Asian Appropriation Alert: Hachiko

So you may remember that I did a post a while back about how in way too many Hollywood movies we can see white actors playing Asian characters, and how it sucks because it's symptomatic of how whiteness is viewed as standard in America. Then I followed it up with a short comment about another movie I heard about in which this happened. And I just found out about yet another one. So I've decided to turn it into a series. I don't know whether this will be a weekly series, a monthly series, or a whatever-ly series, since its frequency really just depends on how many movies like this come out. But we'll see how it goes. To start the series off, I'd like to give a brief chronology of this phenomenon in cinema, and then talk about the latest movie to follow this sad trend.

In the early days of Hollywood cinema, lots of people were racist. Like, really really racist. So racist that the highest grossing silent movie of all time featured the KKK as its heroes. Compared to that movie, most of the racism in Hollywood was more subtle, although it's shockingly offensive by today's standards. In most early movies, Asian characters can be lumped into a few different categories. There are the submissive Asian women, the evil Fu Manchu type characters, and the asian immigrants with horribly mangled "Engrish," just to name a few. And usually these horrible stereotypes were played by white people. Not only did white people keep Asians down by portraying them in negative, generic ways, but also by making sure that they weren't actually able to act in movies. The practice of having white people wear makeup to make them look Asian is known as "yellowface." (I know that the term itself sounds horribly racist, but it's a legitimate term, I swear, and it's actually used by anti-racist people. Just look it up on wikipedia.) This word was derived from the similar word "blackface," which you should probably know the meaning of. The most famous example of yellowface is probably the Charlie Chan series, in which actor Warner Oland played Asian detective Charlie Chan. In fact, Oland actually made an entire career out of pretending to be Asian; he played Fu Manchu in another film series, as well as other Asian characters in other movies. Even when Oland died, the filmmakers didn't decide to cast an Asian actor to replace him. They replaced him with Sidney Toler, who seems like the worst actor ever. Just watch this video (you can even see black stereotypes in it too).

Obviously, anyone who dons racist makeup and speaks in a horrible accent is probably not a good actor, but this guy is just beyond awful.

By the 1970s, yellowface was used much less frequently, and when it was, it was sometimes actually incorporated into the plot, like where a white character would use it as a disguise or something (not that this is OK either, but at least in this case no parts were taken away from Asian people). One of the last movies to feature yellowface prominently was the first Bond movie, Dr. No, in which Joseph Wiseman played the eponymous Asian villain. But after this, yellowface started to fade away. There were only 5 movies featuring yellowface in the 80s, and only one in the 90s.

And now it's 2009. Obama's president, racism is over, and everyone's happy and able to do anything they want, right? Wrong. While yellowface isn't commonplace anymore, it has been replaced by something else. Right now it's unacceptable for an Asian character to be played by a white person in makeup. But it's totally cool for an Asian character to be played by a white person who isn't wearing makeup. Especially if the character's name is changed so that the character isn't even Asian anymore. In this way, stereotypes aren't perpetuated nearly as much, but parts are still taken away from Asian actors. If you want to read more about this, just read my post about it. Or if you want to just know which movies I cited as examples, here they are: the live action versions of Akira, Dragonball, Avatar, and Cowboy Bebop, as well as the movie 21.

On top of this new form of appropriation, yellowface is sadly making a return. If you look on the wikipedia list of movies that feature Yellowface, you'll see that there was one in 1997, the only one in the 90s, and that the next ones after that are four from 2007: Norbit, Grindhouse, Balls of Fury, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry. To be fair, all of these appearances of yellowface are incredibly small, but it's still alarming that yellowface is actually returning so quickly all of a sudden. It being the "post-racial" 2000s, where race just isn't an issue anymore (please note internet sarcasm), and considering which movies these were, it's clear that yellowface is making a return in the form of ironic racism and equal opportunity offensiveness. When these movies have yellowface appearances in them, they're meant for shock value, and some people think that they reflect positively on the actors ("Look how far Rob Schneider is willing to go! Look at how he doesn't care about race!" BTW why would anyone praise Rob Schneider?). And if someone else were to call it racist, then they would just be called racist, because they're the ones who are "noticing race" (as if noticing race and being racist are the same thing, and as if the one who puts on make-up in order to look Asian truly doesn't notice race). Anyway, this is kind of a tangent, but I'm thinking of doing a more in-depth post on equal opportunity offensiveness in the near future.

Anyway, here's the latest example, which I saw an ad for two days ago, in Japan of all places.

This movie is based on a true story that happened in Japan. A Japanese professor had a dog named Hachiko that would wait for him every day at the train station. One day, the professor died before returning, and the dog continued to wait for him every day. Hachiko is so famous in Japan that there is a statue of him in Tokyo in front of the station where he waited. There is even an annual festival to honor Hachiko. Hachiko is obviously an important symbol in Japan. And his story is being turned into an American movie that takes the story completely out of context. While there is Japanese writing on this poster, that's because this is a poster for the Japanese release of it, not because the movie mentions Japan at all. It's set in Rhode Island, and stars Richard Gere, Joan Allen, and Jason Alexander. All white actors. In Japan, the story of Hachiko is one about loyalty, and it's a story that has great cultural significance. From the looks of this poster, the movie will be much more sappy, and from everything I've heard about it, all of the its cultural significance will be stripped away. This is a Japanese story. It's being sold in America as an American one. And there aren't even any Asian lead actors. This is based on a story about Asian people, and none are present. The only remotely Japanese character is the dog, who happens to be an Akita, and has a Japanese name. Everything else is changed, and Asian countries, Asian cultures, and Asian people are still being ignored. Hollywood isn't progressing in this regard. In fact, lately it's been getting worse.

So now, whenever I see an ad for a movie like this, I'm gonna do a post about it, because it's a trend that's really in full force in Hollywood right now. Also, there are a few older movies that I'd like to do posts about in this series (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Departed, and some others), and also I know that this happens with non-Asian characters as well, so maybe I'll write about those if I don't see many more ads like this. And I would like to say that while there are many movies in which the character's races don't matter, there are also many others where having someone of a different race play a character just leads to the story making less sense. And the fact is that if a character's race truly doesn't matter in any movie, then there should be way more diversity in casting. All white casts still show a bias in Hollywood, especially when the characters were originally of different races. I can't think of any examples of this happening the other way around, where white characters are played by people of other races. If you can think of any, please let me know, but until then I'll stick to criticizing this trend in cinema.