Featured Essay
Barbara Jane Reyes
( Part 1 )
_________________________
posted 6 June 2006, Tuesday
Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog
I am finding it fruitless to try to educate unbudging and unwilling folks about Orientalizing, exoticizing, and emasculating. Especially if you are indicting them as perpetrators of said Orientalizing, exoticizing, and emasculating. Perhaps you may read this as resignation, but I have come to understand via recent poet blog fracases that some (many) are beyond reaching, and invariably, arguments arise about disavowing cultural responsibilities, denials of appropriation, denials of being racist, etc.
I am tired of others talking about us and our communities like they know more about us than we do of ourselves.
I am back to my epistomological mini-crisis about American constructions of the un-masculine Asian masculine. I am coming to realize more and more there is indeed some kind of agenda, a purpose, to Westerners constructing the un-masculine and maintaining said constructions. I don't know exactly what and why, except that I know to ignore such agendas is to dehistoricize-decontextualize Western encounters with the Far East, and Western invasion and conquest of Asian empires and nations.
I am interested in the Asian masculine portrayed in all the Japanese films I've been watching. Many of these were directed by Akira Kurosawa, and most of these films take on the samurai as the model masculine, physically, domestically, culturally, historically, and socially. But I am interested in how modern Asian men portray their own masculinity, however affected/effected by their encounters with the West.
Which brings me to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949), which set in post-WWII Tokyo, that is to say, American occupied Japan.
Why my fixation on Japanese cinema? I’m interested in Japanese cinema as it has come to powerfully influence American/Western cinema. But more importantly, I am interested in an Asian culture not popularly portrayed as so thoroughly colonized and “damaged,” as my own Filipino culture always appears to others historically and globally; we are constantly told that nothing of ours is really ours, intellectually, artistically, culturally, geographically. We are believed to be, we are said to be, we are told we are so non-resistant, so passive to foreign intrusion — prime material for emasculating and objectifying, for bending over.
Back to Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, and its being set immediately after WWII, in which young Japanese former soldiers return to their city, which is now in a state of ruin and disorder. It is this apres-guerre generation of disrupted young men who must find a way to reinsert themselves into a totally changed (disrupted) social order, in many ways emasculated nationally (by military defeat and subsequent occupation), and emasculated domestically (their roles in their home lives). In this way, so disrupted, they have nothing to lose and must decide whether, as these “stray dogs,” they will become these reckless “mad dogs.” I am so interested in Toshirô's character Murakami, an ex-soldier, now rookie homicide detective who's further emasculated by the loss of his gun, which is pickpocketed on a crowded Tokyo bus. Murakami teeters on the edge here, rash, obsessive, and hot-headed, and unable to perform rational, thinking police work, as he is completely consumed with the loss of his substitute phallus. I think back on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and a young, gun slinging, and cocky Tatsuya Nakadai, at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, how this gun upsets the balance which Toshirô’s character, the ronin Sanjuro works to maintain.
There are two characters in Stray Dog who are contrasted against Murakami — yet another “stray dog” of this apres-guerre generation, an ex-soldier, Yusa (played by Isao Kimura, who was the youngest of the Seven Samurai), who must have also been teetering on the edge like Murakami. Yusa chooses the life of a criminal, consumed with his disenfranchisement and every knee-jerk rash thing he can possibly do to get money, to get the pretty girl, now that he's got Murakami’s gun. Then there is the older, seasoned cop, Takashi Shimura’s Sato-san, cool and level-headed, able to think of the “bigger picture,” stable, and safe, but certainly not lacking in masculinity. That he is a stable family man who lives modestly, that he works by the book, always thinking of how his actions further the larger investigation — these are what make him good at what he does, but ultimately, these things, his coolness, his ability to think with a rational mind, and the fact that he takes good care of his family, define Sato-san’s masculinity. He doesn’t ever become self-consumed or obsessed with regret as Murakami, for Sato-san is confident he has acted right and thought it through thoroughly all along. In terms of whether or not Murakami really learns from Sato-san, however much Murakami needs Sato-san as his mentor, that’s another story, well beyond the film's resolution and ending.
In other words, there really isn't anything terribly exotic or Oriental about Asian masculinity. It’s so remarkably normal. This is what I get from these films (Kurosawa’s and others), even the samurai films, in which what we as Westerners have come to know as unbudging, hardcore samurai honor (Klingons), and by sharp contrast, nebulously Zen or Orientally Confucian (Mr. Miyagi), are really Western impositions, and really, Asian masculinity appears to come down to being in good form, learned with the sword, fraternal, filial, cool-headed, and rational thinking.
Next - Barbara Jane Reyes / Rashomon
Contents
Contributors
Current Issue - Winter 2007
Home