Daisuke Miyao, Duke University Press 2007

ISBN 978-0-8223-3958-8 (cloth); 978-0-8223-3958-8 (paper)

282 pp, with extensive notes, bibliography and filmography

Reviewed by Freda Freiberg

Sessue Hayakawa was the first Asian-American star of Hollywood cinema. He may not have been as popular as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, but he was celebrated as a supremely subtle and accomplished actor who was type-cast as a charming villain, as the most civilized of primitive people, and as a cultured and principled Japanese man who was prepared to sacrifice himself for the benefit of white America. Daisuke Miyao, a graduate of Tokyo University who gained his doctorate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, has undertaken the first major study of Hayakawa’s career in silent cinema.

The study is notable for extensive and intensive research - filmic, bibliographic and historical research. Miyao has not only unearthed and analysed all of the extant Hayakawa films and their scripts, documented lost films and unrealized projects and cited numerous articles on Hayakawa and his films in contemporary American, European and Japanese newspapers, journals and film magazines; he has also situated Hayakawa’s career in the shifting sands of Japanese-American relations. As a result, he is able to demonstrate that the ambivalence towards Japan evident in these films can be explained by an infatuation with Japanese art in late 19^th and early 20^th century middle-class America and a simultaneous fear of the Yellow Peril, engendered by the growing threat of Japanese imperialism to American interests and the influx of Japanese immigrants into California. He shows how, at the end of WW1, when Japan was an ally of the US in the war against the German Kaiser, the films embrace a more positive image of Japan and the Japanese, but that soon after the end of the war, as Japanese power in the Pacific expands and as white racist Americans become more vocal and ultimately successful in their campaign to stop Japanese immigration and prevent existing Japanese immigrants from becoming American citizens, Japanese actors and Japanese settings become unpopular  with American audiences and Hollywood film producers, forcing Hayakawa to retire.

Until the situation became critical, Hayakawa was able to negotiate the minefield of his situation as a Japanese in American society by occupying a middle position between Japanese and American, East and West, civilization and barbarism, refinement and brutality. However, American audiences preferred him in charming villain roles, as the “heavy”. Miyao shows us that Japanese audiences and critics (in the immigrant community in California and in Japan) were also ambivalent towards Hayakawa. On one hand they were proud of him as a fellow Japanese who had become a successful Hollywood star and admired his skills as a film performer. On the other hand, they resented the contribution of his films to negative images of Japan and the Japanese, to the dissemination and perpetuation of oppressive stereotypes. In his attempts to work in the Japanese film industry before and after the war, he encountered problems – because of his image and behaviour as an American star. He himself noted late in life that he was treated as a Japanese in America and an American in Japan.

In his final chapter Miyao gives a brief survey account of Hayakawa’s career after he left Hollywood in 1922, of his work on stage and screen in England, France (where he spent WW2), and Japan, as well as his later American roles. In this chapter he gives most detailed attention to his role as the Japanese commandant in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, the role for which he received an Oscar nomination. Miyao is able to demonstrate marked similarities between his role in Kwai and the role that originally made him a star – as Tori in The Cheat (Cecil B De Mille 1915) for the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company.

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on Orientalism, romance and the “Yellow Peril” in Hollywood cinema, which has hitherto given scant attention to Hayakawa and his significant role in the silent cinema. The author’s bilingualism,  assiduous research and wide-ranging scholarship have enabled a refreshingly comprehensive account and informed analysis of the reception of the star and his films in both Japan and in America.