DRAFT
3/06/03

SCMS Conference 2003

 
Japanese War Bride – Race, Desire, and Post-Classical Hollywood
by
Janelle Tangonan Anderson
 
           
In this essay, I will attempt an in-depth reading of the neglected film text Japanese War Bride.  The film, directed by King Vidor in 1952, is probably the least discussed of the director’s films.  However, I will argue, one of the film’s important aspects is that it is one of the first films about miscegenation or interracial marriage using real ethnic actors, in real, on-location settings.  Finally, I will argue that the film Japanese War Bride is less about racial hatred and the serious problems of mixed marriage, but rather more about female subjectivity, repressed sexuality, and the male desire to return to the dominant status quo.  Nevertheless, the film deserves a critical re-reading, and should be read as an attempt to be a more progressive 1950’s text.
The narrative details the story of wounded soldier Jim Sterling, who meets Tae Shimizu, his Red Cross nurse in Japan, during the Korean War.  (It is ironic that the film is called “Japanese” War Bride, but that it really takes place during the Korean War.)  Tae nurses Jim back to health.  Then, after a short courtship, Jim brings Tae home to live with him in Salinas, California.  However, Jim and Tae encounter various obstacles during their first year of marriage.
 
Historical Background
            First, Japanese War Bride needs to be read in its historical context.  The film began shooting in 1951, and premiered in 1952.  It was considered a B film.  This was the early 1950’s, the post World War II period.  Americans were successfully Westernizing and occupying Japan.  However, the Korean War had just begun.  As David Halberstam writes, “It was a war that no one wanted, in a desolate, harsh land…South Korea became important only after the North Korean Communists struck in the night; its value was psychological rather than strategic—the enemy had crossed a border.” [1]
  Soldiers were fighting in Korea, but many just wanted to return home and get back to a “normal” life. 
The film Japanese War Bride opens with a shot of the ocean.  We hear dramatic music.  The next shot says “Korea” and we see a battleground.  A spotlight focuses on the wounded Jim.  He faints.  The next shot is a close-up of Jim at the hospital back in Japan.  The first face he sees, and what the spectator sees, out of his chaos, is a close up shot of the face of Tae.  Jim tells Tae that he would like to court her when he gets out of the hospital, and soon we see him asking her grandfather for her hand in marriage.  He wants to marry her and bring his war bride back to America.  He also wants to get out of the Korean War and return to a peaceful, rural, pre-war way of life.
Censorship & Business Practices
            Obviously, this film portrayed very current events, since the Korean War was still taking place in the early 1950’s.  World War II had just ended a mere six or seven years earlier.  So, how did this picture get produced, especially with its sensitive plot material?  Furthermore, the Motion Picture Production Code (1934) stated clearly: “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.” [2]
In the film, we see several scenes of the white Jim and the Japanese Tae kissing passionately. 
Censorship and the Law
            How did Bernhard Productions and King Vidor get away with making this film during the Code?  I will examine both film law, and state and Federal law.  In film, miscegenation was forbidden and the use of real ethnic actors was seldom done until about 1956.  However, in society, anti-miscegenation laws were beginning to change state by state, between the years 1942 to 1967.  Therefore, although the Code was still in existence, laws and society were changing in 1952, the year Japanese War Bride premiered.
 
Style & Technology
             Now, I would like to discuss the formal aspects of the film.  Another example showing that this film is a post classic 1950’s picture, is by its film form or style.  Vidor utilized on-location, documentary-like shooting.  Americans had seen the Italian films and their neorealistic style.  The Italians were doing films on location, with outdoor natural lighting, such as Open City and The Bicycle Thief. [3]
  Vidor wanted to have the same visual style.  Thus, for example, he filmed Japanese War Bride on location in Salinas and Monterey, California, where Jim takes Tae back to live with him and his family on their lettuce farm.  The spectator views shots and long takes of the fertile Salinas agricultural industry and farmland, the site where Japanese Americans and Anglo Americans both came to live.  The spectator sees the actual land, machinery, and farming industry that were so precious to both groups of people in 1952 California.  We see and hear realistic, documentary-like scenes of the market garden business, the seaside, and the fishing and lettuce packing industries. [4]
  Vidor showed audiences scenes that they would not see on television.

Distribution and Reception

            How was this controversial film received in 1952?  What did the American critics, Japanese Americans, Japanese, and the general American audience feel about the film?  How did 20th Century Fox try to distribute, market, and advertise it?  In the ads, we clearly see images and text of sex and violence.  For example, we read in one ad: “Don’t call my wife a Geisha girl…” [5]
  We see an image of Jim knocking out another man.  The press releases have lurid titles such as “Boldly Adult Theme is Frankly Stated in ‘Japanese War Bride’.” [6]
  Clearly, Fox tried to sensationalize the film so that the audience would come.  For example, one ad proclaims in bold letters, “The story of a miscegenetic love…!” 
During my research, I wondered whom exactly Fox was trying to attract.  Was it white men, white women, people of color, or a mainstream family audience?  I think the target audience was unclear.  The film was first shown in Los Angeles theatres only.
            The contemporary local reviews were mixed.  In the Los Angeles Examiner, Thomas Reddy wrote, “Although the Joseph Bernhard produced, King Vidor directed drama is hardly a probing analysis of the problems of miscegenetic marriage, it works out into an entertaining film.”   
Variety called it an “exploitation feature.”  “Picture’s presentation benefits for the excellent direction given it by King Vidor, who helps make it credible through restraint in handling…Film is a bit long at 91 minutes for the general market.” [7]
  The New York Times said, “…King Vidor has directed the drama inherent in the stress attendant on the homecoming of one such young couple without imagination despite a story that does make a perfectly valid plea for understanding…except for its occasional moments of tension, the trials of ‘Japanese War Bride,’ as set down in Catherine Turney’s script, have the impact of a twice-told tale.” [8] Most reviewers read the film as an ordinary family melodrama.
        
 Vidor’s Themes   
Robert B. Ray would call this a postwar “problem picture.”  He wrote, “If the signing of the U.N. Charter, the Berlin airlift, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan officially demonstrated America’s willingness to become a permanent member of the community of nations, the widespread disillusionment with the Korean War and the popularity of “massive retaliation” as the means to effect containment signaled the desire of most Americans to retreat into an isolationist shell…” [9]
 
Thus, for example, Jim takes his war bride, Tae, back home to the farm, and he no longer wants to fight in the Korean War.  His family does not want to talk about Hiroshima or the relocation camps, but rather sweep things “under the rug.” [10]
  However, Ray writes, “Hollywood’s first attempt at a solution was to blend the serious social consciousness of the foreign movies with old-fashioned storytelling.  The result was the “problem picture” …the postwar “problem pictures” did big business…In retrospect, these films’ commercial success obviously depended on their conservatism, thinly disguised by an outward display of social concern.” [11]
 
I would agree with Ray’s theory.  Thus, for example, although Jim and Tae apparently reconcile at the end of the film, the real economic problems between the Japanese Americans and the Anglo Americans remain unresolved in 1952 California.  Furthermore, Jim and Tae try to move out and build a home and space of their own, but society will not leave them alone.  One’s own house or space represents freedom and hope, and we see a poignant scene in which Jim and Tae speak and dream of freedom and having a home on their own stretch of spacious farmland.
Thematic Paradigms
            Gina Marchetti, in her book Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, describes Japanese War Bride as a text about “domesticity and assimilation.”  She writes, “With these dramas, Hollywood…sensationalized domestic racial tensions by transposing them onto the less threatening sphere of white-Asian rather than white-African American relations, …  Moreover, these dramas used the myth of the subservient Japanese woman to shore up a threatened masculinity in light of American women’s growing independence during World War II.” [12]
            For the most part, I would agree with Marchetti’s reading of the film.  Thus, for example, Jim chooses Tae, a gentle nurse, for his wife, rather than Fran, an old admirer who says that during the war, “I’ve been around.”  Furthermore, the text says little about the suffering of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.  There is only a brief allusion to the relocation camps.  For example, while Jim and Tae ride in the car back to the farm, the family casually mentions that “the Hasagawas have it [their farm] back.”   When Shiro, the Hasagawa son, talks with Tae out in the mushroom field, he says that he has been to Tokyo and Hiroshima, but no other explanation or description of the atrocities caused by the atomic bomb over Hiroshima is mentioned. 
            The film illustrates the more interesting, subtler cultural differences between the families of Tae and Jim.  For example, Tae normally walks behind males or older people, but Jim’s family members do not understand this sign of respect.  The text tries to show these differences to the American audience, to foster more cultural awareness and tolerance.
            More specifically, the picture illustrates the conflict between the American women and the Japanese Tae.  I would argue that Tae represents a relatively positive role model for the Asian American female spectator.  Unfortunately, although Tae is educated, speaks English very well, and is employed as a Red Cross nurse, the American women disapprove of her.  For example, the first night, Tae breaks a dish.  Then, Fran learns that Tae had servants back in Japan, and immediately we sense a serious class issue, a class division between the two female characters.  Finally, Tae remarks that she would not mind living with the in-laws in the same house, while Fran desires the 1950’s American Dream, to move out and have a car and house of her own
            Durgnat & Simmon, in their book King Vidor, American,            write, “This film comes near the tag-end of the tolerance cycle, …  They write, “…Vidor’s family focus seems the most flaccid of fifties conventions.” [13]
 
However, like Robert Lang in his book, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli, I would argue that a film about a family, especially an interracial family, is not a “flaccid” or ordinary theme.  On the contrary, as Marchetti also argues, the film takes “domestic relations seriously and focus dramatic attention on housework, children, and the extended family.  Like most domestic dramas, they take up social tensions arising from the hierarchical organization of the bourgeois patriarchal family.” [14]
 
Tae’s Japanese grandfather knows and realizes that an interracial marriage is not an ordinary occurrence.  Earlier in the film he says, “I trust, I pray God, your God and mine, that you are equally sure of what you want.”  Indeed, although the contemporary media and ads for the film warned that “thousands” of G.I.’s were bringing home foreign wives, in fact, less that 1% of total married couples were mixed marriages in 1960.  When one adds to the story the subtext of the relocation camps, Hiroshima, Tae being accused of being a “geisha girl,” and the Anglo American farmers not wanting to accept the Japanese American farmers into their economic association, one can see that this text is not as simple as one might believe. 

            I believe that this film is an example of growing 1950’s conflict and post-war ambivalence and tension.  It is definitely worth viewing, especially as an early text about miscegenation, and as an example of Vidor’s cinematic style.  However, like Marchetti, I believe that the film is problematic, and is less about racism and more about sexism.  For example, Fran, the jealous sister-in-law, is made the clear villain of the film.  She is not “skinny,” as someone says in the film, she is voluptuous.  She is not a “homebody.”  She has not even been christened, she says later in the film.  When she enters, the musical score immediately changes, and her leitmotif is always a jazzy melody.  American men wanted to come home to a stay-at-home wife, not a wife with a job outside the home.  In a promotional poster for the film, the text reads, “More than 12,000 American G.I.’s who brought home Japanese brides say: Japanese cater to their husbands…and love it!  Japanese wives by tradition and training are less demanding—and more giving—than the American girls they had met.” [15]
  Clearly, however, this is a gross stereotype.  Tae had a job herself, as a Red Cross nurse in American Occupied Japan. 
Finally, at the end of the film, Fran’s husband brutally smacks her when he and the family realize that Fran had been trying to frame Tae and get rid of her from the beginning.  In the plot, she writes an anonymous letter to Jim’s father saying that the association will not accept scandal.  She writes that Tae is a geisha, and says that Tae’s mixed-race, but more Japanese-looking baby in not Jim’s but that of the neighbor Shiro’s.  The Sterling family realizes the “truth,” that the real sexual “evil” is Fran.  Thus, Fran’s husband cruelly beats her down.  At that moment, when he hits her, the film demonizes all women with an active desire and sexuality.  The text then seems to be about restoring the white male patriarchal order.  The father-husband will rule, and his wife will be submissive, whether she likes it or not.  The film leaves many questions unanswered.  Therefore, I would argue, it is not a simple text.  It deals with serious gender, social, and economic issues, such as female identity, desire, and subjectivity.
            On the other hand, although the character of Tae may be a problematic representation of Asian female identity, the film is an improvement from what had been represented before 1952.  The problem with the film is that there are basically only two kinds of female representations, Tae or Fran.  Molly Haskell writes, “The whore-virgin dichotomy took hold with a vengeance in the uptight fifties, in the dialectical caricatures of the “sexpot” and the “nice girl.” [16]
  Thus, the Tae is seen as almost a virgin girl-woman, and Fran unfortunately has few sympathetic qualities on her behalf.  However, fifties films were becoming more progressive.  Haskell writes, “It was as if the whole period of the fifties was a front, the topsoil that protected the seed of rebellion that was germinating below.  The cultural disorientation had begun…” [17]
           
In conclusion, I have tried to argue that Japanese War Bride deserves a critical re-reading and a second viewing, especially as an early text about miscegenation and as an example of Vidor’s documentary film style using authentic ethnic actors.  As I have attempted to argue in this paper, this film is more overtly about racial tolerance and miscegenation, but there is the troubling underlying subtext of uneasiness with female sexuality and subjectivity.  It promotes the return to patriarchal authority, climaxing when Fran’s husband strikes her.  However, for its time, it was and is a more progressive text of the post-war period.  It attempts to plead for more racial tolerance and understanding.  Jim tells Tae, “We can’t give up.”  I believe that this film remains an important text for film studies, especially as an example of a more progressive Asian American subjectivity.

Bibliography
 
1.      Archives, King Vidor Collection, University of Southern California (USC) Film Archives.
 
2.      Baxter, John. King Vidor. New York: Monarch Press, 1976.
 
3.      Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
 
4.      Casper, Drew. Lecture, USC, March 29, 2000.
 
5.      Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, with Pierre Sauvage. American Directors, Volume I New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983.
 
6.      Durgnat, Raymond & Scott Simmon. King Vidor, American. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
 
7.      Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love.  Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997.
 
8.      Feng, Peter X. “Pioneering Romance: Immigration, Americanization, and Asian Women.” In Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video.  Peter X. Feng. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
 
9.      Geiger, Jeffrey. “Imagined Islands: White Shadows in the South Seas and Cultural Ambivalence.” Cinema Journal, 2002, Vol. 41(3):98-121.
 
10.  Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
 
11.  Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, second edition, 1987.
 
12.  Japanese American Legal History, www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/Nisei.htm # miscegenation
 
13.  Lang, Robert. American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
 
14.  Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship & the Production Code from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
 
15.  Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
 
16.  Mast, Gerald, and Bruce F. Kawin. The Movies: A Short History. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, revised 1996.
 
17.  Maurice, Alice. “Cinema at Its Source: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies.” Camera Obscura, 2002, Vol. 17(1): 31-71.
 
18.  “Miscegenation,” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000, http://encarta.msn.com 1997-2000, Microsoft Corporation.
 
19.  New York Times, January 30, 1952.
 
20.  Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
 
21.  Pascoe, Peggy. “Race, Gender, and the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West.” In Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
 
22.  Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
 
23.  Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and William A. Wellman. New York:  Atheneum, 1975.
 
24.  U.S. Bureau of the Census, as of January 7, 1999.
 
25.  Variety, January 8, 1952.
 
26.  Vidor, King. King Vidor and Film Making. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972.
 
27.  Wong, Eugene Franklin. On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Pictures. New York: Arno Press, 1978.
 
28.  Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
David Halberstam. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993, p. 62.
Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship & the Production Code from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, p. 285.
Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin. The Movies: A Short History. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, revised 1996, p. 340, 342.
John Baxter. King Vidor. New York: Monarch Press, 1976, p.78.
Archives
Archives
Variety, January 8, 1952.
New York Times, January 30, 1952.
Robert B. Ray. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 134.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 144.
Gina Marchetti. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 158.
Durgnat, Raymond & Scott Simmon. King Vidor, American. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 281.
Marchetti, p. 159.
Archives
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, second edition, 1987, p. xiii.
Ibid., p. 235.