Memoirs of a non-existent Geisha

"If Hollywood want to think that samurai and geisha are what this country is all aout," writes Shoji Kaori, "then the Japanese are not going to argue."

Hollywood has a way of pulverizing authentic history, but with the controversial Memoirs of a Geisha (released in Japan as Sayuri), it has managed to do that and offend just about everyone. The Chinese are at the top of the list, what with their star Zhang Ziyi in the role of a geisha, engaging in a love scene with Japanese actor Ken Wantanabe - Zhang has been branded as a shameless traitor.

The American filmmakers (the director is Rob Marshall of Chicago with Steven Spielberg as producer) are miffed that their movie is getting mixed in racial/bad history issues.

The US audience is turning in the verdict that it's all a little offensive - after all, what's a geisha if not a prostitute catering to the fantasies of devilish males?

As for the Japanese, the press is keeping eerily quiet. Well aware that one wrong word or phrase could turn a mere movie into a major foreign policy issue, critics here are remaining polite, reticent, and very, very restrained. It wasn't so with the last big Hollywood rendition of a Japanese theme: The Last Samurai.

That also was crammed with historical mistakes and misinterpretations - it wasn't a period film set in Japan so much as the Hollywood (male) ideal of a Japanese theme park.

The domestic press gleefully pounded on the errors while at the same time commending the filmmakers for the points they did get right and the fact that an aspect of Japanese culture merited such a big-budget project. Such a healthy reaction is to to be expected with Memoirs.

Still, Sony Pictures and the Japanese distribution industry are making sure that press reticence will not affect the box office. Their sales pitch goes something like this: it's a Hollywood picture folks, it's got nothing to do with Japan.

Actually the Japanese have always been adept at deploying foreign images of themselves to their ultimate (commercial) advantage. When the Europeans jumped on ukiyo-e prints as the newly exotic art form, the Japanese immediately decreed the once-shunned genre as High Art and started manufacturing the prints by the thousands. During the high-tech boom the Japanese created, and then promoted the image of being a snazy, futuristic, sci-fi society.

And now that the western focus is on historical Japanese icons like the geisha and the samurai, the japanese are discovering how very marketable the concepts can be. If Hollywood want to think that samurai and geisha are what this country is all about, then the Japanese are not going to argue. After all, nothing could be worse for business than politics and misguided nationalism.

In the meantime, Memoirs is getting the proper buzz: that it's a lush, attractive film; that it stars the best of Asian talent, combined with the finest helmers in Hollywood. And if viewers though it a little strange that English-speaking Chinese actresses sporting blue contact lenses were chosen to depict Japanese geishas of the 1930s, they kept their misapprehensions under wraps. They could even overlook the fact that the whole thing was shot in an LA suburb, which gives the picture a right, golden sheen. Never mind that the story is apparently set in Kyoto, defined by its pale light and dark tones.

For that matter, the geisha's kimono, hairstyles, and certain rituals are just all wrong, but that's okay, the Japanese are well aware of how 'geisha' and 'samurai' alter out of all recognition once they cross the oceans and land on western shores.

As for Zhang Ziyi, the verdict with this particular actress is that if any non-Japanese is going to play a Japanese woman, she should be the one.

Slender, demure, and fragile-looking, Zhang seems equipped with charms that are increasingly hard to find among the tough and self-assertive modern Japanese girl. One female viewer summed it up and when she said: "This is not a Japanese movie but an American one.

Nothing in it looks Japanese so it seems natural that the geisha girls is a non-Japanese. She was cute, the movie was fun, and that's all that matters, right?"