Review | Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II
Reviewed by Alexander Howard, University of Sydney
Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II opens with a description of a photograph depicting a building in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. The building, “nestled between storefronts, restaurants, and a bustling boulevard” is adorned with “film posters and advertising banners hanging under a whimsical façade of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji” (1). We are looking at the Fuji Kan theatre. Built in 1925, the Fuji Kan was one of several Japanese-owned theatres in Los Angeles before World War II, and it showcased the latest Japanese films, often with live music and commentary. Denise Khor observes that the Fuji Kan was more than a commercial entertainment venue. It was a refuge for Japanese citizens facing discrimination, offering an inclusive shared space amidst widespread social exclusion and housing restrictions along the Pacific coast. Indeed, physical environments of this sort functioned, in Khor’s estimation, “as places of gathering and assembly” (1). These venues, often located in urban centres, hosted not only film screenings but also performances, lectures, sermons, rallies, community gatherings, and fundraising events. On occasion, they were adapted to provide basic needs like shelter and food.
Khor’s account of the Fuji Kan provides a useful entry point into her richly detailed book “that tells us the story of film circulation moving multidirectionally across the Pacific, of ephemeral exhibition practices during and beyond the silent area, and of alternative film publics and contexts taking shape in the United States throughout the early twentieth century and beyond” (3). Specifically, Khor moves to consider this history via an exploration of alternative public spheres of cinematic “practice and possibility” operating in the United States (3). Drawing on extensive archival research, Khor’s monograph looks beyond dominant industries and national contexts to better appreciate the “transnational and global dimensions” of American film and media history (3). Additionally, Khor reorients Asian American film and media history by revealing an earlier history of Asian American independent filmmaking. She suggests that scholarship on these matters “has tended to focus on bad screen objects and the ideological production of negative images and stereotypes” associated with classical Hollywood (10). Over four intricately plotted and argued chapters, Khor attempts to “widen and complicate the relationship of Asian Americans to the institution of the cinema” (11). Transpacific Convergences achieves this goal by expanding “the objects, sites, and foci” that we tend to associate with filmic inquiry, such as live and performative dimensions of cinematic activity. Through this method, Khor’s study “recognizes Japanese Americans as themselves participants in the emerging and changing film publics of the early twentieth century” (11).
Chapter one tracks the emergence of Japanese American independent filmmaking. Khor details how, in the 1910s and 1920s, Japanese Americans adopted a racial politics of respectability and uplift to advance their community’s interests. Notably, as Khor points out, “Japanese American racial uplift was itself a campaign over the image of the race. Leaders and advocates sought self-transformation: to not only reform but to remake the racial self” (24). Cinema proved to be instrumental in this transformation. Its increasing popularity and association with modernity made it an ideal medium for processes of “self-fashioning and reimaging the look of racial progress” (25). For example, the Japanese Photoplayers’ Club of Los Angeles, established in 1917, advanced the cause of the “dignity of the race” on the screen (25) and protested the problematic representational politics of films such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). This context situates Khor’s bravura interpretation of “the earliest Asian American film with a surviving print,” The Oath of the Sword (1914) (15). Released at a time of heightened anti-Japanese sentiment because of the Supreme Court’s decision to bar citizenship for all Japanese people living in the United States, The Oath of The Sword drew on conventional tropes associated with Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904), while simultaneously promulgating, as Khor convincingly argues, “a vision of racial uplift and modernity not unlike better known race films of this era” (15).
Following the analysis of Japanese American film production in the silent era, Khor widens the scope of her investigation. She turns her attention to concurrent theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition venues used by Japanese people in the United States. “Whereas Japanese proprietors operated film theaters from the first start of the nickelodeon era and beyond,” Khor clarifies, “Japanese films were also often projected in nontheatrical exhibition venues” (18). Khor confirms that diverse nontheatrical spaces such as churches, temples, backyards, community halls, and agricultural fields were important exhibition sites for the circulation of Japanese films in the United States before World War II. This is significant because it gestures toward the scale and reach of alternative cinematic networks operating beyond the conventional theatre system at the time in question. Khor is particularly curious about the central role that benshi played in film exhibition during this historical period, because they illustrate her contention that the performative dimensions of film presentation were as consequential as the films themselves in shaping audience experiences and constructing alternative film publics. Benshi were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films during the early twentieth century: They stood next to the screen and described the action, often adding their own commentary and interpretation. “In Japan,” Khor explains, “the benshi had been integral to the cinema. They gained the sort of notoriety reserved for movie stars as audiences came to admire their narratorial and performative skills” (57). When it came to film exhibition in the United States, the benshi served both as performers and film exhibitors, playing a vital role in the development of an alternative system of film distribution and circulation, with consequences for understanding historical cultures of film-going in the United States.
Khor’s discussion of the benshi—who later came to play an important and controversial role when it came to the dissemination of Japanese imperialistic propaganda on American shores in the lead-up to World War II—carries over into chapter three, which concerns the development of Japanese American film culture during the early sound era of the 1930s. Still, as Khor outlines, certain silent-era cinematic practices “persisted not only in the film production by Japanese in the United States but also in the context of film exhibition” (108). Somewhat unexpectedly, the benshi, who adapted their performances to the arrival of synchronised sound, continued to flourish in an age characterised by grave economic instability and uneven technological development. Khor finds that critics and audiences in theatrical and nontheatrical spaces alike “continued to appreciate the contribution of the benshi, making benshi narration indispensable through the 1930s” (111).
Khor’s investigation into the complexities and ambiguities of early Japanese American film culture closes in the early 1940s, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Chapter four “resituates the Japanese-owned theater as a site for the multidirectional movement of films across and between the Asia Pacific” (117), as Khor establishes that Japanese-operated moving-picture theaters and venues operating in the 1940s “had a patronage that extended well beyond a Japanese immigrant audience” (116). By welcoming Filipinos, for example, as Khor’s archivally driven research conclusively determines, “Japanese theater owners countered the racialized logic of exclusion by seizing on the equalizing promises of consumerism” (119). Providing us with a valuable, historicized critique of these and other such logics, Transpacific Convergences will undoubtedly appeal to film scholars, historians, and those interested in Asian American studies. Enriching our understanding of early-twentieth-century film culture, Khor’s monograph makes a significant contribution to the field, encouraging a reevaluation of the transnational dynamics within U.S. media cultures and the vital role of marginalized communities in shaping cultural narratives.