Introduzione/Introduction
Schede film/Programme notes
Sessue Hayakawa: The Americanized Asian Hero
O land of quaint and fascinating people,
Here’s to thy son, who plays so well his art
That we take side with him in each creation,
Tho villain, friend or lover be that part.
Quiet he is, and smiles but very seldom,
Unerring in his mastery of the art;
The silent drama speaks in every picture –
When Sessue comes he leads, whate’er the part.
The October 1917 issue of the magazine Motion Picture published this poem by Kate May Young, of 842 W. 63rd St., Seattle, Washington. The line “Tho villain, friend or lover be that part” especially indicates an American female fan’s enthusiastic but ambivalent fascination with Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973), the actor from Japan. Was he a villain, who embodied the “Yellow Peril”, the pseudo-scientific discourse of the time among middle-class Americans who feared a Japanese imperialistic invasion of the United States? In Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), Hayakawa was a refined-looking and sexy, but sensationally villainous alien monster. Was he a friend, or the model minority in American society? In his star vehicles that followed The Cheat, including His Birthright (1918), Hayakawa frequently played an Asian immigrant hero who was eager to assimilate himself into American culture. Was he a good lover? In his starring roles, including The Courageous Coward (1919) and The Man Beneath (1919), Hayakawa’s Asian hero often sacrificed himself for the white woman he loved. Yet, in the end, his ethnicity often prevented him from being united with his beloved.
Many popular audiences of cinema remember Hayakawa for his Oscar-nominated role as the frowning Japanese officer in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Yet, Hayakawa was a very popular movie star long before that, and was the only Asian matinee idol of the silent era. In May 1916 Hayakawa was ranked number one in the Chicago Tribune’s popular star contests. His sensational performance as a sexy villain in The Cheat, who steals a kiss with a white woman and brands her naked shoulder, propelled him to superstardom during a time when the general public supported segregation and mixed marriages were illegal in many states. With Hayakawa’s image embodying the racial threat, it would seem a natural choice for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company to make him a refined-looking villainous star. But this was not merely a simple strategy. The most popular stars of the time, including Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Harold Lockwood, and Francis X. Bushman, embodied the image of the “clean-living group of all-Americans,” so it was natural for Lasky to provide their new, promising, but non-American, star with this image.
The popularity of “All-American” stars corresponded to a nationwide Americanization Movement, willingly embraced by middle-class Americans. The basic idea of “Americanization” was that immigrants must merge into the national community by being willing to identify themselves with American principles and customs. Hayakawa’s star image was meant to represent a successful assimilation narrative for Japanese immigrants. To this end, the motif of self-sacrifice was particularly useful. It could place Hayakawa’s non-white characters at the moral center of the narrative, while keeping them out of full assimilation into American society and prohibiting them from interracial marriages. If Hayakawa’s heroes sacrificed themselves and died for the good of white American women, the anxiety of miscegenation was avoided. With this motif, Hayakawa’s characters became safely desirable for the middle-class white women onscreen, and for middle-class white audiences. Consequently, the status quo of white American society was maintained because the unassimilable non-white screen characters willingly destroyed themselves. While Hayakawa’s character in The Cheat is capable of social assimilation but remains morally unassimilable, conversely, the motif of self-sacrifice could make Hayakawa’s characters morally assimilable but racially unassimilable in American society.
In line with this strategy, Hayakawa’s Americanized lifestyle was overtly publicized in fan magazines. In March 1916 Grace Kingsley of Photoplay wrote: “Sessue Hayakawa, the world’s most noted Japanese photoplay actor, does not dwell in a paper-made house amid tea-cup scenery…. he lives in a ‘regular’ bungalow, furnished in mission oak, and dresses very modishly according to American standards…. [Hayakawa] has played American and English roles in Japan, having the distinction, indeed, of having introduced American and English drama in his native land. He played … Ibsen and Shakespeare, making an especial hit as ‘Othello.’ … [Hayakawa] studied English drama and literature at the University of Chicago for a year, and translated a number of the English classics into Japanese.”
There is no official record that Hayakawa had an acting career in Japan. Hayakawa, the son of a rich fisherman in Chiba prefecture, came to the U.S. with the help of his relatives, who were engaged in abalone fishing in California. According to his autobiography, he entered the University of Chicago, not to study acting but political economy, to help out his family’s business. Kingsley fictionalized Hayakawa’s background in order to emphasize his Americanized status and to validate his acting capability by Western standards. Through his display of the American way of life in his star vehicles and fan magazine articles, Hayakawa became a representative of the model minority who attained success via legitimate industry without threatening the current socio-political and economic system.
Hayakawa’s popularity was not limited to the U.S. His stardom was appropriated within various and contradictory political, ideological, and cultural contexts in the U.S., Japan, and Europe during the period of his films’ greatest public circulation. In France (where The Cheat, released in August 1916 as Forfaiture, was a particularly big success), Hayakawa’s acting style inspired such intellectuals as Louis Delluc and Colette to develop a concept in art, photogénie, embodying the unique aesthetic qualities that motion picture photography brings to the subject it films. Photogénie later became a significant theoretical basis of the French Impressionist movement. Japanese audiences first criticized Hayakawa for appearing in “anti-Japanese” films, and called him an “insult to the nation”. However, when Hayakawa obtained the status of a superstar in Hollywood, Japanese intellectuals and government officials, including the influential film theorist Kaeriyama Norimasa, praised him as an ideal representative of Japan, and called him the “ambassador of the nation”. - Daisuke Miyao
