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America's antifans: East Asian popular culture, American fans, and national transformations

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America's antifans: East Asian popular culture, American fans, and national transformations

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America’s Antifans:
East Asian Popular Culture, American Fans, and National Transformations

By

Shan Mu Zhao

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, American Studies
December 2020

Copyright 2020 Shan Mu Zhao
ii

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the faculty on my qualifying and dissertation committees, Dr.
Viet Nguyen, Dr. Henry Jenkins, Dr. Nitin Govil, Dr. Evelyn Alsultany, Dr. Taj Frazier, Dr.
Kara Keeling, and Dr. Karen Tongson, for their guidance through the research and writing
process. Each faculty member not only gave valuable feedback, but also acquainted me with
unique ways of understanding the world. Dr. Nguyen supported my intellectual growth
across years of research in an unconventional project, and I particularly appreciate his
reminder that remembering oneself and remembering others are not mutually exclusive.
Many thanks to Dr. Jenkins, whose diverse interests gave me a sense of possibility, and
whose work opened up a world beyond the text and has spurred me to look for the
ingenuity in ordinary culture. I thank Dr. Govil for introducing me to global cinema, and
especially for his constant encouragement and generous efforts to help me with writing
and organization. I appreciate Dr. Alsultany for her guidance in conceptualizing the
project's dimensions as it came together in the final stages of writing.
I thank the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity for providing the rich
community for my research, and the ACE-Nikaido foundation for their financial support in
my language acquisition. I would also like to thank the many faculty members at other
academic departments that welcomed my presence in their classes, enrolled or otherwise:
Dr. Brian Bernards, Dr. Youngmin Choe, Dr. Sunyoung Park, and Dr. Robert Kozinets. I
would also like to thank Dr. Dal Yong Jin at Simon Fraser University, who warmly included
me in the Communications program for a semester and put me in touch with Asian
transmedia storytelling. I am also grateful for Dr. Donald Goellnicht and the Department of
iii

English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, which helped me to expand my
understanding of culture and theory.
My growth would not have been complete without the professors with whom I have
worked as a teaching assistant: Dr. Emir Estrada, Dr. Manuel Pastor, Dr. Laura Pulido, Dr.
Chris Finley, Dr. Rick Berg, as well as Dr. Nguyen and Dr. Tongson. Teaching with these
professors not only demonstrated models of engaging young thinkers, but also helped me
to fill in gaps in my knowledge. I would also like to thank Dr. Lori Morimoto for her
mentorship in the world of fandom research, and Dr. Lon Kurashige, who spent a great deal
of personal time helping me map out my thinking and positionality as a human being. I am
also grateful for the help of Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Flores for their tireless
planning, scheduling, and all around resourcefulness in navigating life at the university,
without which the community of our department could not have flourished.
I would like to thank my family for their firm convictions and lifelong love of
knowledge. I am especially grateful to my mother, who raised me during her own PhD and
served as a role model for perseverance and dedication. She is responsible for exposing me
to diverse societies and ways of thinking, without which I would not have the intellectual
and emotional nuance I have today. I appreciate the support of my old friends: Michelle
Silongan, for her insights into the work of politics, for her mind that is as wide as it is deep,
and for being the first person to convince me to watch TV; Stephanie Law, for help with
translation and for her understanding that personal lives are never black and white; Walter
Lai, for keeping me updated on the wider cultural world and the deep nuances of critical
theory; my friend and partner Michael Liu, for drawing me into serious play and eternally
playful seriousness, and for being my home but also challenging me to new intellectual
iv

depths. I could not have completed my project without my new friends: Rosanne Sia, who
has allowed me to ambush her with questions about everything and anything, and has also
been my companion in unfamiliar waters; my cohort buddy Rebekah Garrison, has helped
me keep it real and who taught me to never relinquish responsibility for those one
represents; Jennifer Tran and Jinhee Park, my fellow witches - they opened my eyes to the
full range of what it means to be human, showed me how to approach the world with love,
and their sincerity and determination to live as full people has made my life full.
I would like to thank the Los Angeles Asia Pacific Film Festival staff and volunteers
for the opportunities to put my preoccupations to work. I would like to thank the Hong
Kong Film Archive for their help in locating materials in the Bruce Lee fandom, and Mr.
Brad Walker for his generosity in sharing his personal archive of Bruce Lee materials.
Finally, I would like to thank all fandom communities who have made me feel at home
wherever my life has taken me, and whose creativity, emotional richness, and tireless work
for our beloved texts have made my research possible.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ..……………………………………………………………………………………………………...ii
Note on Language…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. vi
Abstract .………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………vii
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1: Like Superman, But Better: Superheroic Kungfu and the Common Man ………....37
Chapter 2: The Kato Show: Negotiating Asian Sidekicks in Hong Kong Films, Asian
American Comics, and Chinese Coproductions ……………………………………………74

Chapter 3: A Tightrope Ambiguity: Loving and Hating America in Japanese
Military Video Games ……..…………………………………………………………………...….127

Chapter 4: Not South Park, WWII Edition: Homoeroticizing Nations in Hetalia ………….….173
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………222
Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…234

vi

Note on Language

Asian language names will be presented last name first, unless the individual is published
or otherwise well-known in English-speaking regions with their last name second.

vii
Abstract

This dissertation examines East Asian popular culture and its reception among
American fans as a circuit of antifandom, where audiences in each region build on the
fannish work of the other to creatively transform American epistemologies deployed in
Asia during the Cold War period and beyond. After WWII, the US buttressed political and
social reforms in Asia by disseminating mass media and popular culture as vehicles of
American values. I frame this cultural dissemination as a project to make Asians fans of
America by making them fans of American culture, which I argue that it has instead created
a transnational antifandom towards the US. Antifans are audiences whose relationships to
media texts are defined by varying degrees of dislike, criticism, and ambivalence. East
Asian popular culture is replete with references to American popular culture,
demonstrating local familiarity and fascination with American culture; at the same time,
these references are used to articulate local disaffection with American policies and
ideologies, and are used to imagine alternatives. As the presence of East Asian popular
culture has grown in Euro-American regions, American fans of East Asian popular culture
have also engaged their perspectives for self-reflection, and generated fan works that
further new frameworks for thinking about American ideologies, thus becoming America’s
antifans themselves.
I trace transpacific antifandom by examining popular culture franchises as they
travel between select sites in East Asia (Hong Kong, the PRC, and Japan) and the US
(including Asian American communities). East Asian societies have used different cultural
forms and media genres to respond to ideologies disseminated during the Cold War,
including liberal individualism, militarism, and capitalism, and attendant ideas of race,
viii
gender, and sexuality. By virtue of Bruce Lee’s role as the sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet
television series, Hong Kong, Chinese, and Asian American films and comics have adopted
elements of superhero narratives, some of which are combined with the kungfu genre’s
antiracist themes to modify the role of the Asian sidekick. Correspondingly, Bruce Lee’s
kungfu films enabled American fans to reconsider their belief in exceptional power and to
create new models of masculinity, which also entails modifying superhero conventions.
Japanese popular culture embodies postwar reservations regarding the US’s international
influence, especially American militarism. The video game series Metal Gear Solid draws
upon both postwar opposition to American policy in Japan as well as Hollywood Vietnam
War films to interrogate the state’s monopoly on violence and the US’s manipulation of
values during the Cold War. Alongside this masculinized sphere of video gaming, American
women fans of the Japanese animated series Hetalia reject the US’s historically aggressive
approach to international relations and instead use slash fan works to model care and
cooperation between countries.
In addition to the specific ideologies and social models that these fandoms have
reconstructed, these cultural flows demonstrate that creative audience engagement with
media is not limited to commercial media but extend to state-driven culture and national
ideologies as well, and that fandoms are a valuable site to investigate global transformative
changes to American cultural power.

1

Introduction
In February 2018, special counsel Robert Mueller filed an indictment from his
investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 American elections and collusion on
the part of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s associates. Among the intense public
analyses that followed, voice actor Paul Eiding released a video where he simply reads
parts of the indictment out loud. Eiding used the voice of one of his beloved characters,
Colonel Roy Campbell, from the Japanese game series Metal Gear. In Metal Gear Solid 2
(2001), the Colonel helps the player character to uncover a conspiracy of covert social
control orchestrated by a group of secret government elites calling themselves “the
Patriots.” The video game series is awash in science fiction and thriller tropes, which
includes a White House artificial intelligence system impersonating Colonel Campbell to
call and mislead the player character. However, such dramatic events also delineate issues
such as the lack of government transparency, the hypocrisy of American values, and the
constant effort to spin information for political ends. Eiding’s reading of the indictment
highlights the surreality of the moment –the investigations’ findings seem like the plot in a
video game. In their reactions to Eiding’s video, some fans asked whether the video is
meant to represent the Colonel revealing the truth, or is Eiding performing as the AI system
who is impersonating the Colonel, and further deceiving us? These comments jokingly take
the game’s political mystification to paranoid levels, but in a way that nonetheless reflects
the uncertainty of real life.
Fans of the Metal Gear have increasingly seen the games as prescient, and have also
recognized that unexpectedly, it has been a Japanese game series that has so much
predictive power for American politics. Another Metal Gear fan video highlights an
2

antagonist who claims he intends become president and make America great again, and a
fan commented, “Japan clearly understands something we don’t” (killer1one1, “Metal Gear
Trump”). Eiding’s video and fan discussions about the games’ political relevance is an
example of how popular culture from East Asia has increasingly become reference points
for American fans to think about their own society. Scholarship on Asian popular culture
has burgeoned as their popularity in Euro-American regions have grown, and indeed
scholars have recognized that many in the West become their fans precisely because they
offer representations, aesthetics and ideas that domestic Western media do not. For
example, Susan Napier notes that many anime fans were tired of Hollywood’s narrative
patterns and thought that American television programs weren’t sufficiently thought-
provoking (177). Following on these observations, my dissertation seeks specifically to
address how American audiences understand and process non-American representations
of the US through their engagement with East Asian popular culture.
The forms of East Asian popular culture that circulate globally today – Korean
dramas and pop music, Japanese animation, comics, and video games, Sinophone cinema
(especially from Hong Kong) – are not only of interest because they give some external
perspectives on the US, but because they specifically embody a history of Cold War
American influences in the region. The US implemented educational programs and new
media systems in societies such as Japan and Korea in an effort to turn these countries
away from imperial Japanese influences and to ward off Communism. Production and
distribution were heavily influenced as a result; for example, much of South Korean
filmmaking in the 1950s relied on equipment from the US government (Klein, “Why
American Studies” 891). In addition to structural and institutional marks of American
3

influence, East Asian popular culture also regularly feature representations of America –
whether it is specific American characters, American settings, cultural practices associated
with the US, or media tropes from American genres. Thus, my second research question
asks: how have the creators of East Asian popular culture, as well as the cultural
community they are located in, used media to reflect on and process American influences?
These phenomena – American cultural influences abroad and East Asian popular
culture in America – can be investigated in a number of disciplines. In this dissertation, I
am framing them in terms of audiences engaged in a transpacific negotiation over
American epistemologies, and investigating American cultural influences in East Asia and
East Asian popular culture in the US through a combination of transnational American
studies and fandom studies. Together, these fields frame the US’s cultural influences in East
Asia during the Cold War as a project of creating fans of America by fostering fans of
American mass media and popular culture. In this view, East Asian popular culture texts
are not simply national texts which have gone international, but are responses from
creators who have become fans of America and American media, albeit incompletely. As
such, East Asian popular culture represents the work of antifandom. Antifans are audiences
who are invested in media texts while being ambivalent or critical of them, in this case
exhibited towards American media and discourses. East Asian popular culture has drawn
investment from Americans, while their ambivalence and critical perspectives on America
enable American fandoms to understand the history of the US’s international influence. As
American fans reproduce them in fan works, they create imaginaries alterative to American
epistemologies, and become themselves America’s antifans. My dissertation argues that
even as mass media and culture has been tools to expand the US’s reach, their transnational
4

circulation among audiences of diverse societies enables fans to collectively transform
American values and epistemologies.
Indeed, journalism and scholarship on East Asian popular culture have often
mentioned that its creators are passionate antifans of America and American media, even if
they do not necessarily use these terms. For example, Christina Klein notes that South
Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho grew up enthusiastically watching Hollywood films by
directors such as Steven Spielberg and Frances Ford Coppola on the US military’s television
network (876), and has developed “a real love and hate feeling toward American genre
movies” (878). Similarly, in an interview with Hideo Kojima, the writer and director of the
Metal Gear series, Kojima expressed that his father hated the US during the Pacific War but
then began to love American films and popular culture in the postwar period, and some of
this ambivalence has influenced the his games (“Hideo Kojima Versus the Big Robots”).
Similarly, when American fans of East Asian popular culture are drawn to it due to their
dissatisfaction with American popular culture, they are exhibiting the beginnings of
antifandom.
A combination of transnational American studies and fandom studies also
potentially pushes both fields to new archives and in new directions. Although research on
fandom has considered gender and sexuality from its inception, studies have still largely
focused on audiences of domestic or English-language media, partly due to the field’s initial
focus on television audiences. A discussion of East Asia and America as each other’s
audience contributes to the study of transcultural fandom and the ways in which fandoms
engage with national ideologies and ethnic differences. In addition, a consideration of state-
driven media can expand models of fannish engagement, which have been developed in
5

Western liberal democracies where power over ideology in the media lie in the hands of
media corporations rather than state regulators. On the other hand, while American studies
has grappled with the transnational paths of American power in the past two decades, the
field has continued to privilege literature and independent artistic practice as evidence for
transnational cultural rather than mass media and popular culture, and has almost never
focused on the reception stages of culture. Attention to popular culture reception can
reveal ways in which mass media audiences, rather than cultural elites, process American
culture, explore how culture circulates among multiply situated subjectivities and
communities, and point to models of collective cultural negotiation. As Eiding’s video
demonstrates, fan engagements with cultural texts and their epistemologies about America
are not simply a matter of information reception. Rather, whether they are East Asian or
American, fans process ideas by creating transformative works, and do so as a part of a
fandom community and engage with culture with both pleasure and a critical eye. Thus,
discussing transnational cultural negotiations as the work of fandoms also takes into
account the multiple effects produced by America’s international influences, and the
sometimes contradictory emotional investments behind the production and reproduction
of culture.

Transnational American Studies and the Transpacific
Although the US and East Asia’s mutual influence are an aspect of cultural
globalization, globalization studies tends to pursue social models that explain global
interconnectedness as a whole, rather than focus on meanings made in particular regions.
As John Tomlinson reflects, much of globalization literature focuses on institutions, and as
6

a result there can be some “hermeneutic naivety” in cultural analysis (34).
1
Sometimes,
globalization studies can be presentist; as Kuan-Hsing Chen writes, “the discourses
surrounding globalization tend to have shorter memories, thereby obscuring the
relationships between globalization and the imperial and colonial past from which it
emerged” (2). A seminal and influential article on the Korean Wave by Doobo Shim argues
that it is a hybrid culture, though hybridity is discussed in terms of traditional local culture
interfacing with economic liberalization and capitalist-driven industry practices, implicitly
putting the hybrid character of South Korean popular culture after the 1980s. In
scholarship on popular culture from Asian studies, American cultural influence can be
framed as a representative of Western social conditions, or treated as incidental. For
example, while Marc Steinberg includes American influences in his discussion of
convergence culture in Japan and culture in post-Fordist economies, neither post-Fordism
nor convergence is investigated as American formations. While locating American
transnationalism as a part of globalization and modernization is useful, this approach
neglects how “the US state’s exceptions to the rules of the transnational market secured its
position of dominance within the global economic order,” (Pease, “Introduction: Re-
Mapping” 24), such as refusals to sign industrial emissions treaties, the control of the IMF
and the World Bank, and conducting invasions in the Middle East despite the lack of UN
sanction (24).
In the last two decades, American studies have undergone a transnational turn in an
effort to reckon with the American exercise of power beyond its own geographical and

1
This may be due to the elasticity of the term “globalization” and its field of study, which can include topics such
as the spread of neoliberal capitalism, regional integration, supranational governance, and concepts of modernity,
where the specificities of US motives, paradigms, and policies are understandably only one sliver of a larger whole.
7

national borders. A significant instigating factor for the transnational turn was George W.
Bush’s installation of a state of exception after the 9/11 attacks, where both civil rights in
the US as well the sovereignty of other societies around the world were suspended or
ignored for the sake of American security. This prompted scholars to interrogate the
assumptions of the field, recognizing that an unacknowledged belief in American
exceptionalism – that the US was unique among all nations – was partially responsible for
studying it apart from all others (Edwards and Goankar 2) and responsible for a scholarly
preoccupation with defining a unique national character (Pease, “Introduction: Re-Mapping”
27). As a part of the transnational turn, scholars observed that American exceptionalism
nevertheless requires other countries for its frame of reference, whether it is that the US is
unburdened by European pasts and can reinvent itself, or that it is uniquely situated to
inherit the future. The post 9/11 context was also not an exception from past American
politics; as Pease writes in The New American Exceptionalism, during the Cold War,
discourses of Soviet and communist expansion allowed the US to represent imperialist
practices as preemptive measures for security (24). As a result, Americans were able to
construe their occupation of places like Germany and South Korea not as violations of
America’s liberal and democratic character, but as necessary to maintain these aspects of
American character (25).
The recognition of American exceptionalism practiced abroad has lead scholars to
conceptualize new transnational geographies such as the hemispheric America, the
transatlantic, and the transpacific as spaces of exceptionalism (Pease, “Introduction: Re-
Mapping” 26). Studying the US in context of the Pacific rather than the Atlantic has
particular effects; the Atlantic context has been dominated by frameworks that privilege
8

European nation-states in colonial competition and assumptions that American civilization
began on the East coast and moved west (Pease and Shu 13). In the Pacific, old European
colonial powers still exercised overt military and political control, however flexible
neocolonialist approaches also arose, such as pushing for trade liberalization, defence
concessions, and interventions into social organization and culture, which were pursued
zealously in American foreign policy. The US had always been interested in Asia for the
purposes of trade, but took the first steps to exercise control over Asia and the Pacific
during the second half of the 19
th
century in the form of port treaties with Japan, the
pursuit of an open door policy with European powers in China, taking possession of the
Philippines from Spain and annexing Hawai’i. As European colonialist powers began to
retreat from Asia due to the toll of the World Wars in Europe, American power increased
dramatically and was unrivaled throughout the Cold War (Cumings 389). The US sought to
remove Japanese imperialist influence on Asia in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WWII
supported indigenous national movements in theory, but increases in Cold War tensions
spurred the US to launch economic, social, and cultural interventions that prioritized
warding off Communism. The all-encompassing intervention was based on a philosophy
that liberalism necessarily expressed itself in both the economic and the sociopolitical
realm, and the lack of liberal economics and authoritarian regimes fostered one another
(Frietsche 102).
Even though the US also plied its influence in Europe during the Cold War,
premodern Chinese imperialism, Japanese colonialism, and European colonialism and
exploitation had made the Asian region uneven, which the US exacerbated rather than
bridged. For example, there was no regional aid like the Marshall Plan for Asia, and the US
9

mainly relied on Japan to provide the industrial base in the region (Cumings 400). The US
government was also reluctant to concede independence for former colonial holdings such
as Korea and Vietnam, due to the fear that they would adopt Communist governments,
placing them under “trusteeship” instead (Cumings, Korea’s Place 187). This unstable
situation led to warfare and the division of some nations, such as Vietnam, Korea, and
China. Due to military considerations, the US also pushed for favourable security treaties
with nations such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, with the result that American troops
were deployed there permanently and these states could not independently pursue
defence or foreign policy (Cumings 400). US financial aid supported export-oriented
industrialization among non-Communist Asian countries and the US quickly integrated
them into US-lead trade networks, which means that rather than foster free markets, to a
certain extent the US fostered economic dependency (Cumings, Korea’s Place 325).
Americans also heavily influenced society and culture, such as by reforming curricula
according to American liberal principles, setting up exchange programs with the US
(Matsuda 167), and disseminating American media and popular culture. As Amy Kaplan
argues, it is easy to deny that Americans are imperialists based on models of territorial
intrusion and denial of political sovereignty (17), however the US has spread a culture of
imperialism by positing itself as the only viable model of modernity and the natural object
of identification and emulation (Chen 177). These histories have continued relevance also
due to major political and economic decisions in the region. The 1990s saw a discourse of
the Pacific Rim, which valorized the industrial and economic ascent of South Korea, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and Singapore, and more recently the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) sought to
further economically integrate the region. Often, these regional formations are lauded for
10

economic growth and expansion by state governments in the US as well as in Asia, which
ignores the histories of imperialism and ongoing exploitation (Nguyen and Hoskins 7).
Transnational American studies points towards new topics of study that defy
simple geographic categorization and area studies frameworks, including borderlands,
colonization, migration and immigration, and flows of labour and capital. An emphasis on
the transnational can also lead scholars to re-examine topics assumed to be national, such
as comparatively studying identity, ideas, and social movements across cultural and
national frames, or to recognize imaginaries and phenomena that cannot be contained by
territorial nation-states, such as oceanic cultural currents and environmental degradation.
One trajectory is to study the significance of American culture outside the US. In her
American Studies Association presidential address, Shelley Fisher Fishkin notes that
cultural imperialism seems to be too simple a framework for the spread of American
popular culture (33). Chen, in turn, argues that cultural imperialism portrays power as
being completely imposed from the outside, and the results can be only conceived of in
terms of brainwashing or false consciousness. Viewing American power as cultural
imperialism in this way does not reflect the significance of America in Asia, the ways in
which Asian countries have created international cultural and media networks (177), and
the ways in which anti-Americanism can be mobilized by nationalism to ignore inter-Asian
issues (175).
In Fishkin’s American Studies Association presidential address in 2004 regarding a
turn to the transnational, she footnotes a number of studies on American popular culture
abroad, such as Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony, and Not like Us:
How Europeans have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since WWII. It is of
11

note that all of these studies are about European experiences. Similarly, Austrian scholar of
American studies and English Leopold Lippert argues that transnational American studies
can be follow the adaptation paradigm or the border paradigm, and his overview of works
on cultural adaptation are almost entirely dominated by European adaptations of media
and popular culture (27-29). For example, Maria Fritsche argues that the Marshall Plan was
accompanied by a massive cultural campaign, including hundreds of films, and discusses
how this film campaign moulded postwar European attitudes regarding capitalism,
industrialization, national reconstruction, and the place of mass culture (Fritsche 6). Such
historical operations have influenced subsequent generations of Europeans, who have
created their own local imaginaries of America. Jaap Kooijman, writing about the Dutch
context, argues that rather than continue to see American culture in the Netherlands as
intrusive foreign culture, it is more productive to view them as references to the US that are
local Dutch creations, allowing scholars to examine how they are mobilized in Dutch
national movements and debates.
Similar considerations of transnational American popular culture and mass media in
Asia have been rare. Approaching the transpacific from Asian American studies, a common
Foucauldian methodology has been to view subject formation as the expression of power.
This has led scholars to approach culture as the evidence for how power subjectivizes, or as
the critique against power that emanate from communities who have been subjectivized.
For example, in Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that “it is through culture that the subject
becomes, act, and speaks itself as ‘American’” (3), and due to the US’s historical oscillation
between exclusion and partial inclusion of Asians, the immigrant is a valuable site of
critique (8-9). Similarly, Jodi Kim argues that the Cold War in Asia was “a complex and
12

manifold project of American empire and gendered racial formation,” and that Asian
American cultural forms generate a critical cultural indexing of this (6). These approaches
to culture, while vital for political movements, risk creating a standard where culture is
valued insofar as it encapsulates critique, and also risk epistemologically yoking particular
critical discourses to particular subjects. On the other hand, transnational American studies
discussing cultural texts that circulate transnationally have been dominated by studies on
canonical literature, such as Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s study of Japanese adaptations of Mark
Twain, Chinese political mobilization around Walt Whitman (Fishkin 32-33), and Yunte
Huang’s argument that American literary figures such as Herman Melville and Henry
Adams are shaped by their experiences in the Asia Pacific region. Institutional factors can
account for this discrepancy,
2
however it has produced a gap where very little is known
about how American media and popular culture has worked in Asia in the 20
th
century, or
how Asian popular culture signifies when it comes to American epistemologies.
Importantly, neither of these approaches adequately account for positions in reception and
the pleasure in cultural engagement.
It is possible to argue that European experiences with adaptation carry over to Asia,
however a number of factors make the study of American popular culture in Asia distinct.
The first is the US’s unilateral role in Asia, as mentioned previously. In addition, as West
Germany was the only European area with significant American jurisdiction, studies of

2
Scholars in Asia who work in the English language may be constrained in their American objects of study by
foreign language and literature departments, which continue to prioritize the literary canon. The study of popular
culture has been taken up by Inter-Asia cultural studies, which branched from Asian studies. These linguistic and
institutional barriers may be less present for European scholars more conversant in English. At the same time,
Asian American scholars in the US, who have faced barriers based on ethnicity, may be constrained by the need to
legitimize their work by focusing on established forms of culture such as literature rather than popular culture,
which is likewise not necessarily an issue for European scholars working in their own region. In addition, the
tradition in Asian American studies to assert American belonging may also have precluded those studying popular
culture from emphasizing its transnational dimensions until more recently.
13

American popular culture in Europe tend to approach it as the result of globalization rather
than the result of a targeted Cold War ideological effort. For example, some scholars of
Germany and US-German relations argue that it is more realistic to view anti-Americanism
in Germany as a convenient outlet for issues that actually pertain to modernization and
globalization (Berman 15). A second factor is the steady increase of East Asian popular
culture in the US in the last few decades, and their appeal to a wide demographic range.
While European interpretations of American influences have garnered the attention of
scholars, American media consumers do not in general encounter them. Studying East
Asian popular culture as a part of an investigation into transnational America enables a
study of how Americans encounter histories of American foreign and influence.
3

Finally, impacted by racialism and Orientalism, the place of Asia in the American
imagination is quite different from that of Europe, and this has affected the tone of
American interventions in Asia as well as significance of Asian popular culture in the US.
American attitudes towards Asia could be blatantly racist; Bruce Cumings writes that in the
1930s, scientists generally thought that the brains of Asian peoples were half the size of
Whites (387). In addition, American popular media leading up to and including the Cold
War period such as radio, cinema, television, and comic books rarely featured people of
Asian descent. Therefore, American media exported to Asia also resulted in negotiations

3
How Americans encounter and adapt Asian visual styles and aesthetics is secondary in this project. While content
and form have no clear demarcations, it is often easier to adapt visual style from another cultural community, and
in doing so detaching it from its prior cultural significances. This has increasingly occurred as Asian popular culture
became popular in the US. For example, in Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, Jane Chi Hyun Park
notes that Asian differences are no longer excluded from Hollywood films, but have been commodified into a
palatable style that evokes the Orient. Indeed, the cinematics of kungfu have influenced Hollywood films such as
The Karate Kid, and the popularity of Japanese anime has lead to anime styles in American cartoons such as Avatar:
The Last Airbender. I am not disregarding these formal adoptions because they are cultural appropriations or
because they are less authentic when deployed by Americans. Rather, their high visibility in American popular
culture can crowd out attention to the ways in which Asian negotiations over American concepts and ways of life
have also travelled.
14

over ethnicity as well as capitalist and liberal ideologies. As I will discuss, the frequent
deployment of Whiteness in Japanese popular culture points to the normalization of
American and European standards, while for places like Hong Kong which has long
grappled with European colonial racial hierarchies, portrayals of Asian ethnic inferiority in
American popular culture have been explicitly challenged.
In addition, the US’s Cold War interventions in Asia extended a long-standing belief
that indigenous and local communities in the Asia- Pacific were incapable of self-
government and culturally backwards, whereas reforms and aid introduced to Europe
were not predicated on these assumptions. Indeed, Max Weber’s concept of the Protestant
ethic as the foundation for capitalism was demonstrated with Northern European examples.
On the other hand, Orientalism presupposed that Asians were trapped in their past
traditions, which were incompatible with modernism and liberalism. When Asian societies
modernized and technologized, this has been perceived as the result of superficial imitation
rather than actually imbibing the essential values of Western culture. Techno-Orientalism,
where Asian difference is registered through their advances in science, technology, and
modernity rather than tradition, relies on this sense. Roh, Huang, and Niu note that
American popular culture increasingly portray Asians as robots who are “mere simulacra
and maintains a prevailing sense of the inhumanity of Asian labor – the very antithesis of
Western liberal humanism” (5). In other words, Asians are a threat to the West’s hegemony
not because they are essentially the same as Westerners, but because they only reproduce
the appearance of modernity. Thus, even though the US has fostered industrial
development in Asia and has been the consumers of their high-tech exports (most notably
Japan from the 1970s onwards and South Korea from the 1990s onwards), the sense that
15

Asia has no unique modern culture persisted for most of the 20
th
century. Henry Kissinger
apparently resented interacting with Japanese officials, deriding them as “little Sony
salesmen” (Pyle 242).
The widespread appeal of East Asian popular culture in the US has brought upon a
recognition that Asia has its own dynamic popular cultures. This shift can be interpreted in
a number of ways. For Asian governments, it could represent a rallying point for
nationalism and further creative industry development. As a matter of globalization, it can
be read as a reversal of Americanization, where non-Western societies now exemplify
modernity and postmodernity. These interpretations can, however, cast Asian differences
as absolute and indigenous, or imply that Asian culture is significant insofar as they
embody universal futures. For example, it was common for early English-language
scholarship on Japanese popular culture to describe its aesthetics as the result of the
premodern woodblock print styles brought forwards into a postmodern superflatness.
However, manga artist and cultural critic Otsuka Eiji argues that these views dehistoricize
and depoliticize Japanese popular culture, as anime also inherited fascist aesthetics and
early Disney styles from the beginning of the 1900s (xxiv). Otsuka’s analysis of Japanese
popular culture does not try to counter Orientalist views that Asia only copies the West by
framing it as original Japanese culture, not does his analysis attempt to posit Japanese
popular culture as a utopic future. Rather, he frames it as a part of a process where Japan
has negotiated with a specific, historicized Western modernity. Similarly, in this
dissertation, I view East Asian popular culture as fannish reproductions of American
culture throughout the Cold War period, a reproduction which copies but also transforms.
The American mission to reform Asia has left its mark on East Asian popular culture at all
16

levels, in its topics, tropes, and aesthetics. East Asian media producers have copied
American culture, but not merely superficially, and not necessarily in ways that Americans
intended.
Examining the relationship of the US and Asia through media, popular culture, and
their audiences also open transnational American studies to consider different
demographics and modes of cultural engagement. If the spaces of the hemispheric, the
transatlantic, and the transpacific are where American exceptionalism is normalized (Pease,
“Introduction: Re-Mapping” 27), then mass media and popular culture have been vital tools
in this normalization. To date, this normalization has been mostly discussed in terms of the
formation middle class intellectuals and cosmopolitanism. For example, Kuan-Hsing Chen
raises the example of Taiwanese professionals who consciously espouse American values
such as liberal democracy to illustrate the legacies of American power (163). Inderpal
Grewal argues cosmopolitanism facilitates the spread of multiplicity, however this takes
place in a neoliberal framework that nevertheless subjectivizes (22), such as when India’s
desire for transnational investment leads them to create the category of a Non-Resident
Indian (NRI) (87). In the realm of cultural texts, Christina Klein argues that 1950s America
generated a body of middlebrow culture such as musicals and films that sought to
represent Asia as a region that Americans should regard with care. In her analysis,
middlebrow intellectuals were optimistic about the possibilities of intercultural tolerance
and understanding, and believed they were ambassadors of liberalism and anti-
imperialism (11). Moreover, they relied on sentimental modes of narration and
representation, where relationships are depicted as sustained by emotional reciprocity
(14).
17

However, audiences and texts in the transpacific circuit of popular culture cannot be
uniformly described as middlebrow, nor do American political, social, and cultural
influences only impact Asia’s middle class and elites. Americans in postwar Japan
specifically valued Hollywood films because film could reach a wide audience (Kitamura
33), and while some of these were selected for education and cultural uplift, different
circuits of distribution also undercut this political strategy. The Central Motion Picture
Exchange was set up by Hollywood to distribute films in postwar Asia and was the
corporate means by which American administrators achieved their aims (Kitamura 41),
however the CMPE’s commercial interests were to distribute what entertained and sold,
which put them in conflict with government objectives (Kitamura 63). In addition, vast
amounts of media and popular culture were targeted at American personnel stationed in
Asia, which did not aim to educate but to entertain; these kinds of popular culture also
found their way to Asian audiences (Yecies and Shim 157). For example, the video game
company Sega was first started by American businessmen in 1940, who predicted that the
looming American involvement in the Pacific would create demand for amusement
machines. Thus, popular culture also circulated in the form of animated programs for
children, Westerns and action films, pop music, superhero comics, and video games, and
recently it has also been through these forms that the majority of Americans have come
into contact with East Asian culture.
Rather than middlebrow, some of these texts have been decidedly lowbrow, and
they attracted cult or mass audiences rather than intellectuals. As transpacific studies has
been expanding beyond the American nation-state and also looking to new archives, these
kinds of possibilities are also increasingly recognized. For example, Lily Wong discusses the
18

1934 Chinese film Shennü as an example where Chinese left-wing film producers portrayed
a virtuous sex worker as a victim of social circumstance to garner support for national
reform, in explicit contestation against Hollywood portrayals of Chinese sex workers as
threats to family and society. At the same time, the melodramatic performance of the
actress in Shennü, Ruan Lingyu, made her such a celebrity that her suicide drew a hundred
thousand mourners to her funeral (67). Wong argues that the funeral gathering can be seen
as national rally around an effective onscreen representation of a social victim, and indeed
Ruan’s melodramatic performance and stardom helped to undergird this turnout. At the
same time, however, Ruan’s melodramatic performance and suicide made her affective
significance for fans overflow the political utility of her representation (71). Wong
discusses the film and its audience’s response to Ruan’s death mostly in terms of cinematic
temporality and Ruan’s affective performance, however the affective bolstering of politics
and affective excess beyond the political demarcations of the day are also the properties of
fans.
This mass media cultural exchange also entails different modes of audience relation
to the media object and to the Other that created it. Nguyen and Hoskins argue that one of
the major shortcomings of cosmopolitanism as a mode of relation is that difference is
included insofar as it validates cosmopolitanism, and differences are domesticated on the
terms of western nations (14). Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism illustrates this
specific issue – that the massive American cultural output about Asia during the Cold War
was undergirded by a desire for Americans to prove that they were indeed cosmopolitan.
However, fandom tends not to occur due to priori political motivations. It is true that often
fandom involves taking mastery of the fan object, where fans want to know or collect
19

everything related to a franchise, and this element of fandom can extend existing relations
of power. As Edward Said writes, intellectual authority over the East is essential to
Orientalism (19), and the “strategy” in writing about the East involves “how to get a hold of
it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its
awful dimensions” (20). However, fandom encompasses more than a demonstration of
mastery. For example, Japanese game designer Kukino Masaaki explains that his love for an
American action film franchise lead him to fly to the US just to watch it (Szczepaniak,
“Interview with Masaaki Kukino”); journalist and author Davis Miller recalls that watching
Bruce Lee films as a child was like being spellbound (Miller 14). These instances of
fascination are not evidence of a coherent politics of uplift, a pursuit of aesthetics, or
mastery, but rather a fascination and devotion that seems to defy reason.
As modes of engagement, devotion does not position the fan as a master over the fan
object, and this opens up potential modes relation that does not simply extend the
historical exercise of power between nation states. In her study of how Roswell fans
responded to the 9/11 attacks, Louisa Stein notes that while conflicting interpretations of
American power often arose between American and non-American fans, the fan community
as a whole appealed to the values in the Roswell series to accommodate these ideological
differences (481). The function of media and popular culture is also not simply to serve as
vehicles for the “right” information. In his discussion of audiences of pop music and mass
media produced in communities other than their own, George Lipsitz acknowledges that
globalization and imperialism shapes the field of cultural power, however he also argues
that “creative misunderstandings” through culture has potential for knowledge and
political action. Lipsitz describe the innovations of jazz and blues musicians in detail,
20

arguing that many of arrived at innovations precisely because they did not learn the “right”
ways to play (Dangerous Crossroads 166). Cultural commodities may dislocate culture,
however the moral and political messages in popular culture may take on new significances
and power in new locations (161).
Circuits: Chapters
Edwards, Goankar, and Larkin caution that simply studying the US in context of
transnational connections does not overturn American exceptionalism. They argue that
transnational cosmopolitan differences are easily absorbed into the American myth
because American exceptionalism is based on an imaginary of creating unity out of
differences, and projecting a coherent national fantasy (20, 24). Thus, American
exceptionalism manifest when research represents the US as the origin of diasporas or the
final destination of immigrants (9), and when the US portrays itself as a leader among
nations and a paradigm for everyone else to follow (23). Instead, the editors urge scholars
to think of the US as a turnstile for global currents (9), and to research instances where the
American voice does not resonate (23) or where American voices and forms are “diverted
off pathways imagined by the logocentric power” (24).
However, studying America as one force among many or instances where American
voices do not resonate also risks ignoring the ways in which American power has been
applied to create resonance and assert its own exceptionalism. As a result, my choice of
cultural texts and fandoms and the organization of my dissertation reflect transpacific
popular culture as circuits, comprised of both the impact of American policies and culture
on East Asia, as well as the effects of East Asian popular culture in the US. At the centre of
each chapter is one popular culture franchise from a national community in East Asia or the
21

oeuvre of a particular creator or studio, which both embodies East Asian negotiations with
American culture and has drawn a large fandom in the US. In other words, I have chosen
East Asian cultural texts as turnstiles for ideologies which the US has attempted to
disseminate. Studying only how American influences culture abroad reinforces the sense
that America is the most exceptional exporter of culture, able to influence others without
needing to hear back. On the other hand, studying American reception reinforces a sense
that Asian culture is alien, and fails to address the American influences that have circulated
under conditions of unequal power. In terms of fandom studies, the latter also reinforces
the Americans and Western audiences as paradigms of active audiences. In fact, Asia and
America serve as both each other’s objects and each other’s audience, and no party can
transcend their contexts of reception and national affiliations. My approach can seem as
though I am reducing Asian popular culture down to what it represents of the US and its
circulation on American terms. However, my attention to two arms of popular culture
circulation is designed to prevent America from escaping the well of its manufactured
exceptionalism.
The diverse histories of East Asian societies also means that while East Asian
popular culture have become popular worldwide in general, each society’s popular cultures
have gained traction in the US at different points in time, and the particular cultural forms
and genres that have resonated with American audiences have also varied. Chapters 1 and
2 begin from kungfu films from Hong Kong that became popular in the US in the 1970s, and
goes on to discuss the legacy of Bruce Lee’s presence in both kungfu and superhero genres
among Sinophone and Asian American cultures. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss video games and
22

manga/anime from Japan, which began to gain popularity in the US in the 1980s, and
became widespread in the 1990s and 2000s.
Particular themes, ideologies, and local histories also come with these different
cultural forms and different national origins. While kungfu films have a tradition of
engaging with racial hierarchies due to their emergence in the 1800s, when European
powers were encroaching on imperial China, Japanese popular culture as a whole rarely
treats race as an index of power. On the other hand, Japanese popular culture is
preoccupied with the ramifications of international warfare, partly as a result of the
“cultures of defeat” that pervaded the nation after WWII, while Hong Kong and Sinophone
popular culture is not. Thus, each society’s popular culture often implicitly addresses the
sticking points in their negotiation with American and Western power and cultural
influence.
Chapter 1 argues that for 1970s America, Bruce Lee and the kungfu genre enabled
young male fans who were not aligned with mainstream masculinity to carve out a space
for identification, and enabled them to imagine a heroism that derives its value from being
embedded in a community rather than from individual exceptionality. Chapter 2 argues
that the Green Hornet’s sidekick Kato is not afforded superhero status due to American
racializations of Asians, however due to Bruce Lee’s international career, his various Asian
American and Sinophone audiences have used local strategies to negotiate the racialized
superhero-sidekick hierarchy. Chapter 3 examines the Metal Gear Solid game franchise as a
post-WWII Japanese critique regarding the hypocrisy of American militarism and
international social control, however presented through the reworking of tropes from post-
Vietnam Hollywood films which played in 1980s Japan. Chapter 4 focuses on the anime
23

series Hetalia, which anthropomorphizes countries as young men, and argue that slash
fiction from American fans challenge the US’s masculinist and heterosexual posturing,
instead modeling international relations based on care.
The circuits of fandom and culture in these chapters model a dialectic between the
US and East Asia. Chen argues that decolonization and de-imperialization requires a
dialectic – these processes are not complete if the homelands of imperialist powers are not
conscious of their imperial histories and do not work to renounce their identification with
power (200). This is true for American fans, who are generally unfamiliar with American
imperialist histories and do not find themselves in situations where they must reckon with
how other societies perceive the US. Popular culture from other regions, especially regions
in which the US has intervened, can serve as a means for Americans to begin bridging this
gap. Indeed, the following chapters will touch on the ways in which many American fans
begin from a fascination with East Asian popular culture and build towards a desire to
learn about the cultures and societies that made them, including their critiques of
themselves. This critical self-appraisal does not necessarily require that American fans
renounce all attachment with America. Fans of East Asian popular culture rarely gravitate
to it with this aim, and sometimes their position as Americans also enables them to
generate local strategies to intervene in American epistemologies. Popular culture does not
in of themselves contain perfect models to decolonize and deimperialize the transpacific
space, however it crosses national borders and contain flashes of ambivalence in the
normalization of American exceptionalism, which fandoms can collectively think through
and recreate.

24

Fandom Studies
Fandom studies is interested in models for audience engagement with mass culture
and with other audiences, with attention to what fans do with the kinds of social discourses
and power relations that they are embedded in. Rather than prioritizing the production of
culture or the cultural text itself to draw conclusions about what culture means, fandom
looks at the consumption of culture to argue that meanings audiences draw from mass
media is determined by their positionalities and communities. In addition, fandom studies
also emerged as a response to the pathologization of engaged audiences by researchers
who were not themselves fans, to whom fans seemed socially inept and too eager to buy
into media narratives to the exclusion of real life. Early fandom studies instead argues that
the creation of meaning from mass media takes place actively and in an interpretive
community. Henry Jenkins introduced the model of fan readings from culture as textual
poaching – audiences may not have the power to shape media narratives and
representations that media corporations do, however they take aspects of the media that
are of interest to them and use them to shape their own narratives. Fans can do so in ways
not authorized by the media producers, and this recognition has helped to push cultural
studies as a whole to take reception into account when investigating the ideological power
of culture. In addition, fan strategies are exercised in a community, whether through
discussion or through collaborations on fan production. Karen Hellekson, for example, has
argued that although mass media (and especially television) is corporatized and seeks
monetization through broadcast, fans tend to operate according to the logics of gift
economies. Fans who write fanfiction or draw fanart do not seek monetary payment, but
the responses and participation of other fans.
25

As Cornell Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray, and Lee Harrington periodizes fandom studies,
this kind of earlier research examined fans as its unique identity which is culturally
subordinated, and discussed fans mostly along a resistance/incorporation paradigm
relative to media (3). While maintaining attention to power, further fan research have
looked at fans relative to other social groups, and drew conclusions that “fans were
discriminated against, not as fans, but as members of groups that their fandom represents”
(Sandvoss et al. 5). In some ways, this approach to fandom has always been present in
research. Gender and sexuality has been a concern in fandom and subculture research,
whether it be gendered and sexualized fans, or the logic of gender and sexuality that are
used to define and police fans. Early research by Janice Radway into female readers and
writers of romance fiction also argue that these communities have a complex engagement
with patriarchal concepts of emotional fulfillment for women, and have also been targeted
by the book publishing industry as consumers (45). In addition, while male fans have been
stereotyped as desexualized and lacking masculinity, female fans tend to be stereotyped as
overly sexualized and seeking inappropriate levels of intimacy with their fan objects
(Jenkins 14). Kristina Busse, writing in 2013, argues that while many people now claim to
be fans and engage in fan activities, it is often the modes of engagement associated with
masculinity, such as systematic analysis, which have been validated; emotional attachment,
associated with female fans, are still judged to be infantile or pathological (83).
In addition, fan studies have focused on slash fan fiction (narratives by fans which
place characters, generally those portrayed as straight, into homoerotic scenarios) as a way
in which audiences, frequently women, counteract exclusionary representations in
mainstream media. Adding to this research is scholarship on queer fans, which are not
26

necessarily part of the queerness articulated by female fans. Especially as studies on
fandom have begun to question whether fandoms are organic communities, scholars have
noted the use of sexuality and gender to police fandoms. For example, in addition to Busse’s
discussion of how gender plays a part in the judgement of fandom, Joseph Brennan argues
that anonymous fans in slash fiction communities insist on keeping slash anonymous and
secret, overriding the need for some queer fans to use slash to address their identities.
Online harassment against women working in the media have also increasingly propelled
gender and fandom into public spotlight.
However, fandom studies have not until recently addressed transnational fandom
and ethnicity. In “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers,” Rebecca Wanzo notes
that John Fiske summed up the beginning of the field in 1992 by saying that class, gender,
and age are the identity factors that the field has examined the most, and this has lead
fandom studies to develop in particular directions and not others. She argues that
literature from Black scholars on popular culture have been excluded from fan studies
partly because the subjects and concerns they discuss have not lined up with the field’s
priorities. For example, sports fans who engage in racism and nationalism are not fans who
creatively negotiate media narratives, and therefore were not legible to (especially early
periods) of fandom studies. Importantly, much of fandom studies frame fans as choosing
otherness against media or other audiences, while audiences of colour and their fan objects
may actually be othered by the state and media corporations to begin with. In turn,
community-building and mobilization are not necessarily an outcome of being fans, but
“Fandom has often been asked of African Americans and has been treated as an act of
resistance necessary for the progress of the race” (Wanzo).
27

Wanzo also argues that it is productive to examine antifandom from Black audiences.
The concept of antifandom was first introduced by Jonathan Gray, who notes that studying
fans as though they stood in for all audiences misses the fact that many audiences do not
identify as fans, and some even vehemently dislike particular media objects. Gray suggests
that one factor for whether someone is a fan, nonfan or antifan is proximity to texts, as
many antifans come to oppose media texts from engaging with its paratexts and hearing
critiques about it (“New Audiences” 72). However, he also emphasizes that this does not
mean that antifans are misreading media texts. Rather, they are reading different versions
or configurations of the texts (“Antifandom and the Moral Text” 843), and therefore adopt a
different relationship to the text. Thus, being an antifan is not simply the result of having
spent less effort on the text than a fan, a lack of interest and investment, or a dismissive
attitude. In addition, fandom and antifandom co-exist, such as fans campaigning in
opposition to particular changes to franchises they like (845), or judging a text’s aesthetic
dimensions positively but its plausibility and moral dimensions negatively (844). Recently,
Gray has outlined different variations of antifandom: competitive antifandom (fandoms of
rival sports teams) (26), bad-object antifandom (collective determination that a text is
inappropriate, especially morally) (28), disappointed antifandom (objection to a part of a
text in light of the potential in the whole) (30), and anti-fan antifandom (objection to the
fans of a particular text and their behaviour) (32).
Wanzo’s articulation of Black antifandom preceded Gray’s elaboration of
antifandom types, however her discussion of Black audience responses demonstrates that
these kinds of antifandom have been a staple of Black engagement with American media.
For example, she discusses how the NAACP organized protests against Birth of A Nation
28

(arguably a bad object), while the organization and audiences had a more ambivalent
response to Gone with the Wind, objecting to its romanticization of the American South
while standing behind Hattie McDaniel’s performance. Wanzo raises these kinds of
reactions to make a larger point that Black antifandom can be found in media criticism,
which is not necessarily the conventional space to look for fandom, and therefore fandom
should also reconsider its archives.
My discussion of East Asian popular culture as a representative of antifandom
towards America builds on Wanzo’s articulation of antifandom on the part of audiences
who are already at a disadvantage due to an aggregate of social factors. Most prominently,
East Asia and its peoples have been represented according to the prejudices and ideologies
of the US, and lack the extensive production and distribution resources that American
media has created. However, the international dimension also results in differences from
Wanzo’s model of Black antifandom. When Black audiences respond to the media with
means such as publishing and organizations such as the NAACP, these are civic approaches
based on the demand to be treated equally as fellow Americans. In other words, the
audiences are treating the media as an extension of the state that subjectivizes them. In
contrast, Asians predominantly view American content as imports from a nation whose
government and institutions are not theirs, and as such, civil activism may not be the
dominant means of responding to the media. In addition, the exceptional conditions under
which US culture and media are disseminated – such as during US occupations that
promoted compliance and censored dissent – may mean that archives consisting of direct
expressions of criticism and ambivalence exist to a lesser extent. Instead, antifandom
towards American media may be expressed indirectly in how audiences reference
29

American media influences in their own cultural creations, which is aligned less with media
criticism and more with Jenkins’s model of textual poaching.
Lori Morimoto and Bertha Chin’s concept of intercultural fandom is a useful addition
for discussions of how fans may deploy references from imported media. The authors
introduces the concept of the intercultural fan to counteract the dominant sociopolitical
focus in East Asian and Inter-Asian cultural studies on fans simply as national subjects or as
subjects of consumption in international capitalism. In their review of scholarly work on
Asian popular culture, they note that most studies are invested in transnational audiences
as indexes of relations between states, which leads to judgements of authenticity and good
or bad fandom that does not actually take the complex cultural positions of audiences into
account (97). Instead, they argue for more intersectional approaches to fandom and to
regard fandoms as transcultural, where scholars begin from moments of affinity across
fandoms and cultures. For example, they argue that analyzing Japanese doujinshi (fanzines,
often in manga form) featuring the Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung as simply a case of Japan
appropriating Hong Kong culture in a shallow manner (100) misses opportunities to
examine how Japanese manga conventions may be appropriate to articulate a kind of soft
masculinity across borders (102). The authors later update their discussion of transcultural
fandom to argue that all fandoms are in some senses transcultural, as all fandoms negotiate
and exchange different ideas and practices on the part of their fans, whether differences
are ethno-cultural or along the lines of language, class, gender, and sexuality (185).
While Chin and Morimoto articulate a culturally nuanced approach to transcultural
fandom, positing nationality to be on the same level as other axes of identity for fans
replicates some of the gaps in fandom studies. As early as 2002, Matt Hills has argued that
30

national identity has rarely been discussed in conjunction with fandom because prominent
fan objects like Star Trek and Doctor Who are domestic productions (“Transcultural
Otaku”). This unstated domestic national frame has further implications. Fandom studies
has framed the matrix of power that fans are embedded in mostly in terms of consumers
relative to media corporations, where media corporations produce certain representations
and narratives due to market interests. However, I argue that this framing is a result of
fandom studies’ development in English-speaking liberal democracies where governments
have had little overt influence on mass media. This is not necessarily the case elsewhere, as
global media studies demonstrates. Curran and Park notes that states can have enormous
roles in shaping their nation’s media systems, such as the authority to license national
television and radio, and create regulations for international media flows (9). For example,
while the US occupational government intervened in both Japan and Korea after WWII, one
cultural policy difference was that the South Korean government set strict quotas for
Hollywood films, while Japan did not and became the biggest source of Hollywood’s foreign
box office revenue in Asia. Even foundational fandom studies research that emerged from
concerns with national and international frames of reference have not necessarily been
remembered as such; Ien Ang’s seminal work on how Dutch audiences watch Dallas was
instigated due to heated debates about the place of American media in the Netherlands at
the time (Ang 2). Fandom studies’ framing of audiences primarily as consumers of
corporate media assumes that privatized media stands in for all mass media, and ignores
the possibility that other configurations of mass media might produce different audience
positions, and audiences who locate pleasure, community, and power along different lines.
31

Even though the US government seems to take a hands-off approach to media and
popular culture, this is not necessarily the case, and studies of fandoms around US media
can also benefit from considering the nation-state. As Stacy Takacs writes, looking at the
role of the US military in broadcasting challenges common sense assumptions that US
broadcasting has been entirely commercialized and that privatization means independence
from government manipulation (257). The branches of the military opened liaison offices
in Hollywood by 1950, and producers in film and television who wanted advice from for
military-themed programs needed to submit their scripts for approval (268). The US
Department of Defence also contracted hundreds of educational and propaganda films, and
many Cold War films, produced with Hollywood studio personnel, were broadcast on
television to warn Americans of the dangers of Communism. The military’s use of video
games for recruitment and training is perhaps more well-known recent examples of
government influence.
In addition, even if the US government has not overtly and comprehensively
directed domestic media, it has in other countries which have been perceived to be vital to
America’s interests. As previously discussed, the American government and film
corporations explicitly sought to educate Asians during the Cold War period via media. As
Hiroshi Kitamura writes, the CMPE sponsored fan magazine Eiga no Tomo in postwar Japan
(156), and the magazine’s film club had as many as ten thousand members (171).
Audiences were concerned with nationhood and national character, which the magazine
encouraged by editorials urging audiences to absorb American values and English language
instruction (160). At the same time, fans built a community from exchanges such as
sharing celebrity gossip (163) and cultivating film clubs at school (170). Kitamura
32

demonstrates that the national and international frames structure the experience of
audiences, though the pleasures and engagements of fans were not entirely prescribed by
these frames.

Identities, orientations, practices
The methodology of this dissertation combines Wanzo’s approach to looking at
antifandom as reactions to particular social and political positions, paying particular
attention to the structuring role of American power and cultural influence, with the
approach of Chin and Morimoto to begin from cultural affinities in fans and fan works that
are a part of these media flows. In addition, I depart from a focus on fan identities to
consider fan practices and impulses. As Busse writes, the field has debated “whether
members of fandoms are a subculture in their own right or whether they are simply
consumers displaying certain actions and behaviors” (“Fans, Fandom, and Fan Studies” 5).
Sandvoss, Gray, and Harrington recognize that most people are now fans of something, and
changes in technology, media, and society continue to make fans more commonplace (1, 2
nd

ed). These discussions are essentially an evaluation of the field’s focus on subjectivization.
A foundation of fandom and fan studies has been how media corporations and society has
created a subject position called a “fan,” and marginalized it by attributing to it
characteristics of immaturity, emotional excess, and social dysfunction, while in most cases
self-identified fans actually demonstrate the opposite. This perspective on fandoms
continues to offer scholars important insights to power, especially as media industries have
banked on fan identities in new ways, such as by calling on fans to demonstrate their
33

fandom by contributing labour or capital under the aegis of industry management (Scott
172).
However, this perspective has also limited the field to prioritize the fans who self-
identify as such. Rhiannon Bury, for example, argues that scholarship prioritizes fans who
visibly participate in a fandom community over those who do not (Bury 125). As Busse
writes, scholars have been trying to distinguish between fannish identities and fannish
behaviours. For example, In Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison
notes that much of postmodern literature respond to previous literary texts or extend them
in new directions. Therefore, postmodern literature can be approached as fan works, even
though the writers might not hold a fannish identity. In such cases, creating derivations is a
fannish practice. Other fannish practices include interpreting or critiquing texts,
participating in and setting up fan events and spaces, mobilizing for or against texts and
other fans, creating gift economies, and also spending money and resources, and becoming
liaisons in the form of influencers or industry partners. These practices may not all
coalesce in a coherent identity, as they can combine in different ways to create different fan
positions. Even particular practices can vary in terms of fan strategies; a derivative work
can aim to reproduce the original as faithfully as possible, such as in many cases of cosplay,
or it may actively seek to transform the original, as in much of fanfiction, or it may be an
instance of homage.
Examining fannish behaviours enables the consideration of communities and modes
of engagement that are not traditionally considered fandoms, and times and places where
the concept of the contemporary fan as a particular kind of mass media audience did not or
does not exist. For example, the Black audiences and media critics that Wanzo discusses did
34

not necessarily consider themselves fans, even as they demonstrated significant
investment in media texts. In addition, variations on being a fan may still carry stigmas, as
the case of the Japanese label “otaku,” leading some fans to repudiate this label. Examining
behaviours can also open the field to the possibilities stemming from unintentional fandom.
Many East Asian cultural producers who have become popular worldwide in the past few
decades do not consistently identify themselves as fans, and there is scant evidence of their
participation in fandom communities, however many of their works contain derivations
that point to investment in American media or American discourses.
Identities and practices do not encompass all aspects of fandom, since fandom
studies has especially relied on audiences with significant emotional investments. Early
fandom studies has tended to privilege those with a positive emotional attachments in
cultural texts, such as fascination and pleasure, however the consideration of antifandom
opens the field up to examine other attachments such as dislike, disgust, disappointment,
and objection. I call them orientations, since they are highly situational and are not
identities, and they are also not overt practices, even though they may drive fans to adopt
different strategies or practices.
The orientation that I highlight among East Asian media texts and American fans
and their relationship to America is ambivalence. Even though earlier fandom studies have
championed the love that fans have towards media texts, scholars have come to
acknowledge that much of these activities of value to the field are founded on ambivalent
positions. As Gray notes, disappointed antifandom has actually been at the heart of fandom
studies – fans who wrote Kirk / Spock slash fiction liked Star Trek up to a point, but
rejected certain parts (8). Gray also writes, “that desire to cure and rectify ills may be
35

implicitly fannish, but the seed of dislike is inherently anti-fannish” (30). This has been
discussed in other words; in Convergence Culture, Jenkins writes that fandom is “born of a
balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there
would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would
be no drive to rewrite or remake it” (247). Such observations can potentially help scholars
to nuance discussions of the relationship between fans and ideological power.
Transformative works from fans are often discussed as ideological subversive – such as
that Star Trek slash fanfiction is evidence that female fans reject patriarchal and
heteronormative discourses in mass media. Rather than argue that resistance is an
orientation or even an identity – that is, a property or feeling of the fan herself – it is
possible to argue the result of the fannish practice is resistant, while the orientation is the
more basic seeds of liking and disliking particular textual parts.
This kind of recognition can expand the scope of transnational American studies as
well. Nguyen and Hoskins argue that when the transpacific region is usually conceived of as
networks of overlapping state domination and capital, scholars should draw attention to
opposition, resistance, and counter-hegemonic thinking (8). However, responses to
American power often do not fall neatly into one of these sides – America has worked to
produce transnational resonance, yet this resonance is often an ambivalent one. Lippert, in
introducing his study of German performances that reference American culture, argues that
ambivalence is “is the result of the precarious balancing of transnationalism’s democratic
promise against neoliberal rationalization and functionalization” (9). The ambivalence in
East Asian popular culture is a result of a similar balancing of America’s promises of
democracy and modernity against the social control, cultural imperialism, and racial
36

hierarchies exercised during the Cold War. At the same time, American fans of East Asian
popular culture are also ambivalent as they engage with critical perspectives on America
through an investment in Americanness. For example, as I discuss in Chapter 4, American
fans often say that the character of America in Hetalia is their favourite character and are
proud of being American, and at the same time have put him in numerous homoerotic
scenarios that transform American history and political discourses.
In her theorization of women’s cultures in the US, Lauren Berlant notes that
“women’s culture always contains episodes of refusal and creative contravention to
feminine normativity, even as it holds tightly to some versions of the imaginable
conventional good life in love.” This contradictory position can be illegible, as “in popular
culture ambivalence is seen as the failure of a relation, the opposite of happiness, rather
than as an inevitable condition of intimate attachment and a pleasure in its own right” (2).
Viewing women’s culture and its ambivalence as simply either a means of neutralizing
dissent or as a means of fostering radical critique would miss the point that women’s
culture can use conventionality to aspire to social belonging and recognition (4-5).
Similarly, to view fandoms as the location of either false consciousness or critical
consciousness only would miss the point that ambivalence can drive transformative
cultures. In the space of the transpacific, popular culture and mass media have helped to
reproduce American ideologies, however the process of this ideological influence is also the
basis for fandoms to make their ambivalence with American known – what goes around
comes around.

37

Chapter 1: Like Superman, But Better: Superheroic Kungfu and the Common Man

“At Mount Tabor, Miller-Lindsor would be as much the Fight of the century as the
Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier bout that would take place in less than two weeks.
Most students and a few teachers were placing their bets on who’d win. Rumor had
it that Mr. Cole, the wrestling coach, had twenty dollars on Alvin. Supposedly so did the
principal, Mr. Hearty, who’s been a Golden Gloves boxer. Fourteen-year-old Batman, Green
Hornet, and James Bond fans were betting their quarters on me.”
- Davis Miller, The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts Memoir (21)

There is no doubt that the association of Asians and martial arts can be extremely
orientalist. Films from the critically acclaimed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to The
Forbidden Kingdom have reinforced the sense that Asia is the place of ancient mysticism,
and franchises such as Mortal Kombat and The Karate Kid films capitalize on the fantasy
that any Asian person can secretly be a martial artist. In hindsight, the popularity of Bruce
Lee’s kungfu films in the US had reinforced – if not started – the stereotype these ideas;
Asian American comedian Bobby Lee complained in The Slanted Screen that “People would
come up to me, ‘Hey man, do you know karate?’ But no! But it’s because of Bruce that
people think I know karate” (The Slanted Screen). In addition, both in martial arts practice
and in media production, non-Asians have appropriated martial arts while displacing Asian
bodies; Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong because he was only offered supporting roles in
Hollywood.
However, focusing on the negative association of martial arts with Asians misses its
other significances. In addition, this kind of focus can also be presentist, as it assumes that
stereotyping and appropriation in kungfu cinema had always been inevitable. This chapter
seeks to examine the media scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s to arrive at a
38

historically-informed picture of how Bruce Lee’s martial arts films
4
intervened in the
narrative and representational frameworks that were available to American audiences. A
part of this chapter will examine martial arts in American popular culture before Bruce Lee
as a way of demonstrating that Lee demystified martial arts and reframed it as a skill for
everyone, even as this trajectory turned into the stereotype that martial arts is so
commonplace among Asians that everyone knows it. In addition, his films also featured
non-White heroes and decolonial themes in a mediascape dominated by Westerns, thrillers,
and urban crime dramas, which represented fraught or outright antagonistic American
race relations.
The content of Lee’s films contributed to their resonance with Americans, however
American audiences also actively absorbed the new kungfu genre in locally significant ways.
As Miller’s account also shows, a contemporaneous model that Bruce Lee fans did bring to
his martial arts films was the superhero genre, which is evident in Bruce Lee fan mail and
subsequent accounts of him in both academic texts and memoirs. Attention to Lee’s
material through the framework of superhero narratives is necessary in light of the fact
that Lee made his American debut in The Green Hornet television series. Although it was
cancelled after one season, it was one of the first representations of martial arts from an
Asian practitioner on television; in addition, as I will discuss in the next chapter, The Green
Hornet was also responsible for Lee’s renown in Hong Kong prior to his return. I argue that
the generic similarities between kungfu and superhero narratives made kungfu films

4
Due to a confusion regarding film titles when Bruce Lee’s films were distributed in the US, Lee’s first film The Big
Boss was mislabeled Fists of Fury, whereas his second film Fist of Fury was called The Chinese Connection. Lee’s
third film was originally called Way of the Dragon, which was retitled Return of the Dragon – which is distinct from
the fourth film, released after Lee’s death, Enter the Dragon. The last film that Lee shot footage for was Game of
Death, which he could not complete. Footage from Game of Death was released as a part of the Documentary
Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey, and also completed as a film in 1978 with Bruce Lee stand-ins. This dissertation will
use the films’ original names.
39

accessible for Americans, however from this similarity also arose an alternative masculine
model. Both genres rely on heroes who paradoxically represent their social community
while being exceptional, yet kungfu as a skill attainable by and exercised on behalf of the
common person has also implicitly impacted the evaluation of the superhero’s reliance on
exceptionalism.

Fandom Positions in Transcultural Critique
Both this chapter and the next will reframe Bruce Lee and his legacy in terms of his
fans. The next chapter will look at fans in Hong Kong, the PRC, and Asian America, and this
chapter will look at non-Asian American fans, many of whom are White. It is true that
White actors have appropriated kungfu and displace Asian actors, with Lee’s experiences
being a prime example: despite his breakthrough performance in The Green Hornet, Lee
only got supporting roles on television from 1967 until he left for Hong Kong. Despite
working on ideas for a kungfu film with Warner Bros., he was not cast for a part; the
resulting television series, Kung Fu, eventually starred David Carradine, who did not
actually practice martial arts at the time.
5

Given the subsequent stereotypes on the part of non-Asians about Asians knowing
martial arts, and especially given issues such as cultural appropriation and whitewashing,
to highlight non-Asian fans who have partaken in these issues may seem unproductive and
uncritical. However, one of the unique contributions of audience studies in general and
fandom studies in particular is that these fields nuance presumed reactions derived from

5
Lee’s wife, Linda Lee Caldwell, claims that while Kung Fu incorporated Lee’s ideas, he was not given any credit (L.
Lee, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew 130-1), though the creators of Kung Fu stated that they happened to be
working on a similar idea at the same time.
40

the analysis of cultural texts. As media scholar Jamie Sexton writes, when scholarship
discusses the transnational reception of films and especially cult films, there is a tendency
to assume that the perception of the exotic is the strongest factor that motivates fandom
and that exoticization is always negative regardless of context (6). This tendency is
especially prevalent in scholarship that focuses on the film texts themselves to the
exclusion of paratexts and actual audience research. Sexton gives an example of this in
Dolores Tierney’s analysis of the reception of Latin American cult cinema in the US, where
she argues that audience takes pleasure in the failure of the films to meet Hollywood’s
standard of realism (qtd in Sexton 9). Sexton argues that this is not necessarily the case, as
the audience registration of difference does not equate with cultural exoticism, and
audiences often take a strong interest in background materials presented in the packing or
advertisement of foreign cult films. In addition, cult status cannot be reduced to an
exoticization of cultural differences, since films produced in the audience’s own society can
also become cult objects (10). This chapter is based upon a similar observation of fans –
that impulses of transcultural fascination are not themselves exoticization per se, but can
be either constructive or destructive given other fan practices and cultural contexts.
Broad cultural critiques regarding the kungfu films in America risk overdetermining
the analysis of fan positions as well. Sylvia Chong writes in The Oriental Obscene: Violence
and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era that kungfu films in the US carried potential for
Americans to reckon with the Asian other. However, during the turbulent era of the war in
Vietnam, a sense of wounded national character and wounded masculinity steered
Americans to appropriate kungfu as a kind of disciplined violence to reconstruct
themselves, rather than use it to bridge otherness. Chong is astute to point out that the net
41

effect of martial arts popularity in the US from the 1960s to the 1980s is appropriation and
political neutralization. However, it would be a mistake to extrapolate from her research
that the wounded, male national subject was the only audience position available. The
opening quotation to this chapter comes from a memoir where Davis Miller reflects on the
influence Bruce Lee had on his childhood, before his masculinity was fully shaped by a
society going to war. As I will discuss in more detail, it was often people of subaltern
masculinities who have been the most avid fans of Lee; this points not to a repairing of a
fallen hegemonic masculinity so much as a branching off of an alternative masculine
heroism.
In particular, I will be discussing Davis Miller’s The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts
Memoir as one of the main sources of information regarding American fan positions.
6
This
memoir is evidence of both the perils and promises of transcultural fandom. In Kung Fu
Cult Masters, Leon Hunt calls his memoir through Bruce Lee “contentious but compelling,”
and also comments that it is ethnocentric (205fn). Indeed, its descriptions of interracial
interactions and cultural consumption can perpetuate the displacement of people of colour
in the US. For example, The Tao of Bruce Lee includes a passage where Miller narrates a
confrontation with a group of Black teenagers in his youth, whom he defeated by
channeling Ali. In an attempt to fit in, Miller gives two White classmates a ride from a
football game, and finds one of them in a fight with a group of Black teens. Miller intervenes
– “After all, if anybody understood blacks, it was me. I dressed black, walked black, talked
black” (38). When one of the teenagers punches Miller, he thinks, “don’t look at my face.

6
Miller is the most well-known for his journalism and later book on Muhammad Ali; his piece, “The Zen of
Muhammad Ali,” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, and later developed into the book The Tao of
Muhammad Ali.
42

That ain’t me. Can’t you tell I’m a lot like you? Can’t you see these clowns use me too?” (39).
Miller gets out of this fight by punching the ringleader in the face, which he describes as an
outcome of instinctively copying Ali’s attacks. Subsequently two White policemen approach
and the Black teenagers disperse. This incident earns him the respect of his classmates,
who had previously bullied him. The young Miller, at least, had a very naïve idea of what it
means to identify with another ethnicity, and as an adult and an author, Miller does not
comment on this either.
An alternative description of fan positionality regarding kungfu films comes from
Leon Hunt’s reflections of his own experience as a spectator. Hunt brings up multifaceted
identifications, saying that as a White, Western fan such as himself identifies with the hero
played by Lee, yet cannot avoid seeing themselves as the gwailo (“white devil”), “either
associated with imperialist oppression or the American karate experts that Bruce Lee was
fond of humiliating” (3). Similarly, there is a tension in his response to the Coliseum fight
between Lee and Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon. Despite identifying with Lee and not
with Norris, Hunt also recognizes that the fight is an embodiment of Chinese nationalism
that intends to exclude him to a certain extent; however, he notes that this recognition
comes from a “left-liberal ‘postcolonial’” self, and is not something that he was aware of as a
younger fan. (4).
Hunt and Miller both recall instances of transcultural fascination as young audiences.
While Miller’s identificatory impulse leads him to commit violence and further widen the
gap between White and Black youths, Hunt’s childhood impulse later enables him to
synthesize formal politicized knowledge. When George Lipsitz examines creative
misunderstandings between different societies and cultures, he also cautions against being
43

quick to judge mainstream, White, or Euro-American audiences who are drawn to music
from other aggrieved communities. As an example, Lipsitz raises the example of Marty
Balin of Jefferson Starship, who used to go to jazz clubs as a child. Balin described his
mental state as such: “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I could feel something happening”
(164). Even though Balin did not know the history of appropriation, colonization,
Orientalism, and primitivism that comprised his field of actions, Lipsitz argues that his
feeling could have been a dawning recognition that he did not have the conceptual tools to
understand a culture and a community that had been artificially segregated from his own
(164-5). Similarly, this chapter tries to understand the multiple subject positions of Bruce
Lee’s non-Asian fans, and to be open to their agency and ability to take their impulses of
transcultural fascination in unexpected directions.

Martial Arts in America
Prior to the popularity of Bruce Lee’s kungfu films and martial arts practice in the
US, martial arts had been associated with Japan, with a limited number of schools in the US
and also limited representation onscreen. As a result, martial arts were generally seen as
either exotic or exclusive. As Ray M. Lott writes in The American Martial Arts Film, Japanese
and Chinese martial arts took root differently in the US in the first half of the 20
th
century.
Immigrant Japanese judo instructors opened their schools to Americans who took judo up
as a hobby, whereas Chinese martial arts instruction tended to limit itself to dedicated
disciples within their ethnic community (5). In addition, a greater influx of Japanese and
Korean martial arts in the post-WWII period was due to American occupation on those
countries. The first karate school on the continental US was opened in 1946 by Robert Trias,
44

a naval officer who had been stationed on Okinawa (Haines 154). Similarly, Lott writes that
Korean Taekwondo instructors were brought in during the 1960s to teach American
servicemen hand-to-hand combat, or to teach an exclusive clientele of congressmen and
senators (5).
7
This is reflected in White Heat (1949), where a federal agent undercover in a
gang has been trained in judo and uses it to dispatch enemies (Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze”
27).
Films in the first half of the 20
th
century contained martial arts sequences involving
judo or karate techniques, however there was no dedicated genre to martial arts alone. In
addition, most of the action sequences involved White American characters who used
martial arts against villains, which were often Asians. An early example is Blood on the Sun
(1945), which shows an American journalist in Japan trying to take Japanese military plans
back to the US. This involves defeating a Japanese officer, Captain Oshima, in judo, with
Oshima played by an American actor in yellowface (Lott 23). While the Japanese did not
feature prominently as villains in the postwar period, the trend of White Americans
defeating Asian villains with martial arts continues with The Green Berets (1968), where an
American trooper defeats the Viet Cong with judo (35). Lott writes that the James Bond film
You Only Live Twice (1967) established tropes associated with martial arts, such as an
exotic Asian location with rudimentary technology and strict disciplinary training (33). He
also notes that in many cases, martial arts was used in action sequences as a gag, such as
when John Wayne’s character in The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) is flipped by a much
smaller man in a comical scene (25). Martial arts that were not used for comedic effect and
not used against Asian villains occurred only sporadically. Two examples are The Crimson

7
The history of martial arts emerging due to US military presence in Japan and Korea is discussed at length in
Sylvia Chong’s The Oriental Obscene.
45

Kimono, where James Shigeta starred as a Japanese-American detective acquainted with
kendo and karate, and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), where a White American veteran of
WWII, having been saved by a fellow Japanese American who was a part of the 442
nd

regiment, is seeking his saviour’s father after the latter was released from internment camp.
While Bad Day at Black Rock was critically acclaimed for its attention to anti-Japanese
racism (Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze” 28), martial arts in the film is a property of the White
veteran, who has this ability only due to the sacrifice of his Japanese counterpart. Martial
arts appeared sporadically in films of other genres until the summer of 1973, where three
Kong Kong martial arts films (including Lee’s Fist of Fury) reached the top of the US box
office charts, unprecedented for foreign films which were not originally made in English
(Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze” 21).
Lott’s and Desser’s survey of martial arts in American films suggests that for the
early 20
th
century, martial arts was often used as a stereotype, but not necessarily in the
same way as today. First, martial arts combat frequently took place outside the United
States, a factor that no doubt reinforced the association of martial arts with mysticism and
Asian tradition. However, second, irrespective of whether they were Euro-American or Asian,
those who used martial arts tended to be a part of the elite, either spies or highly trained
soldiers. Real life reflected the world onscreen, where only a limited number of Japanese
and Korean schools opened to members of the government or the military. Thus, it was not
necessarily the case that Euro-Americans would assume that anyone who was Asian would
know martial arts, as it was rather removed everyday life.
Thus, early 20
th
century America had no strong tradition of martial arts films, and
none associated with China. While martial arts were associated with mystique, it did not
46

convey a coherent set of philosophies or represented distinct ideological positions. As
Davis Miller recalls in his memoir, he had asked to enroll in karate after watching
Muhammad Ali and James Bond, however his Italian instructor largely spouted mystical
stories (Miller 17). It was only after engaging in a fight at school that Miller realized that
what he was taught was useless for self-defense (27). In addition, both a sense of mystique
and the use of martial arts for slapstick comedy distanced martial arts from the common
people. Bruce Lee introduced kungfu to the US against this backdrop. As Max Pollard writes
in Black Belt Magazine in 1967, “interest in gung-fu has mounted and increased steadily
since ‘The Green Hornet’ went on the air. Because the masked character played it straight
instead of gagging it up in satire, the series didn't turn out to be another eternal ‘Bonanza’”
(“Is ‘The Green Hornet’s’ Version of Gung-Fu Genuine?” 18). In addition, Lee’s films
exhibited folk heroes in the present or recent history rather than in a mystical past, such as
an adoptee who goes to Thailand to work in an ice factory (The Big Boss), or a Chinese
restaurant worker in Rome (Way of the Dragon). While Lee could be seen in hindsight as
reinforcing the association of martial arts with Asians, he also demystified what was
previously an elite skill and made the kungfu genre’s discourse of common heroism
available to American audiences.

Martial Arts Genres
Common heroism was not a new phenomenon in Hong Kong cinema, however. In
Chinese martial arts genres, kungfu films emerged from its antecedent, wuxia films, partly
to establish average folk heroes against wuxia’s mysticism and fantastic tropes. The wuxia
genre emerged as a popular literary form starting from the early 20
th
century, and some of
47

its tropes are ancient Chinese settings, swordplay with iconic weapons, and the presence of
divine, supernatural, and other magical forces
8
. “Xia,” which has been translated to English
as heroes, warriors, and knight-errants
9
, tend to derive abilities from supernatural forces
and the cultivation of their energy (qi), allowing them to channel magic and perform
fantastical feats such as levitation (Teo, Hong Kong Cinema 98). In addition, they tend to
live alone and apart from society, such as in bandit hideouts, deserted temples, and the
wilderness (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 18). Kungfu, on the other hand, is more
geographically realistic and socially embedded. Teo explains that various kungfu schools
have an evolutionary history linked with the south of China, which coalesced after the early
Manchu (Qing Dynasty) government burned the Shaolin Temple, causing Shaolin
practitioners to migrate southward and establish their own styles.
Wuxia continued to be popular in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast
Asia through the post-WWII period and in the mid-1900s, when many mainland Chinese
filmmakers were first in exile from Japanese-occupied China or subsequently in exile from
the Communist government.
10
These film makers recognized that audiences were getting
tired of wuxia tropes, and sought to reinvent the genre with local Cantonese folk heroes
(Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 58). These heroes were often exaggerations and
embellishments on real kungfu practitioners who lived during the late Qing dynasty and

8
As Stephen Teo writes in Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, martial arts as a genre can involve any kind of martial art
and have local traditions in many East and Southeast Asian countries. Wuxia and kungfu genres are specifically
Chinese genres, though the word “wuxia” is a transliteration from a Meiji-era Japanese term, which Japanese no
longer regularly uses (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 2).
9
“Xia” refers to someone with exceptional physical abilities and who espouse a sense of chivalry, and has no
precise English equivalent. I will use the term “hero,” though acknowledging that its definition does not map
perfect to “xia.”
10
In addition, as Teo writes, it was not until the 1980s that Hong Kong had to face up to the reality of the PRC as a
political entity, so a nostalgic longing for Chinese culture was pervasive across the diaspora, which wuxia films
could give access to (Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 10).
48

early Republic of China, such as Ip Man and Wong Fei-hung. In these stories, recent state
decline and foreign invasions often become drivers of conflict. These qualities make the
kungfu hero’s social status slightly different from the mythical and singular wuxia hero,
where the kungfu hero is invested with the role of a representative for a regional, national,
or ethnic community. In addition, kungfu protagonists do not have supernatural abilities,
and tend to be from the peasant or merchant classes. As such, they have no access to
weapons, and therefore use hand-to-hand combat. As Teo writes, “the nature of wuxia is
more abstract and philosophical […] while kungfu apparently emphasizes the actual and
pragmatic application of combat techniques as well as training” (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts
Cinema 5).
The commoner or working class backgrounds of Lee’s characters and their combat
styles mean that his films fall squarely in the kungfu genre. From this overview, it is
possible to see that Bruce Lee popularized the kungfu genre in the West but not the wuxia
genre, which did not translate as well due to their historical specificity and reliance on
mystical elements that stretched Western audiences’ sense of plausibility (Chong 160).
11

This is not to say that interest in wuxia did not follow, or that American audiences rejected
all forms of mysticism. The hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan drew upon mystical tropes from a
range of kungfu films from the 1970s and 1980s, such as the 36 chambers of Shaolin.

Contemporaneous Genres

11
In comparison, partly due to longer history of Japanese martial arts in the US, samurai films that were similarly
historical and contained swordplay but not mysticism did fairly well, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
However, samurai films did not reach the same critical mass as kungfu films in the US. For the most part, this is due
to the volume of low-budget kungfu films that Hong Kong studios were willing to produce, with their immediate
target being the sizeable Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.
49

In the absence of a robust martial arts genre in the US, kungfu films have often been
compared to a number of domestic film genres, such as action films defined broadly, spy
thrillers, and Westerns, which formed part of its context of reception. By citing different
genres to compare and contrast with kungfu genres, critics and scholars have also drawn
attention to the different ideological significances of kungfu. As the opening quotation from
Davis Miller shows, teenagers who were fans of Bruce Lee were also attracted to Batman,
The Green Hornet, and James Bond alike. However, Vijay Prashad points to an important
difference between spy thrillers and kungfu narratives, which is that the main characters in
kungfu narratives are not a member of the elite, and instead of having access to gadgets
(and more broadly, Western technology), they can only rely on their fists (126). Scholars
have even read the martial body as a Chinese technology (Lo 93). In addition, Prashad
argues that James Bond’s adversaries were racialized stand-ins for Communists, whereas
Lee’s characters registered as racialized underdogs and represented a decolonial force
(126). For example, Fist of Fury tells the story of Chen Zhen, a kungfu student who
retaliates against the racist actions of the Japanese colonial government, such as denying
the Chinese access to parks (along with dogs) and calling the Chinese the “sick men of East
Asia.” Scholars also point out that it is only in the Hollywood production of Enter the
Dragon where Lee’s character becomes neutralized in a spy thriller genre. He is an agent
dispatched by the British colonial government in Hong Kong, with a desire for personal
mission of avenging his sister, which does not reflect any postcolonial sentiments (Hunt
161). Teo reads this film as Hollywood attempt to take nationalism out of Bruce Lee,
relegating him to the role of a “mere action hero” (Teo 117).
50

The synergy between the martial arts film and the Western has been even better
documented, with titles such as The Magnificent Seven (1960) standing as an early remake
of Seven Samurai. In terms of exhibition, Desser writes that urban theatres frequently
double-billed Westerns and kungfu films, which reinforced their similarities (“The Kung Fu
Craze” 26). Notably, Westerns proliferated on television, such as the series Kung Fu (1972-
5) (for which Warner Bros. may have considered Bruce Lee), which tells the story of a
Shaolin monk who travels the Old West looking for his family and righting wrongs along
the way. Introducing kungfu into the Western was a new concept for the series, but it also
drew upon the sense throughout the early and mid 20
th
century that the American West
had an Asian character, which was reinforced by Asian American communities along the
west coast and Asian arts and architecture imported by west coast elites and collectors
(Francaviglia 257). In this context, it makes sense that Kung Fu was promoted as “an
Eastern Western” (Pilato)
12
.
Similar to wuxia settings, the Old West was a place / is an imaginary space without
consistent state infrastructure and legal parameters, necessitating individuals to impose
their own sense of justice (Tasker). However, as both Desser and Yvonne Tasker note, the
Western declined in popularity through the 60s and 70s. Tasker writes in Spectacular
Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema that in this period, Westerns were slowly
replaced by urban crime dramas and ongoing televised accounts of the war in Vietnam (68).
Despite the roughness of the Old West, it is in the end a romanticized space where
individual heroes still believe in pursuing justice, which the 1970s climate had difficulty

12
In the past decade, there has also been a number of Westerns made in East Asia, such as The Good, the Bad, and
the Weird (South Korea, 2008) and Let the Bullets Fly (PRC, 2010). This phenomenon is discussed in Stephen Teo’s
Eastern Westerns: Film and Genre Outside and Inside Hollywood.
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relating to (Tasker 68). Accompanying this shift away from the Western is also a shift in
what actual space constitutes “the West.” In the 60s and 70s, arguably the space that
succeeded the West in representing lawlessness and danger was Vietnam, though without
the optimism associated with the West that an unstructured context enables heroic self-
expression. This decline of naivety associated with the Western can be seen in the
performance of The Green Berets (1968), where Western star John Wayne plays a special
forces Colonel who is vindicated in his belief that the US should intervene in war. While his
persona of a gritty, individualist warrior worked in the context of the Western, it was
panned by critics, with Roger Ebert criticizing the film for depicting the war in terms of
cowboys and Indians (Ebert).
Sylvia Chong, in The Oriental Obscene, writes that media images during the war fed
into American fantasies of Asians as the victims or perpetrators of violence, from the
famous photograph of Kim Phuc after being hit by napalm, to stories of torture under the
Viet Cong. Fantasies of violence helped the US to construct a self-identity apart from Asians,
portrayed as the obscene (26). At the same time, there emerged a sense that Asians were
better at violence (whether committing or withstanding it), which was bolstered by kungfu
films bearing the image of the powerful martial artist. Chong argues that the fact that
kungfu films became popular was not only a symptom of the Vietnam era, but that these
films provided a remedy in that they taught Americans how to master trauma and achieve
self-discipline (175). Indeed, as Bruce Lee scholar Paul Bowman put it, Americans in this
era were forced to pay attention to “little yellow guys in pajamas” (Bowman, in I Am Bruce
Lee), which could refer to both Vietnamese guerilla fighters and Bruce Lee. Chong writes
that American identification with Asians through violence in this era was “complex and
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potentially powerful” in that some of it was an effort to grapple with otherness and come to
terms with the violence that the US inflicted both in Asia and on itself, however by the
1980s, martial arts had been neutralized. Informing her reading is The Karate Kid (1984),
where martial arts become an aestheticized facet of multicultural consumption (279).
Chong also notes that between 1964 and 1977, The Green Berets was the only film
that tried to address the war directly (127); in the intervening time, urban crime dramas
were a way of addressing it metaphorically (128). In “Genre Anxiety and Racial
Representation in 1970s Cinema,” George Lipsitz argues that 1970s films exhibited “genre
anxiety,” where non-White ethnic elements were added to classical American genres in the
1960s as a means to deal with changing social relations (209). In this framework, urban
crime dramas were means of reinstating White authority figures as agents of justice in the
1970s, as a response to Civil Rights movements in the 1960s. The eponymous officer in the
Dirty Harry series is especially is shown violating civil rights and due process to achieve
what he believes to be just. While Lipsitz does not discuss the war in Vietnam as a driver of
genre anxiety, it is possible to bring in Tasker’s analysis to recognize that international as
well as national ethnic relations were unsettling cinematic genres. While they belong to
different genres, Dirty Harry shares similar concerns with The Green Berets, as they both
work to reinstate White authority figures in non-White social contexts, whether they be the
multiethnic inner city or Vietnam.
Chong’s analysis of the eruption and domestication of kungfu across the 1970s and
80s is pertinent for understanding America’s position regarding the Asian other, however
the 1970s already presented urban crime dramas where White audiences could circumvent
dealing with otherness. Thus, in addition to pointing out that that many White Americans
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identified with Lee, it is important to underscore that they did so in a cultural context that
presented multiple models of heroism and race relations, among which they chose Lee.
Leon Hunt’s account of his experiences watching Way of the Dragon, where he felt no urge
to identify with Chuck Norris and accepted that Lee’s display of kungfu is designed to
challenge Western expertise, signifies a different subculture’s inclinations compared to
audiences who were invested in a figure like Dirty Harry.

Kungfu and Subcultural Masculinity
Just as there were multiple models of masculinities on offer, there were also
multiple generations and multiple subcultures of masculinity. Chong’s analysis implies a
pathway to Bruce Lee that begins with young men achieving adulthood through a
mainstream American masculinity, which is damaged due to experience in the war in
Vietnam, causing them to seek out corresponding Asian source of reconstruction, which is
kungfu. However, in discussing the audience of Lee’s films, Desser writes that they
appealed "not to mainstream audiences struggling with the legacy of the Vietnam War, but
precisely to those subcultural, disillusioned, disaffected audiences who had opposed the
war or who were more radically and generally alienated from much of mainstream culture"
(Desser, “Consuming Asia” 186).
“Subcultural, disillusioned and disaffected audiences” that scholarship has already
discussed at length are American audiences of colour. Similar to the industry decision to
show kungfu films with Westerns, critics and distributors also reinforced similarities
between kungfu films and blaxploitation films, which also reached its height in the early
1970s. When Five Fingers of Death reached the top of the box office charts in 1973, Variety
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noted that it was Warner Brothers’ second success after releasing Superfly the year before
(Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze” 22). Desser notes that double-billing with blaxploitation films
was one of the reasons that critics did not take kungfu films seriously (25). Indeed, as Amy
Ongiri writes, industry decisions to exhibit kungfu and blaxploitation films together was
often motivated by assumptions that ethnic audiences did not watch films for intellectual
engagement and thus enjoyed action and other sensationalist genres (34). However, Black
audiences read Lee’s films as examples of non-White heroes who challenged the status quo,
especially since other than The Big Boss, all of the other films featured White antagonists.
Ongiri notes that a highlight for Black audiences is a scene in Fist of Fury where Lee’s
character, Chen Zhen, kicks down a sign outside a public park saying “No Chinese or dogs,”
and argues that it is memorable because its statement against segregation was explicitly
political when the kungfu genre largely wasn’t (35). This is not entirely accurate; rather,
Lee’s innovations on the kungfu genre were to make global racial hierarchies explicit by
representing diasporic heroes. Kungfu narratives sometimes show problems resulting from
Western and Japanese encroachment on China, however they took place within China and
the heroes’ direct antagonists were only rarely European. Ethnic nationalism was more
often expressed through Han resistance against the Manchu, who comprised the ruling
dynasty at the time, which may not register for non-Chinese audiences. In contrast, Lee’s
Way of the Dragon, he directed, starred in, and produced, made a strong impression
because of its international story; Lee plays Tang Lung, a Chinese restaurant employee in
Rome, who trains the restaurant staff so they can resist the mafia’s attempt to take over
their property, and eventually faces off against the mafia’s hired man, Colt (Chuck Norris).
In the documentary I am Bruce Lee, Hollywood producer and director Reginald Hudlin
55

recalls watching Way of the Dragon in the Fox Theatre, St. Louis, with an all-Black audience;
when the film portrayed the iconic fight in the Coliseum between Tang and Colt, the
audience cheered for Tang entirely (I Am Bruce Lee).
Bruce Lee’s legacy is also very strong in Black entertainment. As Jim Kelly starred in
Enter the Dragon, and continued to use martial arts in American films, martial arts
periodical Black Belt Magazine had published articles by different writers evaluating Jim
Kelly as “a black Bruce Lee,” “the next Bruce Lee” (Black Belt Communications 37, 38), and
also compiled fan mail about Kelly’s performance. Some fans objected to what the
perceived as Kelly’s cheap imitation of Lee (Black Belt Communications 32). On the other
hand, some fans applauded Kelly’s performances. Sgt. S. E. Hopson wrote to the magazine
calling out the implicit racism in criticisms against Jim Kelly, and wrote that “Kelly did
indeed incorporate some of Bruce Lee’s moves with his own, not just to make himself look
better I’m sure, but to show the world that Bruce was the greatest and that he (Kelly) was
touched by Bruce’s expertise and charisma […] I will never see Bruce face to face, but at
least I can hold on to his memory through the media” (32). Similarly, Lawrence D. Blacknall
writes that “Kelly does not copy Lee if anything – he keeps Bruce Lee alive” (32). In
addition, long before Kill Bill (2003) featured Lee’s yellow jumpsuit, it was worn by a Leroy
Green, a Black teenager and aspiring kungfu master in Berry Gordy’s film The Last Dragon
(1985).
Subaltern masculinities are not limited to men of colour. The story that Davis
Miller’s memoir tells is of a young White man under the pressure of achieving mainstream
American masculinity, who decides to forgo it when presented with a figure like Bruce Lee.
Miller certainly started martial arts initially due to a desire to attain masculinity and
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popularity as a teenager. He explains that at school, he had been pushed into the girl’s
bathroom and labeled “Fetus” due to being small and pale (17), and thus karate was a
means to prove that he was an adult and a man. However, the opening quotation comes
from a passage where two students on the Mount Tabor High School wrestling team, Alvin
Lindsor and Sam Stone, challenge Miller to a fight so that they could prove that karate was
inferior. Besides Alvin and Miller as participants in the fight, is important to note that the
male teachers are implicitly grooming boys at the school into their idea of adult masculinity
through non-intervention or through their support of Alvin. If Miller’s description of his
school climate is true, the adult men in Miller’s life could not offer him an alternative model
of masculinity, perhaps because in their generation they did not have any – Miller’s
teacher’s generation would have grown up in a fairly prosperous postwar climate, perhaps
with Westerns as a media staple.
Miller hadn’t yet seen a Bruce Lee film by the time of his fight with Alvin, however
his experiences demonstrate that Lee’s politics do not register only through film narratives,
but also through his martial arts style. During the fight, Alvin taunts Miller by saying, “You
gonna try’n kick me, pussy? Only girls and faggots kick each other” (25). Boxing and
wrestling had historical legitimacy as a gentleman’s sport, and although Miller does not say
so, Alvin’s masculinity is secure in part because he has access to this cultural practice. From
a boxer’s perspective, kicking and other strikes below the belt are moves to take undue
advantage, violating a gentlemanly sense of honour, which Alvin extends to misogynist and
homophobic lengths. Interestingly, despite Miller’s worship of Muhammad Ali, he never
expresses a childhood interest in taking up boxing for himself, but chose to learn karate
instead. Miller continues to struggle with hegemonic masculinity as he got older; he writes
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that after graduation, “everybody enrolled in college, or got a job, or joined the military and
ended up in Vietnam. I didn’t do any of those things” (43). He notes that he was passed over
by the draft because he was too thin (47). To be a soldier requires attributes of hegemonic
masculinity – physical size and strength – that he did not have.
Interestingly, even though Miller’s memoir is filled with his childhood
preoccupations with growing out of “Fetus” status, he does not characterize his late
teenage years in the same way. His frustration was not with his peers moving on or
attaining mainstream adult masculinity, but an ineffable sense of wanting something more
out of his future than these paths had to offer (44). When he does eventually go to college,
he catches Enter the Dragon in theatres during his freshman year. Miller describes it as a
life-changing experience, which left him unable to relate to his peers at college: “Guys in the
dorm, sitting around punching each other’s arms, ragging on each other, laughing at each
other’s pain. Things they felt were important, I couldn’t stand it. Pussy, food, dope, money,
accounting; my dick’s bigger’n yours” (66). If the fight with Alvin demonstrates how
hegemonic American masculinity can use a gendered framework to reject a foreign martial
art, American masculinity is also susceptible to challenge by the same logic playing in
reverse; for Miller, Bruce Lee’s kungfu film placed the negative aspects of American
masculinity in sharp relief.
Finally, Miller’s peers also merit discussion. Their attraction to Batman, The Green
Hornet, and James Bond suggest that they may have been invested in male power fantasies
such as exceptional physical abilities and attracting women. However, if these teenagers
simply aspired to hegemonic masculinity, backing Alvin would have been the logical choice.
Instead, they supported someone who used a foreign, feminized fighting style and
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ostensibly lacked masculinity. In terms of kungfu genre conventions, this is not necessarily
a contradiction. Miller’s description of his peers sets them up as the school community’s
equivalent of the commoners in kungfu narratives, as they are comparatively young and
poor. In particular, their lowly status in the school community is determined by their lack
of masculinity, and as a result they are disregarded by older male students like Alvin and
their adult male teachers. In this context, an aspiration towards hegemonic masculinity is
balanced by evidence that hegemonic masculinity is corrupt, and thus Miller’s peers back
him as their version of a folk hero from their own ranks.

The Green Hornet and Kungfu as Superpower
The behavior of Miller’s fellow students at Mount Tabor High School can be
interpreted according to kungfu genre conventions, however they would not have been in
contact with the genre by the time they were in high school, and would not have
consciously used it as an interpretative framework. The effect that James Bond may have
had on these students is also difficult to determine, but at least what scholars describe as
the series’ racist and xenophobic tropes did not seem to dissuade them from backing Miller
and his foreign, feminized form of martial arts. In recognizing that James Bond did not
necessarily have an ideological effect on its young audiences, the question becomes, what
other genres or media franchises may have influenced young adult audiences as they
approached kungfu for the first time?
Miller begins his memoir with a description of his first experience seeing Bruce Lee
in Enter the Dragon, which he compares to seeing a real-life Superman. With Lee’s first
appearance onscreen, “There was silence around him. The air crackled as the camera
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moved toward him and he grew in the center of the screen, luminous.” Of Lee’s martial arts,
Miller writes,
And then Bruce Lee launched the first real kick I had ever seen. My jaw fell open like
the business end of a dump truck. The man could fly. Not like Superman – better –
his hands and feet flew whistling through sky. Yes, better – this wasn’t simply a
movie, a shadowbox fantasy. There was a seed of reality in every Lee movement. (4)

While Miller did not watch The Green Hornet when it aired, the audience reaction to Lee’s
performance as Kato may have been similar, due in part to the elasticity of the superhero
genre as well as core similarities between the superhero and martial arts genres. As Henry
Jenkins argues, superheroes figures can exist in many different genres, such as horror,
thrillers, and even romantic comedies, pulling these narratives under the umbrella genre of
superhero narratives (“Just Men in Tights” 17). Part of the reason is that before the
standardization of superheroes comics, superheroes emerged out of genre mixing and
development to begin with. Jenkins notes that the names of early major publishers, such as
Action Comics (Superman), Detective Comics (Batman), and Marvel Mystery reveal that
comic books were working in different genre traditions at the time (28). Pulp magazines,
which featured earlier masked heroes such as the Phantom and Zorro, likewise existed
across genres (27). The Green Hornet, which debuted as a radio drama in 1936, also
featured this kind of elasticity. The series’ premise is that Britt Reid, owner of The Daily
Sentinel newspaper, adopts the persona of the Green Hornet to fight crime while using his
paper to expose it to the public. Reid has no superpowers, but finances high-tech gadgets
and also relies on the martial arts skills of his valet and sidekick Kato. The Green Hornet was
conceived before the canonical advent of superheroes (with the creation of Superman in
1938) and represents the genre flux that existed at the time. The creators of the radio
drama, Fran Striker and George W. Trendle, had previously created the series The Lone
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Ranger, and Britt Reid is meant to be the Lone Ranger’s descendent. Thus, the creators
essentially created a universe or franchise and moved stories within it from a Western to a
crime-fighting story. The same elasticity that enabled the creators to do this also enabled
The Green Hornet to incorporate new tropes such as kungfu.
In addition, the American superhero genre has a great deal in common with martial
arts narratives. Peter Coogan argues that three core traits define superheroes: the
possession of exceptional abilities, often physical in nature, using these abilities for the
benefit of society, and the adoption of iconic identities (31-32).
13
Martial arts heroes exhibit
these traits as well, even though they may lack the superhero’s iconic identity. Even so,
wuxia heroes can have fantastical physical features and dress, gain exclusive and iconic
abilities or weapons, and some of them take on names related to animals (eg Golden
Swallow in King Hu’s Come Drink With Me) or model martial arts styles after animal
movements. Most prominently, when translating superhero narratives into Chinese, the
words “man” or “woman” in the superhero’s name tends to be translated as “xia.” For
example, Iron Man has been translated as “steel iron xia,” and the Green Hornet as “green
hornet xia.” This approach in translation represents a corresponding perspective to Miller’s
instinctual recognition of Bruce Lee as Superman – superheroes are recognized and
marketed as different versions of martial arts heroes among Chinese audiences.
The strongest and most explicit link between superhero and martial arts genres is
their emphasis on exceptional physical feats, and it is no accident that Bruce Lee’s first
acting role in the US was Kato in The Green Hornet. An acquaintance of William Dozier, the

13
Coogan notes that some superheroes lack one of these – Batman, for example, technically does not have any
superpowers, and his abilities are the outcome of physical training and technology. Even so, in cases such as
Batman, the hero’s abilities are beyond what average people can achieve, and their means to achieve those
abilities are also beyond average.
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executive producer of both Batman and The Green Hornet, saw his exceptional performance
at the Long Beach Karate Tournament and recommended him for television (Grams and
Salomonson 319). While The Green Hornet was not strictly a superhero title, the television
series was produced by Dozier and Greenway Productions alongside the better-known
Batman series in 1966. Greenway also created crossover episodes such as the Batman
season 2 two-parter, “A Piece of the Action” and “Batman’s Satisfaction,” in which the two
pairs of crime-fighters go after the same stamp forger. By featuring the Green Hornet and
Kato and Batman and Robin in the same universe enables audiences to perceive The Green
Hornet to be a superhero show as well, and it was the first time that many Americans saw
kungfu on television was in the context of a superhero show.
This had paradoxical effects – kungfu came to both signify a superpower but also a
practical skill. There is some evidence that the production treated kungfu as an iconic
superpower; Britt Reid actor Van Williams says in an interview that he wanted to learn
some kungfu from Lee, but when they were discussing their roles, both decided that
martial arts should be exclusive to Kato (Beerdy). Lee also explained that he slowed down
some of his movements, because “All you could see were people falling down in front of me.
Even when I slowed down, all the camera showed was a blur” (B. Lee, The Bruce Lee Story
74-75). At the same time, Lee was already trying to change the perception of martial arts as
mystical and fantastic. In his memoir, his widow Linda Lee Caldwell writes that used the
role of Kato to present his philosophy of practical fighting, which entailed trying to defeat
his opponents as efficiently as possible (L. Lee, The Bruce Lee Story 95). Kato is indeed very
efficient in the series’ fight scenes, using two or three strikes to take each opponent down.
In addition, Van Williams recalls that because it was a part of the Batman series, the
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original screenplay had Batman and Robin win the fight, and Bruce Lee walked off the show
in protest because it would be unrealistic for Kato to lose to Robin (Newsweek Special
Edition). As a result, the screenplay was amended so that the fight ended in a draw.
Lee’s performances in his films further cemented his legendary kungfu abilities, and
fans continue to discuss Lee as a superhero until today. In his interview with Newsweek,
actor and martial artist Michael Jai White confirms that he started martial arts as a child
due to Bruce Lee’s influence, and says “If you were a kid and you wanted to live vicariously
through a superhero, he is what you want” (qtd. in “Living His Legacy” 88). The video “6
Clues Bruce Lee May Have Been SUPERHUMAN!” alludes to Lee’s explanation that he had to
slow down for the camera, but embellishes it with more superhero tropes; contributor
Mike Chen states that “his movements were so fast that it looked like a fight from a
Superman movie where his opponents fell over and Lee never appeared to move at all.”
TopTenz, an entertainment blog, also features this factoid in their video, “Top 10 Reasons
Bruce Lee May Have Been Superhuman,” which has to date garnered over 5 million views.
The reception of Bruce Lee as a superhero may also be driving audiences to understand
other kungfu practitioners as superheroes. The producers of the Youtube channel Accented
Cinema released a video about the Ip Man film series as examples of how to approach the
problem of constructing good challenges for heroes who seem invincible. What is
interesting is that their video is titled “Ip Man: How to Write Superman,” and the challenges
in each Ip Man film is compared to corresponding challenges in Superman films (Accented
Cinema).
More subtly, Bruce Lee’s iconic status has also meant that he is remembered as a
superhero through performance, similar to how superhero costumes are popular for
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dressing up. Lee does not have a set costume like superheroes, however his style self-
presentation is no less iconic. Fans recall that at the height of Bruce Lee’s popularity, boys
got bowl haircuts to be more like him (Manny Pacquiao, qtd. I Am Bruce Lee), and Dan
Inosanto, Lee’s friend and student who introduced nunchakus to him, claimed that so many
children were injuring themselves with toy or homemade nunchakus that California
outlawed them (I Am Bruce Lee).
After the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Justice League films, there
are numerous forum threads online debating what would happen if Bruce Lee fought these
superheroes. For example, the ComicVine thread “Moive [sic] Bruce Lee vs. movie Captain
America” begins with “alcapone22” setting up a scenario where Steve Rogers (Captain
America) finds himself on Han’s island in Enter the Dragon, without armour and shield, and
having to contend with Bruce Lee’s character Mr. Lee (alcapone22). This post generated a
discussion of 70 responses; “steelhound56” was surprised at the number of responders
siding with Bruce Lee and posted “the Bruce fanboyism is strong in this thread…..”
(steelhound56). In addition to speculation, superheroism could be introduced or reinforced
in play, and photographs of Japanese photographer “Hot.Kenobi” gives some clues as to this
might take place. In 2017, Hot.Kenobi went viral for macro photographs of superhero
action figures in tableaux involving real environments and everyday objects, such as a
scene showing the Hulk holding back a distraught Captain America as Spider-Man and Iron
Man puts his shield into a CD player (this image has been reblogged by both Stan Lee and
Robert Downey Jr.) (Hot.Kenobi, untitled). Hot.Kenobi’s instagram includes about 900 such
photographs, mostly involving superhero action figures, and the rest Star Wars action
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figures, however a Bruce Lee is the only action figure included from outside these
franchises (as well as the only nonfictional action figure).
Although Hot.Kenobi’s photographs rely on advanced technology, they are an
extension of the oft-cited, low-tech ways that children have played at being Bruce Lee. Fans
who helped to spread Hot,Kenobi’s photographs may not be interacting with material toys,
however various outlets and fans add their own take to the scenarios that the photographs
initially introduced. A popular photo shows Batman and Bruce Lee facing off with each
other, which is titled “BvB” (Bruce vs. Bruce) (Hot.Kenobi, BvB). When Turnthispage.com
reported on his photos, they added a caption to this image that imagines what Bruce Lee
may be saying: “Hey Doofus. Guess who’s about to put his foot up your over-armored ass?
THIS guy, that’s who. Now step aside. We are not sick men!” (Turn This Page). Perhaps
unknowing, Hot.Kenobi and Turnthispage.com came together to conclude the unfinished
business of the Batman and Green Hornet crossover episodes fifty years before, by playfully
having Bruce Lee face off against Batman, rather than Kato against Robin. From
Turnthispage.com’s caption, it seems clear that fans believe that Bruce Lee would win.
Superman and Everyman
In addition to memorializing Bruce Lee as a superhero for his speed, agility, and
strength, fans (especially those in the role of cultural critics and academics) portray Lee as
a superhero with a focus on his social role and ethics. For example, in the documentary I
am Bruce Lee, a commentator (possibly actor and UFC fighter Cung Le) describes Lee as
“the superhero of the Asian community” (qtd. in I am Bruce Lee). To remember Lee as a
superhero in these terms relies on a transposition between the ethics of superheroes and
martial arts heroes. Despite stories from the two genres arising in different societies, fans
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link the two genres by implicitly recognizing that they share preoccupations with injustice
and inequality, the validity of vigilantism, and the relationship between the exceptional
hero and the community they serve. By virtue of Bruce Lee occupying both genres, fans
have also used the ethos associated with his kungfu characters to posit ideal superhero
types. Specifically, in contradistinction to some superheroes which rely on their difference
from other people, fans and critics explicitly or implicitly establish Lee as a kind of
superhero whose identity as a common man is vital to his heroism,
The superpowers of superheroes can represent wish fulfilment, however they also
ask questions about the legitimacy of institutions to hold power, and by extension, the
value of individuals who are exceptions to these institutions (Peaselee 37). Indeed, these
questions have increasingly defined the genre. Superheroes of the Golden Age of comics
(late 1930s-1950s) tended to reflect the social ideology of the times and lacked reflexivity,
such as the almost wholesale mobilization of superheroes to promote American
participation in WWII. Heroes of this era have also invited the most criticism for their
exceptionalism, with some scholars arguing that superheroes are uniquely American
because of their exceptional status. Coogan writes that superheroes impose their values
onto others, project enormous power, and solve problems that exceed the capacities of the
authorities, which corresponds to the American conception of itself as a world superpower
and the sole superpower after the Cold War (231). More specifically, Robert Jewett and
John Sheldon Lawrence argue that superhero comics helped to establish a new American
mythology that denounces the limits of constitutional government while insisting that
democracy can only be achieved by individuals who have the power to transcend the
democratic and legal process (29). Figures such as Captain America directly represent
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American ideals, while a figure like Superman, sent to earth by his father, draws on the
desire for Americans to follow a messianic saviour (31). Indeed, as Jason Dittmer writes,
the film Superman Returns ends with Lois Lane writing an editorial recanting her previous
article “Why We Don’t Need Superman” (121). Writing two years after 9/11, Jewett and
Lawrence argue that this tendency has real consequences for policy, since the US
circumvented international law in the name of doing good (xiv).
Some of these values also underpin martial arts genres, and therefore a vision of
figures with exceptional power is not necessarily unique to American popular culture. As
David Bordwell writes in Planet Hong Kong, heroes do not align themselves with state
justice: “Chinese history is full of corrupt and rapacious rulers, and there is no strong
tradition of appeal to an impersonal principle of justice” (26). Instead, heroes exercise a
personal code of honour and seek to protect particular people, such as pursuing revenge
when they and those close to them are wronged. They are typically transient, going where
work, challenges, and personal missions take them, and forego riches and status. In wuxia
literature, this kind of alternative, removed social space is represented by an abstract space
called jianghu (literally, “rivers and lakes”) (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 18). Jianghu is
not openly antagonistic towards mainstream society; cooperation or antagonism occurs on
a case by case basis.
14
Stephen Teo also historicizes heroes and jianghu by pointing to
debates by ancient social theorists. For example, while some critics argued that xia are
selfish and anarchic, Han Dynasty scholar Sima Qian argued that heroes acted outside
social norms in contexts where the state cannot render protection, such as the Warring

14
A prominent example is the relationship between Li Mubai and Sir Te in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Despite
being a member of the imperial family, Sir Te is a benefactor to the heroes of jianghu, and they treat him as such,
even if they may intervene in other matters of government corruption.
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States period where warlords feuded amongst themselves (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts
Cinema 19). While a hero seemed to follow an individualized sense of righteousness, this
“stemmed from his disgust of the elite and his empathy with the lower classes” (19).
In “Superheroes, Moral Economy, and the Iron Cage,” Robert Peaselee aims to
discuss the position of the superhero between being exceptional and being representative.
Peaslee starts off his article by saying that “superhero characters are both Superman and
Everyman, alter ego and superego,” and “we are meant to both identify with and distance
ourselves from such otherworldly characters” (37). Rather than a psychoanalytic approach
to analyze an individual hero, however, it is important to note that the tension between
distance and identification is a vital factor for the degree of a hero’s exceptionalism, and the
uses to which their exceptionalism is put. In the superhero genre, it is variations in origin
stories and the trope of secret identities that move heroes closer or farther away from the
common people. For martial arts genres, the shift from wuxia to kungfu narratives also
resulted in a grounding of martial arts heroes in the common people.
From the inception of superheroes until the beginning of the postwar period,
superheroes were dominated by aliens or mythological figures. However, Stan Lee was
responsible for creating heroes at Marvel that were humans with realistic social positions
and personal flaws. He recalls that he paired up with Steve Ditko for Spider-Man
specifically because Ditko’s artwork did not glamorized superheroes, but instead made
them look like “the average man in the street” (S. Lee Ch. 3). Peaselee examines the worlds
of Spider-Man, Hellboy, and Catwoman to argue that superhero narratives represent
institutions disconnected from the public good, where bureaucratization results in
inefficiency, depersonalization, and abuses by those in power (38). For example, Spider-
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Man recognizes that the police prosecute crimes but often fail to prevent them (41), and
Catwoman realizes that financial gain can sway scientific objectivity so that toxic beauty
products can go on the market (48). Similarly, when it comes to the kungfu genre, heroes
tend to be based on real kungfu practitioners, who tended to be from the merchant or
working classes in Southern China.
15
For example, the popular figure of Wong Fei-hung
(played by Jackie Chan in Drunken Master and Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in China) came
from a family of physicians. Apart from physical feats, it is the common origin of kungfu
heroes that enabled Bruce Lee to find a place in American superhero narratives in the
1960s. It is possible that this dimension is also a reason that wuxia narratives did not catch
on in the US – their mysticism was not only foreign, but also somewhat elitist.
The secret identity in superhero narratives also serves to move heroes closer to the
people. Usually, the trope of secret identities involves one identity that is based on
superhuman heroics, and another that is based on being a human citizen. In their criticism
of superhero exceptionalism, Jewet and Lawrence argue that superheroes must sever their
superhero identity from their citizen identity, because they cannot be connected in any way
to the corrupt democratic process that they are meant to transcend (29). They argue
specifically that while Clark Kent’s work as a journalist should ameliorate society, it serves
simply as a disguise for Superman’s real world-changing activities (31). On the other hand,
in an essay written for Superman’s 50
th
anniversary, Gary Engle focuses more on
Superman’s childhood as Clark Kent. He argues that “Superman’s powers make the hero
capable of saving humanity; Kent’s total immersion in the American heartland makes him
want to do it” (85). The emphasis on either a character’s superhero identity or citizen

15
Teo also points out, however, that kungfu heroes tend to include very few women, whereas the wuxia genre
includes many (Hong Kong Cinema 102).
69

identity also differentiates mythical and alien superheroes from Marvel’s human heroes.
Jewet and Lawrence’s discussions about the secondary nature of the citizen identity is not
wrong, however it is more applicable to the former. For characters like Superman who
have always been superior, the civilian character is clearly their disguise, whereas for
characters such as Spider-man and Catwoman who have lived socially embedded lives,
neither their superhero identity nor their civilian one has a clear or inherent primacy.
Martial arts characters do not have secret identities, however when critics compare
them to superheroes, they also evoke dual identities metaphorically. Po Fung, former
research officer of the Hong Kong Film Archive, titled his catalogue entry for a Bruce Lee
exhibit “From Wild Child to Superman – Bruce Lee in Films.” He characterizes the
experience of watching Lee onscreen as watching two different people, since Lee’s
character often starts by being a nondescript and even slightly obtuse young man, but this
persona vanishes during fight scenes: “The difference between fighting and not fighting
seems to reflect a double identity: the ordinary person by day is transformed into a
superhero when pushed” (71), and “in that moment, he is no longer Cheng Chao An or Chen
Jeh, he is Bruce Lee, a mortal possessed by the god of kung fu” (71). Po is clearly
referencing Clark Kent as Superman here, and he argues that the country bumpkin
character that Lee plays is a disguise, whereas Bruce Lee is his true heroic identity.
However, he also qualifies this by arguing that what makes Lee’s films so enjoyable is that
he is able to unite the country bumpkin and the superhero in one character through
comedy. Po contrasts The Way of the Dragon where Lee plays Tang Lung, a Chinese
restaurant worker, with Enter the Dragon, where Lee plays a government agent (also called
70

Lee), and argues that the latter’s lack of a commoner identity is a significant reason that the
character lacks appeal (72).
As previously discussed, Prashad, Hunt, and Teo discuss the dissatisfaction with
Lee’s government agent character in terms of postcolonialism, with Teo saying that the
Hollywood production tried to take the nationalism out of Lee and relegated him to a “mere
action hero” (Teo 117). A postcolonial reading of Lee highlights the target of his power,
which is the colonial or neocolonial elite, however a superhero reading of Lee also draws
attention to a particular tension between two aspects of his character and their ethical
connection. The dissatisfaction with Bruce Lee’s character in Enter the Dragon is
dissatisfaction with someone who has the power to combat the elite, but lacks a connection
to the common people, and is thus “a mere action hero.” To adapt Engle’s comment
regarding Superman, Bruce Lee’s kungfu skills make him capable of fighting for commoners,
but his country bumpkin personas embed him in commoner societies, which make his
intervention on their behalf necessary.
Lee’s country bumpkin characters also pinpoint that the fact that being a human
citizen is no guarantee that superheroes reflect the will of the people; it is particular
identities and socioeconomic statuses. Peaselee’s emphasis on Spider-Man and Catwoman’s
observations about the limits of modern bureaucratization are also observations that
emerge from embedded social positions. Catwoman is a woman who, across her various
permutations, has faced cosmetics corporations, sex work industries, and most
prominently for a thief, the unequal distribution of wealth and property. Greg M. Smith
argues that changes to superheroes’ civilian identities across time reflect changing
relationships between the superhero and labour. The comparatively weak civilian secret
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identities of the classic Golden Age superheroes actually obscure their class privilege, since
a survey of these secret identities turns up all professionals, such as journalists, scientists,
and lawyers. However, “As the 60s bring about a widespread questioning of an
unproblematic faith in the wisdom of institutions and an open rebellion against the
strictures of the corporate mind, it becomes more difficult to maintain the more
straightforward, classic linkage between the professional secret identity and the superhero”
(Smith 135). Instead, Bronze Age comics included greater numbers of heroes whose hero
identity is publically known, and through which they earn a living, such as Luke Cage,
dubbed “hero for hire” (136). This lack of dual identity implicitly critiques the class bias of
Golden Age heroes, who can carry out superheroics in secret and without an expectation of
financial return because their professional jobs earned them a living, or in the case of
Batman, they have a significant inheritance.
The unity of hero and secret identity moves superheroes closer to kungfu heroes.
Smith notes that “There are no day-laborers and almost no small-business people among
the classic secret identities” (127) – and indeed, kungfu heroes are exactly these kinds of
people. Bruce Lee’s characters follow and extend this pattern. Other than Chen Zhen in Fist
of Fury (whose profession other than his status as a kungfu disciple is not mentioned), they
are all migrant “day labourers,” such as an ice factory worker in The Big Boss, and a
restaurant employee in Way of the Dragon. Jachinson Chan notes that even in Fist of Fury,
Chen Zhen infiltrates Japanese concessions in Shanghai by posing as common workers,
such as a rickshaw driver, a newspaper seller, and a telephone repairman (80). To a certain
extent, Lee uses kungfu conventions of the common hero to find a middle ground between
American heroes of the Golden Age and later heroes for hire, by having his secret identities
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be a part of the common people, and this is implicitly recognized by fans and critics who
laud him for his particular brand of heroism.
By describing him as “a superhero of the Asian community,” the speaker in I Am
Bruce Lee is arguing that Lee, in addition to his films, did not lose the social embeddedness
that maintains his motivation to act on their behalf. This statement also introduces an
ethnic element into superhero identities. While there have been non-White heroes who are
motivated by racial inequality, ethnic consciousness does not define superheroes as a
whole. On the other hand, kungfu heroes’ allegiance to the common people tends to be
coloured by nationalism and ethnic nationalism (Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema 63). As
Teo writes, it is possible to view kungfu heroes as a figure for a Chinese nation under
construction during modernity, as the historical backdrop of kungfu films tend to be end of
the 19
th
century and the first few decades of the 20
th
, which include the overthrow of the
Qing dynasty, a period of warlordism, fractious politics on the part of the Guomingdang
(GMD) government, and the Japanese invasion of China (64). When Chen Zhen kicks down
a sign banning Chinese people and dogs from a park in occupied Shanghai, Bruce Lee
becomes a superhero specifically for communities of colour in the US, which may not have
American superheroes that do so.
The legacy of this is arguably not necessarily prominent in American popular
culture and media after the 1970s. Sylvia Chong argues that films such as The Karate Kid
turn martial arts and its confrontational force into a facet of multiculturalism that can be
safely consumed by White audiences, without facing the history of interethnic trauma
(279). Arguably, superheroes that incorporated martial arts have not explored the
potential of the combination of these two genres. Characters such as Iron Fist and Shang-
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Chi depend mostly on mysticism for their appeal rather than their reflections of everyday
struggles. Shang-Chi’s background is constrained by his origins in Fu Manchu stories, and
Iron Fist’s wealthy family background creates rifts even between him and the rest of the
Defenders (“Worst Behavior”). However, as the next chapter demonstrates, popular
culture from Hong Kong, Asian Americans, and coproductions with the PRC take the
intersection of superhero and kungfu narratives in new ways, often explicitly to transform
imagined ethnic hierarchies and relations in these narratives.

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Chapter 2: The Kato Show: Negotiating Asian Sidekicks in Hong Kong Films, Asian
American Comics, and Chinese Coproductions

Bruce took a trip back to Hong Kong to help his mom with immigration into the United
States […] The Green Hornet was at that time showing on TV in Hong Kong, only the people
were calling it The Kato Show. He was greeted there as a returning star. And so that was the
first time he thought, “Wow, people recognize me here, they remember me.” He did a
couple of interviews on television shows. “Oh yeah, that kid. Now he’s a big star in
Hollywood.” So that was the first inkling that maybe there would be a future there, in Hong
Kong.
- Linda Lee Caldwell, I Am Bruce Lee

Chapter 1 discussed how conventions in common between martial arts and
superhero genres enabled American fans of Bruce Lee in the 1960s-1970s to understand
and applaud for him as a superhero connected to the people. However, this tells only one
side of the story of Bruce Lee fandom; he was not only a Hong Kong star whose films were
exported to the US, but also an American television actor whose shows were seen in Hong
Kong and beyond. Of the few television roles that Lee starred in prior to his return to Hong
Kong, his appearance as Kato in The Green Hornet was his first and the most popular. The
international viewership of The Green Hornet not only helped to launch Lee’s career in
Hong Kong, but it was also one the first television serial featuring an Asian masked
vigilante to reach an international audience. Following the introduction of The Green
Hornet and Batman in Hong Kong, masked vigilantes also became a popular trope in Hong
Kong cinema. More recently, Asian American comics have reckoned with the legacy of
Bruce Lee in the superhero genre, and the PRC has invested in Hollywood’s superhero
blockbusters. Lee’s popular portrayal of Kato began Asian American and Sinophone
developments upon the superhero genre, yet his obvious secondary status to the Green
Hornet means that these communities have since explicitly or implicitly grappled with
Asians being relegated to sidekicks.
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This chapter will define the sidekick as a genre-specific figure in superhero
narratives but also as an allegory for parties in a partnership who are unrecognized or
overshadowed. The position of the sidekick is one of partial inclusion, and this inclusion is
contingent on their ability to support the hero, both as a figure within the story world as
well as a thematic device. This also takes on specific dimensions when, like Kato, the
sidekick is a person of colour. I will discuss these theoretical implications of sidekicks from
comics studies and introduced the problems with the racialized sidekick set up by Bruce
Lee’s Kato. The chapter’s main analysis will discuss approaches to the sidekick from Hong
Kong films that use Kato iconography (The Green Hornet, Black Mask, Legend of the Fist:
Return of Chen Zhen), Asian American superhero comics (Secret Identities: The Asian
American Superhero Anthology, The Shadow Hero), and PRC-Hollywood coproduced films in
the superhero genre (Iron Man 3, X-Men: Days of Future Past). Inflected by different cultural
contexts, fans in different societies apply different strategies to correct for superhero
hierarchies – turning mimicry into a viewing position, performing reparative readings of
sidekicks, and directly challenging the hero and the hierarchy of heroism. As such, these
Asian American and Sinophone superhero narratives do not simply tell local stories with
American superhero tropes, but also model ways to address the implicit inequality behind
conventions that make some heroes and not others. To complement Chapter 1’s discussion
of changing masculine heroism within the US in response to Bruce Lee and kungfu, this
chapter takes Lee’s Kato as a starting point to discuss transformations to a genre that
represents American heroism on an international level.

The Sidekick
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Chapter 1 defined central tropes that make up a superhero – a contemporary urban
figure who has superhuman abilities, who uses these abilities to fight for justice in society,
and who represents themselves using a symbol that reflects their abilities. Sidekicks are
not central to the definition of a superhero, but they are often associated. Danny Fingeroth,
in Superman on the Couch, writes that comics inherited the convention of a hero-sidekick
duo from pulps of the early 1900s, especially Lone Ranger stories that likewise featured a
masked hero on the fringes of society (42). In 1940s superhero comics, the first sidekicks
(including Batman’s Robin and Captain America’s Bucky) were introduced as youths so that
comics seemed more relatable to younger readers (Fingeroth 68). As teenagers became a
distinct identity and consumer category in the postwar period, teen sidekicks declined and
teen heroes with their own titles rose (Fingeroth 140), such as Spider-Man. Comics scholars
tend to agree that as a marketing ploy, introducing teenage characters did not result in
greater identification from young readers, as these readers recognized that the sidekick
was less powerful, and still identified with and aspired to be the titular, adult superhero
(Shyminsky 290).
In addition to literally helping the hero out, sidekicks buttress the normative
identities and discourses that heroes stand for. Most popular early superheroes (with the
exception of Wonder Woman) were men, and their sidekicks were teenage boys. Thus,
along with the recognition that sidekicks were not as powerful as the hero came the
implicit reason that they were not yet men. When the sidekick was a teenager, the
superhero was often his guardian, ostensibly responsible for raising him into adult
masculinity (Shyminsky 289, 291). For example, Robin was originally an orphan that Bruce
Wayne decides to take in. Neil Shyminsky writes in “‘Gay’ Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the
77

Narrative Straightening of the Superhero” that because the teen sidekick has not yet grown
into adult masculinity, he introduces a certain degree of disorder to the mission of the
superhero to restore order, and is thus is a potentially queer figure. However, the
messiness represented by sidekicks generally serve to shore up the normative aspects of
the hero: “As an unexperienced crime fighter who often admits and expresses discomfort
over his double life and the complications and confusions that are a result of the
superperson’s need to transition and metamorphose, the ‘queer’ sidekick is able to carry
the scapegoating mark of sexual ambivalence and inscrutability that would be unacceptable
if applied to the hero” (297). In other words, without the sidekick as foil, the nonconformist
identities and sometimes unlawful actions of the superhero would come into sharper relief.
In addition, comics have tended to make personal struggles and failings the property of the
sidekick, while the spotless hero demonstrates his heroism by helping his sidekick through
them; Shyminsky highlights Foggy Nelson, sidekick to Daredevil /Matt Murdoch, who
commits adultery and murder under the influence of a supervillain (which Daredevil is
conveniently immune to), leaving it to Matt Murdoch to get him an acquittal in court (298-
299).
Shyminsky’s purpose is to focus on White male superheroes and their White male
sidekicks primarily to deal with discourses of hegemonic masculinity, and writes that “all-
female, male-female, and interracial all-male superhero and sidekick pairs have historically
been represented and written in markedly different ways” (293). While this is true,
sidekicks who are women and men of color still broadly buttress a male hero’s normativity.
In Superblack: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, Adilifu Nama devotes a chapter
specifically to the Black sidekick to White superheroes, including the Falcon (Sam Wilson,
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introduced 1969) and War Machine (James Rhodes, introduced 1979), sidekick to Iron Man.
In addition to pointing out the plethora of Black characters in supporting roles, his analysis
of the Falcon includes a narrative arc in 1975 where writers elaborated that Sam Wilson’s
real identity was a street criminal. Red Skull, Captain America’s archenemy, had given him
a new identity to become an “upright and cheerful Negro” so as to plant him with Captain
America (Nama 77). Nama’s sociohistorical analysis is that this represents the fears during
the 1970s that a criminal element would always be latent in Blacks despite social mobility
(77). On the other hand, Shyminsky’s analysis would point to why Marvel did not develop
this kind of back story for Captain America himself. Steve Rogers’s most notably identity
crisis is becoming disillusioned with the US and walking away from his Captain America
persona voluntarily, not because he is being manipulated by a villain. Thus, his autonomy –
and hegemonic masculine heroism – remains intact, similar to Shyminsky’s analysis of
Daredevil.
Certainly the ethnicity or gender of the sidekick changes their dynamic with the
hero (as Nama suggests), however a broader view is that superhero narratives tend to use
identity markers for the sidekick that naturalizes their deviation from the hero and from
the norm, which in turn justifies their inclusion in the narrative but their marginal status as
sidekicks. In the prewar period, the marker tended to be age, as non-White or female
characters were largely excluded. In the postwar period, however, the increase of teenage
male heroes (such as Spider-Man, 1962) coincided with the role of the sidekick increasingly
being filled by women (eg. Batgirl, introduced 1961) or non-White men, including Sam
Wilson / the Falcon. While racial integration in the military and the Civil Rights movement
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may have undergirded the inclusion of women and men of color into superhero narratives,
these identities still marked characters as deviating from and subordinate to superheroes.

The Green Hornet, Kato, and Asian American Masculinity
As an early radio series launched in 1935, The Green Hornet’s character designs
follow conventional ethnic and gender roles. Britt Reid / the Green Hornet does not have
superpowers, but uses his wealth partly to finance high-tech gadgets such as his car, Black
Beauty, and a blaster that mimics the sting of a hornet. In addition to his own fighting skills
and technology, Reid depends on Kato’s martial arts abilities, while Kato works as Reid’s
valet, chauffeur and mechanic. Reid’s identity and true purpose is only known to himself
and Kato, and in some productions, Reid’s secretary and love interest, Lenore Case, and the
district attorney. However, Kato has no secret identity, and as he drives Reid to crime
scenes, he fights crime in a chauffeur’s uniform. These character dynamics and plot points
stayed constant from the radio series’ inception to the end of the television series in 1967;
The Green Hornet maintained a pattern of standalone episodes where the Hornet and Kato
take down a target every episode, with little character development.
George W. Trendle and Fran Striker of Detroit’s WXYZ station had previously
achieved a high level of success with the radio series The Lone Ranger for children, and The
Green Hornet targeted a slightly older audience to teach them about combating political
corruption and fraud. In both The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet, non-White sidekicks
are included to highlight the heroic dimensions of the protagonists. In both cases, the
reason that these sidekicks follow the titular heroes is because the heroes have saved their
life at some point in the past. The Lone Ranger saves Tonto, his Native American sidekick,
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from either when they were children or other White prospectors in the West. In the two
1940s Universal Pictures film serials of The Green Hornet, Kato is identified as a Korean
man whom Reid saved from “native Singaporeans” who tried to kill him due to his Korean
ethnicity (The Green Hornet, dir. Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor). Tonto and Kato’s ethnicities
and their back stories serve to portray both the Reids as active agents of physical prowess
and mastery, but benevolent, widely travelled and cosmopolitan. Indeed, the initial
description of Kato’s relationship with Britt Reid makes him barely a person in his own
right. The first episode of The Green Hornet radio show describes Britt Reid as a wealthy
clubman who is surrounded in his apartment by mounted heads of game that he has
hunted, and that “Kato himself was something of a trophy, brought back from a trip to the
Orient” (Grams and Salomonson 72).
Throughout the story, Kato’s use of martial arts also marks him as ethnically
different from the Hornet. As discussed in the last chapter, the stereotype that all Asians
know martial arts was not in place in the 1930s, however Kato’s martial arts paints him to
be more primitive than the Hornet, using his body as a weapon while the Hornet uses
firearms. In addition, it is curious that while Kato does have access to technology and
technical knowledge – from working as Reid’s mechanic and chauffeur – he does not use
them to fight crime. This partial technologization of Kato stems partly from his initial
conception as Japanese, which the showrunners for the radio series were very careful to
craft. In the introductions to the early episodes, Kato is described as “Britt Reid’s Japanese
valet” (Grams and Salomonson 77). The promotion department released promotional
photos of Raymond Hayashi, the first voice actor for Kato, sitting in the Black Beauty.
Grams and Solamonson write that in a letter, the staff explained that “unless you get the
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angle right, there is danger of making him look like a Chinese, which of course to a Jap is
next to hari-kari [sic]”
16
(78). The emphasis on Kato’s Japaneseness emerged from the
relative standings of Japanese and Chinese in the American imagination in the early 1900s.
The Chinese came to the US primarily as labourers, and China had been falling to a
succession of foreign encroachment and domestic strife. The Japanese, however, had
astounded the world by their military capability and rapid industrialization. Despite this
respect for Japanese modernization, however, Kato is not placed on par with the Green
Hornet when it comes to modernity – he knows enough to provide labour so that the
Hornet can use technology, but does not use it himself.
Kato’s specific ethnicity has shifted across the years, as shifting American
perceptions of particular Asian ethnicities changed the terms of their inclusion as sidekick
characters. Since the initial Japanese version of Kato from the 1930s is not born in the US,
he would have been an alien ineligible for citizenship. In The Green Hornet: A History of
Radio, Motion Pictures, Comics, and Television, Martin Grams and Terry Salomonson write
that, prior to WWII, one of Britt Reid’s preoccupations was what would happen to Kato if
their identities were discovered (121); an episode hints that if Kato fails on a mission, he
would be sent back to Japan (74), presumably because he was an illegal alien.
17
Harbouring
a potential fugitive does not discredit the Green Hornet, since as a vigilante, his priority is
his own definition of justice and not the law; if anything, it bolsters a sense of his

16
The producers were trying to refer to the Japanese ritual suicide practice of hara-kiri.
17
If the character Kato was under threat of deportation as an illegal alien, he fared better than the first voice actor
portraying him. Out of the five voice actors that portrayed Kato through the span of the radio show, the first,
Raymond Hayashi, was Japanese. Hayashi was a first generation immigrant from Japan and had family there that
he visited (Grams and Salomonson 75); in 1942, he was apparently served with an official government notice that
he must be sent back to Japan. According to the production staff on The Green Hornet, he disappeared one day,
presumably interned along with other Japanese Americans, and was never heard from again (Grams and
Salomonson 81).
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exceptionalism and independence. However, by December 1939, when the US was growing
steadily uneasy with Japan’s expansion in the Pacific, Kato’s introduction was changed to
Reid’s “faithful valet” (Grams and Solamonson 77). In 1940, the show seeded comments
that Kato was Filipino (“Walkout for Profit”), and he remained such (or simply “Oriental”)
until the end of the radio series. During the time that Kato was identified as Filipino, the
Philippines was transitioning to independence but still counted as American nationals,
effectively making Kato American. However, the first voice actor for Kato, Raymond
Hayashi, was a first generation immigrant from Japan (Grams and Salomonson 75); in 1942,
he was apparently served with an official government notice that he must be sent back to
Japan. According to the production staff on The Green Hornet, he disappeared one day,
presumably interned along with other Japanese Americans, and was never heard from
again (Grams and Salomonson 81).
As Robert G. Lee writes in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, stereotypes
of Asians since their migration to the US have all been ways of managing their supposed
threats to the American national family (Lee, Robert G. 1999, 6). One of these stereotypes is
the houseboy. A large influx of Chinese men came to the US for the Californian Gold Rush
and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the mid-1800, but faced a double
bind when they ended. For most men, neither the wages from railroad labour nor gold was
enough to return to China, but Chinese exclusion acts were already in place to prevent
them from entering the American labour force and miscegenation laws prevented them
from marrying American women. As a result, Chinese men picked up informal work such as
laundry work and domestic labour. This is reflected in the choice to make Kato Reid’s valet,
which is a domestic position and quite different from Tonto’s relationship to the Lone
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Ranger, despite both sidekicks being men of color. While these Asian workers provided
domestic support, their status as single men in a household not their own also potentially
threatened the existing structure of the family. A way of managing this threat was to
portrayed Chinese male domestics as a desexualized “third sex” (Lee, Robert G. 1999, 101)
– stabilizing the Victorian home by doing feminized labour, and by extension not really men.
Kato is an effective for The Green Hornet because his particular blend of Asianess –
some technological knowhow combined with domestic work – makes him a perfect
supporting character for both his roles. Indeed, he slips seamlessly from the houseboy to
the sidekick; unlike the Green Hornet / Britt Reid, his name, “Kato,” seems to be adequate
for both of his roles. When the Japanese identifier was dropped, he was simply “faithful.”
According to the previous analysis of sidekicks, the immediate reason that they exist in the
narrative to lend the hero a helping hand, but the deeper, unconscious reason for their
existence is that they take on markers of deviation and vulnerability so that the hero can
compare more favourably. Similarly, while Robert G. Lee does not argue that the master of
the house benefits from direct comparison with the Asian domestic servant, it is also clear
that no Anglo-American master would risk feminization by taking up domestic labour.
Hence, the function of the house servant and the sidekick are similar - the master and the
hero preserve their masculinity and elite status by delegating particular kinds of labour to
racialized others. Thus, while the sidekick and the house servant are near the hero / master,
exclusion is built into the terms of their inclusion.
When Bruce Lee took on the role of Kato in the 1966-67 The Green Hornet television
serial, he tried and to a certain succeeded in extricating Kato from the constraints of the
Asian sidekick. In 1965, William Dozier of Greenway Productions acquired the rights for
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The Green Hornet for television, along with rights to other superheroes such as Wonder
Woman and Batman, as well as Charlie Chan. Dozier originally intended for Lee to play the
lead role in Number One Son, a series Dozier was developing about the son of Charlie Chan
taking over his father’s detective career (Grams and Salomonson 319). In an interview with
Black Belt Magazine in 1967, Lee said that he accepted this role because the producers
envisioned as a kind of “Chinese James Bond,” and Lee said that “I wanted to make sure
before I signed that there wouldn’t be any ‘ah-so’s’ and ‘chop-cops’ in the dialogue and that
I would not be required to go bouncing around with a pigtail” (qtd. in Pollard, “In Kato’s
Gung-Fu”).
Plans for this series fell through, however, and Dozier recommended Lee for Kato.
Lee Caldwell recalls the impression that Lee made on promotional tours for the show – that
Lee impressed so impressed a critic that he a review saying, “I can tell the producers of The
Green Hornet how to improve their show, even before it’s on the air. What they should do is
let the Hornet’s sidekick, Kato, write his own dialogue. He’s bright and he’s funny” (qtd. in L.
Lee, The Bruce Lee Story 74). Grams and Salomonson write that Lee was unsatisfied with
Kato’s background role after filming a few episodes, writing to Dozier saying “[It’s] true
that Kato is a house boy of Britt, but as the crime fighter, Kato is an ‘active partner’ of the
Green Hornet and not a mute follower,” and “I myself feel that at least an occasional
dialogue would certainly make me feel more at home with the fellow players” (Grams and
Salomonson 320). Grams and Salomonson summarize Dozier’s reply, which explained that
Trendle, one of the original creators of the radio series, wished that Kato would remain as
an ally in the background and not a companion, though Dozier himself agreed with Lee and
promised to try to incorporate more material for him (Grams and Salomonson 320).
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As discussed in the previous chapter, audiences rooted for Lee’s character when he
fought White martial artists in his kungfu films. In the case of these films, it is difficult to tell
how much of this identification is due to interethnic solidarity, and how much is simply due
to the film directing audience identification with the protagonist, who happens to be played
by Lee. However, when The Green Hornet ostensibly invited identification with the titular
hero – and with Dozier’s comments that it was by design to leave Kato as a background
character – many audience members still focused on Lee’s Kato. Reginald Hudlin, who
describes Black audiences cheering for Lee in his films, also says that says that “As a kid, we
watched The Green Hornet for him – we couldn’t care less about Green Hornet – he had a fly
car, I’ll give him props for the car, but Kato was incredible”(I Am Bruce Lee). Similarly,
David Tadman, author of Bruce Lee books, says that when kids re-enacted The Green
Hornet in play, they fought to be Kato and no one really wanted to be the Hornet (I Am
Bruce Lee). Grams and Salomonson write that based on the amount of fan mail sent to the
actors, Kato was more popular with children than the Green Hornet was; his mask was
especially in high demand, and Dozier kept replicas in his office to send to fans (Grams and
Salomonson 320).
The Green Hornet was only aired for one season, which some believed was due to
being played too straight for an adult audience, in contrast to Dozier’s Batman, which
played up camp (Pollard, “Is ‘The Green Hornet’s’ Version of Gung-Fu Genuine?” 14).
Although Lee’s performance and kungfu impressed audiences and critics, it did not lead to
many opportunities in the entertainment industry. In public, Lee expressed understanding
for being passed over as an actor, saying on The Pierre Berton Show in 1970 that “If I were
the man with the money, I would probably have my own worry whether or not the
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acceptance would be there” (B. Lee, The Lost Interview). However, Caldwell recalls in her
memoir that Lee was frustrated with being seen as not merit financial risk due to his
ethnicity, and this reminded him of discrimination by the British against him in Hong Kong
(L. Lee 90). Caldwell also gives a rare insight into the financial consequences for their
family, saying that for The Green Hornet, Lee was paid $400 a week, which just covered
their costs (81). According to the budget report for The Green Hornet, Lee’s income was the
same amount as the show’s stuntpeople, while Van Williams (Reid) earned $2, 000, and
Wende Wagner (Lenore Case) earned $850; Lee also only earned $50 in overtime pay,
which was significantly less than other cast members or stuntpeople (Payment receipt).
Caldwell writes that Lee saw that the only way he could eventually make his own
films in Hollywood would be to take secondary roles in productions associated with martial
arts (90). From 1967 to 1971, Lee was aided by students of his who were directors and
producers in Hollywood, and appeared in minor roles in television series such as Ironside
and Longstreet, and choreographing fight sequences for other films. In Longstreet, Lee
played the martial arts instructor of the titular insurance investigator. Caldwell recalls that
he received more fan mail than any other cast member (97). However, Lee’s pitch for a
kungfu Western television series to Warner Bros. was unsuccessful. As discussed in the last
chapter, the resulting series Kung Fu starred David Carradine and not Lee. Despite
stretching the representational capacity of the role of Kato, Lee remained a sidekick in
Hollywood.

The Green Hornet in Hong Kong
87

Lee’s reception in Hong Kong, however, was quite different. The opening quotation
comes from Linda Lee Caldwell’s recollections of Lee going back to Hong Kong in 1970, the
first time he had returned since 1965 (L. Lee, The Bruce Lee Story 95). The international
broadcast of the show followed quickly after its American broadcast. Max Pollard of Black
Belt Magazine writes in October 1967 that it was being shown already in Japan, Thailand,
Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Canada (18). In Hong Kong, it first broadcast in August 1968 on
TVB Jade, in the Sunday 6pm time slot, and ending in February 1969, in the Wednesday
11:15pm time slot, with a break in October. The Green Hornet did not seem to be
broadcasting when Lee returned in 1970, and whether Hong Kong audiences really
referred to The Green Hornet as The Kato Show is difficult to verify. However, this does not
in any way undercut the impact among Hong Kong audiences that Caldwell recalls. Hong
Kongers have certainly localized and memorialized The Green Hornet in a number of ways,
both in everyday life and in later Hong Kong films. What is particularly interesting is that
film characters who are visual evocations of Bruce Lee as Kato are named the Green Hornet,
rather than Kato. In “Negotiating Fandom: The Politics of Racebending,” Jenkins writes that
“children of color often have to struggle for the right to play characters that are white in the
original, often forced to play subordinate or marginalized roles” (387). For The Green
Hornet, such a role would be the sidekick Kato, yet he is not named in Hong Kong popular
practice and media. Kato’s elision is not likely due to Hong Kong audiences forgetting which
role Bruce Lee played, nor does it seem to be due to audiences identifying with more
powerful heroes over their sidekicks. What seems to have happened is that audiences
implicitly acknowledged that Lee played Kato, but over time substituted Kato for the
Hornet.
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The move to make this substitution was almost immediate. The Green Hornet
finished its broadcast in February; by the end of March, a young man calling himself “Green
Hornet” began robbing residents in Kowloon, and was arrested in April (The Kung Sheung
Evening News, “‘The Green Hornet’ is Captured”). The press did not release any statement
from this Hornet, but perhaps this was his interpretation of the show’s representation of
vigilantism. In the subsequent decades, Hong Kongers also later associated the Green
Hornet with charitable work; in 1978, a walking marathon fundraiser featured a contestant
calling himself “the Green Hornet” (The Kung Sheung Evening News, “An Hour and a Half”),
and a team called “Green Hornet” also won top scores in a 1983 shooting fundraiser (Wah
Kiu Yat Po). These were highly public and publicized events, suggesting that the
competitors involved chose the Green Hornet as a name that audiences and sponsors
would easily recognize and associate with physical aptitude. In turn, they point to the place
that The Green Hornet continued to have in the public consciousness. These competitions
took place eight and thirteen years after the broadcast of The Green Hornet, so it seems that
the generation who watched the show as children and teenagers brought the show forward
as they grew into adults.
Some of these audiences in turn also became part of the Hong Kong film industry, as
evidenced by Kato’s iconic getup of a black uniform and black domino mask appearing
repeatedly in later Hong Kong films, such as The Green Hornet (1994), Black Mask (1996),
and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (2010). In The Green Hornet, the Hornet is a
young man named Dong, who takes down a human trafficking and weapon smuggling ring
backed by a Neo-Nazi colonel, while eluding the police and Tom, a journalist who falls in
love with him and who attempts to uncover his identity. Legend of the Fist is the second
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sequel to Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, and follows the kungfu hero Chen Zhen (whom Lee
played) as he returns from WWI to fight the Japanese occupation in Shanghai, this time
adopting a costume. Finally, Black Mask features Tsui Chik, a supersoldier who escaped the
People’s Republic of China to lie low Hong Kong, but comes out of hiding to protect the city
against other rogue supersoldiers, where he uses a disguise to elude his friend in the police
force. These films render the Green Hornet Chinese through a number of moves. First, there
are no references to Britt Reid or any previous American version of the Green Hornet. The
stories are always take place in China, and the heroes given Chinese origin stories. Second,
race-bending also involves genre-bending, as the narratives in these films use the
superhero trope of the disguise in a story that is otherwise a kungfu tale.
These films are hybrid texts, not simply because they mix genres, but because genre
mixing challenges mechanisms keeping the Green Hornet and Kato separate. Drawing from
colonial policy texts as well as postcolonial literature, Homi Bhabha explains in The
Location of Culture that European colonizers attempt to legitimize their authority by
asserting that European culture is wholly distinct from those of the colonized, yet also
timeless and universal. Bhabha argues that this discourse did not actually exist prior to
colonization; instead, it was a defense mechanism enacted when European culture was
confronted with racial and cultural difference in the colonies (Bhabha, 153). Thus,
European colonial culture is actually articulated in relation to an Other, and therefore
arguably hybrid product. However, colonizers disavow this for fear of losing justifications
for power and instead mask it with discourses of cultural purity and difference. Under
these circumstance, “hybridity reverses the formal process of disavowal so that the violent
dislocation of the act of colonization becomes the conditionality of colonial discourse” (163,
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emphasis original). In other words, making hybridity explicit forces power to acknowledge
that its assertions of distinctiveness and universality are false. By combining kungfu and
superhero tropes, the Hong Kong films I discuss reveal mechanisms of racial distinction for
what they are.
Of these, The Green Hornet responds most directly to the original franchise with a
similar titular hero. The film was written and directed by Lam Ching Ying, who worked on
action choreography in Bruce Lee’s films and later became a well-known Hong Kong actor
in the Chinese zombie genre,
18
Lam’s The Green Hornet exhibits strong martial arts genre
tropes, and in doing so, counteracts some of Kato’s racialization based on technological
primitivism. Following martial arts genre tropes, Dong lives a simply life removed from
society. He and his two uncles, who instruct and guide him in his missions, live as peasants
outside Shanghai. Indeed, this Hornet does not take advantage of any modern technologies.
In addition to kungfu, he only uses a boomerang, while the film suggests that high-tech
weapons are the purview of the dealers and the Nazi colonel. For their part, the uncles
correspond with their contacts in the criminal underworld via carrier pigeons. These
details change the significance of Kato’s partial technologization. As previously discussed,
in an urban American superhero narrative with a high-tech Green Hornet, martial arts
marks the sidekick Kato as different and implies his primitivism. However, in a martial arts
narrative, it is hand to hand combat which is superior because it is untainted by dirty
money and exploitation. By representing the Green Hornet as a hybrid of Chinese kungfu
hero and superhero, Lam’s Green Hornet also asserts that a Chinese peasant who does not

18
The jiangshi (literally “stiff corpse”) genre in folklore and film has also been translated as “hopping vampire,” as
it features reanimated corpses that try to absorb qi (energy) from the living, and move awkwardly by hopping. The
setting is usually imperial China, with zombified imperial bureaucrats literally and metaphorically leeching life from
the populace.
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have access to technology can be a superhero. This means that Britt Reid’s wealth and
technological superiority are not prerequisites for being a superhero, which suggests that it
serves another function, such as racial distinction.
Legend of the Fist also exhibits hybridity, though its reference to The Green Hornet
does not challenge the racial distinction of Britt Reid so much as it rehabilitates Kato’s
position as a servant. In Legend of the Fist, Chen Zhen leads a double life as a nightclub
musician and a nationalist underground operative. Upon discovering a Japanese plot to
assassinate a Chinese general, he steals a disguise from the closest source, which is a movie
theatre displaying a costume from an in-universe film called Masked Warrior. This costume
is essentially Kato’s crime-fighting costume, and after Chen Zhen rescues the general and
his wife, he also chauffeurs them to safety. While the film follows on Lee’s Fist of Fury, the
original did not contain any superhero elements, and Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen did not adopt
any disguises; the choice to put this WWII-era folk hero in a costume is reaching back
further in Lee’s performance history to Kato. One reason for Bhabha’s emphasis on
hybridity is that anti-colonial movements can also resort of discourses of purity to establish
legitimacy (Bhabha 171). Indeed, a common assertion from Hong Kong scholars is that
Bruce Lee’s films embody the spirit of Chinese ethnic nationalism (see Teo, Hong Kong
Cinema), however Lee’s earlier work as Kato is never mentioned, most likely because
Kato’s status as a servant to a white American does not fit into this oppositional narrative.
By evoking Kato and even his domestic work as Reid’s chauffeur, Legend of the Fist brings
Kato and his work into the Chinese nationalist tradition, and suggests that Kato’s service is
not inherently demeaning. As hybrid texts, Lam’s The Green Hornet and Legend of the Fist
narrows the gap separating the original Green Hornet and Kato by striking down some of
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the criteria that produces the Hornet’s superiority, and reframing the criteria that keeps
Kato a subordinate.
Interestingly, these films reference Kato with their costuming choices, but Kato
himself is never mentioned by name. Instead, all the heroes are (mis)recognized as the
Green Hornet. Lam’s Green Hornet is the most obvious in this regard, as the criminals in the
film seem to know the hero by name. The film also establishes that the Green Hornet
identity has been handed down throughout Chinese history, as evidenced by a history
lesson from Dong’s uncles when they become concerned that Tom’s attentions are
distracting Dong from his crime-fighting life. In a basement hideout reminiscent of the
Batcave, the uncles point to exhibits of past Green Hornets and explain how violating Green
Hornet codes of conduct has lead some of them to misfortune. The first mannequin that the
uncles point to is the Green Hornet from the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE), and the second,
the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), each wearing historically contemporary armor with a
mask covering the top half of their faces. Both of these Hornets, the uncle explain, fell to
ruin for fraternizing with women. However, the last mannequin that the uncle point to is
Bruce Lee in Kato’s uniform; the uncles explain that he broke the code which forbids the
Hornet from using the hero persona to gain personal fame and fortune. This scene asserts
that Bruce Lee’s appearance in The Green Hornet was not an act, but that he was actually a
superhero, yet it glosses over that his role in the series was actually Kato.
Black Mask
19
also references Kato in its costuming choices, yet again the costume is
recognized as the Green Hornet’s. In a behind-the-scenes interview with Tsui Hark (the

19
Black Mask is loosely based on a Hong Kong comic book of the same name from 1991, though in the comic, Black
Mask is simply an orphan with martial arts skills and not a supersoldier. In a note at the end of the final chapter,
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writer and producer) and Jet Li (in the role of Tsui Chik / Black Mask), the camera briefly
focuses on one of the costume department staff holding a book with a photo of Bruce Lee in
the role of Kato (Hong), which is clearly the reference for Black Mask’s costume. However, a
scene from the film shows Black Mask fleeing the scene and accidentally dropping his cap,
to be picked up by his friend, police inspector Shek. Shek puts it on and spins around
quickly to face fellow officers who come running after him, causing his coat to flare
dramatically. His fellow officers stop short in surprise, but then applaud and comment that
with this getup, Shek “has become the Green Hornet” (Black Mask). In the Mandarin
language dub of the film, perhaps anticipating that Mandarin speakers are less likely to
know who the Green Hornet is, one officer also adds “the one by Bruce Lee.”
The officers do not compare Shek to Kato, despite Kato being the inspiration behind
Black Mask’s costuming. In addition, it is interesting that they do not simply say that Shek
looks like the Hornet, but specifically that he has become the Hornet. Perhaps this also
characterizes the aforementioned Kowloon thief and athletic competitors who call
themselves the Green Hornet – in particular moments, they became the Green Hornet. The
frequency and ease with which Hong Kongers perform the Green Hornet across racial
difference differs from how non-White fans are often positioned relative to White
characters. When discussing cosplay as performance, Nicolle Lamerichs writes that
cosplayers tend to choose to play characters who match their identity, role, or physical
attributes (Lamerichs). Ethnicity is frequently a factor in this assessment. Such a role
would be the sidekick Kato, yet Lee’s fans substituted him for the Hornet.

the editor of the comic tries to clarify a number of points for readers, the first point being, “He is not the Green
Hornet.”
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Substituting Kato for the Hornet overcomes the fact that Kato is the Hornet’s
sidekick, but I argue that this process was also facilitated because Kato is the Hornet’s
sidekick. The partial inclusion of the sidekick can be seen as a result of colonial mimicry,
which Lee’s fans actively exploited. Two related factors contribute to this double
articulation. First, the sidekick is a figure of partial inclusion in the narrative, as they are
differentiated from their heroes by weaknesses while emulating their heroes to some
degree. Second, one area where the sidekick tends to emulate their hero is their disguises.
However, costuming conventions in the superhero favors iconicity rather than individuality,
potentially counteracting markers of the sidekick’s difference. Together, these two factors
make the sidekick an ambivalent figure, and their subordination is unstable. The sidekick’s
position is very similar to the partially reformed colonial subject in Homi Bhabha’s theory
of colonial mimicry. The colonial project seeks to reform colonial subjects according to the
principles of Western civilization, however it would disadvantage the colonizer if subjects
were to be entirely reformed, since the colonized would be the same as the colonizers and
be entitled to the same privileges. This is one kind of threat that colonial subjects can
present to colonizers. Colonizers defend against it by implementing partial reform (Bhabha
124), where colonial subjects would be the similar to the colonizers, but not quite – Bhabha
points to colonial middlemen who are Anglicized to work for the English as an example
(125). While this partial reform is by design, it is still potentially subversive. Colonial
subjects who bear only some of the colonizers’ attributes can no longer be representatives
of their supposed civilizing mission, and so this mission is revealed to be insincere. In
addition, Bhabha argues that having partial attributes points to mimicry and not
representation (128-129) – that is, partial and superficial imitation that does not reflect
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any cultural essence. This becomes subversive because bearing some attributes of Western
civilization no longer reflects an essential right to power and authority on the part of the
colonizers (129). Thus, mimicry has potential to become mockery of colonial authority.
In the superhero genre, Bhabha’s partially reformed subject is the sidekick. The
tendency to continuously differentiate them from the hero can be read as a way of
managing their potential threat. Especially when the sidekick was a younger hero or a hero
in training, the implication is that they will grow to be a hero, perhaps their hero, and take
that hero’s place. Kato poses a similar threat, especially since Trendle, Striker, and other
writers for The Green Hornet have, perhaps inadvertently, given him the tools to be the
Hornet. Kato is not a sidekick like Robin, who is a sidekick because he is young and
untrained. To be the Hornet’s sidekick means that Kato must fight as effectively as the
Hornet, have technical expertise to maintain the Hornet’s equipment, and share the
Hornet’s dedication to justice. Thus, Kato’s Asian ethnicity and the association of Asianess
with servility are the most salient criteria to justify his sidekick status. In general, by
marking sidekicks with gender and race, which are seemingly insurmountable biological
conditions, superhero narratives seem to succeed in safeguarding the authority of the hero.
However, Hong Kong fans of The Green Hornet have attempted to solved this problem – not
by making Kato white, but by making the Green Hornet Chinese.
This maneuver seems simple, but actually takes advantage of factors specific to the
superhero genre. As Ellen Kirkpatrick writes, the superhero genre is particularly conducive
to cosplay, since the dual identities of many superheroes means that identity shifts are a
part of the genre, and “Changing the visuality of the body through costuming allows a
different reading in identity, be that alter ego to superhero/villain or cosplayer to source
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character” (Kirkpatrick). Kirkpatrick notes in passing that this kind of translation also
happens in superhero narratives as well, since superheroes are continuously revamped
with different individuals inhabiting the heroic identity slightly differently. While she
focuses on how a cosplayer’s individuality can change the superhero they represent, the
reverse is also true. As discussed previously, a convention that defines the superhero genre
is that the hero presents themselves with an iconic identity. Coogan also draws upon Scott
McCloud’s discussion of icons to argue that iconicity also leads to simplification and
abstraction (Coogan 32). Thus, for superheroes, the identity shift in the superhero genre is
not simply from one identity to another, but often from an individual identity to a symbol
or icon, and with it comes some loss of individuality. Coogan writes that the superhero
persona usually has two components – the codename, and the costume. Especially when
the costume functions as a disguise, it further pushes iconicity and effaces individuality.
This abstraction of identity inherent in much of superhero performance also affects
ethnicity. In shots of the Green Hornet and Kato as costumed vigilantes, it is not
immediately obvious who is who. The domino masks, which are meant to hide individual
identity, also serve to obscure ethnic identity.
20
For the ethnically Asian Kato, hiding the
area around his eyes also hides the privileged marker of Asian racialization, which is the
eyes (V. Nguyen 12).
21
Thus, the Kato’s hero image both literally and figuratively masks his
Asianess. It is important to note that as the Green Hornet’s sidekick, Kato is following the
Hornet’s costuming imperatives – or, stated in another way, he is mimicking the Hornet’s

20
Bruce Lee is a fair-skinned person of Chinese ethnicity with some European ancestry, and thus a domino mask
can disguise his ethnicity. The same would not apply to someone with a darker skin tone, though there are
superheroes whose costume cover their entire body, such as Deadpool. In addition, costuming may hide ethnicity
in certain cases, but the same would not apply to sex; costuming for female superheroes tend to further sexualize
them as women, especially combined with exaggerated anatomies in the art of the superhero genre.
21
Martial arts films have represented heroes using masks, however these tend to be masks that cover the lower
half of the face, such as in the film The Chinese Boxer (1970).
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means of disguise as a subordinate member of their crime-fighting duo. However, this
mimicry has an effect of obscuring an identity marker that naturalizes his sidekick status,
and enables his image to become less racialized, and more iconic.
Costuming does not only tone down Kato’s ethnicity; it also tones down Britt Reid’s
ethnicity. Arguably, the one attribute that no colonial or subordinated racialized subject
can have, even under complete reformation or cultural integration, is skin color and
features associated with Whiteness. After all, in the history of American racial formation,
ethnicities once designated as non-White, such as Jewish and Irish, have gradually been
counted as White, but Asians, Latinos, and Blacks continue to be identified as racially other
despite socioeconomic gains. Part of Bhabha’s analysis of mimicry is that calls into question
the equation between having Western cultural attributes and an inherent right to power. If
Whiteness is associated with the right to power, then Reid’s hero persona dilutes his
Whiteness. As a wealthy newspaper mogul, Britt Reid is an Anglo-American, but there is no
ethnicity inherent in the Green Hornet, his superhero persona. The color of the Hornet –
green – is also not associated with ethnicity, unlike the color of the Black Panther, for
example. Thus, being costumed vigilantes pushes both Kato and Reid towards ethnic
neutrality, and dilutes their difference. Since the Green Hornet persona has no associated
race, and Kato the sidekick is as capable as Reid, then Kato is the natural successor to the
Green Hornet persona, or, Kato should have been the Green Hornet in the first place.
Similar to how partial reform undercuts the colonial project, including a character
such as Kato opens The Green Hornet and superhero conventions to a revisionist audience.
Since Bhabha’s theory of mimicry involves embodied subjects, cultural studies of mimicry
have mostly focused on performances – that is, individuals’ behaviours and visible self-
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presentations. What Hong Kong audiences have done is to turn mimicry into a viewing
strategy. Before they dress up as or call themselves the Green Hornet, Hong Kong audiences
must be able to creatively misrecognize Kato as the Hornet, and imagine themselves in this
new, hybrid role. Kato’s status as a sidekick and the costume design of The Green Hornet
series imply a menace to the Hornet, however audiences still must be the ones to make the
strategic move to supplant him.
It is no accident that the fans and producers who took advantage of Kato’s partial
inclusion are the audience of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong of Bruce Lee’s time was still a
British colony, and the prospect of governance from the PRC was still relatively far off.
Hong Kong encapsulates Bhabha’s colonial middlemen – in this case, subjects who were
given skills to the point of being commercially useful, but not beyond that. The media
policies in the colony were aligned with this. In his discussion of the history of television in
Hong Kong, Eric Kit-Wai Ma gives some background to the cultural environment: “the
British government had always stressed the economic value of Hong Kong as a middleman
in Sino-British trade. The colonial government did not want to produce colonial subjects
loyal to the British government; it aimed at making a Hong Kong Chinese who was able to
speak the language of the dual centers of China and Britain” (Ma 29). When it came to
media, the British colonial government did not use it as a tool for cultural propaganda, but
rather promoted media commercialization (Ma 40). This does not mean that Hong Kong
media was free of British ideology; as media historian Mark Hampton writes, “the idea of
letting profitability be the main driver was itself a manifestation of Hong Kong Britishness”
(Hampton 316). In addition, other accounts of the cultural climate in Hong Kong suggest
that rather than directly impose ideology and racial hierarchies, the British government
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enforced them subtly. In Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow reflects on her education in
1970s Hong Kong, where Cantonese and Chinese languages were included in the
curriculum, but “a good level of English was the key to future success” (44). Bruce Lee’s
own films speak to a Hong Kong’s decolonial preoccupation, and an adage from his family
and friends is that when he lived in Hong Kong as a child, he used to get into fights with
British schoolchildren for picking on Chinese students (L. Lee, The Bruce Lee Story 26).
The British government’s relative laissez-faire approach to Hong Kong media
actually resulted in a great influx of foreign media, and with it, foreign ideology. There were
no quotas to foreign television programs or minimum requirement for the broadcast of
local productions (Ma 41); The Green Hornet was only one American television show
broadcast in Hong Kong among others, such as I Spy and The Addams Family. High imports
occurred for films as well. A glance at newspaper advertisements for films of the 1968
shows American productions such as Nobody’s Perfect (1968) and The Green Berets (1968),
and the British production The Face of Fu Manchu (1965). I highlight these three films since
they contain American or British representation of Asians according to varying degrees of
racist stereotyping. It is true that Chinese media in Hong Kong flourished alongside
imported media – Ma specifically argues that the cultural imperialism thesis did not fit
Hong Kong well, since Chinese programs exhibited melodramas and kungfu genres that are
quite culturally specific and local. However, this also does not mean that by virtue of being
local, Chinese programs responded to the conditions of British colonialism. According to
Stephen Teo, the film industry in Hong Kong was heavily influenced by the political
concerns of mainland Chinese exiles, such as patriotic resistance against Japan (Hong Kong
Cinema 15) and class struggle against feudalism (17). As Cantonese language cinema was
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trying to legitimize itself in the1950s and leave behind its focus on films based on operas,
the social critique of Mandarin language films heavily influenced its directions (44). When
not aligned with leftist positions, A-list films in Cantonese tended to focus on family
melodramas (47). The popularity of Bruce Lee’s films in Hong Kong is accounted
significantly by his ability to blend kungfu tropes with a direct challenge to international
racialized inequality, which was quite novel at the time, and not necessarily discussed
through other films and popular media. Although Kato is quite a servile character
compared to Lee’s film heroes, later Hong Kong films show that it was in him that Hong
Kongers first saw themselves, and Hong Kong fans were also uniquely positioned to notice
and exploit the possibilities of Kato’s partial inclusion as a racialized sidekick.

Sidekicks in Asian American Comics
In Hong Kong’s reinventions of Kato / the Green Hornet, the primary concern is to
assert Chineseness against foreign control. Masculinity is present by generic convention –
kungfu heroes tend to be networks of men who, as Dong’s uncles stress, need to avoid the
distraction of women. For contemporary audiences, the masculinity of kungfu heroes may
seem quite muted, and their sexuality even more so. Only Chen Zhen, played by Donnie Yen,
could be said to be hegemonically masculine in a Hollywood sense, as he actively leads a
resistance force and also spends much of the film romancing a nightclub singer. Lam’s The
Green Hornet is often comedic and exaggerated in tone, and while skilled in kungfu, Dong is
portrayed as a naïve and hyperactive child – especially given that Tom seems to be the first
woman he has any interest in. In Black Mask, Tsui tends to adopt a mild and apologetic
demeanor, and the suggestion that he may be a romantic partner is laughed off by a female
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colleague. Dong and Tsui both wear loose-fitting black clothing and their bodies are not
cinematically sexualized, in contrast to, for example, Bruce Lee’s frequent on-screen
shirtlessness.
For Asian American audiences, the anti-colonial interpretation of Bruce Lee’s
performances may not be as important as Lee’s intervention in Asian American masculinity.
Lee’s performance as Kato is seen as a significant part of this intervention, though with
mixed results. Kato’s mixture of traits and histories from various Asian ethnicities and the
background position that Trendle envisioned for him in the television series exemplify
representation for Asian American men for the greater part of the 20
th
century. It was
difficult for all actors of Asian ethnicity to achieve stardom in Hollywood, but male and
female actors encountered gender-specific barriers. As a whole, while Asian women have
been seen as hyperfeminine and sexually available, Asian men have been seen as gay or
asexual but also patriarchal. Variations on these stereotypes emerged according to
historical circumstances. For example, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu embodies the despotism
and sexual perversion associated with imperial China (Chan 30), whereas Kato’s
characterization reflected a combination of Japanese modernity and Chinese domestic
servitude in early 20
th
century US.
In this context, one effect of Lee’s onscreen kungfu is the perception that Asian men
can indeed be role models, and this status depended on his exhibition of manliness. Jeff
Chinn, one of the world’s biggest collectors of Bruce Lee-related media and memorabilia,
says that he doesn’t recall any positive images of Chinese people on television as a boy in
San Francisco, and it made him ashamed of being Chinese. He explained that The Green
Hornet not only showed a positive image with Kato, but “In fact, Kato was a superhero that
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was beating up all the bad guys with his incredible Chinese kungfu! I never forgot how good
I felt when I saw Kato in action” (“Bruce Lee on Screen,” Memorable Bruce Lee). In addition,
the fact that Bruce Lee appeared in a long-running mass media franchise also lent his
performance legitimacy. The Green Hornet was a part of earlier transmedia storytelling that
involved merchandise, such as collectible cards and lunchboxes, which Chinn owned as a
child. He notes that many Chinese Americans took merchandising based on Kato as a sure
sign that Bruce Lee was accepted by American society, and this gave them great pride (The
Green Hornet Lunchbox, Memorable Bruce Lee).
22

Other than martial arts aficionados and collectors like Chinn, however, Asian
American cultural memory has not given Lee’s performance in The Green Hornet much
weight relative to Lee’s later films. In The Oriental Obscene, Sylvia Chong explains that
remembering Kato would force Asian Americans to face another branch of Lee’s legacy,
which are media tropes of Asian American servitude and Asian Americans who use kungfu
in service of the status quo (237). In his chapter on Bruce Lee in Chinese American
Maculinities, Jachinson Chan mentions The Green Hornet and Kung Fu television series
mostly to say that they helped Lee to see the limitations that American media imposed on
him (73). Understandably it would be easier to rally behind more straightforwardly heroic
figures such as the ones in Lee’s films. However, as Asian American studies has shifted to
perform more reparative readings of subordinate Asian figures in historical mass media,

22
Chinn’s comments regarding the items in his collection also demonstrate that Bruce Lee and the news, films, and
merchandise associated with him created intergenerational bonds between different generations of Chinese
Americans. In his caption for newspaper clippings, Chinn recalls that his grandparents used to lovingly collect
clippings on Bruce Lee from Chinese newspapers, and his father used to save him clippings from American
newspapers. He also includes an action figure that his son bought for him as a child (Memorable Bruce Lee).
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Asian American comics and graphic novels have also rehabilitated the figure of the
racialized sidekick.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Lee’s immediate impact was to introduce a new kind of
onscreen Asian American masculine image. However, in conjunction with gender and
sexuality studies, Asian American studies has since questioned the assumption that
American society has deprived Asian American men of a masculinity they would originally
have had, and has drawn attention to the costs of trying to achieve hegemonic masculinity.
For many men in the Asian American community, divergent gender stereotypes against
Asians seemed to represent Asian American women as sexually privileged and assimilated
into mainstream standards at the expense of Asian American men. This imagined
relationship between American society, Asian American women and Asian American men
also affect appraisals of cultural production that are not obviously about sexual
competition. One of the controversies in Asian American literature occurred around Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, which contained autobiographical elements detailing
the suppression of women and girls in Kingston’s household. Critics such as Frank Chin,
who were working towards a heroic tradition in Asian American literature, accused
Kingston of pandering to American racist ideas of patriarchal Chinese values to achieve
literary success. Scholars working from feminist traditions pointed out that divergent
stereotypes of Asian men and women are actually two sides of the same coin: the
impression of Asian women as sexually available (for White men) is justified due to the
impression of Asian men as asexual and patriarchal (Kim 64). Scholars have also attempted
to theorize new models of masculinity that does not rely on militancy and the exclusion of
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femininity, such as King-Kok Cheung’s focus on the poet-scholar of classical Chinese
literature as an alternative tradition (Cheung 106).
Asian American studies in sexuality have also explained that dominant stereotypes
of Asian men as lacking sexuality is also predicated on not only an alignment between
Whiteness and masculinity, but Whiteness and heterosexuality. As David Eng notes,
queerness and racial otherness are closely imbricated with one another. Anti-
miscegenation and anti-immigration laws at the end of the 19
th
century meant that Chinese
men in the US formed bachelor communities, and this mutual association between men was
read as queer. In turn, the perception of queerness affected the racialization of Asian
American men such that they were perceived as less American (18). Attributing gayness to
Asian American men is part of a mechanism by which White American men, and American
society as a whole, excises homosexuality onto racialized peoples to preserve heterosexual
Whiteness, much like how a master of the house would delegate feminized labour to Asian
domestics. As a whole, feminist and queer scholarship have pointed out that correctives to
discrimination and stereotypes of Asian Americans cannot take place through the same
logic that subordinated them. That is, if champions of male heroism insist upon a “true”
masculine heritage that all Asian Americans must conform to, then they cannot see that the
same demand for conformity to hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality is what allows
White Americans to denigrate Asian American men in the first place (Eng 21).
These changes in Asian American scholarship have lead to recuperative readings of
roles that have been denigrated as failing to conform to hegemonic masculinity. Celine
Shimizu’s Straightjacket Sexualities looks at Asian American men in 20
th
century films not
for signs of gender and sexuality-based racial oppression, but for ethical masculinities that
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demonstrate care for others. She argues that while Lee’s characters demonstrate manhood
through violence, violence is often the last resort and used to protect others. Moreover,
after fight sequences, the camera lingers on characters’ faces to convey their inner ethical
struggles (35). Moreover, the construction of masculinity in Lee’s characters does not
depend on the overt sexualization of women, and physical violence against other men is not
continuous with the conquest of women. The love interests of Lee’s characters tend to be
his partners in common goal, and acts of violence can cost him love rather than win him
recognition from women (52). Similarly, in A View from the Bottom, Tan Hoang Nguyen
challenges the equation between a bottom sexual position and passivity, and instead argues
that being on the bottom enables alterative dispositions and bonds. He devotes a chapter to
the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye and its treatment of Anacleto, a Filipino houseboy,
and his relationship with his mistress, an army wife. Rather than seeing Anacleto’s
houseboy status and lack of hegemonic masculinity as a position that necessarily lacks
agency and possibility, Nguyen argues that his sensual and flamboyant queerness enables
him to form an alliance with femininity, which implicitly critiques the military hierarchy,
discipline and repression among the other male characters.
In a similar vein, Asian Americans working in comics have recently approached the
figure of the sidekick as something more than a demeaning role that “real” heroes should
rise above. In comics published from across independent and major imprints, Asian
American artists and writers have focused on sidekicks’ lives, attachments, and ideas apart
from their hero, or have tried to imagine more egalitarian partnerships. For example, Greg
Pak created a new group of young Marvel superheroes the Amazing Fantasy series in 2004,
which included the young genius Amadeus Cho. Amadeus Cho would go on to be a sidekick
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to the Hulk and Hercules, while also adopting a variety of superhero personas and later
becoming the Hulk. Dynamite Entertainment, which owns the comics rights of The Green
Hornet, has also relaunched titles for the Hornet and Kato many times. This includes Green
Hornet: Generations by Amy Chu, which narrates Kato and his daughter’s investigations
after Britt Reid goes missing. In independent comics such as Secret Identities: The Asian
American Superhero Anthology and The Shadow Hero, Asian American creators are also
creating original characters or commenting on the history of Asian American sidekicks.
Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology features three entries
specifically related to sidekicks. The first is a one-paged introductory comic by editor Keith
Chow showing comics creator Gene Yang and filmmaker Michael Kang discussing the
significance of Bruce Lee as Kato, the second comic is Yang’s retelling of The Green Hornet,
titled “The Blue Scorpion and Chung.” The third, Kang’s contribution “James,” shows the
titular character reminiscing about how he made the decision to leave the role behind.
While much of the anthology aims to show Asian Americans as strong, heroic, and a vital
part of American mythology, the section on sidekicks exemplifies a greatest degree of
ambivalence towards superhero generic conventions and the sidekick’s role. The
introductory comic challenges Bruce Lee’s sidekick status, but also represents contrasting
views of his legacy. It opens with the statement, “Honestly, I was never a fan of The Green
Hornet.” It is unclear which author-character says this – the statement itself is a floating
caption above an illustration of Kato driving, with Reid in the back seat. The rest of the
comic portrays Yang and Kang as characters dressed as different film versions of Bruce Lee
fighting numerous stereotypical Asian characters such as Charlie Chan and the Crazy 88s,
ending the comic standing on a pile of their bodies. Meanwhile, the two characters describe
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stereotypes dogging Bruce Lee in the entertainment industry, and urge that “to this day, we
have to fight off the descendants of Kato” (Chow and Baroza 62). However, the comic ends
by raising more questions. Yang says, “Like it or not, the legacy of Kato is ingrained into our
zeitgeist,” and Kang follows with “That’s why it’s important to do what Bruce did. Tell our
own stories, on our own terms.” The last panel of the comic shows the silhouettes of the
two men walking off into the sunset, with one man pointing out that at least the
discrimination was impetus for Lee to go to Hong Kong and make his films, and the other
saying “good point” (62).
While the line that Asian Americans need to fight off Kato’s descendants calls for a
wholesale rejection of sidekicks, the comic as a whole seems unsure how to appraise Lee’s
legacy, or where to locate his agency. While one of the author-characters asserts that Lee’s
films are his “true” legacy and Kato was not true to Lee’s aspirations, at the same time they
acknowledge that Kato is an important stepping stone to this truth. Intentionally or not, the
introductory comic sets up a question of how much agency sidekicks have as sidekicks, and
also how Asian Americans should treat the history of Asian sidekicks and servants, which
“James” and “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” attempts to answer in different ways. In
“James,” the eponymous young Asian American reveals that he got into superheroism to
help out a White college friend named Hank, despite Hank’s lack of superpowers. However,
the media, society, and eventually Hank can only perceive him to be the sidekick, and by the
end he decides to quit. As the last chapter explains, superhero figures tend to be an
embodiment of aspirations to rise above social constraints, since they, by virtue of their
abilities, are not bound by bureaucracy and can act upon society directly. For a racialized
group such as Asian Americans, discrimination has been institutional, and thus the fantasy
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of a hero rising above institutions is less tenable. Instead, "James" points out that superhero
conventions themselves, including hero-sidekick dynamics, have become an institution that
discriminate against heroes like James. Institutionalization also impacts the hero-sidekick
relationship. Rather than a personal duty of mentorship, the comic describes that it is
impersonal measures such as national approval ratings and marketing agencies that
determine how Hank treats James.
Like “James,” “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” represents the superhero as fairly
ineffectual and his sidekick, Chung, doing most of the work. In addition, the Scorpion makes
racist jokes (Yang and Liew, “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” 63) and also tries to put Chung
in his place by insisting that he is only a chauffeur (68). A smuggler recognizes Chung’s
ethnicity and asks him why he puts up with the Scorpion. The comic goes into Chung’s
flashback, where he decided to quit working for the Scorpion and proposes to his girlfriend,
who is happy to hear that Chung can live his own life. However, in a visit to the Scorpion,
who had been hospitalized, Chung also sees the body of a victim that the Scorpion failed to
save without Chung (73). The comic shows Chung’s girlfriend saying goodbye to him
regretfully before cutting to the present, where Chung explains that he is willing to serve
the justice that the Blue Scorpion represents, even if it means sacrifices (74).
“The Blue Scorpion and Chung” is diametrically opposed to “James,” as James
chooses to walk away from being a sidekick, but Chung decides to stay. The comic’s hero
and sidekick are clearly meant to reference the Green Hornet and Kato, and thus Chung’s
reasons for staying as a sidekick also suggest possible reasons why Kato does so. The comic
validate Chung and Kato as heroic on their own terms, rather than to reject their sidekick
status as inherently demeaning and emasculating. According to Shyminsky’s analysis, in
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addition to male sidekicks being designed to be less hegemonically masculine, they are also
represented as gay because they invest in their hero’s happiness and success at the expense
of their own. Chung seems to be the epitome of this – in addition to serving as the Blue
Scorpio’s chauffeur, Chung forgoes his own marriage to dedicate himself to the Scorpion’s
operations. Unlike comics that naturalize the sidekick’s dedication, however, Yang shows
that Chung actively made a decision to continue on as the sidekick, and this decision was
not an easy one. In doing so, Yang also suggests that a sidekick’s heroism is based on self-
sacrifice rather than the defeat of others; this provides an alternative to the introductory
comic’s (and to a certain extent “James’s”) emphasis on remasculinization based on
characteristics such as leadership, independence, and confrontation. By extension, “The
Blue Scorpion and Chung” also responds to the introductory comic’s discussion of where to
locate agency. Agency is not solely located in fighting against the legacy of Kato, but also in
making the most of the sidekick’s role.
Yang’s full-length comic with artist Sonny Liew, The Shadow Hero, further elaborates
on the perspective of the sidekick, though by genderbending the source material’s sidekick.
The foremost goal of The Shadow Hero is to revamp a short-lived comic book character
from 1944 called the Green Turtle / Hank, created by a Chinese American comic book
writer named Hing Chu; the five issues that were released showed the Green Turtle and his
sidekick Burma Boy fighting against Japanese imperial forces in China. Yang notes that the
Green Turtle is drawn with his back turned or his face obscured, though sometimes a
comical face would appear in his shadow. Yang also presents rumours that Chu wanted to
make the Turtle Chinese but the publisher refused, so Chu drew the character such that
markers of his ethnicity are always hidden from view (155-6). Yang intends The Shadow
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Hero to be a prequel to the Green Turtle that explains his origin story in San Francisco. In
the original comics, the Green Turtle’s sidekick, Burma Boy, is an ethnic Chinese youth that
the Turtle rescues when Japanese troops invade the area around the Chinese-Burmese
border. Burma boy is a sidekick of the times – a young man with no superpowers, whom
the hero protects. With the Green Turtle being a young man in The Shadow Hero, the person
who more or less fills the role of a sidekick is his mother, Hua. Yang sets Hua up to be the
one pushing Hank to be a superhero in the first place, and as such, the support that the
sidekick offers also changes in nature.
A short comic precursor to The Shadow Hero appeared in Shattered, the second
comics anthology following Secret Identities. The story presents Hank as a full-fledged
superhero and his mother inviting herself along to his operations, much to his annoyance,
though he is happy that she left steamed buns for him near the crime scene (Yang and Liew,
“The Shadow Hero” 197). The graphic novel length work fleshes out her role with Hank
telling stories of his parents’ immigration experiences. Hank explains that Hua’s life was a
series of disappoints, with the cramped conditions of San Francisco’s Chinatown and a
conventional marriage. After he was born, Hua found a job as a housekeeper for an old
American couple, which includes driving them into town (Yang and Liew, The Shadow Hero
6). When a superhero saves her from a robber who hijacks the car, she pushes Hank into
becoming a superhero as well, despite his initial resistance. Hua makes a costume for him
(initially with the title “Golden Man of Justice”) and a domino mask for herself, and drives
him around San Francisco looking for crime for him to fight (38-39). Hank’s crime-fighting
activities eventually leads to his father being gunned down by the Tong. During the funeral,
Hank discovers that his father had made a pact with the spirit of the Green Turtle of the
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North
23
, where the turtle spirit granted a wish in return for living inside his father’s
shadow. The turtle spirit makes a similar pact with Hank, and Hank’s wish is that he would
never be shot. With this new superpower, Hank becomes adamant about avenging his
father, while his mother cannot believe that he has a superpower and tries to dissuade him
from doing so. When Hank finds the Tong leader, Ten Grand, Hua brings along Hank’s
kungfu master to try and chase him down. However, after seeing his abilities, Hua leaves
him to his fight (139).
Hua is not a formal sidekick, but the comic encourages this reading. This is partly
due to her role in Hank’s crime fighting operations, and partly due to references to Kato,
even though the comic is officially responding to the Green Turtle comics. For example, the
paperback volume for the comic presents two illustrations from the comic on the back
cover, one of Hank looking in disbelief at the costume his mother made for him, and
another of Hua enthusiastically trying on her domino mask, showing them as the dynamic
duo for the story. In addition, her participation in Hank’s crime-fighting operations, the
domino mask that she creates for herself, and her job as a domestic worker and chauffeur
all reference Kato, albeit differently gendered and with a different personal relationship to
their heroes. From a general overview of the comic’s plot, Hua seems more similar to the
two uncles in Lam’s The Green Hornet film, as they are all figures who have no superpowers
and offer support, but also serve as the hero’s teachers and guardians. Thus, rather than
passively emphasize the hero’s superiority and normativity, these sidekicks actively
enforce and direct the hero’s values and actions.

23
In East Asian mythology, each of the four cardinal directions is associated with an animal spirit: the Blue Dragon
of the East, the White Tiger of the West, the Black Turtle of the North, and the Vermillion Bird of the South. Yang
shows the four spirits having a discussion in the comic but does not specify their colour, and presumably changed
the conventional colour of the Turtle to fit in with Chu’s design of the Green Turtle.
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While Hank is the titular superhero, The Shadow Hero is also very much the story of
Hua’s heroism and ambition. If in “The Blue Scorpion and Chung,” Chung shows agency in
choosing to remain a sidekick, in The Shadow Hero Hua shows agency by actively crafting
her hero. Her desire for Hank to be a superhero also comes from an awareness of injustice,
rather than a personal desire for power. In an argument between Hank’s parents about
Hank’s frequent injuries from training, Hua reveals that she knows that a portion of their
income goes to the Tong, that the lack of income is why she has to work as a domestic for
the Olsons, and that she believes that grooming Hank into a superhero would make up for
her husband’s cowardice (33-34). In contrast, Hank remains fairly ignorant and passive
until his father is murdered. Yang also does a reparative reconstruction of the meaning of
being a domestic worker. Hank explains her decision to work in these terms: “She said it
was to help the family make ends meet, but even as a child I knew the truth. She really just
wanted to get away from Chinatown, especially father and me” (6). Rather than present
Hua’s job as inherently demeaning, Yang presents the job as one that would afford her
some independence and time on her own. The chapter in which Hua gets carjacked also
devotes ample time showing how she takes advantage of her job. Mrs. Olson goes into the
bank with a request that Hua not eat in the car, which Hua agrees but then promptly
violates by taking out pork buns she had packed and proceeds to people-watch as she eats
(11-12). Her eating and commentary on passers-by lasts for several panels, before the bank
robber appears. The comic also shows that when Hua drives Hank around looking for crime,
she is using the Olson’s car (38-9). As the beginning of the chapter discussed, Kato’s
coherence comes from being both a domestic and a sidekick, as these two roles provide
support for the hero both in and out of his superhero role. Yang co-articulates the domestic
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worker and sidekick in a similar fashion in The Shadow Hero, but to show that both of these
roles can work together to be empowering.
Part of the reason that these roles are empowering for Hua is that she is a Chinese-
American woman living in the 1930s. Asian American critique has established that a
problem with the discourse of remasculation is a denigration of femininity and queerness,
and indeed, when sidekicks are discussed only in terms of emasculation and gayness,
comics creators elide what significance the role might have for women. For Hua, it does not
make sense to speak of a prior masculinity that has been lost and then needs to be restored.
Faced with gendered expectations to devote herself to her family, having her own job and
being a sidekick allows her to exercise more agency by comparison. Thus, in the genre of
superhero comics, Yang approaches the problem of Asian American agency independent of
masculinity. Interestingly, this does not only apply to Hua, but also her husband. Hua calls
him a coward, however the Turtle reveals a reason for Hank’s father’s non-action. In the
beginning of the story, Hank’s father is feminized by his friends; he refuses to drink with
them, and they tease him by saying that he “take[s] his alcohol like a woman” (9). Later, the
Turtle explains that of all the great people that he had been in contact with throughout
Chinese history, Hank’s father is his favourite person; he had been a drunk boxer in China,
however after alcohol started to take a toll on him, his request from the Green Turtle was
that he would never drink again (83). In this way, Hank’s father exercises agency by
forgoing what his peers define as masculine, comprising of both drinking and fighting.
While Hank does learn to fight, at the end of the comic he is able to end the fight with Ten
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Grand based on wordplay.
24
Through various characters in the comic, Yang responds to
both the problems of scarcity in Asian American superheroes and the demeaning position
of Asian American sidekicks by fleshing out a superhero while changing his relationship to
his sidekick, and changing the sidekick’s relationship to her role.
In taking these approaches to sidekicks, Asian American comics use a very different
strategy from Hong Kong fans’ reimagination of The Green Hornet. In the Hong Kong films
this chapter discussed, there are singular heroes but no sidekicks, with Lam’s film following
kungfu convention of master-disciple relationships instead. In addition, while conflating
Kato and the Hornet is Hong Kong’s unique colonial response, it also leaves the logic of
wanting to be the singular hero intact and glosses over the sidekick’s possibilities. For
Asian Americans, who have constantly faced pressures to be the metaphorical sidekick in
both media and social relations, the sidekick cannot be so easily surmounted, and has
instead become a preoccupation. This preoccupation is an ambivalent one. The statement
in Secret Identities’ introduction to sidekicks, “Honestly, I was never a fan of the Green
Hornet” (Chow and Baroza 62), is anonymous and seems to come from some kind of Asian
American everyman. However, the detail with which Chow, Kang, and Yang discuss and
reinvent sidekicks means this statement does not simply mean a rejection of series. Rather,
the case seems to be that many Asian Americans are antifans of the superhero genre, The
Green Hornet, and Kato’s legacy.
As the introduction outlines, the term “antifandom” can refer to audience positions
defined by various levels of criticalness and repulsion regarding media texts. Recently,

24
The Turtle learns that the Blue Dragon is living in Ten Grand’s shadow, and that in return Ten Grand had
requested “All fights end with my victory.” Hank realizes that the way out of the fight is to use a different
interpretation of the wording, which is that if Ten Grand is victorious, the fight must end, and forfeits (145-146).
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Jonathan Gray has noted two problems with his previous research, which are the
implication that fans and antifans are polar opposites, and that negative affect unite
antifans in a coherent category (“How Do I Dislike Thee?” 25). One sub-category that Gray
raised to nuance antifandom is what he calls “disappointed antifandom,” where “fans like a
text to a point, but reject parts of the text and feel the need to renovate or cure those parts.
In other words, they are fans of the text as a whole, yet also anti-fans of specific parts” (30).
Asian Americans who engage with the superhero genre and with The Green Hornet can be
described as disappointed antifans, seeking to reform the figure of the sidekick.
Gray also writes, “As legitimate as poaching and transformative fandom is as a
response to objectionable, disappointing media, we also need a theory of cultural
exhaustion to explain the frustration, anger, alienation, and hence anti-fandom that arise
when an individual or community is constantly being misrepresented, not represented,
insulted, and/or left out by media” (32). He also asks: “are poaching and anti-fandom
similarly motivated, two ‘equal’ responses to a similar objection, or are there important
differences between the two and between the motivations and experiences that lead to
either response?” (32) One way of answering this question for Asian American antifans of
the superhero genre is to look at intersectionality in audience identity, and how
dimensions of identity factor into engagement or disengagement. The first comic of Secret
Identities, which shows the editors reminiscing on superheroes and planning for the
volume, shows some of the intersectionality between race and gender at work. Editor Jeff
Yang recounts an incident from his childhood where his mother sent him to school in a
Hello Kitty T-shirt. When he joins other boys roleplaying superheroes, they force him to be
Shang-Chi, the Iron Fist, or Karate Kid, and when he refuses, they argue that he is only fit to
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be Hello Kitty and kicks him out of the group (Yang and Castro, “Preface” 9). Like Yang,
Asian American might have been fans of superheroes and the genre’s potential, but
racialization as Asian and its associated gendering also results in Asian American men
becoming antifans of the genre’s specific texts, with negative affect frequently targeted at
the convention of sidekicks. Thus, different identity categories work at cross-purposes to
produce the mix of positive and negative affect that comprises disappointed antifandom for
Asian American men.
Furthermore, in this case poaching and antifandom are not necessarily parallel and
equal responses to a similar objection. Gray’s description of the relationship fans have to
the textual wholes and parts is one factor that distinguishes the two. As he says,
disappointed antifans like the text to a certain point but are unsatisfied with some part of it,
which they try to reform. In the case of antifandoms of the superhero genre and The Green
Hornet specifically, audiences may dislike the text as a whole but are fans of specific parts.
Like Jeff Chinn, many Asian Americans became fans of Bruce Lee because of his pioneering
representations of Asian masculinity, and fans of Kato because he is a hero in mainstream
popular culture. On the other hand, they are disappointed by the relationship between this
character and the texts in which they inhabit, and continue to be disappointed in the wider
media landscape as martial arts became a stereotype of Asian American masculinity. While
these antifans still create transformative works, the cultural exhaustion may mean that
antifans find the text as a whole irredeemable. Rather, they may still be committed to
taking a beloved part out and putting it into a new textual environment. Rather using the
metaphor of poaching, I believe textual rescue is more appropriate. In “Sidekicks: Gene
Yang and Michael Kang,” Keith Chow takes Bruce Lee’s characters out of their original texts
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but puts them in the wider context of Asian American characters, making Lee’s characters
speak to this wider context; in The Shadow Hero, Gene Yang does not try to rewrite the
original Green Turtle comics but creates a new environment where the hero exists
alongside San Francisco Chinatown, ancient Chinese animal spirits, and his
sidekick/mother. This operation of recontextualizing parts is not only a result of exhausted
Asian American antifans, but characterizes Hong Kong fans of Bruce Lee and The Green
Hornet as well. In this case, it is the lack of access to the original text that makes fans
reinvent new text around an old character.

American Superheroes and Global Sidekicks
Asian Americans challenge superhero conventions as Americans who withstand the
effects of racialization and discrimination, however the US’s status as a superpower and the
worldwide engagement with American popular culture means that the audiences of other
nations increasingly come into contact with the concept of a hero’s sidekick and negotiate
their status as a metaphorical sidekick to the US. Previous discussion regarding Hong Kong
audiences’ reinvention of Kato is one example of how the sidekick can be reinterpreted,
however it is important to note that the filmmakers who refer to The Green Hornet and
Hong Kongers who take up the Hornet’s heroic identity did so in relative isolation, with no
dialogue with American audiences of the franchise or even responses from American
license holders for the character. In addition, Hong Kong’s status as a British colony and its
impending return to the PRC for the 1980s and 1990s means that its cultural and
geopolitical identity has not primarily been one of a junior partner to the US.
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The picture for global media and geopolitical cooperation is different in the early
21
st
century. In 2002, Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur wrote an article in The Guardian
titled “The Asians Are Coming.” It begins with a prediction: “Ten years from now, Spider-
Man will make $1bn in its first week. But when Spider-Man takes off his mask, he’ll
probably be Chinese. And the city in which he operates will not be New York, it will be
Shanghai. And yet it will be an international film, it will still be Spider-Man” (Kapur). To a
certain extent, this prediction has come true. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has
been investing heavily in its film industries, including coproductions with Hollywood.
These coproductions tend to be action and adventure blockbusters, including superhero
films. Some films include Iron Man 3 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, with Stan Lee
attempting to create original heroes with Chinese production partners before his death.
25

The coproduction of Iron Man 3 was fraught with conflicts, and in the end the international
version of the film cut most of the scenes with the Chinese actors. Chinese government
officials and audiences interpreted this as Hollywood trying to take advantage of Chinese
financing while sidelining China culturally. In other words, Hollywood film coproductions,
like American superhero duos, creates sidekicks, but the international scope of
coproductions also means that new audiences have unique perspectives on this
arrangement. While the PRC government and audiences were aligned with each other in
their dissatisfaction at Iron Man 3, audiences also rejected the state’s narrow definition of
heroism and also highlighted the continuity between sidekick and villain.
Iron Man 3 is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a multimedia franchise
updating and expanding on characters and events in Marvel’s superhero comic books,

25
In 2015, Lee announced that he was developing ideas for a new superhero story, Realm, and had cast actress Li
Bingbing as a Chinese superheroine (Ford).
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which launched with the first Iron Man film in 2008. Stan Lee, who was responsible for
many of Marvel’s iconic characters, created Tony Stark / Iron Man as a scientific genius,
millionaire, arms manufacturer, and playboy, who designs the prototype Iron Man suit to
escape from the Viet Cong. In the comics, Iron Man does not have any official sidekicks,
though the character who fits this role is James Rhodes, a Black military officer who later
serves as Stark’s personal pilot and mechanic. Adilifu Nama, writing about Black sidekicks,
compares Rhodes to Kato, saying that he remains a “glorified chauffeur” (79). In a story arc
where Iron Man lapses into alcoholism, Rhodes dons the Iron Man suit, and later becomes a
hero known as War Machine and then the Iron Patriot. Nama writes that “War Machine
remained fundamentally derivative of Tony Stark’s superscience and was overshadowed by
his superhero persona” (81). In the MCU films, James Rhodes’s role is more independent, as
he works as a colonel in the Air Force and exhibits ideological differences from Stark. For
example, during senate hearings on whether Stark should be the sole proprietor of the Iron
Man suit, Rhodes testifies against him, thereby questioning whether a superhero should
stand above social conventions of justice. With Rhodes in a more prominent role, however,
it is the Chinese characters and China who are the most obviously sidelined. The beginning
of this chapter covers the mid-twentieth century development of sidekicks from young
White men to men of colour and women, as the comic book industry found new kinds of
otherness to naturalize the figure of the sidekick. More recently, this figure is being filled by
non-Americans who cannot afford to be completely ignored, but are also never fully
included.
The PRC’s involvement in Iron Man 3 as a coproduction and its perception of its
marginalized status is part of a longer history of how pressures to national film policies
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have shaped the country’s place in international trade. The PRC only opened to
international trade and media after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s and early
1980s. Thus, this discussion of how the PRC negotiates superhero tropes is on a different
temporality than Hong Kong, which began localizing The Green Hornet in 1969. Before the
1980s, the PRC treated films mainly as ideological vehicles rather than commodities, and
the government bought packages of old foreign films at a flat fee to exhibit in vertically
integrated, state-controlled theatre chains (Su loc 327). Hollywood producers and studios
viewed China’s vast population as an untapped market, and sought to change these policies.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has tried to negotiate with Chinese
officials to gain access to the market since 1980 (Su 339). In addition, as Media Industry
scholar Aynne Kokas argues, the MPAA is not simply an industry organization independent
from the US government, since its leadership has been filled by presidential advisors and
senators, and the government acknowledges the importance of the MPAA and American
film when it comes to international relations (26). For example, concerns over losses to
film revenue as a result of piracy in China was raised as a major concern when China bid to
rejoin the WTO in 2001, resulting in the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights) agreement, which the PRC was compelled to follow (Wang 81). American
efforts to influence film policy have been successful; in 2013, the year Iron Man 3 was
released, the Chinese box office grew by 27% (Motion Picture Association of America). Iron
Man 3 earned $64.5 million in China on its opening weekend, accounting for a third of the
international opening weekend revenue (“Iron Man 3”).
For their part, the PRC has attempted to balance direct challenges to these attempts
to influence their policy with tacit collaboration aimed at using the US and Hollywood’s
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expectations to Chinese advantage. The foreign film quota increased throughout the 1990s
and early 2000s. Coproductions also became attractive both domestically and
internationally, since they are counted as domestic films, which allows foreign production
companies to circumvent the quota, while enabling foreign production companies to
shoulder some of the costs of production (Peng 308). According to Media and Cultural
Studies scholar Wendy Su, PRC film policy regarding Hollywood in the last few decades has
shifted from “containment to competitive cooperation” (Su 10) but the state sees itself in a
“post-Cold War cultural war” where the PRC needs to maintain hegemony in global
discourse (Su 44). Currently, official coproductions involving the PRC require government
review from production to exhibition (Kokas 32). When released, these films would contain
new filmmaking technologies (such as CGI) and high production values, which would draw
domestic audiences; at the same time, these films would be distributed globally through the
networks of the PRC’s coproduction partners, delivering Chinese content to the world.
26

The PRC intended Iron Man 3 to be such as film, and began as a coproduction. It was
partially funded by China’s DMG Entertainment, stars Chinese actors Wang Xueqi and Fan
Bingbing as doctors who help Tony Stark, and includes financing and product placement
from Yili, a Chinese dairy company. However, the coproduction status was dropped for
unknown reasons, and it was released as a foreign film (Peng 301). Upon its release, the
film received a lukewarm reception from both Chinese officials and audiences. The main
objection was that Wang and Fan’s few scenes were mostly cut from the film’s international
release, with Fan being absent altogether. Chinese audiences expressed disappointment,

26
Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics(New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2004). The idea of
soft power has been extremely influential in China. Its cultural cachet has also increased since President Xi Jinping
stated in 2014, “we should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate
China’s messages to the world” (qtd. in Shambaugh)
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while SARFT (China’s then State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television)
27
released
statements that Iron Man 3 did not meet the state’s standards for Chinese input.
Iron Man 3 demonstrates one form that partial inclusion of Asians take in the 21
st

century. The writers for the film took definitive steps to avoid representing China
negatively, but like the positive representation of Kato in the mid-20
th
century, Asian
characters only fill supportive, background roles. One of the ways in which recent
filmmakers try to preempt negative feedback from Chinese censors and audiences is to
change the ethnicity of its characters – for Doctor Strange, the ethnicity of The Ancient One
was originally Tibetan but was left vague in the film, with Tilda Swinton in the role. For
Iron Man 3, the character which received this treatment was the Mandarin. In the comics,
he was originally a half-Chinese warlord with a Chinese father and an English mother, who
is evicted as a youth by the Communists. He is represented as Stark’s equal but opposite,
technologically savvy but bent on world domination, in contrast to Iron Man’s
interventions, which are framed as humanitarian (Iadonisi 44-45). Iadonisi argues that the
Mandarin combines turn of the century stereotypes of Chinese despotism with Cold War
technological fears. This image is clearly no longer viable for a US-China coproduction. The
Mandarin appears in Iron Man 3, but he is played by British actor Ben Kingsley, and is
vaguely as a Middle Eastern terrorist. A plot twist in the film reveals that the Mandarin is
staged by the real villain of the film. Instead of the Mandarin, the film features two Chinese
doctors; Doctor Wu (Wang) and his assistant (Fan) conduct surgery on Stark at the end of
the film, as the events of the film convince Stark to take the risk removing shrapnel that
was embedded near his heart.

27
As of 2013, SARFT merged with the General Administration of Press and Publication to form the State
Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT).
123

In the film’s international release, Doctor Wu is introduced in a flashback in the
beginning of the film, showing Stark saying hello to him at a party a number of years before.
He is left unmentioned for the rest of the film until the surgery at the end, where he
appears in a short montage of the surgery with no speaking part, and his assistant is not
shown. The Chinese release includes only about three additional minutes of more
conversation interspersed through these scenes. This limited role disappointed actor Wan
Xueqi, who said in an interview that he got involved with Iron Man 3 on the condition that
he would not play a villain, a character who gets killed off quickly, or a groveling
subordinate. He explained that he was told that his character would be a friend of Stark’s
and save him partly through traditional Chinese medicine, and he was not aware that there
would be a different Chinese release (Chen).
28
His statements echo Bruce Lee’s conditions
for initially signing on for Number One Son in the mid-1960s, which were no “‘ah-so’s’ and
‘chop-cops’ in the dialogue” and “he would not be required to go bouncing around with a
pigtail” (in Pollard, “In Kato’s Gung-Fu”). Unfortunately, in some ways the Chinese
characters’ roles end up mirroring Kato’s role for the Green Hornet as well. Kato provides
mechanical support to the Green Hornet based initially on his technological inclination,
initially coded as a Japanese tendency. In the case of a coproduction with China, the place of
Chinese characters does not depend solely on an American impression of Chinese
ascendency but actual Chinese input, however the end result is not substantially different,
as the doctors are included to perform what is arguably a technical service
29
.

28
The surgery scenes do show acupuncture, but it is not prominently featured.
29
I elaborate on the implications of the US-China coproduction of Iron Man 3 for Iron Man as a technopositivist
hero in “Chinese Milk for Iron Men: Superhero Coproductions and Technological Anxiety.”
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Indeed, China Daily quoted the deputy Chief of SARFT, Zhang Pimin, as saying, “a
completely US story, some Chinese money, a few Chinese faces and some Chinese elements
– these kinds of films are not real coproductions” (Wei). Similarly, Chinese audiences were
dissatisfied with the clumsy addition of scenes specific to the Chinese release, and reported
feeling as though they were watching two films spliced together (“Iron Man 3 Elicits Ire”).
On Chinese social networking site Douban.com, nonfiction writer Xia Nai wrote a long,
negative review of Iron Man 3 where he points out that their roles were unnecessary to the
plot. He criticizes Wang’s narrow ideological commitment to only playing a hero and also
calls out national branding imperatives and Marvel Studios for a missing an opportunity to
explore what he believes to be the superhero story most pertinent to China, which would
have been stories related to the Mandarin. Interestingly, Xia expressed that Wang should
have played the Mandarin. In a rant directed at Wang, he writes, “It’s not like we’d blast you
just for playing a villain okay! We really hoped to see the Mandarin as a Chinese person
okay, a reincarnation of Sun Yat-sen okay, what does it take to create a screenplay –
imagination my dear” (Xia). Xia’s review demonstrates that Chinese audiences are not
necessarily aligned with national branding imperatives, and that to a certain extent they
implicitly understood that in trying to play a hero, China would only end up as the sidekick.
It may seem strange that anyone would imagine the Mandarin as Sun Yat-sen
(revolutionary and founding father of the Republic of China in the early 1900s), however,
Xia implies that a villain would have more complexity in his character, and although they
are coded as negative in the fictional world, could be interpreted by the actor and by
audiences as legitimate in its own right. With a sidekick, there is less to be interpreted and
seen.
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Xia’s desire to see a prominent Chinese supervillain also points to two problems:
that China can slip easily from helper to villain in the American imagination, and also that
frequently treating another as a sidekick may actually drive them to be a villain instead.
Numerous political science articles note that China’s soft power strategy as just another
side of the coin for its hard power interventions. In addition, moves such as China’s Wanda
Group buying the AMC theatre chain and Legendary Pictures have been perceived by
Americans as aggressive and totalitarian. For example, the Hollywood Reporter article
reporting on the negative reactions from Chinese audiences to Iron Man 3 drew two
responses, one which reads “Commie see, commie do,” and the other a longer treatise about
how collaborating with Chinese demands means the lack of artistic integrity, “or just
integrity” (Tsui). Ironically, Marvel Studio’s decision to sidestep a potentially offensive
Mandarin has spurred American audiences to see China as an equivalent villain even more.
Metaphorically being the villain rather than the sidekick in geopolitics can have dire
consequences, but Xia’s position that China might as well own its own villainy constitutes a
revolt to the American superhero convention which continuously need to naturalize
sidekicks with marginalized identities. This position is not limited to Chinese audiences in
the PRC. In The Slanted Screen, a documentary on Asian American masculinity, Asian
American actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa says that earlier in his career, the only roles for
Asian American men were wimpy businessmen or evil characters. He explains that “The
worst thing I could do is play a bad guy and be a wimpy bad guy…and my intention was, if
I’m going to choose between a wimpy businessman and a bad guy, I’m going to be a bad guy,
because I’ve got balls” (The Slanted Screen).
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In context of Asian Americans and the documentary, Tagawa’s strategy is more
closely tied to attaining masculinity, whereas for the PRC, similar to Hong Kong kungfu
films, masculinity serves as a vehicle for nationalism. Nevertheless, both chart a course
from sidekick to villain. While the move from sidekick to hero is a familiar trope in the
superhero genre, the move from sidekick to villain is not. The genre has created complex
models of power and exceptionalism from society, however it has not devoted the same
attention to hierarchies, paternalism, and discrimination among the heroes. At the same
time that Black sidekicks such as Sam Wilson / the Falcon and James Rhodes are figures
through which the partial inclusion of African Americans have been explored, the
combination of Bruce Lee and Kato has ensured that both Asian Americans and different
Chinese societies have had to contend with the partial inclusion of Asians on both an
American and an international scale.

127

Chapter 3: A Tightrope Ambiguity: Loving and Hating America in Japanese Military Video
Games

“Memes, safe spaces, Trump… how the heck does Kojima keep predicting the future? Is he a
practitioner of meme magic?”
- Beef Chavez
“Clearly Japan understands something we don’t.”
- killer1one1

in response to “Metal Gear Trump – The Final Debate,” YouTube video, 15 October 2016

In 1999, Colonel Casey Wardynski of the United States army began to devise a way
to represent military combat in a realistic way to potential recruits, which became the
video game America’s Army. America’s Army was released on July 4
th
, 2002 for free as an
online multiplayer first person shooter, where players come together to train and execute
missions from the perspective of individual recruits. The game was blatantly ideological,
with the website describing its mission as “educating the public about the US Army and its
career opportunities, high-tech involvement, values, and teamwork.” For example, the play
experience relies on an “Honour System,” where players get Honour points through
military approved actions and loses them for insubordination or other disruptive play
behaviour. By 2009, the game had amassed almost 10 million registered users. Even
though the US Army acknowledges that most of these players would not end up enlisting,
“an America’s Army player who, through his play experiences, comes to more readily
accept the status quo of army norms, priorities, and ways of thinking about the world
counts as a success as well” (Allen 6).
Several months before America’s Army was released, the end of 2001 marked the
launch of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2). MGS2 had some gameplay differences
from America’s Army in that it was a single-player game with a fictional narrative, but its
128

premise could be a training scenario: the player character is a special forces operative
trying to free the American president from a terrorist group who had taken over
Manhattan, while preventing the terrorists from setting off nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere. However, the rest of the game is not as straightforward. It is revealed that the
Colonel who guides the player character is a computer simulation, that the president has
masterminded the crisis, and that the US has long been controlled by a cabal who have
steered the country into a war economy.
The series is also not an American production; it has been developed by director and
producer Hideo Kojima with Konami, a Japanese studio, from 1987 to 2015. The first half of
this chapter argues that the Metal Gear Solid series encapsulates the ambivalence of Japan
towards militarism and American power in the post-WWII period. Having renounced its
military as part of its terms of surrender, Japan was then incorporated into the US security
umbrella. However, pacifist philosophies, outrage at the American interference with Japan
in the name of Cold War security, and a sense that both domestic and international
militarists had victimized the Japanese people complicate any straightforward sense that
Japan is a beneficiary of American power. Militarism does not exist only at the level of
policy. During the American occupation of Japan, the US had an explicit goal of re-educating
the Japanese citizenry according to American principles, partly through instating channels
for the dissemination of American popular culture for the following decades. However, in
the context of the complex relationship between the two countries, ideas in American
popular culture were not always received according to the US’s civilizing agenda. The
ethos of the Metal Gear Solid series is a response to postwar American political and social
influence on Japan, which its narrative patterns and tropes are a transformation of
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American war films made after the war in Vietnam. Thus, while the Metal Gear games
reflect Japan’s familiarity with American military presence and discourses at end of the 20
th

century, it also expresses an ambivalence regarding American popular culture and a
criticism of American power.
The Metal Gear Solid series comprises of 8 mainline games (Metal Gear 1 and 2,
Metal Gear Solid 1-5 and Peace Walker)
30
and a number of spinoffs. They cover a period of
time from the 1960s to the near future, encompassing Cold War power struggles and
imagined future conflicts in which the US has a part. The series’ player characters are
multiple generations of American secret operatives who are sent by the state to infiltrate
enemy bases around the world. The premise in each game is usually to prevent “metal
gears,” bipedal tanks which can launch nuclear weapons, from falling into the wrong hands.
However, each game quickly develops into the revelation of American politics conspiracies,
a negotiation of freedom and control, and a meditation on the ethics of warfare and the
impact of technology. The series has received both commercial and critical acclaim, selling
over 50 million copies worldwide and attracted in-depth analysis and scholarship.
This chapter will discuss the game as a social fan text emerging from postwar Japan,
drawing on the series’ worldbuilding, narratives, representations, and allusions, rather
than the mechanics. This is partly because the significance of the mechanics has already
been discussed at length. While most games with military themes encourage players to kill
enemy combatants, the Metal Gear series is designed for stealth and discourages

30
The first two games were released under the titles Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, but the third was titled Metal
Gear Solid to reflect that the rest of the series will be in 3D and to reference the protagonist’s code name of Solid
Snake. Beginning with Metal Gear Solid, the title number reverted to count from 1. The Metal Gear Solid series is
not a remake of the earlier Metal Gear games, but serve as sequels and prequels and are part of the same
continuity. Since all games going forward have been called Metal Gear Solid, I will use this name, and its acronym
(MGS) to refer to the entire series.
130

confrontation. Most games in the series provide player characters with non-lethal options
such as distracting items and tranquilizers, which also have less risk of raising alarms
(Miller 2). Direct confrontation is further discouraged by limiting available weapons and
character health, which means that fighting enemies often leads to a game over. The games
also present non-lethal play as a challenge, such as by setting achievements and rewards
for remaining undiscovered or for killing no one. Players do tend to follow the game
structure; as with other games, speed runs (where players strive to finish the game as fast
as possible) are common, but for games in Metal Gear, “pacifist runs” are also a hallmark of
gamer expertise.
These factors have lead to scholars arguing that MGS is an example of mechanics as
structure and motivation for player action, especially as they combine with narrative
elements. For example, an oft-cited scene is when the player character in Metal Gear Solid 3
must wade up a river in a vision, dodging the spirits of every character the player has
chosen to kill up to this moment. This segment both narratively and ludologically penalizes
the player for killing, as the time and effort required increases in accordance with the
number of kills (Noon and Dyer-Witheford 79). Drawing on the work of Ian Bogost,
Stamenkovic et al. argue that the series is an example of procedural rhetoric delivered in a
multimodal way, where the mechanics, the narrative, and gameplay practices, and the
discourses within the game as well as the paratexts around the game all work together to
deliver rhetorical positions regarding its topics and themes.
This kind of scholarship about MGS avoid focusing on either the mechanics or the
narrative, and also help to bridge game studies’ earlier, somewhat binaristic debate
131

regarding whether it is best to treat games as narratives or systems of play.
31
However,
taking both the narratives and systems in games into account does not mean that games
have been treated as social texts. Most scholars and critics have discussed MGS with very
little reference to its Japanese origin, and discuss its themes of warfare as though warfare
was universal. For example, Derek Noon and Nick Dyer-Witheford write that the Metal Gear
series is an example of Japanese games with “disturbing, subversive themes largely absent
from Western game culture” (75), naming in broad strokes the influence of Western action
genres, Japan’s own traditions of militarism, tropes associated with samurai and ronin,
opposition to nuclear power and American global dominance, and anxieties over limits of
the human in technologized warfare (76). They then cite Kojima’s comments regarding his
father, who initially hated America due to experiences during the air bombing of Tokyo, but
fell in love with American culture in the postwar period (76). Other than this biographical
detail, Noon and Dyer-Witheford’s do not provide an analysis of how specific Japanese
influences manifest, focusing instead on Metal Gear’s presentation of combat simulation,
the manipulation of information in a war economy, and the covert promotion of American
culture and systems of power worldwide.

Military Games in the US and Japan
Explorations of militarism, American power, and technology pervade Japanese
popular culture in the form of literature, film, manga and anime, however military themes

31
Ludologists such as Aspen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, and Markku Eskelinen have argued that theories of games should
focus on the formal elements of the mechanics, and that the dominance of narrative as a form to convey culture
hampers theories about games as a medium in its own right. On the other hand, narratologists have argued that it
is impossible to isolate mechanics from their context and how developers and players make meaning of games,
which often involves narration and representation (Murray). The debate more or less resolved with scholars
acknowledging that either side is a matter of perspective, as well as to broaden the study of games beyond a
consideration of these two factors alone.
132

and shooter mechanics are very rare in games from Japan.
32
Kotaku writer Richard
Eisenbeis notes that Japanese gamers have generally thought of first-person shooters (FPSs)
as “overly violent games from the West,” and is somewhat of a niche market (Eisenbeis).
The Metal Gear series is an exception in Japanese games in that it revolves heavily around
real world politics and military combat. At the same time, it is also distinct from American
military shooters in that it does not inherit a history of collaboration with military research
and Hollywood film production. While military technology is often adopted by society at
large, gaming innovations and personnel have been recognized and adopted by the military
just as often as the reverse (Kline et al. 189-180). In addition, contemporary military games
were created alongside Hollywood war films from the same resource pools, and tend to
follow Hollywood’s heroic narratives. These imbrications have been characterized by
scholars as the “military-industrial-media-entertainment network,” an expansion of
Eisenhower’s term to cover the pervasive nature of media in contemporary society (see
Der Derian, Virtuous War).
Early US games came from computing science and engineering researchers, who
were funded by the government as a part of Cold War competition. In some cases, games
were developed from researchers who tried to divert their military research to playful ends,
such as Spacewar!, by Steve Russell and his schoolmates in the MIT Model Railroad Club
(Kline et al. 87). In turn, Nolan Bushnell, another engineering student, adapted Spacewar!

32
3D military-themed game franchises that have persisted for the last two decade include Medal of Honour (1999),
America’s Army (2002), SOCOM US Navy Seals (2002), Battlefield (2002), Call of Duty (2003), and games in the Tom
Clancy’s series such as Rainbow Six (1998) and Splinter Cell (2002). They are all produced in the US, with the
exception of Ubisoft. Ubisoft started off as a French distributor before becoming a development company. Their
development and publication of the Tom Clancy series is based on their acquisition of the Red Storm
Entertainment, the American game studio that Tom Clancy founded (Bertz). Ubisoft is an international
conglomerate, with studios all over the world often handling their own IPs. Most of Ubisoft’s well-know IPs, such
as the Tom Clancy’s series, Far Cry, and Assassin’s Creed, are predominantly developed by various Ubisoft branches
in Canada.
133

For the arcade and eventually launched the video game company Atari. In other cases, the
US military funded and scouted for virtual reality and simulation technology, which could
save resources and mitigate dangers (Der Derian 89-90). Early 3D tank simulator games
like Panther (1975) and Battlezone (1980) were adapted by the military to train soldiers to
operate tanks (Wolf 35). In 1993, the Marines also adapted id Software’s Doom, a science
fiction FPS. Two officers at the Modeling and Simulation office at Quantico were explicitly
asked to look for civilian games which could be modified for military use, and they created
Marine Doom in 1996 (Stahl 117). As time went on, adaptation gave way to co-development,
where military funding would be the basis of commercial games that also have military
uses. For example, the military-funded Institute of Creative Industries at USC released the
game Full Spectrum Warrior in 2004 (Stahl 116). Thus, in the history of US game
development, military funding came together with computing and engineering interests to
ensure that shooting targets comprised a significant portion of gaming experiences.
In turn, Hollywood ensured that historical American military themes dominated
shooters. After video games emerged from the market crash in the early 1980s, media
conglomerations in the US started to create interactive divisions that could create games as
part of transmedia franchises. Based on his interviews with Dreamworks employees, game
journalist Jamie Russell writes that Steven Spielberg had envisioned a WWII-themed game
“with cinematic sweep” since the early 1990s (183), but at the time, the studio deemed that
a WWII historical topic for games would be too niche (184). Spielberg was able to create a
game as an educational “companion piece” to Saving Private Ryan (1998), which eventually
became Medal of Honor. Due to the synergy between film and game development, the
retired Marine officer who advised on Saving Private Ryan also advised on Medal of Honor,
134

from its representations to realistic mission structure (187), and the game also benefited
from Hollywood’s sound design and musical scoring personnel. Electronic Arts (EA)
published the game and also bought Dreamworks Interactive in 2000 (189). EA would
publish Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002, which was also a commercial and critical
success. The Medal of Honor series also directly led to the development of other military
shooters in the early 2000s. The developer Activision, which had been in competition with
EA, funded a studio comprised of previous Medal of Honor developers to create another
military shooter, which became Call of Duty (Takahashi).
The favourable reception of Medal of Honor was partly due to its cinematic feel,
which game critics noted reproduced a sense of realism and player presence (Takahashi).
Similarly, Call of Duty would also be based on historical realism and a cinematic
presentation, and these two franchises help set the tone for American FPSs in the beginning
of the 2000s. Importantly, the creation of military-themed shooters in collaboration with
Hollywood also changed the cultural status of shooters. Gerard Vorhees argues that
shooters for a consumer market actually started off as being predominantly fantasy, horror,
and science fiction, such as Doom (103). Indeed, even though Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
popularized the FPS with a story about an American spy taking down Nazis during WWII, it
is infused with fantastic and ridiculous elements like an army of Nazi zombies and Hitler in
a mechanical suit. Vorhees makes the observation that despite moral panics about high
school shootings in the 1990s, shooting games actually became less and less controversial.
He argues that when shooters were fantastic, they belonged to a subculture that already
raised suspicion, however historical shooters couched violent gameplay in a familiar
historical narrative about American heroism (103).
135

Unlike in the US, game development in Japan did not initially emerge as a spinoff
from military research or funding. Major contemporary game developers began as
manufacturers for tabletop games or cards, coin-operated machines, or ran amusement
parks (Picard). Nintendo started off as a playing card manufacturer (Consalvo 153), and
Konami, who employed Kojima, began as a jukebox repair company (Konami.com). As I will
discuss, postwar Japanese policymakers also made explicit decisions to avoid creating a
military-industrial complex, and thus research and development funding for military
purposes in Japan did not reach a volume or scope that it would influence the technology of
games.
33
As Martin Picard writes in his history of Japanese game development, a successful
home appliance industry, the beginning of computing technology, government campaigns
to support local innovation, high economic growth and a “leisure boom” in the 70s and 80s
all came together to provide the infrastructure for Japan to successfully launch a video
game industry (Picard). Because early video game resources did not come from military or
state funding, the educational backgrounds of Japanese developers also tended to contrast
with their contemporaneous American counterparts; most early Japanese game designers
were aspiring artists and writers (Kohler 84), and even today most major game designers
in Japan are not themselves programmers.
Japanese games’ different path of development led to different genres and tropes to
American games. While the influence of Hollywood films led to American games
emphasizing cinematic realism, many Japanese games are intentionally cartoony (Consalvo
163-4). Earlier American games tended to represent a first-person perspective, show the
vehicle that the player is controlling, or present the game in an interface that mimics a

33
Interestingly, the company Sega was founded to capitalize on the demand for entertainment in American
military bases, though notably it was a Japanese branch of an American game company founded by Americans.
136

vehicle’s control panel. For example, players interfaced with Battlezone via a scope, as
though they were inside a tank. However, designer Nishikado Tomohiro, who is best
known for developing Space Invaders, designed the first arcade game where players
controlled a human character rather than a vehicle (Gunfight, 1978) (Kohler 18). Game
designers also tried to expand games to cover more diverse interests; Pac-man designer
Iwatani Toru was led to the game’s premise and aesthetics because he wanted to
distinguish his game from the majority that focused on shooting aliens, and also wanted
something that could appeal to women, who tended to visit arcades much less than men
(Kohler 22). Subsequently, Nintendo’s character-lead franchises solidified the popularity of
games centred around whimsically designed characters rather than particular kinds of
gameplay. For example, games featuring Mario cover diverse gaming genres such as
platformers, racing, sports, fighting, and role playing. Japanese developers of the late 80s
and 90s especially innovated on the role-playing game. Previously, arcade games were
predominantly match-based, but home consoles enabled developers to plan long stories
and character growth (Kohler 86), and they launched current fantasy RPG franchises such
as Zelda (Nintendo) and Final Fantasy (Square Enix).
The Metal Gear series has been impacted by these Japanese approaches to games.
From the beginning, the series featured complex stories, themes, and character
relationships. For example, the first Metal Gear covers American special operative Solid
Snake being sent on a mission to infiltrate a rogue mercenary state, only to discover that
his commanding officer Big Boss is the mercenary state’s founder and leader. Even though
Metal Gear Solid games have been recently marketed as stealth or a third-person shooter,
players ranked the first game highly in adventure and RPG categories, which surprised
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Kojima (“Metal Gear Solid”). In addition, while the 3D models of the game are realistic, the
characters and events can be cheesy, melodramatic, and satirical. Alongside a realistic
representation of historical events and psychological pathos, the series also features
convenient amnesias and an evil cyborg senator who relies on college football skills to fight
the protagonist. In this respect, the series is much more similar to American shooters of the
late 1980s to 1990s like Doom and Wolfenstein than contemporary shooters that legitimize
themselves with military gravitas.
Finally, Japanese games almost never deal with warfare. This is partly due to
Nintendo’s clout; it made consoles viable again after the video game crash, and sought to
market games as family-friendly experiences, open to a general audience and played on the
living room television (Picard). The lack of military themes in games is also greatly due to
Japan’s conception of its own history of militarism. Due to its experiences in the Pacific War
and its defeat, Japanese postwar representations of its own experience with warfare tend
to emphasize the tragedy and confusion of war rather than its heroic dimension, especially
from 1945 to the 1960s (Shimazu 104). In games, heroic military themes have never been
from a Japanese nationalist perspective; Capcom’s 19XX series of arcade games, one of the
few shooters to reference historical warfare, even has the player destroy Japanese targets,
including the battleship Yamato.
34
Today, military themes can only be found with settings
that are science fiction, alternate universe, or fantasy. The few games military-themed set
in the real world tend to have American creative involvement, or are specifically designed

34
The Yamato was one of the most heavily armed battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and also served as the
Navy’s flagship during parts of the Pacific War. The name “Yamato” is a poetic term for Japan and the Japanese
people, and therefore its sinking at the end of the war was culturally symbolic. It has been commemorated
through memorials, museums, films, books, and the enormously popular anime series Space Battleship Yamato
(1974), which was broadcast in the US as Star Blazers. However, there have been no commercial games using the
Yamato as a centrepiece.
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for the American market. For example, the main line games in the combat flight simulator
series Ace Combat are set in a fictional realm, however the spinoff Ace Combat: Assault
Horizon (2011), which recounts a UN task force suppressing an uprising in East Africa, was
written by American author Jim DeFelice.
Thus, unlike the US, video games are not a means by which militarism, patriotism,
and combat behaviour is disseminated in Japan. Indeed, the Metal Gear series is one of the
few, and it is ambivalent about its military themes. On the one hand, the games show great
respect for soldiering, and the gameplay is based upon the thrill of infiltration and combat.
On the other hand, it is extremely critical of state power, the economics of warfare, and the
psychological effects on soldiers and civilians. I argue that the series reflects postwar
Japanese attitudes regarding state-driven violence, and projects this onto the relationship
between American soldiers and the American state. In addition, the series’ concern with
international conflicts distills a postwar Japanese skepticism of the US’s international
influence.

Warfare and the State in Postwar Japan
As scholars of Japan note, international media tend to criticize Japan for its silence
regarding its history of warfare, but this evaluation rests on the actions of government
leaders who tend to be centre to right-leaning (Dower, “‘An Aptitude’” 105). These
criticisms do not recognize the importance of this issue to Japanese society, nor the diverse
ways in which the Japanese people reckon with their past (Hashimoto 9). Nationalists, such
as the right-leaning members among the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), have indeed
criticized the lack of military fervor in Japan, lamenting while on average 70% of young
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people in the rest of the world say that they would be willing to defend their countries if
under attack, only 10% of young Japanese people say the same (cited in Dower, “‘An
Aptitude’” 110-111). However, left-leaning academics, some media outlets, anti-nuclear
and pacifist cultures, and even mainstream perceptions of Japanese victimhood tend to
oppose militant nationalism and recall that the Japanese themselves suffered under their
own military government. A prominent example of this in popular culture is Hayao
Miyazaki, who has opposed attempts to revise the country’s pacifist constitutional clauses
and supported reparations to comfort women (Byford). His animated film, The Wind Rises,
caused great controversy for depicting the engineers responsible for creating the Zero
fighter plane used by the Imperial Navy. While some critics in the US and South Korea
argued that his focus on artisans in pursuit of their craft ignored Japan’s wartime atrocities
(Byford), the film’s depiction of engineering being co-opted by warfare and state
imperatives also lead Japanese critics to label Miyazaki a traitor (Ashcraft, “Hayao
Miyazaki”). In the same vein, the MGS series may be a military themed with gameplay like
American shooters, however its tragic lens on soldiering and critical stance on state-
directed violence is a consolidation of Japanese postwar attitudes.
WWII-era Japanese government was a military government, yoking all sectors of
society into waging total war. Militarists took over through assassinations, attempted
coups, and manufactured crises that would justify the use of force (Berger 132). For
example, Japanese militarists pressured the Diet into passing the National Mobilization Act
(1938) at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war, which placed the economy, media, and
unions under control of the state. Social interventions included the promotion of state
Shintoism, in which the emperor was figured as divine, and enforcing the Imperial Rescript
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on Education, which had been designed during the Meiji period to instill values of sacrifice
and obedience to the state and emperor. Military leaders extracted sacrifices from soldiers
by exploiting the belief in the Emperor’s divinity, and executed and imprisoned dissenters.
By waging a war of aggression and then refusing to surrender, the government also
prolonged the suffering of the populace from firebombing, homelessness and privation, and
indirectly the destruction wrought by the atomic bombs.
Since Japan’ surrender in August 1945, competing perspectives have sought to make
meaning of the war. As Japanese cultural historian Akiko Hashimoto notes, abject defeat
meant that the Pacific war and Japan’s military expansion into Asia could not be evaluated
according to earlier justifications such as economic growth or the creation of the Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (7-8). As Dower writes, because of defeat and international
judgement, the most pressing question for the Japanese immediately after surrender was
not violence perpetrated against Japan’s opponents but grief and guilt towards their own
people (486). At the same time, due to defeat, the Japanese dead could be mourned for their
demise but not celebrated for their heroism (487). In the search for those responsible for
Japan’s own wartime tragedies, the country felt that it was not only soldiers, but the entire
populace, who had been deceived by the military government (Dower, Embracing Defeat
490).
The MGS franchise is first and foremost concerned with this sense of state betrayal,
even though the games are not about Japan. Almost every game features it, however Metal
Gear Solid 3 uses state manipulation and betrayal as an origin story for the conflicts in the
rest of the series. MGS3 takes place in 1964, where a young Big Boss (John) is sent by the
CIA to eliminate his mentor, a woman known as “the Boss,” after she apparently defects to
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the USSR. He learns that the US staged her defection as a way for her to steal the Soviet
portion of funds pooled by the US, the USSR, and China during WWII. However, after an
American nuclear warhead was unexpectedly detonated in the USSR, the US government
decides to clear its name by using her as a scapegoat. Throughout MGS3, John encounters
the Boss several times, and she instructs him on her philosophy of how there are never
enemies in absolute terms except when politics determine them for soldiers. However, she
accepted her fate so as to prevent a war of retaliation, out of loyalty to the US, and hoped
that consolidating the funds may help to end Cold War divisions. After considerable
distress, John also decides to complete his mission, but quits the CIA and leaves the US to
create a community of soldiers who are not subject to state power.
These premises and patterns of storytelling do not convey pacifism in the sense of
abolishing military forces or warfare in general. Aspects of the series can even exhibit a
nostalgia for a Japan’s military capacity, if not wartime social organization, as many of the
metal gear models in the game are named after American code names for Japanese war
planes, such as Rex, Ray, and Zeke. The series holds up military exploits as heroic and the
camaraderie between soldiers as an expression of natural human bonds. For example, the
Boss is presented as “the mother of special forces” with achievements such as leading the
Allies to victory in Normandy (MGS3). John reveres her as his mentor, and describes their
relationship as something deeper than teacher and pupil, friends, family, or lovers (MGS3).
MGS’s concern is that loyalty on the part of soldiers means that they become victims for
exploitation by the state. The series and Big Boss’s mission of building his own community
emerges like a postwar Japanese thought experiment – if the state was responsible for the
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needless sacrifice of soldiers, what would happen when a military force exists
independently of the state?
Hashimoto identifies three broad discourses in Japanese national memory: that the
war dead were heroes who sacrificed themselves so Japan could enjoy prosperity today,
that the government made victims of their own people, and that Japan and its people are
perpetrators of violence (8). The third discourse of Japan as perpetrators was
comparatively weak in the immediate postwar period, but gained momentum as Cold War
bilateralism gave way to multilateralism, and transnational human rights movements such
as feminist movements in the 1980s and 90s began to pressure Japan to recognize the
atrocities it has committed (18). The MGS games are a part of the second discourse with
elements of the first. While both the discourses of heroes and victims highlights the
sacrifice and suffering of the Japanese people, they differ in the sense that the former
justifies state authority, whereas the latter emphasizes that the sacrifice was meaningless
and that the government were “shadow perpetrators” who cannot be trusted (11). In the
MGS series, the soldiering characters themselves are heroes, but to each other rather than
society, and the state is depicted as the shadow perpetrators.
In its expression of victimhood, the MGS series expresses both its reformist and
conservative tendencies. As Lisa Yoneyama writes, victimhood has constituted a kind of
Japanese exceptionalism; there is a sense that as the people who uniquely suffered the
terrible effects of atomic bombing, Japan is also uniquely positioned to commit to peace
(Yoneyama 13). Nevertheless, Japanese suffering became a cornerstone for an anti-nuclear
and pacifist Japanese national identity (Dower, Embracing Defeat 493). While the MGS
series is not pacifist per se, it advocates for nuclear disarmament. Metal Gear Solid 5
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includes a multiplayer mode where players can raid each other’s headquarters, and
includes the option of taking and disarming their nuclear warheads. The game includes a
secret objective to disarm all nuclear weapons among the playerbase, which the players of
MGS5 discovered and coordinated to work on for 5 years after the game’s release. When
complete disarmament was achieved in July 2020 (Orland), the game played a secret
cutscene showing its characters building a monument to nuclear disarmament, and plays a
segment of Barack Obama’s speech regarding non-proliferation.
35

Japanese victimhood has also undermined the national recognition that Japan was a
perpetrator of violence, and that the majority of the Japanese people were complicit
(Yoneyama 27). Indeed, Japan is never mentioned as a political entity except in Metal Gear
Solid: Peace Walker, and here Japan is mostly portrayed as a victim. The game is set in
1970s Costa Rica, the only state other than Japan to have a pacifist clause in its Constitution.
This parallel between the two countries is a frequent topic of discussion with Kazuhira
Miller, Big Boss’s second in command. Miller explains that he is the child of a Japanese sex
worker and an American officer stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation.
36
He
also tracked down his father and went to college in the US, then served in the Japanese Self
Defence Force (JSDF) to support his mother, who eventually succumbed to illnesses from
sex work. Miller’s background is ambivalent regarding Japan’s relationship to the US, but
leaves no room to consider Japan’s victimization of other nations, or even that nations

35
In 2018, the game erroneously detected that complete disarmament had been achieved, and played this
cutscene prematurely. The players went on for two more years to actually achieve disarmament.
36
Perhaps because he is the only character in the series associated with Japan, Miller is made to embody a wide
range of attitudes regarding Japanese militarism and war and peace in general. On the one hand, he deeply
sympathizes with his mother’s wartime experiences and appreciates that he named him “Kazuhira,” meaning
“peace.” He argues that having no standing military is positive for the economy, and takes pride in the Japanese
Constitution’s Article 9. However, he also explains that Mishima Yukio’s attempted coup of the JSDF in 1980 had a
significant impact on him, and he left the Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) because he did not find the work
exciting, and did not personally believe exclusive defence to be practical (MGS: Peace Walker).
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other than the US has a relationship with Japan at all. While other conversations in Peace
Walker discuss the fact that it was a civil war that lead Costa Rica to abolish its military, the
frequent direct comparisons between Japan and Costa Rica’s pacifisms tends to obscure
Japan’s history as an aggressor, which is the impetus for the Allied occupation to insist on
Article 9. Thus, while the series distills postwar Japanese attitudes to make general
criticisms of the power of the state over soldiers and aspirations towards peace and
nuclear disarmament, what it has to say about Japan itself is a very middle-of-the-road
perspective and reiterates Japanese innocence.

Metal Gear Solid and Japan’s America
The MGS series does not make interventions in domestic Japanese discourses
regarding their own history of warfare, however a cultural sense of victimhood also
enables the series to transfer the designation of the state as shadow perpetrators from the
Japanese to the US state. In doing so, the series inherits a long tradition of Japanese
criticisms against the US that emerged soon after Japanese surrender. Criticisms of the US
began from the policies of the Allied occupation of Japan, and extended to security treaties
between the two countries. All of these involved secrecy, domination, and other means of
bypassing the democratic processes that Americans themselves had insisted on instilling in
Japanese society. Scholarly and journalistic attention to the MGS series has mostly focused
on warfare, and warfare is indeed the mode through which the game is presented. However,
warfare is simply the most obvious means by which one state exercises power over
another. Recognizing what the series has to say about broader concerns regarding control
and power means reckoning with Japan’s quite specific yet multifaceted experience of
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American power, rather than reduce all forms of power to militarism, or treating warfare
as though it was a universal experience.
Out of all the games in the series, Metal Gear Solid 2 has garnered the most attention
from scholars, partly because the game is the most thematically multilayered one. However,
scholarly attention to this game and only some of its themes has also been driven by post-
9/11 American concerns. The game is set in the early 2000s, where a terrorist group calling
themselves the Sons of Liberty has kidnapped the president when he was making a tour of
a filtration plant near Manhattan. The player acts as Raiden, a rookie operative who is sent
to infiltrate the plant alone, relying only on his virtual reality training and codec
communication with his commanding officer, Colonel Campbell. Raiden learns from the
president that those in office are puppets of a secret cabal called the Patriots, who has ruled
the US from the shadows for generations. The terrorists are actually led by the previous
president, who has discovered the sham and is staging a coup. By the end of the game,
Raiden finds out that the Patriots are not even human, but a cluster of AI, and have been
influencing the selection of political leaders, funding allocations, technological innovation,
and the values and ideas of the American public. This includes himself, as the Colonel he
has been talking to is a Patriot simulation designed to lead him astray.
Critics and players have praised the game for deceiving the player to make the
player experience the Patriots’ deception of Raiden. Scholars have argued that the game’s
deception calls media transparency by playing with choices and the sense of purpose
offered by games (Higgin 255). Furthermore, the combination of military themes and
virtual reality reflects the actual development of American militarism at the end of the
twentieth century, as well as the close alignment of the military and the games industry.
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Noon and Dyer-Witheford characterizes the game as a “virtual ‘magic realist’ account of the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Regime” (83), where the US attempts to maintain global power by
pre-empting weapons of mass destruction, deploying special forces and private armies,
eroding civil liberties and international law, implementing the control of information (75),
and using virtuality and technology to train and enhance its military capacity (88). The
authors also observe that much of this was revealed to the public with the Iran-Contra
affair in 1984, when Kojima was working on the first Metal Gear game (84). Although they
do not make an argument that American scandals motivated Kojima, the authors are clearly
speaking from an American perspective. From the time of their writing in the early 2000s,
the Bush administration’s war on terror was a major target of critique, and the Iran-Contra
affair was the revelation of covert American operations to the general American public.
However, Japan had experienced covert American influence and the simultaneous wielding
of military force, technological superiority, bending laws, and information control long
before the 2000s or even the 1980s.
Nominally, after the end of the Pacific War the Allied forces occupied Japan through
the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP), though Americans, lead by General
Douglas MacArthur, monopolized policymaking for the occupied country (Pyle 122). SCAP
attempted to promote liberalism and democracy in civil society, which lead to the
encouragement of unions, independent public media, and gender equality. Given the
draconian wartime measures and destruction, grassroots initiatives from the Japanese
people generally welcomed these changes while interpreting them in local ways (Dower,
Embracing Defeat 242). Nevertheless, SCAP policies were frequently heavy-handed and
were perceived as hypocritical. The constitution was written by American administrators
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in six days and given to the Japanese Diet for approval (Pyle 132-3). SCAP purged
militarists from the government, often without trials, and refused to include any Japanese
in the war crimes trial against Japan (Dower, Embracing Defeat 475). As a result, the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East that eventually ran from 1946-1948
seemed like “victor’s justice,” especially since the US conveniently avoided the matter of
whether their use of atomic bombs on Japan also constituted war crimes.
American hypocrisy became even more apparent at the beginning of the Cold War.
The US government did not initially take a strong interest in Japan and let SCAP and
MacArthur direct reforms, however at the onset of the Korean War, the US began to see
Japan as an important base from which to contain Communism. SCAP’s reforms to promote
pacifism and avenues of dissent were now perceived to run counter to American interests,
and as a result some of these reforms began to roll back. Japanese refer to this change as
“reverse course.” For example, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of State to of President
Eisenhower, tried to pressure the Japanese government to re-establish its military
(Matsuda 47). The Prime Minister and the Japanese people were very opposed to this due
to the constitution’s renunciation of warfare and a desire to avoid fighting America’s wars,
however to obtain American economic aid, the government eventually agreed to a small
self-defense force (Schaller 65). At the same time, Japanese militarists, who tended to be
anti-Communist, were re-instated, and one of these, Kishi Nobusuke, later became Prime
Minister. While the US had been trying to break up the industrial conglomerates (zaibatsu)
that supplied Japan’s war of aggression, the American desire to procure goods and services
from Japan during the Korean War left them largely intact (Pyle 146).
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Although the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 officially ended the occupation of
Japan, the US government pressed for a favourable US-Japan security treaty in exchange for
economic aid, integrating Japan into global trade, and technology transfers. The security
treaty (abbreviated in Japanese as Anpo), signed in 1951 and renewed in 1960 and 1970,
allowed the US to maintain its base on Okinawa and unrestricted use of other Japanese
bases (Pyle 165), no obligation to consult with the Japanese government regarding military
operations from Japanese soil (Schaller 129), the right to use the military to intervene in
domestic Japanese affairs, and legal jurisdiction over American servicepeople stationed in
Japan (Schaller 41). Coming out of their own experiences in WWII, the majority of Japanese
politicians and the public were against involving their country in the Cold War (Schaller
129), and were especially incensed when the extent of American exploitation of its
agreements with Japan came to light. In 1960, the Soviet capture of an American spy plane
revealed that it came from a US airbase near Tokyo, and during the War in Vietnam, the US
flew B-52 bombers out of Japan, which further raised fears of retaliation against Japan and
anger at Japanese involvement (Schaller 194). After the security treaty renewal in 1960,
the US exploited a loophole to secretly transit nuclear and chemical weapons around
Okinawa (Schaller 196-7).
Because American involvement in the Cold War rested on the perception of
ideological threats, American impacts in Japan were not limited to military operations. The
US dissuaded Japan from establishing trade ties with Communist-lead countries and
insisted on Japanese trade with American-controlled import sources (Matsuda 77). The CIA
secretly funded the Liberal Democratic Party, a centre-right party, for decades to ensure
that socialist parties in Japan would not come into power (Schaller 159). During the war in
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Vietnam, the Japanese people generally sympathized with the Vietnamese and
demonstrated en masse against the Anpo renewals, and the US spent $1 million annually
on sympathetic news outlets and politicians (Schaller 195).
On one level of analysis, it appears that the MGS series simply projects postwar
anxieties about the state onto the US, and does so via dramatic video game tropes. Noon
and Dyer-Witheford dismissed the Patriots’ conspiracy in the series, writing that it is “less
instructive as a guide to twenty-first-century power than reading Noam Chomsky, and
probably fatally misleading if taken seriously” (85). However, this history of American
interventions in Japan enables another level of analysis, which is that America has literally
been to Japan what the fictional Patriots have been to America in the world of MGS. The
game’s many American references also mean that the Patriots are not simply a convenient
allegory of state power in general, but refer specifically to American hypocrisy. The names
of the Patriots and the Sons of Liberty are references to the American revolution, and the
Patriot AIs are designated with the acronyms AL, TR, TJ, and GW, which are the initials of
the four presidents on Mount Rushmore. These purported great figures of American
distinction, freedom and equality are shown in the game world to actually be secret
organizations spreading control and terrorism. Similarly, while the US’s postwar mission in
Asia was purportedly to free its peoples from imperialism and Communism, to do so it
implemented broad-based social control.
In particular, the Patriot AIs encapsulate the paternalism with which the US
approached its relationship with Japan. In a conversation with Raiden, the AI explain that
their task is necessary because human being are generating exponentially more
information, yet are unable to properly make sense of it or preserve what is vital for the
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future. When Raiden asks if they were carrying out censorship, they responded that they
propose “not to control content, but to create context” (MGS2). American reforms in Japan
were carried out according to what historians calls the “tutelage system,” a belief that it
was the US’s responsibility to teach other nations to emulate American social and political
organization, which explains how the US could carry out paradoxical reforms to impose
democracy from above and override liberal principles of self-determination (Pyle 5).
Indeed, During the SCAP occupation, General MacArthur infamously declared that the
Japanese behaved like twelve-year-old children (Matsuda 104). American policymakers did
not shy away from employing actual censors (Pyle 131), however SCAP’s drafting of the
Japanese constitution, secret CIA funds, and trade pressures are more similar to the Patriot
AIs’ activities. Americans did not necessarily want to colonize Japan and squeeze out the
contents of its culture, however its goals were to create frameworks for an American way
of life, ostensibly for Japan’s own good. In this manner, MGS2 is also not simply a general
description of a conspiracy or simply an allegory of 21
st
century warfare, but a game that
leads players to discover American hypocrisy along all axes of social life.
The MGS series is also a part of a tradition of Japanese popular culture using
speculative fiction to understand their relationship with American power and imagine
resolutions. Popular culture in the two decades after Japanese surrender tends to show
Japan as a peaceful victim of other world powers. The original Godzilla film (1954) was
made after a Japanese fishing crew was exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing
around Bikini Atoll. The film strongly hints that it was American testing that created
Godzilla, and while Godzilla is a monster, he is also portrayed as a victim. Similarly, The Last
War (1961) reimagines the previous year’s Soviet capture of an American spy plane, where
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a similar incident results in fictional power blocs going to war. Despite Japan pleading for
peace, its association with the “Federation” opens Japan to nuclear attacks and Tokyo is left
a crater. More recently, generations which have been impacted by the activism of the 1960s
and 1970s against US-Japan treaties have also come to work in popular culture,
37
and there
have been narratives that try to imagine ways beyond or outside of American dominance.
The Silent Service, a manga and anime series, portrays a Japanese naval captain declaring a
submarine, jointly built by the US and Japan and armed with nuclear weapons, to be an
independent state. Eventually, the captain and the crew of the submarine defeat the US
Third Fleet, and then enters into an alliance with Japan as a separate sovereign entity.
Hiromi Mizuno argues that rather than seeing the captain and the crew of the submarine as
representatives of a resurgent Japanese nationalism, they represent “the attempt to find a
new world peace that would not have to be at the mercy of American interests” (118).
Even though the MGS series stands out in Japanese popular culture for its depiction
of an almost entirely American cast, its imaginary is similar to The Silent Service in that
much of it revolves Big Boss’s goals for an independent society away from his own state
and from global political rivalries. At the same time, the focus on the US also leads Kojima
and the studio to redeploy familiar American symbols and narratives. Yano Kenji, an editor
and a friend of Kojima, explains in an interview that Metal Gear Solid 5 draws themes
regarding revenge from Moby Dick while subverting what he reads as the novel’s

37
See Otsuka Eiji’s analysis in his foreword to Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan, where he argues against
scholarship that characterizes anime and manga as an embodiment of premodern Japanese aesthetics or a
postmodern phenomenon. Instead, he argues that anime and manga inherits early 1900s fascist aesthetics on the
one hand

and the failures of the left to make policy changes in the 1960s-1970s on the other. He writes that having
failed to advance Marxist causes in politics and being relegated to the social fringes, participants in the New Left
ended up working in subculture forms considered to lack legitimacy, such as children’s media and pornography
(xvi). The popular culture work of this generation is not explicitly political in focus, though political concerns with
Japan, the US, and the Cold War are often sublimated or allegorized.
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implications for American righteousness. The game shows Big Boss taking revenge on
American agents who tried to destroy his base, including rooting out Huey Emmerich, an
American scientist within his ranks, who is secretly a traitor. Yano explains that originally,
Huey was to be assigned the code name “Ishmael” and provided a frame narrative around
Big Boss, code named “Ahab,” mirroring the frame narrative of Moby Dick. This was
scrapped because Huey’s reason for betrayal was that Big Boss’s deviancy from the global
nation-state based system is wrong and dangerous. Yano says that “the story, being told by
Huey (Ishmael) as an American citizen, would be biased toward the American perspective,
showing America as being right the whole time” (Yano). Yano argues that Captain Ahab’s
revenge mission in Moby Dick seems to be a personal one, but “when the character is
superimposed onto American righteousness, he serves as an analogy for how justification
for revenge based on instinctive national memory is converted into a just cause” (Yano). In
the end, the game simply focused on Big Boss as Ahab and implies that America is Moby
Dick, who deserves vengeance as a country and the leader of a world system that has
arbitrarily labelled Big Boss as evil (Yano).

Kojima’s Hollywood Antifandom
These references in the MGS series do not only demonstrate Kojima and Japan’s
engagement with American international policy, but also Kojima’s familiarity with
American cultural and historical icons. The MGS series also contains many references to
American films, and can be seen as a series of homages. Kojima has stated that The Planet
of the Apes was one of the films that definitively made him decide to include anti-nuclear
messages in the MGS series (Kojima, “Hideo Kojima at the Movies: Planet of the Apes”). The
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character of Solid Snake takes his name from Snake Plissken in Escape from New York, and
takes his headband from characters in The Deer Hunter (Tanaka). One of the rebel soldiers
in Metal Gear Solid is inspired by the Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket, and all of the
enemy bosses in MGS3 are codenamed after emotions, inspired by Apocalypse Now. In
addition, the premises and structure of the MGS games recall those of action and war films
of the 1980s, such as Commando, where an ambivalent operative is called out of retirement
and sent to a remote location to deal with a problem of national interest.
Kojima’s extensive use of Hollywood film references in a series of games critiquing
American power is a result of his inheritance of his family’s experiences growing up with
American popular culture in the postwar period. Kojima recalls that his parents were fans
of European films as well as American horror films and Westerns, and that they would
watch one film every evening and he wasn’t allowed to go to bed until it ended (Parkin,
“Hideo Kojima”). Kojima also explains how his father’s formation as a film viewer; during
the war, Japanese patriotic messages appealed to his father and he had wanted to join the
navy, but he also opposed the war because he witnessed destruction and suffering
firsthand. In addition, Kojima describes his father’s attitudes towards the US as “walking a
tightrope” – “He hated the Americans for the war, but when he got older he made contact
with the United States and accepted, and finally fell in love with American culture.” Kojima
concludes with the comment that “I believe that I share this tightrope ambiguity with my
father” (“Hideo Kojima Versus the Big Robots”).
While the MGS series takes an oppositional stance against American power, it does
so through a passionate engagement with American popular culture. This engagement
operates on two levels: first, the mere fact that Kojima uses Hollywood references in the
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MGS series is a result of a process began during the Occupation, where American officials
attempted to reform Japan via principles in American mass culture, and especially film.
While the goal of the US was to create a country that was ideologically favourable to the US,
Kojima demonstrates that this ideological bent did not persist, and that tropes from the
later mass culture could be used to critique US power. Second, the films that Kojima drew
from in the 1980s are specifically post-Vietnam Hollywood films, which aimed in varying
degrees to address the discontent that American felt regarding the US’s wartime decisions
and the treatment of returning veterans. Scholarship on Hollywood films regarding the war
tend to argue that while these films reach for a narrative oppositional to the state, they do
so by remasculinizing White American men, further marginalizing the experiences of and
effects of the war on women, Americans of colour, and non-Americans.
Despite this incisive analysis, most of the scholarship on films about the War in
Vietnam only examines the film texts themselves, and only consider audiences in terms of
modes of address and target audiences. For example, Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud
write that Hollywood action films of the 1980s presuppose an empathetic and not analytic
mode of reception (8). In addition, this scholarship assumes that the audience is an
American one. The extent to which Kojima and other Japanese game developers drew on
the aesthetics and settings of these films demonstrates that they bring a postwar Japanese
perspective on warfare and the state to bear on Hollywood’s Vietnam war tropes,
rearticulating the position of people of colour and non-Americans as the global cost of
American violence.

American Film and Popular Culture in Postwar Japan
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There has been a great deal of cultural exchange since the US opened Japan to world
trade in the 1850s, and Hollywood film especially began to spread American ideas in Japan
after WWI (Tosaka). Hollywood had circulated films in Japan before WWII, however the
combined force of the Great Depression (16) and repressive policies from the Japanese
military’s government (18) had begun to force Hollywood out even before the war itself.
Beginning from defeat, Japan was formulated as a “workshop for democracy” (Matsuda 4)
where the US would, partly due to fears of Communism, intentionally apply broad-based
cultural reform to "co-opt and win over" likely allies rather than simply apply policy or
brute force (Matsuda 16). The occupation tried to accomplish this through both censorship
(Civil Censorship Division, CCD) and information dissemination (Civil Information and
Education, CIE) (Matsuda 20). In addition, the Office of War Information (OWI) took on
some propaganda work before its dissolution, and the United States Information and
Education Service (USIE), a program in the State Department fostered exchange programs
for politicians and students (Matsuda 140).
SCAP implemented a number of channels for the dissemination of popular culture
and media. SCAP encouraged Japanese publications of American classics such as Steinbeck
and Faulkner, treatise on democracy, and accounts of WWII from the American perspective
(Matsuda 28). The CIE also built information centres that lent out books, magazines,
records, and films, which included material on new technologies (Matsuda 25). Japan also
had over 2000 motion picture theatres, and more than a third were devoted to films from
abroad (Matsuda 147). As Hiroshi Kitamura writes in Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood
and the Cultural Reconstruction of Postwar Japan, SCAP believed that cinema was vital to
educating the Japanese about democratic citizenship and “appropriate” social mores, and
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capitalized on the interest in cinema to reach a large number of people with pro-American
ideals (33). Hollywood also participated; the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA) set
up the Central Motion Picture Exchange (CMPE) specifically to distribute films in Asia. The
CMPE’s marketing strategy was to portray that American films were cultured (Kitamura
89), due to a sense in Japan that the US only produced mass culture (Matsuda 147).
SCAP’s CIE department, the CCD, and OWI were largely responsible for film selection.
Topics that were disallowed or edited out in Japanese films include ethnic nationalism
(Kitamura 35), depictions of the military, feudalism (57), nihilism and film noir (52-3), and
the Pacific war, especially the atomic bomb (54). Instead, SCAP and OWI promoted films
that depicted family values, gender equality (101), the US pioneering spirit (in select
Westerns) (107), films showing “respect for the individual…and peoples of other countries”
(35), as well as biopics, literary adaptations, and Broadway plays that were considered
“high culture” (92). Content in American films which were excluded or censored were
crime, violence, positive representations of Axis powers, critiques of the American
government system, and with the onset of the Cold War, films that suggest socialism
(Kitamura 82). In addition, because the CMPE operated as the sole American film
distributor in Japan, they had significant leverage over all aspects of distribution and
exhibition. They brokered deals with smaller theatre chains that were willing to devote half
of their screens to American films (Kitamura 114)
38
. With these theatres, the CMPE
stringently enforced contracts and licenses (116), and ran workshops for theatre owners to

38
At the time, the Japanese film industry was vertically integrated, and studios like Toho distributed and screened
their own films. As a result, national theatre chains were more likely to prioritize films from their own parent
studios.
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reform theatre spaces and film advertising according to standards of middle and upper
class respectability (117).
As historians of Japan note, American cultural campaigns produced mixed reactions
in the postwar context. On the one hand, policies and social realities undercut the values
that the Americans were trying to promote. Matsuda argues that the reverse course was
seen as a sign that Americans were morally bankrupt (147). SCAP purged unions as a part
of reverse course, which destabilized Japanese film studios (Kitamura 47). Another facet
that Japanese intellectuals and politicians seized upon was unequal race relations in the US
and racially-inflected American imperialism abroad. Japanese in general recognized that US
policies enforced racial segregation in their own country (Matsuda 149), even as they
advocated equality in Japan and disallowed Japanese representations of ethnic nationalism.
Anticipating this, the CIE, the CCD, and the CMPE took care to select American films that
only portrayed the US interacting with non-white peoples in an egalitarian manner, and
downplaying elements of inter-ethnic conflict (Kitamura 107).
On the other hand, average Japanese looked upon the US with fascination, and were
interested in both social and technological factors that enabled the US to gain the upper
hand during the war (Kitamura 89). In addition, the dearth of material goods produced
during the war made American products appealing (239). Fandoms flourished around
American media. Matsuda writes that the first information centre in Tokyo had 6 million
visitors between 1945 and 1951 (Matsuda 25). In addition, many American magazines
began publishing Japanese editions, such as Newsweek, Time, and Reader’s Digest, the last of
which circulated 1.3 million copies by 1950 (29). Kitamura closely examines Eiga no tomo
(Friends of the Movies), a Japanese film magazine that relaunched after the war to focus
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exclusively on American films. It did so to obtain resources from the CMPE (Kitamura 157),
but also because the editors, writers, and readers genuinely believed that American film
held the key to Japan’s reconstruction (158). In Kitamura’s findings, audiences also
believed that American films could re-educate Japan on how to respect humanity and the
personal growth of individuals (Kitamura 161, 168). From the magazine surveys, Kitamura
concludes that the core readership was between fifteen and twenty-five years of age at the
end of the 1940s, and though many of them were urban-dwelling students, they also
comprised a broad spectrum of professions, including fishermen, factory workers, and
office employees (165). This new generation of avid audiences includes Kojima’s father,
which he also passed onto Kojima. American films of this era are visible in MGS3, which is
set in 1964. The game features a support team member who is an avid movie buff, who
regularly engages John / Big Boss in conversations about films released from the 1950s
through to the early 1960s, including James Bond, The Magnificent Seven, and Creature from
the Black Lagoon.
The influence of American media remained strong in the decades following the
Occupation, based on the distribution and exhibition channels that the Occupation forces
put into place. In addition, commercial interests increasingly overrode ideological ones. A
conflict between Occupation agencies and Hollywood was present from the beginning of
American film distribution; because of difficulties working within SCAP regulations, the
MPEA threatened to withdraw from Japan in 1949, which elicited massive outcry among
Japanese newspapers and magazines (Kitamura 85). American films competed with
resurgent domestic films and imported European films after the Occupation, and saw a dip
in audiences in the 1960s, but revived with Hollywood blockbusters in the 1970s
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(Kitamura and Sasagawa). Kitamura and Sasagawa also write that television helped to
disseminate Hollywood films, as trailers advertised upcoming releases and older films
were relatively inexpensive for Japanese television studios to run. Indeed, in a series of
articles by Kojima on seven films that influenced his development of MGS, most were
released before or soon after he was born in the 1960s, which he first encountered on
television. Kojima also gives some indication of how television supported film fandom,
recalling that before Bond movies were released, there would be a ninety minute
television specials broadcasting trailers and analysing previous Bond films (“Hideo Kojima
at the Movies: 007”). For the rest of the 20
th
century, Japan consistently pulled in the
highest international box office revenue for Hollywood, until it was superseded recently by
China. In this manner, American films became a part of everyday Japanese life. The
diversity and sheer volume of American media diluted the Occupation’s initial mission of
enlightening Japan, while the Occupation’s distribution channels ensured that Japan would
always be receptive to American film.
The integration of American films into Japanese culture also led to Japanese cultural
producers to bring American films into other media. By the 1980s, references to recent war
and action films began to crop up in Japanese games. Even though Japanese game
developers rarely produce shooters today, Kojima recalls that Konami wanted to develop
the first Metal Gear because war games were extremely popular at the time (in Parkin).
Some of these are Front Line (Taito, 1982), Commando (Capcom, 1985), Ikari Warriors
(SNK, 1986), and Contra (Konami, 1987), the last of which was released the same year as
Metal Gear. Capcom’s Commando was released a year after the film Commando (1984), and
the two protagonists of Contra resembled Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone
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(“Contra”). Japanese developers drew on Hollywood films for some practical reasons. First,
as historians of games note, international cultural exchange in game development is not
new. Indeed, early Japanese successes in arcade games were clones of machines that were
already popular in the US, with the names and art slightly tweaked, such as clones of Pong
(Picard). In addition, Hollywood films played globally and were aesthetically familiar to
both Japanese and American audiences, which developers could leverage for games. The
licences for Rambo games went to Sega, Taito, and Pack-in-Video for different platforms
(Szczepaniak 159). Developers without official licenses for Rambo drew on its tropes
anyway; game designer Iju Keiko says in an interview that Rambo’s popularity prompted
her to design the characters according to the film for the game Ikari Warriors (“SNK”).
Nevertheless, the frequent use of Hollywood action and war films by Japanese
developers goes beyond convenience and marketing purposes, but speaks to a resonance
between these films and their Japanese audiences. Law and policy professor Igarashi Akio
observes that Japanese audiences of Vietnam War films could clearly see that even though
these films were still about the US, they were anti-war at their core (Igarashi). Some film
critics in Japan claim that when a part of First Blood (Rambo) was shown at Cannes, the
Japanese distributors with Toho Towa bought the rights to it within five minutes because
they believed that a tragic protagonist enduring through many hardships appealed to
Japanese sensibilities (Kodama). The Japanese fandom for Rambo remains strong today,
with numerous fan communities and collectors. Among these is a fan who has updated his
blog on Sylvester Stallone daily for the last ten years, and who has published a book
regarding his trip to Hope, Canada, where Rambo was filmed (johnrambo9). In addition to
Rambo, Kojima writes that Escape From New York and its protagonist Snake Plissken were
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very popular in Japan, and the characters’ line “Call me Snake” became a catchphrase in
schools. In addition, Plissken appealed to Kojima because he was an antihero, someone
who wasn’t simply a personification of justice, an agent of an institution, or a victim;
“although he gets used, he ultimately lives by his own ideology” (Kojima, “Hideo Kojima at
the Movies: Escape from New York”).
Plissken and Rambo, like Kojima’s later MGS characters, have an ambivalent
relationship to the state, working on its behalf yet alienated from it. These figures also
arose in American films towards the end of and after America’s war in Vietnam. Thus, the
appeal of these characters to Japan lies not only in their entertainment value, but likely also
resonated as cultural texts from another nation which was undergoing intense
introspection about participating in a bad war. Film studies scholars Gaylyn Studlar and
David Desser draw this connection between post-Vietnam America and post-WWII Japan,
albeit at the level of narrative construction and not audiences, and with a critical eye: they
write that narratives and structures in post-Vietnam War films rely on self-victimization,
which is familiar strategy for both the US and Japan to displace questions of aggression and
imperialism (104). While this comparison may be true, the scholarly comparison also
overlooks the connections enabled by the exhibition of Hollywood films in Japan that finally
grappled with an ambivalence towards the state, which Japan had grappled with since their
own defeat.
As Dittmar and Michaud write, ambivalence around the war is clearly visible in how
the post-Vietnam War films represented soldiers and veterans in contrast to how post-
WWII films treated these figures. While Vietnam War films repeated tropes from WWII
films about family, community, and patriotism, 1970s films about veterans such as The
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Deer Hunter “does so with much less trust in those institutions than its World War II
counterparts” (4). In addition, the theme of unity among soldiers is much less present, and
the authors argue that the lack of common goals betray doubts about the Vietnam War’s
actual purpose (5). Finally, they note that while there were many “command level” WWII
films, which follow military leaders as they take an overview of the war, are almost entirely
absent from the films about the Vietnam War, arguing the latter reveals that the US does
not have a grasp on what the war looked like or meant (6). However, Dittmar and Michaud
also argue that this ambivalence did not persist. Films in the 1970s display more
ambivalence about the war and its effects, while films made after the mid-1980s were
much more conservative (Dittmar and Michaud 5). Indeed, as Susan Jeffords writes, the
Reagan presidency during the 1980s re-articulated a masculine body and body politic
against the perception that the US had been “going soft” during the Carter years (13), which
was expressed through Hollywood film via a slew of hard, masculine heroes. However, she
points out that 80s heroes were not exceptional vigilantes like Dirty Harry but supposedly
average Americans who were tired of government abuse, which aligned with Reagan’s
mission to cut government down to size so that it would truly and efficiently serve the
average American (19).
Despite making distinctions among post-Vietnam War films, scholars argue that
they are not politically contrasting responses, but rather different ways of expressing
similar themes. Variations among films may be accounted for by different target audiences,
as the ambivalence and literary references in Apocalypse Now address a college-educated
audience, while heroic retribution narratives may be addressing a working class audience
(Dittmar and Michaud 8). As Jeffords notes, “Rambo films never argue for the elimination of
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the military, Top Gun for the elimination of the Navy, Die Hard for the elimination of the
police force, or Superman for the elimination of the justice system” (20), but simply for
removing a few corrupted bureaucrats. Studlar and Desser do not periodize films but
instead argue that films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket aim for more realism and
“demonstrate the process of victimization of the draftee or enlisted man” (104-5), while
films such as Rambo and Uncommon Valor are right-wing revisionist texts that “justify a
private war of national retribution for the personal sacrifice of vets” against non-Americans.
As such, all the films rely on a logic of self-victimization (105). Dittmar and Michaud also
suggest that the ambivalence of 1970s films does not make the reception of their messages
any more nuanced, as ambivalence tends to further obfuscate the exercise of power around
the war (10).
It is possible that Hollywood film makers were discouraged from using ambivalence
in a direct critique of the US; as producer Barry Spikings states, a test run of The Deer
Hunter to Universal Pictures executives drew criticism that the film was unpatriotic (qtd. in
Biskind). If post-Vietnam Hollywood films are either ambivalent or vengeful (as per Studlar
and Desser’s analysis), very little of the vengeance is targeted at American structures of
power before being re-directed towards America’s enemies, and the ambivalence is
resolved in favour of certainty in the righteousness of the American project. For example,
while in First Blood Rambo is a Vietnam War vet harassed by the American sheriffs and the
National Guard, and then proceeds to hunt them through the forest, he has to earn his
pardon in the second film by rescuing American POWs in Vietnam, fighting Vietnamese and
Soviet soldiers in the process. Even though Rambo still embodies resentment towards the
US by the end of the second film, his actions over the course of the film still contributes to
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the US’s global interests. I argue in Chapter 1 that the American fandom around martial arts
and kungfu films in the 1970s was not necessarily a part of American remasculinization
after the war, as most of the fans were racialized subjects, those who opposed American
imperialism, or were otherwise already excluded from mainstream masculinity prior to the
war. However, the action films of the 1980s do represent a post-Vietnam remasculinzation
in that they tacitly supported the state recuperating the deviant energies that erupted
around the war.
It is unclear whether Japanese audiences made these periodizations among
American films as well, however their responses cannot be predicted by American ones.
Kojima, as a Japanese developer who is influenced by the memory of American
interventions in Japan, is not obligated to express American patriotism. While Kojima
draws tropes from across 1980s war and action films, he uses them to address state power
beyond Hollywood’s obfuscating, self-victimizing, or vengeful narratives. Dittmar and
Michaud’s observation regarding the lack of “command level” films about the war in
Vietnam finds a particular expression in the military shooter. The game genre that emulate
the perspective of the command is the strategy game, where players move different
military units. By deriving tropes from post-Vietnam War films that use soldiers’ rather
than command’s point of view, Kojima uses a single operative to embed the player in a
command hierarchy over which the player has no control. As with post-Vietnam War
Hollywood films, this creates an atmosphere of obfuscation and conspiracy. However, the
MGS series does not simply offer obfuscation as an experience, but also as a task that
players must undo. Even though Noon and Dyer-Witheford dismiss the viability of MGS2’s
actual conspiracy, they argue that “what Metal Gear Solid does communicate as its explores
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its conspiracy trope, in a way that only video games can, is a visceral sense of the effort of
political demystification, […] an epistemological challenge to figure out ‘what is going on,’
both existentially and politically” (85).
Dittmar and Michaud also argue that despite differences between films about the
Vietnam War and films about WWII, what has been continuous has been the portrayal of
people of colour and non-Americans. Representations of Vietnam War GIs and veterans
tend to be white, which does not reflect the fact that Black Americans were
disproportionately affected by the draft. Dittmar and Michaud note that the few films that
focus on Black veterans, like Ashes and Embers, tend not to be counted in the canon of
Vietnam War films (4). In addition, Rambo presents himself with long hair, headband, bare
chest, and pendant, and is meant to have partial Native American ancestry, however insofar
as it permits him to “symbolically evoke the Indian as the romanticized victim of past
government deceitfulness” (Desser and Studlar 108). Sylvia Chong argues that martial arts
was incorporated into the US in a similar way – that America, perceiving itself to be
wounded at the hands of Asians, would seek to rebuilt itself through a mastery of
aestheticized Asian violence. However problematic this may be, at least the films and
cultures around them in the 1970s sough identification and connection, whereas 1980s
action films seem to show White characters who are able to reconstitute their own
Whiteness and masculinity against characters of Asian ethnicity, or by consuming apolitical
Asianess as a part of multiculturalism (Chong 279).
Certainly, the protagonists and premises of the MGS series have invited criticism
that it privileges White masculinity, while female or non-white characters tend to make up
the opponents (Noon and Dyer-Witheford 91). While this is true, racial markers function
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like the games’ deployment of obfuscation – epistemological challenges to be overcome.
One of the functions of the series’ overarching concerns with state manipulation is to
recalibrate who America’s enemies are, both racialized individuals within, and societies
without. The attention to alienated racialized subjects is particularly strong in Metal Gear
Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, where the renegade or terrorist forces are almost entirely
composed of agents with non-White or non-American ethnic backgrounds. However, a part
of the player character’s discovery is that these agents have taken up violent opposition
against the state due to government betrayal. Early in the series’ development, these
characters make an impression more for their embodiment of weird fantasy tropes and
racial caricature, such as the Romanian agent “Vamp,” who seems to be bisexual, drinks
blood, and walks on water. By the end of the series, Kojima plays into tropes but also
frames his critique of state power according to American sociohistorical legacies. One of
MGS5’s themes is how language constitutes social power, and the game features an old
Navajo scientist called Code Talker, who has bred parasites that can kill speakers of target
languages. The game reveals that a faction aligned with the Patriots has compelled him to
do so by threatening to infect his tribe with the parasite. Code Talker insists to Big Boss
that this kind of violence traces back to colonial displacement, residential schools, and the
US’s appropriation of the Navajo language to use as code during WWII (MGS5).
The game’s main antagonist explains the decision to manipulate language, saying
that since the US is so ethnically diverse with communities who do not necessarily
assimilate, the Patriots “sought a system that used information - words, to control the
subconscious” (MGS5). As the game is a prequel to MGS and MGS2, this statement
establishes that a part of the Patriot’s all-encompassing control in MGS2 is the management
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and obliteration of ethnic differences. In trying to create characters that work against this
totalization, Kojima can perpetuate other problems, such as racial stereotyping, however
the series also avoids equalizing different experiences of state control. The players, by
taking on the role of a White, male special agent, experience the Patriots’ control and
manipulation primarily as they are applied soldiers, while the game leads them to
demystify both the obliteration of difference as well as the move of using racial markers to
obfuscate justifiable opposition to state control.
In creating character whose relationship to the protagonists are first determined by
the state and then transcended, Kojima also transforms the conventions of the 1980s
Hollywood films that he draws from. For example, Kojima has stated that the boss battle
with the rebel soldier Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid is inspired by a scene involving a
Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket, however the characters are treated very differently.
In Full Metal Jacket, the American soldiers are attacked by an unseen sniper in the jungle,
shoot back and wound them, only to discover that it is a teenage Vietnamese girl. As the girl
begs for death, the soldiers argue whether they should kill her or not, ultimately deciding to
do so. In other words, the obfuscation that Dittmar and Michaud criticize becomes
inscrutability when applied to the representation of Vietnamese characters in post-
Vietnam films. Guerilla warfare in Vietnam confounded American soldiers, who frequently
did not distinguish Vietnamese civilians from soldiers, and the attribution of ideological
inscrutability made all Vietnamese potential enemies (Chong 104). Hollywood war films
solidified this by representing the Vietnamese as silent victims, or by updating World War
II's image of the sadistic Asians who torture American soldiers (Dittmar and Michaud 4). It
is important to underscore that while obfuscation and ambivalence both convey
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indeterminacy, the ethical ambivalence on the part of White protagonists or their
ambivalent attitudes towards the US films is never extended to non-Americans like the
Vietnamese. Obfuscation is attributed to Asians, but never transcended, only ended.
In Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Wolf wounds a fellow operative, and the player character
Solid Snake kills her after a lengthy sniper battle. This is followed by a cinematic cutscene
where Wolf explains that she is ethnically Kurdish and experienced genocide, and joined
Big Boss and the rebels to get revenge on the international community for not aiding the
Kurds. The strategy guide for MGS elaborates on her back story, explaining that while Iraq
carried out a genocide against the Kurds, the US missile strikes on Iraq caused a major
refugee crisis and turned her against the US (Metal Gear Solid: Official Mission Handbook
26). Steven Poole, in his discussion of how games use cutscenes, describes this part of the
game as an instance of emotional dissonance – even as the game relies on violence and
killing and left the player no option except to confront Sniper Wolf, the narrative makes the
player regret having killed her (386). Poole’s point is about the narrative importance of
cinematic cutscenes in an interactive medium, however his experience also point to how
the enemy signifies differently in MGS. The political commitments of the sniper in Full
Metal Jacket are assumed from her ethnicity, and her presence provides a moral quandary
to the American soldiers, but her death obfuscates both her life and the reasons that led the
Americans to their position. On the other hand, the lack of choices in the gameplay forces
the player into the role of an agent who must follows orders, but the game’s cutscenes work
against the gameplay’s directive to give players the information necessary for the game’s
overall political demystification. Thus, the games show players that the manipulation of the
protagonist and the manipulation of his enemies are different facets of one system of
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control. In addition, Kojima also uses Hollywood tropes from films that he grew up with for
a very different narrative, in which case the US is implicated in the global abuse of power.

The MGS series exists in a particular transmedia, transnational, and transtemporal
curve. MGS not only incorporated tropes and narrative structures from 1980s Hollywood
films about the War in Vietnam, but uses them to critical ends based on postwar Japanese
sensibilities, transposes film references into games, and brings them back into American
popular culture in a similarly embattled post-9/11 era. Scholars have noted that America
could not reckon with the complexities of the War in Vietnam as it was going on, and the
only film released during the conflict was The Green Berets, which was widely panned for
simplistically supporting the war and failing to address the experiences of returning
veterans. Dittmar and Michaud write that films of the 1980s returned to heroic narratives
due to the necessity to “orient viewers towards their future” (11), in which the US prepares
to intervene in Latin America and the Middle East (12). Indeed, as many scholars note,
George H. W. Bush pronounced the Gulf War as an opportunity to “kick the Vietnam
syndrome” (Chong 11).
Popular culture in the US tends to implicitly follow political discourse, this time not
only in film but also in video games. As I discussed in the beginning of the chapter,
American shooters legitimized themselves in the late 1990s and 2000s by turning to WWII
narratives and settings. They piggybacked on Hollywood films like Saving Private Ryan that
portray American soldiers and the state as fundamentally good, united, and responsible for
individual wellbeing. In their dialogue almost exclusively with these Hollywood
blockbusters, American video games largely failed to reckon with their own film industry’s
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earlier ambivalent reactions about the war in Vietnam. Although games created for
educational or journalistic purposes have sought to represent military and political
conflicts with complexity (eg Darfur is Dying (2006)), the Metal Gear Solid games are the
only fictionalized adventure games released during the early 2000s that interrogates the
right of the state to wage war and the nature of the US’s global dominance.
Although the series may draw upon histories and media regarding 20
th
century wars,
it also speaks to the kinds of warfare emerging at the end of the 20
th
century and beginning
of the 21
st
. Roger Stahl succinctly characterizes the 21
st
century as the era when “deception
replaces destruction” (114), as information and withholding information are increasingly
important to maintain power. The MGS series, like other military-themed games, invites the
player to practice destruction and deception in the game world, but also show that the
player character and the player are also the target of deception. MGS’s scope spanning the
Cold War to the 2010s also suggests that deception is not a break from past, but a
continuous American strategy to garner influence and pit groups against one another.
Kojima’s familiarity with American popular culture and his inheritance of decades of
Japanese opposition to American political control as lead him to create a video games
series of profound ambivalence.
Kojima’s ambivalence is the product of a particular era, however Japanese
ambivalence about American culture and policy did not end with the end of the Cold War.
As Igarashi notes, Japanese critics and audiences of American war films released in the
2000s could not simply adopt the view of their American protagonists. He cites various
comments from Japanese audiences of Black Hawk Down (2001), which narrates a failed
UN peacekeeping mission conducted by American troops in Somalia in 1993. One viewer
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worried that the administrative issues that lead to American embroilment in Somalia might
also impact Japan if Japan were pressured to join peacekeeping missions; another noted
that while he was sympathetic to the American soldiers, the revelation that there were 19
American casualties but a thousand Somali casualties made him aware that the film’s
ability to manipulate his sympathies was frightening (qtd. in Igarashi). Igarashi argues that
“this film does not manage to instill an American value system in the viewer, but is an
example of a reversal in which a Hollywood film leads to a critical analysis of the American
government’s global policy.”
In both the Gulf War and the US-lead War on Terror, Japan was pressured to
contribute forces as a US ally. Since Article 9 of the constitution forbids forces to be
deployed outside of Japan, Japanese sent support forces after the conclusion of the Gulf
War, and then passed the Peacekeeping Organization Cooperation law in 1992 (Saft and
Ohara 84). The Anti-Terror Special Measures Law was passed after 9/11, allowing Japan to
send combat forces to the Middle East (82). Saft and Ohara argue that the dominant tone in
journalism portrayed 9/11 as a global threat and urged the Japanese public to fulfill their
responsibility as a member of the international community (89). Prime Minister Abe Shinzo
has also built on these policy changes (Liff 81) to make significant changes to Japanese
defense policy, establishing the first postwar National Defence Council, a comprehensive
National Security Strategy (NSS), and an updated National Defense Program Guidelines
(NDPG) (Liff 83). Writing in 2015, Adam P. Liff argues that these changes by political elites
do not actually mean that Japan is on the path to remilitarization. Since then, Abe has
attempted to bring the issue of constitutional amendment to Article 9 to a referendum,
however polls showed that 69% of Japanese citizens oppose this (“69% Oppose Change”).
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Liff and Ko Maeda argue that reasons for this opposition are pacifist sentiments in reaction
to Imperial Japan’s militaristic history, as well as the wariness that Japan would be pushed
into a US-lead war (Liff and Maeda). The Metal Gear Solid series, as well as Japanese
ambivalence to American popular culture and policy, will continue to be important for both
Japan’s appraisal of American policy and its understanding of its own national identity.

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Chapter 4: Not South Park, WWII Edition: Homoeroticizing Nations in Hetalia
1) What country are you from? United States
2) Was your country already made a character of Hetalia? Yes.
3) If it was, how fans in your country reacted to that personification? Do you guys like it or
is there something you would like to change in it? People generally are one of two factions -
they're either very much alright with the personification or they take personal offense to it.
Honestly it's the typical stenotype of idiocy, loud-mouthed, & shoot first - ask questions
later & the ever present - I'm the hero. Personally - I'd not change anything because sad as
it is to admit - the typical American is generally an over-optioned, loud-mouthed douche.
“cruel_fortuna”, in response to thread “A Questionnaire – fandoms in different countries,”
Hetalia.livejournal.com. 29 April 2011
Since the 1990s, one of the reasons that American audiences and scholars have been
interested in Japanese anime (animated cartoons) and manga (comics) is that it includes
many genres created for female audiences and represent the hope, fears, and fantasies of
women in ways that Euro-American popular media do not. One subgenre for young women
which tend to be unrepresented in American media is shounen-ai (literally “boys’ love”),
which represent young men in homoerotic relationships. This genre has had a robust
history in Japan since the 1970s, and also resonates with the practice of slash fanworks in
Euro-American regions, in which fans imagine characters of the same gender into fictional
romantic or erotic scenarios. Scholars have noted that shounen-ai gives young women an
opportunity to explore different kinds of gender positions and sexual interactions (Napier
142), and also offers a space where female fans and amateur creators can come together to
share their interest and collaborate on shounen-ai works (Wood 407). Andrea Wood even
argues that the American and transnational fan communities around shounen-ai can be
seen as a counterpublic in that the women form a coalition based on a refusal to subscribe
to normative sexual categories (403).
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Since shounen-ai represents romance and sexuality literally, most of the scholarship
on this subgenre has also singled out sexuality, sometimes along with gender, as the
dimension in which to consider women’s pleasure, feelings of belonging, or resistance.
However, as feminist scholars have pointed out, many social relations which are not
literally about gender and sexuality are still gendered and sexualized, such as national
belonging and international relations. Nationalism has been predominantly founded on
masculinised and heterosexualized preoccupations, especially in narratives of being
emasculated by foreign oppressors (Enloe 44). National belonging for women tend to be
restricted to supportive roles in the domestic sphere, or abstracted when women are
portrayed as figures who need protection (Collins 67), and queer people have historically
been excluded for not participating the reproductive family unit. In addition, if domestic
arrangements are gendered, so are international interactions; nations tend to promote
themselves with masculinised values on the world stage, and these values can become
aggressive in political shifts to the right. For example, aggressive sexual imagery is
frequently deployed to justify or celebrate warfare. Following from these observations,
scholars have done extensive research into the ways in which women disidentify with
nations, and women’s transformative media fandom is also a facet of this disidentification.
Recognizing that the ideological effects produced by media regarding gender and sexuality
are not limited to the personal and interpersonal domain, this chapter argues that the
shounen-ai genre becomes a means for young American women to explore a unique
position towards the nation, and to imagine the US’s place in the world in terms that exceed
and differ from hegemonic masculinity.
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I will discuss these issues primarily through the fandom around the anime and
manga series Hetalia, which allegorize countries around the world as human characters,
and tells stories about historical and ongoing international affairs with these characters in
short comic strips. Original creator Himaruya Hidekaz began the series as webmanga on his
blog in 2006, and since then the webmangas have been published in ten manga volumes,
adapted into 6 seasons of anime, a feature film, four musicals, video games, along with a
wide range of art books or guides and CDs featuring songs, audio clips, and audio plays.
Originally called Axis Powers Hetalia and focusing on the relationship among Germany, Italy,
and Japan and their conflicts with the Allied Powers in WWII, the series has expanded to
introduce unique characters representing 60 countries, and has been extremely popular all
over the world.
Himaruya depicts almost all of the countries as young men (the implications of
which I will discuss in the following sections), focuses on the characters’ interpersonal
relationships, and uses an anime art style where characters have childlike proportions and
large, soulful eyes, appearing cute and likeable. As these characteristics follow the
conventions of anime and manga for young women, Hetalia’s fan communities around the
world tend to skew heavily young and female. They bring desire and national identification
to the series, but also bring a critical attitude towards their own countries and an
understanding of their positions as fans of Japanese popular culture. These different factors
create layers in fan positionality, which cannot be reduced to complicity or resistance with
national constructs, or complicity or resistance with the text’s producer. Hetalia fans
contribute to our understanding of affirmational and transformational fandom, and the
ways in which these impulses can co-exist and change for fandoms around different media
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systems, such as Japanese media mixes. The first half of this chapter will be devoted to this
discussion of fan positionality. The second part of the chapter will look at the significance of
fan works that invent homoerotic scenarios for the Hetalia characters. The world of Hetalia
is a homosocial world, but much of the humour relies on toeing the line of generally
accepted homosocial behaviour. Hetalia’s audience bring their experiences with shounen-
ai and slash to the series, and uses the series’ representations as building blocks to envision
an international order based on emotional transparency, self-reflection, and mutual care.
Threaded through these two parts will be my discussion of how Hetalia represents
an outsider’s view of most of the nations, and its contents also offer fans a perspective
regarding their country which may be different from what they see in their own national
media. While this outsider perspective can be problematic for countries that have suffered
from Japanese imperialism, this chapter focuses on how Hetalia provides Americans with
an outsider’s perspective of the United States with room for both pleasure and critique. As
Chapter 3 outlined, the US has greatly influenced Japan on social, political, economic and
cultural levels, and Japan was arguably one of the earliest training grounds for the US to
exercise international soft power. Thus, the representation of the US in Hetalia is not
valuable simply because it provides an outside perspective, but an outsider perspective
that is both Japanese and generalizable to other nations which have come under US
influence in the 20
th
century. At the same time, the production and international circulation
of Japanese popular media and have for the most part not been state-driven; it was only in
the past two decades that the Japanese government has tried to capitalize on the
worldwide strength of its popular culture. In addition to discussing the contents of Hetalia
and the work of its fans, I will end the chapter by both locating Hetalia within Japan’s soft
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power push as well as demonstrating how its particular kind of queerness exceeds the
mandates of national cultural policy.

Introducing Hetalia
The factors that make up a nation and a country’s traits and policies can be quite
abstract, and one of the attractions of Hetalia is that Himaruya uses personification to give
nations a face and familiar personalities, portraying geopolitics as interpersonal
relationships. As the opening quotation also shows, this move generates both attachment
and controversy, as it relies on stereotypes of nations to generate comedy and reduces an
array of complex cultural practices to one individual. The format of the series, 4-square
comic strips or narratives that last several pages, lends itself to punchy sketches but does
not lend itself to complex characterization or the presence of many characters. In addition,
Himaruya tends not to proceed chronologically, especially after he departed from the main
storyline about WWII. Thus, comedic vignettes can seem like disjointed incidents, where
cultural stereotypes are not situated in a historical context.
In particular, fans and scholars have noted the racial and gender bias in reducing a
nation into one person. Toshio Miyake, in discussing the implications that Hetalia has for
Japanese youths’ understanding of history, notes that almost all of the main characters in
the manga and anime are attractive white men (165) and tend to be physically strong and
blond (167), reflecting on an Occidentalist tendency in Japanese popular culture. Miyake
also notes that most Hetalia has been inspired by a Eurocentric perspective of history, such
as depicting WWI and WWII as essentially European wars, mostly eliding Japan’s own
imperialism during this time (165). What little Hetalia depicts in the Asian context is also
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fraught, such as representing China with a knockoff Hello Kitty doll that is named after a
historically Japanese racial slur for China. Most prominently, the South Korean National
Assembly decried the series as a criminal act in 2008, when the first series of the anime
was about to be televized. South Koreans had begun a petition against Hetalia earlier in the
year to challenge the representation of South Korea as competitive, nationalist / self-
centred, and needy.
39
These controversial contents can be exacerbated by Hetalia’s
comedic tone and anime style, which some critics argue to be a trivialization of damaging
and tragic historical processes (Thompson).
However, the same factors that make Hetalia problematic as a text also provide
affordances for its audience to think beyond the text itself. Miyake writes that the
Occidentalism among Japanese youth does not necessarily translate into a sense that the
West is superior; rather, many doujinshi (amateur manga, similar to zines) artists simply
used Europe a convenient romantic or fantasy backdrop. In addition, Hetalia’s
personification of nations does not follow classical and Medieval European concepts of the
body politic. The Hobbesian concept of the body politic articulates an autocratic polity,
where individuals have fixed roles like biological components, with a ruler as head. Instead,
Hetalia seems to be drawing from Japanese animism and Shintoism, which encourage the
perception of life or life force in all things. This can lead to anthropomorphism, which in
turn encourages the perception of parity between human, non-human, and conceptual
entities (see Sone 200). Indeed, Hetalia presents its characters as actual people that

39
South Korea is portrayed to frequently hug and grope Japan and China, which was interpreted by some
protesters as a veiled comment on the disputed sovereignty over the Liancourt Rocks. The television broadcast of
the Hetalia anime was cancelled shortly after the controversy in South Korea, though the studio, Studio Deen, and
the channel, Kids Station, did not state that the Korean controversy was the cause of their decision. The first series
of Hetalia was then broadcast via internet streaming only (Loo).
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humans can meet and talk to, often subject to the state like other citizens, and are
susceptible to pain, distress, and even death. Thus, nation-characters in Hetalia are not
designed to be figures of national authority or timeless, abstract concepts, but figures of
emotional intimacy and identification. Although the nation-characters are male, the vast
majority of fans, whether within Japan or outside, are young women, who look upon the
characters in Hetalia as objects of desire rather than as evidence of exclusion.
Most significantly, Hetalia conveys an allegorical logic as much as it conveys specific
content, which invites further elaboration with new content. Himaruya has not clearly
explained his principles of world-building and the exact nature of the nation-characters,
leaving fans to decide details. In addition, Hetalia’s short, achronological snippets suggests
that it is snapshots on a much larger universe of nation-characters, and the geographical
and temporal material that the series does not cover is left to fans. Finally, another factor in
its enormous generativeness for fans is that it combines a respect for national specificities
and histories with gentle satire, which accommodates both identification and critique. For
example, the character of America is represented as youthful, friendly, and inventive, but
also uncultured, self-centred, and naïve, especially regarding justice, freedom, and social
relations. Hetalia strips show America trying to seize leadership of the Allies, bully Canada,
push the costs of his parties on Japan, and causing global economic crises, such as during
the Great Depression (Himaruya, “Nonlinear – Lithuania’s Out-Sourcing Part 3”).
In particular, while Hetalia avoids focusing specifically on US-Japan conflicts, a
number comic strips reflects a general Japanese apprehension about American power. “The
Black Ships have Arrived” represents the US president sending America with Commodore
Perry to open Japan, but America is too dim to understand that the economic reasons for
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the trip and believes that his mission is simply to make friends with whales. Isolationist
Japan is represented as a hikikomori
40
who tries to invent reasons to avoid negotiating
with America (Hetalia: World Series ep. 97). America succeeds in convincing Japan that he
should try to meet other nations and make friends (Hetalia: World Series ep. 98), giving
Japan some hope, only for an American official to tell America to present a list of demands
to open ports, aid American sailors, allow American settlements, and set favourable terms
for trade.
41
This story arc represents America as a loveable buffoon who is very much
innocent of what his government undertakes, but at the same time, Japan’s pitiable anxiety
and America’s inability to perceive his predicament also suggests that it is precisely
America’s innocence that is the problem.

Hetalia’s Affirmational Transformational Fandom
Similar to the series’ ability to work on multiple registers, Hetalia fans can hold
contradictory positions in tension with each other, and even to resolve apparent
contradictions in fan positionalities. The fan response that opens this chapter comes from a
survey composed by a Polish Hetalia fanzine writer who was interested in the attitudes of
fans in other countries, with another question in the survey asking whether Hetalia should
be received as comedy or history. One kind of fan response is to take one of these sides.
Many fans argue that they learn more history through Hetalia than from school, however
other fans argue that treating it as history ruins the fun for the rest of the fandom, “because

40
someone suffering from a contemporary social disorder in Japan where they isolate themselves at home,
unwilling to go to school, work, or interact with family and friends.
41
In this sense, America is the exception to Miyake’s observation that Hetalia romanticize the West. Europeans are
generally romanticized, but America is shown to have a negative socioeconomic impact on other countries. The
impact might be specific, such as the American opening of Japan, or general, such as America causing global
economic recessions. In this manner, the tone towards America taken by Hetalia is similar to that of Japanese
popular culture in general, as discussed in Chapter 3.
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you have people who want to canonize so and so event as well as those who cry outrage at
things such as Nazi imagery when it comes to Germany” (“dilemina” in “A Questionnaire”).
However, another kind of response blends the two. For example, “shuriken7” writes that
“The people I have been exposed to accept that it is humorous, but that doesn't stop them
from addressing a more serious side in fanwork” (“A Questionnaire”). Similarly,
“taylorphantom” wrote: “It's really fandom material like fanart and fanfic that people like to
explore the more serious side. I think it's best that way. I probably wouldn't have liked
Hetalia if it was serious in canon, and I prefer the serious fanworks to the cracky stuff” (“A
Questionnaire”). These comments point to a fan stance where the desire to keep Hetalia
light does not preclude fans from engaging in critique, but it is just not the place that
certain members of the fandom chooses to engage in critique.
In this manner, Hetalia fans demonstrate a blend between affirmational fandom and
transformational fandom. These two terms were first discussed by fanfiction writer and
blogger “obsession_inc” in an online essay. They write that affirmational fandom is devoted
to getting the details of the source material straight or deducing in-universe rules, often
drawing on authorial intent for correct interpretations. Transformational fandom, on the
other hand, tends to use the material according to the fans’ own purposes, where fan
activity can be devoted to “fixing” some disappointing issue in the material
(“obsession_inc”). obsession_inc also writes that the distinction is often gendered, where
female fans tend to be transformational fans (“obsession_inc”). This is especially the case
with female fans of mainstream narrative media such as television and film, since these
formats tend to created with heterosexual male interests and perspectives in mind; as such,
female fans must reconstruct the material for their own positionalities (Busse 83). For
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example, the younger audiences of BBC’s Sherlock, especially the female and queer fans
among them, are often characterized as transformational (Pearson 163-4), such as when
they insist that Holmes and Watson demonstrate a queer relationship in the face of the
showrunners’ denials.
The distinction between affirmation and transformational fandom is useful to
broadly interpret fan practices, however scholars are also trying to problematize the
dichotomy of this framework. Melissa A. Hofmann writes that Sherlock fans who see
Holmes and Watson as queer do not necessarily identify as transformational, since they use
the show’s own narrative and stylistic element to justify their interpretations, and also
believe that their interpretation is what the show will build towards. Thus, these fans
affirm the show even as their conclusion may be transformational (Hofmann). Similarly,
Polaseck approaches affirmation and transformation are impulses rather than stable fan
identities (Polaseck). Finally, certain kinds of fan practices are difficult to slot into either
transformation or affirmational; Matt Hills argues that the practice of crafting replicas
oscillates between the two, and argues for a new type of “mimetic fandom.” In addition,
Hills points out that the dichotomy of affirmational and transformational rests on political
assumptions which may prevent scholars from considering the full breadth of fan activities
and identities. He notes that there is a danger in fandom studies where “fan works that are
not self-evidently transformational are simply of no interest […] because all they do is
restate canon,” and affirmational fandom is ignored because it is perceived to be “culturally
privileged” and does not model cultural resistance (Hills, “From Dalek Half Balls”).
When transformational and affirmation fandom is located in the context of national
or transnational media, these political stakes can be even higher, and the effects of
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privileging one kind of fandom over another becomes magnified. In an influential article,
Koichi Iwabuchi expresses reservations about the politics of fans when it comes to
transnational popular culture. He recognizes that at the level of individual fans,
engagement with foreign media can lead to increased intercultural understanding, but
argues that fan activity as a whole increasingly bolsters branding efforts and soft power
pushes on the part of states (90-91). Iwabuchi recognizes that cultural consumption may
not be explicitly political, but argues that “being supposedly politically neutral will mean
colluding overtly and covertly with the uncritical pragmatic uses of media culture for
creative industries and cultural diplomacy” (92).
In a response to this article, Lori Morimoto and Bertha Chin point out that Iwabuchi
seems to be faulting fan pleasures rather than the systems in which they are embedded,
and it is necessary to start from the nuances of fan pleasures to reach models of how power
in global media can be changed (98). In addition, given that most audiences who self-
identify as fans in the Asian context are women (female Japanese audiences of Korean
dramas), criticizing fans pleasures can inadvertently perpetuate the devaluation of
women’s experiences. Iwabuchi’s perspective also demonstrates methodological issues; the
authors discuss Tania Modleski’s observation that mass media tends not to have women’s
pleasure in mind, yet women are made to be embodiments of faulty pleasures. This creates
a condition where the only avenue to legitimize women as enlightened audiences is by
pointing out their resistance (in Chin and Morimoto 94). Chin and Morimoto note that
fandom studies has also taken this route:
ascribing fannish resistances to prescribed sexual identities, gender expectations,
and the machinations of increasingly transnational, profit-driven media
conglomerates as a prerequisite for taking them seriously. The result is that we are
left without a discourse through which to take seriously female fandoms that evince
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no explicit oppositionality, with the effect that such fandoms are left open to critique
primarily on the basis of their perceived complicity with hegemonic state and
corporate institutions (95).

Although none of the authors in this debate use the terms of transformational and
affirmational fandom, Iwabuchi is essentially criticizing the phenomenon where fan
pleasures result in affirmation – not simply the affirmation of media texts, but affirmation
of national discourses through media texts. On the other hand, Morimoto and Chin are
arguing that politically nuanced work in fandom studies should not be limited to criticizing
fan affirmations of national discourses, nor do these affirmations stand in for the entire
range of possible audience positions. Moreover, the binary of complicity and resistance is
too general to be a useful heuristic given the complexity of fan positions.
Iwabuchi, Chin, and Morimoto mostly discuss their theories in the context of
transnational fandom within Asia, and Iwabuchi specifically focuses on problems with
fandom of Japanese media. However, their discussions of fan orientations to national
discourses apply to the American context. On the surface, dilemina’s comment that Hetalia
fans who take history too seriously ruins the fun for the whole fandom reads like a
reactionary complaint that social critique has no place in media fandom, and that whoever
attempts to analyze media texts with power relations in mind is a killjoy, which is the kind
of apolitical attitude that Iwabuchi finds problematic. In his conceptualization of fans,
anything other than direct resistance would risk collusion with power, and certainly direct
expressions of patriotism towards America cannot be transformational.
This kind of insistence upon direct and explicit resistance obscures some of the
possibilities and nuances first set forth in the distinction of transformational and
affirmational fandoms. It can appear that the difference between them is that affirmational
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fans want the source material and its interpretation to stay the same, whereas
transformational fans want them to change. Indeed, transformational fandom can overlap
with disappointed antifandom, which I discussed in Chapter 2 in context of Asian
Americans creating their own superhero stories to “fix” the problem of Asian characters
being constantly relegated to sidekicks. However, the way that obsession_inc lays out
transformational fandom is that it is “about laying hands upon the source and twisting it to
the fans' own purposes, whether that is to fix a disappointing issue (a distinct lack of sex-
having between two characters, of course, is a favorite issue to fix) in the source material,
or using the source material to illustrate a point, or just to have a whale of a good time,”
and “while there are majority opinions vs. minority opinions, it's largely a democracy of
taste; everyone has their own shot at declaring what the source material means, and at
radically re-interpreting it” (obsession_inc). Thus, disappointed antifandom and the desire
to fix the material are only one form that transformational fandom can take. Indeed, since
obsession_inc contrasts transformational fandom with affirmational fandom, which is
partly defined by fan insistence on a correct interpretation, transformational fandom was
arguably not meant to be driven by the same impulse, however resistant particular
interpretations may be.
The comment from “taylorphantom” that they would not have liked Hetalia if it was
too serious implies that Hetalia fans engage because they perceive that the series itself
does not even insist on a correct interpretation of history, never mind fans who do. The
distinction between Hetalia the series itself from what the series enables runs throughout
many of the comments in response to the fan survey, sometimes accompanied by fan
examples of about how the American localization of the Hetalia anime violates the series’
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hands-off approach. Funimation, the distributor that localizes the vast majority of Japanese
anime for North America, released the first Hetalia DVD in 2010 (about 8 months before
the survey), and immediately divided fans. Fans objected to offensive jokes in English and
accused the studio of making the series into “South Park: WWII Edition” (“maisekai” in “Oh
Boy”). In response to the survey question about whether fans of a national community likes
the way their country is represented, “shuriken7” says that they dislike America in the
American localization, where he is “a bit of an asshole,” and the localization “takes away
from the more universal quality of the source work by Himaruya” (in “A Questionnaire”).
Of course Hetalia itself is not universal, however whether the series is universal in
absolute terms is not the point in this case. Rather, fans perceived it to be the more
universal version, and defended this against an American version that they perceived to be
culturally specific. After Funimation released their localization, defenders of the original
Japanese series gave arguments such as “Himaruya would never dare make a joke about
something serious like the Holocaust. The series in all its facets is intended to
be lighthearted, the dub is not. Just because they purchased the rights to license a show in a
country shouldn't give them the right to make their own show from the material given”
(mcmitters, in “Overview of Hetalia panel at Otakon”). Some fans expressed worry about
how the series would be perceived; “valliika” criticized American humour for its reliance on
degrading others, and commented that “this is just gonna give Hetalia an even worse
reputation than it has now” (in “Overview of Hetalia panel at Otakon”).
42
While these

42
Since animation studios need to commit more resources to animation than manga studios and individual artists
need to commit to draw manga, manga for very niche interests tend not to be adapted. As a result, anime as a
whole tends to be for a wider and more mainstream audience than manga. Among Euro-American manga fans,
having an anime adaptation is sometimes seen as a big deal, because it means that the series has gained social
traction and merits resources for an adaptation.
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comments seem like an expression of affirmational fandom, including an appeal to original
creator intentions, fans were not taking issue with the fact that Funimation has a different
interpretation but that Funimation’s interpretation would become canon due to their
industry clout.
43

Describing fan activity simply in terms or affirmational or transformational cannot
capture the nuances of fan engagement and stances in this case. Rather, Hetalia fan
reactions blend transformational and affirmational impulses, which can be called
affirmational transformational fandom. Fans affirm the tone of series insofar as it would
keep the series open to more fans and different kinds of fans, which would lead to a greater
range of transformational works. The transnational context of Hetalia fandom also
complicates any binary interpretation of fan orientations. Iwabuchi’s focus on how
affirmational fandom bolsters state agendas for soft power leads him to single out fan
investments along a single axis, which is between the fan and the country that produced or
backs the fan object. For American Hetalia fans, having an affirmational orientation to the
series often resulted in having a critical orientation to their own national media,
demonstrating that affirmational fandom is part of a triangulation between the fan and at
least two different cultural contexts.

43
One strategy in fan discussions in the English-speaking Hetalia community is to draw analogies between
American social issues and the issues represented in or generated by Hetalia. Fans who took issue with the
localization also tried to convince other fans of the problem’s seriousness by raising cultural values around US race
relations. One fan who declared themselves to be from the American South wrote that they didn’t particularly find
Funimation’s dub offensive, because they “hear MUCH worse coming out of my Grandmother's mouth every day
I speak to her” (verzerrung, in “Overview of Hetalia panel at Otakon”). In response, “ixarachnexi” wrote that “As
one Southern to another...it's one thing to have a character with a redneck accent, but how would you feel if
that same character was making jokes about lynching black people?” Later they explained regarding Hetalia,
“why else would S. Italy give Germany Jews other than to kill them? It's not funny to Jewish or German (or
Jewish or German-Americans) fans- the same way we wouldn't find a lynching or KKK joke funny” (in “Overview
of Hetalia panel at Otakon”).
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Affirmation and Transformation in the Database Model of Media
In addition, it is interesting to note that while there were fans who disagreed with
the claim that the American localization is offensive, no one seemed to dispute that the
original Japanese version of Hetalia was more universal. Part of this is that American fans
may not know what Japanese particularities have gone into the representation of nations in
Hetalia, and define Hetalia as universal based on its deployment of widely-known tropes
and associations such as Italy and pasta. However, another factor is that the series itself
follows certain Japanese popular culture conventions where textual coherence and the
assertion of meaning are downplayed in favour of a proliferation of representations, which
fans can assemble according to their own purposes. This phenomenon manifests most
obviously in Japanese transmedia franchises. Called “media mixes” in Japan, they comprise
of a fictional universe or a cast of characters narrativized across multiple media such as
anime, manga, light novels, and live performances, in addition to a plethora of toys and
collectables.
44

The media theory implications of this kind of transmedia franchise are discussed by
Azuma Hiroki in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, where he characterizes Japanese popular
media as the database model for narrative consumption. Azuma argues that previously, the
modern model of narrative consumption tend to contain a central meaning or message
(what he calls an “inner layer”), even though it may be expressed through a number of
transmedia texts (ie different media texts, the “surface layer”). Azuma argues that the loss
of traditional social structures accompanying Japan’s rapid growth in the 1970s meant that
Japanese society could not rely on grand narratives, and media systems also moved away

44
For a historical overview of how media mixes have developed in Japan, see Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix:
Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan.
189

from this model (28). Azuma acknowledges that the most popular model for postmodernity
is the rhizome, but also finds this lacking. Instead, he proposes a database model based on a
“grand non-narrative” (38). In this model, rather than a coherent narrative base or even a
network, there is simply a collection of information. Smaller narratives or individual texts
no longer point towards a grand narrative or meaning, but simply represent parts of the
database. In turn, there is also little imperative for audiences to grasp a central narrative or
even essential relationships between different pieces of information, since there is none.
45

As Azuma writes, “the agency that determines the appearance that emerges on the outer
surface layer resides on the surface itself rather than in the deep inner layer; ie, it belongs
on the side of the user who is doing the ‘reading up,’ rather than with the hidden
information itself,” and “the surface reveals different expressions at those numerous
moments of ‘reading up’” (32). In other words, since there is no grand narrative that every
consumer is supposed to access, audiences construct their own narratives and meanings
out of pieces of information offered by the franchise in particular moments.
Azuma’s examples of franchises in the database model include Di Gi Charat,
of which the title character began as a mascot character for a store chain selling and game-
related products. For Euro-Americans, more familiar franchises might be Sanrio’s
characters, such as Hello Kitty, which were created to sell products but became so popular
that narrative media were created for them at a later date. These examples lead Azuma to
another observation – because very little narrative and grand narratives remain, popular
media franchises no longer rely on audience attraction to narratives, but rely on characters

45
This is also partly due to the fact that many Japanese franchises do not have a single author or even a single
production company, since different sectors come together to create and market different parts of the franchise
(Azuma 40-41). Ian Condry’s book The Soul of Anime looks in-depths this kind of production model, which he
argues is a more collaborative process than American franchises.
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to attract audiences, as characters can be a part of a variety of stories, media, and
merchanise. Azuma notes that in particular, popular characters from Japan are designed to
elicit moe (36), a Japanese term for a feeling of empathy, fondness, and the desire to care
for another. Sometimes, moe can encompass sexual desire, especially among male fandoms
for female popular characters and icons (Galbraith). Character designs to elicit moe
comprise mainly of cute visual aesthetics, such as hairstyles or large, soulful eyes, but can
also include particular behaviours or personality types. Moe characters do not only exist as
characters in the media; Patrick Galbraith notes that there is a phenomenon of “moe
politics” in Japan where political figures are abstracted into moe characters (Galbraith).
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The two main components of the database model – information with no cohesive
underlying grand narrative, and character-centred franchises – changes what it means to
be an affirmational or transformational fan. Affirmational and transformational impulses
are politically significant to fans and scholars because what is being affirmed or
transformed is at bottom a series’ grand narratives, such as Star Trek’s vision of social
progress into the future, and which social and sexual relations are conducive to this vision.
When a media franchise is closer to the database model, however, it become harder to
identify fan interpretations and activity as affirmational or transformational, since the
grand narrative is nonexistent or weakly represented. The affirmation which franchises in
the database model rely on is attraction and emotional attachment to its characters, which
differs from the original conceptualization of affirmational fandom that is driven by the
desire to confirm the rules of a series with reference to original creator intentions.

46
Hetalia is not the only series to anthropomorphize countries – an older webmanga, Afghanis-tan, focuses on
the Middle East and Central Asia.
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The blend of affirmational and transformational impulses expressed by Hetalia fans
can be accounted for by the database model of the series. Arguably, Hetalia’s lack of grand
narratives goes even further than fictional universes that depend on creator visions, since
any political event in the real world and across history can be a source, making real life its
database. In addition, as I introduced in the beginning of the chapter, Himaruya opts to tell
stories in a piecemeal fashion and rely on tropes and associations, which exemplify
Azuma’s “small narratives.” Fans have no qualms being transformative regarding these
small narratives, even as they are affirmational when it comes to Hetalia’s database form.
Even though fans may not use Azuma’s terms, their descriptions that Hetalia as
“lighthearted” or “universal” imply that fans understand the series’ vignettes to be
information, representing very little culturally specific interpretations. On the other hand,
fan descriptions of what they didn’t like about Funimation’s localization suggest that they
believed that the studio tried to apply grand narratives specific to the US. For example, it is
possible that fans rejected the demeaning humour because they believed that it makes the
world system in Hetalia seem more hierarchical and competitive, which they interpret as a
more American world view. By rejecting Funimation’s localization, fans are also expressing
a concern that by inscribing a key text in the Hetalia franchise with an American grand
narrative, this would change the nature of Hetalia as a database, and thereby closing off fan
agency that the database enabled.
47

47
American audience perceptions that an American localization is too American are a relatively new phenomenon.
From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, it was common for American studios to expend significant resources taking
out references to Japan in anime. Anne Allison explained that DIC Entertainment, the studio which localized
Pokemon, felt like they needed to “neutralize” the series’ Japanese references, such as drawing doughnuts in the
place of rice balls in the animation cells (Millennial Monsters 246). Hetalia fans who rejected Funimation’s
localization represent a a more recent generation of audiences who do not necessarily accept American references
and interpretations as “neutral.”
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Paradoxically, the understanding of Hetalia as database means that affirmational
transformational fandom leads to fans defending Himaruya’s general reading of the world,
while being unattached to his specific narrative contents. When “dilemina” expresses
disagreement with fans who want to excise controversial imagery or canonize historical
atrocities, they are not taking an issue with specific narratives per se. Rather, categorically
excluding certain imagery and events effectively removes it from the database, while
requiring them means pushing for the database to have a narrative about good and evil.
Even though at face value, dilemina’s comments are about rejecting certain content, in
context of how Hetalia is delivered, their statement’s function is to affirm the series’ form
as a database. At the same time, Himaruya’s selections are just another surface, a moment
of “reading up” on the world – and no better or worse than any act of narrativization of the
world by Hetalia fans.
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For example, when fans note that Himaruya doesn’t deal with
events like the Holocaust because Hetalia is meant to be humourous, they most likely mean
that humour is the principle underlying his chosen reading of the historical database; this
does not mean that events such as the Holocaust does not exist in the database, or that a
serious consideration of violence across history is forbidden because he did not take that
perspective. Thus, fans like taylorphantom actively seek out Hetalia fan works that are
different in content and tone than the stories that Himaruya represents, rather than just
allow for different fan interpretations. The database model means that affirmational
impulses are focused on the form rather than content, and does not revolve around creator
interpretations.

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Azuma also discusses the implications of the original and the copy when it comes to the database model,
saying that fan works that draw on the spirit of a franchise for a new character or sticker cannot be considered
knockoffs, but have equal value to the existent database set (30).
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Gender, Sexuality, and National Personifications
As the quotation from the beginning of this chapter shows, most Hetalia fans
willingly or unwillingly recognize the character’s traits in their own country. However, the
same fans also tend to profess that America is one of their favourite characters in the series.
The question from the survey regarding audience reactions to the representation of their
country is phrased as “how fans in your country reacted to that personification? [sic] Do
you guys like it or is there something you would like to change in it?” (“A Questionnaire”).
Fans took this to mean either an appraisal of whether the character adequately represents
Americans, or whether they personally feel any attachment to the character. Many fans
explain that they believe that America’s flaws to be an accurate representation of American
flaws in general, but the vast majority follow up with the second interpretation, expressing
their personal preference for the character anyways. In this second interpretation, fans
sometimes directly express patriotism for the US, rather than express their attitudes about
the Hetalia character. For example, “vurmie” writes, “I personally find America to be pretty
accurate. I don't know of many people who are offended by his portrayal,” followed by “Btw.
I fucking love this country” (“A Questionnaire”).
It would be easy to read this kind of reaction as a failure on the part of Hetalia to
mount an adequate critique of the US, or a failure on the part of fans to step outside of
normative patriotism. However, I argue that both attachment and critique exist
simultaneously, and these tendencies in fans are not necessarily diametrically opposed.
Because Hetalia appeals to young, female audiences, the Hetalia fandom both converges
and diverges with fandoms discussed previously. Young female Hetalia fans may be similar
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to fans of the Metal Gear Solid franchise in that they are Americans approaching Japanese
popular culture’s representation of themselves, however, they differ in their approaches to
nationalism and militarism. Fans of Metal Gear Solid often still valorizes military heroism
and enjoy combat while critiquing its American deployment, however fans of Hetalia tends
to portrays geopolitics and warfare as interpersonal relations or misdirected sexual
attraction.
Fans frequently co-articulate a sense of attraction to Hetalia characters and a sense
of national belonging, however it is important to note that attraction changes what national
belonging tends to mean for women. For example, a doujinshi creator from Taiwan who
published a few volumes of comics about the relationship between Russia and China writes
in an author’s note that they initially felt ashamed for sexualizing China, but then decided
“to hell with the shame” (Liu Zhi). The shame that Liu Zhi mentions most likely arises from
the fact that conventionally, nationalist movements tend to treat the women of their
community as reproductive beings but not sexual beings. Women are defined by literally
giving birth to the next generation, or tasked with reproducing national culture (Yuval-
Davis 22, 45). Sexuality tends to be racialized and attributed to women outside the national
community, such as in the historical exoticization of women from Africa or Asia (Enloe 36-
37). Even in communities where reproduction is not seen as vital to community interests
and where women’s sexualities are not state-regulated, it is generally unthinkable that
women’s sexual desire and feelings of national belonging could be aligned. Yet, the
popularity of Hetalia among young women suggests that this is the case, and moreover that
they find their way to feelings of national belonging, as well as understanding, through
attraction. This is partly due to the fact that Hetalia borrows from a long tradition of
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representing countries as people, reaffirming some of the conventions of these
representatings while deviating from them in terms of how male sexuality is treated.
Most representations of nations are women; feminized personifications such as
Britannia, Mother India, and the Dutch Maiden represent a patron goddess, a maternal
figure worthy of respect and filial piety, and a young, virginal woman who requires
nurturance and protection. This representation of nations as feminine is not feminist, since
women are evacuated of bodily and socioeconomic existence to become symbolic
guardians of tradition and national honour (Enloe 87). In addition, the use of maternal
figures to represent the nation reinforces the narrow role of reproduction offered to
women (Yuval-Davis 45). On the other hand, masculinised personifications have been used
to represent the common man, a political figure designed to mobilize other men. John Bull,
for example, was represented as a typical English yeoman farmer, and the most recent
iteration of Uncle Sam became well-known through recruitment posters for WWI and
WWII. These examples demonstrate a tendency where nations (ethnic or cultural
communities) are represented as women, whereas states, governments, and political
constituents tend to be represented as men. It is true that figures of a country’s everyman
is not the state itself, however as Cynthia Weber writes in Queer International Relations,
“since the move from monarchical to popular sovereignty, it has been ‘modern man’ who
has given the modern nation-state its sovereignty” (35). Thus, it was vital that John Bull has
a specific socioeconomic position which is denied to concurrent female representations like
Britannia: he is a free man of post-feudal England with private property, the ideal private
citizen who can invest the state with sovereignty.
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While in contemporary times countries are no longer explicitly gendered, states
continue to valorize supposedly masculine traits such as rationality, autonomy, strength,
boundary-setting, and leadership, while downplaying or denigrating supposedly feminine
traits such as empathy, vulnerability, and collaboration (Hooper 44). Hetalia also follows
this pattern; it tends to masculinize world nations according to criteria such territorial size,
military capacity, economic impact, athletic accomplishments, and either histories of
foreign expansion or current international influence. The core group of Axis and Allied
Powers (Germany, Italy, Japan; the USA, the UK, France, Russia, China) are male, as well as
other historically imperial or colonial states such as Spain and states with a history of
economic and political autonomy, such as Sweden. On the other hand, female characters
tend to be assigned to smaller sates which have been invaded, colonized, or are
economically and political dependent on neighbouring states, such as Taiwan,
Liechtenstein, and Seychelles.
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Queer studies approaches to statecraft and international relations have recognized
that the autonomous, rational man has been constructed not only in opposition to women,
but also to non-Whites and perceived homosexuals. Outlining the imperial construction of
masculinity, Joane Nagel writes that American masculinity and global expansion were

49
Hetalia fans have had many divergent opinions on the gender-normative tendency in the series. In 2010, the
user “BORGINS” started a thread called “Girls in Hetalia” on the LiveJournal forum “Hetalia_wank,” where they
write, “I don’t see the point of all the girls in Hetalia. […] They get pushed to the side anyway because no one really
cares about them, and all the countries that the girls are weak, useless countries anyways. Not to mention all of
them are really boring and have no personalities.” In addition, she specifically ruled Hungary out, calling her “kind
of a man anyways so she doesn’t count” (“Girls in Hetalia”). Currently, this post has 690 responses, with most
comments disagreeing and criticizing BORGINS for misogyny. While BORGINS presented their concerns with the
series in a problematic way by targeting the female characters themselves, they have nonetheless called attention
to the tendency of national constructs to arise from conventional traits in masculine culture, even when the
character representing the nation is female. The character of Hungary tends to be much-loved by the community
as a representative of a complex character who begins as a nomadic warrior, but “marries” with Austria (to form
the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and becomes domesticated, but without losing her edge.

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worked out dialectically at the end of the nineteenth century. She quotes Theodore
Roosevelt’s speech with regards to seizure of the Philippines to highlight explicitly sexual
component in masculinist expansion: “we, the sons of a nation yet in the pride of its lusty
youth…known its future is ours if we have the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new
century girding out loins for the contest before us” (251). Similarly, the cover of the June
issue of Judge magazine is a political cartoon entitled “The Filipino’s First Bath,” showing
President McKinley cleaning a Filipino man in the waters of civilization, where the Filipino
is represented as a squirming, bawling child. In the case, the sovereign man who is in
possession of his own faculties is no longer an adequate allegory for a globally successful
state; rather, it is made explicit that Western masculinity requires the conquest or
patronization of non-Western states whose peoples are represented as lesser men.
The establishment of masculinity also requires an excision of male homosexuality,
however this rejection is selective. As Nagel writes, “sexualized military discourse is very
much from a heterosexual standpoint, as is clear when we consider the imagery of rape
during the 1991 Gulf War: attacks that needed to be defended or retaliated against were
cast as heterosexual rapes of women (‘the rape of Kuwait’); attacks that were offensive
against the Iraqi enemy were phrased as homosexual rapes of men (‘bend over, Saddam’)”
(258). In this figuration, the militarized and heteronormative imagination tends to link
homosexuality to sexual violence, and also exclusively offensive violence; the US does not
use the metaphor of homosexual rape when it itself is under attack. In Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir Puar draws on Franz Fanon’s work on
race and colonization to say that colonial anxieties of heterosexual rape mask fears and
fantasies of the penetrated male (47, 49). Thus, the function of feminizing nations is not
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only to rally men in its defense as fathers and sons, but also to circumvent any suggestion
that one’s own country is a compromised or penetrated male body.
All of these gendered and sexualized operations on the level of nation-states
suggests that international relations comprise a homosocial world, where homosexuality is
selectively but stringently excluded. In Between Men, Eve Sedgwick writes that patriarchy
has been maintained through the enforcing “appropriate” same-sex male bonding, such as
mentorship, alliances, and rivalry (25), that comprises homosociality. While some of these
homosocial relationships may be cooperative and some might be antagonistic, they all
contribute to maintaining a male-dominated system by excising femininity and
unacceptable forms of homoeroticism. Homosociality also does not necessarily exclude all
homosexuality, as Sedgwick references ancient Greek practices of pederasty that form a
part of mentorship (4); however, in contemporary society, homosocial bonds tends to be
homophobic (5). Puar and Weber’s recent scholarship have mapped a shift from the
sovereign man /modern citizen as strictly heterosexual, to a tendency where certain gays
and lesbians are accepted as “normal” citizens; however, this acceptance does not extend to
all sexual practices, nor has it enabled national communities to think of a world system that
exceeds the limits set by international homosociality. A part of the backlash to Hetalia and
its fans is due to this rigidity. In the comment section of a Youtube video for the anthem of
the Kingdom of Prussia, one listener expressed annoyance at the volume of comments from
Hetalia fans of the character Prussia, complaining about people who indiscriminately turn
anything into “disturbing gay fetish porn,” and asks “But why did it have to be about
Prussia and not Sonic or whatever?” (“National Anthem”) The commenter seems to allow
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that fans are free to think of characters like Sonic the Hedgehog as gay, but draws the line
at countries.
Hetalia follows a homosocial system, however a significant part of its humour relies
on male nation-characters failing to maintain a homosocial system by sliding into
homoeroticism. A short comic encapsulating this humour is about the War of Austrian
Succession, where Austria declares to his government that Prussia “has seized my vital
region,” and Archduchess Marie Theresa responds “There’s no need to speak so vulgarly”
(Himaruya, Hetalia: Axis Powers Vol. 1, 112). Austria is referring to the region of Silesia, but
the Archduchess’s response leads fans to interpret that sexual violation is involved. A fan
commented, “THIS is what history classes should be like. The saddest thing is how
ACCURATE it is, specially [sic] in its crudity” (“mumumugen,” in “[Scanlation] Maria
Theresa and the War of Austrian Succession”). As mumumugen points out, gender and
sexualization inflects a great deal of international relations, however these relations are
rarely analyzed as such, especially when sexuality between men has remained a taboo topic.
The ease with which homosociality can break down into homosexuality means that there
are gaps in the homosocial system, which Hetalia and its fans exploit by using conventions
of shounen-ai at the level of world politics.

Shoujo Genres and Subgenres
Hetalia’s play with the boundaries of acceptable male homosociality is sustainable
partly due to the mature anime and manga industry, which has internally diversified to
cater to many different market segments with their own preferences. Many more Japanese
watch anime and read manga than North Americans watch cartoons and read comics.
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Currently, it is not uncommon for about 50 different anime series to be on television at any
given time, and the anime industry in 2017 collectively pulled in $17.7 million in revenue
(Blair). Manga does not make as much money for its producers, however has lower
production costs
50
and also faces less pressure to turn bigger profits. As a result, there are
many more manga titles than anime, which can cover topics and present styles that cater to
more niche readerships. Hetalia’s origins are even more niche than most manga, as it
started as a webmanga on Himaruya’s blog, and did not require greenlighting from a
publisher. At the same time, it takes advantage of the close alignment of the manga and
anime industries, as it is more and more common for successful popular novels and manga
to be adapted into anime.
The many anime and manga titles in Japan cover topics and genres both more
specific and beyond those covered by children and young adult entertainment in the US.
For example, the mecha (short for “mechanical”) genre, featuring military themes and
iconic giant robots, has been very popular with young men both in Japan and the US since
the 1980s. Transformers has been the most familiar to US audiences. On the other hand,
shoujo genres often emphasize an “inner world of dreams and endless musings about
human relationships” (Schodt 88), and illustrate characters with enormous eyes to
maximize emotional expression (91). Frederik L. Schodt credits Osamu Tezuka as initiating
the genre of girl’s manga with Princess Knight (1953), about a princess who cross-dresses
as a prince to mete out justice in a fantasy world reminiscent of medieval Europe. In the
subsequent decades, more and more women began to create manga for a female readership.

50
Like American superhero comics, Japanese manga is published serially in chapters, but almost all manga are
black and white. The publisher or imprint releases all of their new chapters from different titles together in one
large, phonebook-like volume made of newsprint, which is designed for quick and cheap consumption. Most titles
are then published in higher quality on their own in paperback volumes.
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Schodt cites a female Japanese biographer as explaining that due to strict gender roles in
Japan, “if women in the past had any freedom, it was in the world of sentiment, where no
outside authority could intrude. In this limited and humble realm, they were free to
fantasize and dream” (97).
Shoujo genres have proven particularly popular in the US, as young women had not
been considered as a demographic for either televised cartoons or comics. Many girls in
North America were exposed to the shoujo genre with the anime Sailor Moon (broadcasts in
the US from 1995-6). Despite superhero elements such as secret identities and action
sequences, much of the focus is on the everyday life and sentiments of teenage girls as they
navigate teenage life. These tropes mean that its treatment in the American broadcasting
environment exhibited a gender bias towards shows for boys. As Japanese anthropologist
Anne Allison writes, DIC entertainment and Bandai, who localized Sailor Moon, also
localized the anime series Dragon Ball Z and Masked Rider around the same time, and gave
more favourable time slots to the two latter series because they featured male protagonists
and had boys as the target audience. A Mattel executive explained that this is due to a
general understanding in American children’s media that girls will watch a series targeted
at boys but not the other way around (Allison, “Sailor Moon” 274).
If shoujo titles offered American audiences stories that their native popular media
climate rarely offer, this is also true to the bishounen subgenre (such as Hetalia). Bishounen
means “beautiful young men,” and covers a few linked subgenres for girls and young
women focused on representations of men, with the same emphasis on sentiment, romance,
and sometimes sexuality. Susan Napier writes in From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as
Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West that fans report the appeal of manga depicting
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homoeroticism as granting the reader pleasure of looking at attractive men (141), and their
function may or may not be pornographic. The labels of shounen-ai (literally “boys love”)
and yaoi
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depict respectively stories that focus on aestheticized male romance which may
include sex, and male romance with a focus on sex (Wood 400-401). These became popular
in the late 1970s through both formal manga publishing and doujinshi publishing, with the
launch of the comic magazine JUNE, exclusively devoted to male homoerotic stories, in
1979 (Mizoguchi 54). As Mizoguchi writes, in 1989, the doujinshi convention Tokyo Comic
Market had 100 000 attendees, and amateur doujinshi creators can sell up to 10 000 copies
of their work (55). Thus, by the 1990s, there was a robust market for shounen-ai and yaoi
works among young women in Japan, though sexually explicit yaoi series tend to remain in
the realm of doujinshi and manga.
Shoujo manga, despite being created by women for women, does not necessarily
mean they are follow feminist histories and theory. As Schodt writes, the heroines in these
stories are still depicted as passive, and fictional worlds of sentimentality often represent a
retreat from reality (97). Similarly, Japanese scholars who grew up with shounen-ai genres
note their complexity and ambivalence with regard to both gender and sexuality. The male
homoerotic relationships depicted in these stories do not seek to represent queer lifestyles,
preferences, or ideologies in Japan, but highly stylized characters and situations intended
to appeal to heterosexual women. As Mizoguchi writes, commentators in Japan regard
beautiful young men as “the idealized self-image of girls,” a “third sex,” and “are meant to
act as agents for the readers of these stories” (53). Mizoguchi also outlines the current

51
The term “yaoi” is an acronym derived from the phrase “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,” meaning “no point,
no climax, no meaning,” originally a criticism of the stories’ focus on sex at the expense of storytelling. While
shounen-ai and yaoi tend to be created by women for women, a genre of erotic manga and anime created by gay
men for gay men also exist, which is called bara (literally “rose”), or “men’s love.”
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conventions in yaoi that originated in the 1990s, among which are that the couple tends to
comprise of one more masculine-presenting partner and one androgynous partner, the
top/bottom roles in sex corresponding to the gender presentation, with the roles never
reversing, and sex always involving anal intercourse (56). The stories often represent the
relationship as an impossible romance (52), though the difficulties are often personal and
psychological rather than social and institutional. As Mizoguchi argues, the involvement of
two men in an intimate relationship is a code for the relationship’s impossibility (56).
These tropes mean that despite the stories depicting intimacy between men, the
relationship is more or less treated as a heteronormative romance (56).
This does not mean that readers do not bring gender and sexual politics to shounen-
ai, or that queer readers do not enjoy them. Andrea Wood argues that rather than
representing queerness through same-sex intimacy, yaoi and shounen-ai are queer because
“they ultimately reject any kind of monolithic understanding of gendered or sexual identity”
(397). Similar to Mizoguchi’s identification of male characters in these genres as a “third
sex,” Wood argues that the androgyny of the characters undercut images of masculinity in
both the West and Japan (397-8). Along with anime and manga, shounen-ai became popular
in the early 2000s. Napier finds that fans of shounen-ai and yaoi explicitly pointed out these
genres as an element in the construction of female desire, which in turn also creates bonds
for women across social or national groups. One interviewee said that “[if] it’s acceptable
for guys to fantasize about girl on girl, why is it unacceptable for women?” and that
homoerotic manga asked readers implicitly questions about what is “normal” and “healthy”
(142). Napier writes that the popularity of homoerotic manga is similar to communities
around slash fiction in the US, where women rewrite male-centred and (implicitly
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heterosexual) stories such as Star Trek into stories of male intimacy. Indeed, scholars write
about shounen-ai and slash fiction’s representations of power relations in similar ways.
Mizoguchi notes that “what these protagonists [in shounen-ai stories] often (attempt to)
engage in is an idealized relationship of total reciprocity” (53). Similarly, as I will discuss,
slash fiction are often focused entirely on characters moving towards a relationship of
mutuality and equality, rather than mainstream representations of romance as courtship or
conquest (Kustritz 377-8).

Inter-national Sexuality
Hetalia itself rarely engages deeply into how nations are gendered, as its tone is
mostly humorous, and it depicts unresolved competitions and wars as often as it depicts
cooperation between different nation-characters. However, Hetalia demonstrates Wood’s
argument that the queerness in shounen-ai resides in its rejection of monolithic gender and
sexual identities, especially as the series developed past its initial focus on WWII. Even
though most of the nation-characters are represented as young men, Himaruya has created
a short story wherein all of the characters are women instead, and to date has also
represented nations as a community of cats or animate mochi (glutinous rice dessert balls).
Thus, while the world of Hetalia relies most often on conventional gendered tropes and
seemingly static national stereotypes, it also introduces instability to national
representations by suggesting that nations are fluid and can exist in multiple forms
simultaneously.
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In addition, shounen-ai and yaoi conventions have inflected the relationship
between nation-characters from the beginning of the series.
52
Early stories about the core
group of Axis powers frequently feature gags where Germany must rescue Italy from the
Allies or clean up his messes. In turn, Italy grows to depend on Germany and to feel
comfortable around him, even going so far as to sleep in his bed or walk around naked.
This follows shounen-ai tropes in that Germany is the more masculine-presenting person in
the pair, and Italy the less masculine one. The degree of masculinity also correlates with
conventional definitions of national success; Italy was designed to less masculine to reflect
the country’s historic lack of military organization and prowess (the series’ name, “Hetalia,”
is a portmanteau of the Japanese term “hetare,” roughly meaning “loser,” and “Italia”). At
the same time, Hetalia seems to suggest that Italy and Germany are not meant to be
evaluated as individuals regarding their autonomy, rationality, and physical power, but
rather that they form a pair whose relationship is the focus of interest. By extension, the
overall tone in Hetalia is also that countries are not necessarily meant to be judged
individually based on conventional markers of success, but whether they establish dynamic
relationships with others.
This encourages fans to develop the relationships in Hetalia further by combining
narrative patterns in shounen-ai and slash fiction with geopolitics, which undercuts the

52
Himaruya more explicitly acknowledged that Hetalia works in the shounen-ai genre through the character of
Hungary, who is represented as a fujoshi (literally “rotten woman,” a name for female fans of shounen-ai and yaoi).
The short webmanga strip “Miss Hungary and Her Maiden’s Heart” uses the real world premise that the country of
Hungary imports a lot of gay pornography to depict the character as fan of yaoi and shounen-ai, with a panel
showing her blushing and saying “I love cute boys!” The same strip shows her spying on and taking photos of
France making sexual advances on Austria, torn between feeling protective of Austria and the pleasure of
voyeurism (Himaruya, “Nonlinear – Miss Hungary”). Fans sometimes see Hungary as Himaruya’s acknowledgment
of themselves and their desire to see homoeroticism in the series; for example, a fan commented on “Miss
Hungary and Her Maiden’s Heart” by saying “I really never cared all that much for Hungary (A GIRL in our midst!)
But then I noticed…Its [sic] because I want all of the counties [sic] to be gay (except Austria. Hes all mine!)… I guess
I’m more like her than I thought” (“oblivionsflower,” in “[Scanlation] Hungary-san”).
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masculinization of countries. It is possible to discuss this phenomenon through almost any
of the characters in Hetalia, however I will focus here on fan work shipping
53
America with
other nation-characters to highlight the differences between these works and the kind of
overtly masculinist rhetoric that the US often deploys in politics. Fans pair different
characters with America to different effects. As Camille Bacon-Smith writes regarding the
social context of fan fiction, “Sex and pain are the two situations in which masculine culture
allows physical and emotional intimacy between adults of the opposite sex” (256), and
consequently a great deal of fan work from women who seek to represent intimacy
operates on one of these registers. In Hetalia, works that pair America with Russia tend to
show America and his ego being defeated by an equally powerful opponent, and works
with England and Japan tend to envision how America can create relationships based on
empathy for the pain of others, or to make up for causing pain to others.
Fan perceptions of the interaction between Russia and America is partly prompted
by a series of Hetalia vignettes showing American presidents coming up with ways of
waging psychological warfare on other countries, which includes asking Russia to
manufacture 25-centimetre long condoms. Russia tells America that he has never made
condoms in this size, but fulfils the order and sends to the president a box labeled “extra
small” (Hetalia Axis Powers Ep. 41). When the webmanga strip of this was first scanlated for
the Hetalia Livejournal community, most of the fans expressed amusement that America
got “p’wned by Russia” (“bipolarbliss,” in “[Scanlation] Reduce your opponent’s
willpower”). In the webmanga version of this story, Himaruya explains in an author’s note
that this was based on an actual operation during the Cold War where Americans handed

53
Derived from “relationship” and changed to a transitive verb, this means to support or promote certain
characters getting into a romantic or sexual relationship.
207

out extra-large condoms in the USSR to make its people feel inadequate (Himaruya,
“Nonlinear – Reduce Your Opponents’ Willpower”). This strip with Russia and America
indicates that other than gags reflecting cultural stereotypes, Hetalia depicts history in its
most conventional sense, which is the history of conflict between nation-states. It is easy to
read homoeroticism into alliances, however Hetalia and its fans repeatedly demonstrates
that international conflicts is often coloured by bolstering one’s own national masculinity
and emasculating one’s enemies, which can easily slide into homoeroticism. Joane Nagel’s
example of the American call to “bend over, Saddam” during the Gulf War is a
demonstration of this, however such sexual allegories in real life tend to show one’s own
nation on the sexual offensive. In the vignette about condoms and the Cold War, the joke is
that by trying to promote a sense of its own power by displaying its masculinity and
sexuality, America also unwittingly sexualizes its relationship with Russia, and then
ironically comes out emasculated.
Having seen America “p’wned by Russia” in the series, fans have also produced work
that sexualizes America’s defeat in military or diplomatic engagements, which in real life
have been instances where America has promoted its masculinity, straightness, and
rational coherence. A common request for America and Russia is to somehow allegorize
Cold War concerns about communism, and fills tend to make explicit how American fears
about infiltration and ideological influence has a gendered and sexual dimension. Indeed,
the first request from when Hetalia-kink
54
was launched is “Russia/America – Gunplay.

54
Hetalia-kink is a community built on anonymous requests and fills, where fans can post an idea for a fan work
they would like to see (the request), and someone else can write a short piece of fan fiction or create fan art using
those ideas (the fill). People posting requests, fills, and comments will refer to themselves each other as “anon”
and variations on this, such as “author!anon” or “OPanon” (for original poster). Anonymity means that fans cannot
be persecuted for controversial content, especially since the majority of requests and fills in this community are of
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Bonus points if mentions of America’s CONTAINMENT policy can be worked in” (“YES
FIRST-“). This request has been filled twice; the second is especially interesting as the
writer describes America refusing to shake Russia’s hand because “he though [sic] the
communism might rub off” (“Cold Steel”). Because Hetalia represents the body politic with
the actual body of a character, abstract national forces and operations can be discussed in
bodily terms; the writer of this fill allegorizes the US’s policy of containment with an
aversion to being touched by Russia. Knowingly or not, the writer evokes the conflation of
homosexuality and communism during the Cold War, where gay people in government
were seen as more open to communist influence, and communists were seen as espousing
degenerate morals, including sexual morals. As such, the fill seems to suggest that
America’s opposition to communism is really the more fundamental fear of being touched,
penetrated, and changed, and as such, a homophobic logic runs through ideological fears.
Ironically for America, the story ends in sex, where America loses all sense of his
mission to establish a nuclear policy, and, apparently, his fear of communist influence.
Similarly, another Hetalia_kink fill about Russia and America includes a passage where
America tries to cope with being stripped and slapped by repeating to himself, “Americans
don’t negotiate with terrorists. Americans don’t beg. Americans have the second largest
nuclear stockpile in the world” – which he forgets about as the fill also ends in sex (“Hands”).
As Jenkins writes, slash fiction, and especially the emotional emphasis in them, raises
questions of how heroes in popular culture deal with situations where they are not in

a sexual nature (though this is not the sole purpose of the community, and a number of works are not about sexual
encounters). Hetalia-kink has garnered the fanbase backlash, as requests that sexualized invasions and other
historical conflicts have been outed on fandomsecrets, a general community where fans can anonymously post
guilty pleasures or criticisms related to fandom and popular culture. Reactions to the backlash have been varied;
some fans ignored it, while other have tried to reflect on their privilege of coming from a country without a history
of subservience to other countries, while some others attempted to satirize the backlash and themselves by being
even more controversial.
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control, and “such questions cut into the heart of our culture’s patriarchal conception of the
hero as a man of emotional constraint and personal autonomy” (Textual Poachers 175).
These descriptors of patriarchal manhood also apply to sovereign states, who likewise
aspire to be rational and autonomous; in America’s defensive mantra, the writer directly
draws a connection between the character’s sense of his own masculinity and the
conventional military power and political autonomy of the US, and shows that eroding one
also erodes the other. As such, Hetalia fan fiction about America’s loss of self during sexual
experiences uses this trope to imagine how the country can begin to disinvest in the
masculinist constructs of a powerful nation-state.
On the other hand, stories about America’s relationship with England and
Japan tend to envision the feelings and behaviours America should exhibit if he is to create
mutual bonds with others. In an article defending Hetalia, Theodore Alexander Sands
argues that even though the character representations perpetuates certain Japanese
nationalist perspectives (especially in its treatment of South Korea), the narrative suggests
that the appropriate emotional stance vis-à-vis historical atrocities is regret (136). Sands’s
argument for the prevalence of this theme in the series itself can be overstated, however it
is not untrue. Hetalia’s short, 4-square comic strips tend to be comedic, but longer comic
chapters that focus on historical events or figures are often melancholic. For example, a
story about America cleaning out old possessions in the present turns into flashbacks about
his childhood interactions with England to the Revolutionary War. America reflects that he
gradually lost faith in England as he grew up and wanted to be independent, but decides
not to throw anything that England gave him away after all (Himaruya, Hetalia: Axis Powers
Vol. 1, 81). The story adopts neither a celebratory tone regarding American independence
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nor a reproachful tone regarding English domination, but rather the overall tone is regret
over a relationship that the nation-characters have lost.
Even though most of the Hetalia series does not take this tone, characters
demonstrating regret to each other certainly dominates fan production. Fan works focused
on an emotional relationships offer models of men dealing with flaws and weaknesses
together. As Anne Kustritz writes, slash fan fiction often construct men as equals in a
romantic relationship, and throughout the narrative character are constantly drawn into
discussions about the power dynamics of their relationship (377), which can involve
openly dealing with weaknesses and flaws. Kustritz notes that both men and women are
taught to measure themselves according to others of their gender in an effort to try to be
perfect, however slash fiction “does not deal in the careful presentation of one’s self in
order to show a desired partner an ideal image, but in the revelation and acceptance of
actual faults” (379). This is especially the case in the subgenre of hurt / comfort slash
fiction, which is devoted to one partner guiding another through explicit distress and
vulnerability. Distress can take the form of physical injury or illness, as Bacon-Smith
observes of much of early Star Trek fan fiction (258), or it could be emotional distress such
as trauma, revelation of character flaws, and past wrongdoing (Kustritz 379). In Hetalia,
personal weaknesses and flaws represent national weaknesses and flaws, and Hetalia fan
fiction writers and artists tend to use slash fiction to model how different nations can come
together to work through historical violence and national trauma. In particular, Hetalia fan
fiction is replete with characters expressing regret and seeking forgiveness for the
atrocities that they have committed themselves.
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The topic that frequently receives this treatment is the American bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Hetalia-kink, two early request about the bombing
respectively asked for “a guilt-ridden America and an angsty Japan” (“US/Japan:atomic
bombings”) and “America going through self-hate […]. For he had always been thinking of
himself as the Noble Heroic Liberator of Awesome, but…” (“America/Japan, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki”). The first request was filled once, and the second twice; in the three fills
narrating the same historical event, one fill shows Japan and America both admitting to
doing terrible things and pledging to move forward together, and two where America’s
efforts fail to convince Japan. One portrays the bombings as a betrayal of a prior
relationship between Japan and America, and Japan refusing to believe America’s
assertions that their relationship could go back to what it was (“That which is ephemeral”).
The juxtaposition of different versions of the fill demonstrate fans attempts to imagine an
America that is accountable for what the country has done, but also fan appreciation that
there is no easy reconciliation.
55

In the America and Russia fan fiction discussed previously, the focus is how sexual
experiences shatter America’s self-possession and concepts of strength. The sex lacks an
emotional dimension, and the writers do not have America working through his new self
concept with others. However, fan works regarding America and Japan use other shounen-
ai and slash conventions to model how countries might attempt to engage in equal and
reciprocal relationships. This may not be immediately obvious, as a great deal of Hetalia fan
fiction feature scenarios where there are large discrepancies in power, such as American

55
Although I focus here on fan fiction dynamics between America and Japan, it should be noted that fans as a
whole do not cast Japan simply as a victim. The lack of Hetalia comics devoted to Japan’s actions towards other
Asian countries has been recognized and addressed by fans, especially in longer fan fiction on AO3 and
Fanfiction.net.
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bombing of Japan and postwar occupation. However, such unequal conditions provide
precisely the kind of premise for imagining how inequality can be overcome. Fan fiction
presents scenarios where America does not bring military and economic advantages
against Japan to influence their relationship, and Japan is free to present his appraisal of
their relationship and free to reject America’s overtures. While this is historically
inaccurate, its difference from history is the imaginary of how geopolitics could be. In
particular, an emotional focus and hurt / comfort elements mean that the narratives
emphasize entirely different ingredients in national recovery and international alliances
than emphasized in political realism. The “comfort” demanded of America lies not in
operations such as economic aid or security provisions for Japan, but in America’s
acknowledgement of his role in Japan’s condition and re-evaluating his saviour identity.
Political, economic, and military elements are bracketed off not necessarily because fans
are unaware of them or wish to romanticize the past; their omission suggests that fans
implicitly rule them out as means to achieve an equal relationship. Indeed, requests on
Hetalia-kink almost never ask for stories about the war itself, but the aftermath, and the
implication is that masculinist constructs such as military and economic power was the
problem, and cannot be a part of the solution.
As a whole, slash and shounen-ai conventions allow Hetalia audiences to collectively
fashion a fannish technology of cultural memory that reorients familiar and official
historical contents, which sets a new framework to process ongoing social and cultural
events. Marita Sturken, in her pioneering book on memory studies, defines cultural
memory as “memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is
entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning” (Sturken 3). Indeed, a
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number of writers and commentators for fan fiction about America and Japan bring up
their experiences at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, and how this informed their
appreciation of the fan fiction and vice versa. Importantly, Sturken argues that objects and
representations are not vessels for memory as though memory was static, but rather
technologies of memory, “where memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (9).
It is not necessarily the case that Hetalia and its fans revive subjugated knowledges and
remember what has been forgotten by history. The representation of the Cold War through
Russia and America and the focus on the atomic bombs actually shows that fans tend to
affirm what is generally considered major historical players and major events, not to
mention that Hetalia entails an acceptance of the nation-state as a unit of historical agency
and power. However, technologies of memory does not refer to content in particular, but a
form that affects who engages with cultural memory and how – “the cultural tropes and
codes through which a culture represents its past are also marked by gender, race, and
class” (Hirsch and Smith 6). For example, in Sturken’s discussion of American cultural
memory of the war in Vietnam and the AIDS epidemic, the AIDS quilt as a quilt bear
connotations of folk art, Americana, and women’s collective work (191). In the Hetalia
fandom, slash and shounen-ai fan production constitutes a gendered technology of memory
that allows young female fan to emphasize feelings, mutual influence, and reciprocity in the
history of international relations.
The imaginary of a political order based on a transformation of masculinist national
imaginaries is not limited to Hetalia fans or fans of Japanese popular culture, though
Hetalia provides the most readily available tools. In more mainstream American popular
culture, audiences might ship political figures. Like the fan fiction on America and Russia
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where sex is a narrative intervention into heteronormativity, there are stories about
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or Trump and Mike Pence. As Wired journalist Emma
Gray Ellis writes, “Writing the virulently homophobic Mike Pence into gay love scenes is a
transparent literary revenge” (Ellis). On the other hand, “bromances” between political
figures also encapsulates ideal political visions. A prominent example is the “Trubama”
meme, which arose in 2016 in response to the media appearances that showed President
Obama and newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau behaving in a friendly
and intimate manner. Twitter and news sites showed off series of photographs of the two
leaders hugging, gazing into each other’s eyes, and standing with their faces inches apart,
followed in the rest of the year with sporadic fan fiction about their potential relationship.
During and after the rise of Donald Trump, Trubama took on even greater significance;
Huffington Post Canada joked, “feel the burn of this anti-Trump bromance,” and joked that
Trudeau, as a Canadian, could not resist an American president who talks passionately
about nature and healthcare (Lum). As with the Hetalia fandom, national and international
policy are represented as personally and romantically significant, and shippers advocate
male-male intimacy as an ideal political vision against Trump’s embodiment of a
hypermasculine and isolationist nationalism. Indeed, in response to the Buzzfeed article
about Trubama, a Hetalia fan commented that because of Hetalia, the real-life shipping of
Obama and Trudeau can’t surprise them anymore.

Fandom Positions in Cultural Policy
Hetalia fan productions that romanticize and sexualize nations have make
conceptual interventions in gender, sexuality, and nationhood, however they are also
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significant as a social phenomenon that exist in the context of long-standing American
perceptions of Japanese perversion on the one hand, and Japanese cultural policy efforts to
contain the spread of unfavourable images of Japan on the other. An examination of the
space Hetalia and its fandom occupies also speaks to Iwabuchi’s concern that fandom tends
to simply feed into national branding efforts. In fact, the Hetalia fandom does not shore up
Japanese cultural policies so much as it demonstrates these policies’ blind spots, while at
the same time revealing the sometimes xenophobic and Orientalist nature of American
anxieties regarding Japanese sexuality.
Scholars working in East Asian cultural policy have noted that in Japan, in contrast
to China and South Korea, policy regarding national media and media export has
historically not been under the purview of the national government.
56
Media export had
been conducted by private corporations instead of the government, and there was little
discernible common Japanese cultural foundation to these exports. Iwabuchi, in his earlier
book Recentering Globalization, writes that Japanese exports (both cultural and
technological), had been mukokuseki, or lacking in cultural or national character. In 2002,
Douglas McGray wrote an article in Foreign Policy called “Japan’s National Cool,” in which
he described the emerging strong cultural influence of Japanese media overseas; however,
he also notes that in the three months that he interviewed cultural producers, “Many of
them seemed surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural might abroad” (43). Shortly before,
the Asian financial crisis prompted the government to develop new sectors (Daliot-Bul

56
Lee and Lim write that Japan’s “past as a colonizer, its overt uses of culture for patriotic and imperial purposes
during its colonial and 2nd World War periods, and America’s influence on the country in the occupation period,
have lead to country to adopt a non-statist cultural policy” (6). Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution specifies
that the people have the freedom of association and a free press, and that no censorship shall be maintained. The
Japan Foundation, established in the 1970s, attempted to foster an understanding and appreciation of Japanese
culture, however its focus was on traditional culture.
216

248), in conjunction with a recognition that Japanese television programs had been doing
very well in the rest of Asia since the 1980s (Iwabuchi, “Pop-Culture Diplomacy” 422). A
series of initiatives began in 2002 under then Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi called the
Intellectual Property Strategic Program, designed to identify, protect, and profit from
intellectual property rather than tangible assets (Nakayama). The Japanese government did
not fail to recognize anime, manga and associated popular culture material as part of this;
The IP Strategic Program document of 2003 states that “Japanese media content including
movies, animated cartoons and game software are highly evaluated internationally.
Domestically, the broadband-based content business has come to be recognized as a new
industry with high potential”
57
(“Strategic Program” 2003).
Iwabuchi cites former Foreign Minister Aso as saying “we want popular culture,
which is so effective in penetrating through the general public, to be our ally in diplomacy”
(Iwabuchi, “Pop-Culture Diplomacy” 424). This involves using cultural exchange and the
projection of a favourable national identity to foster understanding or alignment among
other countries (419). Initiatives directly sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
(MOFA) include an International MANGA award, a Foreign Minister’s prize for the World
Cosplay Summit (2007), and the appointment of Doraemon as the Anime ambassador
(2008). In addition, the Ministry for Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), had established
a Cool Japan Fund in 2013 “to commercialize the ‘Cool Japan’ and increase overseas
demand by providing risk capital for businesses across a variety of areas, including media
& content, food& services, and fashion & lifestyle” (“What Is Cool Japan Fund?”).

57
In the 2002 document, anime was mentioned as part of media arts, however by 2004, it became a key aspect of
culture to focus on and its international popularity more emphasized.
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In the past ten years, scholars have generally criticized Japan’s national branding
through popular culture. Iwabuchi, for example, argues that the policy has created a one-
way cultural projection rather than foster a cultural exchange, and there is no sincere
engagement with Japan’s imperial past (Iwabuchi, “Pop-Culture Diplomacy” 425). Hetalia
certainly earns Iwabuchi’s criticism in this regard, as it depicts Japan as a cute and benign
entity and avoids any mention of Japanese atrocities, and this is what drew the umbrage of
Korean audiences and the South Korean National Assembly. The cancellation of the Hetalia
anime broadcast could also be seen as an evasive national branding move, which erases the
character of South Korea altogether rather than tackle the problems with his
representation. Other than criticisms of policy intentions, scholars have also criticized the
efficacy of these policies. Michal Daliot-Bul questions belatedly applying a modern, top-
down and centralized approach to culture when popular culture is clearly proliferating in a
postmodern fashion (249). As such, the various ministries involved in pushing Japanese
popular culture abroad cannot predict or keep up with the proliferation of responses, and
are out of touch with what fans actually like or dislike (Daliot-Bul 257).
Expectations regarding gender and sexuality in Japanese popular culture are one
area of discrepancy between Japanese policymakers and overseas audience responses.
METI’s 2012 Cool Japan Strategy report cites the series One Piece, Ninja Hattori-Kun, and
the vocaloid Hatsune Miku as examples of Japanese popular culture welcomed overseas.
One Piece and Ninja Hattori-Kun are anime and manga series respectively about pirates and
ninjas, and are considered shounen titles, which are targeted at boys and young men.
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Hatsune Miku is the mascot for a line of vocaloid voice synthesizer software
58
and has
become a “virtual idol,” with 3-D models that music producers can use to stage live, though
virtual concerts. Although she is a female character, the target audience is not necessarily;
music fans who are obsessively loyal in Japan tend to be young men who are attached to
female idols (Black 216). Hatsune Miku, like other virtual idols, embody moe femininity in
that she is both infantilized and sexualized, which real women are unlikely to embody at
the same time (Black 219). Indeed, at the end of 2018, a male fan in Japan officially married
Hatsune Miku. I describe these texts and phenomenon in detail to highlight the tendency
for Cool Japan to be biased towards sanitized media for young men, where the light
sexualization of female characters is acceptable. Media that explicitly sexualizes women
and media that sexualizes men for a female target audience are not mentioned, and do not
fit the impression of Cool Japan that the country wishes to promote.
59

However, these excluded categories can be a significant part of Japanese popular
culture’s overseas appeal. As Jonathan Clements writes in Anime: A History, during the
1980s, the genre of Anime that earned the most profit outside of Japan was erotica (170).
The development of anime erotica took advantage of contemporary developments in video,
which generated revenue through rentals and also more easily disseminated overseas; thus,
“adult” anime “became the standard bearers for Japanese animation in many foreign

58
Voice synthesizer software are sound banks based on human voices, allowing music producers to record songs
without vocal performers. These are especially popular in Japan because the Japanese language contains a
comparatively limited set of possible syllables, which can be synthesized and sound reasonably similar to human
singing.
59
The report does mention that gothic Lolita cosplay is a popular phenomenon overseas. Gothic Lolita is a
Japanese fashion subculture inspired by Victorian-era European clothing for girls. Although the name borrows from
the Lolita novel, participants emphasize childlike innocence and aristocratic bearing rather than sexuality. In
addition, it remains to be seen whether Japanese policymakers pay more attention to popular media for women
after the 2017 release of Yuri!!! On Ice, a shounen-ai anime series about relationships among male figure skaters,
which has been both critically and commercially successful worldwide.
219

territories in the 1990s” (171). These anime titles tend to target heterosexual male
audiences and sexualize women, whereas shounen-ai and yaoi works in the reverse,
however both are examples of Japanese media that borders on acceptability. Mark
McLelland, who has extensively researched gender and sexuality in postwar Japan, writes
that his students still tend to consume Japanese popular culture that feature controversial
material and avoid official channels, which contributes to the inability of Japanese
policymakers to exploit their popularity (6). Japanese policymakers are also unwilling to
acknowledge the popularity of explicit popular culture abroad partly due to domestic
concerns that violent and sexually explicit anime and games lead to moral decay, and a
worry that “exploiting those same cultures for international consumption acts to normalize
what is internally seen as undesirable and even deviant behaviours” (DeWinter 42). Thus,
even though the fandom for Hetalia may be more interested in Japan due to the series’
representation of the country, the fandom is unlikely to align with state cultural policies.
At the same time, even though North American and European anime fans may be
interested in Japan and be open to sexually explicit material, the history of anime erotica, in
addition to Orientalist exoticization of Eastern gender and sexuality, has helped to cultivate
a sense among non-fans of Japanese popular culture that Japanese sexuality is perverse. A
Cracked.com article called “9 Beloved Characters Made Horrifying By Japan” lists Hetalia as
the second worst offender (the worst being Manga Bible’s treatment of Jesus). While the
writer objects to Hetalia primarily for trivializing historical tragedies, he also criticizes
Japanese retellings of Star Wars, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Alice in Wonderland for
sexualizing characters inappropriately (Struciewicz). In 2014, Japan outlawed the
possession of child pornography featuring real children, and numerous Western news
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sources expressed bafflement that the same policy did not cover drawn or animated erotica
containing children (Ashcraft, “CNN Wonders”).
60
McLelland writes that this incident
prompted him to consider that the popularity of Japanese popular culture abroad has
resulted in both state Cool Japan policies but greater overseas scrutiny and Japan-bashing
as well (7). Western fantasies and fears about Japanese sexuality go beyond a concern
about domestic subcultures and include a fear of foreign influence, exactly as
Russia/America slash fiction suggest. For example, when Edward Snowden disclosed
classified CIA information in 2013, many articles pointed out that he had been an anime fan.
A Reuters article was devoted entirely to his online profiles and posts on anime-related
websites since the early 2000s (Cooke and Shiffman), and somehow this online article was
filed under news pertaining to Japan.
Fans like those of Hetalia exist between these different national cultural
expectations. On the one hand, fans of Japan the character and those who champion Hetalia
as a Japanese production (even against their own country’s localization efforts) may bolster
a politically sanitized version of Japanese national culture, yet expressing their fandom by
making Japan have sex with other countries falls outside of the Japanese state’s sanitized
purview. At the same time, American media and the general public are also horrified at
Japanese pop culture influences that allow fans like those of Hetalia to sexualize anything
other than consenting human adults. In other words, mainstream national cultures and
state-driven cultural initiatives are unable to anticipate or make room for the intersection
between women’s sexuality and national abstractions. While fans affirm the national

60
As notable geek culture news blog Kotaku reports, many Americans responded to CNN’s tweet about this
incident with criticism, saying that the reporters had falsely lumped together reality and fiction. CNN’s tweet and
responses were also translated into Japanese for Japanese internet users, who criticized the US for devoting
undeserved attention to fictional pornography in Japan instead of crime and gun control in the US (Ashcraft).
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identification at the root of Hetalia, they also create transformative works that cut into the
heart of masculinist and homophobic logics on which international politics runs. Part of the
reason that this is possible is because of the database model of Hetalia, which give fans
ideological room to be transformational, and part of it is fans who hold multiple forces in
productive tension. As American fan “zacloud” writes of Hetalia, “it IS a good learning tool.
But only a tool,” and “Even though Hetalia itself isn't supposed to be taken seriously… I do
take the results of it seriously. Because it CAN change the world, if enough of us think of our
countries as people, and about how we can steer everything into a better direction if we all
work together” (in “A Questionnaire”).

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Conclusion
In June 2020, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, Black Lives Matter
activists were faced with backlash from #whitelivesmatter and other right-wing hashtags
on Twitter. K-pop fans began to overwhelm these reactionary hashtags with posts about
their favourite bands. K-pop band BTS responded by donating $1 million to Black Lives
Matter, and fans quickly decided to match this amount in their own donations (Tiffany). As
this was election year and during the summer election campaigns, #maga (from President
Trump’s slogan of “make America great again”) surged and campaign rallies were also
scheduled across the US. K-pop fans also tried to overwhelm #maga on twitter, and also
reserved tickets to Trump’s rallies with no intention of attending, possibly affecting the
eventual turnout.
Some journalists reacted with pleasant surprise, calling the allies from K-pop fans
“unexpected” (Park). Some argued that this phenomenon demonstrated, in general, the
ability of fan activism to mobilize social media for social and political issues. Fans,
academics, and journalists also sought to nuance their analysis. K-pop fandom is not itself a
monolithic community, and this movement in support of Black Lives Matter does not mean
that K-pop fandoms were free of racism (Tiffany). Indeed Black fans also have to advocate
on behalf of themselves within the community, such as #BlackARMYsequality among fans
of the band BTS. There has been some analysis regarding the unique practice of K-pop fans
as mobilizers; CNN reporter Julia Hollingsworth cites the scholarship of Sun Jung regarding
K-pop activism, which discusses how K-pop has fostered a fandom that regularly makes
donations and does charity work in the name of their idols, rather than give gifts to these
idols (Jung, “Fan Activism”).
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Although most immediate reporting regarding this wave of activism on the part of
K-pop fans in terms of racial justice and the power of social media, it is also important to
point out that it also comes at the tail end of a presidential term heavily based on
xenophobia and nativism. While Latinos were cast as vulgar animals that posed a physical
danger to Americans, East Asian countries have been cast as devious challengers for
American supremacy, and their people as a threat to American middle-class jobs and values.
Donald Trump claimed Chinese graduate students are engaged in industrial espionage
(“President Donald J. Trump”), pushed through trade deals unfavourable to Japan (Sposato),
and called Japan and South Korea “freeloaders” and demanded that they allot higher funds
to upkeep American troops (Stutte). In June 2020, shortly after K-pop fans mobilized,
Trump also suspended all work visas to the US, greatly impacting countries in South Asia as
well. Under these circumstances, even though the explicit target of K-pop fans mobilizing
was racial discrimination and American right-wing political followings, the international
qualities associated with K-pop fandom are also significant.
Although the previous chapters have not discussed explicit mobilizations in
mainstream politics, they elucidate the kinds of fan dispositions towards East Asian
popular culture that may contribute, at certain flashpoints, to these mobilizations. Many of
the K-pop fans mobilizing in 2020 are not of Korean or East Asian descent, and their
favourable orientation towards K-pop is not inherited through their own families and
ethnic communities. It is through bodies of foreign popular culture through which their
politics are articulated, which can be in explicit contrast to concepts articulated in
American politics. While Donald Trump performs a corporate masculinity and rallies rural
hard masculinities as the means to restore American supremacy, many South Korean stars
224

are carefully cultivated to represent soft masculinity, which draws upon Confucian
traditions of the scholarly gentleman (Jung, Korean Masculinities 27). The earliest male K-
pop starts were also picked according to extensive surveys among teenagers as to what
they wanted from their idols (Shim 38). American fans bring this international multiplicity
to bear on what appears to be American matters of elections and racist policing, even
though it may not necessarily be their intention to do so.
Their fandom also complicates the fan texts’ extremely complex relationship to the
US and histories of American influence and imperialism in East Asia. It is possible to
periodize K-pop according to a post-Cold War account of globalization, where economic
and cultural liberation in South Korea created the environment for popular music to be
imported into the country and adopted by young musicians to appeal to youth tastes (Shim
35). However, scholars have also argued that the significant influx of pop music into South
Korea came with American servicepeople. John Lie argues that the Korean Wave, including
K-pop, has too often been celebrated as a narrative of national triumph. Instead, he points
out that the dominance of classical music in South Korea is quite continuous with colonial
era preferences (30). After the ejection of Japanese colonials, it was American
servicepeople’s influence and money that swayed local musicians to perform according to
American tastes, especially under the auspices of the United Service Organizations (USO)
which put on live shows (31). In addition, the Armed Forces Korean Network was one of
the few stations in the country that played pop music (32).
It is important to emphasize that Lie discusses historical antecedents of K-pop so as
to critique of the South Korean state’s triumphalist narratives, and not to judge K-pop as
unworthy of fandom, or to chastise fans for their attachments to K-pop. The value of
225

political judgement should still be considered carefully as scholars pay increasing attention
to how fandom overlaps with socioeconomic groups which are themselves positioned
variously relative power, especially in a context where fandoms mobilize on behalf of these
groups. The distinction I make among identity, disposition, and practice may be helpful in
this regard. Fandoms are increasingly unifying and performing affirmational fandom as a
kind of advocacy for media texts that can potentially advance the political power of a social
group. However, just because mobilization is a highly visible affirmational practice does not
mean it does not come with its own history of negotiations based on different dispositions.
For example, on the r/movies subreddit thread on Crazy Rich Asians, the most highly
upvoted comments were those which demonstrated entirely affirmational positions
regarding the film, while comments demonstrating reservations were the most
controversial, having been both upvoted and downvoted in equal measure. Audiences who
are critical of the film may be corralled by fellow audience members into relinquishing
their critique in favour of pleasure. For example, one redditor commented that they
returned the book for a refund because they objected to the characters’ display of
conspicuous consumption and upper class racism towards their servants (lillibet1, in
“Official Discussion: Crazy Rich Asians [Spoilers]”). Despite being touted for its
sociocultural importance for Asian Americans, the first response to this comment was “just
go see it, don’t overthink it. If you take it too seriously you’re not going to have a fun time.
This isn’t trying to be some deep cultural/social commentary.” Sometimes, audiences who
question the film’s craft or its political value were also pressured to walk back their
statements. Another redditor commented that they thought that Crazy Rich Asians was an
adequate film which audiences seemed to have hyped it up due to its social significance,
226

before discussing problems with the comedic tone and subplots of the film. Later, this
redditor edited their comment asking why their comment was being downvoted, guessing
it was because of their comments on audience hype, and then reframing their previous
critiques in terms of themselves being the wrong target audience (rambi_chan, in “Official
Discussion: Crazy Rich Asians [Spoilers]”).
It is possible to champion the majority of the redditors for collectively supporting
the first Hollywood film with an entirely Asian cast, to castigate fans for glossing over the
political blindspots of the film, or to argue that fans are real fans when they put pleasure
before critique. However, these approaches all miss the ways in which fans can
demonstrate ambivalence, and how communities of audiences negotiate antifandom and
ambivalence in their midst. The audiences who espoused ambivalence regarding the film
did not see critique and pleasure as diametrically opposed. At the same time, the reddit
community discussing Crazy Rich Asians are extremely ambivalent about these
demonstrations of ambivalence, having collectively both upvoted and downvoted them in
roughly equal measure.
61
These fan practices have implications for the archive of fan
materials for researchers as well; some of the redditors who criticized the film also
bemoaned that because they were being downvoted, their positions would be buried
underneath the comments of those who loved the film.
This distinction between identities, dispositions, and practices can also be useful to
discuss ongoing issues of toxic behaviours in fandom. As Richard McCulloch notes, toxic
practices in fandom is extremely challenging for fandom studies researchers to discuss, as

61
The critical comments regarding Crazy Rich Asians can be upvoted to 20 or so points collectively, however this
still pales in comparison to positive comments about the film, which have received thousands of upvotes, and are
displayed at the top of the thread by default.
227

the field has operated on the principle to “avoid making moral judgements about why
people behave in particular ways, aiming instead to understand the contexts in which those
behaviours are enacted, and how the people involved justify their own actions” (“On Toxic
Fan Practices” 374). Earlier research has already pointed out that while fandoms and fans
have developed organically among media audiences, this does not mean that they are not
also subject to active pressures by industries and fans themselves to include some while
drawing boundaries against others. Matt Hills, for example, asks how scholars might think
about the relationship between toxicity and authenticity, and also what kinds of cultural
capital are at work in various fan practices. He writes, “If fandom can be defined as
significantly exclusionary in a whole series of ways, in line with constructions and
circulations of subcultural capital, […] then it becomes rather awkward to assert that
spectacularly and offensively ‘toxic’ fandom is clearly separable from more ordinary
performances of fan identity” (108). It may not be helpful to label particular identities as
inherently toxic or even dispositions as toxic, but to recognize that situational dispositions,
combined with particular ideologies, lead to toxic practices. For example, cases where fans
harass other fans and media creators are arguably still the result of fan mobilizations that
do not differ from any other fan mobilization, however the fans’ feelings of dislike towards
particular textual choices and identities, in addition to feelings of being threatened,
channeled the mobilizations towards toxic practices and at vulnerable targets.

America’s Acafans
The intersection of American studies and fandom studies goes beyond expanding
each other’s archives, but also offer an opportunity to reflect on each other’s methodology,
228

especially how different claims of interiority or exteriority to the subject of study fosters
particular scholarly dispositions. Cold War era American studies was invested in explaining
American power by finding aspects of a unique American national character, and new
American studies emerged in the 1980s as a framework committed to countering this
exceptionalist tendency in the field in favour of understanding how American
exceptionalism has been produced (Wiegman 386). Robyn Wiegman noted that to do so,
American studies adopted a methodology where it claimed an exteriority to the
epistemological constructs of America, which relies on a sense that exteriority can
guarantee noncomplicity (391). Subsequent scholars expanding New American studies in
transnational directions has taken this critique into account by questioning whether
transnationalism guarantees noncomplicity with the US state, and questioning whether the
desire to adopt a transnational framework simply expands earlier American studies’
instincts to re-invent the self by consuming new frontiers, and thus contributes to the very
exceptionalism that they seek to overturn. Perhaps because of these cautionary
considerations, scholarly work in transnational American studies have avoided describing
transnationalism as an utopian escape from US power, and has been more interested in
how transnational circuits have been created out of a flexible exercise of US power.
However, American studies’ self-reflection regarding the limits of geographical
exteriority has not necessarily been matched by a reflection regarding epistemological
exteriority, on which the field still depends. American studies “claim to be within America
but outside, indeed against, its ideological and material reproduction. In this way,
exteriority evokes not simply political but methodological value, as it serves to reference
the cultural forms, texts, and practices that are taken to counter the exceptionalist logics
229

against which New Americanism defines itself” (Wiegman 391). Wiegman argues that this
exteriority is secured due to a belief in the power of a critical subjectivity, “where critical
thought and social emancipation congeal in a heady assumption that, by critically
discerning the operations of power, one secures the very exteriority taken as the means to
transform them” (391). Rather than being particularly radical, she argues that this relies on
a faith in Western Enlightenment principles (391) and is also influenced by the American
desire to free the present from the burdens of the past (393).
In contrast to American studies, which moved from being interior to its object of
study to the exterior, fandom studies has arguably moved from the exterior of fandom
towards the interior. The earliest researchers into fandom were often not fans, and treated
fandom as a bizarre social phenomenon. Fans quickly saw problems with this methodology,
and expressed discomfort with being spoken for by academics. Although fandom
ethnography did not have the baggage of racial hierarchy and colonialism like early
anthropology research, fans argued that research was inflected by class and associated
cultural capital, especially since much of media fandom had been communities formed
around lowbrow culture, investigated by middle or upper middle class academics. Evans
and Stasi, in their discussion of fandom studies methodologies, write that the beginnings of
fandom studies were constructed in relation to the crisis of representation in studies of
culture in general. The crisis of representation also called fields of academic study and how
they represented their objects of study into question, which led fandom studies to
formulate the relationship between academic and fan which were not necessarily
hierarchical or distinct (14). Matt Hills has introduced “scholar-fans” and “fan-scholars.”
The former are professional scholars whose research relies on their fandom, while the
230

latter are fans with expertise in their communities and assume the role of a critic. The aca-
fan emerged from communities of scholars studying fans, and has emphasized that that a
fan driven by passionate attachment and an academic who demonstrates critique and a
certain degree of distance can exist simultaneously.
This impinges on the kind of scholarly subjectivity that fandom studies presupposes.
Dialogue between Jenkins, Hills, and other fandom researchers through the 1990s and
early 2000s argue in different ways that thought processes among fans and academics are
not as different as one might suppose. Jenkins’s work shows that fans are not simply
“orgiastic” and socially dysfunctional individuals but form networks to produce knowledge
and criticism, and are thus similar to academics. Matt Hills approaches this from the other
direction by suggesting that questioning the critical abilities of fans should be turned
around to interrogate the critical capacity of academics. In Fan Culture: Studies in Culture
and Communication, Hills cites the work of Jensen and Pauly to say that media audiences
have been constructed as the ‘other’ to the academic, especially the fan who is not aware of
the political significance of their fan activity and who requires a researcher to articulate it
for them. Instead, Hills writes, “What academics can learn from subjects who are unable to
articulate their own experiences is that they, too, may not be able to articulate the full
meaning of their own experiences, therefore no longer existing in a fantasied ‘authoritative’
space outside any cultural struggle over meaning” (42).
Scholars studying fandom have come to a place where they are both inside and
outside of fandom, and also both inside and outside of mass media in general. When early
scholars of fandoms pathologized fans, they “transformed fandom into a projection of their
personal fears, anxieties, and fantasies about the dangers of mass culture” (Jenkins, Textual
231

Poachers 6). Cultural studies in the culture industries school of thinking sought to stand
outside of mass culture in order to critique its effects, whereas one of fandom’s major
contributions to cultural studies is to demonstrate that absolute exteriority is not
necessary, and in fact can impair scholars from recognizing the nuances in cultural
reception and mediation. In addition, a critical subjectivity is not necessarily coupled with a
position of exteriority. Rather, a critical disposition, or an antifannish disposition of dislike
and opposition, is situational and can be adopted by fans who are firmly inside the
circulation of mass culture to expose its limitations and imagine alternatives to its
narratives.
American studies has in its own ways attempted to address matters of critical
disposition, though often this is done obliquely and subordinated to questions of
exteriority. For example, Pease and Shu have engaged in dialogue with Wiegman regarding
whether the “passionate acts of detachment” on the part of American studies scholars
might actually reveal the strength of the nation-state to solicit such strong reactions (Pease
and Shu 2). Wiegman herself characterizes the disposition of American studies scholars as
“refused identification,” and argues that “By attending to the complicity of the Cold War
project, New Americanism generated its own identity through a practice of critique and
disidentification, both with its predecessor and with the primary object of its field,
‘America’” (390). Winfried Fluck uses “disinterpellation” and argues that disinterpellation
is not a matter of ignoring how the American state hails the subject, but of actively working
against it and working through the trauma of exclusion and being rendered exterior (378).
The value of fandom studies for American studies is to reconsider the yoking of critique to
exteriority, and to reconsider the faith in critique. This dissertation has attempted to
232

discuss the ways in which East Asian popular culture is not outside of American influence,
but this interiority is also the condition whereby East Asian popular culture texts can speak
to American imaginaries. Critique exists in both East Asian cultural texts and American fan
responses, yet the critique is also sustained by a fannish engagement of fascination and
devotion. Another way of actualizing this is to frame the investment of American studies in
America as a fannish disposition, where the field began as America’s fans and has moved to
become America’s antifans. Just as antifans are an aspect of mass media circulation,
arguably so too is critical American studies produced by a very American need to create
oppositional positions to advance itself.
These issues are especially important when regarding the space of the Transpacific.
As the previous chapters illustrate, American hegemony has been reproduced very
extensively in this region throughout the Cold War. In his consideration of postcolonial
theory and its application to Asia, Kuan-Hsing Chen acknowledges that it is difficult to
move beyond a scholarly framework that sees the world in terms of the West and the rest
which are totally separate, made even more difficult by imbalances in power. He writes,
Rather than continue to fear reproducing the West as the Other, and hence avoiding
the question altogether, an alternative discursive strategy posits the West as bits
and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never
totalizing, way. […] Once recognizing the West as fragments internal to the local, we
no longer consider it as an opposing entity but rather as one cultural resource
among many others. Such a position avoids either a resentful or triumphalist
relation with the West because it is not bound by an obsessive antagonism” (223).
An antagonistic disposition and a privileging of critique may also bend the research
methodology of transnational American studies in favour of American scholars. As John
Carlos Rowe observes, “what US specialists in American studies overlook is our tendency to
universalize our own interests and to appeal, however unconsciously, to our own nativist
233

expertise as implicated in a larger agenda of cultural imperialism” (171). Rowe is the most
immediately concerned with how American studies may uphold the interests of American
foreign policy and how American studies scholars from the US may take intellectual
precedence over American studies scholars working in other regions. However, there is
also the danger that American studies’ very real need to critique the US will universalize
the fostering of a critical disposition as the most legitimate starting point to analyzing
America, and also implicitly dismiss the experiences of non-intellectuals in other regions.
To effectively investigate the Transpacific region, scholars cannot be guided by a search for
either the absolute exercise of American power or the absolute resistance to American
power, but also must pay attention to the ambivalence that American power has created in
its interaction with local contexts. This includes the ways in which mass media and
entertainment creates its subjects – audiences whose lived experience encompass all the
dispositions of fascination and frustration, love and dislike, affirmation and transformation,
which are also the roots of new cultural resources to reckon with international interactions
in the 21
st
century.

234

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation examines East Asian popular culture and its reception among American fans as a circuit of antifandom, where audiences in each region build on the fannish work of the other to creatively transform American epistemologies deployed in Asia during the Cold War period and beyond. After WWII, the US buttressed political and social reforms in Asia by disseminating mass media and popular culture as vehicles of American values. I frame this cultural dissemination as a project to make Asians fans of America by making them fans of American culture, which I argue that it has instead created a transnational antifandom towards the US. Antifans are audiences whose relationships to media texts are defined by varying degrees of dislike, criticism, and ambivalence. East Asian popular culture is replete with references to American popular culture, demonstrating local familiarity and fascination with American culture

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zhao, Shan Mu (author)

Core Title America's antifans: East Asian popular culture, American fans, and national transformations

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 10/05/2020

Defense Date 08/06/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American exceptionalism,anime,antifandom,anti-fandom,Asian American,Bruce Lee,China,Cold War,comics,Cool Japan,co-production,cultural globalization,fan fiction,fandom,first person shooters,Hetalia,Hong Kong,Iron Man,Japan,Japanese popular culture,kung fu,kungfu,manga,media,Metal Gear Solid,militarism,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular culture,postwar,slash,Superheroes,The Green Hornet,The Shadow Hero,transcultural fandom,transformative culture,transnational,transnational American studies,transpacific

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Nguyen, Viet (committee chair), Alsultany, Evelyn (committee member), Govil, Nitin (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

Creator Email kalstar@hotmail.com,shanmuzh@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-379842

Unique identifier UC11666709

Identifier etd-ZhaoShanMu-8969.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-379842 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ZhaoShanMu-8969.pdf

Dmrecord 379842

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Zhao, Shan Mu

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA