Anyone who has ever talked to a relative who lived through that era, or read personal accounts of World War II knows that while the German forces were referred to as 'Germans,' the Japanese were called 'Japs.' Anti-Japanese propaganda often portrayed the Asian enemy in quite explicitly racist terms, because of the Japanese's 'foreign' racial status, in the eyes of most Caucasian-Americans of European ancestry. Unlike the Germans, the American government even allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans, solely because of their race, even though many Japanese-Americans fought loyally on the United States' side during the conflict. While Germans are always 'Nazis' in films, the Japanese are always 'villainous Japs' (Beidler 1998, 12).
Noting the racism that was often exhibited in American propaganda, however, hardly excuses the racism that was also present in Japanese propaganda. One interesting subgenre of this phenomenon is in Japanese films like China Nights, which portrays the Japanese conquest of China as 'good' by showing the eventual, willing submission of a beautiful Chinese woman to a Japanese officer. The member of the 'dominant' race is shown as a man and the member of the 'subordinate' race is shown as a woman. The Chinese woman, much like in a conventional movie romance, at first resists the dominant man's advances, but then discovers the pleasures of his control (Chambers & Culbert 1996, 37). The personal relationship of the Japanese man and the Chinese woman is used as a metaphor justifying Japan's conquest of China. The personal becomes a metaphor for military politics. This is particularly interesting, given that the Far East, including Japan, was often portrayed as feminine in American propaganda, and as subtle and cunning rather than overt in its advances.
When characterizing the portrayal of the two sides, Robert Fyne's book review of We'll Always have the Movies, states that after the war: "Finally there were no more two-dimensional Japanese villains wearing those coke-bottle eyeglasses, waving samurai swords, running up hills shouting...
The war is driven by the modern military which has abandoned its warrior ethic and now fights with guns -- a theme repeated in The Last Samurai. Again Funakoshi represents this position. He tells the Japanese military captain, "Who I challenge to Kung Fu and what I do is no business of the military. . . . I am not a politician." The distinction between colonial imperialism and true
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Indeed, the trajectory of the narrative involves exacting revenge on those who prevented her marriage from taking place. Although the Bride's marital aspirations might suggest that she holds a conservative sensibility, this is far from the case and she is ultimately more aggressive than Jen. While Jen also exhibits physical prowess, her sacrificial gesture at the film's conclusion signifies how she maintains a strong reverence for the Confucian moral code,
Factory Girl Fatat el Masna (Factory Girl) by Mohamed Khan depicts a misunderstood segment of society: female Muslim factory workers in Egypt. The contemporary setting of the story allows the viewer to make real-life comparisons with their own notions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and power. Social stratification is a core theme, but gender is a far more salient one in Khan's movie. Fatat el Masna is about individual women taking
In Miller's Batman, one sees a man waging war on a world that has sold its soul for empty slogans and nationalism: the Dark Knight represents a kind of spirit reminiscent of what the old world used to call the Church Militant -- he is virtue violently opposed to all forms of vice -- even those that bear the letter S. On their chests and come in fine wrapping. Miller's
In his discussion of Partition historiography, Padney (Barenscott 7) states: There is the need to deny the fragmented and ambivalent nature of remembrance, its competing modes of representation, and its implication in existing or future political projects. Moreover, there is a process through which many of these alternative accounts become written off as fiction or 'bad history' -- relegating and marginalizing relevant contributions of Partition experience and remembrance" (Barenscott 7). Mehta has
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