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NIKKEI VIEW
Article featuring Gil Asakawa
This article ran in the Miami Herald on July 29, 2001
EAST
IS EDEN
BY
SAM EIFLING, seifling@herald.com
In a west Miami mini-mall sits Anime Hurricane, a shop full of toy boxes and comics stacked on tables, in corners and underfoot. A TV blares Japanese cartoons and the high, dark walls are festooned with posters and scrolls depicting Asian cartoon characters ranging from obscure to Pokémon: drawings of men with hair like the jagged edges of a broken bottle and women with waists ranging from itty to bitty and eyes like fishbowls - it's a mosaic both foreign and familiar.
Yet the greatest testament to the tightening grip that Japanese cartoons, called anime, have on the American psyche rests on the glass countertop a few feet from the cash register: synopses of the 291 episodes of the cartoon series Dragon Ball Z.
The lists come to the rescue of the store's employees because kids often rush excitedly into the shop, requesting tapes of the episodes that follow the one they just saw on cable.
Manager Pat Pungpee, 26, is struck by the enthusiasm, but as a fan who used to have to buy untranslated Japanese tapes underground, he loves it.
``I thought that maybe I would be able to catch the odd TV show that they brought over,'' he says. ``But people are really taking to it. In two years' time, it has exploded. Way beyond what I would have expected. Way beyond.''
But Pungpee is not alone. In fact, he's on the frontlines of the latest cultural incursion. Asian pop culture - from movies to TV, comics to cooking shows - is everywhere in America these days. The tiger is through crouching, the dragon has come out of hiding. After decades on the margins of the American mainstream, the Eastern cultures that gave the world tofu and futons, tai-chi and Tae Kwon Do, Maoism and Taoism, Szechwan and sushi, have surged into the spotlight:
- A Chinese movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has grossed $140 million (the most ever for a foreign-language film in the United States), won four Oscars, and this month became one of the fastest-selling DVDs ever.
- On Tiger's lucrative heels, this summer four movies with Asian leads hit the screen: Kiss of the Dragon with Jet Li, which took in $13.3 million its opening weekend July 6-8; Rush Hour 2, with Jackie Chan; and director Tsui Hark's Hong Kong-shot Time and Tide, (both set to open in South Florida on Friday); and Brother, Japanese cult star ``Beat'' Takeshi's first attempt with a U.S.-based story, opening Aug. 10. A fifth summer movie, the computer-animated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, is based on the video game series developed by Japanese Hironobu Sakaguchi.
- At baseball's All-Star game, three of the big names were Seattle Mariners Japanese slugger Ichiro Suzuki, Los Angeles Dodger Korean pitcher Chan Ho Park and Mariners Japanese pitcher Kazuhiro Sasaki.
- A Japanese cooking show, "Iron Chef," is giving the Food Network a cult hit on college campuses, where some students base drinking games around it. Three special episodes from June 1-3 drew 8.4 million viewers, a record number for the niche network. And the official "Iron Chef" book recently was Amazon.com's 11th best seller in that most un-Japanese of places, Nebraska. A new season begins this fall.
- Kids-oriented afternoon TV programming is filled with such anime as Digimon, Pokémon, Gundam Wings and Dragon Ball Z, to say nothing of their accompanying flood of merchandising.
- Dramatic Chinese films, such as Farewell My Concubine and In the Mood for Love, have long been popular on the art house circuit, but now recent imports from South Korea (Chunhyang) and Taiwan (Yi-Yi, Millennium Mambo) are joining them as critical darlings.
- In visual arts, artists such as Japan's Yoshitomo Nara, with his punkish images of children, are making a name for themselves.
``Sometimes a trend implies a bell curve, like swallowing gold fish or the hula hoop,'' says Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. ``I don't think this is one of those things. I don't think it's going anywhere in the near future or even the distant future. This stuff has been introduced and it's going to become part of the mix.''
`IRON' FEVER
Asia is simply big. Always has been, according to globes. Thirty percent of the world's land. Seventy percent of its people. It has the biggest wall, that Great one in China. The biggest mountains, the Himalayas. The biggest fire-breathing nuclear lizard, Godzilla. After Hispanics, Asians are the fastest growing U.S. minority - Census 2000 counted more than 11 million people of Asian descent or about 4 percent of the population, a proportion projected to double in 40 years.
Quantifying cultural impact is more difficult than counting heads, but this much is clear: While Americans have long admired Asian religion, foods and art, only recently have they been so enamored with Asian entertainment, and "Crouching Tiger" and "Pokémon" are large reasons for that.
How far their success reaches will depend largely on the Asian-crazy youth of America. Generations X and Y, some say, are often well-qualified to grasp the foreign cultures after years of bombardment by Asian-produced video games and Voltron cartoons.
Take the "Iron Chef" phenomenon. The gist of the show is that chefs compete to prepare a multicourse meal from a theme ingredient - green peppers, for example, or piglets or lobster. After an hour of furious cooking, the dishes are served to a panel of judges with glory for the winner and shame for the loser.
"Iron Chef" fan Lisa Spiegel, 32, of Coral Springs loves the show for the dubbing, the intensity, the judges floridly praising dishes like pike eel liver. But it took her some time to understand it. A 19-year-old neighbor eventually told her how much college kids love the show.
``I was glad to hear I wasn't the only one,'' Spiegel says. ``I'm not saying it's as big as beer, but everyone watches it.''
Miami-bred Brett Ratner, who directed "Rush Hour" and its upcoming sequel, says American youth are also enamored with black hip-hop culture, which itself has long loved Asian martial arts flicks. (Prime examples are performers such as the Wu-Tang Clan.)
MOVIE HAD APPEAL
Recognizing this appeal, Ratner paired Jackie Chan, who is Chinese, with Chris Tucker, who is black, in the buddy comedies. The 1998 original raked in nearly $250 million worldwide.
``Teenagers love my movie,'' Ratner says. ``It sold a million DVDs. Pop culture is youth culture. And if young kids love something, it's going to grow into other demographics.''
Which is not to say that adults can't appreciate the finer points of, say, Jet Li's crackling kung-fu. At a recent showing of Kiss of the Dragon in Fort Lauderdale, the crowd gasped loudly when Li's character kicked a billiard ball up from a corner pocket, then from midair into a gunman's forehead. As the film's final credits rolled - and rap blared - the audience applauded. Not exactly art house fare. But it does, in a word, rock.
Li is unsurpassed in martial artistry and now his gunslinging Hong Kong counterpart, Crouching Tiger's Chow Yun-Fat, is no longer a cult star. So, studios have scrambled to uncover the next hot Chinese movie and American audiences can look forward to upcoming imports such as "Flying Dragon, Leaping Tiger" and "Roaring Dragon, Bluffing Tiger."
Then there are those taking the opposite strategy. The bloody but thoughtful crime drama "Time and Tide" arrives with the tag line: ``No tigers, no dragons - just a hell of a lot of bullets.'' Never mind that the movie was completed before the release of "Crouching Tiger" - there's a craze to catch.
Director Tsui Hark, on the phone from Hong Kong, found the studio's advertising line surprising, and bristled slightly at the implication that one great Chinese movie could pave the way for others.
``Movies are not mass-produced merchandise,'' he says.
DRAWING CARD
For mass-produced merchandise, an eBay search for Pokémon will suffice. Trading cards, video games, movies, key chains, Pez dispensers - oodles of gewgaws, an empire sprung from a show about catching and training monsters by the dozens. Pokémon is one huge reason that Cartoon Network, Kids WB and Fox Kids all look to Japan for much of their kids' programming.
Whereas many Americans regard cartoons as kiddie, anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics) are serious business. Before "Titanic" rocked the boat, the anime feature "Princess Mononoke" was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. Aside from having a distinctly striking look, the best anime is mature and intricate, and it's the best stuff that survives stateside.
``[The Japanese] really know how to create very rich and deep worlds with rich and deep mythology and rich and deep characters,'' says Donna Friedman, executive vice president at Kids' WB, which has anime "Yu-Gi-Oh," "Card Collectors" and "Pokémon." ``I think it works on a variety of levels; first and foremost it presents this broad world that only kids understand.''
Not that Japanese cartoons are anything new to American kids. As a child, Mike Lazzo watched "Astro Boy" and "Gigantor," both Japanese exports. At 15, he grooved on another, "Speed Racer." Now he's senior vice president of programming and production at Cartoon Network, which carries ``Toonami,'' a block of action cartoons that has evolved to air "Dragon Ball Z," "Big O" and "Tenchi" - all anime.
``There was a reason I sat and marveled at Astro Boy at 5,'' says Lazzo, 43. ``I was astonished. It was a flying little boy who happened to be a robot, and I thought that was the most interesting thing in the world. There's a lot of older people who watch 'Pokémon' and 'Gundam.' If you're into animation, you'll watch just a good show. My generation, the first to grow up with TV animation, they think animation is cool. My parents' generation used to say, those are kid cartoons. I will watch animation the rest of my life.''
STEREOTYPES REMAIN
It follows that Asian culture is a smash among little kids, big kids and people who used to be kids, because of some immutable laws of the universe: dragons are cool, robots are cool, ninjas are cool, martial arts are cool, the future is cool, magic is cool. All of this, beautifully and carefully crafted, is the stuff of Asian movies and cartoons.
But some fear that little of it carries any substance. Many of the students in the Asian culture classes of Darrell Y. Hamamoto, a professor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California Davis, expect to learn about Sega games and their favorite anime.
Then he hits them with My Lai and Panmunjom and the ghosts of wars that never touched them. ``People who are 30 and under have grown up in a milieu very different from their parents and their grandparents, which was very heavily anti-Asian,'' Hamamoto says. ``The problem is that some of this [cultural] knowledge is scant, it's light, it has no depth. But they can't make the argument that these are simply civilizations that are inferior, that can be condescended to.
``They're not going to grow up with the warped perception of their parents. They just can't.''
But if the younger generations may be more open to Asian images, they still aren't getting a full range of Asian humanity. Asians have long been invisible on American TV and movies and portrayed only as caricatures, Hamamoto says, with women presented as demure sex objects and men as asexual nerds. He has written books and articles criticizing this treatment to little avail, he says, adding that he's so fed up that he's gathering investors to launch his own cable network - Yellow Entertainment Network TV, or YENTV.
His only interest in "Kiss of the Dragon" was whether Li got to be romantic with his blond co-star, Bridget Fonda. He was dismayed to hear the relationship remained purely platonic. Not so much as a peck on the cheek.
``Ah, I knew it. Just like 'Romeo Must Die,''' he says, recalling the Li movie from 2000 in which the star was paired with black actress-singer Aaliyah. ``That tells you a lot right there. The sexuality part of it is tied to power.''
Beyond issues of power are issues of simple taste. Gil Asakawa was born in Japan but grew up in the United States being offended by shows such as Kung-Fu, in which a half-Chinese character was played by a white actor, David Carradine, with his eyes taped back. No wonder he sees "Crouching Tiger" as a boon.
``It will be kind of tragic if Crouching Tiger is a one-hit wonder,'' says Asakawa, who now writes an Asian culture column at nikkeiview.com. ``It could easily be a vanguard of Asian culture being presented to the American mainstream. For every non-Asian that got to see 'Crouching Tiger,' that's a very good thing. Eventually those movies will break down biases.''
Others are skeptical. Eric Nakamura, editor and publisher of Giant Robot, a California-based 'zine about all that is Asian and cutting-edge cool, says people don't see movies as a cultural gateway to study and understanding. As for their power to erase stereotypes, he says, ``dummies are still going to be dummies, and racism is still going to be racism.''
Asian entertainment may eventually do more than simply entertain. Changing the world may be a tall order for quarrelsome cartoon monsters and martial arts stars. But they seem destined to get their chance as they become part of the cultural mix.
``It felt like an Asian fever in the states - Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-Fat, 'Crouching Tiger,' stuff like that,'' says Time and Tide director Hark. ``It feels like a normal thing. It should be like that, right? We have so much in our history of racial difference, but in Asia, there has never been such a thing. We started watching American movies a long time ago.''