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Critical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the US, that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century

Table of Contents

List of Illustration ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
PART ONE: Emperor, Buddhist, Spy, or Indian: The Pre-Star Period of Sessue Hayakawa (1914-15)
1. A Star Is Born: The Transnational Success of The Cheat and Its Race and Gender Politics 21
2. Screen Debut: O Mimi San, or The Mikado in Picturesque Japan 50
3. Christianity versus Buddhism: The Melodramatic Imagination in The Wrath of the Gods 57
4. Doubleness: American Images of Japanese Spies in The Typhoon 66
5. The Noble Savage and the Vanishing Race: Japanese Actors in “Indian Films” 76
PART TWO: Villain, Friend, or Lover: Sessue Hayakawa’s Stardom at Lasky-Paramount (1916-18)
6. The Making of an Americanized Japanese Gentleman: The Honorable Friend and Hashimura Togo 87
7. More Americanized than the Mexican: The Melodrama of Self-Sacrifice and the Genteel Tradition in Forbidden Paths 106
8. Sympathetic Villains and Victim-Heroes: The Soul of Kura San and The Call of the East 117
9. Self-Sacrifice in the First World War: The Secret Game 127
10. The Cosmopolitan Way of Life: The Americanization of the Sessue Hayakawa in Magazines 136
PART THREE: “Triple Consciousness”: Sessue Hayakawa’s Stardom at Haworth Pictures Corporation (1918-22)
11. Balancing Japaneseness and Americanization: Authenticity and Patriotism in His Birthright and Banzai 153
12. Return of the Americanized Orientals: Robertson-Cole’s Expansion and Standardization of Sessue Hayakaway’s Star Vehicles 168
13. The Mask: Sessue Hayakawa’s Redefinition of Silent Film Acting 195
14. The Star Falls: Postwar Nativism and the Decline of Sessue Hayakawa’s Stardom 214
PART FOUR: Stardom and Japanese Modernity: Sessue Hayakawa in Japan
15. Americanization and Nationalism: The Japanese Reception of Sessue Hayakawa 235
Epilogue 261
Notes 283
Filmography 333
Bibliography 337
Index 365

About the Author

Daisuke Miyao is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. He is a coeditor of Casio Abe’s Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano and a co-translator of Kiju Yoshida’s Ozu’s Anti-Cinema.

Reviews

"Fascinating ... an exceptionally rich and provocative study of race and national imagery at the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry."--Richard Pena, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University "This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough--and complex--treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao's placing of Hayakawa's stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity "[O]ffer[s] important new opportunities to develop our understanding of the transnational history of Hollywood cinema. From the vantage point of the particular systems of production, representation and reception concerning the deployment of East Asian actors within American narrative filmmaking, [it] uncover[s] valuable insights into Hollywood's global strategies during a time of enormous political upheaval and cultural change regarding the construction of American self-identity and the USA's attitudes to its East Asian citizens and neighbours. [Miyao] write[s] impressively from 'within' in order to stage...understanding of the ambivalent status...of Americanization and modernization...The way that Miyao comes to...his remarkable nuanced analysis is by arguing that, like his screen persona more generally, Hayakawa embodied a mobile middle-ground between Orientalized and Americanized modes of performance...Miyao also allows us to see a more complex set of negotiations being staged within the distinctive transnational cultural force-field that Hayakawa occupied during his heyday within the Hollywood system...It is the unique achievement of Miyao's book that we are able to visualize the vectors especially of this first aspect of Hayakawa's stardom for the first time. By examining the Japanese-American Japanese-language press and by also discussing the critical reception of Hayakawa's films within his home country, Miyao intensifies the complexion of his history in a substantial way...propose[s] a vital contribution to the current reconceptualization of Hollywood cinema within the framework of modern international film studies." Alastair Phillips, Screen 2008, issue 49