Baskett Michael. The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (ENG)

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142 the attractive empire

The choice to cast Japanese for all the Indonesian roles also assumes an at-

titude that negates the importance of racial difference. Casting decisions are

made at the production level, but the results are complex and often ideological.

Casting a Japanese actress in a romantic leading role allows Japanese spectators

to suspend reality just enough to identify with the characters, without actually

alienating them. However, maintaining her racial difference frees the narrative

from having to adhere to Japanese sexual norms of behavior and titillates the

viewers. For example, when Sariya confronts Fukami and gives herself to him in

the jungle, the camera stays on her naked back for several long extended takes

as she slowly lets down her hair. The director avoided the conventional choice

of shooting Sariya’s and Fukami’s love scenes in medium shots opting instead to

use bust shots of Sariya or close-ups that emphasized various parts of her body.

Even more pronounced are the scenes in which the Japanese sergeant (played by

Japanese ﬁ lm icon Fujita Susumu) lustfully looks at Sariya’s behind and bends

down to rub it. Before he touches her, we are shown a close-up of her back and

buttocks in a tight-ﬁ tting sarong as she squats on a rock washing clothes in the

river. The viewer is made to gaze at the unwitting Sariya’s body along with the

sergeant, literally taking his point of view. The scene resonates with the many

real-life accounts of Japanese soldiers raping local women.

Much like its prewar

counterparts, Bengawan River has little to do with either goodwill or romance.

Singing the Same Songs

Although virtually ignored by contemporary scholarship, Woman of Shanghai is

a remarkable postwar interpretation of Japan’s imperialist past. Produced in 1952,

one year after Bengawan River, Woman of Shanghai concerns issues of war guilt,

identity, and Japanese victimization. Director Inagaki Hiroshi recalled that the

idea for the ﬁ lm came in 1944, when he was in Shanghai shooting a Japanese/

Chinese coproduction called Remorse in Shanghai (Noroshi wa Shanhai ni agaru,

1944). Inagaki was looking for a project for Ri Koran (Yamaguchi) partially due to

his attraction to her “big, beautiful eyes” and also because “she spoke Japanese

clearly and quickly with a Mandarin accent—just perfect for a Japanese/Chinese

coproduction.”

In preliminary negotiations Yamaguchi demonstrated a willing-

ness to participate in the picture that left a lingering impression on Inagaki:

I was very impressed when she said: “If I can be of any help, I’ll gladly do any-

thing. Nothing would please me more than to serve as a bridge for China.”

You couldn’t ﬁ nd any Japanese actresses in those days that were that well

spoken.

Ultimately Inagaki was unable to cast Ri in the ﬁ lm due to her status as a “Man-

churian” actress, while his ﬁ lm was intended to be a Japanese/Chinese co-

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the emperor’s celluloid army marches on 143

production. After the war, Inagaki made a Japanese period ﬁ lm with Yamaguchi,

but his desire to produce the Chinese-themed ﬁ lm together only intensiﬁ ed. He

explained: “I wanted her to sing all her [famous] songs in that beautiful Man-

darin of hers.”

What resulted was a ﬁ ctionalized ﬁ lm biography of Yamaguchi

that is just one of her many attempts to justify her role as an imperial icon as

victimhood. Yamaguchi successfully reinvented her iconic status for a new gen-

eration of ﬁ lmgoers, this time not as a model of smiling assimilation but rather

as a misunderstood, long-suffering heroine. The mix of remorse for war (defeat)

and nostalgia for empire tapped into the prevailing mood in Japanese postwar

cinema.

In Woman of Shanghai, Yamaguchi plays Li Lili, a Japanese raised by Chinese

foster parents in China who becomes a singer in a popular Shanghai nightclub. Li

falls in love with Lieutenant Manabe, a bilingual Japanese spy who was also raised

in China. The plot involves spies from Chongqing, Nanjing, and Japan all mixed

together in the cosmopolitan milieu of Shanghai, but the focus of the narrative

is the couple’s love affair. Li and Manabe’s love is thwarted by Ting, a Chinese

underground subversive in league with the Japanese and also in love with Li.

Manabe and Ting are assigned by the Japanese government to inﬁ ltrate the

Chinese spy ring where Li’s adopted father works. Manabe’s struggle between

duty and love are mirrored by Li’s split loyalties for China and Japan. Li is under

constant surveillance by both sides, not due to any actions on her part, but be-

cause of her father’s activities. Obvious parallels with Yamaguchi’s own life can

be found in Li’s character, who, when asked which country she feels most loyalty

for pleadingly responds: “Which do you love more, your natural or your adopted

parents? I love Japan just the same as I love China. I love my Chinese friends. It’s

not just something that one can logically explain. . . . Oh, how I hate this war!”

The personiﬁ cation of war as the ultimate source of her suffering is not unique

to this ﬁ lm, but is, rather, a recurring motif in postwar war ﬁ lms. Li’s usefulness

as both a source of information and a propaganda tool is a device by which the

Japanese military characters monitor and gain information about subversive Chi-

nese activities. As they say:

Her father is Li Kokumei, one of the top men in the Nanking [sic] govern-

ment . . . his daughter, if you can call her that, is actually Japanese. I guess

that’s a sign of the age we live in. There’s a story behind it, but the short of

it is that no one suspects her identity. I guess it’s because she’s such a good

singer . . . anyhow, she’s Japanese by blood but raised and educated in Shang-

hai and Peking. If we could get her, she’d be a most convenient woman. But

never let your guard down . . . she’s a beauty.

Emphasizing Li’s exotic beauty and musical ability is a direct link to her prewar

persona, but the idea that her songs are covertly anti-Japanese at ﬁ rst appears to

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144 the attractive empire

be a new wrinkle. With only one exception, every one of the unusually large

number of songs in this ﬁ lm were popularized during Yamaguchi’s days as Ri

Koran, prompting one Toho executive to wryly remark: “What is this, a Ri Koran

concert?”

The potential for resistance to Japanese rule in her songs is empha-

sized in a tearoom sequence. When the Chinese owner plays a record of one of

Li’s popular songs, the Japanese police burst into the store, beat up the owner, and

arrest him, saying: “You were warned never to play that song.” Li is inconsolable.

Speaking out in a way the actress Yamaguchi never could, Li berates the Japanese

military for misunderstanding her motives and mistreating China:

I can’t believe they think that’s an anti-Japanese song, it’s not! Everything

sounds that way to them. Even if it were, what do they think they’ll do—stop

everyone from singing? . . . it makes me miserable that Japanese all turn

their backs on Chinese like that. I wonder how many Japanese there are in

the world who really understand the Chinese.

Li’s and Manabe’s suffering is complex, the result of her liminal position as a

literal orphan of empire. While not everyone in the audience was born or raised

abroad, dislocation and loss were certainly recognizable to many in the audience

who had lost either family or friends in some former imperial territory. What

the ﬁ lm’s characters ultimately reafﬁ rm, however, is a national Japanese identity

informed by its imperial past. Thus, when Li conﬁ des in her stepfather that she

has fallen in love with a Japanese spy, he tells her to handle the situation as a

Japanese: “When you see him say, ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s the Japanese way. And when

you part, do it with a smile—the Japanese way.”

Li becomes involved in a shootout at an orphanage among the Japanese, pro-

Japanese Chinese, and anti-Japanese factions and is eventually arrested for trea-

son (just as Yamaguchi herself was). Unable to stay her execution, Manabe visits

her cell to profess his love for her one last time. In dialogue that eerily mirrors

Keiran’s transformation into a “good” imperial Japanese subject in China Nights,

Li explains to Manabe: “I’m not sad at all, I’m happy. You taught me about the

homeland that I never knew. I have no regrets. Now I can die in China as a Chi-

nese, embracing my homeland of Japan.” At the execution ground, Manabe asks

for permission to execute Li as he cannot bear the thought of anyone else killing

her. Ultimately, he is unable to kill her, and both are shot holding hands—almost

an exact replication of the ending of Desertion at Dawn. Yamaguchi’s links with

Japan’s imperial past are not only a direct connection to Japanese war guilt but

also relate to the cinematic reclamation of the Japanese empire as a reafﬁ rmation

of a national Japanese identity.

The continuity in representations of Japan’s empire in Asia did not end with

what Japan scholars have termed the “collapse of empire.”

The tremendous

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social and political changes resulting from the Potsdam Declaration and Japan’s

unconditional surrender, as epoch-making as they were, did not spell the end of

the Japanese empire onscreen as I have shown.

The Emperor’s Army Keeps Laughing

One year before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Shochiku released a war-themed com-

edy entitled Dear Mr. Emperor (Haikei tenno heika-sama).

Directed by veteran

Nomura Yoshitaro

and based on Muneta Hiroshi’s

popular novel of the same

name, the ﬁ lm became an instant box-ofﬁ ce smash that inspired two successful

sequels, Dear Mr. Emperor II (Zoku haikei tenno heika-sama, 1964) and Dear Mr.

Prime Minister (Haikei soridaijin-sama, 1964). Film critics hailed the series call-

ing it “the most overlooked postwar antiwar war ﬁ lms,” and certainly the ﬁ rst two

installments of the Dear Mr. Emperor (hereafter Emperor) series broke ground by

addressing topics that had been either completely ignored or glossed over until

that time.

Unlike the melodramas discussed above, the Emperor series offers

a fascinating and often humorous illustration of grassroots support for Japanese

expansionism into China as well as representations of Chinese nationals living

in Japan during and after the empire.

One of the most striking aspects of the Emperor series is its positive portrayal

of army life as a viable alternative for lower-class Japanese peasants in the 1930s.

In an early sequence in Emperor II, a third-person narrator informs viewers just

how desperate conditions were for Zensuke, (played by Atsumi Kiyoshi)—the fact

that he even survived puberty is suggested as a minor miracle:

In those days of terrible depression, our little troublemaker Zensuke was

often made to go without supper as a punishment. That year when his family

unknowingly ate a rotten ﬁ sh that they had found somewhere, everyone died

except Zensuke, who was being punished.

The series created its main comic effect by deviating from typical “service comedy”

narrative conventions that invariably portrayed the army as a hell on earth. The

protagonist (Yamada Shosuke, or “Yamasho” in the ﬁ rst ﬁ lm and in the second

ﬁ lm, Yamaguchi Zensuke, a night-soil man whom the village children nickname

“Shitty Zen”) is a dimwitted, illiterate, and sometimes violent country farmer who

wholeheartedly welcomes the prospect of army life. As the voiceover narration

explains:

Most people hated the army, but for [Zen] it was heaven. On the outside

everyday he was threatened with poverty, destitution, and near starvation.

Here, he had no worries about where the next meal would come from; he

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even got paid every ten days and never had look for a place to stay. Yes, it was

heaven! But after two years passed, and his time was up, he was out of the

army and back to collecting shit.

Compared with the severity of his prewar life, the hard training and regular beat-

ings in the army does not faze Shitty Zen. The possibility of dying on the Chi-

nese continent never seems to concern Zen, but the prospect of peace absolutely

petriﬁ es him. In a clever montage depicting his literally having to be forced out

of the army at the end of his term, the voiceover narration ironically explains

that “the worst thing that ever happened to him was peacetime.” So in order to

try and save his beloved job, he attempts to write a letter to the Showa Emperor

(hence the title), asking him not to end the war. Ironically, the rapid succession of

military “incidents” on the Chinese continent renders his fear of an early peace

moot. The real challenges come after defeat and repatriation back to Japan. Zen

is unable to adjust to the changes of postwar Japan and just before he is to be

married, he is struck down and killed by an American truck hauling supplies for

the Korean War.

Even given its decidedly ironic tone, Emperor illustrates that in poverty-stricken

1930s Japan, the army might not have seemed as some might imagine. Emperor

recognizes, albeit comically, that not everyone had to be tricked or coerced into

the army—there had, in fact, been a base of popular support for the war. Zen is

obviously quirky, and his options are limited, but we also suspect that there were

many others like him. Even viewers who had served in the war could experi-

ence a sort of nostalgia for their experiences through ﬁ lm series like Emperor.

The army did not necessarily only represent the hellish dead end for everyone

below the rank of ofﬁ cer, so memorably portrayed in darker series such as Yakuza

Soldier (Heitai yakuza) and Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai).

Emperor

suggests that for uneducated peasants, the army also provided a place to learn

skills and interact with other socioeconomic classes in ways inconceivable “on

the outside.”

In the ﬁ rst installment of the Emperor series, the army transforms into a substi-

tute family for Yamasho (called Zen in the later installment). He becomes friends

with people from all walks of life. Though most would have had nothing to do

with Yamasho in civilian life, in the army they treat him as a comparative equal.

The paternal side of army life is epitomized by the kind, fatherly company com-

mander, who makes it a point to see that Yamasho receives more than food, cloth-

ing, and shelter, but that he also gains an education. Army hierarchy is reversed

when the illiterate Yamasho is taught to read and write by a ﬁ rst-year soldier. He

begins reading primary school texts and gradually advances to popular serialized

war stories, such as 300 Miles Behind Enemy Lines (Tekichu odan sanbyakuri)

and comic strips such as Blackie the Stray Pup (Norakuro).

Both Yamasho and

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Tagawa Suiho’s phenomenally popular cartoon character Blackie are uneducated,

lovable orphans who may screw up, but who also share a dog-like loyalty to the

army and the emperor.

Screenwriter Yamada Yoji clearly emphasized these par-

allels, lest the audience fail to make the connection, in explicit dialogue when

Yamasho remarks: “That poor Blackie, he’s a lot like me.”

The link between this Sad-Sack-like character and dogs was illustrated even

more clearly in the second installment of the series, where the protagonist, Zen,

is assigned to be a trainer in a military dog unit. About the dog that he feeds

and trains in preparation to ﬁ ght on the Chinese continent, Zen states that they

are brothers. As with Blackie the Stray Pup, or even characters like Chaplin’s

tramp, viewers are asked to identify with this lovable misﬁ t precisely because of

his deﬁ ciencies—his low-class background, poor education, and short temper—

all aspects that would have been seriously detrimental to “normal” socialization

in 1960s middle-class Japanese society.

Zen’s love of the army appears ironic, especially when juxtaposed with the

other soldiers’ distaste for it. We learn that the army calls soldiers like him—who

stay in the army for six years, yet remain buck privates—mosakure, which means

a type who never learns. But the Emperor series producers did this on purpose.

They realized the power of Zen’s underdog status and kept him a buck private

(nitohei) throughout the series. Zen moved viewers not only because he was an

underdog but because he did not seem to mind being one. With no chance of

promotion in the army and a prison record on the outside, civilian society holds

little appeal for Zen. Viewers feel a sense of pathos about his character precisely

because he does not (or cannot) exercise control over his circumstances. Forsak-

ing the possibility of wreaking righteous vengeance on his oppressors, this char-

acter does nothing on his own and gets by solely on the good graces of the kindly

Japanese around him.

In this sense Zen is much less a ﬁ gure to be lamented than one that reminds

or instructs modern audiences of what seems to have been lost from the Japanese

spirit by the 1960s. His unquestioning loyalty, perseverance, and honesty regard-

ing the army and the emperor are never seriously mocked or critiqued so much

as gently chided. While the presence of the emperor is central in both ﬁ lms, he is

directly represented in only the ﬁ rst installment. The protagonist (here, Yamasho)

is on maneuvers with his battalion in Okayama one day in 1932 when the Showa

Emperor arrives to inspect the troops. The narrator explains (after the fact) that

“of course none of us had actually ever seen the emperor before that day, but

Yamasho hadn’t even seen his photo!” This statement reafﬁ rms the protagonist’s

lack of formal education by calling attention to the fact that he is unfamiliar

with photos of the emperor that were found in classrooms in any national school

(kokumin gakko). The emperor appears suddenly, announced by the company

commander just before we see him. In fact, we never actually see him, but only

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148 the attractive empire

his icons—ﬂ ags with the imperial chrysanthemum crest, his white horse, and

his boots in stirrups. In a traveling shot that passes Yamasho, presumably from

the point of view of the emperor, we hear Yamasho’s interior monologue in a

voiceover:

So that’s the emperor? Hmm . . . who does he remind me of . . . no, not him

. . . he doesn’t look like a god . . . but he sure looks like someone else. What

a kind face . . . he isn’t a bit scary! From that day on Yamasho felt a distinct

afﬁ nity for the emperor.

The soldiers are ordered not to look at the emperor, as it is a punishable offense

(fukeizai). The “problem” of looking at the emperor seems to have extended to the

actual ﬁ lming of this scene. Japanese ﬁ lm critic Iwasaki Akira explained that not

only was care taken in whom to cast in the role of the emperor, but also that direc-

tor Nomura avoided directly showing the actor playing the emperor throughout

the entire sequence. Even Iwasaki, a former diehard leftist critic/screenwriter who

was once arrested during the war for opposing the 1939 Film Law, approved of the

ﬁ lm’s “sufﬁ ciently obtuse” representation of the emperor.

A certain humanizing

of the emperor is achieved in this ﬁ lm, however. The music selected for each key

scene dealing with the emperor is very light, music-box music, which undercuts

the heavy atmosphere of the imperial entourage. And although ordered not to, all

the soldiers, not just Yamasho/Zen, look at the emperor—his is the object of their

individual gazes at the same time that he collectively inspects them.

Elsewhere in the ﬁ lm, the emperor is conspicuous by his absence. For in-

stance, when Yamasho decides to write a letter to the emperor, he never suspects

that it is a crime to do so. The logic of the situation is so far removed from what he

can understand that it must be literally knocked into him by his friend. Yamasho

asks: “Hey, you think if I address this “Emperor, Tokyo” it will make it there?”

To which his friend replies incredulously: “What’re ya, nuts?” The structuring

absence of the emperor in the ﬁ lm’s narrative becomes even more obvious in the

second installment of the series. Here the emperor is set to make two appear-

ances, but viewers never see him in anything other than newsreel footage. The

ﬁ rst time occurs when the protagonist (Zensuke) is a child; the entire community

shows up and waits for three hours, but the emperor never comes.

The second

time, after the war, Zensuke is surrounded by a crowd and cannot see over the

(American) heads. By not directly revealing the emperor, Iwasaki mused that

viewers could keep whatever image they personally had of him in their hearts—

ostensibly adding more personal depth to the criticism. Iwasaki explained that

“for prewar folk that would have created extremely profound or at the very least

complex emotions. A disagreeable feeling [followed by] a vaguely bittersweet fa-

miliar feeling that stirred up nostalgia. Together they . . . leave one in a terribly

contradictory state of mind.”

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Iwasaki went on to praise director Nomura’s handling of what it meant to be

a Japanese man in the closed space of the army by explaining that this ﬁ lm suc-

ceeded in surpassing the author’s original work. In Muneta Hiroshi’s original

novel, the protagonist continues to nurture his worship of the emperor until his

death in the postwar period. His faith shows none of the criticism or cynicism

about the war found in other postwar novels such as Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of

Emptiness (Shinku chitai, 1952). Iwasaki and others have criticized Muneta for

writing elsewhere about how model Japanese soldiers dealt with the harshness of

war.

Iwasaki was impressed by the subtle way in which the ﬁ lm questioned the

emperor’s war responsibility. For Iwasaki, what makes the ﬁ lm so excellent, pro-

found, and powerful is that, without screaming or confessing, it takes the image

of the emperor and asks the Japanese to look at their modern history.

Iwasaki seems to be suggesting that history is far more knowable and accessible

than the ambiguous representations in novels and ﬁ lms that constantly recon-

struct and reimagine the past. At its foundation, Muneta’s novel and Nomura’s

ﬁ lm are less a criticism of wartime Japan or even emperor worship than they are

of the lingering effects of the Allied Occupation and the war in Korea. Zen’s

love, respect, and devotion for the emperor are not what kill him—he survives

the war in China only to return to Japan and become a victim of Japan’s former

enemies.

The Emperor series recognizes the multiethnic fabric of the Japanese empire

in which the war took place. We see that all Japanese, not just the upper class or

even the highly educated, mixed with non-Japanese because they had to. Just as

Korea remained central to the Japanese after the war, and just before Vietnam be-

came a similar reality, the Emperor series seems to be stating that Asia—and par-

ticularly China—has always been an important space for Japan and that Asians

have always been in Japan.

In Emperor II, the Chinese continent provides Zen the opportunity to stay

in (or return to) his beloved army. For the Chinese characters in the ﬁ lm, the

issue of war in China is more problematic. The effect of the wars is something

like a protracted loyalty test in which they have to prove their solidarity with,

and longing for, the Japanese empire. In the following sequence, night-soil man

Zen, dubbed Shitty Zen by the town children, has just gotten the “good news”

about the 1937 China Incident and rushes to the local Chinese barbershop for a

military hair cut.

Zen: My gawd, you two, this place is ﬁ lthy. (to Wang) Trim it all around n’

make it tidy.

Wang: What’s the occasion?

Zen: No occasion, ’cept I got my draft notice.

Fan: Zen-san . . . you’re going to war?

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150 the attractive empire

Zen: You bet! It took them forever but now everything’s gonna be okay.

Startin’ tomorrow my new boss is the emperor so there won’t be no more

trouble ﬁ ndin’ somethin’ to eat.

Wang: That’s why you want your hair cut?

Zen: Uh-huh.

Wang: Do you mind someone like me cutting your hair? I’m Chinese. I mean

I’ve always treated all Japanese as friends. But Japan’s at war with China

and no one comes in my store anymore.

Fan: And everyone calls us, “Chink, Chink.”

Wang: She’s right. Sure you want a Chink like me to cut the hair of a man

going to war?

Zen: Uh, yeah . . . I guess so.

Wang: Zen-san! (grabbing Zensuke) Oh, Shitty Zen-san—Zen-san!! Shitty,

shitty!!

Zen: Say, would ya knock off that shitty stuff? You gotta shit too, doncha?

Wang: Okay. Xie-xie, arigato. Your heart . . . my heart . . . same. You know?

You’re the only Japanese who understands my heart. Makes me happy. (to

wife) Bring a hot towel!

Zen: Uh, how about just makin’ it cheaper instead? I’m a little short.

Wang: What? I don’t want money! We’re peng-you. See? In Chinese, that

means “friend.”

Zen: (gets hot towel thrown on his face) Ow! Damn, pun-yo! That’s hot!

In this sequence Zen’s obliviousness to his surrounding conditions is misunder-

stood as a political act on behalf of Wang (played by Japanese comedian Ozawa

Shoichi)

and Fan. This scene marks the beginning of a friendship between the

two male characters that lasts from 1931 to 1950. Initially, the scene seems to be

reviving stereotypical prewar Japanese notions of the Chinese as unclean, by hav-

ing Zen comment on the obvious dirt, but then it changes direction to associate

Zen with ﬁ lthiness. Viewer expectations are subtly manipulated when we learn

why Zen has come—the pause creates tension between the Japanese Zen and the

Chinese Wang, and we anticipate that Wang may refuse to cut the hair of a man

going to war to kill other Chinese. This fear dissipates, however, when Wang and

his wife shed tears of joy to think that any Japanese would come to patronize their

shop during the war. If Zen’s obliviousness makes him comical, then Wang’s and

Fan’s thankfulness seems downright farcical. Wang’s characterization appears

to rise above simple cheap stereotypes when the question of money is raised—

despite their obviously desperate ﬁ nancial situation, Wang refuses payment on

the basis of friendship.

Much of the credit for this attempt at an evenhanded representation should

go to the ﬁ lm’s assistant director and coscreenwriter Yamada Yoji. Yamada was

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no stranger to the Japanese empire. He had ﬁ rsthand experience that came from

living in the Japanese-occupied Manchuria as a child when his father worked for

Mantetsu, the Japanese-run Southern Manchuria Railway. In a 1977 interview

Yamada recalled how some of his stereotypical expectations of the Chinese had

been subverted immediately after Japanese defeat in Manchuria. “Then along

came the Eighth Army [with] red-capped pistols, and I remember thinking to

myself what a disheveled bunch of soldiers they looked like. But actually they

were quite an army and real gentlemen. I was [in] junior high school then and

had always been taught that the Eighth Army was simply a bunch of bandits . . .

that they were to be feared. But they turned out to be such a gentlemanly army.

The [repatriation] ships didn’t make it to Dalian right away so we were there for

about two and one-half years. Those Japanese who didn’t repatriate soon often

couldn’t ﬁ nd enough to eat. Towards the end, we nearly starved to death. Some

of our neighbors did; it was horrible.”

The struggle to survive in a foreign environment was something that Yamada

could understand, and for the most part he treats liminal characters living under

wartime conditions in Japan sensitively. But the treatment of such characters—

especially Wang and Fan—in Occupied Japan is somewhat less sensitive. Em-

peror’s vision of everyday life in postwar Japan under U.S. Occupation is pre-

sented as being more hellish than life in the army ever was. In the post-surrender

society, prewar order, logic, and nearly everything else is represented as having

been turned upside down, inside out. Likewise, the fortunes of the Japanese and

non-Japanese have been turned almost entirely around.

Zen, an out-of-work repatriate, eventually runs across Wang, who is now sepa-

rated from Fan and runs a restaurant with his new Japanese wife in Tokyo. Fan

runs a black-market operation selling contraband American PX goods to Wang

and others. For the remainder of the ﬁ lm, the gap visibly widens between the

“haves,” represented almost entirely by “third-class foreigners” (daisan kokujin),

and the “have-nots,” represented by Zen and other Japanese repatriates. The

“third-class foreigners” in the ﬁ lm appear to be less the victims of the Greater

East Asian War and its aftermath but rather postwar parasites responsible for

rampant war proﬁ teering. In stark contrast to the poor but humble Japanese who

are barely able to eke out a living, the Chinese in the ﬁ lm are made out to be op-

portunists. Familiar stereotypes of “miserly Chinese” who do anything for money

are an integral part of the representation of Wang and Fan in the postwar period.

As Wang’s restaurant prospers, he expands into the pachinko business.

Fan re-

veals that she has left Wang because of his inﬁ delity with a Japanese woman, but

she still sells goods (Lucky Strikes, beer) to his store because, after all, “business

is business.”

On the other hand, viewers are reminded that certain behavior, acceptable

for Japanese during the war, is no longer appropriate in the postwar period. For

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