Racism (or not?) in The Manchurian Candidate

I recently re-visited the 1962 version of the film The Manchurian Candidate, which I hadn’t seen in a while.

Just to be clear, it’s a great film — eerie and suspenseful, well-written, and has some wonderful performances. The disturbing “dream” sequence described nicely here (scroll down a bit) is quite possibly the greatest example of inspired film editing ever.

That said, AsianWeek agreed with me in that the film’s big flaw is the use of “yellow face” in Chunjin, a Korean character played by an actor who doesn’t even look remotely Asian. I was actually confused when he first appeared on the screen, as it took me a moment to realize that he’s supposed to be Korean. And…he does martial arts! Of course!

I don’t find much to object to in the politics of the film, however. I could see what people are getting at — the title of the film admittedly has “Yellow Peril” written on it — but I see the film as an accurate representation of the fear and paranoia surrounding the Cold War. There’s an interesting discussion in a college course message board regarding the film and (presumably) the book What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America. I haven’t read the book (I’m not sure about a 288 page analysis on one movie), but if anything, I think The Manchurian Candidate is even a bit subversive how it turns out that the real sneaky villain that’s infiltrated American politics is a white woman, in a “you-didn’t-see-that-coming-didja?” plot twist. (Hopefully nobody’s mad at me for spoilers on a popular 40+ year old movie.)

So I cringe through the scenes with Chunjin and enjoy the film.

White people don’t have a monopoly on racism

This piece titled “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” makes for an interesting read. I can just see the bitterness dripping off my computer screen, and equating gaijin to the n-word is overdoing it, but he does make some good points.

Technically, 外人 (gaijin) just means “outsider.” Those 2 characters literally spell out “outside person.” So in a way, it really does just mean “foreigner.” Here in the U.S., we might talk about “foreigners,” “foreign countries,” or “foreign languages” (except for the PC way in which my high school had the “world languages” department) and it’s generally not considered discriminatory.

The problem with gaijin arises in its actual usage. It’s bothered me since I was a small child. I’ve definitely had the occasion to cringe when Japanese people would blanketly refer to the Americans as gaijin while here in the United States. It’s just patently ethnocentric to call everyone else a “foreigner” while you are in their country.

Something the “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” column also touches on is this binary view of the world. When my Japanese relatives would ask me questions about my life in the U.S., they would often ask me about what gaijin are like, as if I was the ambassador in this amorphous non-Japan world and I could shed light on how “they” (everybody not Japanese) are different from “us” (Japanese). I know that what they were really asking me was what Americans are like and not what, say, French people or Russian people are like, but they’re all gaijin anyway, right? (Similarly, my grandmother referred to the U.S. as 向こうの国(the country over there)).

Of course in most any case, they don’t “mean anything by it.” Gaijin isn’t used as an insult so much as a casual way to refer to people who are “not Japanese.” But this casual, implicit racism is perhaps even more dangerous, as it means its usage is more widespread and any criticisms to it can be easily dismissed.

I wonder what exactly my own status is in Japan. As I’ve been alerting family to my new U.S. citizenship, I’ve jokingly been saying that I’ll now be a gaijin next time I go to Japan. Of course, I’ve essentially been one this whole time. Or does the fact that I can look and talk Japanese and I’m familiar with the country enough mean that I can still pass as a nihonjin(Japanese)?

Well, if the state of Japanese-Brazilians that have returned to Japan is any indication (or is it?), it doesn’t look so good for me. But that’s a separate post.