Sorry you had trouble posting the comment. My spam-catcher caught it multiple times, I see. If you want to post lots of links in future, please make a post on your site and just link to that. I’d like to free things up a little, but I have a real problem with trackback spam.

More on your own site.

i could go on and on and on… you need to get some australian cinema up you, cultural studies boy.

I’€™d also like to point out that Asia’€™s daughters you have dated (from what you’€™ve told me) certainly aren’€™t the ‘€œtypical’€ daughters of Asia. Far too hybrid, although whether there is a pure asian or Asia for that matter, and in fact, whether there really is a point in trying to segment them as such is another question altogether.

You’€™re exactly right: they’€™re not typical. Nor is Hiromitsu, though. One thing I didn’€™t mention in my post was that he’€™s a relatively accurate depiction of the kind of person you might find in an old and powerful dôzoku gaisha (family business), especially one of the families associated with a zaibatsu or keiretsu (massive corporations like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo). This is exactly the kind of character Hiromitsu is meant to be. I get the impression, though, that the writer and director arrived at the depiction by accident: by reproducing stereotypes rather than by reading a great book about dôzoku gaisha like Matthews Mayasuki Hamabata’s Crested Kimono: Power and love in the Japanese business family

What’€™s curious about Japanese Story is that it chooses to insert this kind of person into the Australian landscape, rather than the still uncommon, but more visible here, banana-type asian (yellow outside, white inside, CS readers forgive the characterisation—-it’€™s a word such people use to describe themselves) who are the girls I’€™ve dated, the kids I made friends with, and so on. What it hopes to achieve by this I don’€™t know, but it paints a strange picture for those Westerners who aren’t eggs (white on the outside, yellow on the inside) like me or even know anything at all about Asian people or culture. This is the kind of depiction that makes country people and old people ask second and third-generation Asian Australians where they’re from, and to tell them that “your English is so good!” which drives Asian Australians crazy.

In fact the picture it paints represents pretty well what I think Said was talking about when he put forward his analysis of orientalism, because Hiro and his wife, though they represent an exotic type that actually exists in life, are not specified as just a fraction of Japanese or Asian society. Because they are the only representatives of their region and culture in the film, they stand in for Asia as a whole.

As for segmentation, I think it’€™s a better idea than lumping a whole lot of people together. For me, ‘€œAsia’€ stretches east of India, south of the Russian border, north of Australia and finishes eastward with Japan and Indonesia. That sets a boundary for a particular set of cultures and ideas that I feel are somewhat related. India, incidentally, i deem to be part of the West, since it shares the basic, metaphysical foundations from which our culture grew, while China does not (and is therefore East, as is everything else whose culture it influenced to any large degree). The same thing goes for the Middle East. Africa, on the other hand, is probably a whole other story, neither East nor West (if we’re thinking about philosophical and cultural traditions). Whether or not individual people fit neatly into the East/West dichotomy is another matter: I’€™d suggest they don’€™t.

One day we’ll all be hybrid, and we’ll stop talking about stuff like this.

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This is a joke, yeah?

I didn’t think much of JS either – a bit too drawn out and a bit too indulgent of certain stereotypes (effeminate asian man, honourable japanese, &c), but in terms of showing the Australian outback, lots of new Australian films are set in urban areas these days. Having a film that’s set in the desert isn’t entirely unrealistic, given that there is indeed a big fuck-off desert out there. Thought its setting was fair enough (and it actually did include some urban settings as well, if I remember rightly).