Stepping back a little from controversy...

Professor Yamashita gave a lecture today at lunch on Letters from Iwo Jima and the portrayal of the Asian (in some cases specifically the Japanese) in American film.

He started with a summary of the historical portrayals of the Asian enemy in film, beginning with the wartime movies. He noted that in most cases, the enemy is either ridiculously villainized (i.e. the slanty eyes and sinister smile) or is completely anonymous. In most cases, you either see the enemy for a brief moment, or you never see them very clearly at all. This is true in films from the 1940s through the 1980s (he cited several, but I can, unfortunately, only remember the James Bond references).

This changes, he argues, in the 1998 movie version of The Thin Red Line. Even though it's just one scene and just 10 seconds, for 10 seconds the camera stops following the American troops and instead is inside the Japanese pillbox, focused on the two men manning the machine guns. As Professor Yamashita put it, for 10 seconds you can see the enemy, and you can recognize them; you can identify them as possibly your father and uncle, your best friends, yourself and your brother.

In a way, this set the context for Letters from Iwo Jima and the way it changes our understanding of the Asian enemy. I haven't see the movie, so I can't say with great certainty that I agree, but my grandmother and her friends saw it and loved it, as did my Japanese language exchange partners and their friends, so I think it's safe to say that it's not grossly offensive to an Asian/Asian-American audience.

Professor Yamashita also discussed other issues surrounding the nature of the film and why it couldn't have been made earlier. He showed a clip from a Know Your Enemy film about the Japanese, which described them as a "fantastic" people (and by this I doubt they meant "really cool"). At once the Japanese were portrayed as both modern (shots of buildings and machinery, etc.) and backwards (traditional music and dancing). The soldiers profiled were depicted as "trained from birth" to be soldiers. They were small, and simply equipped, but they had a great deal of endurance and knew what their job was. Professor Yamashita suggested that one of the reasons for an unwillingness to explore the Japanese "enemy" even after they stopped being enemies was that there was a prevailing feeling that "we know the enemy, what more is there to learn?"

Another contributing factor to the context of Asians portrayed in film was the history of photographs in relation to Asians. Most of the earliest images of Asia (taken by American and European photographers) were of beautiful landscapes, the exotic (for instance, he showed a picture of "traditional snake charmers"), the laughably backward (a photograph of men pulling geishas in a rickshaw), and the exoticized women (a large number of the photographs of women were of them bare breasted).

Along with this is the history of war photography. As in film, there was a shift from the "anonymous" enemy in photographs to the very human enemy. Historically, the enemy in pictures is either absent, or so dehumanized they are not recognizable as human. There was a very interesting set of shots (taken by the same photographer) of a Japanese soldier killed by a flamethrower compared to a slain American soldier; you could see the face and expression on the American soldier's face, but the Japanese soldier had been burned beyond recognition even as a body almost. However, Professor Yamashita offered a new set of images from a more recently released album on Iwo Jima that shows both Japanese and American soldiers as "human," in the sense that you can see their faces and place them as people.

Producing a movie such as Letters from Iwo Jima, he also posits, would have previously been impossible because it would have undermined the traditional imposed discourse about Japan's role in the war, namely that the Japanese people were ignorant and were forced into this crazy war by the military leaders. I wasn't entirely clear on what part of this Letters from Iwo Jima would have undermined, given that I didn't see the movie, but perhaps the suggestion was more that it would open up consideration of the war beyond the neat textbook discussion.

However, while the movie was excellent, there are, of course, criticisms. Some (especially British critics, apparently) found the film very "Orientalist." Japanese characters that were portrayed as "round" and "human" were coincidentally the characters that had studied in the United States or interacted with Americans; the suggestion, of course, is that they are only good because they have been somewhat "Americanized." This is obviously a fairly well-known narrative to us.

I'm sure very little of this comes as a surprise, I just thought it was interesting to hear about the issues related to film.