into the category of transnational cinema. To analyze them in strictly national terms, as the majority of previous studies have done, is to argue a form of determinism in spite of, not in observant reaction to, their origins and functions. NEW NORMS In this project I locate the transnational in Hollywood-Japan connections as a matter of industry and discourse. What emerges through these connections in the 1980s and 1990s cannot be sourced exclusively within a singular nation or national rubric. Hollywood’s inextricable connection to Japanese markets and filmmakers, and vice versa, disallows the positing of a Hollywood “norm” against which we should compare and contrast the Other of Japanese cinema. 10 For the purposes of this study, and its contribution to the growing subfield of transnational cinema studies, Japanese cinema and Hollywood cinema underwent in this period a process of industrial merging that helped to create a new—imperfect, contested—transnational norm. I also position Japan as a transnational subject, “Japan” as a coherent cinematic image in related films of multinational origins. The audiences for these films, delimited by the subject matter, are not an isolated, nationalized target of address, but a multitudinous mass audience identifiable by its interest in films about Japan’s symbolic place in the world. 11 “Transnational cinema” as a concept grew first and foremost out of a critique of the national cinema model that seemed to overlook important cinema-related heterogeneity within a nation. 12 Once the term entered common usage in English-language film studies, however, scholars almost immediately debated its merits. Detecting an unmerited challenge to their specialization, national cinema scholars urged caution against using “transnational” too loosely 15 and “national” too dismissively. 13 Meaghan Morris, for example, lamented the “surprisingly thin” imaginings of the transnational in film studies, likening them to “a blurry wash of rhetoric about movement, speed, and space.” 14 The danger of the transnational concept is that it potentially opens up a space into which films are placed only after the scholar removes them from some vital context—its production sites, aesthetic traditions, government support, critical and popular reception—that is in some way bound by nation or language. 15 The risk of de-territorializing a film to an insensible degree in order to place it in an analytical space is compounded by the scholar’s own regional position, which the transnational approach complicates by default. Transnational cinema as a prominent concept did not spontaneously erupt out of scholarly networks already established in film cultures all over the world. As Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen note, the transnational cinema concept derived from academic concerns of the 1980s, when the globalizing economy compelled a more realistic assessment of how films are made and distributed. 16 Actual transnational filmmaking, however, predates the 1980s. Priya Jaikumar and Vanessa Schwartz exemplify cases of early transnational practice in their studies of colonial British/Indian cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, 17 and “Euro-American” films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). According to Schwartz, those films “could and did construct an imagery that transcended the nation as an imagined community.” 18 The transnational as an identifying concept of industry, text, and audience has some inherent drawbacks: mainly, if there is no singular nation or region determining the cultural identity of a production company, film, or viewer, the cultural origin of the film itself—if one still exists—remains in doubt. What happens to Japan as a coherent and identifiable entity, if it is entirely configured within a transnational framework? In this project I locate the answers within the underlying concerns of the questions. Transnational connections that challenge the notion of 16 pure national identity are not just a principle of transnational cinema scholars but the subject of all the films here under discussion. Transnationalism, for my purposes, is not just a label and a methodology, but is the very source of tension in this group of films. With the risk of sounding tautological, the origin of the transnational cinema I am analyzing is transnationalism itself— more specifically, the anxiety and eagerness over tensions and opportunities arising from foreign entanglements with Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. NON-NATIONAL CINEMA Appealing to multinational audiences became a necessity for Hollywood filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s. Having dominated most foreign markets since its establishment as a national industry in the early 1900s, 19 Hollywood studios increasingly relied on its distribution networks overseas for revenue, and shaped its content to garner greater shares of audience interest outside of the United States. The period 1985-1995 was a time for what Scott Olson calls “the globalization of Hollywood,” when Hollywood filmmaking achieved unprecedented popularity overseas not only due to political pressure and economic incentives, but for “textual reasons”—Hollywood aesthetic becoming a “global text.” 20 This project presents Hollywood cinema—defined as the product of an industry without a coherent geographical base—as “non-national” cinema. Transnational cinema scholars concur that in relation to so-called “national cinemas,” Hollywood cinema may play a dominant or oppositional role, but it cannot be identified as exclusively American. Its appeal relies on aesthetic traditions that may have been formulated in the United States, but influenced in part by filmmakers from outside the U.S., who either migrated to the States to work in the studio system, or exported their films to the States where they were absorbed by American filmmakers. As the 17 industry, following other major industries, extended overseas to capitalize on cheap labor costs in the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood cinema became the product of what Toby Miller, et al. describe as a “New International Division of Cultural Labor.” 21 So scattered are Hollywood’s production facilities that Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan suggested using a “film-services framework,” not a “studio” framework, for looking at the ways in which Hollywood labor establishes relationships and policies across national borders. 22 Like “Wall Street,” the literal meaning of the term “Hollywood” refers to a small geographic area containing “global” industries. Both terms also have symbolic meaning, referring to a type of business culture with an attendant iconography. Because of the term’s elasticity, defining contemporary Hollywood requires an analytical approach that transcends geography. There is no map of its elusive center, where its power is most concentrated. Definitions of Hollywood, in particular by those who embed critiques of Hollywood-American cultural hegemony in tone and phrasing, tend to obscure rather than illuminate. Typical of anti- Hollywood rhetoricians is critic J. Hoberman, who defines contemporary Hollywood as “the quaint name for an international mass culture, based in the United States but drawing capital, talent, and audiences from all over the world.” 23 Such sweeping terminology, intended to broadside a hegemonic entity, actually fails to distinguish Hollywood from any other “international mass culture” that may be “based” in one country or another. Hollywood’s temporality is equally difficult to define, and scholars disagree on principles of periodization. Precise analysis of the 1985-1995 time frame compounds the challenge of definition, as the industry consolidated its power in a manner reminiscent of its pre-1948 studio period, while expanding itself in unprecedented fashion under the auspices of domestic and foreign media and non-media conglomerates. 18 Perhaps the most basic and persuasive evidence of contemporary Hollywood’s structural break from the studio system period—and its attractiveness to foreign investors—is the decoupling of management from production. As noted by Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, contemporary Hollywood is not necessarily a thing that produces but a thing that seeks control over the rights to products. With the geographic delimiting of the production process since the end of World War II, and the increasing complexity of studio corporate management over the last thirty years, Hollywood has become “firmly established as a globally dispersed business.” 24 Contemporary Hollywood, according to Murray Smith, targets a “heterogeneous range of specific markets,” a process he likens to “flexible specialization” that links directly to the horizontal structure of studio-owning conglomerates. 25 The value of a film in contemporary Hollywood is not, as it once was, the revenue derived from its theatrical earnings in the United States, but its “pre-sold” elements: the potential audiences identified by market research that draw investors to a project at its development stage. Priorities of studio owners are divided between management of individual films (the responsibility of the studio head or chair), and control over intellectual property rights (long-term assets prized by shareholders and the boards they elect). Identifying marketable elements of films and categorizing them as contemporary Hollywood cinema is crucial to analyzing the motives of Japanese investors, who did not want to alter the popular aesthetics that made their investments seemingly worthwhile. Here the definition of “Hollywood” is at its most symbolic, as a narrative mode that has gained universal status. In 1985, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema codified the principles of studio filmmaking from 1917 to 1960 as forefronting causality and coherence in the structuring of shots and storylines. 26 Hollywood aesthetics across the studio 19 system, according to Bordwell, et al., were bound by principles of linear storytelling, with a related group of characters enacting conflicts that build logically towards a climax and resolution. Bordwell followed up the 1985 book with his single-authored The Way Hollywood Tells It to argue that despite some “novel strategies of plot and style,” the basic principles of post-1960s Hollywood are “firmly rooted in the history of studio moviemaking.” 27 Not even the most innovative contemporary techniques could supplant classical narrative forms, which for Bordwell constitute “the world’s primary tradition of visual storytelling.” 28 The Hollywood aesthetic, particularly its quality of “mainstream inoffensiveness,” 29 enhanced its mobility, and just as it is partly the product of filmmakers from outside the U.S., it has influenced the aesthetic of contemporary non-American filmmakers outside of Hollywood— East Asia in particular. In Christina Klein’s estimation, because consumption, and not just production, can and should define any national cinema culture, Hollywood is just as integral to Asian film cultures as films produced in Asia. 30 Jenny Kwok Wah Lau states flatly that “most of Asia’s contemporary visual culture…is, at least superficially speaking, either a direct imitation or a kind of ‘mutation’ from Euro-America.” 31 Lau’s use of the term “Asian” underscores yet another point of transnationality: Hollywood (as part of “Euro-American” visual culture) and its pan-Asian influence. This characteristic sets it apart from the type of transnational cinema discussed by Hamid Naficy, films directed by postcolonial and Third World independent artists since the 1960s that retain a form of “accent” representing the filmmakers’ displacement from dominant (Hollywood) cinema, which Naficy considers “universal and without accent.” 32 Japanese investment in Hollywood filmmaking from 1985 to 1995 was, in one important sense, a function of serendipity. At the same time that Hollywood studios were looking to reduce, if not eliminate, the risk of high-budget production for a globalizing market, they found in Japan 20 the companies and individuals willing to take a risk with bubble-economy capital and assets. While news accounts and business analysts pointed to “cultural differences” as the dividing point, 33 the more relevant, if less dramatic, issue for Japanese investors was the lowering of their tolerance for risk. On the small scale, for Japanese companies that invested in individual films and filmmakers, or in distribution deals with major studios and independent production companies, the risk and attendant losses were proportionately large. Conversely, the purchases of Columbia and MCA/Universal, while staggeringly high in numerical terms, represented a desire for Sony and Matsushita to reduce their own risk. They assumed the position of a media conglomerate that had both the size to withstand heavy losses and the powers of oversight to hold divisions and management accountable—and to mold strategies of growth and downsizing. This project, in part, examines a process that reinforced and urged along the globalization of Hollywood industry by way of Japanese capital. Such a process represents continuity in Hollywood history and also a break. No stranger to foreign investments, Hollywood until the 1980s had never been open to so much private capital from one country in such a concentrated time period. At the very least, this process further complicates any nationally-coded definition of Hollywood cinema—and, for that matter, the nation-bound definition of Japanese cinema. If Japanese cinema history is also the history of its studios and of Japanese companies and individuals whose investment activity helped to produce a significant number of films, then “Japanese cinema” is a product of labor and agreements both inside and outside of Japan. The extension of Japanese capital, and therefore risk and varying degrees of influence, had an experimental and exploratory purpose beyond the immediate goal of earning returns on investments. Despite the variety of motives and methods of Japanese investors at the time, their 21 ideas of what Hollywood represented had consistency and coherence, and were instrumental in establishing a recognizably “transnational Hollywood.” IMAGINED NATION My periodization of Japan’s role in the accelerated transnationalization of Hollywood (as well as its own “national” cinema) coincides with what I would call a “hinge period” in Japanese social and cultural history. The axis of the hinge, the years 1989-1990, marks the death of Emperor Hirohito and the dramatic slowdown of Japan’s economy that has yet to be reversed. The 2006 anthology Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present discusses post-1990 Japan in terms of the tarnishing of its national image of “unending economic expansion.” 34 Other crises of Japan in this period—the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the Tokyo subway terrorist gas attack, the rise of criminal youth, and various bureaucratic scandals—contributed to a contemporary image of Japan as “the site of an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership.” 35 Japan as a discursive topic, as an imaginary in popular culture, seems split across the 1985-1995 period. Its image as remorseless economic juggernaut in the mid to late 1980s segues almost immediately in the 1990s into an image of remorseful gluttony. However, despite the apparent hinging of Japanese social and cultural history from 1985 to 1995, the case studies of this project seem unconscious of the axis point. Mr. Baseball and Rising Sun, the two films released after 1990, are almost perversely mute on the subject of Japan’s economic slowdown. The decadence of urban corruption on display in 1989’s Black Rain, and the transnational excesses of hypercapitalism in Rising Sun are undivided by Japan’s 22 changing national image. By using a “hinge period” that does not seem to determine a “hinged image” of Japan, I illustrate the potency of the aggressiveness of Japan’s national image from 1985-1995. Just as this project departs from Japanese social science studies like those in Japan After Japan that consider the 1990s a turning point in terms of Japan’s national image—a turning point that my case studies do not acknowledge—this project departs from Japanese cinema studies that dismiss transnational approaches to contemporary works in all but industrial terms. “Transnational cinema,” in regards to Japanese film studies, frequently stands for “imperial cinema,” a Japan-centered drive to achieve “soft power” in Western and other Asian countries. 36 Historical studies, such as those by Michael Baskett and Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, document Japan’s imperial cinema as national policy in its occupied territories during World War II. 37 But to many scholars, “transnational” Japanese cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, especially that which engages with other Asian nations, is either a subtle or blatant form of cultural imperialism. Japanese studios and production companies had coproduced with other Asian countries since the colonial period. But from the late 1990s onward there has been a surge in co- productions with South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Many of these are high- budgeted popular genre films loaded with international star casting, many of them dramatizing, to exploitative effect, cross-cultural tensions. Critical scholars of Japanese cinema’s “Asian turn” of the 1990s connect its co- production activity with the hegemonic internationalism of postwar Hollywood. They appear reluctant to consider the transnational as much more than a marketing ploy or smokescreen. Their arguments are similar to political-economic critiques of “global Hollywood.” Scholars note that the techniques of Japanese filmmakers to achieve “transnational” effects with the 23 appropriation of imagery, actors, and narratives involving other Asian countries match some (though not all) of Hollywood’s own “universalist” aesthetic. Jun Okada and Koichi Iwabuchi, though writing mostly about Japanese cultural products of the late 1990s and early 2000s, use the phrases “culturally nonspecific” (Okada) and “cultural odorlessness” (Iwabuchi) to describe a design strategy on the part of Japanese film, TV, manga, and anime producers. 38 To maximize their overseas appeal, Japanese pop-culture producers, to Okada and Iwabuchi, efface their own cultural origins—what Naficy might call their “accent.” This export-driven aspect of Japanese cultural production leads scholars to make conclusions similar to those about Hollywood hegemony: that transnational flows do not in any way diminish the reflection and enhancement of national origins or “nationalizing forces.” 39 Several analyses of contemporary Japanese filmmakers who fill the screen with “foreign” characters and imagery—such as Mika Ko on Miike Takashi, and Eric Cazdyn on Iwai Shunji— find the products themselves lacking true heterogeneity. They refer to the style as “cosmetic multiculturalism” or as a “diasporic car crash.” 40 Like political-economic critics of Hollywood, critics of Japanese films and TV shows reflecting Japan’s “Asian turn” and the “nation-less” (mukokuseki) marketing of products overseas, deride what is perceived as a national-populist effort to gloss over contested histories and identities. Discussions of the transnational in contemporary Japanese cinema tend to emphasize a dominating nationalized agenda, an assertion of native coherence in Japanese cinema—no matter how “diverse” the cast or production group—that effectively neutralizes transnational content in the films. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar attempt to explain this scholarly emphasis by arguing that unlike Hong Kong and Taiwan, Japan (like European nation-states) was an intense object of scrutiny for national cinema scholars because it “troubled the assumed unity and coherence of the nation the least.” 41 24 Anthropologist Marilyn Ivy writes of Japan’s image that “No nation of comparable economic power seems so territorially constricted, so ethnically standardized, so culturally contained.” 42 Analysis of transnational Japanese cinema must override certain popular scholarly assumptions about Japanese cinema’s lack of (all-but-cosmetic) transnationalism. For Ivy, a sense of “loss” in Japan that cannot be redeemed—such as the death of Hirohito that reminded citizens of historical ruptures—pervades an anxious environment of consumer capitalism that fetishizes historical continuity and coherence. This fetishism, to some extent, has pervaded the field of film studies. My project is a clear departure from Japanese cinema studies that argue a foundational nationally-coded homogeneity underpinning so-called “transnational” works. I link Japanese cinema interdependently with Hollywood cinema in industrial and analogic terms. My Japanese cinema case studies, Kuroi ame and MacArthur’s Children, do not have the marketable veneer of transnationality that later films like Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) and Miike’s City of Lost Souls (2000) so blatantly showcased. Still, their approach to their subject matter—the effect of postwar geopolitics and occupation on individual Japanese identity—takes the transnational as a phenomenal force that challenges the characters’ sense of a coherent self. PROJECT METHODOLOGY AND OUTLINE Following this project’s subtitle, I take up the issues of transnational “industry” and “identity” in that order. Throughout the chapters, I highlight struggles of companies and characters (many of them based on actual people) to define themselves amidst a backdrop of accelerated transnationalization. When a company’s value is defined by its investment capabilities and activities, the more it extends outside of its national headquarters, the less it can claim a strictly national identity. Likewise, a dramatic framework that throws Japanese 25 characters into conflict and then into close proximity with non-Japanese characters, sets the stage for identity struggles of mutual intensity. As the film industry grew increasingly transnational in the 1980s, so did the identities of protagonists in Japan-themed Hollywood films and in Japanese films about transnational encounters. Because this project takes a transnational approach, pairing films from different “national” cinemas, it engages in detailed study outside national lines. This is not to say that the approach is “comparative.” Traditional comparison of two or more films of different national origins presumes a coherent essence of those origins that are detectable in the films. When looking at a Hollywood studio film and a Japanese film in the same analytical space, I consider neither one “typically”—that is, only identifiable as—American or Japanese. Black Rain and Kuroi ame, for instance, are not simply “American” and “Japanese” films about the Hiroshima bombing that represent, comparatively, their respective national cultures. Their strategies of staging and narrating Hiroshima as haunting America and Japan of the 1980s, with both countries locked in interdependent economic pursuits that have corrupted or erased memories of the war, are as parallel as they are resonant. Likewise, the British boy and Manchurian monarch of Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor, while suffering imprisonment under the Japanese, share a deep affinity for their captors and a dual identification with them as non-Chinese. Along similar lines, the film Rising Sun departs from its source novel by showing a “postracial” alliance between Anglo-Saxon whites, African-Americans, and Japanese in a struggle for upward class mobility in a hypercapitalist United States; the lavish benefits of corporate enterprise and suppression of the lower classes are too tempting for most of the film’s characters to resist. Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children have slightly departing visions of baseball—the former presents it as an entertainment industry, the latter as a casual game—but the sport functions in both films as a 26 transnational (that is, American and Japanese) arena of conflict between the players’ private and public identities. Audiences of these films could pick out obvious differences in style and narrative—a reflection of budgets and source material—but their collective impact is more powerful than any one individually. The project also builds off, and departs from, book-length studies of the changing “image” of Japan and the Japanese in Hollywood films. These books perceptively point out the deployment of stereotypical imagery of the Japanese either as representing the Asian race or a particular “Americanized” concern about U.S.-Japan relations of any given time period. 43 Although these studies are accurate and valuable as references and as rhetoric, they are mainly premised on, again, established binaries of identification: Hollywood’s “view” of Asians or of the Japanese. While I consider these studies essential in charting, and criticizing, Japan- Hollywood connections in terms of rising and falling cultural trends, there is very little scholarship that considers films produced inside and outside of Hollywood and Japan as related works that transnationalize their subject matter. 44 Each chapter highlights a particular area of controversial collaboration between Japanese and non-Japanese. Chapter 2 is a critical analysis of Japanese investments in Hollywood from 1985 to 1995. Significant deals with major studios and independent producers led to the development of dozens, if not hundreds, of English-language films that were partly or entirely funded by converted yen. In some of these films, Japanese influence is onscreen; in others—most others, in fact—there is little trace of the source of the film’s production funds. These “untraceable” works of Japanese investors are more than relevant; their “untraceability” is in most cases a pre-condition of the deal, as a too-high degree of overtness in Japanese representation would diminish the Hollywood identity, and therefore the principle, and the 27 profits, of the investment. The primary industrial output of Japanese investments in the Hollywood film industry has very little to say about Japan, and that is exactly the preference of the investors. Here we can see the further eroding of a film’s national identity as the Hollywood industry encouraged increased separation between management, production, and funding. This examination of Japan/Hollywood co-production departs from political economic analyses of Hollywood as a global distributor of American products with purely American interests. 45 When considering the Hollywood industry as a whole, it is impossible to avoid the tightness of its power centers and the ferocity of its self-protection against government interference and litigation. And yet its regional identity, so long associated with California and New York, shifted dramatically as the industry conglomeratized. The increasing complexity of the corporate structure of media companies—which were occasionally under the umbrellas of widely diversified conglomerates, such as Gulf + Western (Paramount) and Coca-Cola (Columbia)—allowed for more sophisticated film-investment schemes that included foreign companies. Using the 1993 Columbia Pictures film My Life as a blatant case of Sony self- promotion, the chapter shows how Hollywood cinema, which most political economic studies point to as absorbing alternative cinemas or containing national cinemas while retaining an American centrality of power, can actually be absorbed and contained within a Japanese corporate vision. While the chapter does not argue that Japanese investments changed Hollywood to a profound degree, it does argue that Hollywood’s increasing globalization and transnationalization in the 1980s and 1990s had more than one direction. After discussing the transnationalization of the Hollywood film industry, of which Japanese investments were a contributing factor, I turn to the case study films to explore issues of identity. The format and scope of these chapters are a combination of production histories, 28 textual analyses, and reception studies. By looking at the films in terms of their conception, production, textual design, and distribution, we can see the fraying of their identity as “national” cinema. National border crossings and struggles to achieve some form of national-cultural authenticity were typical for the filmmakers as well as for the films’ protagonists. All of the case studies emphasize the role of World War II in representing an origin of tensions that linger in the postwar era. What we see, though, is not a re-enactment of the war, but an exploration of the war’s legacy. The films’ settings are not combat zones but collaboration zones. The first such zone is the imprisonment of the main characters of Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor, analyzed in Chapter 3. Even though Japan is the nominal aggressor and captor, invading China and trapping both Jim (in Empire) and Pu yi (in Emperor), the two characters realize they have more to gain from collaboration than from confrontation. As the Japanese occupy China, Jim and Pu yi desperately cling to the privileged sense of self that their national identities had granted them since birth. Based on accounts of the real-life Jim and Pu yi—both of dubious authenticity—the films present history as a form of confession. Jim and Pu yi imagine their own childhood experience as a surrender to Japan’s will in order to save their own lives. Believing themselves superior to the Chinese, both characters, reflecting from a postwar perspective, come to terms with their arrogance and eagerness to please the Japanese. They eventually submit to transnational forces that render them victims, folded into a mass identity as survivors. In Chapter 4, two films with the same title (Black Rain), released the same year (1989), show a remarkable contempt for the U.S.-Japan alliance wrought by the nuclear bomb. Although set in different time periods—one in the immediate postwar period, the other in the 29 contemporary 1980s—both films examine, with horror, the collaborative legacy of the war. The Black Rain made in Japan (aka Kuroi ame) shows a village community of Hiroshima survivors who watch the globalizing world pass them by. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima represents an end only for those characters directly impacted by it; for everyone else, it represents a promising beginning: the postwar nuclear umbrella agreement between the U.S. and Japan. Granting Japan security so it can pursue economic recovery, the agreement locks the nations together in co- dependency. The Hollywood Black Rain, while more crude and sensationalist in its generic plotting as a police thriller, finds little to praise in the loosening of national borders in the postwar era. Both Japan and the U.S.—represented by Osaka and New York—are monuments of urban decay, eroding from within. The villains in the film are not intimidated by spatial and cultural difference. They use American currency—that persistent standard of the postwar global economy—as a weapon of destructive capability not unlike those used by the U.S. military on Japan. Representing Hiroshima much less clearly than Kuroi ame, Black Rain nevertheless exploits wartime atrocities as memories haunting contemporary society. MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball, the subjects of Chapter 5, may seem on the surface to be less emphatic in their postwar critique, given they are both lightly-toned comedies. But in their depiction of baseball, and of the baseball field, as a transnational competitive arena, they fit well within this project’s framing of metaphorical collaboration zones. As with Empire and Emperor, national identities are at stake, but it is sport—conflict as play—and not war, that dictates the terms of transnational engagement. Baseball, although introduced in Japan by Americans in the late 19 th century, in both films emerges as a Japanese-coded activity with profound national-cultural symbolism. With Americans and Japanese playing together, as teammates and as opponents, spectators are attuned to the differences in modes of play. In the 30 case of Mr. Baseball, those differences are grievous to the American protagonist who plays for a Japanese team. The pay is good, and serves as motivation for the character’s travel to Japan from the U.S., but the challenge to his coherent sense of self as an “American” player drives him to the limits of his patience and tolerance. MacArthur’s Children has a setting similar to Kuroi ame, a rural community in the immediate postwar period, and also a similar tone of lament for Japan’s limited options after the war. More comedic than Kuroi ame in showing the clash of cultures between Americans and Japanese, MacArthur’s Children, like Mr. Baseball, depicts postwar history as mild farce, focusing on ways in which characters contradict each other, and themselves, in order to achieve some form of international harmony. Perhaps the most cautionary, and controversial, film under discussion is Rising Sun, the case study of Chapter 6, which takes as its collaboration zone the marketplace of screen technology. Like the two Black Rains, Rising Sun shows contemporary urban society as irreversibly transnational and hopelessly corrupt. Unlike those films, however, Rising Sun limits itself to one location in America, with Los Angeles functioning as a microcosm of transnational corporate criminality. Fighting over and on imaging technology, the battle lines in Rising Sun may appear to be drawn along national lines—fueling most of the controversy surrounding the film—but closer examination shows that the lines are drawn by class, not by nation. In that respect, the film is at a complete remove from its source novel. I analyze the novel in opposing relation to the film to counter the vast majority of criticism about the film as a mere illustration of its source. Even though the film became synonymous with the term “Japan-bashing,” I argue that in the film, nationalist sentiments appear as distracting rhetoric, as one more debased element of a transnational, image-obsessed culture. The novel strives at length to delineate national differences and argue their role in America’s economic decline, which can be reversed 31 by first “exposing” those national differences and then ridding America of its foreign threat. The film, however, exposes with visual sophistication the distorting power of media technology that both obscures crime and tempts its makers and users into a transnational criminal complicity. CONCLUSION The collaboration zones of the films under discussion—the prisons containing Jim and Pu yi, the nuclear umbrella agreement in Kuroi ame, the baseball field in MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball, and the sites of urban decadence in Black Rain and Rising Sun—are all sourced in the history of World War II and its aftermath. Each one of these sites represents a loss of health, security, morality, or identity—and the potential gain of enormous profit. In order to perceive these sites as they were designed, as areas of co-dependence and mutual exploitation, characters must adopt a transnational perspective. They must shed the blinders supplied by their now- outdated, wartime-era nationalism. Transnationality in these films is not just a form of identity, a disciplinary label, but a mode of address. Taken as a whole, these films speak to the reluctance and enthusiasm of transnational encounters between Japan and other nations in the postwar period. The underlying struggles for dominance and advantage within these intensified relations, though identifiable in some ways as “national,” do not invalidate the transnational phenomena that emerge in and around these films, whether consciously or unconsciously. Acknowledgment of identity markers of the nation (as constructed within national cultures) and the transnational cluster effects of their border crossings is crucial, I believe, in framing and analyzing U.S.-Japan films of this period. Closing the project is a reflection on why it took so long after the war for films like this to emerge. Why did we not see this in the 1950s cycle of Japan-themed Hollywood films, or in 32 Japanese cinema? Following that, I speculate how transnational Japan-Hollywood connections have altered or remained consistent from the late 1990s to the present. The years 2003-2009 stand as a particularly active cycle period of Japan-themed Hollywood films as well as European, Japanese, and other Asian films exploring Japan’s transnationality. Within this cycle there are pairs and other groupings of films across national borders that have as much potency as those discussed here, such as Twilight Samurai (2002) and The Last Samurai (2003); female-traveler narratives such as Lost in Translation (2003), Fear and Trembling (2003), and The Stratosphere Girl (2004); and the war films Spy Sorge (2003), The Sun (2005), and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In those films and all of the case studies presented here, we see Japan as representing a nationally-coded entity that either loses its coherence or causes nationally-coded characters to lose theirs. As national borders come down, others come up, and vice versa. Although this overall “image” of Japan is hardly new, the combination of war memories, economic empowerment, and most of all a charged ambivalence over what becomes of the national in a transnationalizing environment defines the 1985-1995 period as in some ways distinct from earlier and later periods. This project interrogates the usefulness of concepts of transnational cinema by anchoring them in the spatial, temporal, and relational context of a country many consider to be one of the most “nationalized.” Without reducing Japan to a cipher, I examine its role as a transnational subject in films produced during the accelerated globalization of Hollywood industry—a process largely encouraged via Japanese capital—and circulated to multinational audiences, of which Japan was one of the largest. The nation is not “lost in the wash,” but addressed as a malleable site of production, consumption, and, most importantly, transnational collaboration. 33 CHAPTER 1 NOTES 1 Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “What Is Transnational Cinema?” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 1. 2 Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, introduction to World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, eds. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), x. 3 Michael Shapiro, “Japan and the U.S. Share an Uneasy Artistic Piece,” The New York Times, December 1, 1991. 4 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7, 23-24. 5 Jeanette Roan, Envisioning Asia; On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). See also Shibusawa for an exploration of postwar Hollywood films about Japan that “could not avoid reinscribing the same Orientalist notions they thought they were challenging.” Naoki Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 260. 6 A sampling of Japan-beautification films produced by Hollywood studios in the postwar period include Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Sayonara (1957), The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), My Geisha (1962), and The Yakuza (1974). 7 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 187-204. 8 Even at the end of the Cold War, Japan’s foreign relations were still defined by its bilateral commitment to the United States, although the collapse of the international system’s bipolar structure allowed Japan’s policymakers on occasion to take an increasingly unilateral or multilateral stance. See Glenn D. Hook et al, Japan’s International Relations: Politics, Economics, and Security, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2005), 117. 9 Anikó Imre analyzes the tensions between state policy and public “play” in postcommunist European TV culture in Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 10 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto provides a useful and provocative overview of English-language film studies and its seemingly unbreakable compulsion to view cinema, particularly Asian cinema, in Hollywood-normative terms in “National/International/Transnational: The Concept of Trans-Asian Cinema and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism,” in Theorising National Cinema, eds. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 254-261. 11 Marian Bredin cites cultural sociologist John Tomlinson who cautions against reading media effects across cultural borders as somehow determined by elements within the texts themselves. While I do not presume a nationalized or otherwise essentialized audience response to the case studies, I would argue that an attentive audience is an interested one, and those audiences attentive to these films presumably have some interest in Japan’s international relations. See Marian Bredin, “Transforming images: communication technologies and cultural identity in Nishnawbe-Aski,” in Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, ed. David Howes (London: Routledge, 1996), 164-165. 12 See Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), 15-26; Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Sheldon H. Lu, “Chinese Cinemas (1896-1996) and Transnational Film Studies,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon H. Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). 34 13 See JungBong Choi, “National Cinema: An Anachronistic Delirium?” Journal of Korean Studies 16, no. 2 (Fall 2011); Zhang Yingjin, “Comparative film studies, transnational film studies: interdisciplinarity, crossmediality, and transcultural visuality in Chinese cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2007): 27-40; and Jeremy E. Taylor, Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas: The Amoy-dialect Film Industry in Cold War Asia (London: Routledge, 2011), 4-5. 14 Meaghan Morris, “Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 181. 15 Abé Mark Nornes, in his study of film translation practices, defines language as that which “marks a film as foreign.” Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 8. 16 Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, introduction to Theorising National Cinema, 3-4. 17 See Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) for a transnational approach to colonial and postcolonial British and Indian cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. In Becoming Japanese, although he does not discuss cinema, Leo Y. Ching analyzes how Taiwanese formerly colonized by Japan harbor some ambivalence toward their former colonizers, especially during the Chinese takeover of Taiwan. For Ching, the problematic discourse on national identity in Taiwan calls into question the term “postcolonial.” Leo Y. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 18 Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7. 19 For detailed historical analysis on the penetration of Hollywood studio product in foreign markets, see Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997) and Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1986). 20 Scott R. Olson, “The Globalization of Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Reader, ed. Toby Miller, (London: Routledge, 2009), 527-528. 21 Toby Miller et al, “The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” in Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 2005), 111-172. 22 Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, “The Policy Environment of the Contemporary Film Studio,” in Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting, eds. Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 59-63. 23 J. Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin De Siècle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 236. 24 Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, introduction to The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, eds. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2008), 5-7. 25 Murray Smith, “Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, eds. Stephen Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 7. 26 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Richard Maltby disagrees with the principles of Bordwell, et al’s “classicism and stylistic determination” because they do not address, in Maltby’s view, Hollywood films as “commercial commodities.” Elizabeth Cowie goes further by critiquing Bordwell, et al’s definition of Hollywood as so inclusive that any variation is contained within it, and that its premise of profit-motivated 35 aesthetics is self-contradictory. See Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, Second Edition (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 15; and Elizabeth Cowie, “Storytelling: classical Hollywood cinema and classical narrative,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 178-190. 27 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2006), 1. 28 Ibid, 3-4. 29 Ezra and Rowden, 2-3. 30 Christina Klein, “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 2008): 871. 31 Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, introduction to Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, ed. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 1. 32 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3-4. 33 In his analysis of the “demise” of the Sony/Columbia deal, Peter F. Bruner argues that “Large cultural difference is an amplifier of several of the drivers of failure: It creates a tin ear for danger; it heightens the complexity of decision processes; and it may introduce cognitive biases, management choices, and operational practices that are inappropriate for the situation.” (emphasis in original) See Robert F. Bruner, Deals from Hell: M&A Lessons That Rise Above the Ashes (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), 171. 34 Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda, introduction to Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, eds. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. 35 Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” in Japan after Japan, 22. 36 See Chapter 7 for more on “soft power” initiatives in contemporary Japan. 37 Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) and Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Understanding the Origins of East Asian Film Networks (Oxford: Routledge, 2010). 38 Jun Okada, “Cultural Odor in the Global Order: Globalization and the Raced Japanese Body,” in Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange, eds. Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell (New York: Routledge, 2012), 47; and Koichi Iwabuchi, Re-centering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 24. 39 Iwabuchi, 17. 40 Mika Ko, “The Break-Up of the National Body: Cosmetic Multiculturalism and the Films of Takashi Miike,” in Theorising National Cinemas, 135-136; and Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 159. Ko’s use of the term “cosmetic multiculturalism” derives from Tessa Morris-Suzuzi’s “Immigration and Citizenship in Contemporary Japan,” in Japan - Continuity and Change, eds. Javed Maswood, Jeffrey Graham, and Hideaki Miyajima (London: Routledge, 2002), 163-78. 41 Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 14, emphasis mine. 36 42 Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-3, emphasis mine. 43 For critical analyses of Hollywood cinematic representations of Japanese and Asians, see Kakii Michihiro, Hariuddo no nihonjin: eiga ni arawareta nichi-Bei bunka masatsu [Hollywood’s Japanese: American-Japanese Cultural Tensions in Film] (Tokyo: Bunge Shunjū, 1992); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Murakami Yumiko, Ierou fueisu: hariuddo eiga ni miru ajiajin no shōzō [Yellow Face: Seeing Asian Portraits in Hollywood Films] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1993), Brian Locke, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Wang Xiaofei, “Constructing Japaneseness: War, Race, and American Cinema, 1924-1992” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 2009); and Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). Analyses of films about Japan and Asia as locations include Monma Takashi, Ōbei eiga ni miru nihon: amerika, yōroppa [Japan in Western Film: America, Europe] (Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha, 1995); Masuda Sachiko, Amerika eiga ni arawareta “nihon” imēji no hensen [The Changing Image of “Japan” in American Film] (Suita-shi: Osaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004); and Carol Ota, The Relay of Gazes: Representations of Culture in the Japanese Televisual and Cinematic Experience (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2007). Works focusing on Asian iconography as cultural signifiers in Hollywood films include Jane Chi Hyun Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 44 Scott Nygren’s Time Frames explicitly calls for a transnational approach to a “diasporic Japan” in cinema, an approach that would include examination of a “series of reciprocal relationships between curious pairs of films” such as Black Rain and Kuroi ame. See Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 220-228. 45 Toby Miller, for instance, argues that despite the foreign ownership of Hollywood studios, which includes Sony and Matsushita, control remains in the United States. “What matters spatially,” he writes, “is not the company’s headquarters, or the location of its major shareholders, but the site of its actual product development and management.” The funds may be foreign, but “control of these funds remains firmly in U.S. hands.” See Miller, et al., 92. 37 CHAPTER 2. HANDS OFF, HANDS ON: THE INFLUENCE AND LIMITS OF JAPANESE INVESTMENT IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD CINEMA “Hollywood had proven many times over that it was the most staggering propaganda force in the world. It has done more to homogenize international tastes in clothes, lifestyles, concepts of beauty, attitudes towards love or violence or femininity or manliness, than all of the politicians and preachers and designers in the world combined.” --Terry Ogisu, Sanrio Communications, 1977 1 LIFE…A SONY PRODUCT In November 1993, a little over four years after Sony Corporation purchased Columbia Pictures, Columbia released My Life, a drama about terminal illness. In the film, a Los Angeles public relations agent named Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) is stricken with an advanced form of cancer while his wife (Nicole Kidman) is several months pregnant. Knowing he will be dead before his child will grow out of infancy, Bob videotapes his daily routine and dictates life lessons to his future son. The camera accompanies Bob in the bathroom, in the car, and on a long-distance visit to his estranged family. All the while, he addresses the camera as if it were the face of his child. At regular intervals the film adopts the camera’s point of view, as if positioning the viewer in the future space of Bob’s son watching the footage of his (by then) deceased father. The camera is in Bob’s hands even during the climactic birth scene, though he is momentarily too overwhelmed to record. The film ends with Bob’s death, envisioned as a roller- coaster ride into a blinding white light that dissolves into a playback image of Bob reading Dr. Seuss to his young son on the family TV. The light of transcendence into death merges with the videographic recording light, preserving Bob in image form even as he departs his physical form. Bob’s camera is a Sony 8mm Hi-Fi Stereo Precision model, a detail that would be trivial if the camera were not so omnipresent and thematic. The Sony logo is unavoidable: white block 38 lettering on the black hardware attached to Bob’s hand, held up to his eyes, and receiving his direct address. But Sony’s presence in My Life goes beyond product placement. It is a fantasy of a corporate mission accomplished. In the world of the film, technology overcomes incurable illness, a metaphorical projection of a Sony-sponsored utopia of consumerism. Sony provides the hardware that turns our lives into software. Bob is not just using a Sony product. He is a Sony product, providing education and entertainment for his son (and for us) with technology that, after his death, completely contains him. My Life illustrates a type of “synergy” that motivated Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures, using the “software” of entertainment to sell the “hardware” of video technology. The Sony camera enables Bob to reconnect with his Midwestern family and to achieve a kind of immortality. Sony developed the tools to extend Bob’s life, and with the camera on constant display, the film’s audiences are shown the means to extend their own. And My Life itself, as a “humanistic” product of early 1990s Hollywood, contained the elements to extend its own life beyond its theatrical run in the United States. Internationally distributed, and released to home video, cable television, and other ancillary markets, the modestly-budgeted My Life with its mid- level star and “universal” themes, earned some minor profits. The Sony logo did not need to be on Bob’s camera to make the film profitable. However, the film’s potential profitability no doubt motivated Sony’s insistence on exploiting the film’s premise to foreground the company brand. Sony was not the only Japanese company to pursue a worldwide consumer market share through the vehicle of Hollywood cinema, though it became the most popular symbol of Hollywood’s openness to Japanese financing between 1985 and 1995. In the context of media conglomeration trends, Sony followed, rather than pioneered or departed from, the course of the industry. But its purchase of Columbia, as well as Matsushita’s purchase of MCA/Universal the 39 following year, appeared anomalous, and even mildly threatening, to commentators in the U.S. concerned over trade deficits and Japanese investments in U.S. real estate. Scholars have already offered critical analyses of the alarmism that greeted Japanese investment activity in the U.S. at the time. 2 Building on those works, this chapter aims to place Japanese investment activity in an industrial context that includes smaller-scale companies and agreements. Why did Japanese companies invest so heavily in Hollywood cinema and not in their own national cinema? What sorts of films emerged—or failed to emerge—from these agreements? What was the impact of Hollywood’s prominence on the Japanese film industry? And, from a theoretical standpoint, how might all this activity affect our judgment of Hollywood’s own national identity? THE FORMULA The emergence of the video market in the 1980s was a test of the flexibility of Hollywood studios and an assertion of the powerful role of Japanese investors and consumer hardware manufacturers in the production, distribution, and exhibition of Hollywood films. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled against Universal and Disney in their lawsuit against Sony Corp., indemnifying Sony from claims of copyright infringement against American owners of VCRs. 3 Due in part to the “explosive growth of the home video industry” in the mid-1980s, according to Tom Schatz, “a new breed of smaller companies” began producing films with some assurance that worldwide distribution and video sales and rentals would offset the risk of distributing theatrically in the U.S. in direct competition with major studios. 4 The small size of some of these “mini-majors,” which included Carolco, Vestron, Cannon, DEG, and New Line, belied their complexity: it is this type of company that many Japanese investors either targeted or created. 40 The growing demand for “American” films outside of the United States in the 1980s, particularly in Japan, was significant and measurable. In 1988, the U.S. reported net exports of movies, home videos, and pay-per-view cable TV at $2.5 billion, an increase of 32% from the previous year. Japanese admissions and box office numbers had dropped in 1985, and in the ensuing decade, the number of foreign films exceeded the number of domestic films, even as the number of screens declined steadily from 2,300 in 1981 to 1,800 in 1991. 5 . These figures provide a partial backdrop for a mutual interest among American and Japanese film producers in the “world market”—Hollywood films that appealed outside of the United States. With the plateauing of the American audience and diminishing returns for Japanese films in Japan, producers in both countries saw the benefits of mobile Hollywood products. The rising production costs needed to meet the demands of a global market made investments from overseas not only attractive, but necessary. It would be a mistake to group all Japanese investors into a nationally-coded category; their motives varied, as well as their methods. But it is reasonable, as pointed out by Takashi Nakamura, president of Dentsū Advertising in Los Angeles, to consider Japanese investors as a loosely connected group that was, in stages, learning the ins and outs of Hollywood financing. 6 Foreign importers and investors alike viewed Hollywood as the primary source of production values and creativity. 7 A late-1990 Time magazine article listed the reasons why Hollywood films were so globally marketable: “Scale, spectacle, technical excellence…[a] style of the outrageous, a gift for vulgarity…driving plots, story lines and narratives…strength of character, self-reliance, a certain coarseness, a restless energy.” 8 That, combined with a powerful global distribution network and the cultural advantages of producing in English, established a national 41 product “without peer on the international stage,” second only to aircraft manufacturing on the list of American industries with a trade surplus in the late 1980s. 9 The type of film the Time author describes above is the broadest of commercial products, characterized by a substantial budget, star power, and a “high-concept” premise. 10 Those qualities became more intrinsic to Hollywood filmmaking in the mid to late 1980s, and as much as they appear “American” in character, their development was for the express purpose of appealing to as wide an audience as possible, regardless of nationality. Along with the rise of international stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson came the rise of their salaries and the dominance of medium- and high-budgeted features that translated well in overseas markets. 11 From 1980 to 1990, the average production budget of a Hollywood studio film increased 186% from $9 million to $26.8 million; parallel costs for advertising increased 169%, from $4.3 million to $11.6 million. 12 Neither the size of the American audience nor the average price of admission increased to similar levels to balance these rising costs. 13 Revenue from ancillary and overseas markets not only served to fill the budget gap but became the studios’ main source of income. In 1989, film attendance in Japan was at its lowest number since the end of World War II, and yet Japan was still the largest foreign market for Hollywood films. With more viewers watching imported films in theaters and at home, Japanese producers and investors found greater profit potential in acquiring local distribution rights to Hollywood films and television shows rather than developing new programming at higher expense and higher risk of failure. In response to Japan’s trending consumption and acquisition of Hollywood products, and to offset some of the risk of high-budget filmmaking, Hollywood studios accommodated—and in most cases, welcomed—Japanese companies and investors who saw the mutual benefits of investing 42 in the American entertainment industry. A February 1991, article in Variety estimated that between 1987 and 1991, more than half of Japanese corporate investment in the United States was in the entertainment industry. 14 The subsequent analysis is organized by the type of investment, not chronologically, in order to discuss a variety of strategies in qualitative fashion. For each strategy there are elements of control and risk that characterize the motives of the investors and their comfort level with the political sensitivity of potential deals. The appearance of creative control over a Hollywood film or company on the part of the Japanese in the 1980s and 1990s risked political and cultural backlash in the U.S., but the desire for complete control over production that motivated Sony and Matsushita in their acquisitions was to reduce the more dangerous risk (in their view) of losing their investments. However, the decoupling of management from content creation meant that a Japanese company or individual could invest in “Hollywood,” even manage Hollywood products, without imposing any “vision” on the films themselves that suggested a “foreign” culture. If anything, most Japanese investors wanted to maintain and preserve exactly the sort of commercial films Hollywood had already been producing. Films attracting Japanese investment did not require Japan-related content or Japanese staff—just the imprimatur of “Hollywood.” Japanese investors adopted four distinct strategies that cut across all phases of filmmaking. The first and most straightforward was to purchase distribution rights, capitalizing on the popularity of Hollywood product in the Japanese market. The investors either negotiated for the rights to completed films or, to avoid competitive bidding, invested in Hollywood studios or companies to finance films at the development stage, in exchange for a profit percentage and/or distribution rights. Secondly, investors provided seed money to independent producers from Hollywood to establish new production companies. The producer need not be American but 43 should have a track record of commercial success either in the U.S. or Japan. The third strategy was for a Japanese company or individual to set up operations in the U.S., to co-produce (or not) with Hollywood studios or talent. The role of the Japanese heads of operation was not limited to financial backing but included the selection and development of projects for both the American and Japanese markets. The fourth and most dramatic strategy was to purchase an entire studio, to have access to its library, its distribution networks, a guaranteed profit share on successful new films, and a platform to market the Japanese parent company’s native products. The great majority of films produced under the first three strategies were mid- to low- budget works that yielded few returns, if any, to their investors in the theatrical market. The most profitable scheme appeared to be purchasing video or TV rights. There are also several “lost” films that were publicized at the development stage and then never produced or barely released. It is important to discuss these films in terms of their potential value to investors, for they represent a vision of “successful product” as vividly as the films that materialized. They also serve to complicate the definition of contemporary Hollywood industry, not just in terms of its increasing transnationality but as a site of non-production, its constant hedging against failure. Failed or stalled productions characterize Hollywood industry as much as its slate of releases, as Japanese investors quickly and painfully learned—or accepted. BUYING IN Distribution deals for completed Hollywood product in the late 1980s was a competitive struggle, due to the popularity of American films and the expansion of video and satellite TV markets in Japan. With the impending launch of two communication satellites in 1989 (designed by Boeing and purchased by Japanese conglomerates in the 1980s, ironically, to offset some of 44 the international trade deficit), new TV stations demanded product. The annual Los Angeles- based American Film Market served as an indicator of need for Hollywood content overseas. At the 1987 meeting, a large contingent of executives from Japanese distributors Tōhō-Tōwa, Shōchiku, and Nippon Herald were eager to buy Japanese rights to U.S. films, not just to sell Japanese films to the American market. 15 At the 1988 Cintex symposium in Las Vegas, investors from Japan clamored for deals where they would put money into Hollywood productions, take the rights back to Japan, and then use those rights to develop pay-TV systems and other services that would use the satellites. 16 In the fall of 1990, NHK Enterprises, along with Dai-Ichi Kangyō and Sumitomo Banks, the C. Itoh trading company, and the Seiyū Ltd. conglomerate formed Media International Corp., or MICO, which began in November 1990 to ship $770 million to the U.S. over the next five years to acquire “features, bigtime sporting events, and all sorts of TV fare” for the home market. 17 The ability to provide Japanese TV viewers with Western-based product was a major cause for the early and continued success of the WOWOW network (formerly Japanese Satellite Broadcasting, or JSB). A consortium of over two hundred and fifty companies, and beginning with its airing of Twin Peaks, WOWOW built its subscriber base on the popularity of foreign films and television shows. 18 As cable TV failed to generate a substantial market in Japan, more companies turned to satellite TV, where there was an increasing demand for Hollywood-based programming. In early 1992, Mitani (manufacturing) and JTS International (trading) established Mudia Corp. in partnership with Tom Hulett and Associates in Santa Monica to invest $60 million in Hollywood-produced television shows. 19 Some of the TV distribution deals were exclusive to one of the six major studios, seemed to have no precedent, and ignited political debate. In summer of 1993, Tōei purchased, for an unknown price, Japanese TV, satellite, and non-pay cable rights to all of 20 th Century Fox’s 45 features and programming, a simplification of Tōei’s previously “ad hoc” model of dealmaking. 20 Receiving far more public scrutiny was a large-scale pact in late 1991 between Toshiba, C. Itoh, and the recently merged Time Warner Inc. The Japanese companies paid $500 million apiece for about 12.5% of Time Warner’s movie, cable, and HBO programming operations. With this deal, Time Warner reduced the enormous corporate debt created by its 1989 merger, and gave Toshiba and C. Itoh the rights to content that could drive the development and sales of HDTV, satellite, and cable licenses in Japan. 21 Politically, the deal was controversial: earlier in 1991 Toshiba was the target of attacks by the U.S. Congress for selling classified American technology to the Soviet Union in 1987, resulting in the resignation of Toshiba’s leadership and U.S. government sanctions against the company that hurt its exports. 22 In response to the Time Warner deal, House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) criticized it as demonstrating an apparent double-standard: even though Toshiba could buy a piece of the American media industry, Japanese law forbade an American company to purchase “even a single share of [Japanese broadcasting outlet] NTT on the open market.” 23 Even though Toshiba and C. Itoh were careful to express no interest in Time Warner’s print division, and left management to an American subsidiary, the size of the deal and the political risk it engendered illustrates the degree to which Japanese electronics and media companies felt that Hollywood product was crucial to their success in Japan. Many of the most significant deals were with independent distributors or production companies, and required a keener sense of the potential profitability of individual films. A frequent attendant of the American Film Market was Kuzui Enterprises, an independent distributor run by the husband-wife team of Kaz and Fran Kuzui, who later directed Tokyo Pop in 1988. Based in New York and Tokyo, Kuzui formed a partnership with Tokyo’s Communica 46 Film Corp. to distribute “high-quality” Japanese films in the U.S. and “indie” American films in Japan. 24 Successful runs of Kuzui-distributed films in Japan like David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink (1991) led to a $20 million joint venture with Nissho Iwai (trading company) and Sōgei (advertising), to distribute Western films in Japan and to cover some of the production and advertising costs; the first films distributed under this arrangement were The House of the Spirits (1994) and George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker (1993), starring Macauley Culkin. 25 For the Kuzuis, a marketable film in Japan need not have a large budget or major studio behind it, but a “quality” that somehow translated well in Japan—a trademark name or image like Lynch or Culkin, or a prestigious award such as the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. As selective as Kuzui Enterprises, but not as impressed with highbrow talent and prestige, GAGA Communications (established in 1986, with offices in Tokyo and Los Angeles) chose as its U.S. investment partner Troma, Inc., the New York-based producer of low-budget splatter- horror-comedies. Due to its success in selling Troma’s films in Japan, GAGA purchased 50% equity and the Japanese rights for Troma’s Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D. (1990). 26 GAGA also joined JVC and TV Tokyo in paying for half the $2.4 million budget of the mildly satiric Prayer of the Rollerboys (1991). Prayer was a speculative-future film depicting America as a country sliding into ruin, overtaken by Japan to the extent that Harvard University had relocated to Hiroshima. But it was the commerciality of film’s emphasis on youth and rollerblading, and the cult status of star Corey Haim, not any political theme, which attracted the Japanese investors. 27 Geared primarily for the video and TV markets, the film only got limited theatrical release in the U.S. and Japan. 47 The intuitive sense of a type of film that was likely to draw niche audiences in Japan or elsewhere, displayed by Kuzui and GAGA in their selection of investment partners, was absent from many other similar deals. In some cases, the Japanese market was not a crucial element of the deal; the investors simply trusted an independent or mini-major production company to turn out inherently “Hollywood” product that would guarantee high theatrical returns—a dangerous and regrettable assumption that set a cautionary precedent for future deals. Two early arrangements involved troubled production companies MGM/UA and New World Entertainment. The MGM/UA deal was a $15 million investment by CST Communications (composed of C. Itoh, Suntory, and the Tokyo Broadcasting System) into three MGM/UA titles that failed to generate profits: Bright Lights, Big City (1988); Fatal Beauty (1987); and Betrayed (1988). 28 Around the same time, the newly-formed Sōgō Vision (a partnership between NHK Enterprises and the advertising companies Hakuhōdō and Dentsū) put $7 million into New World Entertainment for the foreign theatrical distribution rights to a series of flops like Felix the Cat: The Movie (1988) and Brenda Starr (1989). 29 The poor performance of all those films and the instability of both MGM/UA and New World informed Japanese investors of the limits of the Hollywood brand. A strict “hands-off” policy put blind trust in Hollywood producers and distributors and made them unaccountable for losses. Another problematic target of Japanese investment was Carolco Pictures, producers of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Basic Instinct (1992). Carolco filed for bankruptcy in 1995, representing a loss for Japan’s Pioneer Corporation, whose 18.5% ownership stake helped to keep the company afloat in 1992. 30 Also in 1992, Mitsubishi Corp. made its first Hollywood investment in partnership with TV Tokyo by buying the television rights to around two hundred titles produced by Orion Pictures for $26 million. Orion at the time was enduring its own 48 bankruptcy restructuring plan, but Mitsubishi had no interest in the company itself, just the broadcasting rights to its successful library, which included Dances With Wolves (1990) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). 31 The appeal of mini-major investments over large-studio partnerships was clearly visible when publishing company ASCii entered into both types of deals nearly simultaneously. First, it was the key equity investor in Universal’s Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). Although Tomatoes was the most successful film of that year for Universal Pictures (then owned by Matsushita), ASCii didn’t receive a positive return on its investment given the manner in which distribution profits were allocated. 32 Conversely, by investing in both Castle Rock and New Line Pictures with a $15 million purchase of the Japanese distribution rights to six films from each company over two years, ASCii reduced its risk by spreading it over several films and applying its knowledge of the Japanese theatrical market. 33 Following suit with this type of arrangement was Nippon Herald Films, which invested in Arnon Milchan’s company New Regency in 1995 in exchange for exclusive Japanese distribution rights. The slate of films had not yet been produced—and at least one, David Fincher’s The Crowded Room, would be abandoned—but included Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). 34 Nippon Herald’s faith in New Regency, and the other Japanese investors’ trust in mini- majors, suggests a preference for a company-focused, rather than a title-focused, investment strategy. But by concentrating on pre-existing smaller production companies or mini-majors, Japanese investors were exposed to a higher risk. Companies like MGM/UA, Carolco, and New World did not require multi-billion-dollar investments, but their failures to generate profitable titles within a short timeframe, along with their fledgling status in the industry, engendered a desire on the part of Japanese investors for more control over production. Even if greater control 49 required a greater amount of investment and a higher degree of risk, by maintaining direct oversight on production budgets and management, Japanese investors could at least gain a sense of how their capital ran through the Hollywood system of production and distribution. Their assertion of control over production took on three different forms: setting up new production companies under the management of proven Hollywood talent; establishing Japanese-run production units in the United States; and purchasing entire studios. SMALL-SCALE, HANDS OFF For a non-Japanese film producer or director to set up a yen-funded production or production company, a proven track record and intermediaries were necessary. At the 1991 American Film Market panel on Japanese partnerships, Leonard Schrader (brother of Paul) testified to the difficulties of independent foreign filmmaking in Japan. His film Naked Tango only received funding from Tōhō-Tōwa after fifteen to twenty years of dealmaking. Kuzui Enterprises also reflected on the hardships of funding Tokyo Pop, which was eventually backed by Shōchiku-Fuji. 35 Japanese companies were willing to finance individuals, but typically only those with impressive filmographies, whose instincts for commercial projects would result in a slate of films to be distributed worldwide by major studios. 36 Partnering with individual producers would also reduce risk, under the assumption that not every project would succeed, but enough would to justify the investment. As a side benefit, the non-Japanese production head could supervise all phases of projects while the Japanese ownership maintained control over rights and collected valuable information about the workings of the Hollywood film industry. Kakutani Masaru, executive vice president of Fujisankei, explained his company’s reasons for a 1988 investment of $50 million in producer David Puttnam: “To make films for the world 50 market using American know-how, to prepare for the growth and expansion of…new media, and for pure investment reasons.” 37 Clearly, Japanese investors with deep wells of resources were willing to pay a premium for the educational and long-term value of Hollywood products, not just their immediate profit potential. The formula for judging “American know-how” tended to be a combination of tenancy in an “executive” role in Hollywood—Puttnam, for example, had been the former chairman of Columbia 38 —and a nominal attachment to at least one or two major commercial hits. JVC (subsidiary of Matsushita) made a large investment in producer Lawrence Gordon in late 1989 based on his three-year record as president of 20 th Century Fox and for “producing” hits like 48 Hrs. (1982) and Die Hard (1988). At the time Gordon and JVC struck the deal, the benefits appeared to be mutual and JVC oversight appeared deferential and muted. Gordon received $100 million as an initial investment to create Largo (named after himself) where he would have the freedom to develop and produce projects of his choosing while JVC received the profits and an expensive education in the Hollywood film industry. 39 In a 1991 Japanese periodical interview, Gordon explained that “control types” in the film business slow down production and waste money: hence JVC’s affirmation of “no control” over Gordon’s decisions. 40 JVC’s commitment to Largo was genuine—contributing another $50 million to the company even after laying off 18% of its own workforce amid huge financial losses in Japan 41 — but its “no control” policy was disingenuous. Hesitating to commit more than $25 million to any one production, JVC management clashed with Gordon over his pursuit of a lucrative franchise like Die Hard that would command a large budget. 42 With a few modest hits—like Point Break (1991) and Unlawful Entry (1992)—but mostly failures, Largo phased itself out of production mode when Gordon left the company to pursue an independent production deal at 51 MCA/Universal. His first film there was Waterworld (1995), a project JVC had rejected. 43 Largo’s post-Gordon identity was that of a “foreign sales company” rather than a production house that distributed domestically in the U.S. through Universal and Fox. 44 The company pre- sold foreign rights to films in development that had “worldwide appeal” like Ridley Scott’s White Squall (1996). 45 While sharing the nominal role of “production company” on films developed by other companies, Largo functioned mainly as a rights seller until JVC closed it in 1999. Daniel Melnick’s IndieProd existed before Japanese investment, as an independent feature film and TV production unit, and then as a merged company acquired by Carolco under a five-year arrangement in 1987. 46 Like Gordon, Melnick’s attraction to the Japanese was a combination of executive experience—as the brief president of Columbia in the late 1970s in the wake of the David Begelman scandal 47 —and “hands-on” production experience. Near the end of his five-year commitment to the struggling Carolco, JSB offered Melnick nearly $100 million to start a “Largo-like entity” that would link up with a major distributor who would match JSB’s amount. 48 JSB’s sole interest was in exclusive satellite and pay-TV rights to IndieProd’s films that would play on the fledgling WOWOW network. It had previously attempted a $50 million co-production arrangement with American and European partners but could not meet its viewer subscription target of around 900,000. 49 Having already invested in Wild at Heart and the Japan- themed Iron Maze (1991, credited as a “Trans-Tokyo production”), JSB was familiar enough with low-budget Hollywood investments to recognize the importance of ancillary markets, to the extent that it declined to pursue any theatrical rights. But it needed a major studio to take on the risk and expense of theatrical distribution. 52 When Tri-Star Pictures agreed in 1993 to add $100 million to JSB’s IndieProd investment in exchange for most worldwide theatrical and video rights, the connection seemed natural, and not because Tri-Star was then owned by another Japanese company. Tri-Star had distributed Carolco’s films since the late 1980s—representing one of Sony’s few sources of profit during the first years of its ownership of Columbia—and needed a new production company agreement to fill the gap. Melnick’s relationship to Carolco carried over its good terms with Tri-Star chairman Mike Medavoy, and a deal was struck for Tri-Star and JSB to give IndieProd $200 million for production costs and another $150 million for print and advertising costs of Melnick’s future films. 50 The newly independent IndieProd held the responsibility for “creative” decisions, but with a mandate to produce films “with international scope and appeal,” giving the Japanese market “an eclectic selection.” 51 However, the first two films produced by the JSB/Tri-Star-backed IndieProd were costly: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), which had a combined production budget of around $75 million and combined U.S. domestic gross of around $45 million. 52 Though Frankenstein earned four times its domestic gross in foreign markets, both films represented the very type of over-budgeted debacle that JVC guarded itself against in its oversight of Largo. Daniel Melnick’s final credited film as producer appeared the same year as Largo’s: Blue Streak, in 1999. The Largo and IndieProd deals, designed to reduce risk by ceding more control to the Japanese financiers who selected their own management, exposed the investors to the risk of entrusting management duties to “creative” producers. However, the absence of blind trust and the measured deference to the creative heads of the companies gave JVC and JSB the leverage to dictate production policy and contain their losses, all the while pursuing the goal of attaining 53 valuable copyrights, branding, and Hollywood commerciality for the markets they knew best— their own. They may have been disappointed by the low short-term returns on their investments, but the disappointment was on their own terms. Also disappointed by their producer-focused models were Shōchiku-Fuji and Nippon Herald. Shōchuki-Fuji made deals in 1989 with two independent producers, Edward R. Pressman and Jeremy Thomas, but neither deal fulfilled its promise. Pressman entered into a two-film co- production pact that yielded only one film, the Claus von Bulow trial drama Reversal of Fortune (1990). 53 Thomas, the producer of 1987’s The Last Emperor (see next chapter) and the head of Film Trustees, a U.K. based film-financing company, made a $50 million, six-picture arrangement with Shōchiku-Fuji even after the Japanese company censored The Last Emperor when it initially distributed the film in Japan. The first two films released under the new arrangement, Everybody Wins and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Emperor follow-up The Sheltering Sky (both 1990), underperformed. After David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), Thomas’s next production that Shōchiku-Fuji had turned down, 54 Thomas liquidated Film Trustees and dissolved his agreement with Shōchiku-Fuji. 55 A commonality among the two investment strategies discussed above—which linked them with Sony and Matsushita’s studio purchases, only on a smaller scale—was the “creative” distance that the Japanese investors placed between themselves and the production process. Basic formulas—“Hollywood equals worldwide commercial appeal,” and “Producers of past hits are producers of future hits”—guided the selections of long-term Hollywood-based partners. For short-term gains, the more fortunate investors seemed to be those who restricted their interests and expertise to the Japanese market. Instincts for what will succeed in Japan as opposed to the United States gave some films, and their Japanese distributors, one of their greatest sources of 54 revenue. In 1992 Nippon Herald distributed David Lynch’s Twin Peaks feature Fire Walk With Me in Japan at the same time the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film’s negative reception at Cannes, and later in the U.S., was the opposite of its astounding success in Japan. The profits Nippon Herald collected from the Lynch film partly supported its May 1992 agreement to fund 12.5% of each of nine films produced under James Cameron’s Lightstorm company in exchange for Japanese distribution rights. 56 Cameron’s True Lies (1994), the first Lightstorm film Nippon Herald distributed, was also a major hit in Japan, though it could not be at a further remove, aesthetically or commercially (in the U.S. market), from Lynch’s film. 57 The answer to the question of whether a film guaranteed profits in all territories due to a marketable transnational hook, like a Cameron-Schwarzenegger blockbuster or a Lynch-directed auteurist work, is, of course, a definite maybe. As the Nippon Herald example shows, while trusting a Hollywood-American derived brand is a potent strategy, allowing a film’s performance in U.S. theaters to dictate distribution agreements would result in potential lost profits. Nippon Herald was as confident in the profit potential of the Lynch film in Japan as U.S. distributor New Line Cinema was disappointed in its actual performance in the States. Whether the acquisitions group at Nippon Herald had the sort of intuition that Kuzui Enterprises prized in itself when it acquired “indie” fare in America for the Japanese market, is difficult to say—though it would take an obtuse organization to be unaware of the popularity of something like Twin Peaks in Japan despite its relative “cult” status in the U.S. In any case, the first two types of Japanese investors discussed here took their cues from their knowledge of reception patterns in Japan. Investors were at their lowest risk when acquiring Japanese distribution rights for already-completed films, proven successes in the States. Investing in films still in development, or in new companies headed by veteran producers, resulted mainly in films 55 that occupied a “mid-space” between the kind of arresting, fluke phenomenon that Twin Peaks represented, and the big-budget, mass-appeal commercial dominance of a True Lies. The typical film that emerged from a “small-scale, hands-off” development and distribution deal was a mid- budgeted work with middling stars, perhaps with an internationally-famed director, or a low- budgeted genre work aimed for modest theatrical returns and a shelf life in ancillary markets. It is this undistinguished category of film—the Fatal Beautys, the Brenda Starrs, the Unlawful Entrys—that partly characterizes this important phase of Hollywood’s transnationalization from 1985 to 1995. These are the “safe bets” that Japanese investors relied upon without injecting themselves into what they perceived as a specialized field of content creation. SMALL-SCALE, HANDS-ON Japanese filmmakers who sought a “small-scale, hands-on” arrangement in Hollywood— that is, asserting “creative control” over production—were few in number, and many who established a small company with Japanese seed money could not produce according to plan. But their goal, like the Japanese investors who felt safer with a “hands-off” arrangement, was to apply their direct knowledge of the Japanese market and their sense of “universal” Hollywood product. Their vision of Hollywood was a place of infrastructure and valuable labor—a site of production that, for the purposes of these specific films, served better than Japan’s own film industry, which co-produced mainly with other film industries in Asia. Sanrio Communications set up a film production unit in Hollywood in the late 1970s as a 100% Japanese-owned subsidiary that used local talent to produce two animated features, The Mouse and His Child (1977) and Metamorphoses (1978). 58 Sanrio’s second-in-command at the time, Terry Ogisu, wrote an opinion piece in Variety to explain his choice of a Hollywood 56 location: not for the level of its technicians (though that was satisfactory), but for its distribution networks, its ability to reach other countries and cultures in ways the Japanese film industry could not. 59 Independent Japanese producers in the U.S. believed that by controlling production, they could reduce risk as long as the finished product looked recognizably “American.” Only a small number, including Sanrio, achieved some minor success. Ichise Takashige established Ozla Pictures in Los Angeles in 1992 to produce Japanese-controlled films in the U.S. and distribute worldwide through Robert and Ellen Little’s First Look Pictures/Overseas Film Group. The content was purposely exploitative—films like American Yakuza (1993) and Blue Tiger (1994)—and engineered for the U.S. video market and worldwide theatrical market. 60 Ichise was one of the few independent producers from Japan to profit from a type of “hybrid” production: an Asian-themed film shot in Los Angeles with an American director and a partly Japanese cast and crew. 61 “Creative control” is a relative term in a film production: whereas Ichise controlled his company’s films as manager and as “talent”—helping to conceive the films and making script contributions—Japanese independent producers in Hollywood who desired control without the pressure of developing specific films simply made their approval of creative elements a condition of the investment. An illustrative case of a Japanese investor’s preference for “macro” control over “micro” control is the Fujisankei Group’s attempts to maximize decisive power over the films it helped produce. As mentioned above, Fujisankei’s first entry into Hollywood was an equity partnership with Warner Bros. and David Puttnam’s UK-based Enigma Productions in 1988. Under that agreement, Fuji and Warners deferred to Puttnam’s instincts for socially- conscious commercial material. The films he produced, however, such as Memphis Belle (1990), Meeting Venus (1991), and War of the Buttons (1994), did not replicate the success of his earlier 57 films Midnight Express (1978) and Chariots of Fire (1981). Later on, in 1994, Fuji and Warners invested in U.S.-based Outlaw Productions. 62 For the Outlaw deal, Warners and Fuji insisted on more creative control: all three parties had to agree on the films, with Fuji reserving the right to pass on any project. Warners and Fuji purchased fifty-fifty equity in Outlaw’s films, with Fuji retaining Japanese distribution rights (for video and TV, primarily) and Warners the rest of the world. 63 Ironically, in many cases, maximizing decisive power on the part of Japanese investors had the unintended effect of reducing the possibility of their films ever getting made. In 1991, between its two equity partnership arrangements with Warner Bros., Fuji established what it hoped would be a completely independent media firm called Fujisankei California Entertainment (FCE). With Kakutani Masaru as president, the company had a $50 million budget to produce 6 “modestly budgeted” films a year. “We are creative producers,” Kakutani told The Los Angeles Times. “We don’t need creative input from others.” 64 Having produced the successful Koneko monogatari in Japan in 1986—redubbed in English and rereleased in the U.S. in 1989 as The Adventures of Milo and Otis—Kakutani had reason to trust his instincts and abilities in producing cross-national commercial films. But the firm has yet to be credited with a single independent production. 65 Another promising company arrived in California two years earlier: Okamoto Naofumi’s Apricot Entertainment. With a $50 million investment from a family friend (Tanaka Yutaka, chief executive of Shinwa Co., an Osaka-based construction and cement company), Okamoto established Apricot as the “first” all-Japanese backed independent production company in America. 66 Okamoto’s strategy, as he expressed it, was to avoid the very sort of deal represented by CST’s investment in three MGM/UA titles (see above). He did not want to co-produce, but 58 rather use Los Angeles as a base of operations for his own productions. 67 But the projects announced as Apricot’s opening slate—a horror film entitled Beware the Moon, a baseball comedy starring Kosugi Shō, a high-budget World War II film called The Chrysanthemum Covenant—never materialized. Even later projects that seemed on the verge of production, such as an alien-conspiracy thriller based on Area 51 folklore, remain unproduced. 68 To date, Apricot as a production company is credited with a single film, the 1992 thriller Illusions, starring Heather Locklear, made expressly for the TV and video markets. The failure to produce, in the case of FCE and Apricot, is as instructive to its backers as the mixed results of products released by Largo and IndieProd. By simply hanging a shingle in Los Angeles and publicizing their Japanese identity, FCE and Apricot received public attention that American-backed independent companies could not. They were also able to redirect the company’s initiatives to serve local production needs on projects they did not generate, earning revenue at a geographic center of the industry from the safety of a peripheral position. In cases where Japanese production companies or investors insisted on creative control over specific projects that required Hollywood talent or co-investment, it is sometimes difficult to tell which scenario was more frustrating or enticing: the films that did not get made, or the films that did. Two examples, one of each scenario, shows the limits of international co-production when each party has equal creative control over the project. In a “unique” arrangement in 1993, Universal and Shōchiku announced a co-production remake of the 1977 Japanese film Yellow Handkerchief (Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi). Directed by Yamada Yōji and starring Takakura Ken, the 1977 film was a major hit in Japan; its transnationality lay in its source material, a short story written by Pete Hamill that Yamada found in an issue of Reader’s Digest. The remake plan was for Universal and Shōchiku to co-produce jointly at all levels, each having approval rights over 59 development, production, and marketing. Universal chairman Tom Pollock told Daily Variety that “Shōchiku wants to make movies for the world market,” an indication of mutual understanding of what a Hollywood film represents to both domestic and foreign producers. 69 The film as planned, however, never came to be: fourteen years later, Shōchiku announced it had sold limited rights to producer Arthur Cohn. 70 The reason for the film’s non-production at Universal is unknown, though according to Universal president Casey Silver, the only hurdle towards production was a lack of agreement on a viable script. 71 Collaboration in this case was a process of frustrating indecision. But the non-production of the Yellow Handkerchief remake at least avoided the embarrassment of Solar Crisis (1990), a co-production that cleared the hurdle of mutual agreement over content, only to face total commercial apathy. Originally called Crisis 2050, the film was a science fiction thriller about a crew of astronauts attempting to prevent an Earth- shattering solar flare by ramming a human-powered vessel into the sun. Producer Morishima Tsuneyaki had made the most successful movie in Japanese history up to that time, 1983’s Antarctica, and yet he had never before worked outside of Japan or attempted to make a film that would be internationally appealing. Investors in the project included Gakken Publishing, NHK Enterprises, Asahi Breweries, Toppan printing company, Yamaichi Securities, Lotte (confectionery), and Nippon Steel. 72 The film’s many special effects were under the supervision of Richard Edlund, who had trouble developing the story with Japanese management. He was particularly concerned about the “kamikaze” aspect of the mission to the sun and wanted to downplay it so the film would be “understandable to an English-speaking audience but wouldn’t seem silly or corny to the Japanese.” 73 60 Filmed in the U.S., and released in Japan by Shōchiku in July 1990—it was Shōchiku’s replacement that year for the usual installment of its popular Tora-san series—the appeal of Crisis 2050 to Japanese audiences was mainly in the foreignness of the locale. 74 The Asahi shinbun reported that much of the Japanese audience was under the impression that it was an American film, not a Hollywood-made Japanese film. 75 The investors pre-sold 1.4 million tickets in Japan, but most of them went to investors’ employees. No foreign distributor picked up the film, and it underwent extensive reshoots without Morishima or director Richard Sarafian present. Sarafian had his name removed from the film’s credits and replaced with the pseudonymous moniker Alan Smithee. The revised film, whose title changed to Solar Crisis, attracted little interest at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, and its budget by then had swollen from $20 to $43 million, making it the most expensive Japanese-American movie ever made. Finally Trimark Entertainment, a small studio whose only competitor for Solar Crisis was New Line Entertainment, bought North American rights in 1992 and released the film on four hundred screens to overwhelming indifference. Morishima Tsuneyaki summed up the experience with a confession to Variety: “We were babies. We did not know how Hollywood worked.” 76 The success of the Solar Crisis production in convincing some Japanese audiences that the film was “American” could not redeem its lack of commercial appeal, which appears to be a direct result of tinkering with storyline elements to make the film more “universal.” Unlike Ichise Takashige, whose films made no attempt to hide their East Asian influence, and also unlike the companies Largo and IndieProd, who made films with Japanese money that bore no visual trace of Japanese culture, the producers of Solar Crisis tried to display and deny its Japaneseness simultaneously. The film appears to have no cultural origins whatsoever, as it is impossible to trace the science fiction elements to a strictly American or Japanese tradition; even 61 the director’s name is a cipher. Solar Crisis shows the commercial (not to mention aesthetic) drawbacks of a type of transnational cinema that aims for a generic “world” audience. The calculations of the Japanese investors were predicated upon the “market multiplier” concept of international co-production: that if each party in the arrangement pushes for elements that would guarantee a base audience in that party’s domestic market, then the film reaches “universal” status. In the case of Solar Crisis, however, instead of multiplying its potential markets, the choices of its international co-producers cancelled each other out. LARGE-SCALE, HANDS-OFF…AND ON Sony and Matsushita’s rationale in purchasing entire Hollywood studios went beyond a desire to assume control over products that circulated widely in the Japanese market. Control of a studio created opportunities for “synergy”: securing the rights to “software” which they could bundle and sell with their native “hardware.” Of course, Fujisankei and JSB had far-seeking motives as well in owning rights to Hollywood films, but their focus was on expanding market share in Japan. Sony and Matsushita, manufacturers of products for the global market (Sony being the more export-driven of the two), considered Hollywood films a vehicle for expanding their multi-national corporate brand. Although the Columbia and MCA/Universal deals triggered much more negative publicity and political backlash than the smaller Hollywood deals (with the possible exception of the Toshiba/Time-Warner enterprise), Sony and Matsushita’s image of Hollywood and Hollywood product was consistent with that of Fujisankei and JSB. Hollywood—geographically and culturally—represented a market and a production site of “American” (i.e., global) entertainment. By investing in the industry, Sony and Matsushita were not unlike Toyota or Nissan in setting up production sites for automobiles in the United States. 62 With Japanese backing, American labor could supply Japanese products indistinguishable from (and in subtle ways, superior to) those produced under all-American ownership. For political as well as practical reasons, Sony and Matsushita initially pursued a “large-scale, hands-off” approach to Columbia and MCA, entrusting creative control to American management. As this section will show, however, within a few years the Japanese ownership of both companies would assume greater and more “hands-on” control of product that in Sony’s case led to a massive corporate restructuring, and in Matsushita’s case a massive sell-off of its entertainment division. Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola in October 1989 for $3.4 billion plus $1.2 billion in outstanding debts followed the same principles as its purchase of CBS Records in 1987: to bundle entertainment “software” with Sony “hardware,” a concept defined as “synergy” (sōjōkōka or shinajii in Japanese). 77 The next year, Matsushita made a similar deal for much the same reasons, when it purchased MCA/Universal for $6.1 billion. Both companies, however, were entering an industry that by the end of the 1980s had recognized the importance of sheer size in adapting to worldwide market conditions. With the deregulation of broadcasting in Europe, and new markets developing in Eastern Europe, China, and of course Japan, multimedia companies had to merge and enlarge in order to survive, effecting a sweeping industry-wide change from 1985 to 1990. 78 As The Economist observed in reaction to the Sony/Columbia deal, television deregulation around the globe made film libraries like Columbia’s “worth a fortune.” 79 Both Columbia and MCA needed the capital and expansion opportunities the Japanese companies could provide. Columbia had been accumulating debt and a catalog of unprofitable films ever since Coca-Cola’s purchase in 1982. The colossal failure of 1987’s Ishtar led to a scaling back of the studio by about 50% and a merger with sister company Tri-Star Entertainment. 80 MCA’s TV and record divisions had been dragging down profits, 63 Universal had a nearly empty development slate, and MCA was losing money with its Cineplex Odeon theater chain and startup problems at its newly opened studio theme park in Florida. 81 The “synergy” concept was a bit vague, and remained so even years after the studio buyouts, but the confluence of worldwide political and technological change in the late 1980s gave all parties concrete motives to negotiate mergers. In fact, the fear of falling behind other media conglomerates that motivated the March 1989 Time-Warner merger seemed a more convincing justification for the Sony and Matsushita deals than any corporate “vision.” Two factors were inarguable: temporal and spatial barriers to media production and distribution were disappearing; and the identity of media producers with the highest potential for profitability, was Hollywood-American. The Sony and Matsushita deals were as much, if not more, about size and site rather than synergy. 82 In that sense, the deals were not so different from Capital Cities’s purchase of ABC, General Electric’s acquisition of NBC, and Rupert Murdoch’s buyout of Fox in the mid-1980s. The impact of these mergers and acquisitions on American culture, far from threatening it (as vocal critics at the time argued), would be to “increase its exposure around the world.” 83 “Foreign” ownership of big media companies operates similarly to “domestic” ownership in the sense that it encourages and facilitates the continuity of Hollywood-American dominance in the worldwide marketplace. The adoption of Hollywood-coded entertainment as a “universal” model by Sony and Matsushita, on which they could attach their own native products as well as their capital, speaks to the transnational values of Hollywood that incentivize foreign investments and thereby accelerate the transnationalization of the entire industry. The amount of worried speculation in the popular press about the long-term effects of the studio purchases corresponded to the size of the investments. American government regulations forbade a foreign company from owning U.S. television stations because of “the potential for 64 spreading propaganda.” 84 Matsushita, therefore, had to divest itself of the MCA-owned, New- Jersey-located TV station WWOR to satisfy those regulations. 85 In a further move for the benefit of public relations, Matsushita agreed to sell off the MCA-owned hotels and concessions at Yosemite National Park. 86 Sony, for its part, had to endure more hyperbolic American media characterizations of itself as a threat to American culture, even though at the time of the Columbia deal, 66% of its products sold outside of Japan, and nearly every Sony TV that sold in the United States had been manufactured there. 87 The figureheads of both Japanese corporations—Morita Akio at Sony, Tanii Akio at Matsushita—committed public relations blunders at the time the deals were struck by neglecting to represent their companies as emphatically opposed to asserting creative and management control over studio-produced film content. 88 Presenting themselves as “hands-off” studio managers was the most frequent and simplest counter to suspicions and accusations of cultural sabotage. In a remarkable statement, Sony chief executive Ōga Norio told The New York Times that the key to Sony’s success was to make the Japaneseness of the corporation “invisible to Americans,” so they do not feel they are losing a “vital cultural asset.” 89 Tanii went so far as to file a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, co-written by MCA chairman Lew R. Wasserman, promising that both companies were dedicated to MCA’s creative independence. 90 The genuine thoughts of Morita and Tanii were likely closer to a statement Morita made at an October 11, 1989, symposium held in Tokyo at the Keidenrenkan Foreign Enterprise Activity Conference. In response to the protectionist rhetoric of Sony’s American critics, Morita answered that if “buying America’s soul” were a problem, then selling it must also be a problem—and presumably not a Japanese problem. 91 What is most ironic about the critiques of the Sony and Matsushita buyouts is the idea that Hollywood was limited to American interests, 65 and, even more bizarre, that Hollywood was a site of politically-sensitive cultural production that would be under threat by overseers from a “foreign” culture. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), one of the few prominent public defenders of the Sony/Columbia deal who understood the malleability of the origins of Hollywood “values” was former president Ronald Reagan. Shortly after the Keidenrenkan symposium, Reagan appeared on Fuji TV as part of a nine-day visit to Japan to praise the Sony deal as something that might “bring back decency and good taste” to Hollywood films. 92 In his view, Sony as “outsider” might be able to counter Hollywood’s rampant “immorality” and “vulgarity.” As Donald Richie pointed out, Reagan’s impression of Japanese popular culture as thoroughly benign and wholesome, showed great ignorance of the “violence and vulgarity” in contemporary Japanese cinema. 93 Compounding the ill-advisedness of Reagan’s remarks was the fact that Fujisankei financed the entire trip, giving $2 million to Reagan personally, and that Sony was considering a $1 million contribution to the Reagan Library. 94 The basic premise of Reagan’s remarks, however, is considerable: in its anti- regulatory spirit, it pre-supposes a disengagement of nation from product value. Like all who argued against Sony or any other foreign investor having creative influence in Hollywood, Reagan believed that American films were vessels of ideology. But for him, it did not matter who controlled the message, as long as the message itself was agreeable; Japanese companies could produce it as well as anyone. Sony and Matsushita’s version of “hands-off” management was, as Ōga indicated above, an exercise in controlling “visibility,” not a total detachment from management responsibility. Given that their goal was to perpetuate and underwrite formulas of proven success in Hollywood, they were “invisible” to the extent that their studios succeeded, even though studio success depended a great deal on management oversight. When the studios struggled through the early 66 1990s (as did all the studios), mass-media rhetoric about the deals in the United States shifted from concern over the Japanese companies’ power of propaganda to a strange ambivalence over their mistakes and failures. 95 Both studios had problems that the industry could understand, even empathize with, and their strategic efforts to reduce losses showed the disparity between Sony and Matsushita’s long-term goals for their entertainment divisions. Their “hands-off” oversight of the studios was, in effect, a temporary show of indulgence and deference to the knowledge and intuition of “American” managers who the Japanese devalued as soon as studio market shares dropped, or when management goals clashed with ownership goals. Sony was willing to tolerate short-term losses and excessive spending with the expectation that their investment would pay off in the long term. “Synergy,” however that concept could be applied to a mix of electronic hardware and entertainment software, was the “mantra” that guaranteed long-term success. 96 Needing a CEO to manage the studios, Sony entrusted Mickey Schulhof, the chief of Sony’s U.S. operations. Schulhof in turn hired producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters—whose 1988 Batman was precisely the kind of film Sony wanted as a long-term franchise—to run Columbia. Their notorious overspending added another $1 billion to Columbia’s purchase price. Japan’s recession, a slump in hardware sales, and the rising yen led Sony’s Tokyo executives to pressure Columbia into making more hits at reduced costs, as every studio at the time was attempting to do. 97 Instead, Columbia poured its resources into bloated flops like The Last Action Hero (1993). On average, all of its 1993 films lost money, 98 and in 1994 the studio ranked last among all other majors in market share. 99 Paralyzed by poor returns, resignations, and ever-rising costs, Sony announced a $2.7 billion writeoff in late November, 1994—one of the largest ever for a Japanese organization. 100 As its stock plummeted, Sony further announced half-year losses in 1994 of $3 billion after tax. Analysts noted that when 67 adding debt and severance packages to Sony’s Columbia expenses, the total price of the studio amounted to $7 billion, or roughly twenty-two times the studio’s annual cash flow. 101 November 1994 also saw the retirement of chairman Morita Akio, who was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke the previous year. During Morita’s convalescence, acting chairman Ōga almost immediately announced an organizational reform that consolidated Sony’s nineteen production divisions and eight sales divisions into eight large divisions, giving the president of each division—as well as Ōga himself—more autonomy to make decisions. 102 Ōga selected Idei Noboyuki, a former marketing executive, as new Sony president. As a “software” enthusiast and not an engineer, Idei represented a changing corporate philosophy that equated business growth in the entertainment industry with intellectual property rights. Dismissing Schulhof in December 1995, Idei shifted control of Sony Entertainment back to Japan, flattening the U.S. operation so its executives reported directly to Tokyo. 103 Profits rose sharply under Idei’s management, though they were largely concentrated in Sony’s music division and its growing market share in the video game industry—not in the film division. 104 Matsushita’s profits were also shrinking in the early 1990s, and like Sony it consolidated corporate control of its products to Japan, only without a film studio. In April 1995, without consulting MCA’s management, Matsushita sold 80% of MCA to Seagram for $5.7 billion, unable to work out an agreement over how to make “synergy” work. MCA’s management had lobbied to make partial or total acquisitions of Virgin Records and CBS, and pushed for distribution deals with cable operators and TV networks to run the “software” MCA produced, but Matsushita refused them all. 105 Matsushita president Tanii Akio had to resign in February 1993 over a loan scandal, and his successor, Morishita Yoichi, considered the rapid changes in the entertainment industry too worrisome and unpredictable. 106 Matsushita’s embarrassment over 68 its 1993 recall of 700,000 refrigerators, and its shrinking profits required that the company re- focus its attention on Japan and its markets, not to remain scattered across the ocean. 107 After announcing the sale to Seagram, the management at both MCA and Matsushita admitted to The New York Times that “they had learned almost nothing about each other, and were parting as strangers.” 108 At the time of the sale to Seagram, MCA was worth $7.1 billion, more than the $6.1 billion Matsushita paid for it, but with the yen 35% stronger in 1995 than in 1990, and since Matsushita kept $1 billion of MCA’s debt, assessing a net gain or loss for Matsushita was nearly impossible. 109 As tempting as it is to weigh the relative failures of Sony and Matsushita and declare one company more fortunate than the other, evaluation of failure or success in itself is problematic. If the primary goal of both companies was to make “software” the vehicle for selling native “hardware,” then both deals were misconceived. If considering “profitable growth” as a goal, again both outcomes were disappointing, as Columbia overspent for meager returns, and Matsushita’s conservatism stunted growth. Sony’s failure may be greater than Matsushita’s because of Sony’s stubbornness in retaining a troubled and expensive asset, but its troubles were common in the film industry, and remain so. In fact, for all the reasons above, what is most remarkable about Universal during its ownership by Matsushita, and about Columbia from 1989 to the present, is how unremarkable and typical their films appear alongside films of the other four major studios, none of whose parent corporations have pursued so openly a “synergistic” merging of films and consumer electronic hardware. The “failures” of Sony and Matsushita were not to bring an end to Hollywood, or even to two of its studios, but to fail in exercising decisive control over Hollywood-branded product in such a way that would give either company a competitive advantage over the other. What began as a rivalry between two Japanese 69 corporations, with Hollywood as the combative arena, became a collective emblem of an attempt by Japanese companies to capitalize on a global industry in transition. Their efforts may have had mixed results from the point of view of the companies themselves, but their effect on Hollywood industry overall was an acceleration of its globalization and transnationalization. BLOWBACK AND DEVELOPMENT To some extent, the transnationalization effect of Japanese investment in Hollywood carried over to the Japanese film industry. The keen interest Japanese investors showed in Hollywood reflected, in part, the declining condition of the Japanese studio system at the time. After Nikkatsu declared bankruptcy in 1993, only three major studios remained: Shōchiku, Tōhō, and Tōei. As vertically integrated companies, controlling most of Japanese cinema production, distribution, and exhibition, these three studios, understanding the draw of Hollywood product, had for decades settled into a collusive relationship with the distribution agents of Hollywood and independent American producers. For Japanese filmmakers, a point of self-examination was the extent to which they should break from established commercial formulae in Japan and/or “internationalize” their films in order to compete with Hollywood product. Either position placed many filmmakers in the role of antagonist to the Japanese studio system. Although Hollywood studios and American investors did not have the open access to ownership stakes in Shōchiku, Tōhō, and Tōei that Japanese investors had in foreign production companies, they succeeded in exploiting a weakness in the Japanese studio system—its exhibition infrastructure—to reverse the decline of the theater-going audience in Japan. Two phenomena resulted partly from these Hollywood-related struggles in the 1990s: a “new” form of independent filmmaking in Japan and the construction of multiplex theaters. 70 The Sony and Matsushita deals made the Japanese film industry’s apparent provincialism—oddly mixed with a reverence for Hollywood—a controversial issue. In a Shūkan jiji (Weekly News) story about the Sony/Columbia deal, filmmaker Kumai Kei complained that there must be some kind of great “cultural strategy” (bunka senryaku) at work when his latest film, Death of a Tea Master (Sen-no rikyū: honkakubō ibun, 1989) could not get distribution to major urban theaters in Japan. In the same article, Hara Masato (producer of Kurosawa Akira’s 1985 Ran) expressed his belief that the most important issue for Japanese filmmakers was how to get their films out into the world, and that Hollywood-style filmmaking had become a form of “competitive know-how” (kyōsōryoku nōhau). 110 While the Hollywood film community expressed anxiety about the potential negative impact of Sony’s ownership, claiming among other things that “Japan-made films are meager in their internationality,” 111 Japanese filmmakers denigrated Sony’s knowledge of Hollywood, and of filmmaking in general. Endō Takeo, manager of new business development at Shōchiku, dismissed the Sony deal because Sony management were not “film people,” unlike himself and others at Shōchiku who were seeking co-production partners outside of Japan. 112 Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (Gojira vs. kingu gidoraa, 1991) director Ōmori Kazuki worried that there were few talented people in Japan who had extensive film experience as well as the ability to undertake large Hollywood investments. 113 The tightening of what were already close-knit relationships between major Japanese studios and Hollywood placed many Japanese filmmakers in a confrontational role. Both Kumai and Ōmori made their films for Tōhō studios, but they were both somewhat alienated from the industry’s ties to Hollywood: Kumai because his film could not get exhibited in Japan on the scale of a Hollywood film, and Ōmori who, like Endō, felt that Japanese companies were setting themselves up for disaster by over-investing in 71 Hollywood. The industry had grown and transnationalized to the point where professional identities were challenged: “national” vs. “international,” “studio” vs. “independent,” “film people” vs. “non-film people.” 114 The opening of video and TV markets in Japan created a demand for new product that was not forthcoming from the three major studios. Companies that Shōchiku’s Endō would deride as “non-film” invested in films by independent producers who targeted these “ancillary” markets as a type of first-run exhibition, skirting the studio system altogether. In 1993 the WOWOW network underwrote a short film series called J Movie Wars, which supervising producer Sentō Takenori used as a gateway for young filmmakers eager for work and exposure. 115 Advertising company Hakuhōdō, the co-founder of SōgōVision that had entered into a disastrous arrangement with New World Entertainment (see above), partnered with software company Pony Canyon to finance low-budget independent films in Japan. The projects released under these agreements were overtly trendy, targeting the youth market with an emphasis on fashion and special effects. 116 If these films exported, they were mainly distributed to other countries in Asia, not to the West, though they appeared at international film festivals as representing a “new generation” of Japanese cinema. 117 While filmmakers in Japan wrestled with the notion of “internationalizing” themselves and their films, or with circumventing the studio system, investment opportunities for Hollywood companies in Japan were meager. The Asahi shinbun characterized transnational investment activity between Hollywood and Japan as “one-way traffic” (ippōtsūkō)—yen converting to dollars, not the other way around. But the Japanese market, which outranked all other foreign territories for Hollywood films, 118 was a matter of concern for the studios, because the audience size was shrinking. Unable to invest in the vertically-integrated Japanese studio system at the 72 production level, Hollywood studios entered into agreements with Japanese companies to improve the exhibition infrastructure, which was in a deplorable state. These agreements placed Hollywood—as well as the “non-film” Japanese companies who partnered with them—in a peculiarly competitive role with the Japanese studios. The studio-owned exhibitors in Japan who saturated the market with Hollywood product found themselves in a defensive posture against Hollywood and its Japanese partners to exhibit the very same product. Independent Japanese producers had already attempted to break the exhibition monopoly in Japan. In the late 1980s, Suntory invested in Argo Project, a group of independent producers who purchased two theaters in Japan’s two major cities, Tokyo and Osaka, to exhibit their own films. By 1993, however, high rental fees and low revenues forced the company out of business. 119 The studios maintained their monopoly, but with the number of screens and audience size in decline, improvement of exhibition space became a demand as well as an opportunity for foreign investment. 120 Under U.S. pressure, a new Japanese law went into effect in May 1991 allowing retailers to open a “large store” without having to negotiate for years with local shopkeepers. 121 Supermarket developer Nichii partnered with Time Warner to create Warner Mycal, to build and operate the first multiplexes in Japan. These Western-styled complexes, mainly in rural shopping malls, would show more films more often than the average theater, with wide stadium seating, for a higher price. 122 The first seven multiplexes, which began operations in 1993, were successful enough in rural areas that other U.S. companies joined in: a Paramount- Universal collaborative called United Cinemas International (UCI), 123 and American Multiplex Cinemas (AMC). 124 Conflict only arose between the multiplex companies and the Japanese film industry when multiplexes began opening in major urban areas, where the studios own nearly all the 73 theaters and collect roughly 70% of all Japanese box office revenue. 125 Japanese studio-owned distributors and their partners controlled Hollywood studios’ ability to exhibit Hollywood films in theaters built by Hollywood-Japanese consortia. Only after the multiplexes had proven to be successful in urban areas, despite Japanese studio pressure and interference, did the studios capitulate to distributing Hollywood films to theaters they did not own. 126 Shōchiku was the first Japanese studio to exploit multiplex development for its own gain, partnering with American operator Cinemark International Inc., to build complexes; the first opened in March 1997. 127 The rise of the multiplex in Japan reversed the declining number of its movie screens. In 1993, the number—1,734—was the lowest on record since 1947. By the end of the 1990s, the number rose above 2,000, back to the level of the 1980s, and continued to rise. The attending audience also increased, from a postwar low of 120 million in 1996 to 145 million in 1999. 128 All throughout this period, the number of Japanese films released in theaters did not exceed the number of foreign (mainly Hollywood) films. Multiplex development, therefore, catered to the existing Japanese audience with a preference for Hollywood cinema. It also appealed to new audiences (or to audiences that had given up on moviegoing) by conjoining Hollywood cinema with shopping areas in Western-styled venues. Japanese developers were as invested in Hollywood as the companies that directly funded productions, and the Japanese studios that distributed them in the domestic market. CONCLUSION Even though Japanese investments in Hollywood slowed down in the mid-1990s, that does not mean Hollywood as a community remained fixed in its structure and identity while Japanese investors failed to penetrate it. On the contrary, Hollywood proved itself in this period 74 to be open to supposed “outsiders” who had to buy their way in but nevertheless effected tangible results through the power of their capital. The yen injected into the system, in its various permutations, resulted in a lot of stalled projects and disappointing returns; but it also resulted in a large number of completed films. “Japan” and “Hollywood” in this period had merged to an unprecedented degree. The Hollywood “image” of Japan, therefore, can be argued as partly a self-imaging on the part of Japanese investors and collaborators—or at least an endorsement of Hollywood image-making with a consciousness of a Japanese audience. The results of many, if not most, of Hollywood-Japanese entanglements in the late 1980s and early 1990s did not measure up to the highest long-term expectations. But the rationale and the intent behind the deals speak to the transnational values of Hollywood product. The choice for Japanese investors at that time was to prefer the Hollywood film industry over the Japanese film industry. The investments tightened already-existing connections between the two, blurring Hollywood’s “national” identity to an even greater degree. The goal of the investors was to maintain Hollywood’s dominance of the international film market (including Japan) while placing a great percentage of its financing and management under their own control. The challenge was not to convince Hollywood studios to accept foreign contributions—a prospect that so worried political and cultural observers who were mindful of economic friction between the U.S. and Japan—but to compose a bi-national model of investment that yielded the most profit. Although the many failed investments and disappointing deals may point to oppositions between two loosely defined cultures, Hollywood and Japan, the persistence of Japanese investors and the popularity of Hollywood product in Japan point to greater connection than disconnection. 75 In My Life, when Bob Jones turns on his Sony camcorder and points it at himself so he can speak to his future child from beyond the grave, he is simultaneously in control of technology and submitting to it. As a consumer, Bob chooses Sony. As a producer, he dispenses “universal” (fatherly) wisdom in the hopes that his son will consume it (via Sony hardware). Sony itself, and other Japanese corporate investors, have the same relationship to Hollywood: they are both users and objects, no less so, or more so, than America-based (or European, or Australian-based) conglomerate ownership. The Hollywood brand—connected, of course, to Hollywood-trained labor—is what draws the investor, and the producers of that brand engineer its values to translate across nations and markets. The Japanese studio system in this period was as co-dependent on Hollywood as the divisions of media conglomerates are on each other. Hollywood product—which Japanese investors were increasingly funding and claiming as their own intellectual property—dominated the distribution channels and exhibition space of Japan’s major studios. Filmmakers in Japan took advantage of proliferating non-theatrical markets to loosen their dependency on the studio system, defining themselves not only as independent, but as non-Hollywood-affiliated. This twin-identity of negation—anti-studio, and anti-Hollywood (though many filmmakers owe clear creative debts to Hollywood narrative and style)—contributed to their emergence internationally as a “new Japanese cinema.” Furthermore, Hollywood studios and American-based companies gained advantage in Japan’s exhibition market, with the introduction of multiplex theaters that contributed to a rise in the number of screens and theater attendees. The increase of screen and audience numbers reversed figures that were in decline since the early 1960s. These phenomena are the result of investments, mergers, and acquisitions across industries and national borders that allowed for greater corporate expansion, experimentation, 76 and risk. Endō Takeo’s remark above, that Sony did not have “film people” and so were at a disadvantage with the Columbia purchase, is ironic because at the time Sony bought Columbia, it was already a film company in two senses: it manufactured blank film for recording purposes, and media hardware for playback purposes. Columbia Pictures was a third iteration—a production site of feature films that played, internationally, on consumer hardware. Matsushita was also a film company when it bought MCA, and Toshiba when it invested in Disney. Even Japanese investors who were completely unrelated to film (Suntory, for example, or the various consortia of banks and securities firms) became “film people” upon their purchased entry. All of this activity, far from exemplifying an outsider’s expansion into a foreign culture, was contained within “Hollywood”—just as Sony hardware contains Bob—and served to transnationalize Hollywood as an industry, as a community, and as an idea. In the next chapter, we turn from industry to text. The acceleration of Hollywood globalization via Japanese capital was not simply an industrial backdrop, a political-economic development restricted to trade journals. It was also not restricted to films like My Life, with its direct marketing of Sony hardware, or to films like Solar Crisis, that forefronted elements of international co-production and failed spectacularly in the international marketplace. Japan, Japanese aggression, and U.S.-Japan relations were potent subjects in films of the time that considered the impact of transnational encounters, with World War II as a controlling metaphor. The same ambivalence marking the collaborations of Hollywood and Japanese investors is clearly visible in the “collaboration zones” of the films analyzed below. 77 CHAPTER 2 NOTES 1 Terry Ogisu, “Japanese Conglomerate Seeks Rising Presence in Hollywood Prod’n Scene,” Variety, June 15, 1977, 64. 2 The most notorious example of alarmism in mass media was the October 9, 1989, cover of Newsweek that featured the Columbia “lady” logo dressed in kimono, and the headline “Japan Invades Hollywood.” William M. Kunz considered this as “nothing short of cultural warfare” in 2007, but that was a common criticism of the time. NPR journalist John McChesney suggested two reasons for the hyperbole: 1) the area was understaffed, with NBC, CBS, ABC, and NPR having only one full-time correspondent in either Tokyo or Asia, and The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times only three each in Tokyo; and 2) business stories from Japan had to sound interesting to the American readership, so the few reporters in the area framed events in terms of conflict—in this case, making Japan the new “bad guy” to replace the Soviet Union. William M. Kunz, Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007); and John McChesney, “Asia in the Media: Gateway to the Pacific Rim: Information Resources for the 21 st Century,” Minutes of the 122 nd Annual Meeting. Honolulu, HI, May 1993, eds. C. Brigid Welch and Lallie Dawson Leighton (Princeton: Association of Research Libraries, 1993). Critiques of the “cultural warfare”-styled coverage of the deals at that time include Hobart Rowen, “Japanophobia an Easy Cop-Out,” Washington Post, Oct. 1, 1989; and Ellis Cose, “Press: Yellow-Peril Journalism,” Time, November 27, 1989. The Japanese press was not immune to its own form of hyperbole, along the same lines: a 1991 issue of Baado framed Japanese investments as a “counterattack” (gyakushū) against a Hollywood system that previously had fleeced investment groups in the late 1980s. See Fukuwara Kiyoshi, “Hariuddo ni kazaana wo akero!” [Open a vent in Hollywood!] Baado 1(7), September 9, 1991, 100-103. Much of the newspaper coverage in Japan reacted to the American press coverage in tones of bemusement or worry. Peter W. Oehlkers analyzed this as a “news echo,” where one country’s framing of the news impacts another country’s framing of the same news item. Japanese press “echoed” the hyperbolic coverage in American media, which was not representative of all coverage. See Peter W. Oehlkers, “Mediating News: The ‘International Media Echo’ and Symbolic International Relations,” in The Global Dynamics of News: Studies of International News Coverage and News Agendas, eds. Abbas Malek and Anandam P. Kavoori (Stamford: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 2000), 31-53. 3 A detailed account of the Universal vs. Sony case is James Lardner’s Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1987). 4 Tom Schatz, “The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, eds. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2008), 24. 5 In 1985, 319 Japanese films were released in Japan, compared to 264 foreign films. In 1990, these figures reversed dramatically: 239 Japanese films vs. 465 foreign films. These numbers closed slightly in 1995, with 289 Japanese films and 321 foreign films released, but the trend of foreign films over domestic films remained, and would so until 2006. Figures provided by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, Inc. (EIRIN), cited in Nihon eiga no kokusai bijinesu [International Business of Japanese Film] (Tokyo: Kinema junpō Sha Co., Ltd., 2009), 182-183. As Yoshiharu Tezuka points out, not all the “foreign” titles imported into Japan during the 1980s were Hollywood products, but a mix of Hollywood, European art-house films, and American independent productions. Tezuka sees the European composition of many of the imports as a symptom of a sort of Japanese cultural elitism that ranked European works higher in terms of “foreign” value, unlike American products that Japan had already appropriated as “low” culture. See Yoshiharu Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworkers’ Journeys (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 81. 6 In the summer of 1990, the Nippon keizai shinbun company began a course in Tokyo on investing in American film companies. Many electronic firms and TV companies, trading companies, and financiers took the course in a “rush,” (sattō) partly due to the increased demand in Japan for films on video and satellite. Yamaguchi Hiroko, “Matsushita ga MCA wobaishū” [Matsushita buys MCA], Asahi shinbun, weekly edition, Dec. 18, 1990, 27. See also Charles Fleming, “The Japanese Way: Slow and steady,” L.A. Herald-Examiner, Jan. 23, 1989. 78 7 Barbara Rudolph, “Hollywood or Bust,” Time, September 4, 1989. 8 Carl Bernstein, “The Leisure Empire,” Time, December 24, 1990. 9 Paul Farhi, “Foreigners Can’t Replicate U.S. Entertainment Success, So They Buy It,” The Washington Post, Nov 5, 1989. 10 Justin Wyatt explores the market-driven construction of contemporary Hollywood films in High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 11 Richard Stevenson, “In Hollywood, Big Just Gets Bigger,” New York Times, Oct. 14, 1990. 12 Jeanie Kasindorf, “Payback Time,” New York, January 27, 1992, 34-40. 13 According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the average U.S. admission fee rose from $3.55 in 1985 to $4.23 in 1990. The number of admissions (ticket purchases) also rose, more modestly, from 1.056 billion in 1985 to 1.188 billion in 1990. 14 Garth Alexander, “Japanese Take Exception to Katzenberg Remarks,” Variety, Feb. 19, 1991. 15 Jim Hardiman, “Japan Sends More Top Executives With Great Yen For U.S. Pictures,” Variety, Feb. 25, 1987. 16 Will Tusher, “Japan Opens Door For Hollywood,” Variety, Sept. 29, 1988. 17 Frank Segers, “Desperately Seeking Software,” Variety, Sept. 17, 1990. 18 Karen Regelman, “Sub Rising for Japan Satcaster,” Daily Variety, May 6, 1994. 19 Garth Alexander, “Japan beaming over satellite boom,” Daily Variety, Apr. 27, 1992, 16. 20 Karen Regelman, “20 th Intl, Toei ink output deal,” Daily Variety, July 12, 1993, 14. 21 Colin Nickerson, “Time Warner gets Japanese as partners,” Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 1991; and John Greenwald, “A $1 Billion Pacific Alliance,” Time, November 11, 1991. 22 Garth Alexander, “Toshiba Cryptic on TWI Rumors.” Variety, May 16, 1991; and David E. Sanger, “Toshiba Rewrites a Hollywood Script,” New York Times, Oct. 9, 1991. 23 “H’Wood-Japanese Alliance Bashed by House Chair,” Variety, Oct. 4, 1991. 24 “Japanese and Yank Indie Pics Due for Trans-Pacific Debuts,” Variety, Mar. 7, 1984. 25 The Culkin-starred Home Alone (1990), a smash hit in Japan, was entirely funded by Japanese for 20 th Century Fox under the management of British TV and film producer John Heyman. See Terry Ilott and Garth Alexander, “The Yen Stops Here,” Variety, July 8, 1991. 26 Charlotte Wolter, “Going Hollywood: The Japanese Financial Invasion,” Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 26, 1989. 27 Nina J. Easton, “Was It the Politics? Was It the Script? Nope, the Rollerblades Won Them Over,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 1, 1991. 28 Frank Segers, “Hollywood and Japan Continue Their Strange and Wondrous Courtship,” Variety, Mar. 8, 1989. 29 See Fleming (1989). 79 30 Judy Brennan, “MGM expected to buy equity stake in Carolco,” Daily Variety, Dec. 21, 1992, 1. Carolco and MGM’s extensive credit problems with Crédit Lyonnais are part of the reason the newly-formed European Union was an unattractive market opportunity for Japanese investors. See Judy Brennan, “Film funding’s day in sun is eclipsed,” Daily Variety, Mar. 3, 1993. 31 Charles Fleming, “Mitsubishi buys Orion pix for Japan TV,” Daily Variety, Oct. 26, 1992, 1. 32 See Brennan (1993). Contemporary Hollywood’s creative accounting practices that tended to shut out investors and talent contracted to receive “net profits” are examined in Pierce O’Donnell and Dennis McDougal’s Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 33 Claudia Eller and John Evan Frook. “Pressman Huddling with WB.,” Daily Variety, Apr. 27, 1992, 1. 34 Don Groves and Garth Alexander, “Nippon Herald joins Cameron,” Variety, June 1, 1992; and Michael Williams, “Milchan, Nippon Pact,” Daily Variety, May 24, 1995, 10. In 1993, Nippon Herald sued New Regency in a Japanese court, accusing the company of a breach of contract for failing to make The Crowded Room. Details of the lawsuit can be found athttp://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1069442.html. 35 AnneThompson, “When in Hollywood…Do as the Japanese do,” L.A. Weekly, Mar. 1, 1991. 36 Japanese producers also attached themselves to certain directors, who made films as one-offs for the investors. Examples include Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989, financed by JVC), and Carroll Ballard’s Wind (1992, produced by Yamamoto Mata, who also produced Paul Schrader’s 1985 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters). Both films were shot on location, in America and Australia, respectively, with a largely American cast and crew. 37 David Ehrenstein, “Cintex Probes Japan-US Showbiz Ties,” Variety, Sept. 26, 1989. 38 Puttnam’s short and disastrous tenure at Columbia in 1986 arguably contributed to Columbia’s dwindling market share and increased debt in the mid-80s, compounding Sony’s expense during its 1989 takeover. See Charles Kipps, Out of Focus: Power, Pride, and Prejudice—David Puttnam in Hollywood (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1989). 39 Richard W. Stevenson, “Japanese Put Up $100 Million to Back Films in Hollywood,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 1989. 40 Lawrence Gordon, “L.A. genchi intabyū,” [L.A. interview], Baado 1(7), September 9, 1991, 104-105. 41 Garth Alexander, “Japanese investors won’t abandon H’Wood,” Daily Variety, Aug. 31, 1992, 7. 42 Kathleen O’Steen, “Gordon leaves Largo,” Daily Variety, Jan. 13, 1994. 43 Bernard Weinraub, “Chief Quits Film Venture Financed by Japanese,” New York Times, Jan. 13, 1994. 44 Adam Sandler, “Elson Joins Largo as Exec VP,” Daily Variety, Mar. 28, 1994, 8. 45 Rex Weiner, “Largo taps Bradley VP acquisitions,” Daily Variety, Dec. 7, 1994, 9. 46 Al Delugach, “Melnick Agrees to Merge With Carolco for $3 Million in Stock,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 2, 1987. 47 While head of Columbia in the late 1970s, Begelman forged checks and was fired after protracted infighting among Columbia board members. See David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (New York; William Morrow & Co., 1982). 48 “Next Largo?”Variety, July 13, 1992. 80 49 Mark Schilling, “JSB enters Hollywood co-production,” Screen International, July 17, 1992. 50 John Evan Frook and Judy Brennan, “IndieProd pacts with JSB, TriStar for distrib'n, prod'n,” Variety, Dec. 13, 1992. 51 Patricia Saperstein, “IndieProd finds freedom with foreign investors,” Daily Variety, May 6, 1994. 52 For budget and profit figures on both films, see www.boxofficemojo.com. 53 Frank Segers, “Japan Film Co., Pressman Team For Co-Prod’ns,” Variety, Feb. 28, 1989. 54 Naked Lunch was co-produced by another Japanese company, Nippon Film Development and Finance (NDF), established in 1989 by Iseki Satoru to raise capital for films produced outside of Japan. Other films co-produced by NDF in this period were Howards End and The Crying Game (both 1992). In early 1992, NDF received government approval to list a film commodity fund on the Tokyo futures market, which according to Variety was “the first time such a fund has ever been listed anywhere in the world.” See Garth Alexander (Sept 21, 1992). Iseki was an outspoken figure on the issue of Japanese-American co-productions. At a 1991 American Film Market panel entitled “Challenging the Status Quo: New Waves in the Japanese Film Industry,” Iseki criticized the lack of returns for Japanese investors on the Hollywood films they helped to produce. A main problem was the long-form Hollywood- style contract, which for Iseki “speaks to a great deal of distrust.” Also problematic was the idea of adjusted gross income, which was supposed to represent net profits but was too frequently an under-estimated “charade” designed to lower or even eliminate payouts to investors. See Judy Brennan, “Iseki Throws Cold Water on East-West Film Links,” Variety, Mar. 6, 1991. 55 Don Groves, “Liquidation on agenda for U.K.'s Film Trustees,” Variety, Oct. 11, 1992. 56 Don Groves and Garth Alexander, “Lightstorm Entering Japan,” Daily Variety, May 28, 1992, 3. 57 Nippon Herald withheld $3 million from True Lies profits for the same reason it had sued New Regency: that Lightstorm allegedly failed to deliver films that were promised. See Dana Harris, “AFMA rules for Lightstorm,” Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 5, 1998, 8. 58 “Sanrio Films in Japan & U.S.,” Variety, May 4, 1977. 59 Ogisu, 64. 60 Tōei Video was a co-producer of Ichise’s U.S.-located films, which were part of a special series of low-budget, direct-to-video titles called “V America.” 61 Ichise Takashige, Hariuddo de Kate! [Success in Hollywood!] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2006). This career autobiography provides more detail about Ichise’s production experience in California in the early 1990s, which he describes as “vital” (93) to his undertaking a slew of American-Japanese remakes of his Japan-produced horror films Ringu (1998) and Ju-on (2000). 62 Outlaw Productions had developed 1992’s Japan-themed film for Universal, Mr. Baseball; see Chapter 5. 63 Christian Moerk and Suzan Ayscough, “Outlaw nabs WB/Fuji deal,” Daily Variety, May 24, 1993, 1. 64 Alan Citron, “Fujisankei to Produce Its Own Films in the U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 18, 1991. 65 In 2008 Fujisankei California Entertainment changed its name to Fuji Entertainment America, Inc., and has yet to produce a feature film. Its major activities appear to be acquiring rights to U.S.-based content for the benefit of the parent company, Fuji Media Holdings. 66 Nina J. Easton, “Mr. Okamoto Goes to Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 11, 1989. 81 67 Charles Fleming, “JVC Won’t Be the First Japanese Firm in Hollywood,” L.A. Herald-Examiner, Aug. 21, 1989. 68 Kirk Honeycutt, “Carradine Film Sizes Up ‘Area’,” Hollywood Reporter, Apr. 12, 1995. 69 Kathleen O’Steen, “U, Shochiku join up in a unique pic pact,” Daily Variety, Dec. 7, 1993, 1. Shōchiku executive vice president Okuyama Kazuyoshi was in charge of the studio’s international business division, and pursued a five- year plan of international co-production to gain access to overseas talent and an education in Hollywood filmmaking. Okuyama’s mandate was to help Shōchiku transform itself into a company that produced more “international-quality films.” Films he produced at that time include Okamoto Kihachi’s East Meets West (1995, shot in New Mexico) and Harada Masato’s Rowing Through (1996, based on David Halberstam’s 1985 book The Amateurs, and co-financed by Aska Film Productions of Montreal). 70 Patrick Frater, “Shochiku pacts for ‘Handkerchief’,” Variety, Feb. 8, 2007. Eventually shot in 2007 in a post- Katrina New Orleans, and starring William Hurt and Kristen Stewart, The Yellow Handkerchief did not have a theatrical release in the U.S. or Japan (where it was distributed by Shōchiku) until 2010. 71 Karen Kaplan, “The Twain Are About to Meet: Japanese Producer Looks to American Studios for Keys to Success,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1995. 72 “Lost & Found,” Variety, July 13, 1992. 73 Aljean Harmetz, “Japanese Invest in 2 Hollywood Productions,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1989. 74 Bill Hersey, “Japanese favor overseas locale,” Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 6, 1990. 75 “Eiga bijinesu,” [Film business] Asahi Shinbun, Sept. 27, 1990, evening edition, 1. 76 “Lost & Found.” 77 Haunted by its loss to Matsushita in the Betamax/VHS “format war” of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sony took advantage of the Black Monday market collapse (October 20, 1987) to buy CBS Records for $2 billion from a reluctant William Paley, chairman of CBS. See Peter J. Boyer, “Sony and CBS Records: What a Romance!” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1988. Sony was developing a special digital audio tape format (DAT) for what was soon to become another format war for digital music, and therefore sought out a major record label to bundle popular music with its new technology. 78 Richard W. Stevenson (October 14, 1990). 79 “Who ya gonna call? (the merger of Sony and Columbia),” Economist, September 30, 1989. 80 John Schwartz et al, “Japan Goes Hollywood,” Newsweek, October 9, 1989. 81 Geraldine Fabrikant, “Hollywood’s Next Hot Property,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 1989. 82 Richard W. Stevenson, “The Deal for MCA; Move Reflects a Belief in Role of Sheer Size,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1990. 83 Janice Castro, et al, “Let Us Entertain You,” Time, December 10, 1990. 84 “Special Report: Foreign Owners from Walkman to Showman,” Time, October 9, 1989. 85 Paul Farhi, “Matsushita Set to Announce MCA Deal; Owner of Universal Pictures Expected to Be Bought for $7 Billion,” Washington Post, Nov. 26, 1990. 82 86 Gordon McKibben, “Japan’s Matsushita Buys MCA for $6.6B,” Boston Globe, Nov. 27, 1990. 87 “Sony’s buying Columbia fits penchant for things American,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 8, 1989. 88 Morita’s two major mistakes were announcing the Sony-Columbia deal at a September 27 Tokyo news conference for Japanese reporters only, and publishing a book co-authored with Tokyo politician Ishihara Shintarō, The Japan That Can Say No (“No” to ieru nihon, Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1989). The awkwardness of the exclusionary image of the Japanese-only news conference led to Morita’s hosting a special press conference and dinner for foreign journalists on October 3 at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters. See Fred Hiatt, “Sony Chairman Seeks to Send Friendly Signals to U.S. on Columbia Deal,” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 1989. One day earlier, at yet another Tokyo press conference, Morita apologized for his involvement in The Japan That Can Say No, half of which was a collection of essays by Morita outlining his criticisms of American industry and economic practices; in the other half, Ishihara argued for a Japan that used its own technology as a weapon of negotiation against the United States. Although the official 1991 English translation of the book did not include Morita’s essays, enough copies of the original version had circulated around Washington and Hollywood to make his low opinion of America’s lax manufacturing and short-sighted investment habits a semi-characterization of Sony’s corporate philosophy. See James Flanigan, “Morita Book May Hinder U.S. Japanese Relations,” Journal Record, Oct. 19, 1989. Matsushita president Tanii Akio’s PR problem was an ambiguity in the phrasing of his answers to a sensitive series of questions at a November 26, 1990, press conference at Matsushita’s Osaka headquarters. When asked if he would object to a Universal film that portrayed the Japanese in a negative light, Tanii responded through an interpreter: “I believe this acquisition will improve U.S.-Japan relations, so I don’t think that a Japan-bashing movie would come out of MCA.” See Paul Farhi, “Matsushita to Acquire MCA for $7.5 Billion; Deal Is Largest Japanese Buyout of U.S. Firm,” Washington Post, Nov. 27, 1990. 89 David E. Sanger, “Sony Has High Hopes for Columbia Pictures.” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1989. 90 David E. Sanger, “Matsushita Shifts Stance On MCA,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1990. 91 “’Tama utta kata mo mondai’ korombia baishū de morita sonii kaichō, bei ni hanron,” [‘Soul-selling problem’ – Sony president Morita’s reply to the U.S. regarding Columbia purchase] Asahi shinbun, Oct. 12, 1989, morning edition. 11. 92 Steven R. Weisman, “Reagan Sees Virtue in Sale of Studio to Sony,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1989. 93 Karl Schoenberger, “Reagan’s Rosy View of Japanese Films,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1989. 94 Kara Swisher, “Reagan; Sorry, Hollywood; After Sony ‘Slip,’ and Apology to U.S. TV Execs,” Washington Post, Nov. 9, 1989. 95 In a dramatic rhetorical reversal from its “invasion” angle of October 1989, Newsweek reported mismanagement at Sony/Columbia in an October 14, 1991, article titled “Sweet Smell of Excess.” The article quoted one Hollywood executive on Columbia’s box office bombs: “this is our revenge for Pearl Harbor.” Additional accounts of Columbia’s irresponsibility at the expense of a seemingly hapless Sony are Bill Emmott, “How Japan Got Mugged in Hollywood,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 1993; Barbara Rudolph et al, “So Many Dreams So Many Losses,” Time, November 28, 1994; and Phil Reeves, “Welcome to Tinseltown, Mr. Morita,” Independent (London), April 10, 1994. 96 Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 256. 97 Sydney Finkelstein, “Why Smart Executives Fail: Four Case Histories of How People Learn the Wrong Lessons From History,” Business History 48, no. 2 (April 2006), 153-170. 98 Terry Pristin, “Columbia Move on Arnold’s Movie Raises Budget Issue,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1993. The $18 million-budgeted My Life, which grossed $28 million in the U.S., was a minor exception. 83 99 Marc Peyser, “Sony Gets a Brand New Action Hero,” Newsweek, September 12, 1994. 100 John Nathan, Sony: A Private Life (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001), 238. 101 Christopher Reed and Kevin Rafferty, “Dangerous Yen for Hollywood,” Guardian, Dec. 1, 1994. 102 Matsuzaka, Takeshi, “’Post-Morita’ Sony; Collective leadership,” Nikkei Weekly, Jan. 24, 1994. 103 Andrew Pollack, “A Stunning Leap to the Top at Sony,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1995; and John Greenwald et al, “Goodbye to a Prodigal Son,” Time, December 18, 1995. 104 Inoue, Yasuhiro, “Hard and Soft Mega-Media Conglomeration: Has Sony Strategy Created Synergies?” Keio Communication Review, No. 25 (2003), 39-56. 105 Beth Laski, “Matsushita: No MCA sale,” Daily Variety, Oct. 31, 1994, 1. 106 Andrew Pollack, “Matsushita Tells Why It Decided to Abandon Hollywood,” New York Times, Apr. 12, 1995. 107 “Japan’s fallible firms,” Economist, February 27, 1993. 108 James Sterngold, “Hollywood 1, Japanese 0,” New York Times, Apr. 16, 1995. 109 Gwen Robinson, “MCA Sale Written Off at $1.9 Bil,” Daily Variety, May 25, 1995, 1. 110 Murakawa Hide, “Sonii no beieiga kaisha baishū ga nihon eigakai ni tōjita hamon” [Sony’s American film company acquisition caused sensation in Japanese film world], Shūkan jiji [Weekly News] 31, no. 42 (November 4, 1989), 28-32. 111 “Sonii, beieiga kaisha baishū no hamon” [Sony, Ripple-Effect of American Film Company Purchase], Asahi shinbun, Oct. 16, 1989, morning edition, 9. Koichi Iwabuchi argues that the Sony and Matsushita deals “can be seen as a confirmation…of the second- rate ability” of Japan as a software producer, and that Japan’s “cultural influence and presence in the world” was overshadowed (in distorted fashion) by its economic power. See Iwabuchi, 37. Kakii Michihiro makes a similar point when he argues that Japan had no strategy at the time for exporting its culture, so its presence as an economic power was well known to outsiders, but not its culture. See Kakii, 45. Their arguments are not parallel, but somewhat connected: Iwabuchi sees Japanese companies as strengthening “American cultural hegemony” (37) while Kakii blames cultural “misunderstandings” (gokai, 47) for the perpetuation of Japanese stereotypes in Hollywood films. 112 Frank Segers, “Sony Buyout a Yawner to Nippon Film Honchos,” Variety, Oct 18, 1989. 113 “Hashiwatashi nayami wa ‘sofuto jin’ fusoku” [Shortage of “software people” a mediation problem], Asahi shinbun, Nov. 28, 1991, morning edition, 8. 114 See Ko, 2-3, for a discussion of Japan’s contemporary cinematic “multiculturalism.” Films highlighting the experience of foreigners in Japan in this time period—tangential to this study but worthy of note—Include Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s World Apartment Horror (1989) and Sai Yōichi’s All Under the Moon (Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru, 1993). 115 Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2005), 72. 116 Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (New York: Kodansha America, 2005), 216-217. 84 117 Aaron Gerow refers to the group of young filmmakers who emerged internationally in the 1990s as the “Festival Generation.” See “Recognizing ‘Others’ in a New Japanese Cinema,”Japan Foundation Newsletter, 14:2 (January 2002). Sentō Takenori worked as producer for several of them, including Nakata Hideo (Joyū-rei, aka Don’t Look Up, 1996) Aoyama Shinji (Helpless, 1996) and Sentō’s wife, Kawase Naomi (Suzaku, 1996). Sentō also produced a film that was shot in the U.S., Yasuda Takuo’s Artful Dodgers (aka Sleepy Heads, 1996). This group of filmmakers and others outside of the studio system garnered international fame through festivals and video distribution. Ironically, they have come to represent “contemporary Japanese cinema” more so outside of Japan than many of the studio-based filmmakers. 118 “Beikoku no kokoro wo yomiayamatta sonii” [Sony misread American mentality], Asahi shinbun, Oct. 5, 1989, morning edition, p. 5. The Japanese film market represented a rare trade surplus for the U.S. in the early 1990s. Japanese audiences gave $237 million to Hollywood major studios in 1990, up 17% over 1989. Independent studios got an additional $150 million. See Fred Hift, “What did Japan do to deserve such ingratitude?” Video Age International, April 1, 1992. 119 Mark Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film (New York: Weatherhill, 1999), 9. 120 A November 1991, article in Shūkan tōyō keisei (Weekly Asian Finance) represented demand for better sound and picture in Japanese theaters, to try and draw audiences back into theaters as the video market expanded. See Akimoto Keiichi, “Hariuddo ni takarareru nihon no kane” [Collecting Japanese money in Hollywood], Shūkan tōyō keisai [Weekly Asian Finance.] no. 5036, November 30, 1991, 60-66. 121 David E. Sanger, “A Time Warner Venture in Japan,” New York Times, May 10, 1991. 122 Yumiko Ono, “Time Warner, Nichii Establish Venture to Build Multiplex Theaters in Japan,” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 1991. 123 UCI partnered with Fujita Den, the founder of McDonald’s Japan, in 1997 to develop 20 multiplexes that by the year 2000 would help push the number of screens to over 2,500. Jon Herskovitz, “UCI Opens Door to Japan,” Daily Variety, May 15, 1997, 8. 124 Gwen Robinson, “Yen for Multiplexes,” Daily Variety, Mar. 2, 1995, 12. 125 Michelle Magee, “Japan Gets U.S. Exhibs,” Daily Variety, Jan. 26, 1996, 29. 126 AMC’s Fukuoka theater, the Canal City 13, was a major test case. After opening in 1996, it was unable to show first-run Hollywood films due to pressure from Japanese studio-owned exhibitors. Don Groves, “Japan Flexes Plexes,” Daily Variety, Jan. 31, 1997. Once Hollywood product was allowed in, attendance grew 40% at the complex in one year, while regular theaters in Fukuoka saw their attendance drop 30% in the same time period. See “Fukuoka, eigakan sensō” [Fukuoka, Movie Theater Wars], Yomiuri shinbun, Mar. 31, 1997, evening edition, A11. 127 Jon Herskovitz, “Shochiku, Cinemark bow first plex,” Daily Variety, Mar. 25, 1997, 40. Despite a management coup at Shōchiku the following year that resulted in the ousting of its president, Okuyama Toru, and a dissolution of its partnership with Cinemark, the studio in effect bought out Cinemark and retained a 53% ownership stake in the multiplex company, which was renamed Shochiku Multiplex Theatres. Jon Herskovitz, “Report: Shochiku to ax Cinemark partnership,” Variety, Mar. 30, 1998, and Mark Schilling, “Shochiku, Cinemark fall out over Japan multiplex venture,” Screen International, April 3, 1998. 128 EIRIN. See n.5. 85 CHAPTER 3. BOYS ON BICYCLES: THE ANTAGONISM OF HISTORY IN EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987) AND THE LAST EMPEROR (1987) “This is the right way to go back to Shanghai, inside a film.” — J.G. Ballard 1 The final image of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) appears after the closing credits: a fade-in, fade-out of the logo for Amblin’ Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company. The logo isolates an image from Spielberg’s E.T. (1982): the film’s lead character, the boy Elliott, rides a bicycle with his alien friend E.T., who is sitting in a basket between the handlebars. E.T.’s extraterrestrial powers have levitated and propelled the two of them, and the bicycle, into the night sky. Spinning its wheels in the air, the bicycle keeps Elliott secure in his seat as he launches into the realm of fantasy. Viewers of the film had the fleeting sensation of sharing Elliot’s mid-air vantage point on the ground below, and the image of the boy and the alien in mid-flight, backlit by a low-hanging full moon, stamped itself as a Spielberg trademark and company brand. The isolation of E.T.’s flying-bike image in the Amblin’ logo, however, omits the action following—the awkward crash-landing. In the film, the hard impact of bicycle wheels on country terrain has a comical tone. Of course Elliot, and the audience, could not stay up there forever. Elliot’s gentle refusal of E.T.’s invitation to join him on a departing spaceship at the end of the film signals maturity. He chooses home over adventure. The flying bicycle gave him acceleration, freedom, a momentary escape from natural laws. But such moments, the film suggests, cannot last. To over-indulge in imaginative flight, to desire escape to the point of abandonment of home and family—like Elliot’s absent father, an adulterer—is on some level a shameful betrayal. 86 This fleeting image of an occupied bicycle in midflight, that grants a momentary sensation of escape, re-appears in Empire of the Sun, and in a related film of the same year, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. These two films echo E.T.’s judgment of the limits of imagination. In each film a boy rides a bicycle not only to get somewhere fast but to deny restrictive authority. Jim, the Shanghai-born British youth of Empire, and Pu yi, the Manchurian boy raised as a divinity in Emperor, spend their formative years in a series of gated communities. The films are clear in their denunciation of the colonial and imperial forces that have isolated these two foreigners in a weakened Chinese state. However, in their adoption of the boys’ limited, and warped, perspectives, the films arrange historical events to dramatize the poignancy of the boys’ ignorance or rejection of them. When Jim (Christian Bale) rides his bike through the streets of occupied Shanghai, dodging tanks and Chinese assailants, or when Pu yi (Tao Wu) pedals out of range of his eunuch guardians in Peking’s Forbidden City, their desire for escape takes on epic, and ironic, dimensions. They have immediate, and somewhat parallel, needs—Jim has lost his parents and has nothing to eat, and Pu yi is desperate to see his dead mother outside the City walls—but their obstacles are scaled beyond their knowledge, beyond even their desire to know. History (that is, a concentrated series of historical events) has made their desires impossible to fulfill, but history is what neither boy understands or accepts. Their bursts of motion—fleeing and pursuing, on bikes and on foot—are flights of fancy, denial, and near- dementia. Unlike Elliot, these boys are slow to learn the value of solid ground. The longer they persist in imaginative flight, the more they regret when the controlling forces of their environment bear down and demand an accounting or punishment. 2 In the previous chapter, we saw ambivalence in public reactions to Japanese investment activity in Hollywood in the 1980s. While Hollywood producers mainly welcomed the 87 investments, political commentators and Japanese filmmakers spoke out against it as a threat to what they valued in their respective national cultures. Japanese investors collaborated with Hollywood for what appeared to be purely economic gain. In Empire and Emperor we see a similar ambivalence in reaction to Japanese military aggression. As prisoners, Jim and Pu yi are at the mercy of the Japanese, and consider them, in technical terms, as enemies. But the two characters embrace their captors for enabling a more powerful—and illusory—sense of privilege as prisoners. Although born in China, Jim and Pu yi are alienated from common Chinese citizenry. British colonial rule and Manchurian royalism have placed the two characters above Chinese status. When the Japanese invade, Jim and Pu yi’s identities offer protection, and even more: the opportunity to lord over fellow prisoners. Collaboration in Empire and Emperor is a partial surrender to Japanese, and also an exploitation of them as enabling childish fantasies. With Japanese assistance, Jim and Pu yi can continue to live in a dream world of supernatural power, projecting heroic images of themselves as if living out a Hollywood adventure film. In both Empire and Emperor, Japan threatens, but never quite destroys, the lives of the lead male characters. As outsiders possessing some symbolic value to the Japanese—Jim as a foreign prisoner, Pu yi as rubber-stamper of Japan-dictated policy in Manchukuo 3 —the characters elude death, only to suffer a fragmentation of identity and national allegiance. Their desire for escape is a desire for a return to pre-war conditions, when they indulged in childhood fantasy. Ironically, in their entrapment by the Japanese, the maturing boys occupy spaces of regression. Their movements and desires curtailed, they survive by following orders; any successful resistance has only temporary effect. And yet the more isolated and restricted the environment, the grander their imaginations. Grounded by the occupying Japanese army, the boys imagine themselves in flight: Jim in his worship of fighter planes, Pu yi in his coronation as 88 “Emperor” of Manchukuo. Their enemy is not Japan, but the break in the continuity of their fantasy-rich childhoods that Japan imposes. So attached are Jim and Pu yi to childhood privilege that glimmers of knowledge of the changing world outside are cause for anxiety; so eager are they to cling to the safety of home that they trust the Japanese as protectors, fearing the end of the war as a threat to structures that enclose them and keep them “safe.” Spielberg and Bertolucci frame historical change, represented by the Japanese, as the obstacle to Jim and Pu yi’s desire for continuity. The characters’ perspective, from within “historical” enclosures, is a yearning for history’s end—for a world perpetually indulgent to childhood whim. Points of tension arrive at points of education: gaining knowledge, or questioning one’s own naiveté, is tantamount to an admittance of overwhelming guilt, or an obliteration of self. Jim and Pu yi maintain their childhood selves through ignorance or through conscious, or unconscious, misinterpretation of historical events as they occur. Narrative structures diverge between the films: Empire tells its story in linear chronological order, with an intensifying elision of events as the story progresses, ending with a family reunion; Emperor adopts the flashback structure of a confession, and then leaps forward to capture crucial events near the end of Pu yi’s life. Another important distinction between the films is the general thrust of action: Jim throughout Empire is constantly in motion, leapfrogging between locations and characters, whereas Pu yi is a much more passive figure, his actions almost completely overdetermined. At every stage of both films, however, the continuity of desire for a role outside history prevails. So what, then, is Japan’s role? As a nation, it is subject to Jim and Pu yi’s coming-of-age narrative, a product of carefully rendered non-Japanese points of view. With brief but notable exceptions, the films make no attempt to explain the motives or construct a subjectivity of the 89 Japanese, who appear as if summoned by historical inevitability. Without the Japanese, there would be no story to tell, no antagonist for Jim or Pu yi to observe and react to. But Japanese intentions are unexplored; we witness their actions as following a grand unspoken design. Spielberg and Bertolucci share an admiration of Japanese strength, which attracts their young protagonists, to the point where Japan’s surrender in 1945 constitutes a traumatic loss for Jim and Pu yi. At the same time, the inevitability of Japan’s loss to the Allied Powers heightens the near-absurdity, or madness, of Jim and Pu yi’s ambivalence. We know, of course, what Jim and Pu yi do not know, and as they scramble and shuffle their allegiances to one dominant power or another, we are aware of the historical forces that are dictating their resistance, and their futures. Japan’s significance in both films is more psychological than historical; it represents history as antagonist. THE GILDED JAPANESE CAGE At first glance, Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor have obvious connections: two films on modern Chinese historical subjects, directed by Westerners, and released within weeks of each other at the end of 1987. The films cost around the same amount, $30 million for Empire, and $25 million for Emperor, and despite their different sources of funding—Empire produced by Amblin’ for Warner Bros., Emperor by a consortium of European merchant banks—they both earned the cooperation of the Chinese government and the Chinese film industry, although none of the financing derived from China. Several reviewers commented on these clear similarities, especially when reviewing Empire, which came out in December 1987 shortly after Emperor. But critical comparisons stopped short of detailed exploration, and subsequent scholarly articles treated the films as separate works. 4 There are several distinctions between the films, as already 90 stated above in terms of their divergent narrative structuring and thrust of action, but the films’ similar depictions of history as antagonist, in the form of Japanese invasion of China, warrants detailed discussion. While Japan represents an aggressive force that seeks domination of China, if not the world, the selective point of view in both films—of a maturing, imaginative child— ironizes Japan’s “historical” role. Besides Japan’s antagonistic role in both films, one of their strongest connections resides in the dubious historical verisimilitude of their source material: J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) and Pu yi’s autobiography From Emperor to Citizen (1966, originally published under the title My Half-life), co-written by Party publishing editor Li Wenda. Both books, based on actual events, serve as a kind of reverse hagiography. They self- incriminate rather than self-glorify, an intention that may promise greater truth than fiction, but in this case actually produces greater doubt than trust in their narrative sources, who are pre- branded with public knowledge of their psychological suffering under Japanese occupation. (In that sense, the authors’ notoriety makes their self-rebuke a subtle form of self-glorification.) Neither book offers a revelation of events, only the authors’ personal spin on those events. As studies of historical myopia, they carry a form of epic anti-history that appealed strongly to Spielberg and Bertolucci, whose exaggerations, fixations, and visual tropes build upon and promote the mythologies of the films’ nonfiction sources. The blatant subjectivity of Ballard and Pu yi’s accounts give rein to the filmmakers’ anti-historical construction of story events. 5 While the plots, characterizations, and styles of both films construct a point of view hostile to historical change, the films themselves occupy a significant role in the history of transnational cinema of Hollywood and Japan. Their mutual context of engagement with the Chinese government and film industry of the mid-1980s is also relevant. As international 91 productions, filming in several countries including China (though not including Japan), and as co-productions engaging talent and resources from the United States, Europe, and Asia, both films illustrate the conditions and limits of Hollywood and European transnational filmmaking of the time, and attempt to advance the practice by gaining unprecedented cooperation with China. As a case study of Japan’s prominent role in transnational Hollywood, however, Empire and Emperor exhibit clear signs of ambivalence towards Japan’s prominence. Although it would be easy to say that Japan plays a stereotypically negative role in each film—as noted by critics— the function of that negativity is not as easy to explain. Framing the Japanese as antagonists may appear to be the filmmakers’ concession towards China, an unspoken condition of their co- production arrangement, but the films’ non-Chinese subjectivity and their avoidance of a pro- Chinese boosterism renders any anti-Japanese element of the films as either gratuitous or, as I argue, as a crucial component of an untrustworthy narrative voice. Both films’ primary conflict is Jim and Pu yi’s desire for continuity of privileged selfhood in the midst of violent historical change. Both characters are hungry for knowledge, but resistant to the educational value of that knowledge as it restricts their freedom of movement and thought. Misinterpretation—willful or not—follows information. The discerning viewer understands the gap between Jim and Pu yi’s comprehension of events and the events themselves, as the filmmakers emphasize the characters’ lack of advantage even at their most self- aggrandizing. Deluded omnipotence drives the characters from one cage to another, and every moment of glory—staged straight, but with an underlying tone of irony—increases the strength of their chains. Only when the characters are “free,” at war’s end, are they still and humble, rendered anonymous among peers. 92 FICTIONAL NONFICTION The faithfulness of Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor to historical account matters less than their faithfulness, and departures from, their source material. Neither literary source claims an objective view of history, though each applies some distancing of authorial voice from the autobiographical “I.” In adapting each film, screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Menno Meyjes (on Empire), and Bertolucci, Mark Peploe, 6 and Enzo Ungari (on Emperor) reproduce the distancing effect to make ironic points similar to Ballard and Pu yi’s, even as the scripts exaggerate the settings and actions of each literary work to heighten audience sympathy and dramatic tensions. The cinematic exaggerations do not undermine Ballard’s novel or Pu yi’s memoirs; in fact, cinematic devices in both films reinforce the elusiveness of historical objectivity underscored in each literary work. Ballard and Pu yi’s reminiscences never aim for strict accuracy, but for a method of explaining themselves to readers knowledgeable of their fame and backgrounds. The films go even further in mythologizing their real-life sources, only to arrive at a similar perspective on history: as a structuring of individual psychologies rather than a structuring of coherent events. Readers of Empire of the Sun—and its sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991)—and From Emperor to Citizen are not seeking evidence to further an understanding of World War II or modern China but to gain insight into the development of two remarkably perverse and pathological minds. The use of the words “perverse” and “pathological” here is not intended to be clinically diagnostic or morally judgmental but to characterize the marketability of Ballard and Pu yi as public figures. The stories of young Jim and young Pu yi are the stories of the future author of apocalyptic science fiction and the future puppet emperor of Manchukuo. Their 93 childhood and adolescent stories are special because of the significant notoriety gained in their adulthoods. As Roger Lockhurst wrote about Ballard, though he may as well have been writing about Pu yi, Ballard’s book as a “confessional” made its human subject “comprehensible” to a mainstream readership. Empire and Kindness “ejected [Ballard] from the double marginalization of ‘science fiction’ and ‘cult author’,” according to Lockhurst. But even as Ballard’s autobiographical novels were “detached” from an oeuvre that included aggressively dystopian works like The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), Empire and Kindness found themselves “re-attached to the oeuvre as ‘straight’ texts which finally decode the bizarre and perverse aberrations that had gone before, rendering the fiction autobiographically comprehensible.” 7 Ballard’s fictionalized account of his childhood experience in Shanghai from 1937-1945, and its haunting effect on his adult life, serves as an account for his other, more peculiar fiction. 8 Pu yi’s account likewise intends to satisfy the curiosity of historical observers puzzled by the behavior of a deposed monarch whose actions amounted to war crimes against China. The results, however, do not measure up to an accurate tabulation of past events but a search for historical connection to the present. The books attempt to explain how their authors arrived at their time and place of composition—“How I got here” (science fiction cult status for Ballard, a re-education camp in Fushun for Pu yi), not “What happened.” For both Ballard and Pu yi, history as event factors less importantly than history as personal narrative. These books are their stories, no one else’s. To argue or contradict their historical claims misses the point; as history, their works are easily discredited. J.G. Ballard was interned at Lunghua prison camp in June 1943 after over a year in detention, with his parents, Edna and James (then-director of the China Printing & Finishing Co.) and his eight-year-old 94 sister Margaret Ann. 9 In Empire, Ballard’s alter ego Jim is separated from his parents (there is no sister) in the chaos of the Shanghai invasion and has only surrogate family in Lunghua. Pu yi’s book carries the co-writing credit of Li Wenda, government editor, who rewrote Pu yi’s “volunteered” confessions from his time in a re-education camp at Fushun; clearly the co- writer’s job went beyond, and perhaps skirted entirely, rounds of fact-checking. The history- bending methods of both authors skew their insights towards the psychological. Scholars noted the dramatic, if not the informational, value of the books’ distortions. Gregory Stephenson writes of Empire that the war “shatters Jim’s identity together with all his received values and notions of life, and forces him to reconstruct himself from the ground up, as it were.” 10 Historian John K. Fairbank considers From Emperor to Citizen a work of formulaic reformism, “exaggerating the evil deeds of the old life and the idealistic appeal of the new.” 11 The effects, if not the causes, of Ballard and Pu yi’s historically dubious narratives are deference to market demand and a purging of traumatic maladjustment. Their readerships want to know what they were thinking during the war, not what they were doing; neither author had the freedom to do much of anything under Japanese occupation. Many of Ballard and Pu yi’s contortions of explanation in their books center around a personal, and painful, question: how could they ally themselves, either politically or by emotional attachment, to the Japanese, their enemies and captors? Both authors give a straightforward answer—fear of death—with a striking similarity. Ballard’s Jim becomes so attached to Lunghua Camp after two years of captivity that as the war draws to an obvious close, he is afraid of losing the predictable “comfort” of the camp, if not his life. 12 He sides outright with the Japanese, hoping to “turn the war against the Americans, and so save Lunghua Camp.” 13 Ballard connects Jim’s hyperactivity in the camp, running errands and playing games, to a “conscious attempt to keep the camp going, whatever 95 the cost,” an activity that “screened his mind from certain fears that he had tried to repress, that the years in Lunghua would come to an end.” 14 The ahistorical absences of family and parental authority sharpen Jim’s fears and apply dramatic logic for his dependence on the Japanese: they are his new parents, and Lunghua is his new home. Pu yi, likewise, admits that towards the end of the war, “As the signs of the Japanese collapse became clearer, I became more and more frightened that the Japanese would kill me to stop me talking afterwards.” 15 Supporting the Japanese war effort, for Pu yi as well as for Jim, could delay the inevitable trauma of Japanese defeat, that would disrupt if not demolish their Japan-constructed environment. Pu yi relates his fear of death to a consistency of perverse behavior in Manchukuo, where for him, “Apart from eating and sleeping, my life could be summarized as consisting of floggings, curses, divination, medicine, and fear.” 16 The confessional tone of these revelations carries over into his admittance of loyal, though fearful, attachment to the Japanese, framing his regrettable actions in the language of victimology. Ballard’s Jim has no crime to answer for, as Pu yi does, but he has a perverse sensibility that acknowledges the irony of his dependence on Japanese “protection” from, say, a Chinese thief in the streets of Shanghai, 17 while having the sense to understand that the Japanese at Lunghua Airport worked Chinese soldiers to death laying down a runway—“laying their own bones in a carpet for the Japanese bombers who would land upon them.” 18 The horror of Japanese atrocities in China frightens Jim and Pu yi as crimes against humanity and as a personal threat; it is the personal nature of Japan’s hold on the two young men that twists and subverts their pre-war identities. They are useful to the Japanese as non-Chinese in China; their greatest fear is becoming a victim like the Chinese. Their survivor’s guilt—as they remain alive partly by dint of their race or nationality, blind fortune, and by the whim or mercy of the Japanese, who 96 give no such preference to the Chinese—is hauntingly expressed in stand-out passages. Pu yi closes his book with a statement following his pardon by the Chinese government in December 1959: “My motherland had made me into a man.” 19 Upon Jim’s exodus from Lunghua to Nantao stadium, he dumps his suitcase in Whangpoo river “to rid himself of Lunghua and face up squarely to the present”; Ballard compares the suitcase, as it floats away, to “the coffin of a Chinese child.” 20 Each narrative follows an educational arc of development, as Jim and Pu yi grow from wayward children to frightened and perverse adolescents and adults, emerging, finally, as self-aware—able to remember and regret, simultaneously, their World War II experience. Reductions of ego mark gains of wisdom. After painful reflection, Jim and Pu yi expose, and dispose of, their empires of imagination, settling for realization that China was their childhood home, the home they resisted, and were now afraid of losing. FAITHFULLY LOOSE Though structured differently, the scripts for Empire and Emperor track Jim and Pu yi’s search for a psychological “home.” Their desire for a world of imaginative freedom—a paradise constructed and ruled by their childhood selves—contrasts with regret over their willed misperception of the actual world around them, the perspective of rueful adulthood. The screenwriters and directors sought visual representations of ironic disparities between childish desire and adult wisdom (i.e., guilt). Channeling the “spirit” of the original works, however, required for the filmmakers a further degree of removal from historical accuracy, and slight departures from the first-person point of view. Although these liberties received the blessing of archival authorities (Ballard and the Chinese government), they suggest a pre-existing openness of the source material to additions and subtractions of settings, characters, and incidents for 97 dramatic purposes. Again, what matters is not what happened in China in the early 20 th century, but how Jim and Pu yi pondered and narrated their own experience, depending on memory rather than on historical record. Spielberg and Bertolucci, and their screenwriters, seek an approximation of verisimilitude as a base from which they can construct a conflicted, yet sympathetic, point of view both of and on Jim and Pu yi. Pauline Kael described Bertolucci’s Pu yi as a man “who lives his life as spectacle.” 21 The same holds true of Jim, and yet by rendering both young men as photographic subjects, and by including brief moments of action and reaction of secondary characters, the films make Jim and Pu yi a pair of mirrored spectacles. We see them, and other characters, the way they see the world—off-kilter, troubled, self-destructive. The films are studies of madness as a process of normalization which, the films argue, is hardly unique to Jim and Pu yi. Other characters have moments of panic and confusion, invented by the screenwriters, as a way of normalizing, if not universalizing, Jim and Pu yi’s own myopia. Both scripts alter the strict individual perspective on settings and actions in Ballard and Pu yi’s books for the express purpose of gaining audience sympathy for Jim and Pu yi. In Empire, the most dramatic change is an expansion of Jim’s experience at Lunghua Camp. The middle section of the film, depicting most of Jim’s camp experience, takes up about an hour of running time, far surpassing the novel in length and proportion. In the novel, the central camp section is a little over twenty percent of the total work; in the film, it is forty percent. The investment of the filmmakers in Jim’s camp experience takes the form of contrived and extended interactions with the Japanese, drawing an emotional connection missing in Ballard’s novel. Ballard’s literary device of Jim’s “perverse” identification with the Japanese reads simply, as Jim’s passing thoughts and remarks; visualizing those thoughts required a re-arrangement of the novel’s 98 physical space and the addition of characters and dialogue to establish what appear as genuine, not imagined, mutual attraction between Jim and the Japanese. Lunghua Camp, according to maps of the location and Ballard’s novel, was about a mile from Lunghua Airport, close enough for attacking American fighter planes to strafe the camp by accident during air raids, and for Jim to watch the attacks “as if he were watching an epic war film from the circle of the Cathay Theater.” 22 The air field was not so close, however, for Jim to be able to interact with a Japanese boy (Takatarō Kataoka) playing on the runway with a toy airplane, as he does in the film. The increased and extreme proximity of Lunghua Airport to Lunghua Camp in the film is emphasized by a wild line of dialogue delivered by Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers) upon their arrival: “We’re right near the airfield!” Stoppard and Meyjes’s adaptation brings planes and Japanese flyers, Jim’s perverse objects of desire, closer to the audience’s consciousness. The beautiful aircraft and kamikaze pilots are right there, bedazzling Jim, and the tall pagoda at the side of the runway looms in the background of countless exterior shots of the camp. Because Jim appears to be the only prisoner at Lunghua with a keen interest in Japanese activity at the airfield, its inescapable presence alongside the camp not only justifies his close attention but naturalizes his admiration. It seems perverse of his fellow prisoners not to take constant notice of the goings on next door, for Jim not to be in awe of the Japanese warplanes soaring over the dull encampment at dawn—who could resist? As an invention of Spielberg and the screenwriters, Jim’s friendship with a Japanese youth, and his interactions with Sergeant Nagata (Masatō Ibu), the highest authority at Lunghua Camp, reduce the “perversion” of Jim’s identification with the enemy by extending it to the Japanese. One admiring gaze returns another across the barbed-wire fence. Nagata observes Jim saluting and singing in tribute to kamikaze pilots as they toast their doom on the runway. At one 99 point Jim saves Dr. Rawlins from a beating at the hands of Nagata by pleading with Nagata in Japanese, “There must be some mistake. We’re all friends, aren’t we? The war’s to blame.” Nagata stops beating Rawlins and walks away, the script indicates, because “Jim’s courage deserves to succeed.” 23 In a long sequence invented for the film, Jim hunts pheasant outside the camp perimeter while Nagata, suspicious of someone’s escape, trudges through the long weeds. The Japanese boy saves Jim’s life by distracting Nagata with his toy airplane. Jim and the boy smile at each other through the weeds, while Nagata, smiling, fetches the plane. Throughout the film, Spielberg highlights associative connections between warring parties and the random humor of miserable circumstances. 24 In another time, another place, the film seems to suggest, Nagata might take the two boys on a magical joyride in a Japanese Zero, playing E.T. to Jim’s Elliot. While these specific settings, character interactions, and ideas are absent in Ballard’s book, they do not play against the book. The patent contrivances of the next-door airfield and communication bridges between Jim and the Japanese give visual reinforcement to Jim’s imaginative leap out of his own surroundings, working along the same creative lines as Ballard when he detached his entire family from his own recollections of his camp experience. Pu yi’s memoirs, already a study in calculated (ghostwritten) subjectivity, undergo further adjustment in Emperor to normalize the figure of Pu yi as a perverse ally of the Japanese. Beginning with a fabricated suicide attempt, the film presents Pu yi as a tortured figure. Handed off by his mother to an overindulgent, and cruelly banished, wet nurse; raised by corrupt eunuchs; betrayed by his wife, who descends into opium addiction; locked up for years in a series of all-male prisons, Pu yi has clearly, and according to the film, naturally, sublimated his “normal” desires into a grand pursuit of self-empowerment. The “floggings” that Pu yi describes above, as occupying much of his time in Manchukuo, suggest a monstrosity of ego that the film 100 elides. In the June 20, 1986, version of the script, a scene set in Changchun of the 1930s shows Pu yi supervising the vicious beating of two pages. “Harder! Beat him harder!” Pu yi commands, and then he leaves the room “drenched with sweat.” 25 A further-revised version of the script, dated February 6, 1987, removes this scene, which appears in neither the final film nor the expanded version released for television. Instead, Pu yi has two shocking moments of violence against another: his pet mouse, which he dashes against the massive gate of the Forbidden City when the eunuchs prevent him from seeing his dead mother; and a eunuch he orders to drink from an inkwell to impress his younger brother. Both are acts of an amoral child that the film suggests are a product of environment and contributing to his adulthood paranoia and self- loathing. The mouse represents Pu yi himself, the “secret” pet that he keeps in his pocket, much like the Chinese and Japanese keep him in one enclosure or another. Pu yi’s suicide attempt at the beginning of the film, cutting his wrists in a train station janitorial office, 26 was invented for the film to show, as with the mouse, that his violent energies are self-inflicting. His crimes against others—his spouse, his servants, the Chinese people—are either crimes of omission, failures to act and react on their behalf, or, more significantly, crimes of arrogance and ego, placing himself above others under the authority of a defunct imperial legacy. The film eliminates the less palatable characteristics of Pu yi, even those admitted by Pu yi himself, to draw his conflict into the realm of mainstream acceptability. He is responsible for the suffering of others by obeying restrictive authority, which he has no hope of defeating. His only escape, besides an indulgence in fantasies of empire, is suicide. As in Empire, Emperor gives special attention to the Japanese and spreads the misery and torment of its main character to select minor characters, again diluting the potency of the main character’s “perversity” by extending it to others. Outside of Pu yi’s immediate perspective, we 101 see the machinations of the one-armed Amakasu Masahiko (Sakamoto Ryūichi), head of the Manchurian Film Association. The Manchukuo section of the film periodically gives over to shots of Amakasu training his propaganda-purposed camera on Pu yi (John Lone), having one fewer arm than Pu yi but exponentially greater power. 27 Women in the film are incomprehensible to Pu yi and yet share his sense of disorientation and a loss of coherent identity. Bertolucci just about creates an all-female world outside of Pu yi’s subjectivity: in one unbroken shot in the rain outside Pu yi’s mansion at Tientsin during his playboy days, the camera tracks the departure of Wenxiu (Vivian Wu), Pu yi’s secondary consort, who demanded a divorce, with the arrival of anti-Chinese spy Kawashima Yoshiko (Maggie Han), known as Eastern Jewel, from Shanghai. Pu yi feels trapped in every environment he enters; the ability of women to move in and out freely may appear liberating, but as shots linger on them, out of Pu yi’s eyesight, we sense their own entrapment. 28 At a Japan-organized party celebrating Pu yi’s second coronation as Emperor of Manchukuo, Pu yi’s wife Wan Jung (Joan Chen), a full-blown opium addict, compulsively munches on flower petals and chafes under Pu yi’s orders to go to her room. Soon after, Eastern Jewel joins her in bed, prepares an opium pipe, places a ring on one of Wan Jung’s toes, and then sucks on them as Wan Jung sucks on the pipe. A Bertolucci invention, the scene is absent in the June 20, 1986, version of the script but appears in the February 6, 1987, version, only there the scene ended with the ring and Eastern Jewel’s remark, “Now we’re engaged.” Bertolucci’s intensification of the women’s physical impulsiveness regresses them to a primal hunger stage not unlike Pu yi at age eight clinging to the naked breast of his wet nurse. 29 Outside this environment, in another time and place, as Empire also suggests, such escapism would appear not only pathological but illogical, with no repressive environment—here coded as Japanese, but also more abstractly, as “war”—to serve as determinant. 102 Ultimately, the adaptations of Empire and Emperor make a case for Jim and Pu yi as traumatized victims, rootless and self-empowered, to an even greater extent than Ballard and Pu yi in their own accounts. Empire removes Jim’s parents, as Ballard does, 30 from the setting, but adds a line of dialogue that contradicts Ballard: in the middle of an air raid on the camp, Jim raves excitedly about the power of the P-51 Mustangs laying waste to the runway and hangars, but when Dr. Rawlins tries to calm him down, Jim says tearfully, “I forgot what my parents look like.” In the novel, when Rawlins (called Ransome in the book) asks Jim if he remembers what his parents look like, Jim says “I do remember,” and then regrets the lie. 31 Jim forgets his parents in both works, but the film stresses the poignancy of his forgetting and finds release in tearful confession; in the novel, tears and sentiment are repressed. Likewise, Pu yi has little sentiment for his family or wives in his memoirs, crediting his wet nurse as “the only person in the palace who could contain my cruelty”; 32 her banishment left “nobody who really understood humanity around me.” 33 The film of Emperor, like the film of Empire, adds tears for the missing mother. When she visits him in the Forbidden City after seven years of absence, he coldly answers “no” when she asks him, tear-stricken, if he remembers her face. He later shows the traumatic effect of their separation: when hearing of her death, he tries to flee the city on a bicycle, wiping tears from his face. Thwarted by the eunuchs, after killing his pet mouse he climbs to a rooftop for what may be his first suicide attempt, howling in protest over his inability to see his dead mother. Earlier in the film, the infant Pu yi (Richard Vuu) cried, “I want to go home!” while running into the open arms of his wet nurse, just as Jim falls into the embrace of Dr. Rawlins after crying over his forgotten parents. On the most simplistic level, the films show us two boys who need, and must live without, a mother’s embrace. 103 Both films sentimentalize the search for home as a futile quest, an exercise of imagination, for those homes no longer exist. As adapters, Spielberg and Bertolucci, at least one or two steps removed from the literary source material, apply a sense of “normality” to a critique of the traumatic effects of environmental change on Ballard and Pu yi, inflating their importance as subjects. The more “humanistic” the films appear, the more Ballard and Pu yi represent not only themselves, but a behavioral conditioning of imperialism, colonialism, and warfare. CO-PRODUCTION OR CO-DEPENDENCE? In an industrial context, these two films easily fall into categories of national or international co-production. Empire, a Warner Bros. film, represents Hollywood as a globalizing force, bankrolling an American-directed production in China, Britain, and Spain with a mostly British cast and crew. Emperor, produced outside the studio system, nevertheless involved a coherent group of European investors supporting an Italian director and crew shooting in China and Italy with a mostly all-English-speaking Chinese-American cast, in a film picked up by Columbia Pictures and Hollywood-endorsed with nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1987. 34 Textually, the films explore similar terrain, but at a glance it seems the two productions could not be more dissimilar in their national composition, except in terms of variety. And yet one of the few industrial connections between the two films—Chinese government support—is crucial to understanding how the films developed, and how they shaped the subjectivity of Jim and Pu yi. The films could not have been made without Chinese cooperation, and almost certainly could not be made today without a restructuring of their financing and casting. As detailed in a recent (August 2012) Daily Variety cover story, for U.S. filmmakers to gain “joint-effort status” 104 from the China Film Coproduction Corporation (CFCC), there must be at least one-third of financing from China, a Chinese main cast, and part of the movie shot in China. 35 Neither Empire nor Emperor meets two of those three requirements. The relative leniency of the CFCC in the mid-1980s suggests a nascent system of which Spielberg and Bertolucci took advantage, and that later on became much more restrictive. Empire required less production time in China than Emperor, but a greater concentration of resources, proving the ability of a major Hollywood studio to corral extras and equipment on short notice at a location willing to cooperate. 36 Shooting began in Shanghai in March 1987, only nine months before the film’s theatrical release. 37 Even with tens of thousands of Chinese extras and the shutting down of several blocks of harbor-hugging streets in Shanghai, the production’s only publicized dividing point with Chinese authorities was the amount of smoke in the air: Chinese officials fined the production, the Shanghai general Film Co., and the CFCC $13,500 for burning piles of tires to simulate Japanese attacks. 38 Emperor, on the other hand, had no major studio backing, and although its financing was a model of independent co-production, it drew sharper criticism from Chinese authorities. Bertolucci engaged producer Jeremy Thomas to negotiate a location deal with the CFCC and the Ministry of Culture. Thomas then organized the funding from several European banks keen on building “contacts and links into China.” 39 In exchange for permission to shoot in and around the Forbidden City, the Chinese government received local distribution and script approval rights. Before filming even began, the production offset its risk with $20 million in guaranteed foreign distribution agreements, leading The Los Angeles Times to describe Emperor as “a triumph of business as much as art.” 40 105 After Emperor’s completion, however, Chinese authorities expressed regret. Having made the cost arrangements “fixed,” and not “soft,” which would have left currency values open to “reinterpretation,” the production received greater value per dollar than the Chinese government would have preferred. 41 Zhao Quin of the Beijing Central Television Agency further criticized the film’s historical inaccuracies when informing the press of a twenty-eight-hour TV series on Pu yi that would give a more “factually correct” version of his life. 42 Ironically, the series producers were denied access to areas of the Forbidden City that Bertolucci was allowed to film, due to a “historical preservation law” that went into effect in April 1985. Vice Minister of Culture Ying Ruocheng, who played the governor of Pu yi’s Fushun prison in Emperor and who assisted the production, was called in to testify in front of the National People’s Congress to help them determine if filming around the flammable wooden structures of the Forbidden City was illegal. 43 Delays plagued the release of the film in the Chinese market. Concerned over the low marketability of a Chinese-language film outside of China, Bertolucci elected to shoot the film almost entirely in English. 44 According to Thomas, a Mandarin-dubbed version of the film was approved in November 1987 and was set to be released in China in February 1988. 45 That release was postponed to June, and then August, supposedly over “translation problems,” but there were obvious content problems. A Japanese critic attending the Mandarin-dubbed version in China reported that the film was ten minutes shorter than its Japanese version, missing the scenes of Pu yi dallying in bed with Wan Jung and Wenxiu, and Wan Jung’s lesbian interlude with Eastern Jewel. 46 Barely escaping government restrictions against filming in the Forbidden City, the film itself became partially “forbidden”—losing its original dialogue soundtrack and sexually suggestive imagery—upon its release in China. 47 106 Without Chinese cooperation, the films would have lost a significant degree of spectacle and reputation; they are unimaginable without the evocative and lingering wide-angle shots of downtown Shanghai circa 1941, and the acreage of passageways and courtyards of the Forbidden City. Both locations, remarkably preserved at the time of production, are sui generis, and no doubt contributed to a critical consensus when both films were released: that the opening sections, “production value” showcases of Jim and Pu yi amid the decadent atmosphere of Shanghai and Peking, are vastly superior to the films’ later sections, when the two young men are in tighter confines manufactured on closed sets. Ironically, China, a source of trauma to the films’ main characters, provides most of the films’ major pleasures, appealing to the tourist gaze even as audiences perceive the country’s antagonism to Jim and Pu yi. In both films, China is a target of Japanese invasion, but it is not a “paradise lost,” except in the maladjusted view of two spoiled children. Even so, by staging cinematic events in the actual locations where historical events occurred, the filmmakers can lay a claim to authenticity even while acknowledging the dubiousness of the films’ literary sources. Explaining their motives for filming in China, both Spielberg and Bertolucci demure on the issue of industrial-commercial demand for spectacle and for co-production arrangements favorable to their needs. Two short documentaries from 1987 focusing on the directors at work on location build up a mystique of personal journey: even their titles—“The China Odyssey” and “The Chinese Adventure of Bernardo Bertolucci” 48 —play up the notion of movement into and within China as a kind of artist’s travel narrative, even though most location shooting on both films occurred outside of China. Spielberg, who turned forty just a few months before shooting began in Shanghai, claimed that with Empire he wanted to “draw a parallel story between the death of this boy’s innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world.” 49 The “entire 107 world” in this case includes Spielberg himself, a middle-aged purveyor of fantasy who sees this World War II drama of youth and ironic escapism as “the best way to exorcise my obsessions up to now.” 50 Bertolucci likewise described Emperor as personally inspiring, feeling drawn to China “because it’s not Italy” and admiring the “theatrical element,” though not the tenets, of the Cultural Revolution. 51 Pu yi at the end of the film becomes “an invention of Mao” for Bertolucci, showing how emperors can become citizens, and vice versa. This, of course, is Bertolucci’s Pu yi, not Pu yi’s Pu yi, or perhaps even Pu yi as considered by the Chinese, who according to Bertolucci reflected “the emptiness of the Emperor” in their faces during tours of the Forbidden City that he attended and remarked upon. 52 Both directors, choosing subjects well outside their backgrounds and experience, are drawn to the promise of the void—a void in some ways created by Ballard and Pu yi in their speculative testimonials, and expanded by the filmmakers to engulf themselves in a comforting negative space. With the help of China, Spielberg can subvert his own deficiencies of high-culture respectability while Bertolucci can present history as pageantry and hearsay. Spielberg’s thank-you letter to Wu Yigong, president of the Shanghai Film Corporation, and to Li Zhimin, director of the CFCC in Beijing, printed in a full-page ad in Variety, addresses them as decisive parties: “I am grateful that your corporations chose ‘Empire of the Sun’ as the first major studio Sino-American film and I am personally honored to have been its director.” 53 Cannily framing himself almost as a hired hand on a China-based production, Spielberg combines humility with hyperbole. Bertolucci could have composed a similar letter—in his case, replacing Shanghai Film Corp. with Beijing Film Studios—describing Emperor as the “first major Sino-European film,” a term equally loaded with pride and hype. 54 And yet how much cooperation with, and deference to, Chinese authorities resulted in films that reflected Chinese 108 experience? Shanghai and the Forbidden City, key elements of spectacle in the films, and one of their greatest selling points, function as prelude, as establishment of background and setting. Each film narrates the casting out of its main character from those settings, and charts a course of suffering and humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. China’s state sponsorship of the films amounts to a buttressing of historical mythologizing of non-Chinese experience under Japanese occupation. “China” appears in both films as the container of fantastical space, home to an International Settlement in Shanghai and a palace in Peking, both isolated from Chinese citizenry until Japan threatens to overtake the entire Eastern Chinese seaboard. Central conflicts in the film occur in a “China” outside China, on European sets that evoke claustrophobia and a yearning for the China that was lost—the China that was China, a virtual China. Although as essential to dramatizing the progression, desperation, and ironic turns of Jim and Pu yi’s experience as the China location footage, the contributions of Spanish, British, and Italian location managers and talent did not warrant public gratitude on the level of Spielberg’s letter to Chinese authorities. In Emperor’s case, Bertolucci’s peers in Italy questioned whether or not the film was in any way Italian. Director Franco Zeffirelli commented on Emperor’s five Academy Awards for Italian craftspeople as nothing to get excited about, as the film was “neither conceived nor executed by Italian Cinema.” 55 Although true that Emperor had no Italian investors, and Bertolucci craved shooting in China for the simple fact that it wasn’t Italy (see above), the Chinese state did not “conceive” or “execute” the production in place of Italy. It provided spectacle—as it did for Spielberg—in exchange for limited distribution rights and advancement in co-production relations with foreign countries. China could not claim exclusive ownership of Empire or Emperor as cinema any more than Italian filmmakers, or British or 109 Spanish or American filmmakers could, though each nationally-coded entity could claim some small measure of influence or contribution. Beginning with the porous visions of Ballard and Pu yi, mythologizing themselves in the guise of historical memory, the two works in any form, literary or cinematic, evade provenance. ACTIVE / PASSIVE Tellingly, both Empire and Emperor end where they begin, with evocative location footage of portside Shanghai and the throne room of the Forbidden City. Both narratives have a circular trajectory of physical travel. Jim journeys from urban and suburban Shanghai to a nearby detention center, off to Lunghua Camp, then Nantao stadium, then back to Lunghua before returning to Shanghai, where the story ends. 56 Pu yi, born in Peking in 1906 and raised in the Forbidden City, leaves for Tientsin in 1924 after twelve years of abdication, journeys to Changchun in 1932 to act as nominal ruler of Manchukuo until 1945; Russians hold him prisoner for five years before turning him over to the Chinese for re-education at Fushun (two hundred miles south of Changchun); ten years later, he travels back to Peking as a pardoned criminal for the remainder of his life. The dual return of Jim and Pu yi to their childhood homes reminds the viewer not only of the impressive scale of the films’ production value, but of the tensions between environmental change and psychological stasis. The Japanese are gone, but so it seems are the colonial and imperial structures that segregated the Chinese from non-Chinese, or imperial Chinese. 57 Both films impose a stark anonymity on characters who throughout the film appeared exceptional. At the end of Empire, Jim stands among other Western children separated from their parents during the Japanese invasion, and his parents walk past without recognizing him. Pu yi appears on a bicycle on a busy Peking street among a throng of Chinese citizens, 110 conforming to traffic laws and calling little attention to himself. Shanghai and Peking have changed, certainly, in their accommodation of Jim and Pu yi. The two of them appear little more than bystanders, no longer catered to, or worshipped, but tolerated. By bringing Jim to a halt at the end of Empire, and allowing Pu yi the freedom of movement at the end of Emperor, the films reverse the energies of the two characters during their tumultuous years away from home. Jim’s hyperactivity and Pu yi’s hyper-passivity throughout most of the films’ running time do not represent a contradiction between the films; rather, they represent opposed methods to achieve similar ends. Both characters are willful innocents, hostile to the knowledge that they have no control over their lives, and terrified of what an acceptance of that knowledge would do to them. As stated above, Jim and Pu yi desire the continuity of their privileged identities despite historical change, to maintain their superior sense of self as non-Chinese in a Chinese war zone. The characters’ fates are to be stripped of distinction, folded into an anonymous mass, but held in the audience’s attention as persons of interest, who in the present day are called upon to reminisce about what was, or what they can recall, to explain what is—why one is a provocative novelist, the other a reformed imperialist. 58 The consistent rendering of Jim and Pu yi’s behavior as active (for Jim) or passive (for Pu yi) allows for little variation in the structuring of onscreen action. Jim’s mobility and Pu yi’s immobility keep them safe under violent authority figures. By acting the “smart boy” who wants to be useful to everyone, Jim avoids the doom of those targeted, mainly, for lack of movement. Appearing healthy and resourceful, Jim wins over Nagata who selects him for manual labor at Lunghua, and later wins over the Americans in the camp by hunting pheasant outside the barbed wire. Pu yi finds safety in near-total inactivity, making himself “useful” as a symbol or figurehead for the Nationalists, the Japanese, and finally the Communists. For Pu yi to voice any 111 independent or contradictory statement earns the wrath of his keepers. Each character imagines himself more powerful than he is, due in part to his “privileged” status, while the audience perceives their antic or languorous behavior as a form of pathological denial. Jim and Pu yi’s false sense of power is at its peak in two pivotal moments, each revealing a monumental vainglory. Under interrogation at Fushun prison, Pu yi alleges that he went to Manchukuo as a kidnapping victim, contradicting the written claim of his English tutor, Reginald Johnston (Peter O’Toole), that he went of his own free will. Pu yi’s interrogator demands the truth and the film flashes back to Pu yi in Manchukuo in 1932, telling Wan Jung that he has no allegiance to the Chinese but intends to “use” the Japanese to protect and serve the people of Manchuria. The Pu yi of the flashback corrects the Pu yi of Fushun prison. Knowing his fate, the audience can see that despite his stated ambitions, he will never have legitimate power, and that he will never fight for it, because it would have cost him his life. Jim assumes messianic qualities when he attempts to restore the life of his young Japanese pilot friend, who had been shot to death by an American. Jim pumps the boy’s chest rhythmically, his head bobbing in and out of the shade and flaring the lens with exposed sunlight, repeating to himself, “I can bring everyone back. Everyone.” The Japanese boy does not recover, and in fact is replaced in one shot by a younger version of Jim in his school uniform, a hallucinatory image that perhaps overdoes the metaphor of lost childhood innocence, but also functions as a subversion of Jim’s compulsion to act before thought—to lose himself in forward motion. With opposed energies, one active, one passive, Jim and Pu yi attempt to sustain a continuity of strength that the filmmakers characterize as imaginary. Their victories, the few that they experience, heighten ironies rather than the viewer’s admiration. 112 Both films use bicycles to “rhyme” Jim and Pu yi’s behavior from before and after Japanese invasion and surrender. Just before his rescue by American ground troops at Lunghua, Jim rides a bicycle in, out, and around the empty buildings of the camp, laughing to himself at the pleasures of non-supervision. 59 The shots, accompanied by a buoyant John Williams score, echo Jim’s time alone at home shortly after the invasion, when he rode his bike through empty rooms on the first floor of his house, no one running after to stop or rebuke him (and with a heavier, or muted, score). Both rides are halted by historical interjection: in urban Shanghai, his bike is stolen by a Chinese passerby when Jim tries to escape a Chinese thief; in Lunghua, an American soldier stops Jim with two strong hands slamming against the handlebars. Forces outside of Jim’s control demand his passivity and submission. Pu yi’s leisurely bike ride near the end of Emperor amid crowds of other riders, recalls the sensation of false freedom he had on his bicycle as a youth in the Forbidden City. Then, he considered the bicycle a means of escape, a gift from Johnston that was the only set of wheels in the entire City; now, a bicycle is nothing special, a marker of “mass” identity. The soundtrack in the latter scene includes the ringing of countless bicycle bells as riders alert one another of their proximity, a polite form of making way. Pu yi’s only power resides in fantasies and memories of the Forbidden City, where now he has to pay admission and pose as a tourist. 60 Both films ironize the persistence of self-glorification in an environment that squelches individualism, ending with Jim and Pu yi’s dissolution into their now-haunted childhood homes. Some of the final images of Empire and Emperor attempt to reveal, through symbolism, Jim and Pu yi’s “true” natures, revelatory in their seeming contradiction of most of the films’ action. Empire shows us Jim’s discarded suitcase floating in the harbor, where passing boats knock it aside, a parallel of one of the film’s first images: Chinese coffins floating in the harbor, 113 knocked aside by a patrolling Japanese ship. The suitcase, likened to a “Chinese coffin” in Ballard’s novel (see above), now appears a coffin, containing Jim’s treasured objects and comforts during his stay at the camp. The image reduces Jim, a figure of proactivity in the film, to a reactive, knockabout object. Pu yi’s own final action is a disappearing act: in the throne room of the imperial palace (now a museum), he distracts a young boy monitoring the room and then vanishes behind the throne. The distraction—a cricket locked in a tiny pot that Pu yi hid behind the throne as a boy—approaches magical realism, as does Pu yi’s dematerialization. This wily escape artist demonstrated none of that power elsewhere in the film; his only demonstrable talent, it seemed, was his persistence of presence. The “active” boy made reactive in Empire, and the “passive” man turned magician in Emperor, hint at unexplored, or understated, dimensions of character—not unexplored by the filmmakers, but by the characters themselves. SPECTACULAR CRIMES The capacity of Jim and Pu yi to contain more than a set of monomaniacal desires channeled through “active” or “passive” behavioral traits appears throughout both films. Guilt— a sense of moral failure to act or react conscientiously—clouds their faces at significant moments of observation. Expressions of guilt vary in the source material: Jim admits to momentary lapses of judgment and non-allegiance to the British, while Pu yi wallows in self-incriminating language, addressing his audience as if they were his confessors. 61 The function of guilt in both works, however, is structural as well as thematic. Avoidance of guilt, which for Jim and Pu yi amounts to denial of their historical and personal role in the suffering of war victims, protects the righteousness of their self-serving activity and passivity. They are seldom aware of the suffering of others except as notable fact. Only momentarily do they assume a position of responsibility; 114 when they do, they overcompensate, inflating the scope of their crimes to match their inflated sense of self. Both films use closeup reaction shots of Jim and Pu yi to indicate guilt, and the Japanese, representing history as antagonist, provide the guilt-provoking action. Jim witnesses two beatings of the American Basie (John Malkovich) at the hands of the Japanese, and each time, the camera shows the action as reflected in Jim’s face. The first occurs on the front lawn of Jim’s home, where he has led Basie and another American, Frank (Joe Pantoliano), on a search for plunder. Mistaking a kimono-dressed Japanese inside the home for his own mother, Jim shouts “Mother!” and the Japanese troops occupying the home burst out and take the three into custody—after pummeling Basie with kendo sticks. Later, Basie is beaten again at Lunghua Camp, this time for using Nagata’s soap as shaving cream. Nagata, unaware that Jim had stolen the soap for Basie, brutalizes the American while Jim watches helplessly. In both cases, the camera emphasizes Jim’s horrified reaction, not simply to the violence done to Basie but to his own sense of complicity; somehow, he made this happen. Pu yi fills himself with guilt upon viewing a Chinese-produced propaganda film on World War II in an auditorium of the re- education camp. As the film presents visual documentation of the Nanking Massacre, bioweapons research at Harbin, and widespread opium addiction, Pu yi watches as intently as his neighbors in the audience, until we see footage of Pu yi himself signing off on these anti-Chinese atrocities—footage masterminded by Amakasu. Upon seeing himself in Japanese propaganda edited into Chinese propaganda, with the narrator declaring Pu yi responsible for horrible war crimes in Manchuria, Pu yi stands up in the theater, the spectacle of his own prosecutorial image zapping him off his seat. Robert Burgoyne analyzes the newsreel as self-subverting in the context of the overall film: it is a Marxist argument, he writes, undone by the distorting power of 115 the propagandistic form, highlighting “the role of cinema as an agent of history.” 62 Emperor argues that Pu yi could not have known about the grisly experiments at Harbin, and yet the power of cinema—as rhetoric, not as history—drives him to claim responsibility, a process of writing, or rewriting, history. Jim also takes on blame at a historical level; he rushes to self-judgment. When the Japanese begin shelling the Shanghai docks on the morning of December 8, 1941, Jim thinks he made it all happen by flashing Morse code to a passing ship outside his hotel window. Spielberg inserts a crucial wide shot outside the hotel, so we can see someone below Jim flashing the Japanese ship, and yet we can also see Jim’s signal lamp flashing above. Jim has presence but no agency; others take note of him but carry on with their historically scripted roles. Jim thinks he is a participant, not a mere spectacle of the war, that he can somehow make things happen or not happen. However, from the perspective of war’s combatants, the Chinese, Japanese, British, and Americans, Jim is mainly their spectacle, a boy in his own world, unattuned to the historical significance of his surroundings. Pu yi suffers a similar lack of awareness of his place in the world. Believing himself innately powerful, he treats family, servants, and mandarins as property on whom he can leave a mark, whereas they see him—and in terms of the film, more accurately—as their property, someone to mark upon, to manipulate, to photograph, to honor only so far as tradition dictates, and only then as ceremony. Jim and Pu yi’s absorption of guilt, their feeling of connection between their own desires and the violent, chaotic world around them, strikes the viewer as egomania in the form of overscaled regret. Their assumption of historical guilt reflects an arrogance of which they seem, at key moments, dimly aware. From the middle of Nantao stadium, delirious with hunger, Jim sees a faraway flash of light—the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Earlier in the film he boasted of 116 his own atheism and crowed to his parents that he dreamed of God playing tennis; now he sees the atomic light as celestial, “like God taking a photograph.” Pu yi, after his pardon, comes across a contingent of Red Guards outside of Tiananmen Square, as they march, sing, and persecute intellectuals and former officials, including the governor of Pu yi’s Fushun prison. 63 A giant painted mural of Chairman Mao’s glowing grinning face overlooks the scene as Pu yi vainly tries to rescue his former governor. Having believed themselves godlike—Jim in his atheism, Pu yi in his imperial divinity—the two characters find themselves belittled under a godlike eye: Fat Man over Nagasaki, and Mao over Tiananmen Square. Each character sees, in brief, how he is seen. The role of the Japanese in either film, therefore, is as ambivalent as their role in buttressing the finances of the Hollywood film industry. They are enemies, but they are also collaborators. Acting against Jim and Pu yi, threatening the continuity of their childhood selves, the Japanese invade, imprison, and exploit. But they also appear as Jim and Pu yi’s agents, maintaining structures that allow the two characters to indulge in empowerment fantasies. Clinging to their territorial masters, Jim and Pu yi root for the war’s continuance, or for Allied defeat, not cheering on the killings of others but relieved somewhat to escape murderous wrath. At the beginning of Empire, Jim stares at a Chinese beggar outside the front gate of his home from the comfort of the back seat of the family’s chauffeured Packard. Then, Chinese victimization appears at a comfortable distance, screened by the car’s windshield and, by extension, British colonial privilege. Pu yi, confined to the Forbidden City, could only understand Chinese victimization in terms of the forces victimizing him. As each film progresses, so does Jim and Pu yi’s complex sense of guilt. They fail to “use” the Japanese to fulfill personal desires for safety and power, and yet as autobiographical narrators (and Spielberg and Bertolucci 117 as filmmakers) they “use” the Japanese as historical antagonists to set the stage for ahistorical, symbolic confrontations. Both Jim and Pu yi strain to find their own historical context, to show themselves participants, and not merely spectacles and observers, of World War II. Their purpose, however, is to find their present selves, not their past, to explain who they are by explaining where they came from. Japan, for both authors, is a signifier of the past, a phase of development that they outgrew. Without Japan there would be little worth in Jim and Pu yi’s reminiscence, and yet Japan’s defeat in World War II results in Jim and Pu yi’s loss—and China’s elimination—of Japan. Neither author regrets Japan’s loss, but they both regret the dread of that loss. REACTIVE GAZE, INWARD GAZE History, represented by war, specifically Japanese action against China in World War II, performs a dual function as antagonist in Empire and Emperor. First, it relocates and confuses Jim and Pu yi, who resist its imposition on the territoriality of their childhood playgrounds. Second, it functions as a site of knowledge so advanced that only the films’ viewers, decades ahead of depicted events, are granted a level of understanding considered proper by the filmmakers. Spielberg and Bertolucci frame most of the films’ actions through the eyes of Jim and Pu yi, but we always know more, and better, than they do. 64 The basis of our sympathy for the two boys is a measure of our own contempt for the environments that could produce such misguided minds. Rarely in either film does a historical event awaken understanding in Jim or Pu yi; rather, events stimulate imaginations already over-fueled by colonial and imperial decadence. In both films, “history” has a destructive power more damaging than the Japanese. The films’ pre-history—that is, European settlements in a weakened China of the early 20th century, 118 and the decline of the Qing dynasty—gave birth to these two deluded sons of empire. Japanese aggression, destruction, and occupation appear to take advantage of foreign confusion. China may be the battleground, and we see the victimization and exploitation of Chinese civilians in street battles and labor camps, but the ultimate enemy is the near-sightedness of non-Chinese power centers that pre-date the onscreen events and prove a curse to the films’ central characters. History’s progression, then, from decadence to World War II and its aftermath, plays as consequence, not as an effect of the Japanese but with the Japanese as an effect. Japan appears, disappears, and reappears as it suits the historical narratives of Ballard and Pu yi, Spielberg and Bertolucci. Japan represents history—in the form of a historical change or turn—but not Japanese or even Chinese history. Japan’s indexicality in both films is a challenge to the sensibilities of a young Brit and a young Manchurian. As a threat to the continuity of their privileged childhoods, Japan has the power to erase history, to end generations of colonial and imperial infrastructure in Eastern China. But “history” in both films has the power to erase Japan, not only by depicting its monumental loss at the end of World War II but by limiting its subjectivity to the imaginations of its temporary victims. Continuity, therefore, emerges intact through the consistency of Jim and Pu yi’s limited perspective and their unquenched desire for freedom of movement. Japan-as-history is no match for ahistorical fantasy in either film. As a Brit and a Manchurian, respectively, Jim and Pu yi were born in, but not of, China. Privileged as children, in part due to their outsider status, they enjoyed freedom from the burdens of Chinese history. The films depict the boys becoming adults through a process of envelopment into the world “outside,” exchanging one form of enclosure—childhood imagination—for another—imperial and colonial struggle. Of course, the boys always inhabited one form of empire or another, always aware of the general structures of their environment, and the degree of 119 their powers within it; they are neither stupid nor unable to learn. They are, however, resistant to a type of education that questions their dubious origins, that dismantles the rickety foundation of their own personal empires of imagination. Jim likes airplanes as much as Pu yi likes being Emperor; they are not convinced, at least not at the time, that Japanese Zeros and Manchukuo are misguided objects of desire. Their conviction of wrongdoing comes later, as adults looking back. In narrative structure, the films are works of adults framing their psychological development as a growing awareness of the world outside their heads, which, as viewers, we see only in fragments but with a keener and more discerning eye than either main character. Jim and Pu yi’s reactive gaze to the Japanese is an inward gaze, a search for qualities within that maintain a stability of identity in the face of overwhelming foreign dominance. Considering themselves special—as non-Chinese within China—they view Japanese soldiers and occupation authorities as less alienating figures than the Chinese, who often appear wretched and anonymous, by turns monolithic and disarrayed. For Jim and Pu yi, dramatic historical turns in China need not affect their histories. To be forever changed by the invasion of Japanese armies is to be dissolved within Chinese history, to shed the exceptionalism and benefits of their non- Chinese identities. Empire and Emperor depict large-scale upheaval in Eastern China as threatening Jim and Pu yi’s preservation of self, which never had strong allegiance to China. As a result, the effects of dramatic historical events on the two young men, such as the Japanese invasion of Nanking in 1937 and of Shanghai in 1941, are scaled to myopic non-participant observers whose stake in the conflict is personal. Their lives may be at risk, but since their real- life counterparts grow up to write their stories, we never doubt their survival—or their survivor’s guilt. As historical events occur in the films, Jim and Pu yi are not fully aware of the circumstances, preoccupied with their own obsessions, neuroses, and vanities. The films share a 120 remarkable restraint of judgment against the two characters, condemning “history” just as much as the characters avoid or deny it. The guilt that Jim and Pu yi suffer is a matter of perspective, a looking back on what should not have been but what, regrettably, was. They survived, but not without heavy loss, even if their losses seem trivial by comparison to China’s. CONCLUSION Japan’s invading presence in Empire and Emperor threatens to end a way of life, but instead it reinforces the progression of a traumatized subjectivity through ironic means. Historical beginnings and ends in both films are a product of recall, not of experience. In the narrative structuring of Jim and Pu yi’s limited knowledge of historical events, despite the centrality of their location within those events, and in the thematic rendering of their point-of-view as a form of willed ignorance and resistance to change, both films mirror their source material. Furthermore, although the guiding hands of adaptation, particularly those of Spielberg and Bertolucci, represent an additional layer of distance, historically and culturally, from the British and Manchurian sources of narrative, both directors claim their adaptations as a pivotal installment of their own professional narratives, an enhancement of their media- constructed autobiographical mystique. 65 By laying “ground” beneath their hyper-imaginative protagonists—by using “history” as a spoiler of childhood pleasures—Spielberg and Bertolucci lay claim to the distorting powers of both history and fantasy. The boys on bicycles in Empire and Emperor never arrive at their destinations. They don’t even know their destinations, only their impulse to hop on board and move, to slip out of the grasp of historical determinism. But like in the Amblin’ logo, they spin their wheels into empty space, locked in stasis while dreaming of flight. 121 Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor are the only two films analyzed here that depict World War II at its onset. (Kuroi ame and MacArthur’s Children considers its final days and immediate aftermath.) Released on the 50 th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Sino- Japanese War, they are also the only films that consider China as a backdrop for transnational encounters between Japanese and non-Japanese. All of the following films restrict their settings to Japan and the U.S. Although this narrative scope somewhat limits the analytical scope—bi- national as opposed to more complex multi-national frameworks—it deepens the films’ ambivalence regarding the U.S.-Japan postwar alliance. China, of course, emerged as a mutual enemy for both the U.S. and Japan after World War II, and its brief postwar alliance with the Soviet Union served to intensify the co-dependency of the U.S.-Japan alliance. In the next chapter, we turn away from analyzing the impact of Japanese military aggression on non-Japanese characters, to the impact of American military aggression on the Japanese. Again, we see the war as a form of tragic opportunism: a surrender to the transnational forces that link nations in circuits of mutual exploitation. The collaboration zones expand here, from the tight enclosures of Jim and Pu yi’s prisons to entire cities representing the aftereffects of transnational aggression: Hiroshima, Osaka, and New York. 122 CHAPTER 3 NOTES 1 J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 333. 2 Focusing on Emperor, Robert Zaller defines the film’s subject as “immobility of personality, and the immobility of history.” He discusses the opening scene of the arrival of a train at Fushun prison as showing “motion [that] is ultimately illusory…it can ‘go,’ ultimately, nowhere.” See “After the Revolution: Bertolucci's The Last Emperor,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 79, 82. 3 In Lynda K. Bundtzen’s apt phrase, Pu yi’s identity is reduced to “a set of elegantly formed Chinese characters” used to sign off on Japan-mandated decrees. Lynda K. Bundtzen, “Bertolucci's Erotic Politics and the ‘Auteur’ Theory: From ‘Last Tango in Paris’ to ‘The Last Emperor’,” Western Humanities Review 44, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 204. 4 John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), released at the same time as Empire and Emperor, and based on Boorman’s own experiences as a child in a London suburb during the Blitz, also begged comparison on the topic of youthful memories of World War II. Articles comparing Empire unfavorably with Emperor and similarly-themed films include Tom O’Brien, “Go East, Young Man: ‘Empire of the Sun’,” Commonweal 115, no. 1 (January 15, 1988), 20-21; and Mike Clark, “Spielberg’s ‘Empire’: The box-office king aspires to artistry; ‘Sun’ doesn’t always rise above script,” USA Today, Dec. 8, 1987, 1D. Both Hal Hinson and John Hartl refer to Empire as a “companion piece” to Hope and Glory, somewhat elevating Hope in stature. See “Spielberg’s Hazy ‘Sun,’” Washington Post, Dec. 11, 1987, C1; and “Witness of War – Spielberg Sees Adult Battle in a Child’s Eyes,” Seattle Times, Dec. 11, 1987, 30. Michael Healy and William Arnold characterize and connect the films as, respectively, humanist and anti- Japanese. See “Substance Enriches Visual Splendor of ‘Sun,’ ‘Emperor,’” Daily News of Los Angeles, Dec. 13, 1987; and “Bad Guys Again? – Japanese Once More Take a Beating on the Big Screen,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 8, 1988, 14. One of the few reviews to prefer Empire to Emperor is Ben Yagoda, “For Spielberg, ‘Sun’ Also Rises,” Philadelphia Daily News, Dec. 11, 1987, 60. An intriguing, if short, article by Raymond Durgnat characterizes and compares Spielberg’s “capitalist” film to Bertolucci’s “Maoist” film. See “The Last Emperor,” Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1988, 82-83. 5 Several articles comment or delve deeply into the historical inaccuracies of either film. Emperor’s distortions are detailed and debunked in Paul G. Pickowicz, “The Last Emperor,” American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (October, 1989): 1035-1036, and Richard Bernstein, “Is ‘The Last Emperor’ Truth or Propaganda?” New York Times, May 8, 1988, 1, 33. Cine Front interviewed Tokyo University China scholar Maruyama Noboru, who objected to among other things the depiction of the “rationalist” (gōrishugisha) Amakasu Masahiko as a fanatic. Maruyama Noboru, “Kunshusei ga hitsuzenteki ni umidasu higeki made miru koto ga dekita,” [Could see how monarchy inevitably brings about tragedy] Cine Front, no. 136 (February 1988): 6-12. Regarding Empire, a pair of articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer featured interviews with survivors of Lunghua Camp, who dispute such events as a food riot in Empire and Jim as a loud and hyper-active child. See Don Carter, “Prison Camp Survivor Says Much of ‘Empire of the Sun’ Is Fantasy,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 4, 1988, C1; and Don Carter, “Lunghua Memories: Film ‘Empire of the Sun’ Spurs Reunion,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 21, 1988. 6 On the commentary track for the Last Emperor DVD released by the Criterion Collection, Mark Peploe denies that the film was an adaptation of Pu yi’s book but was based on “over fifty” publications. The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (1987; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2008), DVD. However, it was Pu yi’s book that received the sanction of the Chinese government, who also approved the script; and Bertolucci’s interest in Pu yi’s story, based on the published memoir, attracted a mutual interest in producer Jeremy Thomas, who organized the financing and location deal with the Chinese. See Kawaguchi Atsuko, “Seisakusha jeremii tomasu ni kiku,” [Hearing from producer Jeremy Thomas] Kinema junpō, no. 972 (November 1987): 92-93. 7 Roger Luckhurst, “Petition, Repetition, and ‘Autobiography’: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’ and ‘The Kindness of Women’,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 689-690, original emphasis. 123 8 In an interview, Ballard admitted that as he was writing Empire, he kept envisioning parts of his other work. “It was like an assembly kit made up of bits of my other novels set not in the near-future, but in the 1940s.” J.G. Ballard Conversations, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2005), 138-139. 9 Greg Leck, Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia: Shandy Press, 2006), 586. 10 Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 131. 11 John K. Fairbank, “Born Too Late,” in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, eds. Bruce H. Sklarew et al (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 209. 12 Dennis A. Foster sees Jim’s attachment to the camp in Ballard as resistance to uncertainty of bounds: “[Jim] finds leaving the protected compound, the one place where power fully defines the parameters of being, intolerable.” Dennis A. Foster, “J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Senses: Perversion and the Failure of Authority,” PMLA 108, no. 3 (May 1993), 530. Belinda Kong views Lunghua Camp as a “biopolis”: “In the absence of a government that safeguards his right to live, Lunghua Camp epitomizes for [Jim] the perfect biopolitical order.” Belinda Kong, “Shanghai Biopolitans: Wartime Colonial Cosmopolis in Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun,” Journal of Narrative Theory 39, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 290. Both scholars insist that in Ballard, the “empire” that emerges at the end is America, and that this new empire grows out of the ashes of demolished British and Japanese social authority. Spielberg emphasizes American presence in the camp, but ironizes American militarism and opportunism. Jim ultimately rejects Basie with force and with the approbation of the audience. 13 J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun: A Novel (Cutchogue: Buccaneer Books, 1984), 164. 14 Ibid, 177. 15 Pu yi, From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, trans. W.J.F. Jenner (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), 304. 16 Ibid, 303. 17 Ballard, 42. 18 Ibid, 123. 19 Pu yi, 472. 20 Ballard, 201. 21 Pauline Kael, “The Manchurian Conformist,” New Yorker, November 30, 1987. 22 Ballard, 182. 23 Tom Stoppard and Menno Meyjes, “Empire of the Sun revised fourth draft” (February 2, 1987), 84a., viewed at the Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections Department. 24 In Kinema junpō, Takazawa Eiichi contrasts Empire’s “humanism” (hyūmanizumu) with the “vicious civilization and invasion images” (dokudokushii bunmei to shinryaku no imeeji) of Emperor. See “Kakokuna rekishi to taiketsu suru supirubaagu no hyūmanizumu,” [Spielberg’s humanism confronting cruel history] Kinema junpō, no. 984 (May 1988): 38-39. 124 25 Mark Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Enzo Ungari, “The Last Emperor revised script,” The Recorded Picture Company, Screenframe Ltd. (June 20, 1986), 119, viewed at Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections Department. 26 In both earlier versions of the script, Pu yi attempts suicide by hanging himself with a white silk scarf. 27 In reality, Amakasu had both arms, but according to composer Sakamoto Ryūichi, who enacted the role, Bertolucci saw the ultranationalist Amakasu as a villain, “like Captain Hook, with a piece broken off somewhere.” Sakamoto Ryūichi, “Ongaku dukuri de wa urarenai kichōna taiken” [Music composition, invaluable experience], Cine Front, no. 136 (February 1988): 5. 28 Yosefa Loshitsky and Raya Meyuhas argue that Emperor’s segregation of women is more of an act of erasure or an “expulsion of the feminine” from society. Yosefa Loshitzky and Raya Meyuhas, “’Ecstasy of Difference’: Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 26. 29 The covert (and overt) sexuality of these moments of oral pleasuring in Emperor has a single parallel in Empire: a scene where Jim masturbates to Mrs. Victor’s exposed body in the moonlight of the camp. The revised fourth draft of the script clarifies Jim’s intentions. As the Shanghai docks are bombed, “He tears his eyes away from Mrs. Victor and searches for the B-29. His lust for the plane is as great as his lust for Mrs. Victor.” When Mr. Victor catches Jim spying, the action reads: “His hand flutters away from his groin and, to hide his embarrassment, he shouts out.” (Fourth revised script, 81-82) The film follows the script precisely, except we never see Jim’s hands, and just after he shouts out, an explosion startles the camp. Lester Friedman considers the explosion as Spielberg’s “displacement of sexual culmination, or perhaps even of Jim ejaculating.” Few other critics and scholars have commented on this scene, perhaps because it runs counter to Spielberg’s critical reputation of the time as being a director unconcerned or uncomfortable with sexual subject matter. Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 218. 30 Ballard praised the faithful elision of his parents from the story as being “psychologically truer to my experience…We had no parental control [in the camp].” Ted Mahar, “Ballard Finds No Flaws in Film Made From His Novel,” Oregonian, Jan. 10, 1988, E04. 31 Ballard, 165. 32 Pu yi, 71. 33 Ibid, 72. 34 Fatimah Tobing Rony labeled Emperor outright a work of “Hollywood cinema” due to its funding by Western capital and aesthetic ties to the Hollywood epic. Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Reviews: The Last Emperor,” Film Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 51. 35 Josh L. Dickey and Clifford Coonan, “China talks tough on co-prods,” Daily Variety, Aug. 29, 2012, 1, 13. Any film with “co-production” status is exempt from China’s import quota system, ensuring its exhibition in the Chinese market and other perks, such as a greater percentage of box office revenue. 36 See Chapter 4 on the relative lack of cooperation that Black Rain’s producers discovered in Osaka, Japan. 37 Dale Kutzera, “Empire of the Sun—an Exotic Journey,” American Cinematographer 69, no. 1 (January 1988): 44- 52. 38 Empire found much more controversy in Spain, where Lunghua Camp was constructed. Spanish press was excluded from the set, resulting in loosely sourced articles about labor disputes. Producer Kathleen Kennedy called a press conference in part to complain that the film was costing more than expected, prompting counter-complaints from local government and production managers. Associate producer Chris Kenny admitted to Variety that the production chose Spain quickly, and late, and therefore could not avoid higher expenses. See “Spielberg’s Movie 125 Raises Stink in China,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Apr. 7, 1987; Peter Besas, “Comments From Spielberg’s Camp Re: High Cost of Spanish Shoot Raise Local Industry, Press Ire,” Variety, June 24, 1987; and Richard Lorant, “Spain’s realities slice into Spielberg dream,” Daily News of Los Angeles, May 12, 1987, 24. 39 The list of banks begins with Thomas’s own bank, Hill-Samuel in London, followed by Pierson, Heldring & Pierson of Holland; Standard Chartered Bank of the UK; Gota Bank of Sweden; and Credit Ansthalt Bankverin of Vienna. There were also two coproduction companies, Yanco Films of Hong Kong and Tao Film of Italy. See Gordon Bowker, “Fall of the House of Manchu,” Observer, Nov. 23, 1986, 48-54. 40 William K. Knoedelseder Jr., “Making ‘Emperor’ in China an Epic Job of Financing,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1, 1988, 1, 8. Emperor’s route to U.S. distribution never had the smoothness or profit potential of foreign territories. L.A.-based company Hemdale Entertainment contributed a third of Emperor’s budget for US distribution rights, which it sold to Columbia while retaining syndication rights. In December 1987, three months after firing chairman David Puttnam, Columbia announced a withholding of a holiday release of the film, prompting a threat by the Cineplex Odeon chain to “ban all Columbia and Tri-Star releases at its theaters.” Thomas, disenchanted with Columbia, criticized what he saw as a weak re-release following the Academy Award ceremony in April, 1988. Emperor’s expansion to 450 and then almost 900 screens had disappointing returns, and Thomas eventually sued Columbia, Hemdale, and Nelson Entertainment for $30 million. See “Columbia to take US Last Emperor rights,” Screen International, August 22, 1987; Kim Masters, “Threat to Pull ‘Emperor’ Fuels Studio’s Feud With Theater Chain,” Los Angeles Daily News, Dec. 10, 1987; Claudia Feller, “Col crowns ‘Emperor’ with relaunch following Oscar win,” Hollywood Reporter, Apr. 14, 1988, 1, 16; and Will Tusher, “Distrib Breach Alleged By Producer,” Variety, Aug. 31, 1988. 41 Bill Grantham, “Filming in China Not Impossible,” Variety, May 29, 1987. 42 Peter Ellingsen, “Chinese Finally Get to See Last Emperor,” Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 4, 1988, 13. 43 Associated Press, “‘Emperor’: Did It Break Chinese Law?” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Apr. 16, 1988, C1. 44 Todd McCarthy, “Thomas, Bertolucci Secure total Chinese Cooperation for ‘Emperor’,” Variety, Aug. 23, 1985, 6. 45 “Filmed in Forbidden City – Will ‘Last Emperor’ Play in Beijing?,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 28, 1987, C5. 46 The critic also noted that the Mandarin dubbing removed some of the awkwardness of the English delivery of lines in the original cut. Hamamoto Ryōichi, “Eiga [rasuto emperaa] shanhai de no jizen jōei mo kōhyō” [Popularity of ‘Last Emperor’ before Shanghai screening], Yomiuri shinbun, August 1, 1988, morning edition, B4. 47 Thailand also censored Emperor, cutting about twenty-five minutes of scenes showing Pu yi’s harsh interrogations and the Red Guard parade near the film’s end. Reports indicated two possible reasons for the cuts: “fear of offending China,” and the film’s clashing with “the Thai concept of kingship.” See Associated Press, “Government censors snip Last Emperor,” Toronto Star, Apr. 14, 1988, B6; and Knight-Ridder News Service, “China Cool to ‘Last Emperor’ Japan and Thailand Censor Oscar Winner,” San Jose Mercury News, May 5, 1988, 8E. Infamously, Emperor’s Japanese distributor Shōchiku-Fuji deleted roughly forty seconds of documentary footage of Japanese army atrocities in China before the film opened wide in Japan. Bertolucci and Thomas’s angry public objections resulted in a re-insertion of the deleted footage and a public apology from Shōchiku-Fuji director Motoyuki Kubotani. See “‘Rasuto enperaa’ no katto mondai ni tsuite” [About the cutting problem of ‘Last Emperor’]. Cine Front, no. 136 (February 1988): 28; and Will Tusher, “’Emperor’ Producer Gets Apology From Shochiku For Cut Footage,” Variety, Jan. 27, 1988, 6, 24. The censorship proved to be a blessing in at least one respect: the negative publicity surrounding the cuts helped to make Emperor the most successful foreign film in Japan in 1988, grossing $19.6 million. Empire, by comparison, grossed $5.62 million in Japan. See Frank Segers, “Japanese Bow to ‘Emperor’ in ’88,” Variety, Jan. 18, 1989, 1, 43. 126 48 “The China Odyssey,” directed by Les Mayfield, was produced by and premiered on ABC on December 30, 1987. “The Chinese Adventure of Bernardo Bertolucci,” directed by Paolo Brunatto, is featured on the Criterion Collection 2008 DVD release of The Last Emperor. 49 Myra Forsberg, “Spielberg at 40: The Man and the Child,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 1988, H21-22. 50 Kawaguchi Atsuko, “Supirubaagu eiga no bunkiten” [Spielberg’s movie turning point], Kinema junpō, no. 983 (April 1988): 129. Spielberg, it is important to note, was not the project’s first director, or even the second, or third. After paying ten thousand sterling for the rights to produce, with Roland Joffé directing, David Puttnam passed the project along to Robert Shapiro, head of Warner Bros.’ European operations. Jack Clayton was to direct, but Shapiro preferred Harold Becker and commissioned Tom Stoppard to write the script. After scouting locations in Shanghai and Spain, Becker was fired when David Lean showed interest in directing, with Spielberg on as producer. Lean and Spielberg, however, clashed on Lean’s then-active project Nostromo, and Lean left Empire under the sole charge of Spielberg. See John Baxter, The Inner Man: The Life of J.G. Ballard (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2011), 273-275. 51 Tony Rayns, “Model Citizen: Bernardo Bertolucci on location in China,” Film Comment 23, no. 6 (November 1987), 35. 52 Bernardo Bertolucci, “Billions of Emperors,” Film Comment 23, no. 6 (November 1987): 34. 53 Steven Spielberg, “Letter,” Variety, May 6, 1987. 54 A New York Times article similarly calls Empire the first “major Hollywood feature to be shot in China since the 1949 revolution.” Andrew L. Yarrow, “Boy in ‘Empire’ Calls Acting ‘Really Good Fun’,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 1987, C30. The accuracy of either claim—Empire or Emperor as the “first major” Sino-American or Sino-European coproduction—rests on a separation of Hong Kong from the mainland in defining a “Sino”-coded entity. Empire’s own studio Warner Bros., for example, co-produced with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest on 1973’s Enter the Dragon. It would be correct, however, to declare Empire and Emperor as the first major state-sponsored Chinese co- productions with America and Europe since the 1979 establishment of the CFCC. 55 Mark Thomas, “Italians Proud Of ‘Emperor’ Oscars, But Is It Italian?” Variety, Apr. 20, 1988. 56 Nigel Morris defines Empire’s narrative as more linear, with Jim’s struggle broken down neatly into national identity crises: first he “learns to live like a Chinese”; then he becomes “an honorary American”; he also has a “Japanese alter-ego.” Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London: Wallflower, 2007), 142, 144, 146. While I agree that Jim’s identity fractures throughout the narrative in ways that defy his British origins, I do not see the struggle as quite so linear. 57 Because Jim is reunited with his parents at the end, Fred See argues that the film shows “a lost boy returned to the sentimental plenitude of home.” Fred See, “Steven Spielberg and the Holiness of War,” The Arizona Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 119. I would argue that the appearance of “normalcy” in Shanghai at the end of Empire is not meant to relieve the audience, and that the image of Jim’s suitcase floating in the harbor serves as a reminder of what Jim has forever lost. 58 Frank Gormlie disagrees with the notion that Jim is to some degree anonymized at the end of Empire; the film, for Gormlie, is a “celebration of individualism” that ends with closure and resolution. See Frank Gormlie, “Ballard’s Nightmares/Spielberg’s Dreams: Empire of the Sun,” in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles L.P. Silet (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 131. 59 According to Tom Stoppard, Jim’s bike ride, and the very presence of a bicycle in the camp, was Spielberg’s conception. See John H. Richardson, “Spielberg: An Educational Experience for Screenwriter,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Dec. 11, 1987, L10. 127 60 Emperor unsurprisingly affected tourism at the Forbidden City. China sponsored a tour beginning in September 1988 that included Pu yi’s birthplace, the Forbidden City itself, his house in Tientsin, and his prison in Changchun. Lu Bing, deputy director of the Beijing Tourist Administration, called the film “great promotion for tourism in China…Now we will make it become real.” See “China to Offer Tour of Last Emperor’s Haunts,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 1988, 2, and Rachel Horne, “A Visit to the Last Emperor,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 27, 1988, G16. 61 Arnold C. Brackman considers Pu yi’s posture and protestations of conflicting motives as unclear evidence of guilt or innocence. “The final verdict on Pu yi,” he writes, “is found in the historical events themselves, whatever his motivation.” Arnold C. Brackman, The Last Emperor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 143. Pu yi as a historical figure is forever cursed by the seeming disparity between his words and his actions, or inactions. 62 Robert Burgoyne, “’The Last Emperor’: The Stages of History,” SubStance 18, no. 2, issue 59 (1989), 99. 63 Li Wenda, the ghostwriter of From Emperor to Citizen, was put in solitary confinement for seven years. Both he and Pu yi’s prison governor were branded counter-revolutionary, not for any of the book’s specific contents but due to its export value as a translation outside China, making it a “foreign” object to some extent. Edward Behr, The Last Emperor (London and Sydney: Macdonald & Co., 1987), 325. 64 Andrew Gordon sees Empire as “a study in mania: a boy’s fantastic dream of war.” Jim is not a self-reflective character, so it is up to the viewer to understand the “manic-depressive experience of alternate rapture and despair” that the film is trying to impart. Though we know better than Jim, we are meant to sympathize with his erratic emotional state. Andrew Gordon, “Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun: A Boy’s Dream of War,” Literature/Film Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1991): 211. 65 Several critics used the directors’ cultural origins and their apparent “distance” from Chinese subjects to comment on the films as being overladen with pictorial effects. John Powers considered the Spielberg film to be without an element of “personal pressure,” unlike Ballard’s novel, resulting in a film that “seems oddly hollow and impersonal.” J. Hoberman, comparing Empire to Boorman’s Hope and Glory, joined many critics in preferring the Boorman film as a personal work, whereas Spielberg with his film was “making do with a sincere, if limited, love for bike-riding and a mystical worship of things from the sky.” See John Powers, “The Sun Almost Rises,” L.A. Weekly, December 11, 1987, 53, and J. Hoberman, “Empire of the Sun,” Village Voice, December 22, 1987. Regarding Emperor, Unno Hiroshi commented that Bertolucci’s “Western gaze” (seiyōnin no manazashi) on the Forbidden City is in fact “doubly forbidden” (nijū ni kinjirareteiru) because Chinese citizens were not allowed entry; the pileup of ceremonials and objects for Unno was more annoying than evocative. David Denby echoes many of Unno’s points. The Yomiuri shinbun review also commented on the demerits of a film about China as seen through Western eyes (seiyōnin no me kara chūgoku). See “Kinjirareta toshi e no shinnyū,” [Trespass into the forbidden city] Kinema junpō, February 1988, 79; David Denby, “Under Western Eyes,” New York Magazine, November 30, 1987; and “’Rasuto emperaa’, rekishi emaki ni owaru” [Last Emperor ends up a historical picture book], Yomiuri shinbun, Feb. 4, 1988, evening edition, C11. 128 CHAPTER 4. ONE BIG GRAY AREA: BLACK RAIN (1989) AND KUROI AME (1989) “It was hard to know who to root for. And people here were uncomfortable with race stuff and talking about the bomb.” 1 —Michael Douglas The above quote is Douglas’s answer to the question why 1989’s Black Rain, a film he starred in and produced, did not do as well as expected in the American theatrical market. He adds that “The Japanese loved it,” reflecting the film’s strong box office in Japanese theaters, 2 as well as his own frustration with American audiences’ seeming inability to accept an anti-heroic character in a racially-charged police thriller that referenced the bombing of Hiroshima— something he believed Japanese audiences were more willing to entertain. 3 By contrast, and by pure coincidence, another Black Rain appeared in Japanese theaters and abroad in 1989, this one an adaptation of Ibuse Masuji’s 1966 novel about the Hiroshima bombing, directed by Imamura Shōhei. 4 This Black Rain—which I will refer to by its Japanese title, Kuroi ame, to avoid confusion—received none of the harsh criticism leveled at Hollywood’s Black Rain; in fact, its critical reputation to some extent hinged upon its stark contrast to Hollywood product. 5 Kuroi ame’s approach to Hiroshima—sourced by an acclaimed novel that was sourced by diaries of actual hibakusha, or bomb victims—seems the exact opposite of Black Rain’s slick and gaudy sensationalism. But Kuroi ame did not achieve the commercial success of Black Rain in the Japanese market; it earned instead an impressive number of awards, including nine from the Japanese Academy and two at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. The coincidental titling and timing of the two films yoked them together only to force them into qualitative opposition: the authentic artistry of Kuroi ame versus the glimmering commerciality of Black Rain. 129 However, in assessing the two films’ aesthetic and dramatic devices, we can detect strong correlations. Despite the films’ differences in tone, budget, and commercial and critical reception, as a related pair they reveal a bi-national struggle of remembrance. The atomic bombings in both films are specters haunting a postwar society that has forgotten them. The bombs’ destructive effects, sourced in the past, linger in the present, and yet too many of us, according to the films, have repressed the source. As referents, the bombings are set at a distance from characters and viewers. In both films, nuclear destruction occupies a location apart from the main action. We see victims of the bombs—in the case of Kuroi ame, most characters are victims of either the bomb itself or long-term radiation sickness—and we also see how the bomb has motivated their actions in the main narrative. But the effect of the films’ plot construction is to locate the bombings in an unrecoverable place of the past, and furthermore, to render them as near-abstract phenomena. The viewer is made to remember, and is also reminded of the need to forget. The bombings appear as memory, as imagined events, and the filmmakers attempt to reify their historical legacy by constructing postwar disaster zones in need of redemption. In the previous chapter, I examined how Japan’s colonial expansion and wartime aggression created “collaboration zones” in China for two highly privileged young men in Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor. Set during the beginning of the war, the films showed the immediate impact of the invasion of China on the Chinese landscape and on the Chinese people, all of which functioned as a backdrop for two non-Chinese prisoners desiring special treatment from their Japanese captors. Japan appeared, then, as an ambivalent force providing both entrapment and escapism. In Black Rain and Kuroi ame, however, we see the impact of the war’s end, the legacies of American military aggression and postwar peace agreements. The images are not ambivalent, and not restricted to Japan; they are, rather, monochromatic and 130 transnational. They are collaboration “disaster” zones, with a relatively clean, attractive surface, hiding the destruction in plain sight. The war devastated Japan’s physical environment, but what has been built in the postwar period seems lacking in vitality. There is energy and beauty, of course, in Black Rain’s Osaka and in Kuroi ame’s village setting. But there is an even greater sense of doom and decay that extends to Black Rain’s New York City; these are postwar disaster zones. What has created this form of hidden disaster—a kind of transnational malaise—is no mystery: aggressive economic recovery, enabled by the U.S.-Japan postwar security agreement. Bi-national collaboration has overtaken wartime conflict as an issue of global concern. Both Black Rain and Kuroi ame use Hiroshima as a destructive precedent that postwar “friendship” agreements have conveniently forgotten. Black Rain and Kuroi ame lay claim to an evocative specificity of location designed to represent the entirety of Japan, and even beyond that, a contemporary world in crisis. Black Rain’s Osaka is Black Rain’s Japan, as seen through the eyes of a paranoid American police detective. And Kuroi ame’s Fukuyama village—its postwar setting—is an open-air set constructed in Hattōji, Okayama, where 1950s architecture still survived and could establish an authentic temporality abetted by monochrome cinematography recalling classic 1950s Japanese cinema. Curiously, for a pair of films so invested in the symbolic power of Hiroshima, the city itself never appears, and over the course of the two films, only a brief section of Kuroi ame is set there; even in that case, a reconstruction of 1945 Hiroshima was not achieved in Hiroshima. 6 As this chapter will show, logistical challenges of location shooting in both films dictated choices of production design that contributed to a distancing effect of the viewer from the purported settings. Osaka and Hiroshima represent “Japan” in both films, but the Japan we see, despite the extensive location shooting, is largely fabricated. The lack of environmental authenticity serves the theme 131 of vanishing historical memory. In defining Fukuyama and Osaka as the place of setting, both Imamura and Ridley Scott, the director of Black Rain, constructed and coded Japanese space that disappeared once the filmmakers departed. Adaptation difficulties created a further distancing effect of Hiroshima from the viewer’s consciousness. Black Rain, it is important to note, ranks as one of the most mistakenly interpreted films regarding Hiroshima ever made. Hiroshima in Black Rain is a product of imagination, not that of its screenwriters but of its viewers. A character’s reminiscence of being victimized by a “B-29” lacks specific reference to a location. Given the film’s title, most viewers understandably assume that character to be talking about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But an examination of successive drafts of the film’s script shows that “black rain” in the film refers not to Hiroshima but to the Osaka firebombings of 1945. Warren Lewis, a co-writer of the film, confirms this in a recent interview with the author, adding that he and his partner, Craig Bolotin, took pains to “scrupulously avoid” any mention of Hiroshima in the script. 7 Confusion over this matter is the direct result of production logistics and casting choices that dictated script revisions. Hiroshima in Black Rain is at a fundamental remove from the viewer’s comprehension of story events, and yet most viewers take the interpretive leap there anyway. Hiroshima is there, and yet not there—a deceptive object of contemplation that at once clarifies and confuses. Adapting Kuroi ame posed a different set of challenges: how to translate first-person diary entries from the original novel into third-person spectacle. Imamura’s faithfulness to Ibuse’s tone and characters notwithstanding, the additions, subtractions, and alterations he worked into his adaptation relegated Hiroshima to the status of flashback locale. Building up the postwar drama of the film, Imamura presents the bombing as tableau, a referent that in itself contains little progressive action and no resolution. The film instead focuses on the issue of a 132 young female hibakusha’s frustrated attempts to find a husband while suffering from the stigma of bomb victimization in postwar Japan. Ibuse’s novel includes her story, but in much abbreviated form: it helps to establish a rationale for investigating various personal narratives of August 6, 1945, which ultimately overshadow dramatic conflicts set in the ‘50s and beyond. Imamura reverses that emphasis, downplaying other characters in the Ibuse novel and drawing from other Ibuse fiction to build and resolve the young woman’s story, broadening her experience as a hibakusha outside of Hiroshima, years after the bombing. In a comparative examination of both films and their “original” sources, we can see the escalating ambiguity (in Black Rain’s case) and condensation (in Kuroi ame’s case) of 1945 Hiroshima’s dramatic function. Neither film, however, can transcend a 1989 sensibility. In thematic terms, and related to choices of adaptation, Hiroshima as a historical subject yields to contemporary—1980s— concerns. Black Rain poses an international conflict between the United States and Japan that is of the ‘80s and yet rooted in the ‘40s; Kuroi ame overlays the historical tragedy of nuclear holocaust with a distinctly ‘80s nuclear consciousness. Hiroshima in both cases recedes in relevance, even though it underpins much of the onscreen action. Black Rain’s vengeful yakuza boss Sugai, aiming to obliterate the American economy in return for the Hiroshima bombing (again, this is the generally accepted yet technically false interpretation of the character’s motivation), puts a dark face on nationalism. His defeat at the hands of American and Japanese police detectives represents an evolution of bi-national relations and a putting to rest of lingering war memories. Kuroi ame addresses the bomb as a product of nuclear power nations that have either forgotten or repressed memories of Hiroshima. Released soon after the Chernobyl disaster and near the end of the Cold War, it found greater relevance as an indictment of current and 133 potential nuclear disaster than of the annihilating power of nuclear warfare. Both films conjure up Hiroshima as an atrocity of long-term destructive force, only to redirect their immediate concerns to political and economic crises that in themselves may recreate disaster on the scale of Hiroshima. The potential calamities dreaded by the main characters of Black Rain and Kuroi ame would not be history repeating itself, but history outdoing itself—disasters so unspeakable that only something like Hiroshima could serve as a precedent. SCOTT CITY In order to relate the long-term after-effects of Hiroshima to contemporary concerns, the filmmakers of Black Rain and Kuroi ame take great pains to design the specificity of postwar crisis zones. The place settings of the films establish an arena of struggle over repressed memories of the war that are haunting the present. In Black Rain, both New York City and Osaka are hazy metropoli reeking of corruption. The excess of smoke, haze, and muted color tones of New York makes the narrative transition to Osaka more of a continuation and intensification than a rupture or pivot point. In story terms, Osaka is alien territory, a formidable obstacle to the two American detectives who fly there. In visual terms, however, it is New York’s twin. Kuroi ame likewise shifts its physical setting back and forth from Fukuyama in 1950 and later years, to Hiroshima in August 1945. But the two spaces are more clearly delineated there than in Black Rain: the large-scale destruction and horror of urban Hiroshima are the source of after-effects that permeate the placid rural community of postwar Fukuyama. While Black Rain multiplies the spatial setting of its action to show correspondences between separate locales, Kuroi ame multiplies the temporal setting of its action to show correspondences between the past and present. In photographic terms, however, both films are 134 monochromatic—Black Rain with its grayed-out color scheme, Kuroi ame with its low-contrast black-and-white. Something unnatural permeates the atmosphere. Technically nations at peace, America and Japan appear under siege by invisible and perhaps abstract marauders. Logistically, both films faced challenges of environmental authenticity and control, and each accepted a degree of compromise in favor of projecting images of dread and potential disaster. Black Rain, a production intended to shoot on location only in New York and Osaka, faced unexpected difficulties in securing public space and business-owned locations in Osaka. California became the site of extensive shooting in locations passing for urban Osaka and rural Japan, and the film retains a palpable sense of non-place. Its entire climax occupies a Napa Valley netherworld that could be a hundred miles from either New York or Osaka. Kuroi ame’s budget limitations prevented a full-scale production in Hiroshima, which in 1988 bore little resemblance to itself in 1945 or 1950. 8 Fukuyama, east of Hiroshima, likewise could not serve as a location hub. Instead the company constructed open sets in Okayama prefecture, east of Hiroshima prefecture, where low-cost yet laborious reconstruction could establish a serviceable Hiroshima and Fukuyama of 1945, 1950, and beyond. As with Black Rain, spatial authenticity mattered less than capturing an authentic tone, an idea of a place that reflected the intentions of the filmmakers. In a 1989 interview with Ridley Scott, critic Yamaguchi Takeshi characterizes Scott’s visual style in both Blade Runner (1982) and Black Rain as growing out of an “English end-of- century symbolism” that is “loaded with decadence.” Scott agrees: “architecture of that time, I feel, is extraordinarily attractive. No matter what country it’s from, I like it, and I think it’s reflected, it’s something I do consciously.” 9 Scott’s limited range of architectural, color, and lighting preferences imposes a consistency on production and shot design, to a nearly excessive 135 degree. Smoke, haze, and moisture saturate the images, whether the scene takes place on a New York City street or at an Osaka plaza. While we never see New York at night, New York’s daytime pallor matches Osaka’s, and not once does either American detective stop and stare at the nighttown fluorescence of Osaka as if there wasn’t already plenty of that at home. Black Rain exhaustively plumbs variations on aesthetic decadence in order to universalize environmental rot. From the very opening shots, images of New York are curdled and murky. A red dot fills the center of the screen to show the title (in white lettering), and dissolves into the contours of the “Unisphere” sculpture in Queens, New York: a globular metallic model of the Earth, with the Americas facing the camera. Detective Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) enters the frame on a Harley-Davidson rolling towards the sculpture, the red brake light of the motorbike twinkling through the hazy air of early morning. It is Sunday, and Nick joins a crowd of bikers underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, a location clouded with steam rising from manhole covers, at least one flaming barrel, Nick’s own cigarette, and various off-camera smoke machines. Nick is the quintessential hyper-masculine anti-hero: he laughs at being called a “wacko” for his reckless motorbiking and then reveals his public identity as an elite (and corrupt) homicide detective. He is a fantasy of macho, middle-aged duality, the veteran who can still mix it up with his juniors and whose sense of public justice adheres just enough to his own chauvinistic value system to make him heroic, or at least potentially so. When he picks up one of his sons at his ex-wife’s house, she appears only at a distance, a ghostly figure waving hello from behind a window and a curtain of rain. This broken marriage is something we might think Nick would have to redeem, but the possibility of reconciliation never motivates him. According to the backstory he reveals later in Osaka, his family obligations are what made him steal money from crime scenes in the first place; marriage and corruption are one and the same. 136 But the fault is not Nick’s: he has the perception to see through the deeper corruption of a city that appears to be just under a radioactive cloud and just above Hades. “The whole goddamn system’s falling apart,” he says to investigators from Internal Affairs who accuse him (rightly) of theft, “and you’re busting my ass?!” There is no master Nick can trust but himself, and in such an apocalyptic worldview his own sins are negligible. And because the film renders both New York City and Osaka as projections of Nick’s hardboiled cynicism—as hellholes of moral decay— what the screenwriters thought was a story of “transition” from all-American egoism to American-Japanese collectivism seems, at times, like an ode to nihilism. 10 Osaka is alien to Nick in many ways, but essentially it is New York on a different hemisphere, and he navigates through it the same way he does New York—with grinding petulance. The film never suggests that there is another dimension of reality, which would make a satirical point about Nick; rather, it indulges in seamy opulence on two continents, and we create our own distance from Nick whenever we start to enjoy the tantalizing gloom. Achieving such a precise quality of image required, in Osaka, an unprecedented level of cooperation between Paramount studio and Osaka’s city government and businesses. Osaka could not simply host a second unit gathering travelogue footage for transitional shots (although such shots are in the film), or a small first unit satisfied with Osaka’s locations “as is,” shooting documentary style. 11 The city had to accommodate a large-scale first-unit production company with a fastidious director and a major Japanese star, Takakura Ken, on locations ill-equipped to handle them. Cooperation fluctuated with non-cooperation. As the film’s assistant director, Cellin Gluck, told the author in a recent interview, long-form verbal negotiations and renegotiations with officials in Osaka occurred on an hourly, not daily, basis. 12 Black Rain’s producers originally planned to shoot the film in Hong Kong, until the Osaka government 137 extended an invitation to the production to use the city and its public facilities. 13 However, mutual misunderstandings between Osakan officials who did not expect such a large-scale production, and Paramount executives who did not expect such tight controls, ultimately truncated the number of scenes completed in Osaka and reduced the film’s “made in Japan” percentage. The plan, as announced at an October 28, 1988, press conference at the Osaka Hilton International Hotel, was to shoot over 70% of the film in Osaka, from October 31 to December 20. 14 Shooting began at an Osaka government building doubling as a police station that provided a pictorial background view of Osaka Castle. 15 As soon as the production left the police building, nearly every location was a struggle to secure and use. Cinematographer Jan De Bont revealed later that the company was still scouting locations when he arrived in Japan just before production began, and the script he read on the plane had already gone through several revisions. 16 The company could not get permission to shoot the climax at a Buddhist temple anywhere in or near Osaka, or to film scenes at Osaka International Airport. 17 The producers also had to postpone a large scripted setpiece—the young yakuza villain, Satō (Matsuda Yusaku), murders an American policeman, Charlie (Andy Garcia), by throwing him in front of a subway train at a peak traffic hour—to wait for their permission request to work through the bureaucracy; when it finally arrived, it came with the caveat that there can be no murder in the subway murder scene. “The image will look bad,” explained Suzuki Shigenobu, an Osaka government official. 18 Logistical problems plagued the company throughout, such as the narrowness of city streets, and tight corners that forced the production to use equipment trucks half the normal size. But more serious problems revolved around the negotiating process with local officials, and 138 security on the set. Successful permissions were the result of long, numerous, and arduous meetings, and shooting on the streets of Osaka involved the city police, who were strict with timetables. At Dōtonbori Bridge, heavy with pedestrian traffic, instead of having permission to shoot all night over consecutive nights, the production received permission to shoot three hours per night, from 3:00am to 6:00am, with police doing little to control the crowds. The production hired a “50-strong private security force” to keep crowds from ruining shots. 19 Osaka production ended thirty-two days after the crew began shooting, and whatever Scott was not allowed to film, or whatever sequences he filmed partially in Osaka, had to be completed in California. Charlie’s murder scene, and the entire climax and resolution of the picture ended up being filmed in, respectively, an underground parking garage in downtown Los Angeles, and Chandon Vineyard in Napa Valley. 20 The early return to the U.S. threw off the production schedule, and several Japanese actors had to renegotiate their deals to obtain visas and complete their roles in America. 21 In some cases, bit players visible in long shots who did not fly to the States were “matched” by American look-alikes in California footage. Duplication of props and vehicles was necessary, along with matching locations. A construction area on Hope Street in L.A. became an Osaka street; Sugai’s Frank Lloyd Wright home, interior and exterior, was in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A.; and LAX substituted for Osaka International Airport. 22 Adding the percentage of the film composed of California-duplicated Osaka scenes, with scenes taking place in interior locations like the Club Miyako that the production had planned all along to shoot in L.A., yields a total of about one hour of the finished film. That, combined with the opening twenty-three minutes of the film set in New York and in the plane taking Nick, Charlie, and Satō to Japan, totals eighty to eighty-five minutes of scenes that sources confirm 139 were not filmed in Japan. The company had planned on shooting over 70% of the entire film in Osaka; in the end, they shot almost 70% of it in America. As if to compensate for the low percentage of on-location footage of Osaka, Black Rain’s overall patterning of composition and camera movement emphasizes where and when the “actual” Osaka appears. The establishing shot of nearly every exterior scene filmed in Osaka is a variation of a “pan-in”: the shot begins on a piece of architecture, usually at a great height, or on a piece of décor, and then pans at a varying pace to where the principal actors are standing, sitting, or walking. The movement is usually right to left, and seems motivated by anxiety over the viewer’s possible doubts that these are genuine Osaka locations. By showcasing the surrounding environment before settling on the players, the film announces repeatedly, “This is not a set.” The same principle applies to establishing shots of New York City in the film’s opening section: pan-downs from a long-range view of the city skyline, or a quick scene in Nick’s apartment in Queens that features giant picture windows looking out on the east side of Manhattan. The content of the scenes does not necessarily warrant such a detailed scanning of the area. The point of view of these establishing shots is that of an unseen tour guide, urging us to feast our eyes on this or that portion of the background before the characters and the narrative intrude upon our admiring field of vision. These shots stand out as anxious authenticators, and the viewer’s awareness of the apparatus of the production—its compulsion to showcase location footage recorded under great duress—heightens, ironically, the artificiality of the environment. The most conspicuous tensions in the film are not between American and Japanese culture, though in the script those tensions are central and thematic. Rather, it is the tensions between filmmaker and location that define the visual design of Black Rain. Uninterested or unwilling to contrast the worlds of America and Japan in visual terms, eager to experiment and 140 indulge in the playground environment of controlled sets, intoxicated by the aesthetics of decadence regardless of their country of origin, and perhaps under pressure to deliver location footage that privileges location over narrative, director Scott presides over a succession of overscaled backgrounds and a multiplicity of visual tics. When a Japanese critic referred to the film as a fascinating journey through “Scott City Osaka,” 23 the critic was responding to a manufactured world, a transnational dystopia filtered through an aesthetic that stresses the ominous and spectacular over the local and authentic. The dramatic purpose of Scott’s design is to enhance the paranoid worldview of the film’s lead character. In an interview, he expressed surprise and a bit of disappointment in Tokyo and Kyoto when he first scouted locations, because they seemed too “well-kept,” with “definitively Japanese” architecture difficult to find. He preferred Osaka for its “European feel…a lot of parks and also a gentility.” 24 But that was the Japan he saw for himself, not the one he intended to film. Nick’s story, for Scott, required a “realistic” approach, showing the concrete, the plexiglass, and a surface homogeneity. Kisaragi Nao quoted Scott as saying that modern images of Japan are not normally projected to a tourist’s eye, and he wanted to change that image, to show more of the “real” Japan to foreign audiences. 25 He further explained to Yamaguchi Takeshi that in his pursuit of realism, he had to project an image of Osaka from Nick’s point of view. Nick is a foreigner who does not understand Japan, so it was critical to heighten the sense of danger and unease—the “real” (genjitsu) Osaka was less important. 26 The dystopic imagery appears not as an effect of Nick’s worldview, but as environmental affect: no matter where Nick goes, the world seems mysteriously askew, foreboding, haunted by unknown forces. Nick’s encounter with Sugai, the victim of B-29 firebombings in Osaka (interpreted by many as the Hiroshima bombing), reveals the hidden sources of dystopia. The heterogeneous past, stained by 141 international conflict and war atrocities, has homogenized the present. Postwar bi-national collaboration has, in effect, flattened the cultural landscape while, ironically, building vertiginous infrastructure. IMAMURA CITY The visibility of the bombing of Hiroshima of course varies between the two films: in Black Rain we “see” the bombing in our imaginations via the testimony of a Japanese survivor; Kuroi ame more explicitly visualizes the blast, the mushroom cloud, the irradiated and blackened rain, and the immediate destruction of the city. One problem with assessing the matter of Kuroi ame’s more explicit depiction of the bombing is its rarity. The film has predecessors, notably in docudramas produced in the immediate post-Occupation period and analyzed cogently in the 1996 collected volume Hibakusha Cinema; Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. But non-documentary works visualizing the immediate impact of the bombing on Hiroshima’s residents are infrequent enough to place Kuroi ame in a rarified category of historical reconstruction. While examining Kuroi ame as a full-scale Hiroshima reenactment, it is important to emphasize the scarcity of its approach. 27 Kuroi ame’s timing placed it at a severe logistical disadvantage compared with earlier works like Shindō Kaneto’s Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, 1952). Based upon an anthology of children’s stories of the bombing edited by Arata Osada, Children not only received substantial local support but had postwar Hiroshima itself as an authenticating backdrop. Children even brings a camera into the iconic Atomic Bomb Dome, surveying it from a perspective forbidden to tourists. Shindō writes that during his location scouting in Hiroshima, his hometown, he noted areas that “still suffered from a substantial number of scars of the 142 nuclear bomb,” wreckage and ruin visible in a 1952 film that is set in 1949. 28 Kuroi ame, a black-and-white film like Children, shares much of that film’s iconography in depicting the atomic blast, such as rapid crosscutting between various characters, closeups of clocks arriving at the fatal time of 8:15am, and the flash of light that seems to freeze time and space. But Kuroi ame, as a production of the 1980s, had to manufacture Hiroshima as well as the novel’s rural 1950s Fukuyama setting outside both areas. The inescapable challenge of dramatizing the Hiroshima bombing to an explicit degree is the unlikelihood of anyone close to the blast surviving it. Kuroi ame, like the Ibuse novel, focuses on characters who were far enough from the epicenter of the blast not to be killed directly by the bomb, but close enough to feel its lingering radioactive aftereffects. Their perspective, therefore, is a traumatic, and troubling, form of spectatorship. Like Black Rain, the film opens on an early morning (August 6, 1945) with the main character on a moving vehicle. Yasuko (Tanaka Yoshiko) rides on the back of a truck to Furue, just outside of Hiroshima city, to bring some valuable assets of her family estate, fearful that soon Hiroshima would be targeted by American air raids. Seeing the mushroom cloud at fairly close distance, Yasuko crosses over to the city by boat, where she is pelted by mysterious black rain. She meets her uncle Shizuma Shigematsu (Kitamura Kazuo) and her aunt, Shigeko (Ichihara Etsuko), and the three of them cross downtown Hiroshima to reach Shigematsu’s factory. Imamura depicts their crosstown journey as an exhibition of horrors. Amid flames and debris, the three pedestrians witness burn victims, piled and floating corpses, and random passersby screaming for help. Shigematsu cautions the two women “Don’t look!” but naturally they do look, as does the camera, and the audience. Imamura lays out the disaster as a series of episodes of spectacular carnage, given an eerie gloss by Takemitsu Tōru’s musical score. 143 Throughout the sequences of Yasuko, Shigematsu, and Shigeko’s trek across Hiroshima, an event revisited through flashbacks, Hiroshima’s destruction covers a wide geographical area but a narrow range of imagery. Although the film contains two brief superimpositions of text establishing the time and location, scenes in Hiroshima offer no such guidance. It is August 6, certainly, but the viewer has little sense of the distance that the three characters are traveling: we only know their goal and the immediate chaos surrounding them. They are in Hiroshima, but an unfamiliar one—a set of physical obstacles that were once the city’s infrastructure. Most spectacularly, a munitions cargo train explodes, succumbing to wildfires while stuck halfway across a demolished bridge. The logic of the city’s network of roads and rivers has collapsed: pathways lead to dead ends, and water is suddenly unsafe to drink. Imamura captures a sense of environmental panic by alienating the characters from their surroundings. One male victim, blinded by the atomic blast, yells from an open window “Where is Hiroshima?!” before falling to his death. Hiroshima has become not only a fearsome place, but unrecognizable as Hiroshima. As a film reliant upon the testimony of direct witnesses to Hiroshima in the hours after the bomb, Kuroi ame forgoes strict verisimilitude to capture a sense of traumatic displacement. Imamura’s approach is not a costly reconstruction of Hiroshima, but a stripped-down imagining of a ruin so severe that it bears little resemblance to Hiroshima before the bomb. In contrast, scenes set in the Kobatake village in the outskirts of Fukuyama after the war, where most of the film’s action takes place, show an environment relatively unscathed, though Fukuyama itself was a target of air raids shortly before the Hiroshima bombing. The devastation has not ended, but it now occurs within the bodies of Hiroshima survivors. Imamura clarified his intentions in an interview with Kinema junpō, where he said the film was not meant to be a loud anti-nuclear statement, but he wanted to depict silence or inaction (chinmoku), the better to show 144 individual pain. 29 The placid scenery of the rural village appears as a comfort to those who witnessed and endured the Hiroshima bombing, and yet it cannot protect them from the bomb’s long-term biological effects. As we grow to understand during the flashback sequences, what impacted Yasuko, Shigematsu, and Shigeko when they crossed downtown Hiroshima shortly after the bombing was radiation exposure as well as the nightmarish sound and imagery of the city’s destruction. The village community in 1950 seems concerned mostly with daily routines. Thomas Keirstead and Deidre Lynch consider Kobatake to be “outside history…a place where women labor and old men rest, and young men…merely visit.” 30 Access to Kobatake from Fukuyama city requires both a train ride and a shuttle bus ride, far from any city attractions. Important current events transpire through gossip by outsiders, or by radio, giving reports on developments in the ongoing Korean War. The hibakusha who live in the village have already had their place in history. Shigematsu’s mountain land offers an escape from the urban sprawl and the presence of Occupation forces. Shigematsu, who no longer works, uses his idle time to assist Yasuko in finding a husband, and to record his (and her) memories of August 6, , 1945, and the days following. However, the comforts of rural life that allow for undisturbed contemplation of the traumatic past cannot prevent the past from intruding on the present, not only in the form of traumatic memory but in debilitating and fatal illness that takes the lives of nearly all survivors of the bomb in the course of the film. Unlike the near-impressionistic set of the bombed Hiroshima of Kuroi ame’s flashback sequences, the Fukuyama village set required greater attention to historical detail—not so much in terms of a historically documented and reconstructed Fukuyama, but in terms of a credible rural setting in close proximity to Hiroshima prefecture in the early 1950s. The village of Hattōji, 145 in the mountains of the city of Bizen in Okayama prefecture east of Fukuyama, hosted the production. With old, thatched-roof buildings still standing after the war, Hattōji, a tourist attraction in Okayama, is considered a cultural asset. For about a year, the art department worked in the village constructing open sets, burying concrete roads, and planting rice fields. Imamura, whose own production company co-financed the film, had the cast and crew boarding together in the village, where they shot for four months in spring and summer 1988. 31 A reporter for Yomiuri shinbun described a visit to the set as like “getting on a time machine and returning to the past.” 32 Reconstructing Kobatake as a place was less of a priority for the production than building off of the already-retro appearance of Hattōji to establish an authentic time. As with the set passing for Hiroshima, the set passing for Kobatake impresses upon the viewer a detailed sense of when the film is set, but not so much a sense of where. Contrasts between the time and place settings are vivid and clear; the environments could not be more unalike. And yet we understand that the settings in and of themselves do not approach documentary realism in terms of their location, unlike earlier films like Children of Hiroshima. The visual effect of contrasting Hiroshima with Kobatake through reconstructed sets is only a slight departure from Black Rain’s subjective renderings of New York City and Osaka: both films effectively “double” their locations while connecting the two thematically. But whereas Black Rain shows New York and Osaka to be identical twins of urban decadence, Kuroi ame creates fraternal twins—Hiroshima and Kobatake look nothing alike but are connected through temporal leaps of memory and slow-progressing symptoms of illness. Yasuko, Shigematsu, and Shigeko’s bodies contain the Hiroshima of August 6 no matter how far they roam. Even if the postwar setting were Tokyo, or as far away as Hokkaido, Hiroshima would be the focal point of discussion and remembrance. 146 FROM TOKYO TO HIROSHIMA As a Hollywood-produced film, Black Rain, in its symbolic referencing of the Hiroshima bombing, places itself in an even more rarified category than Kuroi ame. Until Black Rain, Hollywood cinema had been virtually silent on the subject, at least from the perspective of Japanese victims of the bombing. In 1949, the head of Daiei studio, Nagata Masaichi, offered equipment and the payment of all expenses in Japan to “any Hollywood studio” that would be willing to make an adaptation of John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima. 33 The offer was not returned, and until 1989 no major Hollywood film about the bombings had been released that depicted the point of view of Japanese victims. 34 Hollywood studios in the immediate postwar period were not necessarily against dramatizations of the bomb; the challenge was in showing the chain of decisions leading to the bombings, and their effect on Japanese civilians. In 1947 MGM released a docudrama called The Beginning or the End that purported to show the “true story” of the making and dropping of the bombs. Greg Mitchell and Robert Jay Lifton write of an enthusiastic Louis B. Mayer approving a production that originally intended to show the ruins of Hiroshima and its human victims; but after a succession of drafts that watered down the approach—many of the changes insisted upon by President Truman himself—the released film eliminated any ground-level depiction of the bombings and devolved into pro-bomb propaganda. 35 Black Rain would seem to represent a long-overdue inclusion of hibakusha in Hollywood cinema. However, perhaps because of the scarcity of precedent, and certainly because of the symbolic weight of the film’s title, Black Rain managed to feature a hibakusha who is not really a hibakusha. Due to script revisions that came about because of location shooting difficulties and 147 a casting choice, the character of Sugai, who was meant to be a victim of B-29 firebombings— and arguably still appears so in the film—has come to be mis-identified as a hibakusha. But the matter is not one of correct versus incorrect identifications of a character. The successive drafts arrive at a point that is open to interpretation. Sugai’s hibakusha identity derives from a combination of literary vagueness and an audience’s desire to identify him as such. Just as Kuroi ame imagines a Hiroshima from the point of view of characters who barely recognize it in its ruined state, Black Rain, with some degree of intention, sketches an atomic bomb victim through suggestive means. In an early draft of the script by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, dated November 1987, Tokyo and Beppu (a tourist city in Kyūshū, far west of Tokyo) were the primary Japan locations. 36 The simple storyline has Nick capturing a young yakuza named Kobo in the course of a Mob investigation. Nick and his partner Charlie travel to Tokyo to hand over Kobo to the authorities, but Kobo escapes custody. With the help of Matsumoto, a Tokyo detective, Nick navigates the Tokyo underworld and discovers a yakuza conspiracy to destroy the U.S. economy with billions of counterfeit dollars. In this early version of the script, both Nick and Matsumoto are disreputable policemen, well-meaning but victims of circumstance: Nick is falsely accused of bribery, while Matsumoto lost his son to the yakuza and has succumbed to alcoholism. The “black rain” of this version of the script was witnessed by Matsumoto as a child in Tokyo during the 1945 American firebombings. Intended as a poignant and sentimental characterization of Matsumoto, who has an endearing affection for American pop culture, he reveals his World War II experience in a drunken monologue to Nick and Charlie: Americans change everything. When I was young the city was wood and paper... I was ten when the bombers came. I lived underground for three days. When I came up, the city was gone....A ball of fire....It began to rain, Nick. You know what 148 color the rain was?....Black....It was black from the ash. Very impressive. You Americans, you could make black rain. 37 A later version of the script reflects the switching of location to Osaka, and a reimagining of Nick and Matsumoto. In a dual change of characterization, Nick in the revised script is a defiantly corrupt cop, rightly accused of theft, and Matsumoto is no longer a bumbling alcoholic, but a stoic man of principle with a low opinion of Nick’s home country. According to co-writer Warren Lewis, Matsumoto’s shift in character corresponded to the casting choice of Takakura Ken, whose persona is closer to Clint Eastwood. 38 The “black rain” reference also switched characters, from Matsumoto to the elderly yakuza boss Sugai. As part of their transformation of Matsumoto into a more guarded organization man, Bolotin and Lewis altered the source of the “black rain” speech and sharpened its language so it serves as an explanation for Sugai’s yakuza conspiracy to destroy the U.S. economy. Sugai, who blames American culture for warping the values of the renegade yakuza Satō (formerly named Kobo), gives the speech to Nick alone, in Sugai’s Frank Lloyd Wright- designed living room. He speaks in English: I was 10 when the B-29 came. My family lived underground for three days. When we came up the city was gone. Then the heat brought rain. Black rain. You made the rain black, and shoved your values down our throat. We forgot who we were. You created Satō and thousands like him. I'm paying you back. The speech has a remarkable potency not only in its clarification of Sugai’s criminal motives, but in its evocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite Sugai’s Osakan identity. The term “black rain” in the 1987 script referred to the Tokyo B-29 firebombings of 1944-1945. In the revised script, there is narrated backstory that clearly places Sugai as a child in Osaka: Nick examines a file photo of Sugai, and notices several burn marks on Sugai’s hands and face. Matsumoto explains the marks: “American fire bombing, April 1945. Took his father and brother.” 39 This 149 scene does not appear in the final film. Furthermore, the “black rain” speech in the revised script is printed exactly as actor Wakayama Tomisaburō delivers it, except that the script refers to “B- 29s,” plural, where Sugai in the film says “B-29,” singular. 40 Those missing or revised details, as well as the evocative power of the term “black rain” in reference to the atomic bombings, leads many if not most viewers to assume that Sugai was a child in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, not Osaka. For many viewers of the film in Japan, the speech may be heard more clearly as that of a victim of the Osaka firebombings. Two articles in separate issues of Kinema junpō and Kakii Michihiro’s Hariuddo no nihonjin (Hollywood’s Japanese) quote the sentence “When we came up the city was gone” in Japanese as “Dete kitara ōsaka wa hi no umi datta”—“When we came up, Osaka was a sea of fire.” 41 Because the speech is delivered in English, the review quotes are likely reproducing the film’s Japanese subtitles that accompanied its theatrical release. Film scholar Masuda Sachiko translates the speech into Japanese closer to its English delivery, before acknowledging how the vague use of the word “city” leads to a confusion of associations. 42 A fair number of English-language reviewers and scholars assume without question that Sugai is talking about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, 43 but as Masuda and other Japanese critics and scholars point out—just as the script indicates—the memories of “black rain” could just as well be those of an Osakan. The effect of the speech’s alterations, regardless of whether or not the audience interprets “black rain” as referring to Osaka or Hiroshima, is to de-localize Sugai’s childhood experience into a more generalized experience of victimization. He is an Osakan out for revenge, but the vagueness of his reminiscence—we don’t know exactly where he was when the B-29 (or B-29s) came, only that he was ten years old—leaves room for an interpretive expansion of Sugai’s 150 origins and motivation. If Sugai were from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and now resided in Osaka, his combined experience as a hibakusha and as a yakuza elevates his representational stature. He is a local mobster who suffered trauma that most viewers associate with an event of world- historical proportions. In that interpretive framework, Sugai’s vengeful desire to destroy the U.S. economy speaks for World War II victims on the national level—which audiences almost instinctively, and in this case intuitively, measure by the atomic bombings. THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST As illustrated above, Black Rain’s process of revision in reaction to logistical and casting issues both invited and obscured direct reference to Hiroshima. While drawing the viewer closer to an interpretation of Sugai’s character as a Hiroshima survivor, the vagueness of the connection places Hiroshima at least halfway within the realm of speculation. By contrast, seemingly, Kuroi ame’s re-enactment of the Hiroshima bombing would seem to sweep away all doubt and uncertainty about where events are happening. And yet, in its own process of revision from the original Ibuse novel, its own vision of Hiroshima is likewise abstracted and distanced. Even though the novel draws the reader with ever-increasing frequency and detail into ground-level experiences of Hiroshima from August 6 to August 15, 1945, the film reverses that emphasis and resigns Hiroshima to an ever-receding past. Hiroshima in Kuroi ame is simultaneously unforgettable, and yet largely forgotten; it is a subject of reminiscence whose painful legacy obstructs the present, which is the film’s main concern. Ibuse structures the novel initially as a postwar family drama: Shigematsu, in 1950 Kobatake, faces the dilemma of finding a good husband for his niece Yasuko who, rumor has it, is a hibakusha, unsuitable for marriage. To prove that Yasuko didn’t enter Hiroshima until after 151 the bomb dropped, Shigematsu copies out her diary from August 1945, and we read her words as a first-person account. Shigematsu decides to chronicle his own experience of the bomb to supplement Yasuko’s, and we read, at much greater length, his experiences. Adding to the voices are Shigeko and Iwatake, a member of Hiroshima’s medical reserve unit. These accounts take over the 1950 narrative and the reader gradually loses sight of Yasuko, whose inability to marry increases with her growing symptoms of radiation sickness. Yasuko becomes an object of study for Shigematsu and Shigeko, who report on her declining health in diary form. The book ends with the Emperor’s radio address to the nation on August 15, 1945, and a brief passage of Shigematsu ending his journal of Hiroshima memories and hoping for Yasuko’s recovery. The reader is left to wonder whether Shigematsu, Shigeko, and Yasuko’s postwar troubles were ever intended to be resolved or simply functioned as a conduit for delving into traumatic memory. John Whittier Treat credits Ibuse for his sidling approach to the bombing. Ibuse shows us victims who died “without understanding,” writes Treat, and Ibuse shows them without presuming to understand any of it himself. 44 In Treat’s estimation, Ibuse “coyly defers” in his treatment, writing “about people writing,” mediating the Hiroshima experience without distorting it. 45 With this device Ibuse “skirt[s] the pitfalls” 46 of other writers on Hiroshima by deferring his authority to mediators—many of them based on actual people. Ibuse escapes the burden of “defining” Hiroshima while retaining a sharpness of detail that has its own subjective authenticity. Transitional passages of Shigematsu in 1950 worrying over Yasuko’s marriage prospects, and encountering other relatives and neighbors, gradually shorten and then disappear altogether as the novel gives over to lengthier passages of activity in Hiroshima during and after the bombing. 152 Imamura’s adaptation takes the opposite tack, consigning Hiroshima memories periodically to the first half of the film, while placing greater emphasis on Yasuko’s marriage dilemma, Shigematsu’s frustration, and the lingering effects of the bomb on the postwar community. Although the film opens on August 6, 1945, what appear to be flash-forwards to 1950 quickly take the position of the film’s primary time setting, with 1945 operating as an occasional flashback setting. John T. Dorsey and Naomi Matsuoka describe this structure as showing a “fundamental difference” from the novel: “for while Ibuse focused on the past as it overwhelms the present, Imamura focuses on the present, showing a series of deaths.” 47 The reversal of imbalance between scenes set in 1945 and the postwar present shapes a viewer’s engagement in the narrative differently than the reader’s. While the novel pulls the reader ever more forcefully into the past to discover the roots of present-day trauma, Kuroi ame the film demonstrates an occasional compulsion to reach into the past but traps the viewer in a deceptively peaceful present. Death in Kuroi ame is ever-present and ever-“present”: lives are claimed in 1950, and later, by the same bomb that dropped in 1945, only the process is slower, more debilitating and mysterious. Those who barely escaped the bomb itself cannot escape the ravages of slow-developing radiation sickness. Unlike the novel, Imamura’s film shows the postwar period as a succession of funerals, as one after another Shigematsu’s family and friends succumb to the bomb’s long-term aftereffects. The dirge-like tone of much of the film, suggesting “a slow, stately death by stages” in the words of one American critic, creates a claustrophobic effect that another American critic considered “airless and static.” 48 Perhaps anticipating such negative reactions, Imamura tempers funereal passages with humor—another reason for accentuating the postwar narrative. The Asahi shinbun praised the film as a masterpiece in part for its inclusion of humorous characters and 153 situations, all of which were suited more to the postwar setting than in the middle of ruined Hiroshima, where, as critic Satō Tadao indicated, there was no humor whatsoever. 49 Satō highlights the character of Yūichi (Ishida Keisuke), a veteran of the war in the Philippines who lost much of his anti-tank unit and cannot bear the sound of loud engine noises years after the war. The sound puts him in a frenzied state of temporary psychosis, as a passing bus or truck makes him imagine that a tank is approaching, and he rushes out to hurl what he thinks is an explosive device underneath the vehicle; driver after driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting him. As Satō points out, this character is played for farce, an element completely absent from Ibuse’s novel, though Imamura borrowed the character from another Ibuse story, “Lieutenant Lookeast.” 50 Like Kuroi ame itself, Yūichi exists mostly in the postwar present but cannot help occasional flashes into the past. The viewer who laughs at Yūichi is laughing at the erasure of borders between past and present, a sign of madness that is by turns ridiculous and discomforting. The spectacle of a grown man who cannot tell where or when he is creates the distance necessary for the humor of ridicule, but Yūichi is also performing acts of remembrance that militate against the wider community’s desire to forget the past and move on with postwar recovery. Imamura’s inclusion and treatment of Yūichi not only stretches the tone of the Ibuse story into humor, but adds to the expansion of Yasuko’s narrative and visibility. Unable to find a man willing to marry her, Yasuko is drawn to Yūichi as an empathetic companion, and chooses him as her lover. Her desire and agency counters her role in the novel, which is to be an object of concern for Shigematsu and Shigeko: they mediate nearly all of her presence by either reading her diaries or narrating their observations of her in their own diaries. Imamura scales the roles so Yasuko is the lead character, and we can trace the developing story through her private thoughts, rendered in confessions to her father and uncle, private conversations with Aono (Ishimaru 154 Kenjirō), a suitor, contact with Yūichi, and a growing awareness of her debilitating symptoms. Invested in the community’s dedication to routine, and loyal to her uncle and aunt to the point of choosing them over living with her own parents, Yasuko represents a form of heroic, and doomed, perseverance that is the film’s primary subject. Hiroshima defines Yasuko and other victims by what they choose to do with their lives after Hiroshima. The more the film concentrates on Yasuko as a central figure, the more it departs from the novel’s placement of her on the periphery to keep the reader focused on the trauma of Hiroshima as an immediate event. 51 Yasuko’s attachment to Yūichi in the film signals the limitation of her options for companionship in postwar Japan, but it also shows a mild resistance to the historical determinism of the bomb. She cannot escape the physical consequences of her exposure to the bomb, but with Yūichi she is able to escape a discriminatory society that would rather forget the war and ignore all those who are still feelings its effects. Yasuko’s attachment to Yūichi is the film’s only attempt at definitive narrative closure. Other characters either pass away, with disturbing frequency, or simply disappear. Carole Cavanaugh criticizes the film for introducing two female characters very unlike Yasuko—a mother and daughter, Ikemoto (Sawa Tamaki) and Fumiko (Tateichi Mayumi), 52 both sexually active, who value material pleasures above all else in the postwar period—and then dropping them unceremoniously. 53 Matters like Shigeko’s obsessive attachment to the divinations of a local medium, who gives cold comfort in the form of histrionic ravings meant to speak for the dead, take over the narrative and then are quickly discarded. The 1950 scenes have an episodic structure just like the 1945 scenes of journeying across Hiroshima. The novel had a roughly similar structure, but as the remembrances of Hiroshima multiply and intensify, the reader senses a Hiroshima-centric point of view locked in a 1945 time frame with an inevitable stopping 155 point—the Emperor’s radio address and Japan’s surrender. The film, however, more settled in a postwar timeframe, does not have a similar mounting of historical tension. The film’s ending is a stop, not a resolution. Yasuko has a fit of weakness, and Yūichi carries her to a waiting ambulance as Shigematsu looks on, with a mixture of hope and worry. This scene corresponds somewhat to Ibuse’s ending, where Shigematsu ends his journal and prays for a rainbow, a sign of Yasuko’s recovery, even though he knows she will never be cured. 54 Yasuko is, again, mediated through Shigematsu’s thoughts: Ibuse uses hibakusha as a literary device to concentrate on Hiroshima experiences of August 1945. Imamura, on the other hand, has Yasuko dominate the visual narrative to make the film about the long-term suffering of hibakusha after the war. The end scene dramatizes Yasuko’s acute sickness as an instigator of action: calling the ambulance, carrying her out, seeing her off. Her fate at the hospital is unknown, and Shigematsu’s lookout over the hills, ushering in the closing credits, purposely leaves the question open. Originally, Kuroi ame had a dedicated and detailed resolution to Yasuko’s story. Imamura shot a lengthy sequence in color, set in the 1960s, that was a total departure from the Ibuse novel. Yasuko, now in her forties, leaves Yūichi and the village to go on a pilgrimage to Shikoku. Her sickness worsening, she buys a wig to cover her balding head, and wanders from temple to temple as a beggar, accompanied by another old pilgrim who confesses to murdering his wife and child. The last image of Yasuko is a moment of magical realism: she imagines several Buddha statues as members of her family, and in a jump cut she becomes a statue herself. The final shots of the color sequence are very similar to the closing passages of The Last Emperor (1987, see previous chapter). In the present day (circa late 1980s), we see the Atomic Bomb Dome from the outside, where tourists gather and street vendors hawk pieces of the Dome 156 building as souvenirs. A helicopter shot tracks from a wide angle of the Dome to an even wider angle of its surroundings. Modern architecture, industry, and venues like a nearby baseball stadium quickly dwarf the Bomb Dome, which seems a relic from a bygone era. After taking one look at the color sequence, Imamura, against the wishes of his crew, discarded it, and they reshot the ending with the black-and-white sequence of Yasuko taken away in the ambulance. According to assistant director Miike Takashi, Imamura wanted to end the film closer to the way Ibuse ended the novel. 55 Even though another Ibuse short story, “Pilgrim’s Inn,” was publicized as the basis for the color sequence of Yasuko’s pilgrimage, 56 faithfulness to Ibuse seems to have dictated Imamura’s decision to cut it. In adapting Ibuse, Imamura scaled the postwar narrative as a departure from the novel’s dramatic thrust into the past, but he could not fulfill the logical resolution of the postwar narrative because it constituted an unsuitable degree of departure from Ibuse. Eliminating the only footage of the film actually shot in Hiroshima, and by opening the ending of Yasuko’s story, Imamura leaves the viewer wondering about her fate in Kobatake. The truncated ending also narrows Hiroshima as a frame of reference for considering the lives of hibakusha in postwar Japan. Hiroshima’s only context in the film is imaginary, a product of the memories of select former residents. Without the color sequence, Hiroshima in Kuroi ame illustrates a trauma of the past that effectively erased the city from Japan. The film suggests that once the bomb was dropped, Hiroshima shifted locale from its physical terrain to the bodies and minds of its victims. 57 The viewer can only access it through testimonials and impressionistic flashbacks. 157 GRAYNESS Both Black Rain and Kuroi ame evoke the Pacific War and the Cold War as root causes for heightened international tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the mid to late 1980s. Kuroi ame’s rhetoric is less overt than Black Rain’s, but neither one escaped criticism for its approach. Black Rain seemed to many critics a work of crude exploitation, while Kuroi ame faced criticism for its deference and humanism. 58 But both films use the war between the U.S. and Japan to mount an attack on contemporary ultra-nationalism, corruption, and hypocrisy. War memories, it seems, have warped contemporary sensibilities, or in their absence, have prevented a clear understanding of contemporary problems. Both Black Rain and Kuroi ame present characters who either remember the war too intensely—who are, in fact, re-fighting it—or who maintain a blissful ignorance about the war’s corrosive effect on contemporary society and culture. The films seek a correction in the form of selective remembrance: a perspective on the war that keeps it in the past (as a perverse anomaly) while alleging the present danger of its potential repetition. Admirable characters in both films are defined by a lack or a purging of nationalistic spirit. They are able to see the world correctly in terms of its interconnectedness, and without criticizing transnationalism itself, they can point out, and perhaps do something about, the flaws of the new world order. The collaboration zone of U.S.-Japan postwar bi-national relations appears necessary, but far from perfect. Black Rain supports paranoia as a proper outlook on the contemporary world—a paranoia that must, however, be tamed by historical knowledge and cross-cultural agreement. Nick, though unaware of how deeply the war has scarred the landscape, senses the systematic failure of American and Japanese public institutions. Setting himself apart from the bureaucrats and careerists who seem unmotivated to pursue justice if it upsets the perpetuity of their corruption, 158 Nick stands alone and ineffective without a partner who shares his apocalyptic vision. His partner, Charlie, is everybody’s friend, patient with Nick and open to the exotic pleasures of Osaka. Charlie’s quick death at the hands of Satō—by decapitation with a short sword—proves the danger of Charlie’s trusting nature. Youthful cosmopolitanism in Black Rain is a form of naiveté that leads to slaughter. No less naïve is Detective Matsumoto, who like Nick is a child of the postwar era. “I grew up with your soldiers,” Matsumoto tells him. “You were wise then. Now, music and movies are all America is good for. We make the machines, we build the future, we won the peace.” Nick’s instant response: “And if there was one of you guys who had an original idea, you’d be so tight, you couldn’t even pull it out of your ass!” This twin outburst of nationalistic cant echoes 1980s U.S.-Japan inflammatory rhetoric, and indicts both characters: as much as the film embraces Matsumoto’s dignity, it does not approve of his complacency—just as it embraces Nick’s worldview while denouncing his vulgarity. Matsumoto’s argument about postwar “victory” has a thick layer of unintentional irony: to call this Osaka a site of “future-building” is to say we all agree that mechanization and dehumanization are an evolutionary goal. Nick cannot get anything done in Osaka without Matsumoto’s help, but Matsumoto cannot help until he sees the world as Nick sees it. After Charlie’s murder, Nick tries to explain to Matsumoto why he is both a cop and a thief: he couldn’t support his family on an honest cop’s salary. “Theft is theft,” Matsumoto says. “There is no gray area.” Nick’s response: “Hey man, New York is one big gray area, okay?” They are talking about professional ethics, but for the viewer, this “grayness” has at least two other meanings: the color tones of Jan De Bont’s cinematography, and the debilitating process of aging. For Nick, refinements and shadings of moral vision are a product of environment and experience, 159 and if he is afraid of anything, he is afraid of losing his powers of perception in a world that to him is rapidly shedding its humanity. He is not so young that he can trust the world as Charlie did, and not so old that he can leave the world’s problems to the next generation and carry an antiquated value system to the grave, as he thinks Matsumoto is doing. Nick’s time in Japan is frustrating because of the language barrier, but he does not need to know Japanese to see the ineffectiveness of Osaka’s public institutions, and that he could easily become just like Matsumoto—chained to a desk in a row of desks—if he ignored it all and let the young take over. But before Matsumoto can rouse himself out of a delusional faith in the future, he has to see the world through Nick’s eyes, to see what the film’s audience can plainly see. Black Rain is about grayness—not only on the screen, but in the blurring of ethical thought, and in the passage of years that have seen war, recovery, and now a pervading decadence in America and Japan. Nick and Matsumoto are in a generational struggle, not a turf war. They are resisting the ravages of aging in order to keep the young under control, since the old cannot do the job and in fact have made it all worse. Sugai, the yakuza boss in Black Rain, is the criminal version of an unconverted Matsumoto, someone who remembers the war and is carrying on over forty years later as if the values of his youth still mattered in 1989. He is enacting revenge for his losses in World War II through economic means, an enterprise that preys upon American anxieties over Japan’s economic growth that appeared threatening to American interests in the mid to late 1980s. Because the film provokes the viewer into making a symbolic association between Sugai and Hiroshima, Sugai’s economic attack on America appears equal in destructive force to a nuclear weapon, a nationalistic “payback” for what viewers cannot help but interpret as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 59 160 Nick hears Sugai’s “black rain” speech the same way he heard Matsumoto’s speech about growing up in occupied Japan: not only as one nation’s grudge against another, but as the empty rhetoric of a deluded older man. Satō, the young yakuza who threatens to destroy Sugai’s plans unless Sugai gives him a territory of his own, is a new form of mutual enemy enabled by American-Japanese tensions. 60 National and cultural borders do not intimidate Satō—who, like Charlie, considers the world a playground—and neither do Sugai’s outdated yakuza traditions. Satō is basically Nick, only one more step removed from the law. Both men understand the hypocrisy of the leaders of the longstanding organizations they belong to, and instead of aging into the system and perpetuating a rigid, seniority-based orthodoxy, they trust their own iconoclastic instincts, refusing to accept that nation, race, and norms have determined their futures. For both of these alienated men, time is short, and history is not a guide, but a warning and a threat. Matsumoto’s realization of his own outdated nationalism is the turning point of his character: showing up at Nick’s side for the climactic shootout, machine-gun in both hands, Matsumoto is betraying every traditional group to which he belongs, including his family. Nick also transforms over the course of the narrative, ultimately respecting Matsumoto and suppressing his own vengeful desires. He turns Satō over to the Osaka police instead of killing him, 61 asserting the superiority of Nick’s mercy to Satō and Sugai’s criminal bloodlust that is as much fratricidal as anti-American. Matsumoto receives official credit and a commendation for Satō’s capture, and in a further gesture of deference, Nick also gives him the U.S. currency plates that were the means of Satō and Sugai’s attempted subjugation of the American economy. Nick has saved America, but he has done so in a way that reduces his public victory and elevates his private one in the eyes of the audience. 161 In this Hollywood fantasy of transnational struggle, total victory over one nation is not only impossible but impractical. As the film conceives transnational conflict, those who pursue an individualistic or nationalistic objective will bring about mutually assured destruction unless they are purged. At the same time, the film criticizes both Nick’s American chauvinism and Matsumoto’s Japan-coded “groupthink”; they both learn to overcome their deficiencies and legitimize globalism, unlike Satō and Sugai, who have abused networks of globalization for criminal ends. Nick enters the fray of global competition and resets the balance of power while showing Matsumoto, a prisoner of tradition, that they both have the agency to create their own network of alliances across national borders. Initially threatening images of advanced globalization, New York and Osaka appear retrograde, bereft of a liberating element that Nick and Matsumoto provide either by action or symbolic example. 62 COLLECTIVE AMNESIA The central characters of Kuroi ame have no nationalism to be purged. It is not that they have moved beyond nationalism; rather, they have either distanced themselves from nationalist concerns or never harbored strong nationalist sentiments. (The film is unclear about their level of enthusiasm during Japan’s victorious period up to 1942.) The dropping of the bomb, therefore, explicitly targets non-combatants, victims harboring no fervent allegiance to the Emperor or to the Japanese war effort. Even after suffering from the bomb’s destruction, the radiation spread by the black rain of the bomb’s microclimate, and the slow deterioration of their bodies, the film’s hibakusha, with very minor exceptions, declare the abstraction of “war” as their victimizer, not any particular nation or national figure. The film is “anti-nuclear” on its surface, “anti-nuclear nation” in its subtext, but not “anti-national.” Neither Japan nor the United States takes the brunt 162 of criticism from victims who presumably have the moral authority to criticize. Rather, as in Black Rain, larger historical forces, the Japan-U.S. entanglement itself, both in war and in peace, are to blame. Mass destruction and loss of life, followed by a geopolitical alliance that stimulated economic growth for Japan and created a base of operations in Asia for the United States during the Cold War has, in turn, destroyed Hiroshima and then attempted to erase its destruction from national consciousness. Although not a nuclear-weapon nation, Japan as a nuclear power nation has apparently joined the U.S. in its disregard or convenient forgetting of the destructive capability of nuclear power. The film targets nationalistic opportunism as a lamentable value of international Cold War alliances. The hibakusha in Kuroi ame have the moral authority to criticize, but their object of criticism seems too large and invulnerable to feel any direct attack. When characters give in to vocal (or voiced over) disdain or rage, instead of scoring points, the film despairs. Hiroshima, and its forgetting, appears to be a willed phenomenon of global forces—including Japan—that required or exploited its destruction to take advantage of the attractive comforts of a postwar era. With that, the film’s concentration on the postwar narrative, as a departure from Ibuse’s novel, connects the story to a contemporary 1980s sensibility. “War” in Kuroi ame seems more of a process of collaboration than a conflict; or rather, the conflict seems to be the necessary prelude to future collaborations of the warring parties. The U.S. and Japan may be engaged in an “economic war” in the 70s and 80s, the film seems to argue, but they are more effectively, if less visibly, engaged in a mutually beneficial exploitation of Cold War geopolitics. Hiroshima memories in this environment are not meant to remind the viewer that the U.S. and Japan were once, and therefore always will be, at war; the film does not propose that Japan break its relations with the U.S., or engage again in warfare to avenge Japan’s losses—the character of 163 Yūichi deliberately plays up the absurdity of war re-enactment. 63 Instead, the film points to the deplorable social, political, and cultural neglect of hibakusha as a global crime of omission. To enjoy the economic benefits of postwar alliances at the expense of the war’s victims, according to the film, is tantamount to perpetuating their victimization—or, even worse, to supporting the atomic bombings as that which hastened the war’s end and ushered in a new era of prosperity. Non-nationalist victims of the bomb are introduced at beginning of the film as Yasuko and her extended family. In various locations just before the dropping of the bomb, these characters are engaged in quiet, routine activity—catching a train on the way to work, chatting up acquaintances, participating in a tea ceremony (at a fairly early hour). As we learn later on, Shigematsu feels guilt over Yasuko’s condition in 1950 because it was he who brought her away from her parents’ home to the Hiroshima suburbs in order to avoid forced labor. Shigematsu and Shigeko are neither anti-American nor anti-Japan; they are pro-family and anti-war, aligned exactly with the film’s universalist ideology. In the flashback scenes of Hiroshima’s devastation, Imamura isolates images of ruptured family ties: a mutilated boy approaches a brother who no longer recognizes him; a woman nurses a dead child; a wounded man from Hijiyama who has abandoned his dead wife and dying son. None of these characters have strong military or political affiliations, at least none that we know. 64 One postwar policy that embitters Shigematsu is agrarian land reform that allowed him to keep much of his mountain land but forced him to sell off much of the rest—a sacrifice that drove his mother to senility. The deeper cut, however, is the accumulating loss of his friends and family. As mentioned by two gossiping women working outside Shigematsu’s home in a rice field, Yasuko is the last of the Shizuma family line. Shigematsu’s proactive energy is devoted to protecting the life of his loved ones above all else— certainly above national piety. 164 In a film loaded with sympathetic characters, bonded by victimhood, a distanced attitude towards nationalist extremism helps to cement their connection with an international audience. Shigematsu’s vocalization of his anti-war views is kept at low volume and low frequency: in the script for the film published in Kinema junpō, Shigematsu’s two strongest anti-war statements— “Nothing good can come of war,” and “An unjust peace is better than a just war”—are prefixed by the stage direction “as if grumbling to himself” (ubuyaku yō ni) 65 . The sentiments are for the film’s audience, not necessarily for the few characters within earshot. The contents of his statements are strong, the tone sincere and embittered, but he keeps those thoughts mostly to himself. He even cautions his friend Shokichi (Ozawa Shōichi) against complaining too loudly that people have forgotten that the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are treating victims shabbily. Shigematsu knows that in postwar Japan, even in the city’s outskirts, complaints of any kind against national reconstruction would have an alienating effect. Just as Hiroshima turned into a disaster zone unrecognizable to its residents once the bomb dropped, the postwar environment isolates the bomb’s victims into a segregated zone too weak to be included in national drives to economic empowerment. The victims seem to be in their own temporal plane, slower than their surroundings, sitting in sufferance as postwar development passes them by. Another form of distancing from nationalism is, ironically, the film’s particular brand of anti-nuclear rhetoric. Kuroi ame purposely avoids condemning only those nations with nuclear weapons; it adds Japan to the list of responsible parties. Shokichi’s outspoken criticism of Japan’s treatment of hibakusha includes a swipe at anti-nuke protestors, who in Kuroi ame appear misguided and impotent. Early in the film, near the Fukuyama train station, a truck passes Shigematsu and Yasuko with signs supporting the 1950 Stockholm Appeal calling for a global 165 ban on all nuclear weapons. A rider on the truck shouts through a megaphone inviting people to a meeting in Fukuyama that night commemorating the Appeal. Shigematsu and Yasuko watch the truck go by without comment. The absurdity of an anti-nuclear faction that seems to care more about the bomb’s proliferation outside Japan than the plight of the bomb’s victims within Japan, is inescapable. Likewise, towards the end of the film, Shigematsu listens to a report on the radio news that President Truman was considering the use of the bomb against communists in the Korean War. Shigematsu’s muttering response is, again, anti-war without reference to any specific nation: “Humans (ningen) are obstinate beings. We’re strangling our own throats.” Although no nuclear bombs were dropped in Korea, the mere threat of the bomb in Cold War diplomacy, from the point of view of its surviving victims in Kuroi ame, belies a willed ignorance of how indiscriminately the bomb destroys. The Korean War, which Aono tells Yasuko is bringing huge business to his family’s ironworks factory, is such a boon to the Japanese economy that the bomb, now threatening to be deployed in part to protect U.S.-Japan interests, has become an extension of Japan’s own defense system. Shigematsu’s reference to “we” (ware) in his dialogue refers to all nuclear weapon nations and their allies, Japan included. At its darkest, the film suggests that the reason America dropped the bomb, despite that issue’s debate over several decades, has yet to be determined. Shokichi and Shigematsu have a brief exchange where they question the official reasoning behind that fateful decision, that it brought a quick end to the war. Shokichi asks, “Why not Tokyo? Why Hiroshima?” Shigematsu responds, “I don’t understand,” again speaking the film’s own stance on the bomb that corresponds to Ibuse’s. Shokichi says he will not be at peace unless he understands, and the viewer is left with another open question. While Kuroi ame does not propose a specific source 166 for the idea behind the dropping of the bomb, it condemns the bomb by indicting those who seek a wiping-out of Hiroshima memories and those who, even worse, are benefiting from a nuclear umbrella agreement. “Why was the bomb dropped?” as a historical question, yields to a more socio-cultural one: “Why do we want to forget about it?” An answer to the first question would likely be discussed along narrow international lines—observations and assumptions of two warring parties at moments of record. The latter question addresses both nations, and other nations, in a collective accusation of betrayal, and if the question were ever answered—an impossibility—then the actual motivation for dropping the bomb may be revealed. Kuroi ame universalizes the problem of Hiroshima by sourcing it in a secretive, borderless realm outside of Hiroshima. CONCLUSION Even though the two Black Rains were separate productions, each was well known to the other. At the time of Black Rain’s press conference in Osaka—October 1988—Imamura was in post-production on his film, and out of concern that having two Black Rains would confuse his “large and loyal following on the European film festival circuit,” he got assurance from Black Rain’s American producers that they would change the title of their film. 66 But by September 1989, Black Rain’s title remained, and Gary Lucchesi, then president of Paramount, showed reluctance to change it by claiming the studio wasn’t aware of Imamura’s film until August 1989. He insisted, however, that no one could confuse the two, since one of them starred Michael Douglas and the other one did not. 67 Although in Japanese the two titles are well distinguished— Imamura’s title appears in kanji characters, while Scott’s is in the katakana system used for the phonetic transliteration of foreign titles—Imamura’s “European” audience as well as his 167 substantial American art-house audience had to distinguish between two films released at the same time with the same title, both of them carrying the symbolic weight of the atomic bombing of Japan. After Kuroi ame’s prize-winning Cannes Film Festival screening, critics were quick to distinguish the two Black Rains, usually at the expense of Paramount’s. 68 The transnational “encounter” between the two films in the international marketplace resulted in a commercial victory for Paramount and an artistic one for Imamura. But in content and theme, the two films appear closer than not. Hiroshima in both films—as oblique reference in Black Rain, and as traumatic flashback in Kuroi ame—appears as the initial stage of a global process of degeneration. Contemporary society is either oblivious to this, or cynically complicit. Understanding the corruption of postwar hyper-capitalism, represented by America and Japan in both films, requires a clear vision of the wanton destruction of the past and a willingness to halt or at least acknowledge the political and cultural forces perpetuating destruction in the present. The films address audiences beyond the borders of the home nation of their production. Black Rain’s commercial success in Japan and Kuroi ame’s artistic success outside of Japan illustrate their transnational mobility. They talk about Hiroshima without making any conclusions about Hiroshima; in the case of Black Rain, the word “Hiroshima” is never mentioned, and yet the potency of the symbolism of the term “black rain” made Hiroshima a consistent factor in reviews and criticism. The films’ oblique or otherwise distanced approach to Hiroshima seems a fulfillment of Marguerite Duras’s statement in her published script of Hiroshima, mon Amour (1959), that it was “impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.” 69 In neither film is Hiroshima tangibly there; it exists only as a referent, as a once-present city that the bomb made instantly “past.” Hiroshima itself cannot be redeemed or 168 “brought back,” but Black Rain and Kuroi ame argue its connection to dangerous conditions of the present. The “postwar” never ends in either film. Here the mutual codependence of the U.S. and Japan seems most apparent, and inextricable. Even as characters speak of themselves as “American” or “Japanese,” they realize their environment after the war has become a twisted hybrid, a collaboration zone warped by transnational developments in politics and economics. But the characters do not desire a return to wartime or pre-war conditions, just a simple acknowledgment of historical origins that most everyone else seems too eager to overlook. As seen in previous chapters, successful postwar collaboration depends, partly, on forgetting or ignoring the war itself. In the next chapter, we examine two films with a basic similarity to Black Rain and Kuroi ame. The Japanese film MacArthur’s Children shows the immediate aftermath of the war and its impact on survivors in a rural community. And Mr. Baseball, like Black Rain, is set in contemporary times and focuses on superficial cultural differences between Americans and Japanese. But unlike Black Rain and Kuroi ame, the next two films offer up a small and somewhat utopian collaboration zone. Baseball, introduced in Japan well before the war, represents in both MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball a transnational arena of struggle that is also a site of redemption. 169 CHAPTER 4 NOTES 1 Michael Fleming, “The World on a String,” Movieline, January 2001, 60. 2 Domestically the film earned $46 million and ranked twenty-eighth for films released in 1989. This domestic gross was about the same as Michael Douglas’s earlier film Wall Street (1987), which cost half as much as Black Rain, and was nowhere near the $157 million domestic gross of Fatal Attraction (1987), the earlier collaboration of Douglas and producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing. For a film budgeted at $30 million, not including prints and advertising, this was a disappointing figure. In Japan it was a much bigger hit proportionally, ranking eighth for the year and earning about ¥2.3 billion, or about $16 million in 1989 dollars—this is a little over one-fifth of its total $88 million worldwide gross. Box office data for Black Rain, Wall Street, and Fatal Attraction are not adjusted for inflation, and are available at www.boxofficemojo.com. 1989 box office figures for Japan are available at www.eiga-ranking.com. Exchange rate of 144/1 is derived from figures provided by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, reported monthly since 1971 at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/EXJPUS.txt. 3 One of many outspoken American critics of the film was historian John W. Dower, author of War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986) and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). He likened Black Rain’s exploitation of the term “black rain” to “taking Auschwitz and making it a code name for some gangster movie…it somehow turns a tragedy into one more Hollywood gimmick.” Susan Chira, “Japan’s New Screen Image: Economic Toughie,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 1989. 4 Although the film credits for Kuroi ame copyright the work as a 1988 production, it was not released in Japanese film theaters until May 1989. 5 One American review of Imamura’s film closes with the definitive comparative statement: “to see both movies is to understand the difference between the pop and the profound.” Desmond Ryan, “A Family’s Horror of Survival in Aftermath of Hiroshima,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 23, 1989. 6 Kuroi ame originally had a sequence set in present-day Hiroshima, and location footage of this section exists, but it was cut from the final film. This point of discussion is elaborated upon later in this chapter. 7 Phone interview with author, October 24, 2012. In response to my asking his thoughts on the common misreading of the film’s use of “black rain,” Lewis said that was a reflection of how we “decided as a culture to forget” the firebombings of Tokyo and Osaka in favor of the more widely discussed topic of the atomic bombings. Because the final version of the film is open to interpretation, the intention here is not to invalidate all previous commentary on Black Rain that assumes Sugai is talking about Hiroshima; that very commentary has served to link the film with Kuroi ame. I do, however, feel it is important to mention the screenwriter’s intentions as a way of demonstrating how the film, in its ambiguity, mirrors back to audiences their own sense of historical memory. 8 Kuroi ame’s budget was ¥370 million, or approximately $2.85 million, based on an average 1988 exchange rate of 130/1. “Imamura Shōhei x Kawamata Takashi,” AERA, August 22, 1989, 60. 9 Yamaguchi Takeshi, “Ridorii sukotto: stairisshuna kantoku no eizō tetsugaku” [Ridley Scott: A Stylish Director’s Image Philosophy], Kinema junpō, no. 1022, (November 1989: 2): 109-110. I would expand Yamaguchi’s use of the term “English decadence” to characterize a style of filmmaking that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s with the ascension of four film directors from England: Alan Parker (Midnight Express, 1978; Pink Floyd The Wall, 1982; Angel Heart, 1987; Mississippi Burning, 1988), Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, 1983; 9½ Weeks, 1986; Fatal Attraction), Ridley Scott (Alien, 1979; Blade Runner, 1982), and to a lesser extent, Ridley’s brother Tony Scott (The Hunger, 1983; Top Gun, 1986). Their progenitor was perhaps Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now, 1973), and the style can be described most succinctly as “beautiful rot”: an emphasis in the films’ visual design on decayed or decaying architecture, brownish and grayish hues, atonal sound effects, and seemingly unmotivated editing rhythms and backlighting through haze; and thematically on corrupt or dangerous environments. Black Rain fits will within this stylistic vein. 170 10 In an article for Kinema junpō, screenwriter Warren Lewis described the film as a “story of personal transition” (hitobito no suii no monogatari). See Kisaragi Nao, “Nibei no toppu staa ga kunda akushon taisaku” [Japan- American Top Star Produced an Action Superproduction], Kinema junpō, no. 1020 (October 1989: 2): 42-44. 11 In the late 1980s, at least two other America-produced films shot extensively in Tokyo: Kuzui Enterprises’ Tokyo Pop (1988) and Troma Inc.’s The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989). Both companies shot their films extensively in Tokyo, with a minimal crew, and with cooperation from local media companies. Having established themselves over a period of several years as art film distributors in Tokyo (see Chapter 2), director Fran Kuzui and her husband Kaz were able to finance and produce Tokyo Pop as a low-budget romantic comedy about an American amateur singer (Carrie Hamilton) trying to succeed in Tokyo with the help of an amateur band led by Diamond Yukai. See “Japanese And Yank Indie Pics Due For Trans-Pacific Debuts,” Variety, March 7, 1984; “Offbeat-pic Distrib Kuzui Looks for ‘Quality’ U.S. Pix, Projects,” Variety, November 9, 1988. The crew of The Toxic Avenger, Part II arrived in Japan shortly after the Black Rain unit left. Director Lloyd Kaufman had scouted locations beforehand with Fujimura Tetsu, the head of GAGA Communications, who first met Kaufman at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival to sell himself as Troma’s Japanese agent. Furusawa Binbun was Toxic Avenger II’s production manager, and put the film together in Japan on a $200,000 budget. There may be no finer demonstration of cooperative spirit in late-1980s location filming in Japan than the sight of the rubber- suited Toxic Avenger rampaging through a studio at Fuji Television, with Fuji’s “Medama” logo emblazoned on a nearby wall and its actual employees performing as extras in the scene. See Lloyd Kaufman, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger (New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1998), 234-235. 12 In-person interview with author, October 24, 2012. 13 Stacy Jenel Smith and Vibeke Laroi, “Rough Weather in Japan: Movie ‘Black Rain’ Runs Afoul of Nation’s Customs,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1989. 14 Takahashi Akira, “Burakku rein: seisaku happyō” [Black Rain: Production Announcement], Kinema junpō, no. 998 (December 1988: 1): 73. 15 Kisaragi, 44. 16 David Jon Wiener, “High Crime Culture Clash in Black Rain,” American Cinematographer 70, no. 9 (September 1989): 42-49. De Bont was flown in as a replacement for cinematographer Howard Atherton, who is credited for “additional photography.” 17 Yamaguchi Takeshi, “Matsuda haiyū ga nokoshita mono” [Things Left Behind by Actor Matsuda], Kinema junpō, no. 1025 (January 1990: 1): 107-115. 18 Reuters, “Hollywood Finds It’s Hard to Play By Tokyo’s Rules,” Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 20, 1989. 19 Donald Chase, “In ‘Black Rain,’ East Meets West With a Bang! Bang!” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1989. 20 Wiener, 44; and Michael Berger, “Japan’s Osaka Moves Into the Movie Age,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 25, 1989. 21 Smith and Laroi. Immigration restrictions on foreign production personnel from Japan wishing to come to the United States to work were the target of complaints by the film industry in 1987. Joe O’ Kane, president of the Association of Film Commissioners, claimed that up to $40 million of production losses were the direct result of immigration regulations. See Will Tusher, “Foreign Prod’n Losses Pinned on Immigration Regs,” Variety, Sept. 23, 1987. 22 Ibid. 171 23 Watanabe Shōko, “Gaikokueiga hihyō: burakku rein” [Foreign Film Critique: Black Rain], Kinema junpō, no. 1021 (November 1989, 1): 164. 24 Chase. 25 Kisaragi, 44. 26 Yamaguchi, November 1989, 111. 27 This chapter does not deny the allegorical and symbolic power of Hiroshima in Japanese films that do not depict the actual event. See Jerome F. Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (London: Routledge, 2001) and Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) for detailed examinations of “allegorical” films about the atomic bomb’s significance in Japanese cinema. However, the enormity of numerical imbalance between allegorical and representational works regarding Hiroshima emphasizes the rarity of Kuroi ame’s approach. 28 Shindō Kaneto, Life Is Work: Kaneto Shindo and the Art of Directing, Screenwriting, and Living 100 Years Without Regrets, ed. Ken Provencher, trans. Marie Iida (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, forthcoming 2014). 29 Kakii Michihiro, “Ibuse masuji no meisaku ni imamura shōhei ga chōsen!” [Imamura Shōhei takes on Ibuse Masuji’s masterpiece!], Kinema junpō no. 997 (November 1988, 2): 136. 30 Thomas Keirstead and Deidre Lynch, “Black Rain by Imamura Shohei,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 116-118. 31 Kakii, 135. 32 “Kuroi ame: 22 nenkan atatameta Ibuse sakuhin,” [Black Rain: Ibuse’s novel, kept warm for twenty-two years] Yomiuri shinbun, Sept. 20, 1988, 15. 33 Jack Quigg, “Jap Producer Asks for U.S. Company to Film ‘Hiroshima’,” Los Angeles Examiner, Aug. 31, 1949. Part of the reason for Nagata’s appeal was the imposition of censorship guidelines in postwar occupied Japan that greatly restricted dramatizations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. For example, the film version of The Bells of Nagasaki, based on the autobiography of radiologist Nagai Takashi, was released by Shōchiku in September 1950 after prolonged negotiations with the censorship arm of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, which allowed only a few brief shots of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki to establish the dropping of the bomb. See Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 53-57. 34 1989 did see the release of Fat Man and Little Boy, a docudrama about the Manhattan Project. 35 Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 359-366. For an account of American censorship of atomic bomb journalism, see Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991). 36 The 1987 script is available at several online sources. My reference is The Daily Script website at <www.dailyscript.com/scripts/black_rain.html>, Accessed November 3, 2012. 37 Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis. Black Rain. Script dated November 1987. 38 Phone interview with author, October 24, 2012. 39 Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis. “Black Rain. Undated revised script,” 60. Viewed at the Margaret Herrick Library Core Collection. 172 40 Wakayama may have said “B-29s” during filming, but as his speech was dubbed over, it is difficult to tell. The dubbed, final version of the speech clearly enunciates “B-29” as a singular noun. 41 See Nishiwaki Hideo, “Genun wo oboeru yōna miwakutekina imeeji” [Fascinating Images that Feel Dizzying], Kinema junpō, no. 1020 (October 1989: 2): 40-41; Ogawa Hiroyuki, “Kinejun nyū ueevu: ‘burakku rein’ to ‘kuroi ame’ no genzai to kako” [Movie Times New Wave: ‘Black Rain’ and ‘Kuroi ame’s Present and Past], Kinema junpō, no. 1023 (December 1989: 1): 128-129; and Kakii Michihiro, Hariuddo no nihonjin, 235. A review in Asahi shinbun also suggests, without quoting the speech, that Sugai is talking about Osaka. See “Eiga ni miru bei no tainichikan, tokkōtai omowaseru yakuza” [The View of Japan of Americans Who Watch this Movie, Yakuza Reminiscent of Kamikaze], Asahi shinbun, Oct. 18, 1989, evening edition, 9. 42 Masuda Sachiko, 158. 43 A sampling of reviews, articles, and scholarly works in English that assume Black Rain’s “black rain” refers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not Osaka, includes: Chase, 20; Steve Dollar, “Slick ‘Rain’ – Thriller Emphasizes Atmosphere Over Story,” Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 22, 1989; Lou Lumenick, “Animus on the Streets of Osaka,” Record, Sept. 22, 1989; Dan Craft, “’Rain’ soaked with clichés,” Pantagraph, Sept. 29, 1989; Lynden Barber, “Pillars of Fire.” Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 11, 1990; David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism,” in Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 159; Jane Chi Hyun Park, Yellow Future, 116-117; and Brian J. Robb, Ridley Scott (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2001), 78. 44 John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 201. 45 Ibid, 212. 46 Ibid, 201. 47 John T. Dorsey and Naomi Matsuoka, “Narrative Strategies of Understatement in Black Rain as a Novel and a Film,” in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, ed. Mick Broderick (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), 214. 48 Hal Hinson, “The Haunting Blast of ‘Black Rain’,” Washington Post, Apr. 27, 1990, D01; and David Sterritt, “Survivor’s Tale of Japan’s ‘Black Rain’,” Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 15, 1990, 10. 49 “Kuroi ame,” Asahi shinbun, May 12, 1989, 17; and Satō Tadao, “Hisan to okashisa ga sarigenaku semegi atta kessaku” [A masterpiece that casually puts sorrow against humor], Kinema junpō, no. 1006 (April 1989: 1), 50. 50 Linda C. Ehrlich, “The Extremes of Innocence: Kurosawa’s Dreams and Rhapsodies,” Hibakusha Cinema, 170. 51 Maya Marioka Todeschini finds gender issues problematic in the film, particularly Yasuko’s pure and “ethereal” appearance. Making heroes out of female hibakusha, she writes, is “counterproductive to a better understanding of the complexities of survivors’ experiences.” Maya Marioka Todeschini, “‘Death and the Maiden’: Female Hibakusha as Cultural Heroines, and the Politics of A-bomb Memory,” Hibakusha Cinema, 243. 52 Fumiko arrives at Kobatake, like many other characters already there, as a means of escape, hiding from yakuza she met while working at a Fukuyama cabaret club appropriately named “The Hollywood.” 53 Carole Cavanaugh, “A Working Ideology for Hiroshima,” in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, ed. Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 250-270. 54 Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain: a Novel by Masuji Ibuse, trans. John Bester (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International Ltd, 1969), 300. 173 55 Miike Takashi, Kantoku chūdoku [Director addiction] (Tokyo: Pia, 2003), 80-82. Miike describes much of the color sequence in detail, indicating the large scope of the material and his admiration for it. The entire sequence is available for viewing on the DVD produced by AnimEigo, Inc. in 2009. 56 “‘Kore ga boku no saigo no sakuhin” [This is my last work], Asahi shinbun, Sept. 5, 1988, 13. 57 Although he doesn’t discuss Ibuse or Imamura, Yoshikuni Igarashi analyzes how postwar Japanese remembered their wartime experience through “bodily tropes”—physical health rhetoric inherited from Japan’s wartime period. “[I]n the immediate aftermath of the war,” Igarashi writes, “many Japanese discovered their bodies as the entities that survived destruction and thus embodied historical continuity. Their bodies became sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan’s defeat created.” See Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory; Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5. In such a rehabilitative environment, hibakusha would represent Japan’s historical end. 58 English-language reviews of Black Rain, with some exceptions, complained that the overripeness of the imagery and sound design disconnected the viewer from the film’s subject and content, and that even though the story was clichéd and pretentious, the film lacked the conviction necessary to trigger even basic emotions, except maybe hostility towards the Japanese. See, for example, Vincent Canby, “Police Chase a Gangster In a Bright, Menacing Japan,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1989; Dave Kehr, “‘Black Rain’: Too Much Action, Too Little Plot,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 22, 1989; Rita Kempley, “‘Black Rain’: All Guts, No Story,” Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1989; and Bob Strauss, “‘Black Rain’ Just Another Drip Tale,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Sept. 22, 1989. There is also Pat Dowell’s scathing review for Cineaste, where she describes the subject of the film as Nick’s fear of transformation into a Japanese; his experience in Japan is an opportunity to reclaim his Americanness, rejecting the mysterious Japanese Other, reflecting a deeply racist attitude of the filmmakers. See Pat Dowell, “Black Rain: Hollywood goes Japan bashing,” Cineaste 17, no. 3 (1990). Kuroi ame has been alternately praised and critiqued for its lack of overt proselytizing. The Yomiuri shinbun considered it the definitive anti-bomb piece, in part because it wasn’t “loud-voiced.” See “Kuroi ame,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 13, 1989, 7. Imamura commented after the film’s release that a major criticism he received, particularly from Asian journalists, was that Japanese in the film appear only as victims, not as perpetrators, of World War II. See AERA, 60. Lisa Yoneyama, in her book Hiroshima Traces, writes of films like Kuroi ame as unsatisfactory representations for actual hibakusha, that there is something about the bombing that cannot be mediated. She further explores the “nuclear universalism” of the cenotaph at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, whose inscription reads “Please rest in peace / For we shall not repeat the mistake.” Language that renders the subjects of Hiroshima remembrance anonymous, for Yoneyama, is at odds with “demands to acknowledge historical and structural specificities [that] have emerged in various institutional contexts,” particularly in the US and the Soviet Union. See Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 18, 21, 89-90. 59 In Die Hard (1988), the “economic vengeance” theme is treated as a gag. When the film’s hero meets the Japanese head of a giant trading corporation, he expresses surprise that the company is holding a Christmas party. “Hey, we’re flexible,” says the president. “Pearl Harbor didn’t work out so we got you with tape decks.” 60 Satō, who only speaks Japanese, specifically demands a territory in Hawaii—a wonderfully suggestive bit that Paramount did not translate in Black Rain’s subtitle track. The revised script emphasizes this point with Satō’s line: “I want to be an equal to the other bosses. If I can get my own turf in Hawaii where Sugai’s breath does not reach then I will have no complaints.” Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis. Black Rain. Undated revised script, The Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA, 112. 61 Sparing Satō was a late decision on the part of the filmmakers, but they scripted and shot both versions. The undated revised script contains both endings: first, Nick impales Satō on a stake “which pierces through his back side to the front side. Sato is dead.” On the very next page Nick and Matsumoto “drag Sato into the Headquarters.” Bolotin and Lewis, Undated revised script, 143-144. According to assistant director Cellin Gluck, the police-station scene was shot very early in production, on location, well before the decision had been made to insert it into the final cut. In-person author interview, October 24, 2012. 174 The “killing Satō” scene was shot later, in California: images of this are available for viewing on the DVD version of the film released in Japan. See Burakku rein (Black Rain, 1989). Paramaunto hōmu entateinmento japan (Paramount Home Entertainment, Japan). DVD 2007. 62 In the 1987 version of the Black Rain script, at the end of the film Matsumoto joins Nick on crime-fighting missions in New York, a coda that strains credibility but achieves a balance of border-crossing for the Japanese; as the film stands now, travel from Japan to America suggests criminal motives. 63 One Japanese work that took nationalistic revenge as its theme was Nakazawa Keiji’s Pelted by Black Rain (Kuroi am ni utarete, 1968) a manga that featured, among other characters, a hibakusha hitman who targets Americans out of pure rage over the Hiroshima bombing. 64 Shigematsu’s factory may well have been providing goods for the war effort, but not much is made of it in the film. 65 Ishidō Toshirō and Imamura Shōhei, “Daihon: Kuroi ame” [Script: Black Rain], Kinema junpō, no. 1006 (April 1989: 1), 65, 75. 66 Vincent Canby, “Tokyo, City of the $12 Movie,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 1988. 67 Aljean Harmetz, “2 Movies Called ‘Black Rain’” New York Times, Sept. 27, 1989, C17. 68 Reviews comparing Scott’s film unfavorably with Imamura’s include: Nigel Andrews, “Arts: Barbarism beyond blitzes and battlefields – Cinema,” Financial Times (London), July 28, 1990; David Denby, “Paradise Lost,” New York Magazine, February 5, 1990, 58-59; Robert Denerstein, “Suffering Uncovered in Japanese Film,” Rocky Mountain News, July 13, 1990; and Peter Goddard, “Douglas and Japan lift thriller,” Toronto Star, Sept. 22, 1989. 69 Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 9. 175 CHAPTER 5. A HOLE IN THE SWING: PROVINCIAL AND SPECTACULAR IDENTITY IN MACARTHUR’S CHILDREN (1984) AND MR. BASEBALL (1992) “A ball game can’t end in a goddamn tie!” —Mr. Baseball The English titles for both MacArthur’s Children (1984) and Mr. Baseball (1992), two comedic dramas that show baseball as a transnational sport of the U.S. and Japan, are well chosen. They are nicknames of the films’ main characters, expressing a public identity. Even the original Japanese title of MacArthur’s Children, Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan (The Setouchi Boys’ Baseball Team), while more detailed and prosaic, refers to a group identified by its role as players in a spectator sport, not by their actual names or even by the name of the team that they chose—the Kōsaka Tigers. Within each title lies embedded expectations and assumptions, grandiosity coupled with social burden. Jack Elliot, the American dubbed “Mr. Baseball” in the Japanese media, and the elementary school kids who form a local team in MacArthur’s Children, play baseball for more than the joy of the sport. Almost against their own will, they play for the benefit of international public relations. With a mutual understanding of the rules of play, but with differing concepts of what the game means, Americans and Japanese in both films enact dual roles of player and diplomat. The fact that Americans and Japanese play together is of less interest to the filmmakers than how they play together, and why. But why baseball? In contrast to the previous chapters, this chapter analyzes films about transnational collaboration zones that existed before the war. Introduced to Japan by Americans in the late 19 th century, baseball evolved into, and beyond, a national sport in both countries. Partly inspired by the famous 1934 “tour” of Japan by a group of American all-stars that 176 included Babe Ruth, Japan formed its own professional league. Though the war briefly halted international play, after the war Americans were invited to play professionally in Japan. Baseball as a transnational collaboration zone, therefore, is tied to prewar and postwar experience, bridging the periods in an odd form of nostalgia that is expressed through friendly competition between future and former enemies. National-cultural differences in the game are numerous but, as MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball point out, can be overcome with effort. What predated and survived the war, simultaneously binding and separating the two nations, is the transnational communicability of the game itself. Neither film idealizes baseball as a cultural bridge. They endorse the sport as an arena for defining and resolving cross-cultural conflict, but they make clear distinctions between the public spectacle of the games, and the private thoughts of select players. Just as the main characters function as both players and national representatives, the games function as both public competition and private identity struggle. Jack does not want to be “Mr. Baseball”; he wants to play the game his way, in contrast to the Japanese way, and to get paid for it. Likewise, the kids in MacArthur’s Children are not interested in giving Anderson, the GI who proposes a game between the kids and a team of GIs, the experiential “souvenir” that he wants; they are redeeming personal losses from the just-ended Pacific War. 1 At the same time, the games take place in a spectatorial environment where observers—mostly Japanese—have their appetites for exciting international gameplay either satisfied or denied. Gaps between the public and private identities of the players, then, are the dramatic focus of both films. Consequences for clashes between individualism and collectivism—between private desires and public demands—are symbolic as well as statistical. In both films, the main characters chafe under rubrics not of their choosing: Japanese baseball management, and the 177 postwar Allied (i.e., American) Occupation authorities. Off the field, censorship regulates communications between Americans and Japanese. The offhand remark, the veiled insult, the endless potential for giving offense, either intentional or unintentional, marks transnational encounters in both films. Daily life for Jack and the three leading child characters in MacArthur’s Children—Ryūta, Saburō, and Mume—is a series of choices between following their natures and desires, and behaving “appropriately” when foreigners are present. Characters charged with keeping Jack and the kids in line—Jack’s interpreter Yōji, and the kids’ homeroom teacher Komako—are well-meaning but mostly hapless in the face of overwhelming cultural tensions. Cultural gaps are a simple source of visual and verbal humor, for their mix of genuine misunderstanding and simmering resentment, but they are also the characters’ primary obstacle in retaining or regaining a clear sense of identity under restrictive power regimes. Humiliated, tested, and exhausted by foreign dominance, the characters treat baseball as an internationally, and publicly, sanctioned form of conflict. But both films downplay game- winning as a victory in and of itself. Instead, a victorious outcome on the field—in the context of U.S.-Japan relations—is, ideally, a tie. The games are rituals that may appear as grudge matches, but they end in compromise, or in some form of reconciliation that robs the players of personal glory while granting them sympathy with their opponents and a source of collective pride. To win is to lose, and vice versa. Both films make fatuous the male domination of the game. While men play, women watch, judge, and understand clearly the symbolic role of the game as gendered spectacle. Tellingly, both films centralize female characters as instigators of resourceful action and emotional maturation on the part of the male leads. Although all the major female characters in the two films are Japanese, I hesitate to study them as problematic representations of the national. 178 Rather, I see the filmmakers—nearly all male in major production roles, including the phalanx of screenwriters who worked on Mr. Baseball—designing female characters in strong symbolic relation to the all-male sports environment of baseball. 2 Hiroko, the bilingual media producer in Mr. Baseball, and Komako, Mume, and Tome (the opportunistic widow/hairdresser/bar owner/actress) in MacArthur’s Children all possess a mysterious power of flexibility and agency far beyond the capabilities of the male leads. Craftier and more resilient in their negotiations between the public and the private, these women are in one way outside the sports realm, in their traditional roles as nonplayers (although Mume is a member of the Tigers’ otherwise all-male team), but in another way are deep inside it. Their influence determines not only the outcomes of the games but the significance of the games in the wider community. The role of the community in Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children is to frame the competitive action of the players in culturally symbolic terms. What the spectators witness in both films is a demonstration of willed transnationalism, a deliberate mashing of American and Japanese motives and methods. The dramatic promise of a spectacular display of culture clash, however, is undercut by the films’ anti-nationalism. As also seen in the Hollywood Black Rain (1989), nationalistic tendencies inhibit character development. The attendees of the baseball games may be drawn to the prospect of international conflict in a sanctioned arena, but for the participants, clinging to national identity forestalls satisfying results. Once a formerly chauvinistic or provincial character synthesizes with the culture of another, competitive spirit matters less than the harmonious merging of cultural difference. The player who has internalized difference has already won before stepping onto the field. In both films the applause and approval of the spectators is a public response to what the films’ audiences perceive as a player’s private victory. The members of the onscreen community watching the public competition seem 179 to intuit what the films’ audiences already know about the evolved psychology of the players. Their applause echoes the filmmakers’, and audiences’, approval of the games’ harmonious outcome. And yet, both films acknowledge the evanescence of symbolic play. After achieving private victory and public approval, the main characters are ready to move on, and away, from the competitive arena. In Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children, the players either disband or abandon the community that witnessed their glory. Such reluctance to pursue a long-term career as public athletes in Japan reflects both a lingering alienation from the community that applauded them, and the profound significance of the dramatic moment achieved on the field that could never be repeated. After their climactic games, Jack leaves Japan almost immediately, and Ryūta, Saburō, and Mume get on with their studies—Mume heading all the way back to Tokyo to meet her destiny as the upper-class daughter of an admiral executed for war crimes. Once these characters prove themselves capable on the international playing field, they stop playing. Their titular nicknames—bestowed on them by others—elevate their symbolic role while burdening them with public expectations. The characters’ refusal to persist in competitive play shows a healthy resistance to the belief that their roles as public figures should overrule their private desires. The glories and the disgraces of spectacular identity, therefore, are built up by the filmmakers to profound communal effect, only to be diminished by the more profound wisdom achieved privately by the main characters, who grow to accept their unspectacular roles in a changing, transnationalizing world. Previous chapters have focused on collaborations between Japanese and non-Japanese in terms of transnational aggression. In Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor, Japan is the active force triggering collaborative impulses in victimized characters. In Black Rain and Kuroi 180 ame, Japan is a site of devastation, where pernicious bi-national agreements between the U.S. and Japan have corrupted postwar society. In these two baseball films, however, we see how the collaborative impulse works on a group level without overt aggression or cautionary dystopian environments. MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball show us characters pre-occupied with international relations while their actual problems are closer to home—in their own communities or stubborn dispositions. Baseball is the transnational collaboration zone, and a mildly utopian one: a place where characters can resolve private identity struggles in a competitive public arena. RESTART AND REVISION This chapter is also a somewhat delayed answer to a question raised in Chapter 2, on Japanese investments in Hollywood. When Matsushita purchased MCA/Universal in 1990, Universal was already in production on Mr. Baseball. The film was shut down, and most of its key production members dismissed. When it restarted the following year, it had the dubious reputation of being a “company film”—a Japan-pleasing, cultural casualty of bi-national economic partnership. Ironically, a film partly about the necessity and frustration of self- censorship practices in transnational encounters became itself an alleged target of censorship demands on the part of Japanese investors in Hollywood. But how much power, culturally—not just financially—did the Japanese actually have in the major studio film industry? What did Matsushita/MCA’s first “test case” of transnational corporate power dynamics look like? I argue against the enticing symbolic connection between censorship practices in Mr. Baseball and of its producers. Its creative development, casting, and staff turnovers resulted in a film that pinpoints subtle cultural tensions in order to dramatize a kind of censorship: self- motivated behavioral adjustments that signify cultural sensitivity borne from a partial surrender 181 of arrogant ego. If the “surrender” had been complete—or if the film had not been made at all— then Mr. Baseball’s reputation as a thematically compromised work, a victim of industrialized censorship, would have greater traction. The film itself, however, resonates more strongly as a charting of tensions that have greater comedic effectiveness the more they give rise to frantic and overscaled reaction. Like MacArthur’s Children, Mr. Baseball highlights stressful negotiations between the public and the private. As a production, Mr. Baseball found much of its own private practices on public display, with traditional “making-of” publicity blended with journalistic speculation on the potential cultural influence of Japanese investments on the Hollywood industry. Principal photography began at Yankee Stadium on October 2, 1990, for a Universal Pictures comedy called Tokyo Diamond, with Peter Markle directing. After two days of shooting, the film went on hiatus, and did not resume until late summer 1991, with a new title, new script, and new director. 3 None of the Yankee Stadium footage or second unit footage shot in Japanese stadia around the same time appeared in the final film. All that remained of Tokyo Diamond were basic story elements, lead actor Tom Selleck, and a few key staff members. 4 The official reason for the production’s hiatus was an outbreak of snowy weather in areas of Japan where the production planned to shoot in January 1991. 5 But the November 1990 buyout of MCA/Universal by Matsushita emerged as an unofficial, and seemingly more credible, reason. By February 1991, when an article in The Los Angeles Times speculated about the film’s delay, and certainly by November 1991 when The New York Times featured a front-page story about Matsushita’s alleged “coaching” of the film, what had begun as a light-comedic $15 million Tom Selleck vehicle called Tokyo Diamond had transformed into a controversial $30 million case study of studio interference called Mr. Baseball. 6 182 Both the Los Angeles and New York Times stories exploited a public relations blunder by Matsushita president Tanii Akio to intensify a sense of concern over Matsushita’s potential for censoring Universal Pictures. For The New York Times, Mr. Baseball was nothing less than “the first movie about Japan produced by a Japanese-owned Hollywood studio and the first test of the Japanese promise to leave creative control in Hollywood.” 7 The film’s long hiatus, the hiring of a series of additional screenwriters for rewrites, the doubling of the film’s budget, and the hiring of Australian director Fred Schepisi all contributed to speculations that Matsushita was indeed “coaching” the film into a more Japan-friendly product. Despite emphatic denials from the film’s crewmembers, Matsushita and Universal management, and Selleck, 8 the specter of self- censorship became part of what Vivian Sobchack called the film’s “discursive field.” Analyzing the New York Times story as “utterly revealing of its cultural implication in the post-American moment,” Sobchack connected its “anxieties” to the film’s very own, with both movies and baseball having their “American ‘national heritage’” threatened by the Japanese. 9 Not even critical reviews were immune from the “anxieties” that Sobchack observed. One critic made the ominous statement that “The only thing unsettling about this fun-loving, uplifting film about American and Japanese culture comes with outside knowledge – that this film was produced by Universal, a subsidiary of MCA, which is a subsidiary of Matsushita Electronics.” 10 Intending readers to project sinister top-down creative oversight on the part of Matsushita, journalists and reviewers collaborated in a cynical framing of Hollywood as susceptible to foreign pressure, and of Matsushita as representative of a controlling and reactionary Japanese corporate culture. 11 Of course, all of the news articles had the luxury of reporting on an uncompleted project. The fact that Mr. Baseball got made at all, and that its culture-gap comedy appears to the extent that it does, speaks more to the absence of self-censorship than its imposing presence. 12 A 183 comparative analysis of the film’s original treatments written by Theo Pelletier and John Junkerman, along with the working script for Tokyo Diamond written by Monte Merrick, and the shooting script credited to Kevin Wade, shows a process of expansion and refinement rather than contraction and sanitization. Conceived in 1981 by Pelletier and Junkerman, and originally called Blue Note and then Tokyo Joe (after Joe Pepitone, the New York Yankee who played in Japan in the 1970s), the film was a drama about an American ball player in Japan who was also a jazz enthusiast. 13 The shorter of two treatments provided to the author by Pelletier shows a disillusioned Joe during his final days as a player in Tokyo. The film ends with his decision to leave Japan; Hiroko, a jazz musician completely unaffiliated with baseball, accompanies him. A more expanded treatment of Blue Note dramatizes Joe’s entry into Japan, with a slightly more comedic tone, but again it ends with his departure, this time to attempt reconciliation with his American ex-wife. Both treatments follow Joe’s point of view exclusively, and emphasize his rebellious opposition to the intractability and militarism of his Japanese coach. 14 In Monte Merrick’s Tokyo Diamond script, the fourth revised version dated October 1989, the character “Scott” (formerly named Joe) has a more relaxed attitude. The Japanese cast expands to include an interpreter for Scott, named Kazu. There is also a cartoonish villain named Sugama, who owns the “Tokyo Warriors” and tries to force Hiroko into marrying him. This is the script that Fred Schepisi referred to in a 2010 interview as needing greater attention to “cultural nuances,” and it is easy to see why. 15 Kazu, who is fired for some trifling error, in a drunken rage decides to commit ritual suicide in his living room. With Scott present, Kazu orders his wife to bring out an “ancient samurai sword” to perform hara-kiri. 16 While the tone is comical, the casual display of pre-modern “tradition” in a modern home carries a troublesome contrast between Scott’s easygoing demeanor and the exotic rigidity of the Japanese. Merrick’s 184 script normalizes Scott as a sympathetic figure of bemused reaction, devoid of neurosis or cultural chauvinism, while the Japanese appear, by nature, dysfunctional and outdated in their approach to everything from baseball to arranged marriages. The shooting script credited to Kevin Wade, dated late 1991, restores some of the psychological tensions missing from the protagonist of Tokyo Diamond. 17 In the original treatments for Blue Note, jazz is the cross-cultural phenomenon more enticing to the protagonist than baseball. By 1991 the character, now named Jack Elliot, no longer has affinity for jazz, but he arrives in Japan with a middle-aged recalcitrance. He is neurotically set in his ways very much like his Japanese coach and interpreter, and their dysfunction seems less symptomatic of ancient tradition and more a product of the subculture of contemporary Japanese baseball. Informed by humorous accounts of cross-cultural tension in books like Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa, 18 Mr. Baseball dramatizes events in the Japanese careers of American players such as Warren Cromartie, Bob Horner, and Randy Bass. 19 Tom Selleck’s casting also influenced the script. The first baseman of Selleck’s beloved Detroit Tigers 20 was Cecil Fielder (Jack also plays first base), who played in Japan in 1989 for the Hanshin Tigers after four unsuccessful seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays. “In Toronto,” Fielder said, “I was always concerned about not getting out. When I was in Japan, I learned the importance of hitting the long ball if the team was depending on you for production.” 21 The fear of “getting out” is a source of Jack’s slump in the film, the “hole” in his swing, and only by accepting his role on the team and hitting for them, not just for himself, does he succeed in Japan. If Mr. Baseball is in any way significant as a “test case” of Japanese corporate censorship in Hollywood—which I believe it is—then the answer to the question of whether or not Japanese-owned studios dictate Hollywood product to represent Japan in only flattering ways, is 185 “no.” The final version of Mr. Baseball shows little sign of Matsushita-imposed censorship, or even self-censorship, but an increased investment in the transnational appeal of the story. The problematic Japanese caricatures of Tokyo Diamond yielded to documented culture gaps specific to American-Japanese baseball. Like in the original treatments for Blue Note, the American in Mr. Baseball is not so much a hero or even a “regular guy”—Tokyo Diamond tried to make him both—but a stubborn, provincial veteran who, in going overseas, keeps his own counsel at his own peril. FORBIDDEN SPEECH Although censorship did not affect the development and production of Mr. Baseball, it is central to the regulation of behavior in the film, and in MacArthur’s Children. Both films present censorship as a public policy that characters must be willing to accept in order to get along with foreigners. But censorship also appears as a private practice, a deplorable side effect of so much public sanitization of speech and manner. Characters who practice censorship in social interactions are doing so for the benefit of public order; the danger, however, is internalizing the practice to the point where a character represses his or her private identity. Negotiating censorship demands of the public without compromising private thoughts indicates a character’s healthy adjustment to unexpected transnational encounters. Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children work out several comic variations of the failure to speak appropriately in public and honestly in private. Mr. Baseball’s censorship battles flow from Jack’s status as an international athlete worthy of close media attention. Immediately upon his arrival at a Nagoya airport, 22 Jack’s interpreter Yōji (Shioya Toshi) introduces him to the management of the Chūnichi Dragons, who 186 were the only team in the world willing to pick up his contract from the New York Yankees. Jack receives a business card and starts to put in in his back pocket when Yōji admonishes him: “Major insult. Like you are sitting on their identity.” Yōji then shuttles Jack off to a press conference in the terminal and translates for Jack in a way that finesses impolitic responses to reporters’ questions. Asked “What do you think of our country?,” Jack, who just arrived minutes earlier, bends down to a microphone that barely reaches his chest and says, “The airport’s nice, I guess. And there’s lots of little people walking and talking very fast.” Yōji translates that response as an admiring comment about Japan’s modern architecture and technological prowess. 23 Jack’s inability to disengage his private musings from his public voice sets the pattern for his communication difficulties in Japan. 24 The problem is not that he cannot speak or understand Japanese, but that he does not yet recognize the legitimacy of the league that hired him. As long as Japanese baseball has nothing to do with real baseball, in his eyes, he can walk and talk freely without serious consequence. Free expression—the ruder, the better—is all that remains of Jack’s American ballplayer identity, since he has lost most of his athletic ability and reputation. He is so possessive of his frankness that when a newspaper article appears in Japanese dubbing him “Mr. Baseball” and misquotes him entirely with words of humble praise for coach Uchiyama, whom he detests, he confronts Yōji about his compulsive urge to “save face” for Jack. “I’ll take care of my own face,” Jack says. “You just translate what comes out of it.” Yōji’s frantic attempts at diplomacy are to Jack a kind of authoritarian control. Jack’s violations of clubhouse rules and team traditions that run counter to American baseball—group exercise, conservative play, no spitting on the field— are at first unintentional, and then spitefully tactical. He purposefully violates rules not because they are difficult to follow but because he wants to show how easy they are for him to violate. 187 Instead of allowing himself to be censored publicly for the sake of orderly practice and gameplay, he persists on exhibiting a private crisis of alienation. Jack’s turning point comes when he is forced to reconcile his public role as a player with his private life: he discovers that coach Uchiyama (Takakura Ken) is the father of his lover, Hiroko (Takanashi Aya). A plot complication absent from all drafts of the Mr. Baseball script except the most recent 1991 version, Uchiyama’s parental relation to Hiroko embitters Jack initially because he sees it as personal pressure to sanitize his public behavior. Furthering the pressure is the revelation that Uchiyama, whose prior dialogue was all in Japanese, has excellent skills in English and needs no translator to deal with Jack. Shortly after being re-introduced to Uchiyama as a bilingual blood relative of Hiroko, Jack is isolated on one end of a table at an uncomfortable meal with Hiroko, Uchiyama, and Hiroko’s grandparents. As his Japanese hosts slurp their noodles, Jack who has been eating quietly in obvious discomfort, is told by Hiroko that slurping is a sign of politeness. Jack then does the exact opposite of self-censorship: he makes a childish display of following orders by slurping his food to the point where slurping actually becomes rude. Put in a position where he must conform to custom or damage his relationship with Hiroko, Jack initially follows custom as a form of parody. In a similar calculated move, Hiroko leaves the two men alone, granting them privacy and mutual freedom of speech. Here the film establishes an opportunity for Jack to speak his mind to an authority figure with whom he must get along, and for Uchiyama to explain his authoritarianism in such a way that grants Jack access to privileged information. As it turns out, Uchiyama has been laboring under his own system of censorship, not only in the secrecy of his English language skills, but in his attitudes toward baseball. The casting of Takakura Ken connects Uchiyama to Black Rain’s Detective Matsumoto in several ways, 188 notably the calculated revelation of their English fluency. 25 Both Jack in Mr. Baseball and Nick (Michael Douglas) in Black Rain are taken aback by Takakura’s English, to comic effect, as both Americans spoke with blatant racial insensitivity in Takakura’s presence, unaware that he understood every word. Film scholar Masuda Sachiko likens Takakura’s slyness in revealing his English ability to the Hollywood-American image of a Japanese man as a “surprise attacker,” historically connected of course to Pearl Harbor. 26 In the case of Matsumoto, the aggression is there: after a brief introduction at the Osaka police station, Nick grouses to his partner Charlie, “Just hope they got a N-- in this building who speaks fucking English.” Matsumoto, overhearing, re-introduces himself in Nick’s language: “Assistant inspector Matsumoto Masahiro, criminal investigation section, Osaka prefecture police. And I do speak fucking English.” For Uchiyama, however, English ability is not a weapon to accuse and disabuse Jack of cultural chauvinism (although it has that effect); he extends it as a privilege to Jack and as a somewhat painful self- exposure. It is established that no other player on the team, not even Yōji or Jack’s American teammate, Max (Dennis Haysbert), was aware of Uchiyama’s speaking skills. A viewer looking back on previous scenes can only wonder at the degree of self-censorship Uchiyama demonstrated when posing as a monolingual coach relying on translators. Even his daughter Hiroko, fully aware of her father’s abilities, acted the role of translator for him and Jack until Uchiyama dropped the act. Although the reason for Uchiyama’s public suppression of his English abilities is not fully explained, two reasons—one practical and the other thematic—are apparent. As a practical matter, without the need of a translator or subtitles, Jack and Uchiyama can communicate directly, and in privacy, to gratify English-language audiences. In service to the storyline, Uchiyama emerges as a conflicted character very much like Jack. In the first half of the film, 189 Uchiyama shows occasional spasms of violence: kicking doors, scattering helmets, usually in response to Jack’s unruly behavior. We interpret that as Uchiyama’s frustration over his inability to control his players, but as he reveals later on as Hiroko’s father, what frustrates him, and Hiroko, is his inability to lose control of himself. In return for Uchiyama’s granting Jack special privileges in communicating and training one-on-one, Jack draws out what appears to be Uchiyama’s own innate transnationality. Arriving at Uchiyama’s house with a bottle of liquor, Jack greets him with, “I heard there’s a Japanese tradition: get drunk and tell off your boss, and he can’t hold it against you.” This nationally-coded lowering of communication barriers of politeness opens up an international debate about the purpose of baseball. Uchiyama persists in calling it “work, not fun,” while Jack asks him to remember his days as a young player, and to let the “kids” on his team have fun. (By referring to his teammates as “kids,” Jack acknowledges his own weathered career in relation to theirs, no longer kidding himself that he can perform as he did in his youth.) The viewer is led to understand that Uchiyama’s Japanese-coded sports ethic of baseball as “work” is a suppression of his genuine belief that baseball is, or at least used to be, American-coded “fun.” 27 Ridding himself of public displays of his English language skills furthers a repression of his younger self. Uchiyama does not so much learn from Jack as relearn. In front of his team, he shows his amenability to joyous outburst during the climactic game against the Tokyo Giants: he picks up a small cheerleading cone and drums it against the wall of the dugout. 28 Takakura’s deadpan expression in this scene—a kind of playful stoicism—matches that of Matsumoto’s in Black Rain when he accepts Charlie’s tie as a gift, puts it on, and says “I like you.” After a narrow win against the Giants, Uchiyama confronts the Dragons’ Japanese (and Japanese-speaking) management about the renewal of his coaching contract. “It’s gonna cost you, chief…” he 190 mutters aloud in English as he turns and walks off, to the surprised and anxious reaction of his gray-haired superior. This “uncensored,” bilingual Uchiyama is a stranger to his management—a mostly humorless bunch—and the film’s audience approves of the change. GROUP CENSORSHIP Censorship plays a similar ambivalent role in MacArthur’s Children. Based on the 1979 novel by Aku Yū, whose independent production company financed the film, 29 it is set on Awaji Island (Aku’s hometown) immediately following Japan’s surrender in 1945. The film takes a seriocomic approach to the American-led Occupation. As in Mr. Baseball, self-censorship is both a social lubricant and a dramatic obstacle. To get along with the Americans, Japanese characters regulate their speech, avoiding confrontation by silencing nationalistic sentiments. But the act of silencing clashes with American-led policies of forced democratization—an oxymoronic principle that sets Japanese characters arguing within and amongst themselves. Concerned mainly with policing the appearance of retrenched nationalism and militarism in postwar Japan, the occupying Americans are oblivious to the psychosocial conflicts of the occupied. Taking the point of view of late elementary schoolchildren, many of whom lost their parents, the film lays out contradictory impulses of freedom and control. Unable to express themselves freely, adults in the film are required to regulate children’s behavior in an environment intended to encourage “democracy.” At the same time, children without parents, or without a paternalistic Japanese government, test the limits of their supposed new freedoms under American rule. For both adults and children, restrictions on free speech are the reverse side of democratic policy, given the rapidity of cultural transformation mandated by the occupiers. 191 Self-policing nationalistic expression is the most obvious and demonstrative form of censorship in the film. Again, the wiping out of nationalist sentiment somewhat parallels that in Mr. Baseball, only there the nationalist spirit was Jack’s (and to some extent Uchiyama’s), and in his role as guest, Jack had to practice self-censorship as the first stage of purging his own nationalism in order to gain sympathy and respect. The censors and self-censors in MacArthur’s Children, as hosts to the Americans, attempt to rid themselves of any signs of nationalism proactively—perhaps in the spirit of anti-nationalism but certainly out of fear for the potential consequences. In fast-edited documentary footage at the beginning of the film, set to the jazzy bounce of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” we see the ruins of Hiroshima and crowds of starving and wounded Japanese on city streets. Douglas MacArthur arrives in Japan to accept its formal surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri and delivers a speech: “It is my earnest hope…that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past…a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish -- for freedom, tolerance and justice.” A freeze frame on MacArthur’s face at the end of his speech fades into a closeup of the hand of a schoolboy readying an inkwell for an exercise in group censorship: the school principal wants all references to militarism in their Japanese language textbooks blackened out. Director/co-writer Shinoda Masahiro compounds the irony of censorship under MacArthurian “freedom” in the same scene by having twelve-year-old Saburō (Ōmori Yoshiyuki) take two slaps in the face for talking back to the principal. Saburō yells back that with Japan at peace (heiwa nippon ni natta) and hitting therefore no longer allowed, he will not take discipline and runs off. Saburō’s opportunistic outburst, sparing himself tedious schoolwork, disrupts the order of the classroom in such a way that the audience approves, even with the 192 understanding that censorship is the unavoidable and pragmatic goal of their work. Without debunking the system of speech control, the film accepts childish anti-authoritarianism as a natural legacy of postwar occupation. In their concerted efforts to control their children in deference to the occupiers, adults in MacArthur’s Children reveal their utter lack of control. While Saburō exploits the presence of the Americans to gain leverage against Japanese authority figures, Ryūta (Yamauchi Takaya), the nominal class leader, follows instructions under silent protest. The two are best friends, equally hostile towards the occupation (they both lost their fathers in the war), and yet Saburō is more extroverted in his reactions to cosmetic social and cultural change in the postwar. 30 At a movie theater, Saburō shouts “They did it!” upon seeing, for the first time, Japanese characters kissing on the screen, enjoying the loosening of at least one aspect of wartime Japanese film censorship. Ryūta, meanwhile, broods over what he’s been forced to relinquish, or extinguish. Ordered by his grandparents to burn all of his drawings of Japanese warplanes and battleships, so the Occupation authorities won’t discover them, Ryūta is tear-stricken as the artwork goes up in flames. In a later scene, when an American army jeep pulls up in the marketplace, Ryūta picks up a rock, intending to throw it at the soldiers sitting in the jeep. But as he moves closer and overhears the Americans talking casually about how strange Japan is—one of them holding a bamboo umbrella as an amusing curiosity—Ryūta suppresses his vengeful impulse by using his free hand to loosen his grip from the rock, prying away the fingers one by one. He cannot be as bold as Saburō, or some of the other kids who shout at the soldiers: as a boy of the middle class, he has enough to lose to keep control of his actions but not so much that he could afford even an occasional slip. Keeping up his image as class leader, Ryūta is a model of diplomatic favoring, getting along with everyone by following adult guidelines of decorum—playing “good student” 193 for both Japanese and Americans. He cannot even leave the classroom in the middle of an English lesson to wave farewell to his classmate Mume as her ship departs for Tokyo; he instead sits in tears, repeating over and over the English phrase, “I am an American boy.” All the children in the film recognize that an authority higher than the Japanese is in charge, and vacillate between fear, bitterness, and slow acceptance—unaware that the film’s adults are mirroring the same range of responses. Before Lieutenant Anderson (Bill Jensen) rides into the city to meet with local authorities and to demolish batteries still in place on the island’s shoreline, the chief of police—Ryūta’s grandfather—orders the removal of a large banner hanging outside the public building that reads “Mobilize the National Spirit!” (kokumin seishin sōdōin) The banner comes down just as Anderson’s jeep pulls up. Ryūta’s drawings and the nationalistic slogans in full view of city passersby seem equally capable of giving offense or unnerving the Americans. Adults cannot hide behind the innocent identity of children, some of whom curse at the soldiers in Japanese and receive friendly waves in response. Recognizing the vital importance of behavioral adjustment in smoothing over transnational encounters, adults on both sides practice it faithfully. MacArthur’s Children has a scene repeated almost exactly in Mr. Baseball (and countless other American-in-Japan films before and after): Anderson admonishes his fellow soldiers for entering a Japanese house with their boots on, just as Jack gets the same admonishment from Max upon entering the Dragons’ locker room for the first time, also in a pair of boots. 31 The process of successful cross-cultural interaction in Japan, for adults, relies first on a mutual acceptance of basic Japanese rules of daily life—that which is non-negotiable. Tensions arise from disagreements over what is negotiable and what is not. While Mr. Baseball presents the Japanese as mostly uniform in their agreement over what is culturally intransigent—and therefore what Jack has to learn to accept— 194 MacArthur’s Children shows the incoherence of Japanese mores through the infighting of a wide array of characters in a transnationalizing environment. Shinoda frames the American presence not as overbearing foreign oppression but as a parallel, or an extension, of domestic oppression. Everyone, it seems, is harboring the stress and shame of subjugation, and not always at the hands of the occupation. Saburō and Ryūta’s teacher, Komako (Natsume Masako), advises her students not to “sneak around” or “butter up” with the Americans, and adds “our spirits cannot be occupied,” as if her students were in a vulnerable position, in need of comforting. Saburō and Ryūta sense something hidden in Komako’s emotional intensity, and they are right: unbeknownst to them, Komako’s brother-in-law Tetsuo (Watanabe Ken) raped her the night before at her own home. Shinoda clarifies the source of her own personal subjugation—Tetsuo and his parents, who expect him to replace Komako’s husband Masao, a soldier apparently killed in action. Komako’s message to her students about the indomitability of their spirits is a public statement of challenge to her own private terrors. Packaging her words for the ears of children, she cannot escape their detection that something besides the Americans is troubling her, and yet the Americans, ironically, are the one subjugating force they all recognize. WOMAN WITHOUT A NATION Komako is one of three major female characters in MacArthur’s Children, and each one represents a perspective on identity struggle during the occupation that sets them apart from the male characters, even with the all-male sport of baseball as a controlling metaphor. Komako resists the pressures of her in-laws to follow her traditional role as Masao’s husband, even after his rumored death. Tome (Iwashita Shima), the widowed proprietress of a shoreside barbershop, 195 caters to social change by converting her place of business to a Westernized bar. And Mume (Sakura Shiori), Saburō and Ryūta’s classmate, the tallest and most upper-class student in the school, endures the trial and execution of her father, Admiral Hatano (Itami Jūzō) for war crimes. Impressively, Hiroko in Mr. Baseball, the one major female character in that film, functions on her own as a conglomeration of the three types of female characters in MacArthur’s Children: she struggles against tradition, manages herself as a creative businesswoman, and has trouble resolving any feeling for her father, who keeps his distance. If Uchiyama is a man deprogrammed of an entrenched nationalism, Hiroko is a woman without a nation. An advertising agent and graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York, Hiroko drives a Volkswagen Gold convertible, speaks fluent English (save for a few malapropisms, like saying “bambi” when she means “bimbo”), has few if any close friends, an absent mother, and an estranged father. She has a prodigious narrative function: as if to compensate for an underpopulated cast, the filmmakers laden her with an astounding fluidity. As Charles Fox notes, she is “the moving force behind all the action,” representing neither Japan nor America but a type of womanhood that Fox describes as the exclusive product of the “male imagination” and “in many ways the politically correct answer to all of Jack’s wishes and needs.” 32 Hiroko is gifted with a superhuman ability to understand the minds of men from two different cultures, and if her own cultural bias never dulls her powers of perception, that is because she has been scripted without allegiance to any particular culture. She is quick to understand Jack’s flaws, to correct his misunderstandings, and to present herself as both a saving grace and a patient judge. With Uchiyama, she is less patient, but she discerns his similarities to Jack and manipulates the two men—each previously unaware of the other’s relationship to her— into a reluctant yet successful partnership. 196 Hiroko’s porosity of identity is a narrative escape hatch, the solution to every dramatic problem. The screenplay’s many authors altered her character from draft to draft to such an extent that her only consistent feature seemed to be her name. Initially a single jazz musician in her thirties in Junkerman and Pelletier’s original treatments for Blue Note, 33 she became a journalist in Merrick’s script for Tokyo Diamond, saddled with an illegitimate son. Reportedly in yet another version of the script she was a fashion designer, and producer Robert Newmyer was “struggling” with her. 34 Finally she emerged as a graphic designer with extraordinary access to the Dragons, supervising commercial shoots with Jack and working out of an all-female office as well as a home studio. Her independence, and particularly her boldness toward Jack, grew as the script drafts multiplied. In response to criticisms of her character as someone much too eager to be Jack’s lover, producer Doug Claybourne remarked, “It’s hard to have a relationship with Japanese women [in films], unless they’re somewhat Westernized.” 35 The “somewhat” in that statement is key, because to have her completely Westernized would upset the dramatic balance maintained by her versatility. Hiroko is self-sufficient to a fault, a product of transnationalism so advanced she exceeds both nation and history. Masuda Sachiko and Charles Fox agree that Hiroko is a self-contradiction, progression and regression combined. Masuda draws connections between Hiroko and the more traditional Hana-ogi in Joshua Logan’s Sayonara (1957), arguing that even though Hiroko uses sarcasm to put Jack in his place, something Hana-ogi (Taka Miiko) did not seem capable of doing to Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando), the two characters are much alike because each of them has to act as an intermediary between convention and liberality, to be an atypical Japanese woman in the throes of an interracial romance while still fulfilling the stereotypical role of a Japanese woman in a Hollywood film. Hiroko’s self-determination, for Masuda, is offset by moments where she plays 197 into the stereotype, such as the scene where she performs an “erotic service,” drawing Jack a hot bath and rubbing his shoulders while they talk about his problems. 36 Fox refers to the very same scene to draw a similar parallel to the 1980 television adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun: the background music of Mr. Baseball’s bathing scene (a flute piece composed by Jerry Goldsmith) cues the viewer that we are now in the realm of tradition, and since Shōgun also had a romantic nude bathing scene, Hiroko becomes in essence “a modern Mariko to Jack’s Anjin-san.” 37 All three film romances have an additional commonality: none of them have a future in Japan. Mariko sacrifices her life in Shogun, and both couples in Sayonara and Mr. Baseball move to the United States where, it is suggested, there are fewer obstacles to romance. At the end of Mr. Baseball, Hiroko sits in the bleachers while Jack trains with the Detroit Tigers. She watches him work while doing her own work: she takes a call on her cell phone and tells whoever it is (in English) that she’ll “fax a new set in an hour.” Sayonara’s Hana-ogi rejects her nation to marry Lloyd, but Hiroko, who is both nation-less and wire-less, does not need to make such sacrifices. On their first night out she informs Jack none too subtly that she hopes to go back to New York some day to continue her career as a designer. Even though her status in Japan is that of a returnee from America, the viewer is aware that she is already plotting her exit strategy. She will be back in America with or without Jack. He does not have to commit to living in Japan or learning its culture; he only has to commit to her. The film succeeds in avoiding a potentially offensive argument over which nation is better suited for Jack and Hiroko’s future, America or Japan, by making Hiroko adaptable to either one and thereby relieving Jack of the burden of making a choice. When they fight, the issue is not where they should go but when and how, and Hiroko’s instincts, as usual, are correct: they should leave together, but only when Jack 198 fixes the “hole” in his swing, and when Uchiyama can express himself as a loving and supportive father. THE UNCONTAINABLE Hiroko’s seemingly limitless boundaries of character allow her to intervene in Jack’s crisis by arranging private negotiations with Uchiyama—an arrangement that also serves to improve her strained relations with both men. The women in MacArthur’s Children, however, perform their interventions and manipulations within strict limits. Komako, Tome, and Mume can only do so much in their social roles, but each finds a way to transgress not only the traditions of those roles but the expectations of the male characters. Collectively, they represent a form of knowledge and intuition beyond the capabilities of men—again, as in Mr. Baseball, fulfilling a stereotypical role while acting as a liberating agent. Despite the comedic tones throughout MacArthur’s Children and Mr. Baseball, women are rarely the target of thematic ridicule. Rather, they contain the power of judgment to succeed, or at least to make admirable attempts, at reconciling their desires with public or social demands. Komako has few private moments. At the beginning of the film, she breaks down crying upon hearing Hirohito’s radio address of surrender on August 15, 1945, and the framing of that shot isolates her in a doorway where Ryūta stands beside, watching her. (He also narrates the scene in voiceover.) 38 Pausing near the schoolhouse to take a stress-relieving stretch on the way home, she is accosted by Tetsuo and his manipulative demands for attention. She cannot even keep Tetsuo’s bedroom assault on her a secret, as he reveals it to Tome, characterizing it as a mutual affair. Komako’s husband Masao, believed dead, turns up at a local shrine with a missing leg; not even that can stay a secret, as Saburō, who with Ryūta functioned as a go-between for 199 the separated couple, gossips about it to Tome. With no control over her own privacy or public image, Komako endures the scandalous gossip with admirable poise until Saburō arrives at the classroom with a pair of guardians whom he calls “brother” and “sister”—a city couple in colorful Western clothing. Their flamboyance and arrogance disrupts the classroom, endangering Komako’s discipline over her students, who are already distracted by new policies of gendered co-education. To enforce discipline over the students and to give them a taste of the West within sanctioned Japanese boundaries, Komako proposes that they form a baseball team, inspired by the memory of Masao, who was a junior All-Star. By bringing baseball into the classroom, Komako re-asserts her public role as educator and her private role as Masao’s wife. At the same time, she negotiates internationally, agreeing to play her team against a team of American GIs, led by the amiable Lieutenant Anderson. Through her actions, the formerly disruptive and fragmented classroom coheres as a disciplined (or at least mutually supportive) group, while the opportunity arises to make a demonstration of baseball as a transnational sport. Komako encourages both the tightening of connections between her Japanese students in the midst of American occupation, and the opening up of baseball to multinational competition—with her resurrected husband at her side. Tome and Mume never reach as fulfilled a state as Komako. Their narratives, also framed as tense negotiations between personal desires and social roles, end in a permanent separation from the island community. Always set apart from most of the islanders—Tome as an aggressive businesswoman, Mume as the privileged daughter of an admiral—they represent a failure of assimilation that the film proposes as a failure of a hypocritical (male) social structure. Both characters harbor cruelties that they cannot release directly against their targets. Tome, a widow who engages in black market dealings and illicit affairs to survive, has the stage as an outlet. She 200 and an actor friend devise a play based on gossip about Komako given to her by Saburō: a thinly veiled account of Tetsuo’s designs on Komako, Masao’s return from the war, and Komako’s dilemma over which man has the greater claim upon her. The play is Tome’s attack on Tetsuo, whom she loves, and on Komako, her rival. Playacting is Tome’s primary trait. Trying on role after role, as barber, black market dealer, actress, and barkeep, she winds up abandoned by Tetsuo and her female employees, who all move away to Tokyo or Osaka, where their criminality has greater profit potential. The last image of Tome is her standing on the shoreline outside of her bar, now permanently closed, waiting for a ferry to take her to the mainland. Cutting from Tome’s last scene to the start of the baseball game between the Kōsaka Tigers and the GIs, which she does not attend, the film contrasts her failed scheme for bridging the cultures—the bar has a giant “Welcome” sign in English—with the success of the baseball game. Her career is a postwar casualty. Mume’s father, Admiral Hatano, is also a casualty, executed for war crimes in Singapore, leaving his daughter an orphan. The center of much criticism about the film’s thematic ambiguity, Hatano for the purposes of this chapter is more noteworthy as a parental influence than as an unnerving portrait of a war hero. 39 Dignified, and yet a commander of deadly action in the war, Hatano has passed along his dominant traits to Mume, who like Tome has great capacity for rebellion and needs a stage to playact her resentments. The film isolates Mume in shots where she stands silent as another character speaks or narrates some horrific detail about her father. After the Bikini Atoll nuclear test, Ryūta informs her that her father’s ship, the Nagato, was the bomb’s primary test target. Documentary footage of the blast is superimposed over Mume’s quiet reaction to the news. Later, we see her standing alone in a field as her father narrates a letter sent to her from his Singapore prison, telling her to go back to Tokyo and to stop burdening 201 her caretakers. As his voice gives paternal instruction from afar, a closeup of Mume’s hand shows her crushing a flower in a closing fist. These silent moments of reaction to her remote father suggest a deep well of accumulating rage. 40 Baseball is her only outlet, and with the Americans on the opposing team, she can compete against them. But like Tome, at the end of the film she leaves reluctantly on a ferry, again crushing flowers to her chest. 41 The island village cannot contain the ambitions and sufferings of either Tome or Mume. Although spared much of the devastation of the war, in the postwar period the island becomes even more of an anomaly. Like Kobatake in Kuroi ame, it occupies an odd temporality: intact and preserved after the war, it serves as a refuge for those who want to escape the ruins of war zones. But in the postwar, it is slower to develop than major cities, and the residents seem ill- prepared for the necessary psychosocial adjustments to the incursions of a foreign culture. While the vast majority of the male characters on Awaji Island, children and adults alike, seem content to cooperate with the Americans as long as their community remains intact, female characters are less enamored of the wartime status quo. Their losses—of privacy, of business, of family— cannot be blamed on the Americans. It is the presence of the Americans, in fact, that they welcome as an outlet for exploring alternatives to the Japanese systems that have failed them. Baseball, likewise, cannot contain the female characters except in their limited roles as managers, spectators, and one-off arrangements like Mume’s acceptance as a Kōsaka Tiger. Unlike the male characters, who seem consumed with the symbolic potential of the game as expressing national pride, the female characters understand baseball for what it is: a mode of play, for which they have only temporary interest. The utopian spectacle offered to them by the game is the witnessing of non-violent, though fiercely competitive, transnational masculinity. 202 CENTER OF ATTENTION Both Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children are acute depictions of a Japanese community of spectators, drawn to the public drama of theater and sports, which is in some ways another form of theater. As mentioned above, a common device in both films is the reaction shot. The films’ viewers are constantly informed of spectators’ judgments of main characters who perform in public. In each case, the expansive scope of the film emphasizes the optical value of the main characters, either in a large public setting like a stadium or in a small club-like setting— the locker room or the classroom. To his dismay, Jack in Mr. Baseball is a Japanese media figure. Although his contract with the Dragons allows them to license him out for endorsements, he claims not to have read that section and is shocked to learn how utterly the team “owns” him. His impressions of Japanese media are summed up in a quick scene of channel-surfing on his apartment television: samurai drama, bizarre variety shows, and dubbed American schlock. Soon he finds himself part of the media spectacle, dressed up as a sumo wrestler and a kendo fighter in a commercial for an energy drink. The news cameras at his airport press conference, outside his apartment, and at the baseball games seemingly document his every public move, while his teammates take note of his countless cultural violations. Seeing a newspaper version of his wacked-out energy drink ad on the train, Jack puffs a cigar (as fellow passengers cough in protest) and says, “I hate this place.” Even though his impression of Japan from New York—an impression shared by his agent and managers—was that it occupied an outer limits of baseball, in Japan the sport is a focal point of attention, and Jack, as a foreign player, is singled out for special attention from spectators and the media. 203 Jack’s process of fixing the “hole in his swing” (a phrase of Uchiyama’s, translated for Jack after Uchiyama’s initial, and accurate, analysis of his batting technique) includes a rehabilitation of the one public image he can control—the one he exhibits in the clubhouse. His performance statistics on the field dictate to a large extent his media coverage, but his disrespect and arrogance to his teammates damage what the film considers to be the more important of Jack’s public images. Here the film cannot rely on the deus ex femina role of Hiroko, nor on the device of a “transformative” foreign culture. Selleck, whose script approval rights gave him creative control of his character, reportedly insisted that Jack, from beginning to end, “keeps himself whole as an American baseball player.” 42 At the time of the film’s release he told another interviewer, “My big dilemma all through the movie was I was playing a very flawed character and yet I was representing American baseball.” 43 As Selleck interpreted the film, Jack’s “flaws” needed to be exposed and addressed, but they neither tainted the image of American baseball nor required a dilution of his national identity to be corrected. Japan is a site of repair for Jack, not a rebirth. As with Uchiyama’s embrace of the innate transnationalism of his youth, Jack’s acceptance of the legitimacy of Japanese baseball brings out what appears to be a natural affinity for team play. Japan influences Jack to the extent that he finds a way to succeed not by assimilating Japanese culture and tradition but by overcoming his own misperceptions of Japan and “the Japanese way,” which at one point he describes as “shut up and take it.” Through special training under Uchiyama that is the film’s mystical yet practical version of shutting up and taking it, Jack acquires a sense of humility that does not require a rejection of his native culture, only a clear understanding of his flaws—those that can be corrected, and those that cannot. “Accept” is the mantra Hiroko provides him, and it does not mean “accept Japan,” or surrender to it, but accept himself, accept his position in Japan, and 204 furthermore, to declare his renewed sense of self to his teammates. He makes a public apology to them in Japanese (coached by Yōji), which earns their acceptance and Uchiyama’s diagnosis that he is ready to “hit.” Jack has reconciled his private and public lives to the point where he can sit through an interview on Japanese television completely relaxed about everything from his endorsement obligations to the prospect of challenging Uchiyama’s home run record—a matter of great national anxiety. In Mr. Baseball, winning is not the same as resolution—just as Japanese baseball games can end in a tie if too many innings or too much time has elapsed before a clear winner can be declared. At first Jack’s hyper-competitiveness makes it impossible for him to accept such un- American rules of play, but he learns to embrace the “tie,” or even a personal loss, as an adequate form of team effort. In the climactic game against the Tokyo Giants, Uchiyama orders Jack to “swing away” with the bases full, knowing full well that the pitcher’s forced strikes would likely result in Jack hitting a home run and overtaking Uchiyama’s seasonal record. Jack opts instead to bunt, extinguishing his own personal glory in favor of a team-based strategy that brings in two winning RBIs. Uchiyama’s instruction to swing away demonstrates his detachment from his spectacular role as record-holder; Jack’s choice to bunt likewise shows his disengagement from his own spectacular role as record-chaser. What the game means to them privately takes precedence over what it means publicly. Both characters relieve their burdens of a public image that demands winning over losing by finding a way to win and lose simultaneously. PROVINCIAL STRUGGLE The climactic Japan-America game in MacArthur’s Children ends in a literal tie, but not without controversy over the decision—and from the viewer’s perspective, no end of ambiguity 205 over the players’ motivations. Komako’s interest in forming the team, and the community’s public support of it, rallying around the children’s efforts as if they were an invigorating source of social energy, are clear, and yet the children’s own interest in the sport invites speculation. Shinoda makes the dynamics of the game and the players’ attitudes deliberately ambiguous to emphasize the fantastical arena of play as a utopian projection, a temporary illusion of transnational space where players neither win nor lose but enact a ritual of friendly competition. An invention of Shinoda and screenwriter Tamura Tsutomu, the Japan-America game did not come from the 1979 Aku Yū novel on which the film is based. 44 Tamura, whose script for the film was published in Kinema junpō, wrote the game as an opportunity for Ryūta, Saburō, and Mume to score points against the Americans by any means necessary. Tamura acknowledged in the script that the children and the adults did not make for a good match. Ryūta and Saburō blithely disregard the rules, ignoring forced outs and tag outs, running the bases until reaching home. The Americans at first get upset about the violations, but then allow them as a way for the kids to earn sympathy runs in a lopsided competition. Mume then hits a clean in-field home run to win the game with a slide and a close catch. 45 In the final film, Shinoda revised the game so it appears to be a clean effort on both sides. Before the game, Saburō tells his teammates they have to beat the Americans “by fair means or foul,” but we see no follow-through of his “foul” intentions. 46 The game we see is a montage of back-and-forth action without cheating, and though that should result in the Kōsaka Tigers getting slaughtered on the scoreboard, instead it comes across as fantastically competitive. Down by three runs, Mume gets her good hit to the outfield with two players on base, but rather than depict a dramatic—and likely incredible—in- field home run, the film has a dog scamper out to the field, grab the ball in its mouth, and run away with it. Masao, the head umpire, declares the game a tie. 206 Over freeze-frames of the dog’s escape with the ball, Ryūta narrates that the spectators of the game, who know Mume’s father was executed in Singapore, believe that the dog was inhabited by the Admiral’s ghost. It is difficult to tell, though, how that impression colors the action of the game. Was the ghost-Admiral working for his daughter—for whom he seemed to have affection but no sympathy—or against the Americans who orchestrated his trial? Here the game’s representational values as transnational spectacle and as psychological catharsis are jumbled. Like Mr. Baseball, the game has a doubling dramatic effect on the individual players and on the community of Japanese spectators, but without the clarity of the Hollywood version. In MacArthur’s Children the American players are devoid of any layer of psychology beneath their exterior joviality. As pure spectacle, the Americans are read upon as “opponents” to the extent that the Japanese characters are willing. The children who play against them, rallying the support of adults in the community, understand the international scope of the proceedings, but apart from Saburō and Mume’s desire to play for the memory of her father, there is no obvious “team goal” apart from going along with Komako’s arrangement. Shinoda himself seems unsure in publicity materials for the film’s 1985 release in the United States. In a set of “comments” provided to distributor Orion Pictures, Shinoda says the children form a baseball team “to help them deal with their feelings of confusion and loss. However…I am still not sure what they wanted to escape from or what their goals were.” 47 Considering the first game that we see, a lopsided loss against another Japanese team, one thing the Kōsaka Tigers are unable to escape is their provincial identity as Japanese. Playing against a mainland team, the Tigers lose so badly that the other team suggests calling the game. Masao refuses, and takes offense when the opposing coach refers to the Tigers as “mongrels” (daken). While they fistfight it out, to a roaring crowd, the Tigers stand off to the side, heads down. The 207 scene shows not only the complexity of Awaji in microcosm, but Japan as a nation of mixed territorial identity—what Wimal Dissanayake calls the film’s “multilayered representational space of the nation.” 48 The mainlanders assume superiority over the islanders. No matter how well the Tigers perform against the Americans, on the baseball field or otherwise, they are “mongrels” in the eyes of big-island, big-city residents. Although the film is nostalgic for a time when Japanese children fantasized alternatives to Japanese socio-cultural traditions, clearly these children are limited in their ability to transcend their local community. The film reaffirms the controlling power of adults and the continuity of tradition. Shinoda’s perplexity over the children’s motives is perhaps linked to the film’s troubling point that no matter what the children want, no matter the promises of “freedom” and “justice” from an American Supreme Commander, in some ways they are not going to get it. Community identity in MacArthur’s Children is, therefore, doubly provincial: islanders in relation to the mainland, and Japan in relation to America. The film’s nostalgia, in turn, fluctuates between the characters’ reminiscence of their childhood days on the island, and a broader, nationally-coded nostalgia toward the occupation period. Shinoda’s choice of narrator— Ryūta—suggests a singular figure of collective identification. 49 Even though long sections of the film take place outside of Ryūta’s knowledge, he is the sole narrator. Why him, and not Saburō, or Mume, or Komako, or all four, or none of them? The film is conscientious in its tracking of each member of a large group of characters, adults and children alike, but it gives Ryūta, the class “leader” who cannot speak his mind, the role of spokesperson for the entire film—and for the generation he represents. 50 In another odd touch, Ryūta, who narrates the film presumably from some point in the future, narrates in his childhood voice. We never know what Ryūta grows up to become. With 208 that choice, the film risks distancing itself from a contemporary (1980s) audience while attempting to draw it into the immediacy of the film’s events. But for adult viewers alive during the occupation, as Shinoda, Aku, and many of their collaborators were, perhaps the withholding of information about Ryūta’s future allows for a more direct connection to the past. 51 This middle-class, self-conscious, introspective boy is the least alienating figure imaginable—the ideal vehicle for populist nostalgia. There is no need to explain his future to 1980s audiences because, in a sense, the film has already suggested it: he will go to a mid-level university, rise to middle management, and one day sit in the middle of a movie theater and watch MacArthur’s Children. CONCLUSION The transnational spectacle of baseball in Mr. Baseball and MacArthur’s Children functions as both marker and synthesizer of character identity. The provincialism of Jack, Uchiyama, and the island children of Awaji sharpens when Americans and Japanese share the field. But the sharpening is also a diminishing, a limitation that characters must overcome in order to benefit from international relations. Out of all these characters, only Uchiyama chose to mix potentially antagonistic players; the others went along with arrangements of management, struggling to resolve conflicts not of their choosing. The overweening obstacle in the films is the characters’ inherent provincialism and nationally-coded identity, not their partial surrender of them. As Vivian Sobchack pointed out in her brief analysis of Mr. Baseball, underlying the Matsushita purchase of MCA was a fear among participants and observers that the transaction may be too successful, that the blending of Japanese and American modes of creativity and 209 enterprise would have an impurifying effect on well-worn national traditions. Reportage about the MCA deal centered on a nervous question: What would happen if Matsushita dictated the content of American films? All throughout Mr. Baseball, Jack struggles with a similar question: What will happen to him if he does not get out of Japan as soon as possible? Mr. Baseball faced accusations of self-censorship based on its firm conviction that the “worst” that could happen— submission to Japanese coaching and guidance—may actually be the best that could happen. MacArthur’s Children also addresses the fear of dilution of provincial, nation-bound identity through forced interaction between Americans and Japanese. And just as the Hollywood film makes light of spectators and players who take the game too seriously, the Japanese film undercuts characters’ desires to “win at all costs.” Shinoda goes so far as to revise the climax of the film to eliminate cheating from the players’ options, and to have the game decided by nonhuman intervention. Baseball is the spectacle that draws out and challenges provincialism while providing the opportunity for characters to demonstrate their burgeoning transnationalism. As spectacle, it gives characters a dual identity as public figures, appealing to spectators of the games. Players work as diplomats as well as athletes, enacting a representational role dictated by their home nations, while attempting to resolve cultural tensions plaguing them outside the competitive arena. After the films climax with conflicted characters sharing the transnational field, the players quit the game. Giving up personal glory in favor of a measured acceptance of transnationalism, the players have nothing left to win. As the next chapter points out, however, “opting out” of transnational gamesmanship, in the 1980s and 1990s, is nearly impossible. Just as Japan picked up Jack’s contract and drew him to Nagoya, the American economy’s weakened economic position in the 1980s vis à vis Japan 210 drew Japanese investors to the U.S. What emerges, in the film Rising Sun, is a transnational playing field that is also a battleground: Americans and Japanese “play” together to “win,” but the rewards, in terms of the film, are strictly material, and far more dangerous. 211 CHAPTER 5 NOTES 1 I use the reductive term “Pacific War” specifically to characterize World War II as MacArthur’s Children characterizes it: as mainly occurring between the U.S. and Japan. 2 An on-location report in Asahi shinbun credits Donna Smith, then senior vice president of Universal, for supervising the cooperative arrangements with the Chūnichi Dragons and Nagoya Stadium. “Beikokujin yakyū senshu to ‘nihon’ no kōryū eigaka” [Adapting the intermingling of an American baseball player and ‘Japan’], Asahi shinbun, July 18, 1991, evening edition, 7. Upon her appointment in January 1989, replacing Terry Nelson, she was, according to the Los Angeles Times, “one of the highest ranking women in the studio system.” John Voland, “Movies,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 23, 1988. 3 MacArthur’s Children also had a lengthy hiatus between location shoots. It began principal photography in March 1983, and moved back and forth from several Setouchi islands to a Kyoto studio—both closed and open sets—until October. After a hiatus, it resumed location shooting in March of 1984 and finished in April. The reasons for such a lengthy production period, however, had more to do with logistics and working around the child actors’ school schedules rather than a studio buyout and replacements of key staff. For a detailed account of the production of MacArthur’s Children by Koibuchi Masaru (who would later produce other films directed by Shinoda), see “Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan riree hōkoku, dainikai” [MacArthur’s Children, relay report, second inning], Kinema junpō no. 883 (April 1984, 1); “Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan riree hōkoku, daisankai” [MacArthur’s Children, relay report, third inning], Kinema junpō no. 885 (May 1984, 1); and “Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan riree hōkoku, daiyonkai” [MacArthur’s Children, relay report, fourth inning], Kinema junpō no. 886 (May 1984, 2). 4 Cellin Gluck, first assistant director of the second unit, shot around twenty days in Japan in August and September 1990 before his dismissal upon the unit’s return to the States. He was rehired as second assistant director of the first unit under Fred Schepisi’s direction. He confirmed the absence of any 1990 footage in Mr. Baseball. In-person interview, October 24, 2012. 5 Frank Swertlow, “Hollywood Freeway – Better Luck Next Season for Selleck,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Jan. 24, 1991. 6 Michael Cieply and Alan Citron, “Universal’s ‘Diamond’ in the Rough,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1991, F1, F4; and Steven R. Weisman, “Japanese Buy Studio, and Coaching Starts,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 1991, A1, B8. 7 Weisman, ibid. 8 Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, “Selleck Hookslides Around Sellout Tag,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Mar. 14, 1991; and Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, “Selleck defends baseball movie,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Dec. 24, 1991. 9 Vivian Sobchack, “Baseball in the Post-American Cinema, or Life in the Minor Leagues,” East-West Film Journal 7, no. 1 (1993): 1-19. 10 Mick LaSalle, “Selleck Rounds the Bases – Sports comedy focuses on culture clash between U.S. and Japan,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 2, 1992. 11 The New York Times’s David E. Sanger played up the pessimistic view of the MCA buyout in articles intended to “expose” self-censorship practices in Japan that may end up carrying over into its management of Universal. According to one article, “Japanese have been all but unwilling to talk openly about issues ranging from ugly moments in their history to the treatment of Koreans in movies, fiction, even music.” Sanger quotes Seijo University social psychology professor Hiroyushi Ishikawa’s belief that Matsushita would never produce a movie where the hero is killed by a member of the Japanese Army. David E. Sanger, “Ideas & Trends; The Deal for MCA: Why the Anxiety Over Japan’s Latest Find in America,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1990. In another article, Sanger argues that because Matsushita observed the Arab trade embargo of Israel at that time (though Matsushita denied it), the 212 corporate philosophy of giving in to outside pressures would extend to business practices at MCA—not necessarily in the form of anti-Israel films, but in a reluctance to make films that would displease powerful trade partners, like China. David E. Sanger, “THE DEAL FOR MCA; Politics and Multinational Movies,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 1990. Other articles were less fearful about Matsushita’s heavy-handedness, acknowledging that by 1990, “studio interference” was a quaint idea, something from the classical studio era that no longer applied to contemporary multinational conglomerates. Still, articles doubted whether a Japanese-owned studio would approve a proposed remake of a film like Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) to avoid hassles with Japanese shareholders. Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute (a Washington think tank critical of Japanese trade policies) explained his concern: “It’s inevitable that producers and directors will be sensitive to Japanese interests and sensibilities and things that criticize the Japanese may get a second look…It’s simply a fact of life that he who pays the piper calls the tune.” See Matthew Gilbert, “Will Matsushita Tinker With MCA?” Boston Globe, Dec. 2, 1990; and Paul Farhi and John Burgess, “Buyout Expected to Get Tough Reviews in U.S.; Foreign Ownership Involves Several Issues,” Washington Post, Nov. 27, 1990. 12 For an example of a film that fell victim to overt suppression by self-empowered Japanese censors, a more convincing case may be Hell Camp, an unproduced Milos Forman film about two Americans in Japan—one a businessman, the other a wannabe sumo wrestler. TriStar Entertainment, then owned by Sony, cancelled the project two weeks before principal photography in late 1991. Debate over the cancellation centered around the refusal of the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) to cooperate with the production. TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy, Sony spokespeople, and Shindō Jūnichi, the film’s Japanese producer and intermediary, all deny that Sony wanted the picture shut down. But it is not clear, at least not in reports by Lars-Erik Nelson and Steven R. Weisman, why JSA refused to cooperate, what was said between JSA and Sony, or how hard Sony tried to push the movie forward. Medavoy did not call it censorship, but his options, as he outlined them, were limited: “Either we change the script, or we shoot it in another country—although that’s not really possible in this case—or they change their minds.” Lars-Erik Nelson, “’Hell Camp’ May Be First Effort By Japanese to Censor an American Film,” Orlando Sentinel, Dec. 12, 1991. Forman met with Tomotaka Dewanōmi, president of JSA, and with a member of the Yokozuna Council, to no avail. Ōga Norio, president of Sony, called on an “old personal friend” to try and sway JSA’s decision, still without success. Weisman’s article speculated that Sony’s image in Japan as a postwar upstart company gained it no advantage in negotiating with JSA; Sony did not even own a sumo box at the main stadium. Steven R. Weisman, “Hollywood Bows to Sumos and Drops a Film in Japan,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1992. 13 Phone interview with John Junkerman, January 19, 2012. 14 The “shorter treatment” refers to “Blue Note: by Theo Pelletier and John Junkerman,” eighteen undated typewritten pages. The “expanded treatment” refers to “Blue Note: A Film Treatment by John Junkerman and Theo Pelletier,” twenty-four dot-matrix printed pages. Both treatments were mailed to the author by Theo Pelletier from his personal archives in February 2012. 15 Fred Schepisi, “The SandC Interview; Fred Schepisi, Director Mr. Baseball,” Sports and Cinema, Sept 23, 2010. http://www.sportandcinema.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-sandc-interview-fred-schepisi-director-mr-baseball-2/. Accessed December 2, 2012. 16 Monte Merrick, Tokyo Diamond: an original screenplay, revised fourth draft (Outlaw Productions), October 21, 1989, 79. 17 Several other writers worked on various drafts of the script. After buying Merrick’s version, and before shooting began in fall 1990, Universal hired Gary Ross, whose script for Big (1988) had been nominated for an Academy Award, to rewrite Tokyo Diamond “to broaden the baseball angle, and strengthen the story structurally.” Then during the film’s hiatus in 1991, after the sale of MCA to Matsushita, the script had new writers, Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman (adapters of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1988). According to producer Robert Newmyer, Price and Seaman were responsible for taking out the “stereotypical treatment of Asians that many Japanese claimed to find in Paramount’s Black Rain” in order to “enhance the film’s appeal” in both the U.S. and Japan. See Cieply and Citron. Once Fred Schepisi replaced Peter Markle as director, he and screenwriter Ed Solomon went to Japan and rewrote the script between them, and then when filming resumed in late 1991, Selleck, who had final approval rights on the 213 script, hired Kevin Wade for several weeks of rewriting during shooting. See Schepisi, “The SandC Interview.” The shooting script credited to Kevin Wade contains rewrites dating all the way to November 1991, well within the film’s production phase. Final screenwriting credits on the film went to Theo Pelletier and John Junkerman for “story,” and Ross, Wade, and Merrick for “screenplay.” According to Junkerman, arbitration with the Writers Guild Association determined credits; undeniably the final film retains the basic story of Junkerman and Pelletier’s original treatments for Blue Note. John Junkerman phone interview with author, January 19, 2012. 18 See Robert Whiting, You Gotta Have Wa (New York: Macmillan, 1989); William W. Kelly, “Blood and Guts in Japanese Professional Baseball,” in The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure, eds. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 95-112. Whiting was, for a brief time, an advisor on Mr. Baseball. See Weisman, November 1991. 19 Cromartie, an African-American who played for the Tokyo Giants, seems to be the model for Jack’s teammate, Max (Dennis Haysbert). Bob Horner, a model for Jack, received a uniform from the Yakult Swallows with the number 50 on it—the number of home runs the team expected him to hit; Jack receives a uniform numbered 54 for the same reason. And Bass, a Hanshin Tigers player who challenged the home run record of Ō Sadaharu in 1985, had trouble getting Japanese pitchers to throw him strikes, a problem Jack encounters late in the film. Tanuma Yūichi, “Beesubooru eiga nidai wo megutte” [Concerning two baseball movies], Kinema junpō, no. 1101 (March 1993, 1): 88-90. 20 Selleck, a native of Detroit, sometimes wore a Tigers cap on his television show Magnum P.I. In 1987 he received ten shares of Tigers stock as a gift from Thomas Monaghan, who owned 97% of the team. “Selleck Gets Tigers Stock,” Gainesville Sun, Sept. 15, 1987, 2A. 21 Bill Center, “Fielder’s big man in script for Tigers,” San Diego Union, Mar. 16, 1991. 22 Like Black Rain, even though Mr. Baseball’s earlier script drafts had the film set in Tokyo, logistics dictated an alternate location for the film’s action, in this case Nagoya. 23 Monma Takashi rightly points out the lack of credibility in this scene, given that plenty of Japanese people listening to Jack’s response would be able to understand the clearly audible English that Yōji mistranslates. Monma Takashi, Ōbei eiga ni miru Nihon, 158. 24 Jack’s press conference comment was cut into a TV ad for the film, but so worried ABC’s Standards and Practices division that it refused to air what they thought was “demeaning to the Japanese.” See Marty Mule, “Big Deal Made About ‘Insult’,” Times-Picayune, Oct. 4, 1992, C3. 25 Casting for all major Japanese roles in Mr. Baseball did not occur until Schepisi joined the project, and Takakura did not accept the offer until Schepisi wrote a hand-delivered note of invitation and waited three days for a response. Neal Koch, “No Tea, No Sympathy,” New York Times, Aug. 23, 1992, H16. Takakura had no baseball experience, although in high school he was the sempai of the future “great commander” of the Orix Blue Waves, Ōgi Akira. Tanuma Yūichi, Nichibei yakyuu eiga kinema kan [Japanese-American Baseball Movie Theatre] (Tokyo: Hoochi shimbun kaisha, 1996], 215. 26 Masuda Sachiko, 160. 27 In a scene shot for the film but deleted in the final cut, Uchiyama leads Jack to a cemetery and talks about his experience as a younger player. He relied on his gift for hitting, but when that vanished, he was confused and faced with an identity crisis. He came back from despair and achieved a seasonal home-run record by simply “giving up” his inner struggle. Takakura regretted that this scene was cut, because it helped explain his character’s background more clearly. Takakura Ken, “Takakura ken ga kataru” [Takakura Ken talks], Shūkan Bunshun 34 no. 39 (October 15, 1992), 201. 28 The beating of cheerleading cones is a motif in Mr. Baseball, as Japanese spectators make a habit of beating them rhythmically in support of either team. MacArthur’s Children does a postwar variation on this, with male spectators 214 of the games beating on large drums. Linda Ehrlich argues that the drum-beating evokes tradition, “as if participating in an annual harvest dance, to inspire their team.” Linda C. Ehrlich, “Erasing and Refocusing: Two Films of the Occupation,” Shohei Imamura, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, 1997), 168. 29 The production company of MacArthur’s Children, YOU no kai, was made up of fifty members, including Aku, Shinoda, much of the film’s main cast, and the heads of big companies like IBM, Fuji TV, and Suntory. Gathered specifically to produce this one film, YOU no kai was considered an “epoch-making attempt” (kakkitekina kokoromi) to finance a film independently in Japan, close to a Hollywood model. See Satō Kiyoko, “Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan riree hōkoku, daiikkai” [MacArthur’s Children, relay report, first inning], Kinema junpō no. 882 (March 1984, 2). 30 Keiko McDonald argues that even though the children in the film “indulge a show of childish idealism” when they gather around to gripe about the Americans, they “show no signs of real hostility.” Keiko I. McDonald, “Images of Americans in Postwar Japanese Cinema,” Asian Cinema 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999), 13. Although that is true, one difficulty in assessing the film is distinguishing between “signs” of hostility that may be mere bluster, and genuine hostility that may or may not be outwardly expressed. 31 In almost accusatory fashion, New York Times critic Vincent Canby picked up on some familiar strains in MacArthur’s Children and considered it “like a Hollywood movie of the 1950s, photographed in rich, sunny colors, covering a wide range of fairly familiar characters, with everything treated rather superficially, neatly, and sentimentally.” He recommended readers watch some postwar Ōzu instead. See Vincent Canby, “From Shinoda, ‘MacArthur’s Children’,” New York Times, May 17, 1985, C8. 32 Charles Fox, “Speaking in Images: Japan in Hollywood Films,” Kotoba to sono hirogari: Ritsumeikan hōgaku bessatsu, Yamamoto Kazuo kyōju taishoku kinenronbunshū [Language and Its Expansion: Ritsumeikan Law Special Issue, in Celebration of Prof. Yamamoto Kazuo’s Retirement], 2004, 286, 290, 287. 33 Treatment co-writer Theo Pelletier describes his and Junkerman’s portrait of Hiroko as someone probably not attractive to a typical Japanese male—a little over the hill, and an outsider. Phone interview with Theo Pelletier, February 4, 2012. 34 Swertlow, 1991. 35 Dan Cox, “’Mr. Baseball’ offends some Japanese,” Houston Chronicle (Reuters), Oct. 2, 1992. 36 Masuda, 140. 37 Fox, 289. 38 Hirohito’s address opens the film, his words heard against a wide shot of children gathered in the school yard to listen. In an oft-quoted interview from the 1970s, Shinoda said that “In my films I have tried to show the present through the past and history, coming around to the truth that all Japanese culture flows from imperialism and the emperor system.” Such a sweeping statement is tempting to apply as an analytical framework, but its sweeping nature runs the risk of cutting short debate, especially on a film made ten years later. See Joan Mellen, Voices from the Japanese Cinema (New York: Liveright, 1975), 253. 39 Critic Rob Silberman found the Admiral figure problematic in that he shows the film’s “refusal to consider the war and its consequences head-on.” He appears heroically idealized. Critic Kanai Toshio considered MacArthur’s Children an improvement on Aku’s novel in particular due to the heavier backstory of the Admiral, whose calm acceptance of death by execution was a powerful point. See Rob Silberman, “MacArthur’s Children,” Cineaste 14, 3 (1986), 50, 52; and Kanai Toshio, “‘Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan’ ni ozu yasujirō wo mita!” [I saw Ozu Yasujirō in MacArthur’s Children!], Kinema junpō no. 889 (July 1984, 1), 89-91. 215 40 In a press interview for the film’s U.S. release, Shinoda answered a question on his general thoughts about violence with the telling statement: “In MacArthur’s Children, I feel the greatest violence in the character of the young girl [Mume]…She’s full of many kinds of hatred for the history of this whole era, particularly, I think, for the emperor, to whom her father was so faithful.” Shinoda Masahiro, “Dialogue on Film,” American Film, May 1985, 13. 41 Also set in Japan, and also nicknaming its main character in the title, The Karate Kid Part II (1986) matches the young American karate student with a young Japanese woman who inspires his defensive training while, ironically, drawing him into dangerous situations where his skills are tested. 42 Weisman, 1991. 43 David Kronke, “A League of His Own – Nice-Guy Image Unavoidable, Selleck Settles for Rough Edges,” Daily News of Los Angeles, Oct. 3, 1992. 44 “Shinoda masahiro sakuhin: miyagawa kazuo intabyū” [Shinoda Masuhiro’s work: Miyagawa Kazuo interview], Kinema junpō no. 887 (June 1984, 1), 54. 45 “Shinoda masahiro sakuhin: daihon” [Shinoda Masuhiro’s work: script], Kinema junpō no. 887 (June 1984, 1), 78. 46 Saburō’s blunt nationalism in this scene is undercut by Shinoda himself in an interview about the film. Even though Saburō tries to whip up his teammates against the Americans because they “killed” Mume’s father, Shinoda claims that the Japan-America game “has nothing to do with revenge. It was not the Americans who killed the father, but rather it was we [Japanese] who were responsible for his execution. Back then, we thought that we were to be blamed and not our enemy, and I still think so now.” Kyōko Hirano, “MacArthur’s Children: An Interview with Masahiro Shinoda,” Cineaste 14, 3 (1986): 51. 47 “MacArthur’s Children,” distributor materials, Cinefiles, University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 1985. MacArthur’s Children received a fairly wide release in the U.S., beginning May 17, 1985, in New York and spreading to around two hundred theaters nationwide. “Nyūyokku kawakiri beishuyōtoshi de jōei e” [New York beginning major city showing in America], Asahi shinbun, May 18, 1985, 9. 48 Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction: Nationhood, History, and Cinema: Reflections on the Asian Scene,” in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xxv. 49 Filmmakers and crtics alike agree that MacArthur’s Children has no one protagonist. In a roundtable discussion for Kinema junpō that included Shinoda and novelist Aku Yū, they agree that Aku cannot have just one main character in his work, and that Shinoda thinks the same thing about seeing the film, that he doesn’t know who the main character is. “Shinoda masahiro sakuhin: zadankai” [Shinoda Masuhiro’s work: roundtable], Kinema junpō no. 887 (June 1984, 1), 49. Scholar Keiko I. McDonald writes that the film’s central character is “collective…a number of individual histories in service of a central problem.” Keiko I. McDonald, Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 154. 50 The Asahi shinbun reported the running time of the film at two hours, twenty minutes; the international release is about twenty minutes shorter. Having only seen the international version, I cannot determine to what extent the pacing of the film and its various subplots was the work of the distributor, Orion Classics. See “‘Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan’ – eiga” [MacArthur’s Children: Film], Asahi shinbun, July 9, 1984, 13. 51 Screenwriter Tomioka Taeko, who co-wrote Shinoda’s film Double Suicide (Shinjū: Ten no amijima, 1969), wrote an essay for Asahi shinbun that discussed MacArthur’s Children in relation to “today’s” fifty-year-olds, who seemed to her an “afterimage” (sanzō) of the kids in the film. See Tomioka Taeko, “Kodomo no keiken: eiga ‘setouchi shōnen yakyūdan’ wo mite” [Children’s experience: seeing the film ‘MacArthur’s Children’], Asahi shinbun, July 12, 1984, 5. 216 CHAPTER 6. “DON’T FENCE ME IN”: TRANSNATIONAL EXCESS IN RISING SUN (1993) “He looks Japanese.” “Maybe he’s Polish.” —Rising Sun (film) The 1993 film Rising Sun, released by 20 th Century Fox, presents a symbiosis of American and Japanese corporate corruption. Adapted and directed by Philip Kaufman, the film slyly undermines the earnest nationalism and protectionism of the source novel by Michael Crichton. Published in 1992, the novel followed the rhetorical strategy of contemporaneous writings by so-called “revisionists” on Japan: that its inherent political and cultural differences placed America at a disadvantage in international economic relations. A suspense thriller with a cautionary tone, it characterized Japan’s intentions in the United States as destructive, and all but urged the (American) reader to expel the foreign threat. The film adaptation, however, raises the issue of national differences only to deride it as a distraction. Japan and America are not mutually exclusive, an idea propagated in the novel; they are, the film argues, interdependent, impossible to separate. Temptations of wealth, glamour, and sexual fantasy have brought Americans and Japanese together in a pursuit of hyper-capitalism. Differences exist, but they are more sharply defined in the film as a measure of class, not of nation. Supposed expert knowledge on differences between American and Japanese society and culture is dispensed freely in the film, as in the novel, but in a much weaker authoritative voice. Accused of anti-Japanese racism in the press and in public protests during its release—as was the novel—Rising Sun nevertheless subverts the novel’s unwavering confidence in its sweeping generalizations about the Japanese 217 by contradicting those characters who are most confident in their opinions about national differences. The film, as is typical of suspense thrillers, does retain a cautionary tone, but at a complete departure from Crichton’s. In the novel, the murder of a woman by a Japanese corporate executive is recorded on film, and sinister forces manipulate the recording to convince investigators that an innocent man committed the crime. The novel finds salvation in media technology when it is used against the Japanese: the recording is re-manipulated back to its original state by a Japanese-American computer whiz, revealing the murderer, solving the crime, and closing the case. The film offers no such comfort in its resolution, beginning with the nationality of the murderer—here identified as American. Throughout the investigation, and even before the murder occurs, Rising Sun’s audience is repeatedly warned that imaging technology has so far advanced that it functions more as a tool of deception than as a trustworthy source of information. Not even “raw footage” of the murder can clarify the perpetrator, and the film ends on a deflated return to the status quo. While the novel pleads for a revival of an American-styled competitiveness that can defeat Japan, the film shrugs at the futility of belief that an advanced image-based culture can achieve any clarity of vision—least of all in identifying and characterizing race and nation. What the film protests, through comical exaggeration and parodic devices absent from the novel, is transnational surrender to the power of the image. In the process of adapting the Crichton novel, Kaufman uses cinematic means to highlight—and to transnationalize—the excesses of hyper-capitalism as criminal motivation. The temptations of a Los Angeles subculture of easy money, real estate, and access to power players and their associates in the drug and sex trade are almost too much for any American or Japanese to resist. Crichton’s 218 prosaic recitations of statistics in long passages of dialogue, much of it taken from “revisionist” sources cited in a bibliography, 1 either ignore or consider beneath contempt the sensual pleasures offered by unfettered and extralegal business affairs. The film depicts the spectacular and corruptive synergy of two nationally-coded participants whose appetites are fueled through profitable interaction. While the novel considers America a willing corruptor of self under Japanese aggression—a process it argues to be reversible due to fundamental cultural differences—the film presents Japanese and American business criminals as enabling the worst in each other in an irreversible mutual interdependence. The wielding of nationalist rhetoric in the film, so earnest and alarmist in the novel, comes across as a cynical distraction from the truly alarming excess of transnational corruption that tempts all players. In this respect, the film Rising Sun is most closely connected with the sweeping critical judgments of Black Rain and Kuroi ame: that what we are seeing is transnational profit motive overtaking humanity. But Rising Sun is more pointed in its critique, more seductive in its imagery. The “collaboration zone” here is media technology, that which delivers the temptation of material gain and also its fulfillment. As a film, it is better positioned than the novel to display what it critiques. In that sense, it works on a different level of representation than Black Rain and Kuroi ame. Those films raise no questions about what makes something “American” or “Japanese”; national and cultural differences are accepted at face value. Rising Sun accepts nothing on its face, not even the face: with screen technology, facial imagery can be altered, replaced, misidentified. And no American needs a ticket to travel to Japan; it is already in America, wholly, if not seamlessly, integrated. A radical departure in tone and theme from the novel, the film nevertheless reproduced enough of the novel’s structure to be considered a more faithful, and therefore controversial, 219 adaptation in both the U.S. and Japan. Crichton and his writing partner Michael Backes left the project early over creative differences (detailed below), but their retention of writing credits and the swiftness of the project’s release so soon after the novel’s, gave the impression of a seamless, straightforward visualization. Not only did the film undergo the same process of censorship in Japan over the same specific passages as the novel, but arguments over the film in both the American and Japanese press largely mirrored those of the novel. 2 I argue that the film, despite its similar reception to the novel in both countries, had a more mindful sense of a transnational audience—not in the sense of pandering to foreign markets (although there is always some degree of that), but in the sense of rejecting the novel’s sober America-centric approach in favor of an ironic mocking of entrenched nationalism. With its thematic rendering of image technology as producing that which we cannot trust, the film constantly weakens the viewer’s confidence in the legibility of the image. Also, the lead role of Peter Smith, co-investigator in the novel, undergoes dramatic change: originally an incorruptible and somewhat Everymannish white officer, he becomes, in the film, a highly corruptible cop played by Wesley Snipes. Cast opposite Sean Connery as the other lead investigator, Snipes portrays a man surrounded by both temptation and racial prejudice. In the film’s heightened sexual atmosphere, an element that generated controversy in ways that the novel did not, Snipes-as-Smith has to navigate a barrage of sensual enticement and subtle (or not-so-subtle) bigotry. The film teases the prospect of a bi-racial buddy film only to point out existing and intractable class differences, somewhat demarcated by race, in the film’s transnational environment. With the central murder case solved and yet of minor consequence, Rising Sun ends with the question of whether or not Snipes will pursue Connery’s lover. The film disposes of the novel’s outrage over international corporate crime and macroeconomic 220 policies and instead focuses on temptations of the individual, to which no one seems immune. The certainty of Crichton’s lament over the causes of America’s “decline” becomes ironic uncertainty in Kaufman’s adaptation. “WHAT WE THOUGHT WE KNEW” As a detective thriller, the novel Rising Sun plays with a reader’s assumptions about who or what to believe about the central murder case. But it has unwavering conviction about what the reader should believe about Japan and the Japanese. It is this certainty that, in 1992, called its legitimacy into question. Despite the novel’s bestseller status, after the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy at the turn of the decade, Crichton’s “revisionist”-tinged depiction of Japan as an anti-American economic juggernaut found little traction in either government or mass media except as a talking point to debate rhetorical extremism regarding Japan. Crichton argued that the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy was a natural deceleration of growth, not a decline, 3 but the novel had so such hedging of its conclusion that Japan was ever-rising, America ever-falling. Perhaps the book would have seemed timelier two or three years earlier; in any case, it appeared less of a prophecy and more of a throwback. Japan’s stock market plunge in 1990 forced reevaluations of “Japan, Inc.” by American government and media critics who either persisted in their general hypotheses, like Crichton, or who entertained new hypotheses based on revised impressions no less reductive than Crichton’s. At a March 17, 1993, forum entitled “Toward a New Trade Consensus” at the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, DC, a group of business analysts from American academia, government, and the media gathered to discuss “the Japan problem,” which was understood as synonymous with America’s general trade problem. An emerging theme of the group’s prepared 221 and extemporaneous remarks was a desire to “get tough” with Japan, for the new Clinton administration to exert pressure on the Japanese government to stimulate Japan’s economy and to widen the opening of its import markets. Late in the discussion, Arthur Alexander, president of the Japan Economic Institute (a think tank sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs), suggested that there be some acknowledgment that American perceptions of Japan have changed and are still changing in response to Japan’s economic problems: I’m just reading Rising Sun right now, it’s a snappy little book. But it’s based on drawing a trend between three years and projecting that out into the future. The bubble economy and the consequences of that were very important from roughly 1988 to 1990 or 1987 to 1990, and we have made policy decisions, it’s influenced psychology, it’s stimulated a best seller and probably a new movie that’s coming out on the basis of it, and a lot of thinking that’s just mistaken by drawing this trendline on the basis of three years of evidence. So in that sense, now that the bubble has broken, a great deal of what we thought we knew about Japan is wrong. And we’re going to have to live with the readjusting psychology. 4 Alexander’s point about “psychology” links Japan’s bubble economy to mass media projections of an antagonistic Japan and a collective audience reaction to that image that Alexander suggests is wrong. The mistaken thinking he describes is a faith in old evidence; he does not, however, entertain doubts in the ability to draw broad conclusions based on new evidence, or even the ability to detect new evidence. The image of Japan as a monolithic system of hyper-capitalism in Rising Sun was already retrograde in 1992, and yet the core principle remains that Japan is special, even unique. In the pursuit of measurable and tangible results in the form of favorable import/export ratios and revenue streams, the reliance on intangible constructs of Japan and the Japanese that underlie foreign policy, trade negotiations, and cultural products such as Rising Sun is itself a sort of mathematical constant. Crichton’s Japan was, to some extent, a conglomeration of the paranoid visions of trade war alarmists who argued for a new understanding of Japan as America’s number-one enemy of the post-Cold War era. That image 222 itself, by 1993, had faded into irrelevance with the deflation of the bubble, and its replacement, a Japan-plus-recession-minus-political-stability model, was occupying the attentions of policymakers and news reportage. Japan was still different from America, but in different ways. “Readjusting psychology,” as Alexander describes it, is a reaction to new evidence that questions only how to incorporate the new—not how to discard the old, or even more extreme, how to discard common premises or conclusions of the old and the new. Old evidence is still evidence, however tainted by transpiring events, and it remained Crichton and others’ defense against charges of racism. Positioned as detectives of Japanese motives and systems of industry and government, scholars and journalists such as Chalmers Johnson and James Fallows had to play the uncomfortable role of deniers of accusations of “Japan-bashing” 5 by the Japanese government and media—using “information” as their basis for conclusions that not only criticized Japan, but essentialized its differences from America. 6 Crichton’s novel plays out a similar narrative, as the two American detectives, one an expert on Japanese culture, are targeted in the media as “Japan-bashers” as they pursue a trail of evidence that leads, inexorably, to essentialized Japanese criminality. Despite the logical nature of Alexander’s appeal for a “readjusting psychology,” what he is proposing is a different analytical means to the same underlying conclusion: that Japan is fundamentally foreign, an unfair trade partner, and must be contained. Alexander also, in passing, links the book to the upcoming film adaptation as if the latter were to be a cinematic fulfillment of Crichton’s prose. Released in the late summer of 1993, the film threatened to be a cautionary tale even more outdated than the novel—a resurrection of Crichton’s extinct Japan not unlike the genetically-recreated dinosaurs of his earlier novel, Jurassic Park (1990). In fact, when the film was released in America and Japan, certain 223 audiences responded to it with as much, if not more, hostility than had greeted the novel. Protestors representing Asian-American support groups demonstrated outside theaters on the film’s opening day, and critics in America and Japan expressed the depth of their loathing in print and on television. Carole Hayashino, director of the Japanese American Citizens League that supported protests in San Francisco and sent faxes to media outlets condemning the film weeks before its release, 7 perhaps gave the most compelling reason for the film’s more hostile reception compared to the novel: “When you take that book and transfer it to the screen, visually and emotionally it becomes a more powerful piece.” 8 Reading monologues about Japan’s tactical economic advantages over the United States lacks the impact of seeing corporate Japan in the heightened dread-inducing atmosphere of a suspense thriller. The conclusions that certain readers had reached about Crichton’s novel were so charged with hostility that the film’s changes in characterization, tone, and theme did little to counteract them. If anything, the alterations, when considered by hostile critics, provoked even greater hostility, as seeming attempts to camouflage an innately flawed work. The book and the film are irretrievably linked, not only through ties of credit and sourcing but in the estimations of critics and censors in both Japan and the U.S. However, an account of the development and shooting of the film shows inherent tensions between it and the novel, as the primary cast and crew—with the exception of Connery, who was in a difficult position as Crichton’s friend—took an openly critical stance toward Crichton. Rising Sun is the rare case of an adaptation that attempts to turn the original source inside out, to make the book’s assumptions about national differences seem as untrustworthy as its villains. In contrast to Alexander’s pitch for a readjusting psychology along the lines of “We think we know something else,” the film Rising Sun suggests that in an image- obsessed culture of transnational encounters, we are wrong to think we know anything. 224 FIRST AND THIRD WORLD The novel Rising Sun closes with an afterword, a direct address from Crichton to the reader. It pleads for a collective (American) vision of Japan as different, and superior, to a weakening United States, and is headed by a quote from Sony chairman Morita Akio: “If you don’t want Japan to buy it, don’t sell it.” Morita made that statement in response to vocal concerns about Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures in 1989, and Crichton positions it as a challenge to those who would blame Japan for America’s lack of competitiveness. Taken out of context, Morita’s statement implies that Japan would buy whatever is for sale, and so the only way to prevent Japanese ownership of a troubled asset, given Japan’s apparently unlimited capital and acquisitive desires, was to keep it off the market. Referring to this as “Japanese Morita psychotherapy,” Crichton endorsed its contents as if it were axiomatic. 9 Japan’s late- 1980s investment activity was, for Crichton, a phenomenon of aggression that demanded an American reprisal: “it is inevitably the task of the weaker partner to adjust to the demands of a relationship.” 10 Crichton likened America to 1860s Japan, which had adjusted to the demands of its Western rivals in ways that Crichton approved, by inviting over experts from Western countries to learn their values and methods, and then sending them home. In contrast, as Crichton sees it, Japan’s buying up of assets has changed the American landscape, made it something not fully American. The Japan-occupied areas of Los Angeles in the novel are a functioning micro- system that corrodes a macro-system from within, not in the infectious terms of a virus, but as an expanding network of Japanese-only gated communities. The idea for the book, like many another unpleasant thought, occurred at an airport. After a long trip to Asia in 1987 (which did not include Japan), Crichton found himself spending an 225 inordinate amount of time waiting in line at American customs, in contrast to the more efficient customs process in Asian countries. America appeared to Crichton “like a Third World nation,” and that is the vision he wanted to project to his readers. 11 In the novel, the ruling powers of Los Angeles—politicians, celebrities, corporate CEOs, and the media—gather at the Nakamoto Corporation headquarters for a party celebrating the opening of Nakamoto’s new downtown highrise. During the party, California senator John Morton has sex with an American model on the boardroom table of Nakamoto’s conference room. The model, Cheryl Lynn Austin, likes to be asphyxiated during sex, and because Morton obliges her, he is vulnerable to blackmail when one of Nakamoto’s employees, Ishigura, sneaks into the room after Morton’s departure and strangles Austin to death. In exchange for Morton’s public approval of a sale to Nakamoto of an American manufacturer of semiconductors, Ishigura steals the security tape of the murder, and with the assistance of a Japanese-owned, American-staffed video research lab in Glendale, has the tape manipulated so it appears that a different Japanese man, Eddie Sakamura, the son of an industrialist who works for a conglomerate in competition with Nakamoto, committed the murder. Unraveling all of this is the book’s narrator, LAPD Asian Crimes Unit officer Peter Smith, and his ad hoc partner, special liaison John Connor, who spent several years in Japan and imparts the wisdom of his experience to both Smith and the reader. The opposite of a “gone native” cultural explorer, Connor has “gone nativist,” rejecting Japan as a place of residence and using his linguistic and cultural knowledge as weapons against Japanese criminality in L.A. The American setting reinforces the nativist impulse—it appears as a country under siege—and establishes the outlandish premise of a Japanese cabal that is shrouded in secrecy and yet in complete control of its foreign environment. 226 Hidden in plain view, the Japanese occupy what Connor calls a “shadow world”—a nationalized network of businesses, residences, communications, and influences—that have deceptive appearances and inaccessible entryways. For Crichton, co-existence with the Japanese is impossible in America, because their objective is to dominate, and the American response is either to submit or resist. The Japanese have succeeded so well in America that there are people and places within Los Angeles that no longer subscribe to an American system of laws, economics, and government. “This isn’t America,” Connor tells Smith when they visit Austin’s residence, an apartment complex where Japanese businessmen keep their mistresses. (Yakuza serve as building security.) In Rising Sun, the Japanese have bordered themselves within the States; they are omnipotent and unaccountable, always a step ahead of the protagonists. The mystery of the killer’s identity in the novel seems less important to Crichton than the mystery of how the United States arrived at such an abject position. The murderer is identified and the case closed, but only with the assistance of a Japanese-American immigrant, Theresa Asakuma, who detects the video doctoring and restores the original images of Ishigura strangling Austin. As a child in Japan, Asakuma suffered racism (her father was African-American, which Asakuma says put her in disgrace) and also from a birth defect that deformed her right hand. By accepting this person where Japan did not, Crichton argues, America has demonstrated a rare advantage. Originally set to be published in March 1992, Rising Sun’s release date was pushed up to mid-February to capitalize on a heavily publicized visit to Japan by President George H.W. Bush and a coterie of American business leaders. 12 The purpose of the four-day visit was to compel guarantees from Japan that American automobile and auto parts manufacturers would be allowed to make significant gains in Japan’s import markets. However, the abrasive presence of the executives of American carmakers who accompanied Bush during the trip was a diplomatic 227 failure and political embarrassment. 13 Among the entourage of CEOs was Chrysler Corp. president and chairman Lee Iacocca, who took a combative stance on trade relations. Upon his return from the Japan trip, which did nothing but irritate him, he declared in a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit that “We don’t have to show any more patience towards Japan. None.” 14 Responding to the charge that American automakers should blame themselves, not Japan, for failing to compete with Toyota and Nissan, Iacocca stated, “That’s like blaming our Army and Navy for Pearl Harbor because they weren’t ready.” 15 Rising Sun, whose thesis departed from Iacocca’s—it explicitly blamed America for its failures—nevertheless fit squarely within the arena of “war” rhetoric that Iacocca occupied. The novel evoked not only the Pearl Harbor attack, but the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the oft-quoted passage where Senator Morton admits ruefully, “We are at war with Japan….You know, I have colleagues who say sooner or later we’re going to have to drop another bomb.” 16 The intended effect of war imagery as a symbol of economic rivalry is, perhaps, commercially motived: to sensationalize the dry topic of a trade dispute. But it also manufactures without a trace of self- doubt a national enemy with unlimited and unquestioned power and resources, an enemy that must either be contained or annihilated. The film version of the novel was all but inevitable, but the process of adaptation was a painful one for Crichton, his collaborator Michael Backes, and the film’s director Philip Kaufman. Film rights to the novel sold to 20 th Century Fox about six months before publication. Studio chief Joe Roth saw the book in galleys in the summer of 1991 as he was heading to Japan. Intrigued by the novel’s depiction of America “as a Third World nation taken over by a superior civilization,” Roth consulted with Walter Senior, Fox’s head of international distribution, and Japanese theater owners, before deciding to bid on the novel. 17 Paramount offered to match 228 Fox’s offer—$350,000 as an option and $1.5 million more if the film got made—but wouldn’t exceed it. 18 Neither Columbia nor Universal put in a bid, which was odd given that Universal purchased Jurassic Park only a year earlier; but it was not unexpected. The Wall Street Journal reported that Sony’s U.S. officials “liked the book and urged Columbia to bid on it,” but the studio executives said they passed because the mystery plot was weak and the language of the book too laden with technical jargon. 19 The Chicago Sun-Times, however, quoted an anonymous source at Sony to the effect that the studio practiced self-censorship: “The bottom line is we are owned by a Japanese company.” 20 Crichton, Backes, Kaufman, and star Sean Connery were packaged together for Fox under the umbrella of Creative Arts Agency (CAA), whose chairman and co-founder, Michael Ovitz, also assisted in brokering the Japanese acquisitions of Columbia and Universal. Directors John McTiernan and Robert Zemeckis were also CAA clients, and expressed interest in Rising Sun, but lost the job to Kaufman. 21 From Crichton’s perspective, there could not have been a worse choice. After doing five rewrites of the first forty pages of the script over a period of seven weeks, Crichton and Backes left the project in November 1991, citing creative differences. 22 Kaufman’s blunt reaction: “He [Crichton] should have done 100 rewrites. When I worked on The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Milan Kundera, who’s a real writer, his first word was ‘eliminate’.” 23 General explanations of the creative divide were contradictory: in one news article, Backes calls the novel “a polemic disguised as a thriller” while Kaufman says he viewed the story “basically as a murder mystery.” 24 In another article, the positions reversed: Backes claimed that he and Crichton wanted “a fast-pace thriller” while Kaufman wanted “something more meditative.” 25 After finishing his own draft, Kaufman called upon playwright David Mamet to do a polish, and then claimed sole credit for the screenplay with the Writers Guild of 229 America (WGA), who decided his contributions were not enough to remove Crichton and Backes from the credits. 26 Kaufman’s public disparagements of Crichton’s approach to rewrites, and even of his talents as a writer, did not entirely alienate Crichton or Backes from the project. Their WGA arbitration efforts no doubt reflected their financial interest in what was sure to be a high-profile film, but their retention of credit also represented willing support and defense of the film from its attackers. What they chose to defend, however, was not the film per se, but the original thesis of the Crichton novel, to whatever extent it remained in the film. As critics of the film tended to equalize it with the novel in structure and theme, Crichton and Backes simply restated the novel’s argument in response, using the same deflective language Crichton used to defend himself from the novel’s most vociferous critics: that Rising Sun was “America-bashing,” not “Japan-bashing.” 27 Much of the critical discourse of the film, partly due to Crichton and Backes’s continued connection with it, reinforced the very points that the film labored either to jettison or undermine. 28 An examination of the critical and public discourse of the novel and film in this case matters more, perhaps, than in any other case in this project. No other film received so much attention from public figures concerned about Japan’s image as a capitalist power center. The idea of collaboration between Japanese and non-Japanese in the film Rising Sun may appear less relevant simply because of the overwhelming critical consensus that the Japanese in the film do not wish to collaborate with America, but to dominate it. That was, in fact, the point of view of the novel, and such was the power of its conviction that it tended to override public reactions to the film. In order to view the film more accurately, as a cynical reflection of transnational collaboration, it is crucial to consider the novel and film as distinct works. The filmmakers used 230 the nationalist framework of the novel as a point of departure, not as a narrative model. The nationalism that remains in the film functions as a distraction, as the enticing answer to problems that are not that easy to solve. In the collaboration zone of media imaging technology, anything, even national identity, can be reduced to two dimensions. CREATIVE DIFFERENCES Despite the divide between Crichton and Kaufman, a divide that manifests itself in both Kaufman’s script and the final film, the two assumed similar, and in some cases equal, positions in criticism, in censorship, and in public protests. The tenor of Rising Sun criticism in both America and Japan was set from the novel’s first hardback publication. The book’s argument and methods had a transparency that exposed its polemical leanings. Instead of dramatizing cultural differences that could be coded American or Japanese, the book simply declaims them, pulling statistics and conclusions right out of its bibliographic sources and pushing them into the mouths of the characters. Although a bestseller for thirteen weeks, as a harangue Rising Sun found little public sympathy. Reviews called the book “almost a parody of anthropology guides to Japan,” 29 and either “too pedantic or just too simplistic.” 30 Crichton’s book-derived, consultant-derived knowledge of Japan stirred up a barrage of complaints over inaccuracies. The Asahi shinbun questioned the novel’s use of the phrase “business is war”: the novel characterized it as a Japanese expression; the Asahi said that may be the case, but only if the Japanese have closely analyzed American business methods. Ian Buruma criticized the novel not because it was racist, but because Crichton “conceived a paranoid world in which sincere, decent folks are being manipulated by sinister forces…this kind of paranoia is more complex than mere xenophobia.” 31 231 Film critics and scholars were also invited to air their negative thoughts on the novel. This speaks to Crichton’s experience as a screenwriter and director, as well as the fecund adaptability of his high-concept novels into high-concept films. As an indication of Crichton’s tight associations with the film industry, cinema became grounds for criticizing the book. Vincent Canby, film critic of The New York Times, who was in Japan for the American Navy in 1946 and saw his first Japanese films there, saw the novel as catering to the worst-case scenarists who see Japan as a threat. If you want to see Japan, Canby wrote, watch Japanese cinema: “Their Japan is the Japan I want to know about. The other Japan can be Made in Hollywood.” 32 Crichton responded to Canby with a letter accusing the article of “pathological sensitivity…to any critical discussion of Japan” and wondered why anyone would make a comparison between the novel and Japanese films. Canby responded to say he wasn’t comparing the two; he just meant to say the novel was superficial and cheap. 33 Murakami Yumiko, author of Yellow Face: Seeing Asian Portraits in Hollywood Films (Ierou fueisu: hariuddo eiga ni miru ajiajin no shōzō, 1993), set off another exchange of views in The Nikkei Weekly, first by saying she was “fed up” with America’s image of Japan as the land of the “rising sun” and “rising yen.” She draws a direct line between Japan-demonizing films of Hollywood’s past, and Crichton’s exploitation of “rising sun” imagery, which for her represents “nothing more than a ghost from the past for the Japanese.” 34 In response, a reader challenged Murakami’s article by saying the rising run flag was still being used by the Japan Maritime Self- Defense Forces in their logos, 35 and that the images of foreigners in Japanese cinema weren’t any more convincing than Hollywood’s representation of Asians. 36 Murakami responded in agreement, and expressed regret that Japanese media had not given enough depiction of “the reality of minorities and foreigners in Japan.” 37 The novel Rising Sun, as a topic, is shuttled off to 232 the side in favor of arguments over representations of race in American and Japanese films. The book may have set off a series of debates, but many of the debaters preferred to talk about movies. In American and British criticism of the film, Kaufman enjoyed a slight advantage over Crichton based on a strong back catalog of artistic if not commercial successes, such as The Right Stuff (1983), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Henry and June (1990). Even though Crichton had the more literary background, Kaufman’s status in the critical community was more literary-minded. Crichton’s career as a film director, which ended in 1989 with Physical Evidence, was limited to a handful of glossy thrillers with a clever premise: Westworld (1973), Coma (1978), and The Great Train Robbery (1979), where he formed his relationship with Sean Connery, are the most notable. The contrast between the two sensibilities—one supposedly rarified, the other supposedly blunt and mainstream—became the basis of critics’ charges that either Kaufman had failed to overcome the racist trappings of the novel, or that he had become an unwitting alchemist of popularization for the novel. Calling Kaufman “Hollywood’s artist in residence,” Desson Howe found his vision to be more “benevolent” than Crichton’s, 38 but there was little agreement that the benevolent approach worked. London’s The Independent considered Rising Sun “a highbrow film trying to pass as a commercial thriller.” 39 Some critics agreed with Carole Hayashino that despite Kaufman’s changes, the film appeared more, not less, offensive than the book. By “toning things down,” NPR’s Bob Mondello commented, “the filmmakers have inadvertently made Rising Sun’s xenophobia more effective.” 40 In other words, less overt racism made the film more subtly persuasive as an anti-Japan tract. Sight & Sound’s critic David Ehrenstein considered Kaufman the perfect person to “smooth over” the “more problematic passages” of the book and put across a racist film that could play in a politically-correct 233 marketplace. None of Kaufman’s changes “amounts to much” for Ehrenstein, who aligned with Asian-American protest groups by concluding, “There is no indication that the industry has the slightest interest in treating Asians as human beings.” 41 Other publications had a similar historical perspective, with both The Toronto Star and The Chicago Tribune placing Rising Sun in the context of anti-Japanese propaganda films of Hollywood’s past, and their more current incarnations Black Rain and Mr. Baseball. 42 The controversial subject and public protests against the film (see below) arguably had a minor negative effect on its box office in the United States. It earned $15.5 million its first weekend (ranking it number one for that week), on a $40 million budget. 43 In two weeks it earned $31 million, and eventually grossed about $63 million in the U.S. 44 Adweek magazine, specializing in trend analysis, speculated that the film’s subdued reception indicated a “softening” of American attitudes towards Japan, whose sluggish economy, unstable politics, and strong yen were reducing its threatening image and making the film’s “xenophobic tone” seem passé. 45 That analysis in itself reflects a shifting popular perception of Japan and a conflation of Rising Sun the novel and Rising Sun the film. In Japan, the novel and the film had similar trajectories, both in controversy and in reception, only in that case Kaufman’s auteurist track record was hardly a factor. The book had only sold 100,000 copies in Japan (considered low for a Crichton bestseller) since its publication on June 22, 1992. 46 The protests against the film in America that were reported in Japanese press, and the negative reaction to the film by Japanese critics who saw it in the States, put the film at a disadvantage in the Japanese market. Toshio Furusawa, Fox’s publicity director in Japan, said that the studio’s plan to put the film into general release in October had changed, and that the film would be entered into the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) instead in October to 234 “test critical reaction.” 47 That plan also changed: Fox’s Far East Film Division halted the TIFF screening, and under Kaufman’s approval—as under Crichton’s approval when the novel was translated into Japanese—several minor changes were made to satisfy censorship concerns (see below). When the film opened in Japan on November 6, 1993, it looked to be a hit, making nearly $500,000 in two days in nine key markets. Fox’s PR rep Mitsuhiro Nishijima told Variety shortly after the film’s release that Japan’s mass media “doesn’t focus on Japan-bashing so much…so [the Japanese] don’t get that theme from the movie.” 48 A representative for rival distributor Nippon Herald added: “We’re not so sensitive to racial issues, so I don’t think this will be a social problem…Basically it will be taken as a thriller.” 49 Only days later, however, The Boston Globe reported that the reaction to the film in Japan was “only derisive laughter and sparse crowds.” 50 Mark Thompson, film critic for the Japan Times, told The Los Angeles Times that at the Fox screening of the film, a lot of the Japanese critics were “laughing at parts that weren’t supposed to be funny—whenever Sean Connery spoke Japanese, or the stereotyping of Japanese characters.” The film’s successful first weekend in Japan was a fluke; it eventually earned only $1.8 million after two weeks. 51 Despite the claims of Nishijima and Nippon Herald, many Japanese viewers, some of whom saw the film in America before its release in Japan, were keenly sensitive to its “racial issues.” Eiga geijutsu’s reviewer wanted to praise the movie, but couldn’t, because of its “free- floating hostility” (bakuzen toshita hankan dake de aru). 52 Oda Takahiro, New York bureau chief for the Asahi shinbun, wrote an op-ed piece in English for The Washington Post on August 22, 1993, lambasting the film for making him “disappointed and at times disgusted by the superficial caricature of Japanese culture, corporate or otherwise.” 53 He then wrote a similar 235 article in Japanese for the morning edition of the September 3 Asahi, well in advance of the film’s release in Japan. In both articles, Oda argued that the film, though a fictional trifle, proves that serious misunderstandings exist between America and Japan, and both sides are responsible. He ended both articles with a proverb: “Hito no furi mite, ware ga furi naose”—“Correct your own mistakes by reflecting on those made by others”—meaning that for Japanese audiences, the depth of their own misunderstanding of Americans should be apparent in the film’s (American) misunderstanding of the Japanese. 54 Rising Sun as an “instructive” object for Japanese audiences is a common theme in Japanese-language reviews of the film. Echoing Murakami’s point above, Chūō kōron (Central Review) argued that since “image” is created via a mutual process, before getting mad at Rising Sun’s stereotypes, Japanese viewers should consider their own stereotypical images of foreign countries. 55 The weekly magazine Shuppan posuto (Weekly Post) concurred, arguing that a film that makes Japanese audiences laugh at American stereotypes won’t really promote mutual understanding between the cultures. 56 What is interesting about these critiques of the film, in both English and Japanese, is how closely they mirror criticism of the novel, and how exclusively they focus on representations of the Japanese. The implications of this critical discourse about the film and the novel reflecting an “American” vision of “Japan” are that both works elevate Crichton and Kaufman to the status of national representatives of a national vision. Crichton’s jeremiad, rife with misunderstandings, had disqualified him as a spokesman on any Japan-related subject but ironically bolstered his reputation as a conduit of mainstream American attitudes regarding Japan—attitudes that the less mainstream Kaufman apparently shared by association. 236 THE UNTOUCHABLES Further connecting the novel and the film in terms of reception are the specificities of their censorship problems in the Japanese market, and public protests of the film in the United States by Asian-American support groups, which were heavily publicized in Japan. Again, despite the combative production process of the film and its textual and thematic differences from the novel, those receiving the film, out of concern for its commercial prospects and racial representations of the Japanese, merged the two works into a singular whole. The novel had one major censorship issue on its own, regarding the motivation of the Japanese murderer Ishigura, but it had another issue regarding the character Teresa Asakuma that matched the film’s censorship problems in Japan. First, during President Bush’s visit to Japan in early 1992 (see above), Crichton’s publisher Knopf took the extraordinary measure of asking book review editors to return the galleys and await a new version before assigning reviews. 57 In the final galleys, some factual errors were corrected but in at least one instance, a Japanese expert advised Crichton to tone down an inflammatory passage. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the original galleys contained this explanation of Ishigura’s motivations from the all- knowing John Connor: “when you get right down to it, the Japanese don’t think of women the same way we do. Even now.” The published novel altered this passage to say that the killer acted under pressure, and behaved “differently from an ordinary Japanese” when killing “a woman of no importance.” Crichton quoted his Japanese expert as saying to him, “the statement that Japanese men feel differently about women, while true, was hardly a justification for murder.” 58 When the novel was translated into Japanese, by Sakai Akinobu for Hayakawa Shobu Publishers, at least three passages were altered to soften their effect on Japanese readers—all of them extractions from Theresa Asakuma’s dialogue. First, when narrating her tragic childhood to 237 Smith, she asks him, “You know what the burakumin are?” He does not, of course, so she explains: In Japan, the land where everyone is supposedly equal, no one speaks of the burakumin…The burakumin are the untouchables of Japan. The outcasts, the lowest of the low. They are the descendants of tanners and leather workers, which in Buddhism is unclean…And I was lower than burakumin, because I was deformed…Deformity shames you, and your family, and your community…And if you are half black, the ainoko of an American big nose… 59 Sakai’s translation removes this entire passage, and any mention of the words burakumin and ainoko, which were both taboo in Japanese media at the time. 60 Later on, when Asakuma and Smith see a dark silhouette on a video screen while analyzing the security video of the murder, Asakuma comments, “Nothing here. Too dark. Kuronbō. What they used to call me. Black person.” 61 In the Japanese version, the derogatory word kuronbō becomes the more neutral word makkuroke, meaning “pitch-black”—and the last two sentences are gone. 62 Finally, in the original novel Asakuma informs Smith about an actual joke told by former prime minister Takeshita Noboru: that because of the rising yen, American sailors could not come ashore to enjoy Japan; they could only “remain on the ship and give each other AIDS.” 63 Sakai’s translation removes the prime minister’s name and replaces it with oomonoseijika—a “big-shot politician,” anonymized. 64 Kaufman’s film, as released in the States, retained Asakuma’s background, and much of her narration of it, using the terms ainoko and burakumin. 20 th Century Fox’s Far East Film Division stopped the film’s premiere at the October 1993 Tokyo International Film Festival in part to alter that very scene before giving the film a wide release in Japan. 65 As pointed out by John Russell, the alterations to the scene for Japanese audiences resulted in a ridiculous exchange between Asakuma and Smith, especially since Smith was cast as an African- 238 American. 66 In the American cut, Asakuma tells Smith she was known as “ainoko” in Japan, and asks him if he knew the term “hisabetsu burakumin.” In the Japanese cut, “ainoko” is dubbed over in English by the term “half-breed,” and the phrase “hisabetsu burakumin” is replaced by the phrase “racial prejudice.” Japanese audiences therefore got to witness Wesley Snipes being asked, with a straight face, if he had ever heard of the term “racial prejudice.” (As in the American cut, he answers in the affirmative.) 67 Irrespective of the use of English-language racial slurs against the Japanese in both the novel and the film, censors overseeing the Japanese market found most problematic some Japanese-language derogatory phrases referring to groups considered outside the common citizenry. In light of the high standards placed by Japanese critics on the level of authenticity of Japanese representation in Rising Sun, Crichton and then Kaufman’s conforming to Japanese media standards forbidding the usage of ainoko and burakumin is one of Rising Sun’s richest, and most hidden, ironies. The public protests against the film and the filmmakers’ responses entwined the film and the novel further into the same rhetorical arena. For some, like Jonathan Sung Bidol of the Committee Against Asian American Violence, the book’s “yellow peril” premise was in and of itself grounds for attacking the film. 68 Based on a reading of Kaufman’s January 1992 script (the one I have used in this chapter as a reference), and unpleasant encounters and communications with Fox executives through 1993, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) helped to organize a campaign against what they considered an anti-Asian film. MANAA had demanded that Fox not only insert a disclaimer in front of the film reassuring viewers that it was fiction, but that MANAA be given a private preview screening. Strauss Zelnick, the president of Fox, accused MANAA of betraying the confidentiality of their meetings by publicizing them, and objected to any pre-screening on constitutional grounds. 69 Guy Aoki, a journalist and co- 239 founder of MANAA, finally saw the film on the Monday before its July 30, 1993, opening, concluded that “if anything, Kaufman made it worse,” and organized a press conference and protest in Los Angeles. 70 About a hundred demonstrators gathered outside the Mann National Theater in Westwood on July 30 , holding up signs that read “RACIST PROFIT” and “CRICHTON IS A RACIST DINOSAUR.” 71 The concern of the protestors was not so much how the film may offend Japanese people or Asian audiences in general, but how it may affect American audiences’ impressions of Asians in America. New York’s demonstration at the Criterion Theater on Broadway and 45th, organized by the Japanese American Citizens’ League, protested the portrayal of “Asian- Americans” in the film. 72 Although Rising Sun has one clear Asian-American character—the coroner played by Amy Hill—the role is so minor that the protestors’ concern likely refers to the film’s extensive Asian-American cast, which includes Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Eddie, Stan Egi as Ishihara (formerly Ishigura in the novel), and Tia Carrere as Jingo (formerly Theresa) Asakuma. In response, Tagawa and Egi defended the film in a way that distanced themselves from the protestors, leading to complaints by Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the L.A. City Human Relations Committee and MANAA’s Guy Aoki, that Fox was trying to “haul out” the Asian-American cast on its own behalf and pit minority groups against each other. 73 Kaufman and Connery’s responses did little to address the specifics of the demonstrators’ complaints, but they revealed their respective connections and disconnections to and from Crichton. In interviews and press conferences, Kaufman latched onto a series of thematic statements that attempted to dissolve the racially-tinged protest rhetoric into a bog of generalities: saying, for instance, that the film is “about behavior to a large degree.” 74 Taking the film out of its contextual specificity, Kaufman argues that U.S.-Japan relations are not the 240 subject, but the situational grounds, of a more humanistic work. Connery’s position was even more difficult: as a long-time friend of Crichton’s, and as the film’s star and executive producer, he had to defend the film in a way that did not offend Crichton, who deplored it. At a press conference in Manhattan, Connery took advantage of recent turmoil in the Japanese Diet to push back at an Asian-American reporter, who objected to images of yakuza in the film: “Are you telling me there’s no corruption in Japan?” Connery said. “Why do you think the government’s changed in Japan for the first time in 40 years?...Are you telling me the Yakuza doesn’t exist?” 75 Unlike Kaufman, Connery addresses the film’s specificities—yakuza lurk everywhere in the film, as in the novel—but like Kaufman, he refuses to engage in arguments over what the film’s images might imply to Asian-Americans. In two different yet defiant ways—Kaufman saying that the film’s themes go beyond U.S.-Japan relations, Connery saying that images of Japanese criminality in the film are not exaggerated—they argue that those who would question the filmmakers’ motives either do not understand the film or are trying to stir up needless controversy. The basic plot construction of the novel, however, with its American setting “under siege” by hyper-capitalists from Japan, was engineered for outrage. Because the novel is told in first- person (Smith’s) perspective and takes place entirely in L.A., never once going to Japan except in character narration as reminiscence—explaining why Connor and Asakuma left the country behind, forever—it simultaneously erases Japan and erases America. Readers and audiences in either country are in the position of assessing a grotesquerie, a perversion of nation that no character can call home. The story’s Japanese are not Japanese-Americans, but Japanese in America; the story’s Americans, in turn, recognize Los Angeles as neither American nor Japanese, but as a territory of morphing identity from which they cannot escape. 241 Such a spectacle of displacement could hardly satisfy any demographic group; it is safe to say, I would argue, that the novel represents no one, save perhaps the authors of Crichton’s bibliographic sources. The film, generally discarding the rhetoric of Crichton’s sources except as mild parody, goes even further in its distancing effects. The novel’s central question, “Who are the Japanese?”—answered in reductive and cautionary prose for the education of narrator Smith and the (American) reader—is much less important in the film. The mostly third-person perspective of the adaptation, placing Americans and Japanese within the same planes of two- dimensional space, complicates the question of identity. How a character appears, in the film’s thriller dynamics, places the viewer in doubt over the character’s actual motives and allegiances. And when Smith commands the eye of the camera in several scenes, the emerging tensions derive from self-doubt: does he believe what he does because of bias, training, or the manipulations of others? Who he is, is more important to him than who the Japanese supposedly are, according to Connor. Unlike the novel, which considers a Japanized Los-Angeles-as- America a reversible phenomenon, the film questions the authority of any image. Abetted by an emphasis on image technology, heightened sexuality, the casting of Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery, and an open ending, Rising Sun becomes a vehicle for testing the credulity of the audience. SCREEN WARS If business is war in Rising Sun, then the screen is the battlefield, and image technology the most potent weapon. Held sway by the temptations of corporate wealth in a capital city of entertainment, Japanese and Americans alike compromise whatever loose morality they may have possessed to gain access to the heady windfalls of transnational dealmaking. Battles are 242 fought for and on image-making technology. The two large Japanese company collectives in play, the Nakamoto and Daimatsu keiretsu, appear to represent, respectively, Sony and Matsushita. The Nakamoto boardroom—the murder scene—features a bank of Sony TVs, while Daimatsu’s American-operated Hamaguri Corporation, which doctors the digital recording of the murder, uses Panasonic monitors. (Hamaguri’s cooperation with Nakamoto suggests a burgeoning hostile takeover. 76 ) The American company MicroCon, Nakamoto’s latest and most prized acquisition target, manufactures semiconductors for a military client base—drawing the alarm of politicians seeking to block the sale with the support of Senator Morton (Ray Wise). Nakamoto’s chairman, Yoshida (Mako), echoes Sony chairman Morita Akio by telling Connor about the political fallout of the impending sale: “If they don’t want Japan to buy it, don’t sell it.” Yoshida’s interest, and that of his underlings, is not so much to subdue America as it is to use American IP and labor to gain advantage over Daimatsu. As the film presents him, Yoshida is the innocent big-daddy figurehead of a transnational conglomerate whose most ambitious and venal employees, both Americans and Japanese, have no compunction over murdering a mistress of the Senator and pinning the crime on the son of a Daimatsu industrialist. To assert their dominance over Daimatsu, and prolong their indulgence of the pleasures of high living, Nakamoto’s murderers use the company’s best asset—its imaging technology—to manipulate Morton, to deceive investigators, and to smear Daimatsu. The novel’s murderers did not have such an international makeup: Crichton’s Ishigura, the same man who presented the doctored recording to the police, is also the man recorded on the original footage strangling Cheryl Lee Austin. In the film, Ishihara plays his part in delivering false evidence, but the murderous hands belong to Richmond (Kevin Anderson), the American lawyer representing Nakamoto as a lobbyist and negotiator. Their bold plan takes advantage of 243 both Cheryl and Morton, who have consensual sex on the boardroom table without any inkling that they are being recorded, and are victims of a murder plot. Eddie is a witness to the consensual act, serving as Morton’s pimp, but he leaves before the murder. His physical presence on the periphery of the boardroom is wiped from the recording, his face from other photographs superimposed over Morton’s. While the entire previous summary (except for the American nationality of the murderer) also applies to the novel, the film more thoroughly establishes a transnational culture of image fixation. In the novel, the pictorial crime seems exotic, specialized—coded Japanese. In the film, the manipulation of identity through imagery seems organic to the daily life of its multinational characters. From the beginning, the film teases the audience with deceptive imagery, putting the audience in a constant state of confusion. The persuasive power of images, intrinsic to cinema, is seductive to the film’s characters and a challenge to the viewer. The screen in Rising Sun is the site of enticing lies and disturbing facts. And with lies as attractive as these, the viewer finds it difficult not only to distinguish them from facts but to bother worrying about the distinction. Image technology creates fortunes that enhance self-image. The better the technology, and the easier it is to manipulate, the quicker we can fashion our image to our desires. Rising Sun insists that in such a media-saturated environment, we all have to act like detectives in front of a screen. For Smith and Connor, displacement via screen imagery is a gradual process; for the viewer, it is immediate and pervasive, leaving little ground for Crichton’s nationalized polemic to take root. From the opening titles through the first ten minutes of the film, the viewer could be forgiven any misunderstanding about where or when story events are taking place. The first image, after the film’s logo—a kanji rendering of the title in red letters that enlarge until they redden the entire screen, and then, on the beat of a cymbal clash, turn hot white—is the yellow 244 ball of the sun. That dissolves into a circular crowd of ants swarming over a patch of desert ground. A horse’s hoof enters the frame and trods over the ants. Riding the horse is a grizzled American cowboy tugging along another horse whose rider is an Asian female with her arms bound behind her back. A dog trots out of an open doorway into the sunlight, carrying a human hand in its mouth. An Asian cowboy dressed in black stands at the side of the road, watching the Americans and their Asian hostage; he is silent and chewing on a thin cigar. This scene has no established setting until words are superimposed across the screen: the lyrics to Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” This is a karaoke video, and the camera pulls back to reveal Eddie and a quartet of backup singers in sunglasses, full of themselves and their vocal stylings. The setting is a Japanese-owned bar. Cheryl (Tatjana Patitz) sits across from Eddie in an expensive black party dress. The karaoke video continues in the background of shots: the Asian cowboy engages the Americans in a shootout, rescues their hostage (slashing her bonds with a single thrust of a blade), and rides off with her into the sunset, holding her hand. After giving Eddie (and the audience) a look of sullen boredom, Cheryl walks out. Eddie chases after her, but before moving outside the camera lingers on the karaoke screen showing the lyrics “I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences…” The film then cuts to an exterior location and we now realize we are already in the West, specifically a Western center of Japanese culture: near Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. Eddie and Cheryl get into his Vector W8 after he threatens her (which she laughs off, though the audience takes it as potential evidence against him when he is the prime suspect of Cheryl’s murder), and as they drive off the camera pans upward to highlight the distant Nakamoto building—actually the downtown California Plaza building—and we finally get a setting marker: a title informs us it is 6:43am, February 9, in the city of L.A. 245 David Pomatti reads this sequence, where neither of the film’s stars appears and nothing seems of consequence, as “calculated to unsettle the American audiences who experience the bewildering succession of disorientations, one dissolving into the next.” 77 Screen technology, as established in this sequence, is so immersive that we are slow to distinguish it from diegetic space. The succession of disorientations continues in the following scene. On the forty-sixth floor of the Nakamoto building, the Japanese company is negotiating with MicroCon, whose nervous representatives whisper to each other about the need to stall and await the congressional vote by Senator Morton approving or rejecting the sale. This entire scene, like the karaoke Asian Western before it, shifts to occupy the frame of a video monitor, this one observed by Tanaka (Clyde Kusatsu), Nakamoto’s head of security. Eavesdropping on the MicroCon chatter with state-of-the-art surveillance tech, Tanaka repeats their spoken words into a microphone, on the other end of which is an earpiece worn by Ishihara, who sits next to Richmond on the other side of the negotiating table. (Yoshida, also in the room as Nakamoto chairman, is supposedly oblivious to all this.) Knowing MicroCon’s desire to stall and wait out Morton’s vote, Richmond tries to hurry his fellow Americans along, but the film wipe-transitions to yet another location: the set of a Crossfire-styled TV news chat show, with Morton as a guest discussing the MicroCon deal. Morton reveals that he is against the sale. This scene is then doubly framed: on one of the Sony TVs in the Nakamoto boardroom (where the MicroCon reps are as delighted by Morton’s revelation as Yoshida is disgusted), and on the Sony TV in Cheryl’s apartment, where she listens to Morton with smiling interest. Eddie is there, also listening, also amused, but his sinister chuckle only confuses her (and, again, plants a false trace of murderous intent in his character). 246 As this prolonged opening sequence shows, characters are largely defined by the mediation of screens. Not only does the camera pan across the innocent and guilty alike, framing all as potential criminals or harboring secret desires, but the film contains nearly every character in screens within the screen, as they are inspected and judged by intent viewers. Morton in particular, with his easy-smiling, easy-frowning senatorial manner, defines himself as against the MicroCon sale for the good of the nation, easing himself into the polished banter of the Crossfire show that specializes in reducing the complexities of international relations to knee-jerk talking points. 78 For Rising Sun’s viewers, this is token babble, hauling out contemporaneous mass- media handwringing over Japan’s threatening image in American political rhetoric—that Japan has replaced the Soviet Union as America’s number one enemy, and so on. 79 For the viewers of the TV show in the Nakamoto building and at Cheryl’s apartment, however, billions of dollars hinge upon what TV-Morton has to say about MicroCon—and they know how malleable that image really is. Eddie and Cheryl are amused because Morton is Cheryl’s lover and is voting against the MicroCon deal as a favor to Eddie, who made the introductions. Morton’s Crossfire statements are boldly worded but unprincipled, open to revision. Blackmailed by Ishihara after Cheryl’s murder—Ishihara “protects” Morton by replacing his face on the murder video with Eddie’s—Morton reverses his public stance on MicroCon and gives Smith and Connor a piece of advice via Sun Tzu: “If a battle can’t be won, don’t fight it.” Out of Morton’s earshot, Connor scoffs at the quote as something Morton read on a fortune cookie. From novel to film, Morton’s stature diminishes, and so does the urgency and solemnity of Crichton’s literary mission. In both novel and film the senator commits suicide, but whereas Crichton’s senator regrets his affair with Cheryl and redeems himself with a dramatic televised speech declaiming everything Crichton believes about the decline of America, 80 Kaufman’s 247 senator is unredeemed by a sense of public service. He never appears on TV again except as a debased figure, a political animal whose only ambition is to enhance his media image and the variety of his sex partners. The watchers of Crossfire are so invested in Morton’s performance, unlike the viewer of Rising Sun, because they know how directly he affects their economic future—and how sex and image technology can so easily compromise a political stance. He is a face on the screen, subject to manipulation. The anti-Nakamoto Morton from Crossfire emerges one day later as a pro-Nakamoto Morton, only with the same smiling face, the same unctuous manner. While the audience is trying to sort out a jumbled and densely organized series of events, made even more complicated by incessant on-screen framing devices, the film tips its attitude about the nature of the screen image with a facetious tone and parodic devices. The evident mocking of the Crossfire-styled debate language—dissipating the novel’s seriousness of purpose in the sneering lingo of TV talking heads—is compounded by playful transitions and music cues. The score by Takemitsu Tōru functions in the same level of subtle parody as the Crossfire pastiche. As Timothy Koozin points out, Takemitsu’s use of the shakuhachi and koto is a sly comment on their stereotypical use in American films about Japan, while also distancing the viewer from story events. The music, writes Koozin, “destabilizes the immediacy of the drama.” 81 Whatever is happening, we do not seem intended to take it as seriously as the film’s characters. Takemitsu, who also scored the samurai film Ran (1985) for Kurosawa Akira, adds to Rising Sun’s pattern of Kurosawa parody. The karaoke video at the film’s opening borrows the hand-carrying dog from Yōjimbō (1961); the kidnapped Asian woman from Princess Yuki in The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin, 1958); and the silent cowboy from Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone Westerns partly inspired by Kurosawa. 248 The film’s use of the wipe for transitions throughout is a further nod to Kurosawa technique. Just as the unknown producer of the karaoke video toyed with the mash-up potential of Japanese and American Western genre forms, the film itself uses select tropes of Japanese cinema to toy with stock elements of the American suspense thriller. Throughout the film, the lack of awareness of the degree to which a character is an object of surveillance is that character’s, and the audience’s, disadvantage. Morton is aware that his words on Crossfire are a matter of public record, but he is not aware (though he should be) that his encounter with Cheryl on the Nakamoto boardroom table is being recorded. Likewise, a scene will play out for several seconds or minutes until we realize that some unseen person has been watching or listening to what we thought was for our eyes and ears only. Smith and Connor make an apparent breakthrough in their investigation when they visit the Nakamoto building security room: they determine that a recording of the murder likely exists. But they also discover a security camera installed behind a wall grating—someone somewhere is spying on the spies, and yakuza thugs are dispatched from this unseen location to follow Smith and Connor. Nothing escapes the prying eyes and ears of curious witnesses armed with media technology. A journalist nicknamed “the Weasel” (Steve Buscemi) needles Smith and Connor for a quotable response to race-baiting news accounts of their investigation, audio recorder in hand. Surveillance devices seem to be everywhere recording and playing back. Bugs are installed in Smith’s car and on his home phone before scenes commence at those locations. Connor knows all this and yet can do nothing to prevent Smith from exposing himself to the panoptical eye of the enemy. Control over events in Rising Sun belongs to those who control image-making technology. In this world, guns are useless; shots are fired, but few hit anything. Morton shoots himself in the head, and two rounds from the single gun of an unknown assassin hit Smith in his vest-protected 249 back, leaving him unconscious but alive. Power in Rising Sun is contained in hands that control devices of video interface—the light pen, the mouse, the joystick. The dog trotting off with the severed hand in its mouth in the karaoke parody at the start of the film is not just a homage to Yōjimbō; it is carrying off what the film presents as the most effective human weapon. The hand- as-weapon, manipulating media tech, blocking the throats of victims, and gesturing in accusation or intimidation, is a countering motif to the film’s emphasis on the curious, questioning, and dominating gaze. The face may be the identifier of race in the film, but the viewer is trained to look upon faces as simultaneously obvious (as racial coding) and enigmatic (as shielding thought). As the film shows in its constant framing of actions as occupying the screen of another’s gaze, the face is frequently the mask of the hand. Put another way, in Rising Sun a viewer’s trust in the legibility of the face allows the masking of the image-manipulating power of the hand. EDDIE AND CHERYL Mediated through screens within screens, the faces and bodies on display in Rising Sun are weak signifiers of identity. Seen in fragments rather than as coherent wholes, major characters harbor secrets that spring forth without warning, or not at all. The filmmakers follow traditional thriller mechanics by withholding vital information about characters, allowing suspicious-looking or otherwise suggestive activity to plant false impressions in the audience. With race and sexuality at the center of the film’s codes of representation, the withholding of key character information plays with the viewer’s image-derived associative presumptions about cultural differences. 250 Eddie and Cheryl, perhaps the most visually fragmented characters in the film (Senator Morton runs a close third), are also the most mysterious, the most highly sexualized, and the subject of the film’s most imaginative, false projections. The covetous nature of the film’s primary cast, tempted by the seemingly boundless rewards of U.S.-Japan corporate integration, focuses their attention on Eddie and Cheryl as representing the most enviable and desirable participants. Eddie and Cheryl are rarely viewed “objectively”—as from a third-person perspective showing the characters as transparent selves. Rather, the film shows them almost exclusively as others see them, or imagine them, reflecting back the biases and desires of their watchers. Their associative power as sexualized “Japanese male” and “American female” invite hasty speculation, which the film continuously undermines as the product of reductive bias. Eddie’s sexuality and Japanese identity was a focal point of journalistic outrage, both inside and outside of Japan, at the time of the film’s release in the popular press, and in the years to come, in academic articles. Negative attention focused on the scene where Eddie uses chopsticks to devour sushi plucked off the naked torso of a reclining American woman, while another naked American woman offers him her breast in extreme closeup—actions that do not appear in either the novel or the January 1992 script by Kaufman. Like the toe-sucking lesbian encounter in The Last Emperor, it seems a hastily-conceived directorial flourish. Critic Yodogawa Nagaharu called the sushi-eating in that scene (depicting nyotaimori, or “female body foodplate,” an exotic practice even in Japan) “offensive to ordinary Japanese people….It makes a complete fool of them….Everything in the film upset me….I feel ashamed just to see the film.” 82 In the conservative Japanese monthly Shokun!, Honma Nagayo, an expert on U.S.-Japan relations and a co-editor of a college textbook on the subject, called the nyotaimori moment “obscene” (waisetsu). 83 Hirano Kyōko, writing for Imeeji fuoramu (Image Forum), saw the 251 film’s overall depiction of white women as simpleminded characters following Japanese businessmen for their money; the nyotaimori scene, with Eddie wearing only a traditional loincloth (fundoshi), amounted to a statement against Japanese men and white women alike. 84 John G. Russell also considered the treatment of white women in the film demeaning: they were not slaves, exactly, but “willing white trash”; and the sushi-eating scene went beyond even the novel’s “inflammatory racial stereotyping,” showing the Japanese as “sex animals.” 85 Regarding the sexual politics of the film, Joshua S. Mostow sees the film as, unlike the novel, “a specifically white, male, American fantasy of white and black American males bonding together to expel the threat of an exceptionally eroticized—here meaning phallically powerful—Asian male body.” 86 What is striking about these critiques is their tacit assumption that what Eddie appears to be from the subjective viewpoint of envious and prejudiced characters in the film, is also the film’s “objective” view. Since the viewer is led to believe for most of the film that there was only one man in the boardroom with Cheryl (there were three), and that Cheryl’s sex partner and murderer was most likely Asian (they were two different men, and both Americans), then the viewer’s associative impulses that connect Eddie/the Japanese with murder and violent sexuality are not only contradicted in the course of the film, but framed within an ideological bias shared by the film’s most vocal anti-Japan character, Lieutenant Tom Graham (Harvey Keitel). Graham, relying on his racial prejudice and crude visual cues, believes wholeheartedly what the doctored video of the crime is telling him: that Eddie is a murdering sexual sociopath. The film deliberately plants this false belief, and Graham’s loathing of the Japanese is justified in his eyes when he sees Eddie’s face in the doctored video of the murder and crows, “I knew it all along!” Even viewers unfamiliar with the novel or the traditional narrative modes of murder mysteries 252 suspect that Eddie is innocent, simply because Graham’s vulgarity and American chauvinism, played for humor, have him leaping to conclusions based on Eddie’s unreliable screen identity. When Graham and Smith go to Eddie’s house to arrest him and witness the nyotaimori scene through a parlor window (another screen), Graham mutters to Smith, “[He’s] plundering our natural resources…” with comic bitterness. He clearly envies Eddie as much as he congratulates himself on his false impressions. Displays of Eddie’s “phallic power” in the film—such as grabbing Cheryl’s arm and threatening her in the early scene outside the karaoke bar—are all designed to convince the viewer that he is a dangerous man, while in the course of the film he reveals himself more and more as, not quite innocent, but more dangerous in his personal connections than in his own nature. What is most “perverse” about the nyotaimori scene could be that he is not putting his hands on either woman. When questioned at his house by Smith and Connor after the murder, Eddie demurs when asked if he liked Cheryl’s asphyxiation fetish, pronouncing himself a “meat and potatoes” sort of man. His father is a powerful industrialist, and his friends are yakuza, but his own crimes are corporate rather than homicidal; his job seems to be arranging dalliances between associates and prostitutes to gain control over them for his father’s keiretsu. His sexuality seems rather conventional, and by the end of the film, with his innocence proven, completely beside the point. Eddie’s sexuality occupies the film the way Connor believes the Japanese occupy America: in the shadows, inaccessible, emerging only to deceive. A projection of envy. Cheryl is even more fragmented and illusory, her face, voice, and body distorted by mediated reproduction. Her identity is almost completely subsumed into video and audio rendering. As a model, she has a professional screen identity: in her apartment she has hung up a 253 poster of herself in a Japanese ad for Kirin beer. Her self-destructive private identity appears more enigmatic the few moments we see her alive: leaving the karaoke bar in annoyance, rubbing her neck with masking powder in her bedroom mirror (another screen) to hide bruises after sex with Eddie, and most of all her biting and calling for “more” during asphyxiating sex with Morton on the Nakamoto boardroom table. The film heightens the exoticism of the boardroom sex act by underscoring it to the sound of the rhythmic beating of taiko drums from the party one floor below. 87 Her gasps are amplified until they fill the soundtrack, and then segue to the ringing of Smith’s home phone, as he receives a call to come to Nakamoto and oversee the homicide investigation. Cheryl’s gasping is an odd motif: sound designer Alan Splet uses a recording of her heavy breathing to punctuate the effect of Smith’s windshield wipers sliding back and forth in the rain at night, and mixes the sound of her gasp with the rhythmic churning of oil derricks in the background of a scene outside of Smith’s car, as he and Connor have a heated argument. Cheryl’s disembodied and inarticulate voice urges on the proceedings while solidifying the virtuality of her identity. 88 Once she is murdered, her private identity narrows to the glib judgments of the few who knew her, like Eddie. “She had a problem,” he reports to Connor. “She was a sick girl. She liked pain.” 89 The character who appears most concerned about her death—a “neighbor girl” named Julia—turns out to be a Nakamoto-planted subterfuge to lead Smith into believing Eddie committed the crime. 90 After her death, Cheryl appears only as a corpse, a video subject, or, most intriguingly, as a brief fantasy in Smith’s erotic imagination. We see Cheryl’s body examined by a coroner and then later, on a video monitor, being wheeled out of the boardroom on a covered stretcher. Again and again we see the video of her strangulation, at one point reflected in the clear lenses of Asakuma’s eyeglasses—a double screening effect. Her death is the instigation of 254 the film’s entire plot, but who she is, or was, is less important to the detectives than how her actions leading up to and during the murder have been recorded, or made visible as evidence—or, in Smith’s case, have opened up a world of temptation. After he is shot in the back (protected by a vest), Smith sees Cheryl in his mind’s eye as an enticing figure sitting on the edge of the boardroom table, calling out his name in breathless tones. In Kaufman’s revised script for the film, this erotic image is part of a dream that includes one of the naked American women from the nyotaimori scene, who attacked Smith during the police raid on Eddie’s house. 91 Straddling his back, this woman pounded on Smith until he pushed her off and pointed his gun at her; she is neither threatened by him nor embarrassed by her own nudity. Although she does not appear in Smith’s erotic dream with Cheryl, as intended in the script, her attraction to Eddie, like Cheryl’s, binds them together in Smith’s erotic fantasies. Cheryl’s “neighbor girl” Julia makes a bold pass at Smith, placing his business card in the fold of her panties and teasing him flirtatiously. Here again, the sound effect of Cheryl’s gasping transitions a sequence: heard over a shot of Smith’s mollified reaction to Julia, the gasping continues through a distorto-cam shot of him sitting in his car, convinced that Eddie killed Cheryl based on Julia’s accusations. An element completely absent from the novel, Smith’s libidinous apprehension of female sexuality, like Graham’s racial prejudices, predisposes him to making potentially disastrous conclusions based on mistaken identity. Cheryl’s beauty and deviance, and the power of corporate capital, are not only sexually seductive but a distorted, and distorting, window of observation. Graham, Smith, and the film’s viewers are poor detectives in the face of temptation. 255 CONNOR AND SMITH By eliminating most of the book’s long passages of information-heavy dialogue about Japan’s competitive prowess, and by re-fashioning Smith into a character who would not sit impassively receiving Connor’s lessons, the film reduces Connor’s authority as a sage while giving Smith a more active role. The casting of Wesley Snipes as Smith (renamed “Spider” Web Smith) compounded the tensions between Smith and Connor, whose insistence on calling Smith “kōhai”—a term not used by Japanese in direct address, but which indicates a position of inferiority to a sempai or senior figure—is at first interpreted by Smith as a racialized remark: “That wouldn’t be like massa, now, would it?” Joe Roth had suggested the casting of Snipes, 92 and Kaufman rewrote the script to accommodate racial dimensions that were now triangulated among blacks, whites, and Asians in urban America. Although Connery was Crichton’s dream casting choice for Connor, Snipes proved too disruptive to the novelist’s intended vision. Crichton thought the casting of Snipes “puts an additional burden on the picture” because of “tensions between blacks and Japanese.” 93 Crichton’s concern proved correct, at least in academic criticism that defined, and objected to, the film’s triangulation as pitting whites and blacks against a common Asian enemy in America. Along with Mostow’s comment above about the film’s “bonding” narrative that showed blacks and whites “expel[ling] the threat” of dominant Japanese, Yuko Kawai and Brian Locke similarly argued that the film uses the stereotype of Asians as “model minorities” to represent a mutual source of anxiety for whites and blacks who needed to join forces to fight back the Japanese menace. Both Kawai and Locke highlight the scene where Connor and Smith take refuge in a South Central neighborhood, whose lower-class black and Latino residents intimidate 256 the pursuing yakuza (Eddie’s friends from the karaoke bar) as a favor to Smith, who grew up there. This scene for Kawai “overlaps” with media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which made a spectacle of African-Americans and Latinos targeting Asian shopkeepers, while whites disappear from the frame and become the unaccountable observers of African- American/Asian conflict. 94 Locke saw that scene and others as stigmatizing the Asian characters, and that the casting of Snipes “turns a buddy detective novel into a white and black buddy film.” 95 However, I argue that the film does not become a trialectic answer to the book’s dialectic, accentuating lines of difference between blacks, whites, and Asians instead of merely the latter two. The casting of Snipes and the rewriting of Smith as African-American does not follow the traditional formula of an interracial “buddy” narrative where a formerly tense interracial male couple finds common ground, and tight bonds of friendship, while pursuing a villainous Other. There is an element of that in the visual pairing of Connery and Snipes in various settings, and the way Snipes modifies his impulses around Connery during scenes of conversation with sensitive witnesses, like Yoshida or Morton. But by the end of the film the two men have more profound differences than similarities. What they share most is a cynical awareness of the limits of justice for capital and corporate crimes (see below). What they do not share is an equal status, a mutual obligation to reveal himself to the other. Connor, in the film, wears his privilege literally on his sleeve: while stopped in South Central, Connor nods when one of Smith’s African-American buddies strokes Connor’s suitcoat and asks, “Armani?” While much has been written of the inscrutability of the Japanese in Orientalist works like Rising Sun, not much attention has focused on Connor’s remoteness from Smith, his cloaking of self in the trappings of high-class commiseration with Japanese heads of state and industry—entitlements that Smith 257 challenges verbally as hypocritical and corrupt. Connor and Smith may work together, but they do not “work” together: their differences are too numerous to overcome. The film, in fact, ends on the open question of whether or not Smith will sexually pursue Asakuma, to whom he is highly attracted but who, it turns out, is Connor’s lover. Connor’s background is working class: he informs Smith that he grew up in “Scotland backyards,” not, as Smith jokes, in Scotland Yard. When Smith picks up Connor at his apartment, over a fishery on Rose Street in Little Tokyo, it has ornamental decoration but few amenities (and a mysterious woman pulling a screen divider shut, whom we later learn is Asakuma). As someone with long term experience in Japan, Connor has an outlier reputation—“too good a friend to Japan,” as Graham puts it. Dispenser of bromides about basic cultural characteristics of the Japanese in contrast to America’s “fragmented MTV rap-video culture,” Connor functions as ambassador and investigator, “educating” Smith while deftly navigating the “shadow world” of the Japanese in L.A. Unlike Smith, Connor has high-powered connections, golfing and lunching with Yoshida and commenting on former acquaintances hovering around the Nakamoto building. Self-sufficient to a fault, he shows little dependence on Smith and even sees the younger man as a deterrent: Smith is temperamental, gullible, and guilty of a bribery charge. At no point does Connor appear grateful or appreciative of Smith; he assumes a leadership role and responsibility for Smith, but when Smith takes command in South Central, Connor can only say about the neighborhood “You call this safe?” In the film’s biggest argument between the two men, when Smith threatens to “bitch-slap” Connor for interrogating him about the bribery charge, Connor succeeds in extracting a confession from Smith that yes, he took a drug dealer’s money (with Graham) to pay family bills. After revealing himself as corrupt, Smith adds that the only reason he did it was that he figured 258 Connor was “on the take” as well, because he saw Connor accept a plain white envelope and a warm handshake at the country club after golfing with Yoshida. The envelope contained a golf membership worth about $100,000, which Connor defended as “very important for what I do.” “Well, I guess that makes everything alright now, don’t it?” Smith answers sarcastically—only he pronounces “alright” as “all white.” In a more typical buddy film, Connor would have confessed to Smith, as Smith did to him. He would have admitted his complicity in a privileging of upper-class, country-club whiteness that is no less deplorable now that rich Japanese are among the club’s members. He would have torn up the $100,000 envelope in Smith’s presence. Instead, at the end of the film Connor sits in the back of Yoshida’s black sedan to join him for a round of golf without a trace of self-consciousness about his “free” admission. At the same time, Smith drives Asakuma back to her apartment—Connor’s apartment—and he seizes the moment to distinguish himself from Connor: “He’s out playing golf. You and me, we’re alone.” The “you and me” he declares is based on their similar racial backgrounds, and also a shared distance of intimacy from Connor. In an earlier scene with the three of them, Connor trains a camera on Asakuma’s face as Smith leaves the location; her expression on the playback screen shows little affection or appreciation for the man behind the camera. In the final scene, Asakuma gives Smith’s flirtation a mixed response, verbal rejection followed by visual encouragement: she leaves the front door unlocked, and Smith notices it swinging ajar by a few inches. Connor in voiceover says “kōhai” warningly, as Smith stands by his car considering whether or not to enter the apartment. Leaving Smith outside the car, the potential for betrayal is there, but if Smith and Asakuma were to begin an affair, the cost would be minimal: two unequal and estranged relationships—Connor and Smith, Connor and Asakuma. Without even a momentary lapse of self-control, Connor appears most vulnerable when the film suggests he may 259 be cuckolded by his kōhai, in part because of his own indulgence in upper-class privilege. This is a radical departure from the novel, where Connor had no previous connections with either Asakuma or Yoshida; Caucasian Smith was divorced but unavailable; and Connor himself identified with black discrimination, calling the Japanese “the most racist people in the world,” and himself a victim of constant racism in Japan: “I got tired of being a n---er.” Despite Crichton’s complaint about Smith’s African-American identity exploiting “tensions between blacks and Japanese,” and critics’ arguments that Connor and Smith are a tight interracial duo “expelling the threat” of Japanese in America, the film sets patterns of cross- identification and alienation within and between all three racially-coded groups. Snipes, who trained in karate and hapkido since childhood, did not miss the opportunity to engage in a martial-arts battle with several of Eddie’s yakuza friends. Smith also creates a form of “buddy” attachment to Eddie, protecting him from Graham (who shows his ideological malleability by siding with Nakamoto) and accepting Eddie’s loyalty oath. Smith’s ex-wife Lauren (Tamara Tunie) cozies up to Richmond at the Nakamoto party, and on the phone with Smith later on refers to “my lawyer”—again, Richmond—as her advocate in their child custody battle. 96 The film does not present whites and blacks as “bonding” to “expel” any Asian threat: what we see is one interracial couple at constant odds (Connor and Smith) and another (Richmond and Lauren) working together for Nakamoto. As the film presents Smith and another major African-American character, Phillips (Stan Shaw)—Nakamoto’s assistant head of security—they are entitled to their Japanese-coded pursuits: Smith with his martial arts and language training for his job as Japanese crime liaison, and Phillips with his acceptance of Nakamoto’s panoptical oversight of his job performance, as Nakamoto satisfies him much more than his former employer, General Motors. The novel argues that these two men are in tainted professions, and closes with Smith 260 not only quitting his job but proposing a dismantling of the entire program because of its partial funding by the Japanese government. The film shows Phillips and Smith as slightly corrupt, a little tempted by transnational excess, 97 but the stress of their positions, which they defend as part of their identity (Smith: “I’m a good cop!”; Phillips: “This is a good job”), and their liking of certain cultural and managerial contributions of the Japanese, enhances their sympathetic roles as conflicted professionals in a transnational environment. DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE Transnational criminality in Rising Sun undermines Connor’s authority and effectiveness as a sage and detective. Even though his supposed expertise on the mores and manners of the Japanese, and their contrast to American ways, enables him and Smith to move the investigation along while giving the audience a primer course on national differences, that expertise is futile in the pursuit of justice for a transnational crime. Deception is the film’s purpose upon the viewer, who is forced to play along with Connor in what he calls “that most American of games: catchup.” The film, and the American and Japanese orchestrators of Cheryl’s murder and coverup, tends to be well ahead of the audience and the investigators. The more Connor and Smith uncover, the more confusing the case grows, until finally the two policemen, after chasing Richmond out of the Nakamoto building and fighting Eddie’s yakuza associates, they hear a scream, a heavy splosh, and look down at Richmond’s corpse deliquescing into quick-dry cement. “We gotta do something!” Smith says; all Connor can say is, “Do what?” Just as they realize who murdered Cheryl, the entire investigation slips out of their control. The novel’s relentless emphasis on statistical trends and essentialist rhetoric is intended to jolt the reader into a state of vigilant alarm; it is a reach for clarity, not confusion. At the end of the film, there is an 261 almost blithe return to the status quo from before the murder. Nakamoto is embarrassed but still in business, still negotiating with MicroCon, and Smith and Connor have a mordant sense of humor about their own lack of understanding and effectiveness. “You sit by the river long enough,” says Connor in his final scene, “you’ll see the body of your enemy floating by.” The film’s critique of the power of screen technology to misrepresent motives and behavior works against the novel’s near-utopian faith in media technology, in the right hands, to render the ultimate truth. The critique is subdued, and at such cross-purposes with the novel that it is unsurprising to read vastly different interpretations of it in academic scholarship. Raz and Raz read the film as pessimistic, arguing that “The very notion of ‘truth’ is subverted in Rising Sun, replaced by electronic simulations, denied the possibility of ever being ‘fully’ recovered...a contemporary nativist dystopia.” 98 Meanwhile, Foreman and Thatchenkery see a disempowerment of the forces of image manipulation, arguing that “panoptic power, when hybridized with digital technology, subverts the centralizing controls of the system’s architects.” 99 In other words, Smith and Connor’s ability to turn Nakamoto’s technology back on itself—un-doctoring the doctored video of the murder with Asakuma’s assistance—is a way of calming fears of the new “grand narrative” that cedes world power to the Japanese, who have grown too large to retain their own coherence as a dominating force identifiable as “Japan.” I would argue that the film entertains both prospects: the nightmare vision of identities and actualities warped or erased by emerging technologies alongside the dramatization of human frailties that reveal identities and expose truths. The ironic tone of the film compounds the confusion already embedded in the film’s backhanded application of the novel’s reactionary caveats. 262 The undermining of Connor’s authority in the film, as opposed to the novel, becomes most apparent on a second viewing. Knowing Richmond and Ishihara are guilty of Cheryl’s murder, the viewer can only puzzle at Connor’s faulty instincts in a scene at a sushi restaurant. Sitting, eating, and drinking with Yoshida, Richmond, Ishihara, and Smith, Connor makes an impressive display of his behavioral “expertise” by coordinating his bodily movements with Yoshida and exuding a magnanimous air of sympathy for the beleaguered chairman. Yoshida begins to talk about MicroCon, and Richmond, sitting across Connor to his left, interrupts the chairman with his own editorializing. The action freezes as Yoshida stares down Richmond with a glance so withering that the lawyer stops and apologizes, with nervous embarrassment. With that intimidating gaze, Yoshida, Connor, and the viewer think that Yoshida has power over Richmond, who seems unaware of his place in the hierarchy of the room. But by the end of the film the viewer realizes that it is Richmond who has power beyond Yoshida’s control. That Connor, endowed with uncanny intuition about Japanese-American relations, cannot tell that Cheryl’s murderer and his accomplice are sitting right next to him, makes his deliberate synchronization of manner with Yoshida seem more about keeping a high-powered contact on friendly terms than about solving a homicide case. At the end of the film, Ishihara has to identify Richmond as the murderer, and only after Connor, Smith, and Asakuma corner him with a false accusation. Ishihara and Richmond’s cooperation and complicity in Cheryl’s murder evade Connor to the point where Connor’s cultural expertise seems a detriment to the investigation. Although Connor has a healthy lack of trust in Ishihara and Richmond, he cannot seem to imagine the possibilities of the two of them working together, and outside the knowledge of Yoshida, whose innocence is unquestioned. 263 Connor’s rigidity of “wisdom” regarding the social obligations of Japanese to honor debts and to perform apologies, allows Eddie and Ishihara to complicate the investigation. Visiting Eddie at his home soon after the murder, Smith argues for apprehending Eddie as a prime suspect, but Connor’s personal debt to Eddie’s father, who saved Connor’s life in Japan (the details of that backstory are untold), prevents him from making an arrest. Furthermore, Ishihara uses Connor’s rote acceptance of ritualistic favor exchanges among the Japanese as a tactic against the police. Connor had helped Ishihara “save face” in front of his Nakamoto superiors at the start of the investigation, and in return Ishihara does Connor the “favor” of delivering what are supposed to be genuine video recordings of the murder and performing sumimasen. Connor does not trust Ishihara implicitly, but neither does he recognize Ishihara’s brazen disregard for the sanctity of “face-saving” ritual that Connor assumes all Japanese respect—that, at least, Yoshida respects. After Ishihara confesses to Yoshida that he did everything he could to “protect the situation”—doctor the video, lie to detectives, blackmail the senator—Yoshida, like Connor, can only marvel at the depths to which this salaryman has sunk. “He has been too long in America,” Yoshida says to Connor. “He has adopted many bad habits.” Connor’s vision of the Japanese, it seems, is a vision whose standard-bearer is Yoshida, the corporate patriarch. Ishihara’s violations of the law and Japanese-coded protocol can have only one explanation, American influence. Once Ishihara departs from Yoshida and Connor’s behavioral paradigm, he ceases to be Japanese in their eyes; they can effectively remove him from society. But even though Ishihara’s cultural subversions muddled the investigation and stymied Yoshida and Connor, these two men seem more interested in their golf game than in seeking justice for Cheryl. “Everyone wants this case closed,” Connor tells Smith as they watch Richmond ooze into the building foundation. 264 Closed implies forgotten when Connor joins Yoshida in the back of a chauffeured sedan and sighs, “A perfect day for golf.” Meanwhile, in Smith’s car on the way to her and Connor’s apartment, Asakuma seems preoccupied. He asks her what’s wrong. “Golf,” she says. “I don’t get it.” Connor may be Smith’s rival for Asakuma, but her rival for Connor is Yoshida. CONCLUSION The large number of Japanese investments in American real estate and media industries, and the building of Japanese automobile factories in the United States in the mid to late 1980s, despite consistent friction between national governments over trade policy, had the not- surprising effect of transnationalizing business interests that, depending on the status of an increasingly globalized economy, promised mutual prosperity in favorable times, and mutual suffering in unfavorable times. There was less celebration than consternation over Japan’s economic troubles that reduced its investment activity in America by a dramatic margin. The flurry of activity that predated the bursting of Japan’s bubble in 1990 had established interdependent networks and long-distance production practices at such a scale that an American consumer could no longer identify an “American” versus a “Japanese” car, for example. Japanese brand names emblazoned products made and consumed in America; a Columbia movie looked just as good (or bad) as a Paramount movie. This blurring of national identity in products of a transnational economy is central to Rising Sun’s conception of an emerging, and dangerous, new media culture. In the film’s postmodern playground, the last thing we should trust in determining the national identity of a person or a product, is the image. The novel Rising Sun and the film adaptation have opposite views of transnational business and personal identity. Although the novel’s attitude ranges from mild to severe paranoia, 265 the film holds up that paranoia as a laughable object, as a reactionary fear of transnationalism that has already permeated American culture to an irreversible degree. The fear, of course, derives from lingering memories of World War II, as well as the fact that Japan initiated much of this trans-Pacific activity through economic means; America is far more used to extending itself outwards to “develop” other nations than to find itself treated as a site of development—by a former enemy, no less. The film Rising Sun considers the ironies of a 1993 America as a developing nation, and begins and ends with the refrain of a song that parodies the ideology of just about every character in the film, American or Japanese: “Don’t Fence Me In.” 266 CHAPTER 6 NOTES 1 Several sources cited in Crichton’s bibliography have self-explanatory titles: Clyde Prestowitz, Jr., Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (New York: Basic Books, 1989); James Fallows, More Like Us: Putting America’s Native Strengths and Traditional Values to Work to Overcome the Asian Challenge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989); and Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power (New York: Alfred A., Knopf, 1989). See Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 353-355. 2 For example, in his critical analysis of the novel Rising Sun, Ronnie D. Lipschutz partially blamed the popularization of Crichton’s “misogynistic and racist diatribe” on the fact that it was “turned into a film,” although he provides no analysis of the film itself. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 172. 3 T. Jefferson Parker, “Michael Crichton: ‘Rising Sun’ Author Taps Darkest Fears of America’s Psyche,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1992. 4 Arthur Alexander, “US-Japan Trade Relations,” Economic Strategic Institute forum, March 17, 1993, C-SPAN broadcast at www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SJapanTrad, accessed December 15, 2012. 5 The term “Japan-bashing” was a late 1970s invention of Robert C. Angel, former director of the Japan Economic Institute (JEI). Frustrated with American critics of Japan, Angel wanted a term that would equate with anti-Semitism. He got the idea for “Japan bashing” from a television program on Pakistani immigrants to Britain, where the term “Paki-bashing” was used. Angel insists the idea for coining the term was not at the instigation of the Japanese government. Ironically he was considered a “Japan-basher” himself after resigning from the JEI in 1984 due to “editorial policy” disagreements with the Japanese Foreign Ministry. See Oishi Noboyuki, “Inventor of ‘Japan bashing’ coined phrase out of frustration,” Nikkei Weekly, September 13, 1993. 6 Masui Shigeo and Hatano Takashi, “Nibei paneru tōron ‘nihon tataki to poriteikaru korekutonesu’ sōgo hihan wo chokushi” [Japan-American panel debate: ‘Japan bashing and political correctness,’ straight look at mutual criticism], Yomiuri shinbun, June 6, 1992, Tokyo morning edition, 4. 7 Roger Simon, “Japan-bashing movie karate-chops Americans,” Baltimore Sun, Aug. 1, 1993. Simon quotes portions of Hayashino’s fax: "There are no likable Asian main characters…The Japanese are one dimensional evil gangsters or businessmen intent on taking over the U.S. by nefarious means…The Japanese men are portrayed as enjoying perverse sexual practices, particularly with blonde American women." The latter sentence, Simon claims tongue-in-cheekily, is what sent him off to the theatre to check for accuracy. 8 Associated Press, “’Rising Sun’ Upsets Asian-Americans,” Orlando Sentinel, July 30, 1993. 9 Crichton, Rising Sun, 349. 10 Ibid. 11 Deirdre Donahue, “Crichton’s hot ‘Sun.’ Novel warns of Japanese supremacy,” USA Today, Feb. 7, 1992. 12 Carlin Romano, “Novelist Makes an Unusual Rewrite in His New Book, Michael Crichton Softens Some Sensitive Passages About the Japanese,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 10, 1992. 13 Michael Wines, “Bush Returns, Hailing Gains in Japan Agreement,” New York Times, Jan. 11, 1992. 14 Lee Iacocca, “U.S.-Japan Trade Relations,” Economic Club of Detroit, January 10, 1992, broadcast on C-SPAN, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/JapanTra, accessed December 15, 2012. 15 Ibid. 267 16 Crichton, Rising Sun, 230. 17 Elaine Dutka, “Hollywood Scared of the Japanese?” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 8, 1992, 24, 26. 18 Elaine Dutka, “Racist Rap for ‘Rising Sun’ Stuns Author,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 13, 1993. 19 Laura Landro, “Controversy Brews over Novel Sharply Critical of Japan,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 16, 1991. 20 “Hollywood cool to novel bashing Japan,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 8, 1992. 21 Nina J. Easton, Sept. 1, 1991. 22 Jane Galbraith, “’Rising’ Differences,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 18, 1993, F1, F3, F4. 23 Melina Gerosa, “Writer’s Block,” Entertainment Weekly, May 21, 1993. Kaufman gave a more softly-worded explanation to USA Today, that he and Crichton parted ways because of “working styles”: “Crichton, in a way, was working more in the Hollywood tradition of, you know, ‘I’ll write you the script and then you direct it’.” Susan Spillman, “’Rising Sun’ director takes heat,” USA Today, July 30, 1993. 24 Dutka, June 13, 1993. 25 Michael Shapiro, “Is ‘Rising Sun’ a Detective Story, or Jeremiad?” New York Times, July 25, 1993, H9, H14. 26 Galbraith, March 18, 1993, F1, F3, F4. 27 Itagaki Yuka, “Maikuru kuraitonsan,” AERA, July 27, 1993, 50. 28 Mike Backes, “‘Sun’ Doesn’t Perpetuate Stereotypes,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1993. 29 Jorge Ribiero, “‘Rising Sun’ doesn’t rise above bashing,” Nikkei Weekly, Mar. 21, 1992. 30 Kunio Francis Tanabe, “Crime and Bashing; Michael Crichton’s Degrading Digressions,” Washington Post, Feb. 3, 1992. 31 Ian Buruma, “It Can’t Happen Here,” New York Review of Books, April 23, 1992. No doubt a reflection of its middlebrow status, the novel hasn’t been the subject of nearly as much academic criticism as the film adaptation. An analysis of the novel’s parallels to the James A. Michener novel Sayonara in terms of gender, power, and spatial relationships can be found in Sheila Hones, “’Japanese’ Spaces and the Construction of ‘America’ in Mass-Market US Fiction: Sayonara and Rising Sun,” Keisen Jōgakuen College Bulletin 9 (January 1997): 3-26. 32 Vincent Canby, “Japan Unfolds Through Many Images,” New York Times, June 14, 1992, 1. 33 Michael Crichton, “Did You Read the Book?” New York Times, July 19, 1992. 34 Murakami Yumiko, “Rising Sun blinds U.S. to realistic view of Japan,” Nikkei Weekly, October 26, 1992. 35 By pure coincidence, only a month after Murakami responded to the reader’s letter about the use of the kyokujitsuki by the Maritime Self-Defense Forces, an Okinawan judge made the first ever formal declaration since the end of World War II that the hinomaru was Japan’s national symbol. The ruling came about after an anti-flag activist named Shoichi Chibana burned a hinomaru flag during a sports event in Okinawa in 1987. Indicted for “burning the national flag,” Chibana countered that the flag wasn’t official. The court ruled that it was, confirming the flag’s legal status, surprising many Japanese who thought it had always been official. See T.R. Reid, “Surprise! Rising Sun Is the Official Flag of Japan, Court Rules,” Washington Post, Mar. 24, 1993. 268 36 Michael Harper, “Japanese critic of U.S. media could find distortions at home,” Nikkei Weekly, December 21, 1992. 37 Murakami Yumiko, “See ourselves as others see us,” Nikkei Weekly, February 1, 1993. 38 Desson Howe, “The ‘Sun’ Rises Regardless,” Washington Post, July 30, 1993. 39 Sheila Johnston, “The grass is always greener,” Independent (London), Oct. 15, 1993. 40 Bob Mondello, “Is New Movie ‘Rising Sun’ Racist?” NPR All Things Considered, August 7, 1993. 41 David Ehrenstein, “War Business,” Sight and Sound 3, no. 10 (October 1993), 12-13. 42 Peter Goddard, “Is Hollywood still at war with Japan?” Toronto Star, July 31, 1993; Clifford Terry, “A View of Japan Purely by Occident,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 1, 1993. 43 Winnie Hu, “Rising Tensions,” Dallas Morning News, Aug. 4, 1993. 44 Karen Regelman, “Japan embraces ‘Rising Sun’,” Variety, Nov. 11, 1993. 45 Betsy Sharkey, “Change of Heart,” Adweek, August 16, 1993. Kumagai Yumiya reached the same conclusion in an analysis of Japanese stereotypes in Rising Sun: that in a 1990s context, given the recession, Japan-bashing works lose all credibility. Kumagai Yuriya, “Rising Sun ni miru nihon oyabi nihongata bijinesu ni tsuite no sutereotaipu” [Stereotypes of Japan and Japanese-style business as seen in Rising Sun], Keizai to keiei, 28 no. 3 (December 1997): 165-190. 46 Wada Shigeru, “Controversy Stalls Release of ‘Rising Sun’,” Nikkei Weekly, August 9, 1993. 47 Merrill Goozner, “’Rising Sun’ Is on Far Horizon for Japanese,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 15, 1993. 48 Regelman, 1993. 49 Ibid. 50 Charles Radin, “Japan laughs off a movie’s insults,” Boston Globe, Nov. 13, 1993. 51 Teresa Watanabe, “’Rising’ Laughter,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30, 1993. 52 Emori Hiroshi, “Kaufuman no ‘ryoushin’ nanka kan takunai,” Eiga geijutsu 43 no. 1 (January 1994): 76-77. 53 Oda Takahiro, “’Rising Sun’s’ Great Leap Backward; Why Philip Kaufman’s Modern Film Encapsulates Reactionary Cliches,” Washington Post, Aug. 22, 1993. 54 Oda Takahiro, “’Kōkaron’ eiga ni manabu mono” [Something to learn from “yellow peril” film], Asahi shinbun, September 4, 1993. morning edition, 4. 55 Saitō Keiko, “[Raijingu san] wa sutereotaipu da to okoru mae ni” [Before getting angry because of Rising Sun stereotypes], Chūō kōron [Central Review] 108 no. 3 (December 1993): 154-155. 56 Yamazaki Koichi, “’Raijingu san’ wa yahari nihonjin hikken no eiga da!” [‘Rising Sun’ is a must-see movie for Japanese!] Shuppan posuto 25 no. 40 (October 22, 1993), 78-79. 57 Romano. 269 58 Ibid. Andrew C. McKevitt also discusses the novel Rising Sun as a colonization narrative. The film medium, McKevitt argues, being more “visceral” than print, allowed Philip Kaufman to go beyond Crichton’s emphasis on the economic conflict between Americans and Japanese, and to explore in more detail the Japanese conquering of American women. Andrew C. McKevitt, Consuming Japan: Cultural Relations and the Globalizing of America, 1973-1993, Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, May 2009. 59 Crichton, Rising Sun, 261. 60 Ainoko is a derogatory term for a mixed-race child; Sakai uses the more neutral term konketsu in the novel. Burakumin, although commonly used in English as a descriptive term, is in Japanese a derogatory term for the descendants of hamlet people or village people who lived as outcasts in feudal times, doing jobs that were considered unclean, like butchering or leatherworking. Their low social status was passed down from generation to generation. Although the modern government has taken steps to try and give equal status to the Dōwa (the preferred reference to that group in Japanese discourse), even in the 1990s there is some social discrimination against them. 61 Crichton, Rising Sun, 275. 62 Michael Crichton, Raijingu san, trans. Sakai Akinobu (Tokyo; Hayakawa Books, 1993), 520. 63 Crichton, Rising Sun, 276. 64 Crichton, Raijingu san, 523. 65 “’Raijungu san’ shuttsuin chūshi,” Asahi shinbun, Sept. 11, 1993, evening edition, 9. 66 John G. Russell, “Jurassic Japanese and Silicon Samurai: Rising Sun, Tech-noir Orientalism, and the Japanese Other in American Popular Culture,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Regional Studies, Gifu University 2 (1998): 89-126. 67 The release of the film on DVD in Japan adds yet another version of this problematic scene. The English language subtitles surprisingly include the words ainoko and burakumin, even though Asakuma doesn’t say those words. And the Japanese language dub fixes the bizarre insertion of the phrase “racial prejudice” with an even more general exchange. Instead of asking Smith if he knew any foreign phrases in reference to outcasts in Japan, Asakuma says “Nihon de wa, keiro no chigau konketsujin wa, doushite mo…” [In Japan, as an out of the ordinary mixed-race child, no matter what I did…] and Smith finishes her sentence: “Sabetsu sareru?” [You were prejudiced against?] 68 Esther Iverem, “‘Rising Sun’ Protest,” Washington Post, July 29, 1993. 69 Jane Galbraith, “Group Takes ‘Rising Sun’ Protest Public,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 7, 1993, F1, F6. 70 Robert M. Payne, “Total eclipse of the Sun,” Jump Cut 40 (March 1996), 29-37. 71 David Ferrell and K. Connie Kang, ‘’Rising Sun’ Opens to Charges of Racism,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1993; Narita Yōko, “ ‘Raijingu san’: amerika kōkai no hankyō o otte” [Rising Sun: Following the reaction to the American opening], Kinema junpō no. 1931 (October 1993, 2): 24-27. 72 “Rising Sun demo,” Village Voice, August 3, 1993. 73 Elaine Dutka, “Asian-Americans; Rising Furor Over ‘Rising Sun’,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1993, F1, F9, F10. 74 Frank Rizzo, “Some scrutinize film for anti-Asian attitudes,” Hartford Courant, July 30, 1993. 75 Jamie Portman, “Rising Sun, Raising Tempers,” Vancouver Sun, July 28, 1993. 270 76 The word hamaguri, incidentally, refers to clams, but it is also a slang term for adult female sex organs. This makes it comedic for those who know the slang term, while also a crude feminization of the company in its symbolic relationship to Nakamoto. 77 David Pomatti, “On the ‘Orientalism’ in Rising Sun,” The Journal of Acihi Gakuin University, Humanities and Sciences 49, no. 2 (December 2001): 63. 78 The fake Crossfire group consists of host Steve Clemons (consultant on the film), Eleanor Clift, Michael Kinsley, Clarence Page, and Pat Choate (author of Agents of Influence, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), playing themselves. 79 Michael Kinsley wonders aloud if Morton is overreacting and if Washington is simply on the hunt for a new “evil Empire” to replace the Soviet Union now that the Cold War is over. Both sides of this exact argument regarding U.S.-Japan relations of the early 1990s circulated widely in the popular press, even touching upon Rising Sun itself. Before becoming Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, political economy professor Robert Reich wrote an editorial for The New York Times calling Rising Sun the “least subtle” framing of Japan as the new Soviet Union—the specter of an aggressive new competitor that, following Crichton’s argument, can urge America forward to greater achievements. Robert Reich, “Is Japan Out to Get Us?” New York Times, Feb., 9, 1992. Journalist and historian Inose Naoki found the film of Rising Sun less of a Japan-bashing work than the novel, but saw a type of victim consciousness in the way the Japanese appeared to be the new KGB, a superior foreign enemy supplanting the Soviet Union. Inose Naoki, “Kore wa amerika no nihonkan o haneishita eiga da” [“The American View of Japan Is Reflected in this Movie”], Kinema junpō, no. 1931 (October 1993, 2): 19-20. 80 Senator Morton’s speech in the novel has this grand conclusion: “I want to make it clear: the industrial giants of Japan and Germany are not the cause of our problems. Those countries are challenging America with new realities—and it is up to us to face those realities, and meet their economic challenge head on. If we do so, our great country will enter an era of unparalleled prosperity. But if we continue as we are, mouthing the ancient platitudes of a free market economy, disaster awaits us. The choice is ours. Join me in choosing to meet the new realities—and to make a better economic future for the American people.” Crichton, Rising Sun, 294. Crichton’s afterword, basically repeating Morton’s speech in a direct address to the reader, appears redundant. 81 Timothy Koozin, “Parody and Ironic Juxtaposition in Toru Takemitsu’s Music for the Film, Rising Sun (1993),” Journal of Film Music 3, no. 1 (2010): 66. Another, briefer analysis of Takemitsu’s music in Rising Sun can be found in Lena Pek Hung Lie, “Toru Takemitsu’s Film Music and Its Corresponding Film Genres,” International Journal of Arts and Sciences 4, no. 1 (2011): 153-154. Lie defines the Rising Sun score as “electro-acoustic,” a combination of ambient music, traditional and non-traditional instruments: yunlou, Jew’s harp, durrabukka, waterphone, and almaglocken providing suspense. This was the only score Takemitsu composed for a Hollywood film. Director Philip Kaufman was first exposed to Takemitsu at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, where he saw Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964). Kaku Takuto, “Intabyū: Takemitsu Tōru,” Kinema junpō no. 1931 (October 1993, 2): 34. 82 John Wright, “Business Is War,” Advertiser (Australian), Oct. 23, 1993. 83 Honma Nagayo and Moroi Kaoru, “Giga toshite no nihonjin” [Caricatures of Japanese], Shokun! 25 no. 12 (December 1993): 176-184. 84 Hirano Kyōko, “Seikakusa nado kyoumi nai kara omoshiroi? [raijingu san]” [‘Rising Sun’ not interested in accuracy, so is it interesting?], Imeeji fuoramu [Image Forum], November 1993, 126-131. 85 Russell, 119. Kaufman responded to criticism of the nyotaimori scene in at least two ways: first by saying that complaints about the scene say more about “his critics’ hang-ups” than any inherent stereotyping. Henry Sheehan, “Director defends his ‘Sun’,” Orange County Register, July 30, 1993. He also asked an interviewer about that scene, “Where have you seen this before?” meaning that the scene cannot be called stereotypical because it is not something people have seen often enough to make it a cinematic cliché. See Rizzo. 271 86 Joshua S. Mostow, “Rising Son: Race, Women, and Exchange in the Film Rising Sun,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement, no. 16 (1999): 87. 87 In the novel, the party music was Glenn Miller-styled big-band; in the novel it is “Tsunami,” a signature piece by the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, who perform onscreen. According to an article in Asian Music journal, Seiichi Tanaka, the dojo’s grand master, had walked off the set in protest when he realized how “Tsunami” was going to be used in the film. “He was eventually coaxed back,” wrote the article’s author, Paul J. Yoon, “but was unhappy with the final product.” Yoon also claims that the film’s casting director “requested that only Asian/Asian American members of the group show up for the shoot,” using drummer Sata Leigh as a source. Yoon is highly critical of the film’s “triangulation of sexual depravity, nefariousness, and the Japanese, with a rousing taiko soundtrack to boot.” Paul J. Yoon, “Asian Masculinities and Parodic Possibility in Odaiko Solos and Filmic Representations,” Asian Music 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 114. As of December 16, 2012, the dojo’s website still listed the Rising Sun soundtrack as one of its film credits. http://www.sftaiko.com/about_previousgigs.html. 88 Kaufman’s January 1992 script for Rising Sun is explicit about the utilization of Cheryl’s gasping on the soundtrack: it represents “shortness of breath…and Time: tension.” Philip Kaufman, “Rising Sun: revised script,” January 14, 1992, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA. 89 In the novel, but not in the film, after the case is solved, Cheryl’s grandmother comes to L.A. from Texas to thank Smith for his efforts and to explain Cheryl’s character thus: “I never thought she was entirely right in the head.” 90 Julia fills in some of Cheryl’s backstory for the detectives, saying that Eddie swept her away from a Toyota factory in Kentucky. Although Julia is untrustworthy, items in Cheryl’s apartment and purse confirm some of Julia’s story: Cheryl had yet to change her Kentucky driver’s license since moving to L.A., and a photo shows Eddie with Cheryl and Cheryl’s mother (or grandmother, if the film is following the novel) smiling in front of a beat-up truck, supposedly in Kentucky. 91 Philip Kaufman, “Rising Sun: revised script,” 53. 92 Gavin Smith, “Heroic Acts and Subversive Urges,” Film Comment 29, no. 4 (July 1993): 36-43. 93 Nisid Hajari, “The Dark Side of the ‘Sun’,” Entertainment Weekly, August 6, 1993. 94 Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans; The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril,” The Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 124-125. 95 Locke, 98. Connery, showing some disagreement with Crichton, defended the casting, saying that Snipes made the character of Connor “easier to play and more interesting…they play off each other.” Peter Keough, “‘Rising Sun’ Sets Off a Combustive Issue,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 25, 1993. Snipes wasn’t as diplomatic, calling the book “bland and boring,” and his original character a “pawn.” Stephen Hunter, “Wesley Snipes Downplays ‘Rising’ Tensions,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 28, 1993. 96 Bizarrely, though it is implied that Lauren and Richmond are sexual partners as well as business partners, at the end of the film Smith never once comments on the fact that the man sleeping with his ex-wife is the man who murdered Cheryl. 97 Security officer Phillips enjoys one benefit of his job: using his camera-controlling joystick, which he refers to as “the gizmo,” to scope out attractive women in the building. Phillips says “Let’s use the gizmo” to Smith when scanning the 45 th -floor party for “honeys.” Later, at the police station, when Smith and Graham are viewing the footage of the recorded video of the murder, the security camera zooms in on a shadowy figure having intercourse with Cheryl on the boardroom table. Smith says “someone’s using the gizmo,” and Graham, commenting on the scene, says, “Yeah, he’s really using his gizmo.” 98 Jacob Raz and Aviad E. Raz, “’America’ Meets ‘Japan’: A Journey for Real between Two Imaginaries," Theory, Culture & Society 13, no. 3 (1996): 160. 272 99 Joel Foreman and Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery, “Filmic representations for organizational analysis: the characterization of a transplant organization in the film Rising Sun,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 9, no. 3 (1996): 44-61. 273 CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION: LOST IN TRANSNATION “I tell myself often that I am not a tourist. I exist somewhere else, in between voyeur and exile. Which is to say, my journey is almost complete. In Japan, the movement from Tourist to Exile to Insider is one that ends at Exile. There is no final step inside. We are kept at arm’s length by the arc of a bow, by the sound of a drum.” —Will Ferguson 1 With media technology as its collaboration zone, Rising Sun brings us full circle with issues raised in Chapter 2: the influence and limits of Japanese investment in Hollywood. Los Angeles, supposedly the origin of much of the world’s mass entertainment, is actually one of the world’s many destination points for mass-entertainment investors. Conglomeratized in the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood as an economic system closed many of its channels while opening others. Stripped of its “American” identity (to which it always had only a tenuous claim), Hollywood emerged in the 1980s under a new, transnational norm—partly identifiable as Japanese. As with Hollywood, so with the main characters in the films I have discussed here. Taking Japan’s former status as America’s enemy in World War II as a point of dramatic conflict, all of the case studies here have shown the tensions wrought by postwar alliance, the “new norm” for the United States and Japan after 1945. Remarkably, these films reflect on the cost, and not merely the benefits, of postwar alliance. What has been lost in mutual pursuits of national security and economic development cannot be recovered, and these films, on some level, lament the irreversibility of transnational norms. They also, however, highlight the necessity of postwar alliances, which seem inevitable, evolutionary, and all-encompassing. Without a transnational perspective, a character loses sight of global economic, political, and cultural functionality. But the films also point out the dangers, and the existence, of economic and moral corruption wrought by transnationalism and globalization. 274 But why in the 1980s and 1990s did these films emerge? Why not in the 1950s and 1960s, when postwar collaboration was an immediate, visible phenomenon? Previous studies of Japan- themed Hollywood films of that period have emphasized two factors: first, the economic motives of Hollywood producers filming “runaway productions” outside of the U.S.; and second, the symbolic role these films played in idealizing the national culture of America’s strongest postwar ally in the Pacific. To be sure, the difficulties of overseas production, censorship concerns, and the need to appeal to Japanese audiences determined much of the content of those earlier films. But even a nuanced approach to these works of early Cold War culture would not answer the question why it took several decades, nearly towards the end of the Cold War, for films about Japan’s international image and relations to carry a somewhat cautionary tone. Rather than engaging in “Japan-bashing”—a too-reductive rhetorical label—the filmmakers responsible for the case studies of this project, including Imamura Shōhei and Shinoda Masahiro, trace the roots of the transnational excesses of their time. As part of an industry becoming increasingly transnational, and as witnesses to Japan’s industrial expansion into the United States and other East Asian countries, these filmmakers are noting, with ambivalence, the influence of the war. More specifically, it is Japan’s postwar international relations, its bi-national security agreement with the U.S.—structured for mutual benefits after catastrophic losses—that have enabled such unprecedented border-crossings and economic pursuits. Whether this activity is perceived as troubling or perfectly legitimate, the identity of the instigator cannot be confined to one nation, or correlated to wartime aggression. Products of an industry exceeding its previous boundaries, these films source their own excesses in transnational collaborations, of which Japan is a major participant. 275 Why, then, stop at 1995? The choice of that year relates to an industrial shift in both Hollywood and Japanese cinema. As noted in Chapters 1 and 2, international markets were a trans-Pacific concern, only Japanese filmmakers and investors during the mid-to-late 1990s focused more on its East Asian film markets than on the American market. Likewise, development of digital technology and home theater systems—areas where Japan’s hardware manufacturers failed to compete against South Korean rivals—shifted Hollywood profits even more towards DVD and other ancillary markets. During Japan’s long recession, Japanese investors had less capital, and less urgency, to invest in Hollywood cinema. Furthermore, throughout the 1990s media companies and advertisers in Japan developed the “production committee” (seisakuiinkai) mode of filmmaking, embracing the profit potential of native, transmedial intellectual property. What, then, became of the cinema of Japan-related transnational excess after 1995? Simply put, it became a fashion statement. The 1990s and 2000s have been a relative boom period for Japan in the exporting of anime, manga, pop music, TV shows, toys, games, and fashion to Asia and the United States. 2 The growth of such export markets gave rise to speculation that Japan was succeeding in selling itself to non-Japanese: a form of “soft power” (coined by Joseph Nye 3 ) called “gross national cool” (coined by Douglas McGray 4 ). This phenomenon has been the subject of extensive study and debate, 5 as well as an instigator of government action to publicize a national image of Japan as catering to youth culture. 6 The marketing engine of Japanese “cool” is to some extent a self-fueling mechanism: as Nye and McGray and others, reacting to what they perceive as a significant trend, publish writings that are read widely in Japan, the validation of “outsider interest” contributes to Japanese branding of products as catering to that interest. In the same vein, eager consumption of pop culture products 276 from Japan since the 1980s, a process facilitated by digital media technologies of distribution, has informed the sensibilities of American and European filmmakers who show their enthusiasm—and market savvy—in their increasingly sophisticated appropriations of Japanese pop culture imagery. Japanese investments in Hollywood from 1985 to 1995 helped to establish a context for a transnational cycle of films expressing ambivalence about Japan-centered globalization. Likewise, the simultaneous backsliding of the Japanese economy and increasing circulation of products branded “cool” helped to establish the context for another cycle of films projecting an image of Japan as a site for youth exploration, identity play, and product consumption. Concurrently, 9/11 and the Iraq War, while not the only determinants, nevertheless served as a potent backdrop or subtext of films about American and Japanese militarism. Tropes of the Japan-themed films of the 1985-1995 period continue into this latest period, but with variations reflecting an anxiously self-conscious Japanophilia. As seen in Black Rain and Mr. Baseball, adult men suffering from mid-life crisis appear to overcome their initial hostility in Japan and redeem their sense of purpose. More recent films chart a similar course but replace the hostility with a bewildered, if benign, sense of alienation from their surroundings. Gustav and Uwe in Enlightenment Guaranteed (Erleuchtung garantiert, 2000), Bob in Lost in Translation (2003), and David in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio, 2009), overcome their culture shocks with an inward, not outward, exploration of personal limits. The Japanese surrounding them appear under no obligation to assist or explain, unlike the articulate (and comfortingly bilingual) interlocutors serving Nick and Jack in the earlier films. These more recent men find comfort only in fellow outsiders, Europeans and Americans in Tokyo. 277 Youth travel to Japan in postwar films and in scattered works such as The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978) was generally undertaken by children under close adult supervision. The adults, typically serving in a military or corporate role, were appointed guardians by family ties or by employment, and inevitably lost control of their wards in the course of the narrative, which served to bridge cultural gaps between Japanese and American youth in heavy-handed contrast to the adults. Beginning in the 1980s, however, and at an accelerated pace in the “cool Japan” imagistic context of the late 1990s and 2000s, youth travelers to Japan are in their teens or twenties, usually without adult supervision (or under the weak auspices of a token guardian), and are left to their own devices to navigate the foreign culture, which appears much more accessible and yet retaining a mysterious surface quality that intimidates—and attracts—the traveler and viewer. The French-Japanese co-production Wasabi (2001) may feature the most blatant nod (more like a genuflection) to the youthful attractions of Japanese pop culture: a French-Japanese teenager who has surrendered so completely to the techno-toy fashions of Tokyo that she appears a fetishized image of arbiters of Japanese “cool”: an orange-haired pixie who lives entirely in the present tense, much to the confusion of her middle-aged French dad. The most active young foreigners in Japan, those with the deepest “inside track” to the byways of society and culture, are generally engaged in criminal activity, regardless of gender. The mobility of the young men in Sleepless Town (Fuyajo, 1998), Dead or Alive (1999), City of Lost Souls (Hyōryū-gai, 2000), Starlit High Noon (Mahiru no hoshizora, 2005), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Shinjuku Incident (Xīn Sù Shì Jiàn, 2009), and Enter the Void (2009); and of the young women in Swallowtail Butterfly (Suwarōteiru, 1996), Black Angel, Vol. 1 (Kuro no tenshi, 1997), New Rose Hotel (1998), demonlover (2002), and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) is tied to their outsider status: they gain access to Japan through its criminal subculture of 278 drugs, gangsterism, street racing, prostitution, and pornography. Their foreigner status gains them advantages as long as they remain within what John Connor in Rising Sun would call the “shadow world”—a subterranean marketplace of illegal transactions that is tolerated by general society as long as certain rules of conduct are observed within that subculture. A sub-cycle of this period, remarkable due to the traditionally male-dominated narrative of travel-to-Japan films, gives special attention to young American or European women attempting to integrate into Japanese society, pursuing romance, employment, or a sense of general purpose in an alienating—and sometimes violent, though always urban—milieu. The figure of the young, frequently blonde, female foreigner in contemporary Tokyo or some other major Japanese city, was perhaps first introduced in Tokyo Pop (1988) and then re-appeared in Lost in Translation, Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements, 2003), The Grudge (2004), The Stratosphere Girl (2004), The Ramen Girl (2008), and Shutter (2008). The wandering blonde, like the middle-aged man and the young criminal in the other films mentioned above, is composed on the screen as isolated in her Japanese surroundings. Physically there, she is nevertheless not-there, not herself there; her gender and appearance mark her every move as confirming her identity as what she is not. She either retains her outsider status to the end of the narrative, unable to integrate any part of herself, or she finds some fulfillment after laborious trials. Otherwise, as in Fear and Trembling, The Grudge, and Shutter, she is utterly destroyed. The dangers of wandering are implicit in the films’ reactionary approach to Japanese environments. As the cheeky producers of The Stratosphere Girl claim—or disclaim—in the film’s credits to calm the viewer’s anxieties, “No blondes were harmed in the production of this motion picture.” 279 The lack of a necessity to resolve cross-cultural tensions in these recent films may indicate a cinematic worldview of Japan as an insular, ultra-conformist society not far removed from the views of the so-called “revisionists” accused of Japan-bashing in the 1980s and 1990s. Certainly there arose in recent popular writings about Japan’s “lost decade” a social science or anthropological approach to Japanese culture that sought to illustrate the proverb “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” 7 That phrase, a cliché presumed to be a timeless Japanese maxim, has been quoted soberly in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the transnational break-dancing documentary Planet B-Boy (2008), as well as in the Academy Award-winning, muckraking documentary The Cove (2009). The phrase is meant to explain why non-Japanese protagonists have a difficult time in Japan, and why Japanese themselves cannot be roused out of a supposedly conservative national groupthink. However, I would argue that the lack of necessity for cross-cultural resolution in these films is intended not to bash Japan but to code it as cinematically “cool”—spectacular, remote, and indifferent. In Japanese and non-Japanese cinema alike, Japan to foreign eyes is a shimmering surface of vertiginous physical peaks and social flatness, a place where one can easily get “lost,” even if one were to integrate completely into society. At best, this indifferent quality allows characters to indulge in touristic activity without any of it having to mean anything except to reinforce the characters’ aimlessness; at worst, it antagonizes characters by acknowledging or exploiting them as foreigners whose fates are not of moral or national concern. Survival depends on a character’s own personal level of “cool,” his or her ability to cope with a lack of understanding by trying not to understand. The suggestion in the films that there is nothing to understand about Japan, even if one were to try, simply enhances the degree of cool. The more a character tries to push against the social surface, to break the law, solve a mystery, 280 demand native respect, or, as in the case of Fear and Trembling, to see how far one can be humiliated for no apparent reason, the more that character is punished for lack of coolness, unless his or her antagonists are also outsiders who are a disgrace to the nation—yakuza, pimps, drug-dealers, all of the above. Rebelling against despicable outlaws in Japan, while disturbing public order, makes heroes out of foreigners. The Bride in Kill Bill may be the apotheosis of cool outsider in Japan: a blonde American female avenger who speaks Japanese with Sonny Chiba, slaughters an entire yakuza clan (led by a half Chinese-American), and then leaves the country to watch samurai videos with her daughter. A cool customer. The approbation or acceptance of violence in the service of conservative values—family, national pride, honor (however that is defined)—extends to a pair of films that I would argue are central to the period: Twilight Samurai (Tasogare seibei, 2002) and The Last Samurai (2003). Neither a war film per se, they nevertheless appear at a time of war, with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq including, for the first time since its inception, a unit of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Forces. These two samurai films arrived at an intersection of four interrelated trends in popular culture. In Japan, a spiking interest in bushidō philosophy accompanied a surge in period films. 8 In the U.S., a period boom in Hollywood cinema worked alongside an expanding interest in Japan and Japanese culture as sources of popular entertainment and film subjects. 9 These four trends concentrated within Twilight and Last to highlight a rich series of correspondences between them. Together, the films represent the samurai as a symbolic figure of core beliefs that the filmmakers believe are in danger of extinction. A conservative figure in liberal times, the samurai in both films appears nonconformist, an explicit critique of moral relativism wrought by historical turns. The transnational samurai in these films functions as both contrast and comfort—a vehicle 281 through which filmmakers can judge the uncertainty of their times while reassuring audiences of the certainty and the correctness of the filmmakers’ own interpretation of bushidō philosophy. Many films revisited World War II to dramatize transnational encounters in combat zones or in occupied Japan. In these films, whether produced or directed by Asian or American filmmakers, foreign casting, multiple spoken languages, and a sense of multinational community or transnational communication are the norm. The Sun (Solntse, 2005) and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) are a remarkable pair of films directed by non-Japanese (Aleksandr Sokurov and Clint Eastwood, respectively) and yet featuring mostly Japanese characters of historical or military renown in the closing months of the war: the Emperor Hirohito and General Kuribayashi Tadamichi. Each film takes the point of the view of the Japanese and contains at least one significant sequence when an American challenges the expectations of the Japanese characters with whom we have been placed in a position of identification. The intrusion of the American point of view—MacArthur in the Hirohito film, a wounded Marine in the Iwo Jima film—creates a muddle of conflicting impressions. MacArthur’s bellicosity in the presence of the quiet (and borderline autistic) emperor, and the Marine’s letter from his mother, read aloud among the Japanese, appear as breaks, as expansions of the cinematic point of view that, from the audience’s perspective, are shattering revelations. The Japanese films Spy Sorge (2003, directed by Shinoda Masahiro) and Out of This World (Kono yo no sotoe – Club Shinchugun, 2004), set during and after the war, respectively, further tear down national walls, literally in the case of Spy Sorge: it ends with TV news coverage of the breaking of the Berlin Wall, and with John Lennon’s “Imagine” playing on the soundtrack. Out of This World also ends with the music of international fusion—a medley of Japanese jazz performers, stars, and celebrities who entertained Allied troops on U.S. bases 282 during the occupation. These two films were never released in the United States, and yet they share a fluidity of transnational identification with The Sun and Letters From Iwo Jima, a flexible mode of perspective that places the viewer in an incoherent position of national affinity. Changing industrial practices, government policy, and historical events can only partly explain this latest cycle of Japan-themed transnational films. The establishment of regional Film Commissions and the “J-Pitch” support program under government ministries in the 2000s, 10 intended to increase local production and international coproductions, have assisted in the making of several films but do not represent a dramatic shift in local production practices. As with the case studies of this project during the 1980s and 1990s, these later films are the works of individuals, not of nations. The most important visual difference between the recent cycle of films about “Japan in the world” and the 1985-1995 cycle, is the increasing sophistication of representations of nationally-coded visual culture. When we see “Japan” on the screen in a “foreign” film, Japan appears more transparent, less dependent on some form of cinematic translation. For Japanese audiences, Letters From Iwo Jima can pass for a Japanese film, just as The Last Samurai could pass as a samurai film. Likewise, the Japanese company Production I.G. could animate a stand- alone sequence for the film Kill Bill in a way that pays homage to itself. The Kill Bill sequence features a teenage girl eviscerating a yakuza with a sword while wearing a school uniform. An earlier Production I.G. animation, Kitakubo Hiroyuki’s Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), also featured a sword-carrying, teenage girl assassin in a school uniform; only in that film, she killed vampires, their blood showering the walls with an equal intensity. Part of a multi-national, multi- media project, Blood has also been released as a series of novels, a TV show, video games, and most curiously, as a 2009 live-action Hong Kong-French coproduction filmed in China and 283 Argentina and featuring a Japanese/Korean cast, all speaking English. The synergistic expanse of a product like Blood is surprising if one underestimates the transnational potency of national pop iconography. The films I have analyzed in previous chapters as case studies, despite their ambivalence about national identity in a globalizing world, project a confidence in the understanding of precepts underlying national image, and national difference. The issue for characters in Black Rain and MacArthur’s Children, for instance, is not one of sorting out differences between Americans and Japanese: those differences, comfortably essentialized, merely have to be overcome. In the more recent films, the ease of travel has closed physical distances and rendered cultural differences more of a cosmopolitan curiosity than a pedagogical exercise. The foreign youth criminal, eager consumer, aimless wanderer, or otherwise disinterested resident has no time, and frequently, not even the desire to “connect” in earnest, clumsy fashion with representative Japanese. Transnational connections are the new norm. The last shot of Lost in Translation appears after the closing credits: a smiling Japanese woman waves “goodbye” to the camera. This nameless character appeared earlier in the film, posing for a snapshot in a Tokyo apartment. She had no lines and no effect on story events. The final shot could be just a pop flourish, an ironic wave from a metaphorical tourist director thanking us for watching the film. She does not seem to be saying “Don’t come back”—but she also does not seem to be saying “I will miss you.” She is neither inviting nor uninviting; she is acknowledging, with a smile, a casual connection. The significance of the wave is its insignificance: it says “You are here, and it is not a big deal.” 284 CHAPTER 7 NOTES 1 Will Ferguson, Hitching Rides With Buddha (New York: Canongate, 2005), 110. 2 For detailed analysis of export statistics, see Tsutoma Sugiura, “Cultural Power and Corporate Strategy,” Nikkei shinbun, Sept. 23, 2003. Tsutoma, Director of the Marubeni Research Institute, circulated this series of translated articles to managers of banks and insurance companies in part to show that despite a slowing of consumption in Japan due to economic issues, the export market, especially for “content” products (music, movies, toys, games, etc.) shows substantial growth. 3 See Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Cambridge: Perseus Books Group, 2004). As opposed to “hard power,” conceived under the threat of military action or financial inducements, soft power depends upon the agency of other countries to provide the “power” country what it wants, without threats or financial pressure. 4 Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy 130 (May-June 2002): 44-54. In this report on Japanese pop culture’s popularity overseas, McGray distinguishes between things that sell (fashion, toys, gadgets, cartoon characters) and things that don’t (sumo wrestling), indicating that it’s not necessarily the products’ Japanese identity that renders the products “cool” to non-Japanese consumers. McGray credits the 1990s recession in Japan for helping to create this coolness, as the waning economy, for McGray, exposed the traditional hierarchies of corporations and artisanships as flawed, giving license to artists and businessmen to depart from traditional norms. 5 Works that interrogate the meaning and efficacy of Japanese “soft power” in its pop-culture products include Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys in the Global Imagination (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); P.E. Lam, “Japan’s Quest for ‘Soft Power’: Attraction and Limitation,” East Asia 24 (2007), 349-363; and Yasushi Watanabe and David L. McConnell, eds. Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2008). 6 It is worth noting that government initiatives to market Japanese “coolness” does not extend to public funding of creative industries. See Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. (Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 7 See Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); John Nathan, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006); and Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 8 Articles about Japan’s “bushido boom” include Yūri Kazuko, “Samurai no hisō to hiai (dekoboko kagami),” [Samurai bravery and pathos (rough mirror)], Asahi shinbun, Feb. 12, 2004, 12. The Asahi in a series of articles criticized Banshō’s use of the word “bushidō” in addressing his troops, and a few commentators and critics found similar problems with The Last Samurai in its application of the code. See “Nitobe inazō [bushidō] naramoto shinya yaku” [Nitobe Inazō’s [Bushidō] translated by Naramoto Shinya], Asahi shinbun, Feb. 22, 2004; Iwashima Hisao, “Bushidō būmu; heiwa koso Nitobeshi no negai,” [Bushidō boom; Nitobe’s desire for peace], Asahi shinbun, Mar. 6, 2004, 14; and Katō Yuzuru, “(Kyō no nōto) samurai” [(Today’s note): samurai], Yomiuri shinbun, Dec. 24, 2003, 10. See also Ochi Michiō, “Bushidō wo egaita amerika no genjou: dare ga ‘rasuto samurai’ na no ka?” [The American condition depicts bushido: who is the Last Samurai?], Kinema junpō 1395 (December 2003): 35-37. On Japan’s “period boom” in cinema, see Mark Schilling, “Screen dreams of the good old samurai days,” Japan Times, Dec. 15, 2002; Aaron Gerow, “Period dramas back in fashion,” Daily Yomiuri, June 17, 2006, 19; and “Gendai de wa riaru sugiru (jidai mono) naze ka ninki” [Why are very real period things popular today?], Asahi shinbun, Jan. 20, 2002, 35. 9 “Hariuddo ‘nihon būmu’ no wake” [Hollywood’s “Japan Boom”], Tokyo shinbun, Feb. 1, 2004, 24. 285 10 “Eiga roke de waga machi PR: unyushō, yūchi no jichitai shien e” [Hometown PR on Film Locations: The Ministry of Transport, Supporting Municipality Allure], Asahi Shinbun, July 24, 2000, morning edition, 31. In January 2001, a major reorganization of Japan’s government led to the consolidation of several ministries. The Ministry of Transport merged into the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (http://www.mlit.go.jp/index_e.html); and the Ministry of Education into the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (http://www.mext.go.jp/english). The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), which initially embarked on Film Commission efforts, became the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). This change reflects, as argued by Mark Elder, the need for Japan’s government to remain competitive with other nations while adjusting to the economic and technological demands of increasing globalization in the 1990s. See Mark Elder, “METI and Industrial Policy in Japan: Change and Continuity,” The Japanese Economy 28, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 3-34. 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adair, Gilbery. “E.T. and a half.” Sight and Sound 57, no. 2 (1988): 138-139. 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Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999 Yūri, Kazuko. “Samurai no hisō to hiai (dekoboko kagami)” [Samurai bravery and pathos [rough mirror], Asahi shinbun, Feb. 12, 2004, 12. Zaller, Robert. “After the Revolution: Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 79-93. Zhang, Yingjin. “Comparative film studies, transnational film studies: interdisciplinarity, crossmediality, and transcultural visuality in Chinese cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2007): 27-40. Zielenziger, Michael. Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006. 329 FILMS REFERENCED This list of films referenced in the text suggests the wide range of material linking, in some way, Hollywood and Japanese cinema from 1985 to 1995. Listed films released before and after that time period are only a small sampling of precursors and successors. TITLE DIRECTOR YEAR The Beginning or the End Norman Taurog 1947 The Bells of Nagasaki Ōba Hideo 1950 (Nagasaki no kane) Children of Hiroshima Shindō Kaneto 1952 (Genbaku no ko) Around the World in Eighty Days Michael Todd 1956 Teahouse of the August Moon Daniel Mann 1956 Sayonara Joshua Logan 1957 The Barbarian and the Geisha John Huston 1958 The Hidden Fortress Kurosawa Akira 1958 (Kakushi toride no san akunin) Hiroshima, mon Amour Alain Resnais 1959 My Geisha Jack Cardiff 1962 Woman in the Dunes Teshigahara Hiroshi 1964 (Suna no onna) Double Suicide Shinoda Masahiro 1969 (Shinjū: Ten-no amijima) Tora! Tora! Tora! Richard Fleischer, Fukasaku Kinji 1970 Enter the Dragon Robert Clouse 1973 Don’t Look Now Nicolas Roeg 1973 Westworld Michael Crichton 1973 330 The Yakuza Sydney Pollack 1974 The Mouse and His Child Charles Swenson and Fred Wolf 1977 The Yellow Handkerchief Yamada Yōji 1977 (Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi) The Bad News Bears Go to Japan John Berry 1978 Coma Michael Crichton 1978 Metamorphoses (Winds of Change) Takashi 1978 Midnight Express Alan Parker 1978 Alien Ridley Scott 1979 The Great Train Robbery Michael Crichton 1979 James Clavell’s Shōgun Jerry London 1980 Chariots of Fire Hugh Hudson 1981 48 Hrs. Walter Hill 1982 Blade Runner Ridley Scott 1982 E.T.: The Extraterrestrial Steven Spielberg 1982 Pink Floyd The Wall Alan Parker 1982 Antarctica Kurahara Koreyoshi 1983 Flashdance Adrian Lyne 1983 The Hunger Tony Scott 1983 The Right Stuff Philip Kaufman 1983 MacArthur’s Children Shinoda Masahiro 1984 (Setouchi shōnen yakyūdan) Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters Paul Schrader 1985 Ran Kurosawa Akira 1985 331 9 ½ Weeks Adrian Lyne 1986 The Adventures of Milo and Otis Hata Masanori 1986 (Koneko monogatari) Gung Ho Ron Howard 1986 The Karate Kid Part II John G. Avildsen 1986 Top Gun Tony Scott 1986 Angel Heart Alan Parker 1987 Empire of the Sun Steven Spielberg 1987 Fatal Attraction Adrian Lyne 1987 Fatal Beauty Tom Holland 1987 Hope and Glory John Boorman 1987 Ishtar Elaine May 1987 The Last Emperor Bernardo Bertolucci 1987 Wall Street Oliver Stone 1987 Betrayed Costa-Gravas 1988 Big Penny Marshall 1988 Bright Lights, Big City James Bridges 1988 Die Hard John McTiernan 1988 Felix the Cat: The Movie Tibor Hernádi 1988 Mississippi Burning Alan Parker 1988 Tokyo Pop Fran Rubel Kuzui 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Philip Kaufman 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit Robert Zemeckis 1988 Black Rain Ridley Scott 1989 332 Black Rain (Kuroi ame) Imamura Shōhei 1989 Brenda Starr Robert Ellis Miller 1989 Death of a Tea Master Kumai Kei 1989 (Sen-no rikyū: honkakubō ibun) Fat Man and Little Boy Roland Joffé 1989 Mystery Train Jim Jarmusch 1989 Physical Evidence Michael Crichton 1989 The Toxic Avenger Part II Lloyd Kaufman 1989 World Apartment Horror Ōtomo Katsuhiro 1989 Dances With Wolves Kevin Costner 1990 Everybody Wins Karel Reisz 1990 Henry and June Philip Kaufman 1990 Home Alone Chris Columbus 1990 Memphis Belle Michael Caton-Jones 1990 Naked Tango Leonard Schrader 1990 Prayer of the Rollerboys Rick King 1990 Reversal of Fortune Barbet Schroeder 1990 Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman 1990 The Sheltering Sky Bernardo Bertolucci 1990 Solar Crisis Alan Smithee (Richard Sarafian) 1990 Wild at Heart David Lynch 1990 Barton Fink Joel and Ethan Coen 1991 Fried Green Tomatoes Jon Avnet 1991 333 Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah Ōmori Kazuki 1991 (Gojira vs. kingu gidoraa) Iron Maze Yoshida Hiroaki 1991 Meeting Venus István Szabó 1991 Naked Lunch David Cronenberg 1991 Point Break Kathryn Bigelow 1991 The Silence of the Lambs Jonathan Demme 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day James Cameron 1991 Basic Instinct Paul Verhoeven 1992 The Crying Game Neil Jordan 1992 Howards End James Ivory 1992 Illusions Victor Kulle 1992 Mr. Baseball Fred Schepisi 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me David Lynch 1992 Unlawful Entry Jonathan Kaplan 1992 Wind Carroll Ballard 1992 All Under the Moon Sai Yōichi 1993 (Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru) American Yakuza Frank A. Cappello 1993 George Balanchine’s Emile Ardolino 1993 The Nutcracker Jurassic Park Steven Spielberg 1993 The Last Action Hero John McTiernan 1993 My Life Bruce Joel Rubin 1993 Rising Sun Philip Kaufman 1993 334 Blue Tiger Norberto Barba 1994 The House of the Spirits Bille August 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Kenneth Branagh 1994 True Lies James Cameron 1994 War of the Buttons John Roberts 1994 East Meets West Okamoto Kihachi 1995 Heat Michael Mann 1995 The Quick and the Dead Sam Raimi 1995 Waterworld Kevin Reynolds 1995 Don’t Look Up (Joyū-rei) Nakata Hideo 1996 Helpless Aoyama Shinji 1996 Rowing Through Harada Masato 1996 Sleepy Heads (Artful Dodgers) Yasuda Takuo 1996 Suzaku Kawase Naomi 1996 Swallowtail Butterfly Iwai Shunji 1996 (Suwarōteiru) White Squall Ridley Scott 1996 Black Angel, Vol. 1 Ishii Takashi 1997 (Kuro no tenshi, Vol. 1) New Rose Hotel Abel Ferrara 1998 Ringu Nakata Hideo 1998 Sleepless Town (Fuyajo) Lee Chi-Ngai 1998 Blue Streak William Friedkin 1999 Dead or Alive Miike Takashi 1999 335 Blood: The Last Vampire Kitakubo Hiroyuki 2000 City of Lost Souls (Hyōryū-gai) Miike Takashi 2000 Ju-on Takashi Shimizu 2000 Enlightenment Guaranteed Doris Dörrie 2000 (Erleuchtung garantiert) Wasabi Gérard Krawczyk 2001 demonlover Olivier Assayas 2002 Twilight Samurai Yamada Yōji 2002 (Tasogare seibei) Fear and Trembling Alain Corneau 2003 (Stupeur et tremblements) Kill Bill, Vol. 1 Quentin Tarantino 2003 The Last Samurai Edward Zwick 2003 Lost in Translation Sofia Coppola 2003 Spy Sorge Shinoda Masahiro 2003 The Grudge Takashi Shimizu 2004 The Hotel Venus Takahata Hideta 2004 Out of This World Sakamoto Junji 2004 (Kono yo no sotoe – Club Shinchugun) The Stratosphere Girl Matthias X. Oberg 2004 Starlit High Noon Nakagawa Yosuke 2005 (Mahiru no hoshizora) The Sun (Solntse) Aleksandr Sokurov 2005 The Fast and the Furious: Justin Lin 2006 Tokyo Drift Letters From Iwo Jima Clint Eastwood 2006 336 Planet B-Boy Benson Lee 2007 The Ramen Girl Robert Allan Ackerman 2008 Shutter Ochiai Masayuki 2008 The Yellow Handkerchief Udayan Prasad 2008 Blood: The Last Vampire Chris Nahon 2009 The Cove Louie Psihoyos 2009 Enter the Void Gaspar Noé 2009 Map of the Sounds of Tokyo Isabel Coixet 2009 (Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio) Shinjuku Incident Yee Tung-Shing 2009 (Xīn Sù Shì Jiàn)

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