swallowtail

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

I put _Swallowtail_ on my best 30 list because I do think it is an 
important film.  I would hesitate to agree with Christine, however, that 
it is a film effectively critiquing ethnocentrism in Japan.  That seems 
to be its surface concern, but in the end, I have the feeling that it 
reduces its celebration of difference to a consumerist appropriation of 
the Other into the Japanese national self. The key scene I think everyone 
should watch when seeing this film is the one when Ageha visits the opium 
den to get a tattoo.  For a film celebrating the Asian Other and 
valorizing an ethnic and linguistic mix within the Japanese national 
space, I found it very disturbing that the Chinese represented in that 
scene are NOT given subtitles when they talk.  They are, in effect, 
reduced to the "frightening" Other as the film reconstructs, in very 
unfortunate ways, the classical colonial hierarchy founded in the 
tourist/colonial gaze.

Since this is good timing, I should mention that I do discuss the film in 
an essay, "Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: The New Nationalist 
Revisionism in Japan" coming out this month in a special issue on 
textbook nationalism in _Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars_ (Vol. 30, 
No. 2; April-June 1998).  I locate the film in the same popular cultural 
nexus as Fujioka Nobukatsu and the new neo-rightist revisionists.

By the way, some in Japan have tried to celebrate the film for its 
critique of ethnocentrism, but there's a growing number of people who are 
very disturbed by its politics.  In a public talk with me, Yomota Inuhiko 
cited the film as one of the worst representations of Asia in recent 
Japanese film he has seen, and in the Feminist Film Workshop held at 
Ochanomizu Daigaku (where I presented the film), the general opinion was 
that the film reproduces in frightening ways the prewar colonialist 
mentality of Imperial Japan.  There seems to be a debate building here on 
the film.

There are other interpretations, but that again is the reason I think it 
is an important film.  An important film to critique, discuss, and analyze.

Aaron Gerow
YNU