Word: hollywoodism
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...especially the early 1940s, also of cultural purification. Even the eminent writer Tanizaki Junichiro argued in those years of intense nationalism that foreign loan words, mostly from Chinese, should be purged from the Japanese language. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, such popular American cultural products as baseball and Hollywood movies were forbidden. This policy was not designed to impress foreign views of Japan, but was in line with official propaganda, touted all over the Japanese empire, that the Japanese spirit and Japanese culture were superior to anything the West might have to offer. It was the ultimate reaction...
Those dark days are happily in the past. Baseball, Hollywood movies, American fashions, French ideas and so on - all came back with a vengeance. As soon as the war was over, Japanese became intensely interested again in the outside world and also in what the outside world thought of them. Once again, the Japanese cast themselves as eager pupils of a more powerful civilization. Some postwar efforts to incorporate Western fashions were as extreme as anything seen in the Meiji period. Hollywood movies were remade with local stars, made up to resemble their American models. Japanese pop music was often...
...fascination with Japan's perceived strangeness stretches from the beginning of films - when actor Sessue Hayakawa was one of the first Hollywood stars - to today. In the new Brit comedy Bridget Jones's Diary the heroine's mum blithely describes the Japanese as a "very cruel race." And if you think the Japanese cannot portray themselves as very cruel, check out Teruo Ishii's Joy of Torture films. In these two gore classics from the '60s, victims of feudal lords are roasted, splayed, beheaded, crucified and otherwise inconvenienced. These are not the only examples of cinematic exploitation and self-criticism...
...Movies, of course, are not documentaries; and movie directors are not obliged to tell the truth about themselves or their countrymen. An American might warn foreigners about inferring too much from the gruff heroes and idiot pranksters of Hollywood pictures. A Japanese person, when asked about that nation's cinematic self-portraits, can sagely reply that it's only a movie. Most films are more eloquent about their makers' intentions than about their society's ills. And films about a foreign culture say more about local fears than about the country in front of the camera...
...gestures of most stars. Audiences loved his sharp good looks and the animal elegance with which he took charge of a woman. Thereafter he played nobles and villains, whom the leading lady finds instantly attractive but must ultimately renounce (unless she was played by Tsuru Aoki, another Japan-born Hollywood star who was, for 47 years, Hayakawa's wife). In a society as officially white as America in the 1910s, Hayakawa was a pioneer: the first Japanese superstar of Hollywood films. So far, alas, he is also the last...