Chinese Government Ban on MEMOIRS

So the Chinese government decides to ban MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA from being shown there, afraid it will inflame anti-Japanese sentiment.

Officials at Sony Pictures Entertainment said they were notified of the cancellation early this week. Film industry officials and the Chinese state media said last week that government officials were worried that the public could be outraged by seeing three of the Chinese-language world’s leading actresses portraying Japanese geishas.

The decision is a big setback for Sony Pictures, which planned to distribute the Columbia Pictures film here, as well as for the film’s Chinese stars, Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh, a Malaysian-born actress also popular for her roles in China.

But anti-Japanese sentiment has run high over the last year after Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where some Japanese war criminals are commemorated.

My reaction: no DUH, stupid. I don’t know what Sony was thinking. And I can’t believe execs thought that the Chinese would embrace seeing some of “their” biggest stars play Japanese geisha. Only someone very out of it (very white?) would think it was a good idea.

Let’s put it this way: my mother (born in China just prior to WWII) didn’t elect to drive a Japanese-made car until 1992 or so, and she’s lived in America since 1964.

Now, there were plenty of reasons to dislike the novel:

• stupid fetishization of blue-eyed asian female protagonist Sayuri–TYPICAL white boy move, I mean, PUH-LEEZE, Arthur Golden, can’t you be any more original than David Bowie/your run-of-the-mill frat guy?
• the story’s set in 1930s Japan but there’s no mention, no glimmer, no HINT whatsoever that the Japanese imperial army is traipsing all over Asia liberating fellow yellows from white colonialists (one catch: the fellow yellows get to have Japanese overlords now, instead of ones from Europe)
• the above is puzzling because the love of Sayuri’s life is basically a war profiteer (a wealthy “businessman”)
• the fetishization of the insular world of the geisha is precisely so that “inconvenient” questions of empire and warmongering fall away
• as usual, ‘Asian women catfighting’ stand in for the inability of white women to own the surprising amount of politically incorrect hierarchy, dominance, and other unpretty issues of power among white women. (I say white women because there’s a certain kind of feminism where insistence on “sisterhood” ends up flattening out all the other dimensions of power and difference among women.)
• when I heard that Steven Spielberg was contemplating directing MEMOIRS, I was shocked. it would be like Spielberg directing a movie that’s set in Austria during the Holocaust about a young gentile Austrian girl falling in life-long love with her older lover who’s a BMW executive and Nazi supporter. I mean, what would be the point of Spielberg directing a film like that? Apparently he had the sense to back away from MEMOIRS. Hopefully, someone at the Weisenthal center talked some sense into him.

All in all, I’m glad the Asian actors worked–and I have other friends who worked on the film in different capacities–but I wish the political capital expended to make a big-budget, all-Asian cast film was used for some other film. Some better film. Not MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. The upshot is that it’s less likely for a Hollywood studio to make a big-budget film with an all-Asian or mostly Asian cast due to GEISHA’s failure. That sucks.