WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, the much-touted film based on Arthur Golden’s best-selling book, just had its star-studded world premiere in Tokyo. Widely anticipated, there are already rumors of Oscar nominations.

            The film was originally a Steven Spielberg project which he handed off to Rob Marshall, whose most recent hit was the musical, CHICAGO. Even before the film was made, voices were raised in Japan about whether Hollywood could capture the nuances of the Japanese geisha culture.

            Now anger is rising on both sides of the Sea of Japan. At issue are the three main leads – the geisha girls.  Zhang Ziyi, of “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,” Michele Yeoh, a former Bond girl, and Gong Li, known for her work with Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar Wai are all ethnic Chinese.

            This is a wounding to Japanese pride, not a small thing in Japanese culture. But the Chinese are upset too. One Chinese website attacked Zhang for playing “a Japanese prostitute” and the lover of a Japanese man, the actor Ken Watanabe. “How outrageous to sleep with a Japanese man for money – she has humiliated all Chinese.” Another blog was more violent: “She should be chopped to bits.”

            The references are to the bitter memories form the Second World War, when thousands of Chinese women were forced into sexual slavery by Japan – a still raw issue in Chinese-Japanese relations.

                        Even Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige, who directed Gong Li in Farewell My Concubine, went on record that a Chinese actress can’t possibly play a Japanese geisha.The culprit here is neither Japan nor China, but Hollywood, which surely still believes it can create and re-create the universe just as it sees fit. From a marketing perspective, the Chinese actresses have all been exposed to American audiences, whereas no contemporary Japanese actress is well-known in America. Marshall, the director, was more blind and blunt when he said, a few years ago, that there were no Japanese actresses suitable for the geisha roles.

            Because the Gion district of modern-day Kyoto no longer has exotic teahouses and temples of the 1920s and 30s – the period in which the book and the film are set – most of the movie was shot in California. Marshall is very proud of this: “We ended up building a little Japan with cobblestone streets, bridges, a river, period buildings and antique props in Ventura.” Then he says he found the story “daunting to tell, as an American. I especially wanted to honor the profession because a lot of people in the West still don’t know what geishas are.”

            Certainly if Marshall can shoot the musical CHICAGO in Toronto, he can make Ventura substitute for Kyoto.

            At heart was also the difficulty of learning the geisha culture and tradition. The Chinese stars were trained for six weeks at a geisha boot camp where they learned to walk, bow, kneel, pour drinks, play the shamisen and dance. They also tried to learn to speak English with a Japanese accent.

            The accents are wrong, complains one critic – the actresses speak English with Chinese-English accents, not Japanese accents. The white makeup on their faces which true geishas wore was dispensed with, ostensibly because this would be too scary for Americans.

            Some of the Japanese cast had doubts, but one Japanese cast member said these doubts were dispelled when he realized that the book was told through American eyes and the film filtered through the lens of an American director.

            “I think Hollywood people don’t care whether the actresses are Japanese or Chinese,” said Chaki Miyazaki, a music producer from Kyoto, “When I was in the United States, American people thought Japanese, Chinese and Korean were all the same.”

            Critics can say that all of this perhaps doesn’t matter: it is fiction and make-believe, after all. But at the heart of it is a certain kind of cultural imperialism, an arrogance which only cares about its own, narrow, narcissistic point of view. If John Wayne could play Genghis Khan and Omar Sharif be Doctor Zhivago, why not Zhang Zhiyi as a geisha?

            The issue of cultural representation is not to be dismissed lightly. The under-representation or misrepresentation of diverse ethnicities by American television in particular leads to a skewed view of society, a narrow vision of the world, a parochialism which is blunt and blind. A blogger in the Memoirs of a Geisha controversy wrote about how, when she was a little girl, she watched Asian Kung Fu films because she wanted to get whatever little she could of Asian culture to help understand herself and her identity. To the point, she wrote, “Every country has a culture that should be presented in truth, not in cliché.”

            Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan who was in India to promote a film took a more activist stance. He said that Asia’s film industries should unite against Hollywood if they want to preserve their unique culture. “Why do we need to ape their culture? I see an Indian saying, “Yo, man!” But that’s not what Asians are about. Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.”

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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