The noble warrior approach of American filmmakers is considered naïve in Japan, where the samurai myth has long been tarnished. Japan is Hollywood’s flavor of the moment, but is the view true? In the climatic battle of Kill Bill Vol. 1 Quentin Tarantino’s bloody revenge flick, O-Ren Ishii, the kimono-clad yakuza chieftess played by Lucy Liu, turns to Uma Thurman’s blonde, blue-eyed Bride, and caustically remarks: “Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords”.

The Bride turns out to be pretty good with her blade, but the sentiment might well be an epigraph for this season of subtitles and samurai. Through the same sort of Hollywood kismet that produces concurrent movies about deadly asteroids and exploding volcanoes, the theaters are suddenly overrun with images of Japan.

Tom Cruise is thundering across the battlefields of Meiji Restoration Japan in “The Last Samurai,” in pursuit of the doomed Bushido honor code and the enlightened spirituality of Zen Buddhism. “Lost in Translation,” Sofia Coppola’s portrait of alienated Americans in Tokyo, is one of the indie hits of the year. Nearly half the action in the first volume of “Kill Bill” (the second appears next month), with its rapturous, over-the-top homage to yakuza, manga and other Japanese genre films, takes place in a surreal movie-land Japan, subtitles and addled accents flying. It’s not just the setting that unites these movies. They are the objects of heated debate, particularly among Asian Americans and Japanese, about whether Hollywood’s current depictions of Japan are racist, naïve, well-intentioned, accurate—or all of the above.

Reservations about “The Last Samurai” started with reviews that castigated the movie for its stale portrayals of Japanese culture, as well as the patronizing narrative of a white man teaching the rapidly modernizing Japanese how to honor their past. Tom Long, of The Detroit News, wrote that “The Last Samurai” pretends to honor a culture, but all it’s really interested in is cheap sentiment , big fights and, above all, star worship. It is a sham, and further, a shame.

Meanwhile, in an unfortunate incident: A consultant retained by a party planneer for the Los Angeles premiere of “The Last Samurai” put out a public call requesting “beautiful Asian women” willing to dress up and “mingle in character… to create the ambience of ancient Japan, circa 1870’s.” The ad was pulled after the consultant received numerous complaints about the treatment of Asian women as attractive set-pieces__ as well as the notion that all Asian women are equivalent. “Hollywood clumps us all together and it does not matter whether we are wearing kimonos or hanboks or saris,” Sarah Park wrote in a letter reprinted on www.aamovement.net.

In Japan, the movie opened on Dec. 6, and has since been met with box-office enthusiasm and generally favorable reviews. “With his pursuit of realism director Edward Zwick seeks to surmount the misunderstandings and biases made by Westerners in the past, “wrote Noriki Ishitobi in the Asahi Shimbun, one of three major daily newspapers in Tokyo, in a translation supplied by Warner Brothers.

Tomomi Katsuta, who writes about films for Mainichi Shimbun, another of the newspapers, said the movie was a vast improvement over previous American attempts to portray Japan on screen, in movies such as “Shogun” and “Rising Sun.” Those films were humiliating for Japanese audiences, he said. “They didn’t understand Japanese culture or the customs of the Japanese.” Zwick, he said, had researched Japanese history, cast well-known Japanese actors and consulted dialogue coaches to make sure he didn’t confuse the casual and formal categories of Japanese speech.

Of course, Japanese audiences are relishing the opportunities to re-engage in the time-honored moviegoing tradition of picking out a period drama’s false touché: in this case, viewers have complained about anachronistic samurai ballet gear, overly talkative warriors and the unlikely scenario of the emperor appearing before a foreigner. “Even with serious pictures like ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ the reviewers mainly picked out mistakes,” said Donald Richie, an American film historian based in Tokyo.
But what seems to grate at Japanese viewers a bit more is the movie’s storybook approach to the samurai, who are depicted as unfailingly noble, and as pure as warriors can possibly be. In fact, the samurai myth is now a fairly tarnished one in Japan, in a way that the movie’s glory-filled depiction doesn’t reflect. And since that myth was originally created by Japanese literature and film, it’s odd to see those outdated images return in new American packaging. “Our images of samurai are that they were more corrupt,” said Katsuta. As for the character of Katsumoto, the philosophical samurai leader played by Ken Watanabe, Katsuta said, in a phone interview, “it set my teeth on edge.”

Perhaps the most sensitive and well-rounded Japanese character can be found in a film far smaller than any of these three, “Japanese Story,” which opened the Hawaii International Film Festival last fall and recently opened in Los Angeles. The Australian movie, which won the Australian Film Institutes best picture award, that country’s equivalent of the Academy Award, earlier this year, stars Toni Collette as a geologist who falls into an unlikely romance with a Japanese businessman, played by Gotaro Tsunashima, who travels to Australia to escape the obligations of work and family.

Sue Brooks, the Australian director of “Japanese Story,” wanted to deal head-on with the clichés she had encountered in previous Western movies about Japan and address Australia’s long-standing, World War II-bred hostility toward Japan. “It’s sort of like an old sore that needed to be healed,” said Brooks. “Not that we can heal it in one film, but we can give back that little bit.”

In one scene, an older Australian man takes the couple out in a rowboat and muses on the country’s relationship to Japan. “in the war, we thought you blokes were coming after us,” he says to the character Hiromitsu, who is unlikely to understand all of the man says. “Now you blokes own the place.”

But even Brook’ movie didn’t entirely steer clear of old archetypes: before he is humanized by his love affair with Sandy(Collette’s character), Hiromitsu comes across as a cold, rational businessman—another stock image from Western depictions of Japan.

Compared to much earlier attempts to portray Japanese characters in Western movies, however, the current crop might seem downright enlightened. During and immediately after World War II, in films like “Back to Bataan,” the Japanese were portrayed as “bucktoothed, glasses wearing, cruel, treacherous semi-animalistic characters, said Robert Sklar, a film historian at New York Univesity. After the war, paternalistic paeans such as “Sayonara” gave us sentimentalized Japanese characters, with the women in particular portrayed as mysterious and compliant, in contrast to hteir more feisty and independent American counterparts.

Revisionists war films such as “Tora Tora Tora,” released in 1970, emphasized military bravery on both sides, said Sklar. But in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, amid fears of Japan’s economic power over the auto and electronics industries, the Japanese presence in American movies came in films like “Gung Ho” and “Rising Sun” which portrayed Japanese executives as cold, dehumanized moneygrubbers.

Today, the political and economic dynamic between the two countries is less easily categorized. In the absence of any overriding conflict, the current spate of Japan-obsessed movies may simply represent the increasing popularity of Japanese culture in a rapidly globalizing world. Sushi bars are common in most major Western cities, and anime-inspired video games are rife. Japanese icons from Pokemon to Ichiro Suzuki have become familiar names.

I think is has something probably to do with the new image that Japan is transporting as trendy and right at the very edge of new technological discoveries,” Richie, the film historian, said in a telephone interview from his home in Tokyo. Richie, whose latest book, “The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan,” was published in August by Reaktion Books, said that over the past decade Japan has become more familiar to Westerners through the export of its popular culture.
That familiarity can both lessen and reinforce cultural stereotypes. The popularity of anime and Japanese technology, for example, makes “Lost in Translation” seem less exotic and more hip, particularly to the young audiences who embraced the movie. “Its general zaniness is what appeals,” said Richie. “The idea that Japan is a land of ravers where non sequiturs abound is very appealing to a certain level of Americans.”

“The Last Samurai,” on the other hand, plays to the nostalgia for a more honorable time, as well as the rather simplistic desire to honorother cultures by appearing to adopt them. “It’s almost painfully politically correct,” said Richie, echoing critics who have compared the movie to “Dances with Wolves,” Kevin Costner’s epic film about a white man who join a Native American tribe.

But despite the cinematic kimonos, swords and pachinko parlors, the soul of these movies hasn’t really shifted eastward. “We’re embracing the culture for our own purpose, to understand ourselves,” said Jeanine Basinger, chairman of the Film Studies department at Wesleyan University. “We’ve run out of settings in which to do it and our stories are getting tired and we have to find new clothing.”

Return to Dresner review.