Samurai Spirit: Orientalist Images of Japan in Contemporary Film

In her piece "Black Bodies/Yellow Masks," Deborah Elizabeth Whaley identifies four different Orientalist images that are commonly found in popular culture:

"(1) the sexualized, yet virginal Japanese geisha; (2) the South Asian Indo-chic; (3) the Chinese kung fu warrior; and (4) the use of Asian languages as an iconographic fashion statement detached from specificity of meaning and etymological usage."

While these images are important to recognize in popular culture, I also think that Whaley's list comes dangerously close to equating Japan with femininity and China with masculinity. That's why I want to concentrate on #3 in this post, specifically because "the Chinese kung fu warrior" definitely has a Japanese counterpart: the Samurai.

Many people have noted the Orientalist aestheics in the music and imagery of the Wu-Tang Clan. When looking at Whaley's list, it's obvious that the primary image used by the Wu-Tang Clan is #3. This is one reason why I'm using the image of the samurai as a parallel to the "kung fu warrior." The RZA, a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, has composed the score for two movies that I must admit I'm fond of, but that I also must admit show very orientalist images of samurai: Afro Samurai and Ghost Dog. These movies are also good reference points for discussing the same relationships between African American culture and Asian culture that Whaley discussed in her piece.

For this post, I'm going to specifically focus on Ghost Dog, since I've seen it way more times. This movie features Forrest Whitaker (one of a few famous alums of my high school), as a hit man whose entire personal philosophy is based on Hagakure, an 18th century book by Yamamoto Tsunetomo that outlines the code of the samurai. The one thing I will say in the film's defense is that it's based on an actual book, and it would've been way easier for the writers to just make stuff up. Still, the fact that the movie derives almost all of its imagery from this book is problematic. While Whaley is very positive about the use of Asian imagery in African American art, and while the issue is undoubtedly a very complex one, images like these can still be used to produce an essentiallized image of Asia.

It's nothing new for images of samurai to be used in Orientalist ways. Much like the belly dancing discussed in Susaina Maira's piece entitled "Belly Dancing: Arab-Face, Orientalist Feminism, and U.S. Empire," representations of a "samurai code" can be a way to profess an interest in Japan while avoiding discussions of contemporary issues that Japanese people actually face. I spent last semester in Japan, and the only time I was ever involved in a discussion that had anything to do with samurai philosophy was in an art history course, and even then it was only as a small part of one class. But there are still American songs, films, and people that base all their knowledge of Japan on romanticized ideas of the samurai.

I'm reminded of a scene in a movie I just watched called "Kamome Shokudo," which is about three Japanese women who work in a Japanese restaurant in Finland. In the movie, there is a young male Finnish character named Tommi who starts coming to the restaurant because, like many young white males including myself, he has an interest in Japanese culture. In almost every scene that this character is in, he is wearing a shirt that has some representation of Japanese culture, most of which are from contemporary Japanese popular culture (this description might sound eerily familiar for people who know me). Most of the time, the women who work in the restaurant either make some friendly comment about his shirt or don't make a comment about it at all. The only scene in which any of the women have a noticeably different reaction to one of his shirts is when he is wearing one that has the kanji for "samurai spirit" on it. In the beginning of the movie, he wears a shirt with a Japanese cartoon character, and one of the women in the restaurant is able to relate to it. But the woman who comments on the "samurai spirit" shirt is portrayed as being unable to relate to it. I think these scenes are pretty good representations for a number of reasons. Tommi's character is not really portrayed as being Orientalist, and his shirts display a wide range of Japanese cultural artifacts. But the only shirt he wears that is portrayed as being Orientalist is the one that conveys a dated, romanticized notion that doesn't have as much relevance in contemporary Japanese society. This also ties in to #4 on Whaley's list: " the use of Asian languages as an iconographic fashion statement detached from specificity of meaning and etymological usage."

One more thing that I'll comment on is the fact that Chinese and Japanese cultures can be (sometimes inadvertently) portrayed as interchangeable in popular culture. I'm not going to get into this in too much detail, but I do find it interesting that the RZA, a producer who derives much of his aesthetics from Chinese popular culture, did the score for two movies that derive much of their imagery from Japanese culture. This is just one reason why I think that the image of the samurai can be viewed as a counterpart to "the Chinese kung fu warrior."