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(gentle, rhythmic music)
(dramatic, orchestral music)
- You are about to see the second of three films
which have been made to help us size up our enemy, Japan.
To beat the Japanese and to do the job thoroughly,
we have got to understand them thoroughly.
The Japanese aren't easy to know.
I've lived among 'em for 10 years
and I can testify that they are as different from ourselves
as any people on this planet.
(gentle, dramatic music)
- Hollywood has a bad track record,
from way back, of course,
showing ethnic minority groups of all kinds,
you know, Native Americans, African Americans,
who were always caricatured, almost always,
Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans.
(gentle, dramatic music)
All these groups were depicted
usually in stereotypical ways.
There are a lot of exceptions, you know, some good films,
but the Japanese character is somewhat stereotypical,
you know, and it is controversial, of course,
when you have what they call yellow-face now,
with white actors doing Japanese parts.
(quiet, piano music)
- In Hollywood, white actors are really
at the top of the food chain.
They get access to all the lead roles,
they even can play, you know, characters of color.
- Lovely ladies, kind gentlemen,
pleased to introduce myself.
Sakini by name, interpreter by profession.
(dramatic, orchestral music)
- That is very different from actors of color,
especially Asian American actors who
rarely even get to play themselves
because white actors are sometimes taking that role
and so not only are Asian American actors
not part of the lead and being able to kind of
build their star power, so then,
it becomes this cyclical problem
where they're not getting cast as leads
and so then they don't become A-list actors.
So then people are thinking, "Oh well,
"we can't cast an Asian to play this role
"because they're not A-list,
"they're not gonna be able to draw in the audiences,
"so let's cast an A-list white actor instead to play that."
And that has been the historical trend
amongst the casting of Asian actors,
compared to white actors.
- [Narrator] Marlon Brando spent two months
with an interpreter and a tape recorder
to acquire the Okinawan accent required
for his comedy portrayal of Sakini.
Recognize him?
(cheerful singing)
- Sayonara.
- They're very open to casting white actors
as Asian Americans because it's been done in Hollywood
even though it's been offensive,
now they do it in different ways,
like, oh, well let's just make that,
all of a sudden make it Asian character,
not Asian, but sort of Asian,
and that has happened in, for example, "Dr. Strange,"
where they have the ancient one
who was in the comic books,
written as a Tibetan man and they cast Tilda Swinton as it,
and they said, "Oh well, she's not Tibetan anymore,
"she's Celtic," right? (laughs)
And, except that, when you watch the film,
it takes place in Tibet,
she's wearing very Asian-esque clothing
and the entire scene is obviously set in Asia.
(gentle, cheerful music)
And so, and also Scarlet Johanson,
who is in "Ghost in the Shell"
and that was based on a Japanese Manga
and that character is a, you know, is a Japanese character
and then they just, they started to say,
when there was some protest against this casting, that,
"Oh, she's not really Japanese."
But then if you watch the film, (laughs)
it's set in Japan and it turns out,
I think the kind of ending is that she really is Japanese.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- There is a strange tradition in Hollywood films.
Of course, when you look at old Hollywood films,
that's kind of a sign of our cultural imperialism
that we play all parts.
- But is it so great, I thought it must show on my face.
- What is the cause of this great difference
and when did it begin?
- On the night we first opened our hearts to each other,
my husband, even if it is only a girl,
I shall be very happy.
(man mutters quietly)
- In the very, very beginning of,
even before Hollywood, we can go back a little bit,
minstrelsy was something that was a theatrical entertainment
that was, you know, it was performed on the streets
and it's performed by white, ethnic actors
in blackface, in yellow-face, in red-face.
(gentle, orchestral music)
And so they portrayed characters of color
in exaggerated, often demeaning
and caricature ways and it was entertainment.
And so that carried over to Hollywood.
That was a very, very popular form of entertainment
and it carried over to Hollywood in the early days.
(gentle, orchestral music)
For example, in "The Good Earth,"
that was a dramatic, you know, based on a Pearl S. Buck,
best selling novel, and so they cast a white actor
as the male lead.
(dramatic, orchestral music)
And at the time,
there was this production code called, "The haze code."
(men laughing)
- This is the day! (laughing)
- According to the haze code,
you can't have the actors, even if they're portraying Asian,
to have any kind of cross-racial romance, right,
and so to be able to portray that at all,
it makes sense that they would cast white actors.
(dramatic, orchestral music)
On screen, people of color and whites
were not allowed to have any kind of,
even romantic suggestions.
And that happened even when white actors
were playing characters of color, right.
So even if you have two Chinese characters,
if one of 'em was played by a white actor,
the other character could not be played by a Chinese actor
because that would be, 'cause audiences would understand
that that's actually a white actor and a Chinese actor
and therefore, they can't have any romantic relationships.
- If you love me,
if I please you.
- It shall be done.
Anything.
- That was an internal Hollywood code
that was based on, kind of morality,
as well as anti-miscegenation laws
that were happening in the United States where,
you know, people, whites, and people of color
were not allowed to have marital or romantic relationships
in, you know, in the United States.
(gentle, orchestral music)
And so they did this in order to make sure
that the audiences, in the conservatives areas,
especially the South, would not boycott or protest.
They wanted to be able to reach these audiences
that they knew would be against
any kind of interracial romance or interracial relationship.
(gentle, orchestral music)
That was an institutionalized way
of preventing Asian American,
as well as other actors of color,
from achieving stardom because, hey, you know,
there is going to be a role that's actually about
an Asian American person and yet
we can't cast an Asian American actor to play that
because of this code.
♪ Oh, oh I come from the South ♪
♪ From way down South ♪
♪ Where the the corn and the taters used to go ♪
♪ There's a great big elegant picture show ♪
♪ And my old Kentucky home is a French chateau ♪
- There were laws against inter-marriage, miscegenation
and in 1949, California
allowed miscegenation, that was a landmark,
but it wasn't until 1967 that interracial marriages
were legalized throughout the U.S.,
in the Loving versus Virginia case,
which was a black woman and a white man.
(quiet, dramatic music)
- I feel like that's always been Hollywood's rationale
for racism because they always say that,
"Well it's the audiences."
That is something that is from historical,
from the institutionalization of the haze code
all the way to today where there is no haze code anymore,
but there's still that catering
to the conservative audience.
(gentle, quiet music)
- There are a lot of exceptions, you know, some good films.
Cecile B. DeMille made a film in 1915
called "The Cheat," which is a good film,
but the Japanese character is somewhat stereotypical.
(cheerful, orchestral music)
- So in the example of "The Cheat,"
I find that really interesting because Sessue Hayakawa,
who was actually a, he was a matinee idol.
So he was actually seen as kind of sexy and interesting
for, you know, for audiences to come and see,
but that always he was seen as the enemy, right,
he branded a white woman in that movie, (laughs)
which is just, I mean it's uncalled for.
I mean, it seems obviously very barbarous.
(cheerful, orchestral music)
Right, and at the same time,
I think he was also exotic-sized
and there was intrigue about him.
So that really captured the threat of the Asian,
but also the kind of, the draw and allure
of someone who is so different from us, right.
(cheerful, orchestral music)
- Frank Capra made a great film,
"The Bitter Tea of General Yen," in 1933,
which is about a Chinese general
who's in love with Barbara Stanwyck.
It's a daring film for its time
'cause it's about interracial love
which is a huge taboo in American films
and he got away with it
and the Chinese general is played by a Swedish actor.
- You've run down my rickshaw boy.
(men speaking Chinese)
- And, you know, there were good Asian actresses around,
they could have made more effort to find them.
Anna May Wong had some career.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- I mean, if you look back on Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan,
these were series of films and television shows
that kind of defined Asian Americans for so long, right,
like, and they have different,
they'll have different white actors
actually switch in for those roles, right,
and so it doesn't matter, you can put in (laughs)
like a million different kind of white actors
for the same role and yet,
they continue to reproduce the same kind of stereotype.
- [Narrator] Christopher Lee as the dreaded, Dr. Fu Manchu.
- The Doctor Ingrid Cock
will die an extremely painful death.
- 'Cause he actually had prosthetics put in
to make his eyes look more Asian
and so this is kind of, you know,
still an example of yellow-face.
(cheerful, orchestral music)
- Humble self responsible for tip.
Notice large increase in number of secret agents
since creek ordered back to Pacific.
- [Nancy] And you have someone like Charlie Chan,
who I would argue is the predecessor
to kind of the model minority of today,
the kind of very non-expressive, you know,
has kind of these wise sayings, like fortune cookie sayings,
and is passive, but,
and so he was a very popular TV character.
- 70, 75, I got the fluid down, Mr. Chan.
- Too bad, I was in hopes soon to overtake other car.
- And so today, you know, we still have,
in my interviews with the casting director,
one said that, she said that it was common
for casting directors to think of Asian actors
as not very expressive.
- You two supposed to take baggage to hotel.
- We did, pop, then we came looking for you.
You know we have to look after you.
- [Joseph] Racism was so pervasive in American society,
a lot of people didn't even think about it.
- In fact, no trouble is too big for us.
- Some of your trouble too big for me.
Come, we must investigate slight case of murder.
- Murder?
Well here I come.
- Here I go.
- So that happened during, you know,
throughout kind of the wars with Asia,
so it's really easy to kind of
portray Asian, you know, threat, right,
in the same time that, you know,
that Asia is seen as the enemy.
- When the war came,
America was very slow to enter the war
because isolationism was very strong in America,
but Pearl Harbor galvanized people
and it is quite clear that Roosevelt
wanted us to get into war.
He knew that we had to defeat fascism in Europe.
- A state of war has existed
between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
- [Announcer] On December 7th, 1941,
Japan, like its infamous access partners,
struck first and declared war afterwards.
Costly to our Navy was the loss of war vessels,
airplanes and equipment.
In immediately unifying America
in its determination to fight and win the war
thrust upon it and to win the peace that will follow.
- The record of American films
is just appalling in that period
and "The Purple Heart" and other films
just depicting savages and, you know,
certain caricaturistic, physical traits
that they loved to harp on.
- The Japanese will win.
He wears wood-fiber clothes, cardboard shoes,
he cheerfully eats 1/3rd of his usual diet,
he works 14 hours a day, seven days a week,
and our soldiers, ask our troops that baton,
we do not leave anyplace that we want.
You must kill us.
We will win this war because
we are willing to sacrifice 10,000,000 lives.
How many lives is the white man willing to sacrifice?
- I just watched "Know Your Enemy: Japan," again,
Capra's outrageous film and it was just a nonstop parade
of racist cliches.
- [Narrator] He is prouder, still,
of the fact that to be a soldier
is the highest human achievement in Japan.
He has been trained to be a soldier almost from birth
and into his tough little mind
has been drilled and hammered
the fanatical belief that Japanese are descendants of gods
and destined to rule the Earth and all who live on it.
(canon blasts)
To this end, treachery, brutality, rape and torture
are all justified if used against non-Japanese.
(man yells)
- [Joseph] And the films were made, basically,
for two reasons, one was to motivate them to fight
because a lot of Americans didn't know why,
you know, why we were fighting
and then the other was to educate them
in the reasons for fighting.
- [Announcer] He lives on rice,
rice and fish, or occasionally rice and meat,
but often on rice alone, and he's proud of it.
(men laugh)
(chanting in Japanese)
- So they would make these films to pressurized people
to do things in those days and that's how it worked.
There wasn't television as much,
but there were motion pictures,
they would show some of these in theaters.
- There was an intentionality on the U.S. government
to use Hollywood as propaganda stick, right.
So a lot of cartoons actually were used,
during World War II that portrayed the Japanese as enemy.
- Tokyo, help, calling Tokyo, help!
(chattering mock Japanese language)
- I actually saw one where it was Bugs Bunny,
it was called, "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,"
and nips was a derogatory term for Japanese
and it portrayed them as, it was interesting,
'cause it portrayed them with really big feet,
they were very animalistic so they had the buckteeth
and the glasses, but they also had,
they were barefoot and had these really big feet,
like they were animals, right.
So it's really easy, I think,
to portray an entire race as animals, you know,
in order to kind of then justify killing them, right,
justify marking them as an enemy, dehumanizing them.
- Hurry hurry hurry, get 'em while they're cold.
(people chattering)
Here, one for you, monkey face.
Here you are, slant eyes, everybody gets one.
- I would argue that the entertainment
is even more dangerous than the obvious propaganda, right,
because when you're watching something as entertainment,
you're not even looking at it critically,
you're thinking, "This is how it is," (laughs) right,
because you're filters are down
and actually, in the war effort,
that entertainment is the best way to do propaganda.
(bombs blasting) (playful music)
If you have Bugs Bunny, who's iconic, right?
I mean, he was beloved.
If Bugs Bunny, you know, thinks the Japanese are our enemy,
(laughs) then they must be enemies, right?
So it's much more effective to have already established
kind of movie stars or cartoon stars
to kind of participate in the propaganda
in ways that then the U.S. audience
is going to consume without any filters
and going to consume and believe that is real.
(dramatic, orchestral music)
- Eh, cock-a-doodle-doo, please.
(dramatic, orchestral music)
- Even though Hollywood, you know,
it's not like we can say Hollywood (laughs)
made the Japanese enemies,
it doesn't help when you have something
going back to "The Cheat," right,
you have something going back to Sessue Hayakawa,
who, despite being a matinee idol,
was branding white women, right, on screen,
and seen as, you know, a barbarous other, right,
always seen as other, never seen as an American,
even though, you know, we had all these Japanese Americans
as farmers, and you know,
they were very much incorporated into the United States.
(gentle, piano music)
And working really hard and contributing to society
and yet, that was never seen on screen.
(gentle, piano music)
- There's a lot of, really, slurs against Japanese Americans
and basically portraying them all as spies and disloyal.
(gentle, piano music)
But a lot of the Japanese Americans were,
they had been here a long time
or at least a generation or two.
(gentle, piano music)
The whole country was galvanized into war
and then Hitler declared war on the United States,
two days after our congress declared war on Japan.
But then, very soon after that, in early '42,
the planning started soon after Pearl Harbor
to round up the Japanese Americans,
in California, especially, and other Western states,
and put them in detention camps
as enemy aliens, you know, dangerous people.
(people chattering) (gentle music)
They put them in buses and trains
and took 'em to these camps that were very minimal,
way out in the middle of nowhere.
(gentle, piano music)
The terrible irony, of course,
is that there wasn't a single Japanese American,
whoever was convicted of spying for the Japanese
during the war, it was an illusion.
And they rounded these people up and put them in camps
and took their homes away and their farms.
(gentle, orchestral music)
And a lot of people think it was partly due
to the racism of white farmers wanting their land
because these Japanese immigrants
had done very well as farmers,
especially in, had a lot of property and were prosperous.
(gentle, orchestral music)
And so they took their land away
and they claimed they were going to save it for them
and they didn't and a lot of them came back,
at the end of the war,
and they found they had no property left.
(gentle, orchestral music)
A number of Japanese were shot, trying to escape
or killed for various reasons.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- So my family, the Tomita family,
was interned in Manzanar.
(somber, orchestral music)
My family, they dressed up in their clothes
to go to the assembly center,
thinking that they were going to someplace special
where they would be safe and protected.
They didn't know they were going to the horse stalls.
They didn't know they were going to be living in,
where the horse shit would be, where hay was.
(somber, orchestral music)
They brought one suitcase each.
They had to make their own beds of hay.
One really great thing that I think my father
and my uncles told me is that
because my grandmother and grandfather,
(speaks Japanese) were farmers,
that they didn't know where they were going to,
they they brought seeds, packages of seeds
because they didn't know if they were going to get
the kind of food they were going to be eating.
As Japanese, they prepare their cabbage,
they prepare their lettuce,
they prepare their tomatoes in very simple ways.
They didn't know if they were gonna get American food,
which was in cans.
(somber, orchestral music)
That was a really, very small detail,
how they went to the bathroom.
You know, there's no private toilets,
they were just stalls for animals to go through.
There were no partitions, there were no doors
for women to go to the bathroom.
They were these kinds of details
that I asked my uncles, I asked so many people of,
you know, of certain ages who went to camp,
how did they live, how did they survive,
what are the details that they had.
(somber, orchestral music)
There's so many more stories
that their farms are taken away,
their houses were sold for $50.
All my family lost everything.
And the focus on proving themselves to be American
is that they stopped speaking Japanese
because they didn't wanna be seen as being the enemy.
(somber, orchestral music)
- There were 10 WRA camps were relocation authority camps,
spread out throughout the United States
from Colorado, Amache, Colorado, Heart Mountain, Wyoming,
Poston, Arizona, California, Manzanar,
Tule Lake, California,
which eventually became a segregation camp for dissidents.
Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where my father was put in a camp.
(somber, orchestral music)
- They were American citizens.
Over 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned
and 2/3rds of those people
were born here in the United States.
So they were stripped of their civil rights
and denied due process and basically
imprisoned in barbed wire camps.
(somber, orchestral music)
- There were Japanese American boys
whose families were interned,
they were going off to fight, right,
on behalf of the United States.
So this kind of desire to prove their loyalty
despite the fact that their entire family
was being, you know, was being imprisoned.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- After the war and the release
of the Japanese American internees,
coming back to their hometowns,
so my family came back to Los Angeles and they were housed
in temporary housing barrack at the airport,
but there were curfews in place
because there were still restrictions as to their movement
that they couldn't, I believe,
they were not allowed to assemble
in more than groups of five,
and I come from a family of eight.
It's like, if there was a group of five or more,
they were suspicious.
So there were a lot of restrictions
immediately after the war
that Japanese Americans couldn't get together
and to organize and to find a living.
- After the war, things started changing, you know.
I mean, because we wanted to be friends
with our former enemies, which was smart
because we learned a lesson from World War I
when the allies punished Germany after the war,
that was a terrible mistake.
(gentle, orchestral music)
So the Japanese became our friends
and that's one of the great ironies in a postwar world.
(gentle, orchestral music)
Also, they were demonizing the Russians
because the Cold War was getting underway
because as World War II was winding down,
they started focusing on Russia is gonna be our enemy.
(sirens wailing)
So there was a lot of paranoia.
The prevailing theory today
is we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan
because we were trying to intimidate Russia.
We really didn't have to drop the bombs,
Japan was basically defeated,
but the Russians were about to enter the war
and we wanted to scare them off.
(patriotic music)
We wanted to be friends with Germany and Japan
and of course, we ruled those two countries for years.
You know, we were the occupying forces
and so we rewrote their Constitutions
and we ran those countries
and changed their cultures and everything.
- [Announcer] But what about the troops
that are arriving on Okinawa today?
What will they find on this,
our most important military base in the Far East?
They will find a modern community, in many respects,
very similar to many communities in America.
They will find a place where they can make a home
for their family and live as Americans
are usually accustomed to.
In all this, the Okinawans have learned much of Western man.
They have learned new skills,
discovered a higher standard of living,
and enjoyed new forms of recreation.
But how has all this activity affected the Okinawans?
Under American guidance,
the island has turned into a prosperous, modern community.
- They started showing us the Japanese were like us,
they are our friends and they love baseball.
- [Announcer] But the soldier
didn't have to understand it all to appreciate it
and in his appreciation of the things Japan had to offer,
he earned the good will of the Japanese people,
as well as finding pleasure himself
in the enjoyment of new experiences.
- [Nancy] All of a sudden, you know, Japan is now an ally
and also I think there's more understanding.
Also, it's interesting 'cause I think that postwar,
when the soldiers come back, right,
so then they're starting to bring back knowledge
of their time in Asia or their time interacting with Asians,
that there's greater understanding
and especially when the geopolitical,
kind of movement changes and the tides shift,
when all of a sudden, this group that was our enemy
is now our ally.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- The American Army made a rather silly film
around that time, which is somewhat similar,
it's called "Japanese Bride in America."
And it's a propaganda film,
meant to show, you know, it's an acted film
with a good actress playing this Japanese bride
who comes home with a young American husband.
- [Woman] In 1945, after the war had ended,
I met an American soldier named Walter Hutch.
We fell in love.
- Everything is nice, everybody's nice.
The only thing that happens that's negative
is they're walking down the street
and some lady gives her a dirty look
and then the narrator says, "Oh well she was upset,
"but this woman's son had been killed in Iwo Jima,
"so my wife understood how she felt."
Okay, that's it, you know.
- [Man] We did get a look of real resentment from one woman.
She had lost a son at Iwo Jima.
Miwaka was disturbed,
but when I explained, she understood.
I knew she was still feeling a little strange
and I thought some new clothes might make her feel better.
So we went shopping.
- [Joseph] It was much worse in some cases,
for Japanese women trying to adapt.
They really tried to assimilate,
but they weren't always accepted.
- [Woman] Mrs Hutch had become a second mother to me.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- In Hollywood history, it's always about
fantasy.
It's about sexual fantasy, it's about love fantasies.
(playful music)
- How do you do and welcome.
My name is Miko Taka.
I have been asked to tell you about
a motion picture called "Sayonara."
"Sayonara" was photographed on actual location in Japan.
The word sayonara means goodbye
and yet, it means so much more,
as you'll discover when you see
this entirely different motion picture.
- That wonderful, romantic movie,
where an American soldier goes over
and falls in love with a Takarazuka dancer.
It was a romantic film.
You know, we have the true Romeo and Juliet
kind of tragic history.
The story that happens between the Red Buttons character
and the Miyoshi Umeki character.
But then you get the strong, handsome,
heroic American soldier, played by Marlon Brando,
basically falling in love and loving Japanese culture
through Japanese women.
- I have never been in love, but I have dreamed about it.
- And it's the fantasy of women
in the beautiful Geisha makeup
and Takarazuka is a very, very, high polished art form.
She is an entertainer, she is skilled in dance,
she is skilled in singing.
And my mother still loves the fact that
there was a Hollywood movie, starring Marlon Brando
and he falls in love with a Geisha
because it romanticizes Japan.
- Sayonara, goodbye.
I'm sure we'll meet again soon.
- They are not prostitutes, they are not prostitutes,
Geishas do not equal prostitutes,
but somehow, in 2018, it's still that kind of
belief still exists that Japanese women,
dressed in the beautiful Geisha,
with the white makeup and the painted red lips,
they're very small, but very petite,
with the kimono, with the fan, with everything,
that's a very, very, beautiful,
but it's a very specific type of Japanese cultured woman.
It seems to have impacted the impression
of what Japanese women are.
"The Barbarian and the Geisha,"
the horrible John Wayne movie where again,
the white man is going to rescue the Japanese woman
and take the beautiful Japanese flower of a woman,
you know, to be his loving wife,
to be his subservient wife.
- [Woman] America,
so far away.
- Not so far away that I'll forget you.
Every time I see a woman with ornaments in her hair,
I'll think of Okichi with the yellow combs.
- But of course, the romanization falls into cliche
and it falls into prejudice.
It falls into not the racial kind of prejudice,
where it's, you know, that Japanese women are,
it becomes, they're all delicate flowers
that we all know how to dance,
that we all serve tea, that we're all very gentile.
(gentle, orchestral music)
We need to tell a little bit more
truthful portrayals of Japanese,
but also, we just need to portray people
who are just regular people
who have nothing to do with their cultures.
Like, I'm as American as, you know, the girl nextdoor.
- There are some outrageous examples,
probably the most extreme is Micky Rooney
in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," where he plays
this very, very extreme, silly, Japanese caricature
and it's a good film and then he's,
otherwise, suddenly he appears, from time to time,
as Mr. Yunioshi and it's really embarrassing today.
(cheerful, orchestral music)
- Won't you join me?
- [Narrator] Yes, join Audrey Hepburn,
as you've never seen her before.
- "Breakfast at Tiffany's," I think that was
one of the most popular movies of its time.
Audrey Hepburn's so glamorous.
(Hepburn whistles)
Except that, it's got one of the worst caricatures
of Japanese Americans and Japanese people
in the history of yellow-face, right.
So we have Mickey Rooney, who is a white,
you know, very famous white musical,
you know, very huge star, playing a Japanese character
and he's got the buckteeth, the black, you know, glasses,
and he's wearing a kimono,
he's walking around really strange,
bumps into things 'cause, you know,
Asians are clumsy or something. (laughs)
So it's this, the kind of bumbling idiot, right,
and also speaks with a very heavy, exaggerated accent.
- But that was two weeks ago!
You cannot go on, or keep ringing my bell!
- It really makes me so angry,
it makes me so angry that the depiction of Mickey Rooney,
who has since apologized, as well as Blake Edwards
for that nasty impression of a Japanese man.
It just makes me so angry that that was deemed as funny,
that was deemed as hysterical, that was deemed as humorous,
and I saw it and I go, "What the fuck is this?"
It was, this is a Japanese man?
He has nothing to do with what my father is
or my grandfather is or so many Japanese
or Japanese American men I know.
It was such an embarrassment.
(alarm buzzing) (man grumbles)
The two examples of Marlon Brando in
"Teahouse of the August Moon" and playing Sakini
and Mickey Rooney, is that they're playing Japanese men,
pulling their eyes to squinty, wearing bad yellow makeup
and putting on a very, very, very bad accent.
- [Announcer] Marlon Brando,
who's talents have ranged from William Shakespeare
to Damon Runyon, is out of this world as Sakini.
- Sakini here, boss.
- Don't ever put your finger on an officer.
- It's a little confusing and disturbing,
but as long as we know that it's only a moment in time,
these Hollywood films take place,
it's a picture, it's a photograph, it's a Polaroid
of how we wanted to tell stories
in that particular time and place.
- [Man] Sakini!
- Yes boss?
- [Man] You are a civilian employee
in the pay of the United States Army
and you should dress accordingly.
- Yeah. - [Man] Pull your socks up.
- Oh, very sorry, boss, very sorry.
Socks up.
Anything more, boss?
- [Man] That'll be all.
Is that as fast as you can walk?
- No, no boss, but to walk any faster, socks fall down.
- And that's how I've always felt,
growing up and watching these old films is that
they didn't really understand who Japanese people were,
they didn't really understand who Chinese Americans were,
they just saw them as other.
(cheerful, piano music)
The Korean War started to open up the world
to more bigger audiences and that we want to see
more stories dealing with these beautiful places
because we've already championed them.
We won over, you know, the Japanese and World War II.
We won in the Korean War, we won in the Korean War,
and we're entering the Vietnam War.
It's that we're trying to see how we're becoming
a little bit more global, a little bit more educated.
(people shouting) (gentle, piano music)
- And also I think greater recognition with
getting closer to the civil rights era,
that there is just more,
also like, during the civil rights era,
there was also a third world movement
so as you're moving closer to the Vietnam War,
the young people are starting to
have a greater understanding of geopolitics
and starting to rebel against, kind of,
older sentiments of seeing
these parts of the world as enemy, right,
or this group of people,
like people of color as enemy and women's rights,
and I think that there's just the beginning of,
kind of an awakening of, "Oh, we have issues."
(people shouting) (gentle, orchestral music)
So a lot of these race movies came out.
So even kind of "Crimson Kimono."
- [Announcer] The sensational murder of Sugar Torch,
burlesque queen, triggers a manhunt in the teeming streets
of Little Tokyo and Los Angeles
and fires a turbulent love story
between and American girl and a Japanese boy.
- You mean you wanna marry her?
- You wouldn't have said it that way if I were white!
- One of the most interesting films
is Samuel Fuller as "The Crimson Kimono."
It came out in 1958,
it was about two policemen in Los Angeles,
investigating a crime in Little Tokyo,
which is a part of Downtown L.A.,
where a lot of Japanese people had lived and had businesses
and one of these detectives is Japanese American,
one is white, Anglo guy, and the white woman in the film
winds up with the Japanese American guy.
She prefers him to the white guy,
and they kiss and that was a big deal then.
Nobody else was doing that kind of thing.
- It can never work out, Chris.
If he feels like that, what can I expect from you?
- Everything.
'Cause I love you.
(gentle, orchestral music)
- [Joseph] Fuller was a tough-minded guy
who understood social issues
and he was not afraid of controversies
and he loved plunging into controversies.
Very liberal guy, very democratic.
- But it was a very personal movie to Samuel Fuller.
He wanted to show a romance between a Japanese American male
and a white American female,
which really hadn't been done before.
(gentle, orchestral music)
And he tried to sell the idea to Sam Briskin,
who was the producer there
and Sam, as to be expected in 1959,
he wasn't exactly thrilled by the idea.
He was saying, well, you know,
you're gonna have to make the white cop,
who's the third part of the triangle, a bad guy,
but Samuel Fuller resisted.
He wanted them both to be good cops.
- Back in the 50's, this was a dicey thing.
- Living with you here like this
brings dishonor on them and they hate any of us
who give that impression to foreigners.
- [Joseph] Sam led the way with "House of Bamboo,"
deals with complex relationships
between Americans and Japanese after the war.
(hand claps face) (woman gasps)
- You don't tell 'em the truth,
they're gonna get rid of me, you understand?
Now what's my name?
- [Joseph] Then he realizes there are issues that come up
and conflicts and sexual conflicts
and personal conflicts and so he deals with them honestly.
- I don't want anything to happen to you.
- But they're refreshing today
because they seem much more modern, like we think today,
like, oh, okay, these are human conflicts
and there's no bias that Sam had
against any ethnic group or anything.
And that's so refreshing 'cause, I mean,
Hollywood has just a terrible history
of mistreating ethnic groups of all kinds.
(somber, piano music)
- [Tamlyn] 1988 and 1989, I had the great opportunity
to film the piece, "Come See the Paradise,"
written and directed by the British director, Allen Parker.
- No no no no! (slams table)
- Talk to me, mama.
- It was a depiction of a true story,
but based with fictional characters
that Allen Parker was inspired to write about,
dealing with the Japanese American internment camps.
- My wife is an American citizen, sir.
- You think the camps are wrong?
- [Jack] Yes sir, I do.
- Camp, you call this a camp?
This is a damned outdoor jail!
- [Tamlyn] It was written and made and directed
by a British director, Allen Parker,
who was successful in getting 20th Century Fox
to finance the film about a Japanese American family
and the girl of that family falling in love
with a Caucasian, union laborer, played by Dennis Quaid
and he saw that as an opportunity
to tell a horrific chapter of American history
and being a non-American, I think he had a very,
a more objective point of view,
looking at America as a nation of many cultures,
but that the government can do that
to a certain group of people.
- This is America pal, so remember, you're an American.
We're at war now.
- What are you talking about?
- Ain't you heard?
The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor.
- "Come See the Paradise" is the only film
on the Japanese American concentration camps,
but again, we also have to remember
that it was made in 1990
and so we are here in 2018 and we can do better
and hopefully it will provoke,
it will inspire, it will impact other filmmakers
to make, not only films on Japanese American internment,
but other historical events
that really have shaped our country's notion
and impression of ourselves,
as well as around the world, so.
- Jack, you gotta listen, she's Japanese, Jack.
We'll find you a nice American girl.
- What I can never be, not ever, is Japanese.
I couldn't love Lily more.
- And partly, the problem is
there is just not enough representation
Even during the Cold War era,
we could still list like three or four, you know,
movies at most, right, and so when people are
basing those images, you know,
their ideas of Japanese Americans or Asian Americans
just on like four or five films,
it's problematic, right, because those images
can't stand in for the diversity of experiences.
I mean, if you think about Asia,
it is a huge, huge region with so many different cultures,
different languages, I mean in Asia,
people don't think of themselves as Asian,
they think of themselves as Japanese, Chinese,
Vietnamese, Filipino.
- A lot of people see, especially in middle America,
especially in pockets of the world
where they don't get a chance to meet persons
of a particular culture.
Film is that important,
it's perhaps their only education sometimes
in introducing themselves to the world.
(gentle, piano music)
On August 15th, 2018, "Crazy Rich Asians"
is coming to the screen
and that's going to be the first time in a long time
where we get to see an Asian fellow
fall in love with an Asian girl
and that's kind of novel, especially for a Hollywood film.
So as persons of Asian descent, not only here in America,
but we're looking forward to the success of that film
because it's a little bit more real.
(gentle, piano music)
- The Kevin Kwan, who is an Asian American author,
who wrote this, you know, New York Times best seller book,
when they decided to make a film adaptation,
people asked him if they could make the lead,
who is a Chinese American woman,
who goes to Asia, right, 'cause she's like,
"Oh my gosh, these crazy, rich Asians,
"I'm just Asian American, what is this about?"
They wanted to make her white, right,
they asked if they could make her white.
And he's like, "You've missed the entire point of my novel."
And he, as an Asian American writer can say like, "No,
"I don't want that to be the adaptation of my story."
(gentle, orchestral music)
I mean, growing up as a young person,
and so it's happening now that I'm older,
but I'm so glad that young Asian American women
are gonna be able to, at least,
see one representation of themselves.
(gentle, orchestral music)
Asian stereotypes are probably one of the long lasting ones
from the beginning to now where
it's only until recent, I think,
that people are really seeing an uproar
and I think that's because Asian Americans
are really taking to social media,
they're starting to organize more
and they are making a fuss and we have allies, right,
from other groups of color who say,
"We don't wanna see, you know, white-washed characters.
"We actually wanna see Asian actors playing,
"we want to see a Japanese actress play the major
"in "Ghost in the Shell,"
we don't wanna see Scarlet Johanson, right.
(gentle, orchestral music)
If you put all people of color together,
they are actually an incredible, powerful audience
that will make or break a show
and also the idea that white audiences won't watch shows
with people of color, for example, "Black Panther."
I mean, that has done well internationally, right?
So that's just not true, that's a lie
that Hollywood still perpetuates,
based on what it's believed in the past.
(gentle, orchestral music)
We are the leads of our own rom coms,
right, (laughs) in our own lives,
but never seeing that on screen is really problematic
and you just feel completely alienated, literally, right?
We're seen as others and we feel ourselves
that we don't belong in the kind of fabric
of the American narrative, so.
(gentle, orchestral music)