The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 9 (1998)

Doubleness: American Images of Japanese
Men in Silent Spy Films
Daisuke MIYAOINTRODUCTION
Japanese men have been depicted as spies in many movies madeoutside Japan. In this context, many people might recall the ﬁfth James
Bond ﬁlm You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967), in which theJapanese secret spy association helps Bond to save the world, or ﬁlms
about Ninja such as Revenge of Ninja (Sam Fursteinberg, 1983) starring the Japanese actor Sho Kosugi. A ninja, according to Richard
Deacon’s deﬁnition, is “a samurai who [has] mastered the art of making himself invisible through some artiﬁce and is chieﬂy engaged inespionage . . . [and] resembles a combination of James Bond andBatman.”1 We can trace the origin of these depictions of Japanese men
as spies or spy-like characters in the silent era of motion pictures: ten
out of ﬁfty-four ﬁlms listed under the subject heading “Japan and theJapanese” from 1910 till 1920 in the American Film Institute Catalog
were spy ﬁlms.2
The actor most closely associated with the tradition of the Japanese
spy in motion pictures is Sessue Hayakawa, who was a popular star in
the U.S. from 1914 until 1922.3 According to the AFI Catalog heappeared in thirty-four ﬁlms from 1914 until 1919, ﬁve of which were
spy ﬁlms. Moreover, he achieved popular recognition for the ﬁrst time
when he played the role of a Japanese spy in the ﬁlm The Typhoon
Copyright © 1998 Daisuke Miyao. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
69

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DAISUKE MIYAO(Reginald Barker, Oct. 1914). An article about the ﬁlm in the
Milwaukee News called Hayakawa “a movie star.”4
Why have Japanese men been depicted as spies many times inmovies made outside Japan since the beginning of silent era? Is it
because some aspects of images of Japanese men have been particularly suited to the spy ﬁlm genre? If so, what are these particular aspects?
Though there have been a great many essays about spy ﬁlms and ﬁlms
in which Japanese men appear, none of them have explained this notable connection between Japanese men and spies in the movies. The
purpose of this essay, therefore, is to historicize the point of intersection between the spy ﬁlm genre and ﬁlms in which Japanese men
appear, in terms of socio-cultural context. The socio-cultural discourseof Orientalism seems to have played an important role in this intersection.
According to Edward W. Said, Orientalism is “a Western style fordominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Said
writes:One of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism
was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient—its sensuality, its
tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy,
its backwardness—into a separate and unchallenged coherence.5

This essay mainly deals with the relationship between spy ﬁlms inwhich Japanese men appear and Orientalism.
Moreover, this essay tries to present a more complicated version of
the nature of otherness than have the monolithic discourses of Orientalism. That is, racial or cultural otherness has been conventionallypresented in terms of a femininity enforced by Western colonists or amodern hierarchy in which European countries and the United States
have supremacy. This essay discusses American images of Japanese
men in terms not only of the femininity ascribed to Japanese men by
the Orientalist construction of the Asian other but also of the masculinity ascribed to Japanese men at the same time. In other words,
this essay is meant to reveal the fact that American people have identiﬁed Japanese men with a complex Orientalist image that involves anambiguous masculinity as well as the more conventional femininity.
Japanese men have had a complex and ambivalent masculine image.
To American people, Japanese men could be both sexually attractive
and sexually threatening. Japanese men could be not only a political

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71

and economic threat but also a threat to the American ideal masculinity.
Before speciﬁcally examining American images of Japanese men insilent spy ﬁlms, let us take a look brieﬂy at the beginning of the spy
ﬁlm genre and the genre’s notable characteristics, as an overview.
Motion pictures have been using spies and espionage as a topic since
the very beginning. As James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts pointout:
As long as there have been motion pictures, the phenomenon of espionage has been used to entertain as well as to propagandize for nationalor governmental causes. Thus the spy ﬁlm has been an intricate part ofthe motion picture industry, justly ranking in popularity with the western, detective ﬁlm, musical, horror movie, and comedy as a popularcinema form.6

According to Parish and Pitts, “one of the ﬁrst ﬁlms to use the spy
motif seriously was the 1914 Universal serial, Lucille Love, Girl of
Mystery,” which “dealt with a man who becomes an international spy
in order to revenge the loss of the girl he loved, by stealing defense
plans from the man who had won her.”7 However, the spy motif wasused considerably earlier than 1914. The AFI Catalog lists eighteen
ﬁlms under the subject “spies” from 1898 until 1910, and 156 from
1911 until 1920.8 It is clear that the motion picture spy genre was bornin the very early period of the medium.
In 1898 Sigmund Lubin distributed a ﬁlm titled Execution of the
Spanish Spy.9 According to the AFI Catalog, this was the ﬁrst ﬁlm todepict a spy.10 In March 1907, the Vitagraph Company of America
produced The Spy, a Romantic Story of the Civil War. The story is
about a Union spy captured and sentenced to death who changes
clothes with his devoted wife and escapes to complete his mission.11
David W. Grifﬁth, “the father of American cinema,” directed The
Prussian Spy at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company inMarch 1909. This is a tragedy based on the international love between
a French girl and a Prussian spy, who is killed by a jealous Frenchofﬁcer.12 The characteristic theme of the spy genre movies at that time
was, in many cases, a tragedy caused by the very nature of espionage:
disguised identities and international deception.
As long as there have been motion pictures, there have been “exploitation ﬁlms.” According to Robert Sklar, the term “exploitation ﬁlm”

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DAISUKE MIYAO

has had two meanings, one to do with promotion methods and theother to do with taboo content matter. Sklar writes:
In the lexicon of the ﬁlm industry, the term “exploitation” originallydescribed special forms of publicity or promotion—for example, people
dressed in costumes standing outside theaters to attract attention. Since
the 1930s, however, a second meaning for the term has become dominant: low-budget independent ﬁlms dealing with subjects made taboo by
the Production Code, such as drugs and sex hygiene.13

Sklar insists that the second meaning became dominant under therule of the Production Code, after 1934, but in the pre-Code era, many
exploitation ﬁlms made were not necessarily “low-budget independentﬁlms.” In those ﬁlms, certain kinds of phenomena, such as drug addiction or odd sexual behavior, which were made taboo by the Production
Code, appeared frequently. Those subjects were sometimes related topeople coming to the U.S. from outside or still living far outside of the
U.S., like Asians or Africans. Those people were depicted eccentrically or stereotypically to entertain American spectators as well as to propagandize national or governmental causes. These depictions of foreign
peoples did not necessarily have any connection with their realities.
Exploitation is a word with strong connotations of power abuse, andexploitation ﬁlms like these were made by those who had political andeconomic power over the people or phenomena depicted in their ﬁlms.
Even before motion pictures appeared in the U.S., there were thesekind of “exploitations.” According to Charles Musser, illustrated lectures, which used lithographic and photographic slides, often exploreddifferences of class, ethnicity, race, and even gender within the framework of the travel genre in order to appeal to two particular culturalgroups in American life in the mid 1890s, the so-called Progressive
era. The ﬁrst of those groups was that which identiﬁed itself with thereﬁned culture associated with Harper’s Weekly and polite literature,and the second consisted of members of church-based institutions.14
Japan was one of the favorite subjects for these illustrated lectures.
Popular lecturers such as John Stoddard and E. Burton Holms, forexample, included sessions on Japan.15 Beautiful Japanese scenery or
the unfamiliar behavior of Japanese people were considered exotic
enough to attract American audiences within the terms of the travel
genre. Motion Pictures also dealt with Japanese people as a subjectof exploitation from the very beginning. In 1894, the Edison Manu-DOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN

73

facturing Company produced a ﬁlm titled Imperial Japanese Dance,
which was “a charming representation of the Mikado dance by three
beautiful Japanese ladies in full costume.”16 After that, many ﬁlms
depicting exotic Japanese scenes such as the dances of geisha girls,
sumo wrestling, or festivals were made. The AFI Catalog lists ninetythree ﬁlms under the subject “Japan and the Japanese” from 1894 until
1910 and ﬁfty-one from 1911 until 1920.17 Japanese people were oneof the central subjects of exploitation ﬁlms in the early period of
motion pictures.
The popularity of ﬁlms about Japanese people can be explained
within several scholarly discourses, including the socio-cultural discourse of Orientalism. An exotic image, which was sometimes alsoerotic, appealed to European and American curiosity about other cultures. For instance, one of the functions of nineteenth-century French
paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme or Eugène Delacroix was “to certifythat the people encapsulated by, or deﬁned by its [sic] presence, areirredeemably different from, more backward than and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product.”18
According to Nick Browne, within the ﬁeld of American culture in
the early phase of the silent ﬁlm period, “the popular assimilation ofOrientalism worked . . . in two major interlinked cultural registers ofpleasure and of power.”19 If Browne is correct, how did the “pleasure”
and “power” of Orientalism relate to the spy ﬁlm genre? Speciﬁcally,in the discourse of Orientalism, the spy ﬁlm genre seems to have been
related to the popular discourse surrounding Japan. That is, ambivalent
images of Japan, involving both a positive craze for Japonisme andnegative anti-Japanese sentiments, existed in Americans’ minds.
In my discussion of silent spy ﬁlms that feature Japanese spies, I am
mainly concentrating on ﬁlms made in the U.S. This is partly becauseof the stronger economic and aesthetic inﬂuence of the American cinema compared with that of other nations, and partly because of the limited availability of materials. My argument is mainly based on analyses of articles and advertisements from ﬁlm trade magazines, except
for a few textual analyses of ﬁlms that I was able to watch. The factthat this has forced me to be more descriptive than analytical, particularly in the discussion of particular ﬁlms, is problematic. Nonetheless,this approach of mine might be the starting point for more analytical
study of this theme in the future when more ﬁlm texts become available through continuing efforts in ﬁlm preservation. In this argument,

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DAISUKE MIYAOWorld War One will play an important role, because of the great inﬂuence that the war had not only upon the intersection between the spy
ﬁlm genre and the exploitation ﬁlms of Japan but also upon U.S. ﬁlm
culture itself. Therefore, I have divided this essay into three parts: preWorld War One, during World War One, and post-World War One.
I

IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN IN PRE-WORLD WAR ONE SPY FILMS

In July 1904, ﬁve months after the February 8 beginning of the
Russo-Japanese war, the Edison Company and the Klein Optical
Company distributed a ﬁlm titled Capture and Execution of Spies by
Russians. According to the AFI Catalog, this was the ﬁrst ﬁlm inwhich a Japanese spy appeared.20 According to Klein’s publicity
department summary, in this ﬁlm, two Japanese spies, disguised ascoolies, fail to dynamite railway trucks in Russia and, after a chase,are captured and sentenced to death. The spies give three cheers fortheir Emperor, and are shot dead.21
In September 1910 the Kalem Company produced a ﬁlm titled The
Japanese Spy. According to the Moving Picture World, this ﬁlm tells
the story of a Japanese spy who secures secret information concerning
the latest maneuvers of the United States Army. He leaves his wifeand children in Japan, and, in America, disguised as a peddler, he pursues his mission. He is ﬁnally captured, and “dies like a Samurai, committing hari-kari.”22 These early short ﬁlms portrayed Japanese spies
with particular characteristics: they were disguised, they represented acertain threat to the U.S., and they suffered a peculiarly or exoticallydigniﬁed death.
The ﬁrst feature ﬁlm to use these characteristics more dramatically
was The Typhoon, in which Sessue Hayakawa appears.23 The ﬁlm wasbased on the play Taifun, written by a Hungarian, Menyhert Lengyel,
which had been successful in Berlin, Paris, London, and the U.S. Dr.
Tokoramo (Hayakawa), a young Japanese diplomat in Paris, lives areﬁned life surrounded by exotic and luxurious Japanese furniture. He
has a French sweetheart, who is more attracted to Tokoramo than to
her American ﬁancé. Tokoramo is actually on a secret mission, creating a conﬁdential report on the French military forces based on documents leaked from the French government. His French sweetheartﬁnds out that he has been seeing another woman, and, furious, calls
him a “yellow whining rat” and Japan “a yellow blot on the ocean.” InDOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN

75

response, Tokoramo kills her. He wants to confess to the crime, but hehas to complete his mission, and so his countrymen sacriﬁce a boy
who pleads guilty to the murder and is guillotined. In the end,
Tokoramo follows his conscience by committing suicide in a digniﬁed
manner.24
This storyline and the movie’s characterizations, Richard A.
Oehling argues, “strongly suggested deviousness and duplicity on thepart of the Japanese and, at least by inference, condemned interracial
love affairs as being disastrous and tragic from their very inception.”25
Indeed, this ﬁlm can be interpreted as depicting Japanese men, in
this case Tokoramo, as spies disguised as men of respectable position,emblems of both an exotic culture attractive especially to Europeanand American women and a threat to the U.S.
The Typhoon was a huge success, and this success seems to have led
to Hayakawa playing Japanese spies in his next two ﬁlms. The ﬁrst
was The Ambassador’s Envoy (Thomas H. Ince, 1914), in which
Kamura (Hayakawa), a Japanese spy, is defeated by a clever Caucasian woman.26 The plot and the characteristics of the Japanese spy inthis ﬁlm seem similar to those of The Typhoon. The second was The
Clue (James Neil and Frank Reichert, July 1915), in which Russianbrothers Count Boris and Alexis Rabourdin obtain a map of the permanent mines and coastline defenses of Japan and plan to sell it toGerman secret agents in London. Passing through America, Alexis
plans to marry the wealthy Eve Bertram, who loves him. Boris, meanwhile, falls in love with Christine Lesley, Eve’s neighbor, whom Eve’s
brother Guy, an amateur inventor experimenting with explosives, also
loves. Nogi (Hayakawa), a Japanese spy sent to obtain the explosives,
and who serves as Guy’s valet, plots to destroy the map. As Boris prepares to leave for London, he gives Christine an old Russian coin as a
keepsake. To show Guy that she does not care for Boris, Christine
attaches the coin to Guy’s watch chain. That night Christine discovers
Alexis’s dead body. Grief stricken, Eve summons Detective Williams,
who ﬁnds the coin near the body. Guy, who had fought with Alexis
because he objected to him marrying his sister, and who had then left
the injured man, thinks that he killed him. After Christine agrees tomarry Boris in exchange for his silence, Guy considers suicide, butduring a ﬁght, Nogi sets off an explosion that kills Boris. Badly injured,
Nogi confesses to killing Alexis by jujitsu and dies as he watches
Christine destroy the map.27

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DAISUKE MIYAO

In The Clue, a Japanese spy is a disguised servant who embodies
exotic culture in his practice of jujitsu and his digniﬁed acceptance ofdeath, and is a threat to the U.S. The Moving Picture World writes“The part of a Japanese is taken by a genuine son of the Mikado and ison the whole taken well. The man succeeds in creating and sustaining
to the last the atmosphere of mystery” (italics mine). The critic may
have used the word “mystery” not only because of Hayakawa’s disguise, but also because the critic wanted to imply that Japanese men
were mysterious.28 Variety insists that “Had this picture shown moreof the Jap Secret Service with more Japs and their devious ways, itwould have been vastly more interesting.” What do “their devious
ways” mean? Had the critic of Variety been more satisﬁed if a Japanese spy seduces a Caucasian woman in this ﬁlm?29
A Japanese spy disguised as a servant and representing a threat to
the U.S. appeared in yet another ﬁlm, A Trade Secret (William
Haddock, July 1915), which was based on a novelette of the same title
by Ernest M. Poate that had been published in the All-Story CavalierWeekly (10 Apr. 1915). This novelette shows that the intersection
between spy ﬁction and exploitation ﬁction relating to Japan was not
limited to ﬁlms but also pervaded other areas of popular culture of theperiod. Complete plot information is not available for this ﬁlm, but thebasic outline seems to be that after a chemist discovers a process for
manufacturing synthetic quinine, his Japanese servant, really an agent
for the drug trust, steals the formula, and blows up his master’s palatial
houseboat. In the end, the chemist’s ﬁancée recovers the paper.30
Japanese spies appearing in pre-World War One ﬁlms had an imageof “doubleness”: often disguised as servants in American households,
they were ambivalent embodiments of both attractive exotic culture
and threat. Probably, spies were chosen to depict this ambivalent
image of Japanese men. Since spies are secret agents, it is almost
inevitable that they have double identities. The disguises of the typicalJapanese characters in those ﬁlms mean that their actual double identities reﬂect the double image of Japanese men held by American audiences. What was the socio-cultural background that caused theseemphasized images of doubleness? The doubleness here refers not
only to a two-sided (disguised, double) character—i.e. servant andenemy—but also to the two-sided (ambivalent, contradictory) image
that American audiences had of Japanese men—i.e. exotic, attractive
and threatening, betraying.

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Because of several factors, such as regulation of nickelodeons,
whose main audiences were the working class people, and in which
many middle class people believed that many crimes were committed
by the working class people, enactment of state laws of censorship tothe contents of ﬁlms, construction of new movie theaters for sophisticated audience as substitutes for nickelodeons, and production of feature ﬁlms, ﬁlm audiences in the U.S. in the 1910s are considered tohave become largely middle class.31
On one hand, middle-class Americans had a certain admiration forexotic and luxurious Japanese woodblock prints, objets d’art, theater
arts, and philosophy, and Japanese culture in general. This admiration
had been strengthened by a craze for Japonaiserie (the word wascoined by Baudelaire in 1861) or Japonisme in Europe, and the Japanese pavilions at the World Exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia,
London, Brussels and Chicago. This admiration was exploited by particular companies or forms of advertising which associated the Oriental
image with luxury.32 Tiffany & Co., for example, sold Japanese artifacts such as ceramics, lacquer ware and bronzes.33 The Mikado,
Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular opera, was ﬁrst performed in 1885, andafter The Mikado many plays set in Japan appeared, including Sir
Edwin Arnold’s Adzuma: Or the Japanese Wife (1893). The Kabuki
drama Tsuchigumo, or The Spider Play, was performed at the SaintLouis fair of 1904.34 The U.S. tour of Japanese stage actress Hanako in1907 achieved remarkable success.35 Zen philosophy was introduced
to America in 1906.36
On the other hand, fear of Japanese expansion or invasion into thePhilippines and the U.S. appeared among the middle classes after
Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905. The words “yellow peril” appearedin magazines such as the Outlook, the Nation, and the North American
Review.37 However, for much of the middle class Japan was an ambiguous threat, and it was not yet a serious “yellow peril.”38 This might
have been partly because the number of the Japanese residents in the
U.S. was limited, except in the Paciﬁc states, and the economic threatof the Japanese immigrants was not yet a nationally perceived problem.39
After the turn of the century, Americans became gradually aware ofand interested in the development of the actual Japanese spy system.
For instance, in 1904 Walter Dening’s biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who uniﬁed Japan as a nation at the end of the six-

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DAISUKE MIYAO

teenth century, portrayed Hideyoshi as a spymaster employing a hugearmy of spies. He writes: “the whole empire was one network of espionage.”40
Japan’s defeat of Russia seems also to have played a part in attracting more Western attention to the Japanese spy system. In Britain in1907 General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was attached to the Japanese First
Army as a British military observer, wrote:
The Japanese realized the weakness of Russia much better than any
American or European observers. The British believed that Russia wasin Manchuria to stay. Japan weighed the evidence—superior intelligence—and came to a precisely contrary conclusion. . . . The Japanese
accept what their experts tell them.41

Another British ofﬁcer, Colonel Immanuel (his ﬁrst name is not
written) also attributed the swiftness of the Japanese victory overRussia to “superior intelligence—especially on the naval side” in areport to the German General Staff in 1908.42 In the U.S. in 1907
Harper’s Weekly wrote:
During the war between Russia and Japan, Manchuria was inhabited byspies and soldiers. . . . We shall not know how the Japs did in their conduct of the elaborate spy system, save as the Russians tell of it in theirpresent discussion. . . . The Japanese . . . were able to use the Russian
spies for Japanese purposes, and in the end to outwit the Russians at
every turn.43

Actually, by the middle of 1905, Colonel Motojiro Akashi, thesupreme Japanese intelligence ofﬁcer in Europe, who worked as aJapanese attaché, according to his own claim had seven spies and ﬁve
assistants working for him on a regular basis, within a network that
extended to Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen, Rome, Lisbon andeven Warsaw.44 In addition, from 1900 onwards Japan increasingly
directed its Intelligence Services to take a keener interest in the U.S.
From time to time Japanese warships and ﬁshing vessels carried out
extensive surveying, charting and photography off the American
Paciﬁc coast. In photographic intelligence work Japan was far aheadof either Britain or America. Occasionally there was an “accidental”
grounding by one of these vessels. In one such incident in 1908 a number of Japanese ofﬁcers took the opportunity to wade ashore andexplore the whole area.45 The U.S. Army and Navy started paying
attention to these probes.

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According to Richard Deacon, the Japanese approach to intelligencework has always tended to be more direct and straightforward thanthat of the Western powers.46 Since reopening their borders to foreignintercourse in the mid-nineteenth century, the Japanese have nevertaken a narrow view as to what a national espionage organization
should concentrate on, but have regarded it as embracing all kinds ofknowledge. Besides, according to Deacon, the Japanese also upheld
the code of “bushido,” traditional Japanese chivalry or the unwritten
code of ethics and behavior developed in the feudal warrior society,which laid down that espionage was an honorable and highly patriotic
duty. Lord Grey of Falladon, British Foreign Secretary in the preWorld War One years, seems to have taken a similar view of theJapanese attitude. He writes that during the whole of his eleven years
in ofﬁce Japan never exploited unfairly the advantages it might haveclaimed from the Alliance, and that its government and ambassadors
were honorable and loyal.47
According to Deacon, this emphasis on patriotism as a motive inespionage was not paralleled in Europe and the U.S. in this period.48 In
both the U.S. and Britain secret service work was regarded as something rather disreputable, and never ofﬁcially acknowledged. This
seems to have been the reason why all eighteen of the ﬁlms listed
under the category of “spy” in the AFI Catalog 1893–1910 deal witheither the theme of spies’ executions or the spy stories of nonCaucasian or female people, who were placed in socially lower positions under the so-called white-male supremacy of the period. The
general emphasis on the Japanese secret service’s successful activities
was not, therefore, entirely favorable for Japan’s image in Americanand European eyes, and it could for this reason have become the basisof the exaggerated image of doubleness of Japanese men who becomespies in ﬁlms. Colonel Akashi, who was both a poet and a painter, wasdescribed by Hamilton as “most conscientious, hard-working, considerate . . . a triﬂe over-careful, ponderous and precise from the militaryattache point of view, but obviously upright and reliable in every
sense,” and became a favorite in the European salons. However, histask, as mentioned above, was to spy on foreign nations.49 He wasprobably one of the models for Dr. Tokoramo in The Typhoon.

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DAISUKE MIYAOIIIMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN IN SPY FILMS DURING
WORLD WAR ONE

The impact of World War One on ﬁlm has long been recognizedand discussed in the study of ﬁlm history. Studies have shown that theEuropean production of movies, interrupted and altered by the war,
could not meet the demands of a worldwide market for cinema, and by
the end of the 1910s U.S. products were dominating the worldwide
market. In the U.S. the ﬁlm industry did its part for the war effort bymaking propaganda movies, and by 1919 it had gained respectability.50
These discussions in the study of ﬁlm history, however, have so far
overlooked the aesthetics of ﬁlms made during the war, forgotten to
ask questions about ﬁlm reception, and ignored business precedents,
production strategies and industry tactics. It can be said that substantial studies of the impact of World War One on ﬁlm have only juststarted.51
As Parish and Pitts point out, “Obviously, spy movies are prevalentusually during a time of national involvement in war.”52 The U.S.
declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. The AFI Catalog lists in
1917 thirty-two and in 1918 sixty-ﬁve ﬁlms under the subject “Spies”
compared with only ﬁfteen in 1916.53 The New York Dramatic Mirror
wrote in December 1917 “In these days when the papers daily bare theplots of spies, ﬁlm audiences will ﬁnd much to interest them” in spy
ﬁlms.54
Nevertheless, the number of ﬁlms in which Japanese spies appear
decreased in this period. According to the AFI Catalog, only two suchﬁlms were produced in 1917 after the U.S. became involved in thewar, and only one in 1918.55 Moreover, the characteristics of Japanesespies in these ﬁlms were different from those in pre-World War One
ﬁlms. They were no longer emblems of exaggerated doubleness.
Lewis Jacobs writes:
The crisis of the [First] World War . . . led to a new policy regarding all
minorities. . . . ‘Yellow peril’ agitation against the Japanese and Chinesedisappeared from the screen, since these groups were now with theAllies. The Japanese were represented not only humanly [sic] and sympathetically but romantically.56

The fate of a propaganda ﬁlm which the International Film Service
Corporation had been producing since 1916, in other words, since U.S.

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participation in World War One, provides a good example of this shift
in emphasis. The ﬁlm was a ﬁfteen-chapter serial called Patria, featuring the dancer Irene Castle, the plot dealing with a girl’s adventures as
a U.S. secret agent involved in an attack on the U.S. by Japan and
Mexico.57 William Randolph Hearst, one of the founders of the Corporation, had the express purpose in making this ﬁlm of helping todrag the U.S. out of isolationism and into the thick of World War One
by the portrayal of a rather daring display of zealous patriotism, as
the title indicated, and by making the villains, the Japanese and the
Mexicans, tools of the Kaiser. However, when this ﬁlm was shown in
Washington D.C. in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked the producers to withdraw it from circulation so as not to stir up hostility
against Japan.58
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a 16mm ﬁlm of one
episode of Patria, which includes a synopsis presented before the ﬁlm:
Patria Channing, heiress and owner of the great Channing munition
works, organizes her employees, according to the Plattsburg idea, after
Mexican plotters have incited a strike and caused a ﬁre that destroyed
the Channing munition docks. The Museum of Modern Art episodegoes like this: Summoned from Newport by her guardian, Patria
Channing reaches New York at dawn. Donald Parr of the UnitedStates Secret Service, who aided Patria escape from enemy hands during the trip, is with her. Senor Manuel Morales, conﬁdential advisor of
Senor DeLima, of Mexico, reaches his New York apartment after ahurried night’s journey from Newport. This episode ends with themurder of the guardian.
According to Charles Silver, a supervisor at the ﬁlm study center at
the Museum of Modern Art, the subtitles must have been replacedwhen it was exhibited in 1917 so as not to stir up anti-Japanese sentiments.59 Thus, there is no longer a Japanese spy in Patria. Senor
Manuel Morales, a secret agent, who looks like Charlie Chan, lives ina Japanese-style house furnished with tatami, fusuma, shoji, a woodblock print, and chrysanthemums, drinks green tea, smokes a Japanesestyle pipe, wears a Japanese kimono, has a servant with the Japanesesounding name Hurita, who wears a similar kimono to that of his boss,
is now, according to the subtitles, a Mexican spy. According to Parish
and Pitts, he was named Baron Huroki in the original.60 It seems that
he was named after Baron Kuroki, Commander-in-Chief of the FirstJapanese Army.61 It is obvious from the ﬁlm itself that he represents

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the sort of Japanese spy familiar in pre-World War One ﬁlms.
According to Benjamin B. Hampton, three to six months might haveelapsed between the start of production and the release date of a ﬁlm atthat time.62 If Hampton is correct, Yankee Pluck (George Archainbaud,
May 1917) is a ﬁlm produced before the U.S. proclamation of war andshown after it. According to ﬁlm magazines, the ﬁlm features a reﬁned
Japanese diplomat, actually a Japanese spy, who is trying to obtain
valuable government plans relating to a new U.S. airplane and a submarine. When the theft of the plans is discovered by the heroine, heattacks her and she shoots him in the shoulder and seizes the documents.63 This ﬁlm, again, emphasized the conventional doubleness of
the Japanese spy: disguise as a diplomat, reﬁned attractiveness, and athreat to the U.S. This was because although Yankee Pluck was produced before the U.S. government’s proclamation of the war, it was
only due to open after the U.S. had entered the war, and this ﬁlm wastherefore confronted with the same censorship problem as Patria had
been. That is, the U.S. government disliked its being shown as it was.
The Exhibitor’s Trade Review summarizes the controversy surrounding the ﬁlm:
But why should any producer at this critical stage of our relations withforeign powers deliberately represent as a conspirator against the UnitedStates Government a nation which ranks as one of our allies in the world
war? There is absolutely no excuse for such exercise of bad judgement
and violation of all the ethics which the spirit of patriotism holds as
sacred. . . . But for some reason best known to themselves, the executives responsible for this picture seemingly preferred to dare State andFederal authorities to accept the challenge offered. If the various censors
pass “Yankee Pluck” in its present shape, there is no limit to what may
be expected in the way of pictures transgressing accepted rulings by theauthorities under present war conditions.64

The tendency of the wartime period not to emphasize the doubleness of Japanese spies is much clearer in The Secret Game (William C.
DeMille, Dec. 1917) featuring Sessue Hayakawa as a Japanese secretservice agent. This is partly because this ﬁlm was produced later than
the two ﬁlms mentioned above, eight months after the U.S. joined thewar. Moving Picture World calls this ﬁlm “the ﬁrst story of the newUnited States-Japanese entente,” and writes:
Finely exemplifying the change in international relations as regards

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83

Japan and the United States is “The Secret Game,” the Lasky release of
December 3. In this story the representatives of the two countries are notodds [sic], they are working hand in hand against a common enemy—
Germany. Sessue Hayakawa has a role of a member of a Japanese secretservice organization, co-operating with the United States authorities inan effort to uncover the work of the sleepless Teutons.65

In The Secret Game, a leak has been discovered in the ofﬁce ofMajor Northﬁeld, the Paciﬁc Coast quartermaster, a leak which may
endanger the safety of American transports that are secretly carrying
troops across the Paciﬁc. Nara-Nara (Hayakawa), a Japanese secretservice agent, is assigned to the case because his country has guaranteed safety to these transport ships. Nara-Nara believes that Northﬁeld
is guilty, although in reality it is Northﬁeld’s secretary Kitty Little, agirl of German ancestry, who is passing information to Dr. Ebell
Smith, a German agent. Kitty is suffering from her enforced mission
from the beginning, but cannot help delivering a message to Smith’shouse. Nara-Nara follows and kills Smith. Nara-Nara discovers that
Kitty is the leak in the quartermaster’s ofﬁce. He rebukes her for
betraying her country and points a knife at her; but he cannot kill her,because she is, according to the subtitle, “too beautiful.” Tempted,
Nara-Nara threatens Kitty by saying that “If you come to Japan withme, I am not going to turn you over to the police.” Kitty answers“Then, you are a traitor.” Nara-Nara soon realizes that he is bringing
dishonor to his mission, because consequently he has charged Northﬁeld falsely for the leak of information. Nara-Nara releases her immediately and chooses death to wipe off the stain on his family name.
Kitty ﬁnally realizes that it was a serious mistake to have betrayed her
country. She marries the vindicated Northﬁeld.66
Hayakawa’s role in this ﬁlm was thus somewhat different from theone he had in The Typhoon, despite both roles being of Japanese spies.
In The Secret Game, as a Japanese spy working for the U.S., Hayakawa’s character does not cunningly disguise his identity as a servant
nor a diplomat, but is a heroic detective loyally serving the U.S.-Japan
Alliance. The ﬁrst scene in which Nara-Nara appears in this ﬁlm
demonstrates this change in characterization. Following the subtitle“Nara-Nara: A sincere friend of America and a patriot of Japan,”Nara-Nara picks up tiny national ﬂags of Japan and the U.S. and pinsthem on his suit. While Nara-Nara is being assigned to the secret mission, Kitty is being forced to steal documents from Northﬁeld by a vil-

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DAISUKE MIYAO

lainous German agent. These two scenes are shown at the same timethrough parallel editing, and, in comparison with the villain and thesuffering girl, Nara-Nara looks strong-willed and valiant. As Motion
Picture News writes, “Hayakawa’s Nara-Nara, the Japanese spy whoworks in behalf of the United States, is an admired ﬁgure” in The
Secret Game.67
The sequence in which Nara-Nara brieﬂy threatens the Caucasian
girl seems the maximum compromise between the wartime policy of
depicting Japanese spies as neither sexually attractive nor threatening
and the star image of Hayakawa, which relied on the tension between
sensuality and threat. Nara-Nara, who takes advantage of Kitty, eventhreatening her at knifepoint, easily reminds the audience of Hayakawa’s villainous character in The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, Dec. 1915),
a role which made him a star overnight. In The Cheat a wealthy
Japanese merchant, played by Hayakawa, attempts to lend the heroine
money that she desperately needs, in exchange for her body. When she
refuses, he brutally brands her on the shoulder. This sequence can beinterpreted, on the one hand, as the climax of the Hayakawa character’s sensuality, and, on the other hand, as his representation of a sexual threat to the U.S. In contrast, the parallel character Hayakawa playsin The Secret Game, Nara-Nara, comes to realize the dishonor of his
actions and chooses to die in order to preserve the honor of Japan andthe U.S. Nara-Nara is presented completely differently from Hayakawa’s character in The Cheat, who stays a sensual villain until theend. Therefore, it is possible to say that doubleness of the Japanese spy
in The Secret Game is not so exaggerated.
His Birthright (William Worthington, Sep. 1918) was another spy
ﬁlm featuring Hayakawa made during the World War One period.
Though the plot of this ﬁlm was similar to that of The Secret Game, inthis ﬁlm Hayakawa’s character was not even a spy himself, but wasforced to help a German spy out of love.
In His Birthright, Yukio (Hayakawa), the son of an American
father, Admiral John Milton, and a Japanese mother, Saki-san, isreared in Japan by an old man who tells him that Milton was responsible for Saki-san’s suicide. Determined to avenge her death, Yukio sails
to America as a cabin boy, bearing the blood stained knife used by his
mother to kill herself. In the U.S. he becomes involved with a beautiful adventuress named Edna Kingston. Edna asks Yukio to obtainsome papers from Milton in return for her love, but after he gives her

DOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN85

the documents, she rejects him. His shame is heightened when he discovers that she is a tool of Adolph Meyer and some German spies,
and, in a furious struggle with the entire group, he retrieves the papers.
Milton bursts into the room with the police and rescues his son, after
which he welcomes the young man into his home. Milton explains that
he always loved Saki-san, and Yukio joins the army to ﬁght for theAmerican cause.68
Hayakawa’s role in this ﬁlm is in a sense that of a disguised spy,
because he pretends to be a cabin boy, and steals conﬁdential documents at one point, but actually he was only being used by a German
spy, and in the end he becomes patriotic to the U.S. He is not a threat
to the U.S. at all. It is, therefore, difﬁcult to say that the doubleness of
the Japanese spy was emphasized in this ﬁlm. Since it was the ﬁrst
ﬁlm produced by Hayakawa’s own ﬁlmmaking company, Haworth
Pictures Corporation, established in April 1918, this ﬁlm was publicized on a large scale.69 For instance, the Exhibitor’s Trade Review
printed a four-page advertisement for the ﬁlm, which proclaimed that“‘HIS BIRTHRIGHT’ . . . is one of the best things he [Hayakawa] has
done, and promises well for future Hayakawa pictures under this management.”70
Bonds of Honor (William Worthington, Jan. 1919), another Hayakawa feature ﬁlm, which should have been completed before the war
ended, was also a spy ﬁlm. In this ﬁlm, Yamashito (also known as
Yamashiro; played by Hayakawa), the son of Count Sakurai, is loyal
and courageous, while his wayward twin brother, Sasamoto (alsocalled Sadao; also played by Hayakawa), lives a reﬁned life and, as aresult, sinks deeply into debt due to his gambling. During World War
One, Sasamoto plans to pay off a gambling debt to a German spy, Paul
Berkowitz, by stealing the alliance’s fortiﬁcation plans prepared by
Yamashito and his father, but is caught during the attempt. Insteadof committing hara-kiri, as prescribed by the Japanese code of honor,
Sasamoto escapes to Russia with his German co-conspirators, where
he becomes a drunkard. Yamashito, as a secret agent charged withbringing his brother to justice, poses as Sasamoto in Russia and exposes the spies. Sasamoto ﬁnally commits hara-kiri, and Yamashito marries the girl both brothers have loved, Toku-ko.71
This ﬁlm represents the maximum compromise in depicting a
Japanese spy during the war. At the same time, Hayakawa played agood spy loyal to the alliance, and a reﬁned but bad man, used by a

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DAISUKE MIYAO

German spy, who was a threat to the alliance. Hayakawa’s double role
allowed the ﬁlmmakers to suggest the familiar attractive but threatening doubleness of the Japanese spy ﬁgure while at the same time presenting an acceptable wartime scenario involving a loyal Japaneseally. The bad man has the doubleness which Hayakawa embodied in
pre-World War One ﬁlms. The bad man is punished by the loyal, good
spy in the end, though the good spy, because he is a spy, also has adouble identity. Wid’s, therefore, could write “There is nothing it [sic]to offend racial prejudice.”72
Nevertheless, even though these Hayakawa ﬁlms were successful inavoiding offensive racial stereotyping, they were not commerciallysuccessful. Variety wrote about The Secret Game that “the interest that
attaches to anything in the nature of a picture or story dealing withthe present war situation naturally accentuates the value of ‘The Secret
Game,’” but the representation of the Japanese spy in this ﬁlm was notfavored by its audience.73 For instance, the Los Angeles Examiner
wrote that Hayakawa’s role in this ﬁlm would not be particularly
important in his career and that it gave “him small chance to display
his remarkable cinema art.”74 Concerning His Birthright, the Moving
Picture World calls it “the ﬁrst of the Haworth productions[,] in which
Sessue Hayakawa is somewhat at a loss to convince the spectator ofhigh qualiﬁcations from a dramatic viewpoint,” while the New YorkDramatic Mirror’s ﬁlm critic considers it “a poor story,” and writes “Ilike silent, mysterious and cold-hearted Sessue.”75 These articles imply
that audiences were not satisﬁed with the heroic Japanese spies. Bondsof Honor was generally well-received in contrast to the former two,
because of its compromise of having Hayakawa play the two roles ofhero and villain at the same time. Nonetheless, Wid’s complains aboutthat very concession: “Sessue Hayakawa is a difﬁcult star to ﬁt withscreen material. So many things are of necessity eliminated, for social
or political reason.”76
It seems that while the U.S. was taking part in World War One thepoints of intersection between the spy ﬁlm genre and the exploitationﬁlms of Japan were more especially complex than usual. The characterization of a Japanese spy as the embodiment of doubleness, emphasized in order to attract audiences, became problematic because ofgovernment intervention in the industry caused by concern with sustaining the alliance with Japan. That is, the U.S. government’s war
policy forced the ﬁlm industry to produce propaganda ﬁlms, and theDOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN

87

spy ﬁlm genre and ﬁlms in which Japanese men appeared were directly inﬂuenced by this war policy. It is obvious that some of the ﬁlmmakers were not willing to accept this policy at ﬁrst, for economic
reasons, as the representation of the Japanese men in Patria, forinstance, clearly shows. Why, they must have wondered, did they haveto change the characterization of Japanese men, when most of theﬁlms that included that characterization were doing very well at thebox ofﬁce? Nonetheless, it is also obvious that those ﬁlmmakers had tofollow the government’s war policy, as the case of Patria’s added subtitles clearly indicates.
Propaganda is likely to be a one-side communication, in which
speakers do not say what listeners want to hear, but just what theywant to say. Propaganda is, therefore, unlikely to convey the truth but
is, on the contrary, intended to create the truth. Of course, the ﬁlm
industry’s characterization of Japanese men does not necessarily haveany connection with Japanese men in reality, even if it was heroic or it
had a double identity; it was just an image that American people had.
The audiences of the spy ﬁlms in which Japanese spies appeared did
not accept the “truth” concerning this Japanese spy matter created by
the war policy. They were not satisﬁed with the representation ofJapanese spies as heroes without doubleness, even if they understoodthat Japan was on their side during the war.
III

IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN IN POST-WORLDWAR ONE SPY FILMS

During World War One Japan started its imperialist expansion into
the Asian Continent and the Paciﬁc Ocean with moves such as themaking of the “Twenty-one Demands” to China. The Japanese representatives acted boldly at a peace conference in Paris, requesting theinsertion of a “racial equality resolution” into the agreement of the
League of Nations. The Japanese government sent more armed forces
than any other country to Siberia, and the Japanese army clashed with
the U.S. Army. Many Americans came to consider the Japanese an
actual economic menace to the U.S. Anti-Japanese sentiment spreadnationwide for the ﬁrst time.77 This was the background of the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924.
Under these conditions and following the dissolution of the wartime
alliance, a revival of the genre of spy ﬁlms in which Japanese spies

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DAISUKE MIYAO

with emphasized doubleness appeared was likely to occur. Actually,
however, only one such ﬁlm was produced. This suggests that ﬁlmmakers were not willing to produce that kind of movie after the war.
The only ﬁlm of this period in which Japanese spies appear was Who’s
Your Servant? (Clarence Payne, Feb. 1920), which opens with Rear
Admiral Bancroft discovering that the plans for his new battlecruiser
are missing, and suspicion falling on Lieutenant Clifford Bruce of the
U.S. Navy, his daughter Madeline’s suitor, who was seen climbing outof the Admiral’s window. In reality, Bruce, attempting to keep his
courtship with Madeline a secret, had been retrieving a love letter that
he had written her. Madeline, suspecting Ito, the house servant, ofstealing the plans, takes advantage of the fact that the servant is in lovewith her and visits his room that night. He shows her a sword belonging to an ancestor, used for committing “hara kiri,” and also the plans,
which he boasts will bring him a fortune so that the two can elope. He
urges her to ﬂy with him. Madeline then attempts to gain possession of
the papers, and in the ensuing struggle, Ito is stabbed to death. The
supposition that he has committed “hara kiri” avoids any further investigation, the plans are returned, and the lieutenant wins the consent of
the Admiral to marry Madeline.78
The theme of a Japanese spy’s doubleness resulting from disguisereappeared comprehensively in this ﬁlm: the Japanese spy is disguised
as a servant, demonstrates reﬁned exoticism and is a threat especiallyto a Caucasian female. However, this ﬁlm was a critical failure andprobably also a ﬁnancial one. This indicates that the audiences did notwant this kind of ﬁlm any more. Wid’s writes that its “production
ﬂaws are obvious. . . . Good visualists can build up sequences of gripping power in the development of the business between the girl and
the Jap. Here was an opportunity to bring in a climax to rival the timehonored denouement in ‘The Cheat’.” Wid’s attributes this ﬂaw to theJapanese actor Yukio Aoyama’s weak acting; he “possesses neither
force nor polish in his work.”79 However, this ﬂaw should rather be
ascribed to the fact that a plot like that of The Cheat’s, providing
Japanese men with double identities, was no longer thrilling nor up-todate. For instance, the Exhibitor’s Trade Review writes:
Whenever you see a soft-footed Jap gliding unobtrusively around in the
background of a picture whose plot turns upon the theft of U.S. Navyofﬁcial documents, it is a fairly safe bet that the slant-eyed son of theDOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN

89

Orient is the guilty party. Therefore, it does not come as much of a surprise when one learns that the honorable Ito, realistically portrayed by
Yukio Aoyama, is the low-down cuss who copped the naval plans from
Admiral Bancroft and incidentally brewed a pack of trouble for the heroand heroine.80

After this ﬁlm, no more such ﬁlms were produced during the silent
era. Filmmakers stopped making ﬁlms like this that had no ﬁnancial
potential. If audiences did not want any more ﬁlms featuring cunning
Japanese spies, it was useless to produce them. Interestingly, Who’s
Your Servant? was produced at the Robertson-Cole Corporation,
which had produced and distributed Hayakawa’s ﬁlms, but Hayakawa
never played the role of a Japanese spy again after the war.
One of the reasons for ﬁlms featuring cunning Japanese spies disappeared may be the fact the threat of Japan became clearer than ever toAmerican people under the conditions mentioned above. The “doubleness” image of Japanese men relied on a vulnerable balance between
the worship of exotic Japanese arts and the fear of a potential threat.
When the political, economic and military threat of Japan became visible in actual international relations after World War One, that vulnerable balance broke down and Japanese men turned out to be too threatening to be represented through the image of doubleness.
What were some of the other reasons that ﬁlmmakers stopped making ﬁlms in which Japanese spies appeared, and audiences lost interestin watching them? This situation occurred partly because Americaninterest in, and worship of, exotic Japanese arts and culture declined.
The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature lists in “Art—Japan”
forty-four essays from 1910–14, but only eleven from 1919–21.81 The
number of ﬁlms in which Japanese actors appeared decreased, andmost of them went back to Japan during that time. According to the
AFI Catalog, in contrast to ten ﬁlms in 1918, in 1920 only ﬁve ﬁlms
about Japan were produced.82 The decreasing popularity of Sessue
Hayakawa after World War One also reﬂects this situation. In popularity contests run by the Motion Picture Story Magazine, Hayakawa fell
from number 44 in 1918 to number 124 in 1920.83 Photoplay Journal
could not give a convincing answer to a question from a female fan
asking “I have not seen Sessue Hayakawa featured very much lately.
. . . he is a great favorite of mine. . . . Is his popularity decreasing or isit because of his nationality that he is held back?” As this question

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DAISUKE MIYAO

indicates, Hayakawa’s decline seems to have had something to do withthe fact that he was considered to be a representative of Japan. Indeed,
the Moving Picture World84 wrote that the “essential character of Mr.
Hayakawa . . . is representative of his race.”85 In the post-war period,
moreover, the disillusionment of many Americans with Europe andwith Wilson’s internationalism heightened a mood of narrow-mindednationalism, and a certain tension was caused by the sharp post-war
economic slump in the U.S. For example, the secret Ku Klux Klan
association, which was reconstituted in 1915 to advocate “one hundred
percent Americanism,” expanded its inﬂuence nationwide at that time.
This condition also caused the decline of popularity of the spy ﬁlm
genre itself. Parish and Pitts write:
With the end of the war, the public quickly tired of spy movies. . . . As
the Great War ended and the Roaring Twenties took over, the reaction
against war-like subjects resulted in reduced numbers of spy ﬁlms being
produced. The global conﬂict had left the moviegoing public with such agreat distaste of war pictures that even romantic dramas which relied ona spy motif were affected.86

According to the AFI Catalog, in contrast to the sixty-ﬁve spy ﬁlms
made in 1918, in 1919 ﬁfteen and in 1920 only ﬁve spy ﬁlms were
produced.87
CONCLUSION
In many cases, a spy has a double identity, and, in general,
American people have despised the occupation of spies. These mental
conditions became connected to the pre-existing ambivalent image ofJapanese men: the embodiment of doubleness, which was, on one
hand, worshipful exotic arts and culture, and, on the other hand, apotential threat to the Western world. The Hollywood image ofJapanese men does not necessarily have any connection with Japanese
men in reality. The attractive and threatening image, which was often
presented sexually, was simply a displaced articulation of a wider
American ambivalence towards Japanese men. The connection between a double identity of a spy and the “doubleness” image ofJapanese men was one origin of the intersection between the spy ﬁlm
genre and the Japanese exploitation ﬁlms in the silent era. As long asJapan stayed within the realm of the distant, a safe fantasy far away

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91

from being an actual political, economic and military threat, American
spectators were able to be absorbed in the visual “pleasure” of observing the exotic Japanese spies’ conspiracies and deaths on screen.
However, as we have seen, the basis of this fantasy was vulnerable.
When Japan started acting as an imperialist nation after World War
One, this fantasy gave way in the face of the actual and visible threatof Japan, and both the ﬁlm industry and spectators could no longer
continue enjoying the fantasy of the “doubleness” image of Japanesemen.
Interestingly, the “doubleness” image of Japanese men within
American fantasy was taken over by other peoples. For instance, after
Sessue Hayakawa lost his popularity in the early 1920s, ﬁlmmakers
gave almost the same star image to the Latin actor Rudolph Valentino.
The image given to Valentino was that of an exotic, sensual and sinful
male character. For example, in The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925)
Valentino played a Russian spy with almost the same air of doubleness that Japanese spies had had in movies for many years. That is,
Valentino’s character is both sexually attractive and threatening toAmerican masculinity, because although he is not a conventional
macho-type, he is able to seduce Caucasian women with a feminine
kind of masculinity, and captivate American female audiences. In
Valentino’s case, contrary to Hayakawa’s case after World War One,
American audiences were able to be absorbed in the fantasy of the“doubleness” image without being disturbed by the actual political,
economic and military threat.
In addition, this stereotypical view, the “doubleness” image ofJapanese men established in the silent era, seems to have survived in
the movies. Big budget movies, as a popular and powerful medium ofculture, seem to have had an inﬂuence on reinforcing various racialand ethnic images all over the world. For example, in You Only Live
Twice James Bond visits Japan for the ﬁrst time, and disguises himself
not only as a killer of his colleague Henderson but as a Japanese ﬁsherman. In Japan, Bond, who has a renowned public identity, conceals
his identity physically for the ﬁrst time in the series.88

92

DAISUKE MIYAONOTESThe author would like to thank Prof. Robert Sklar and Prof. Toby Miller at New
York University, and Mr. Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art for their valuable support for this essay.
1
Richard Deacon, Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service (NewYork: Beaufort, 1983) 6.
2
Many other ﬁlms listed under the subject heading “Japan and the Japanese” dealt
with or touched upon geisha girls. The image of Japanese women could not been
detached from geisha girls. That is, almost the only images of Japanese people wereof spies or geisha girls. Elias Savada, comp., The American Film Institute Catalog of
Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Film beginnings, 1893–1910(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1995) index 350, 439; Savada, comp., The American Film
Institute Catalog of Motion Picture Produced in the United States: Feature Films,
1911–1920 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988) index 338, 406–7.
3
See Daisuke Miyao, “Sessue Hayakawa a Movie Star: Early Hollywood and theJapanese,” Amerika Kenkyu 30 (Mar. 1996): 227–46.
4“He Found Acting Easier When Talking Japanese,” Milwaukee News 13 Oct.
1914, Sessue Hayakawa Envelope, Robinson Locke Collection, Library and Museumof the Performing Arts, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (I will call thisSHE from here).
5
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1979) 3, 205.
6
James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts, The Great Spy Pictures (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow, 1974) 10.
7
Parish and Pitts 10.
8
1893–1910 index 439; 1911–1920 index 407–8.
9
New York Clipper 2 July 1898: 302.
10
1893–1910 320–21.
11
New York Clipper 9 Mar. 1907: 96; 16 Mar. 1907: 124.
12
Moving Picture World 27 Feb. 1909: 246; 6 Mar. 1909: 269; New York Dramatic
Mirror 13 Mar. 1909: 16.
13
Robert Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium (New York: Abrams,1993) 424.
14Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990;
Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 40–42.
15
Musser 38–39.
16
Image 8.3 (Sep. 1959): 159.
17
1893–1910 index 350; 1911–1920 index 338.
18
Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 91 (May 1983): 127.
19
Nick Browne, “Orientalism as an Ideological Form: American Film Theory in the
Silent Period,” Wide Angle 11.4 (1989): 29.
20
1893–1910 152–53.
21
Klein Optical Company Catalog (Nov. 1905): 339.
22
Moving Picture World 24 Sep. 1910: 701.
23
“In May 1910 . . . a reel was deﬁned as not less than 700 feet and not more than
1,050 feet. . . . over the next ﬁve years, the term “feature” could be applied to a ﬁlm of
two to eight reels. . . .” See Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema 1907–1915(New York: Scribner’s, 1990) 191.
24
Moving Picture World 10 Oct. 1914: 253; Variety 27 Nov. 1914: 24.

DOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN

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25
Randall M. Miller, ed., The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic
Groups (Englewood, NJ: Ozer, 1980) 189.
26
Dewitt Bodeen, “Sessue Hayakawa: First International Japanese Star,” Films in
Review 27.4 (Apr. 1976): 201.
27
Motion Picture News 12.4 (31 July 1915): 77; Moving Picture World 24 July
1915: 732.
28
Moving Picture World 24 July 1915: 670.
29
Variety 16 July 1915: 17.
30
Motion Picture News 11.24 (19 June 1915): 91; 11.26 (3 July 1915): 104;
Motography 14.3 (17 July 1915): 106; New York Times 17 June 1915: 11, 16.
31John Izod, Hollywood and the Box Ofﬁce, 1895–1986 (New York: Columbia UP,
1988) 33–42; Garth S. Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, 1976)
111–34; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the
Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford UP, 1980) 147–99; Robert Sklar, MovieMade America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975; New York: Vintage,1994) 33–64, 122–57.
32
Endymion Wilkinson, Japan Versus the West: Image and Reality (London:
Penguin, 1980) 110.
33
Robert S. Schwantes, Japanese and Americans: A Century of Cultural Relations(New York: Harper, 1955) 245.
34
Clay Lancaster, The Japanese Inﬂuence in America (New York: Abbeville, 1983)
258, 262.
35
Donald Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha
International, 1971) 250–58.
36
Lancaster xvii.
37
For instance, Outlook 9 July 1910: 539; Nation 101.2634 (23 Dec. 1915): s-5;
North American Review 197 (June 1913): 721–60.
38
For instance, the Alien Land Act of California in 1913, which prohibited people
who did not have qualiﬁcations to get citizenship (primarily, the Japanese) from purchasing land, was strongly criticized by the people in the eastern states and nevernationally supported. See Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The AntiJapanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1962) 65.
39
The Japanese population in the U.S.: 148(1880), 2,038(1890), 24,326(1900),
72,157(1910), 111,010(1920), 138,834(1930), 126,948(1940). Harry H. L. Kitano,
Japanese Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1969) 162–63. A percentageof the Japanese population in the Paciﬁc states: 75(1900), 80(1910), 83(1920). A
percentage of the Japanese population in California: 42(1900), 57(1910), 65(1920).
Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850
(Seattle: U of Washington P, 1988) 153; Payson J. Treat, Japan and the United States(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1928) 190.
40
Walter Dening, A New Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1904)(qtd. in Deacon 11).
41
Lieut.-General Sir Ian Hamilton, A Staff Ofﬁcer’s Scrapbook during the RussoJapanese War (London: Arnold, 1907) (qtd. in Deacon 53).
44
Deacon 60.
43“Chinamen as Spies,” Harper’s Weekly 11.2637 (6 July 1907): 995.
44
Deacon 55. Akashi followed the Japanese espionage system by which information
was passed to and fro, providing each spy with at least three runners to pass messages.
The sequence of the Japanese spies passing information in Spione (Fritz Lang, 1927)

94

DAISUKE MIYAO

was, therefore, based on the actuality, though the ﬁlm’s depiction of hara-kiri, aJapanese spy commits after his failure in his mission because he was seduced by a
Caucasian girl, was one of the most exotic and exploitative scenes ever made about
Japan.
45
Deacon 84.
46
Deacon 34–35.
47
Lord Grey of Falladon, Twenty-Five Years (London: Hodder, 1929) (qtd. in
Deacon 92–93).
48
Deacon 35.
49
Deacon 79.
50
For instance, see Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American ﬁlm: A Critical History(1939; New York: Teachers College P, 1967) 280–81.
51
For instance, see Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, “Practical Patriotism: The UnitedStates Film Industry in World War I,” diss., U of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987; Karel
Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp, ed., Film and the First World War (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 1995).
52
Parish and Pitts 10.
53
1911–1920 index 407.
54
New York Dramatic Mirror 8 Dec. 1917: 18.
55
1911–1920 index 338.
56
Jacobs 280–81.
57
In subtitles in the version at the Museum of Modern Art, the dancer’s name is not
Irene but Vernon, who attained great fame as Irene’s dancing partner. Parish and Pitts
13, 372.
58
William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins P, 1963) 148.
59
Charles Silver, personal interview at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City,
29 Sep. 1995.
60
Parish and Pitts 374.
61
Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to WorldPower, 1850–1905 (London: Allen, 1978) 144–45.
62
Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (New York: Covici, 1931) 173.
63
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 19 May 1917: 1680; Motion Picture News 15.21 (26May 1917): 3312; Moving Picture World 26 May 1917: 1298, 1340; Wid’s 24 May
1917: 328.
64
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 19 May 1917: 1680.
65
Moving Picture World 15 Dec. 1917: 1643; 29 Dec. 1917: 1995.
66
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 8 Dec. 1917: 60; Moving Picture World 15 Dec. 1917:
1684.
67
Motion Picture News 16.24 (15 Dec. 1917): 4224.
68
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 24 Aug. 1918: 1018; 31 Aug. 1918: 1987; Moving
Picture World 14 Sep. 1918: 1612; Variety 20 Sep. 1918: 45; Wid’s 15 Sep. 1918:23–24.
69
Moving Picture World 9 Mar. 1918: 1332; 16 Mar. 1918: 1497; 6 July 1918:
31–34, 76.
70
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 24 Aug. 1918: 1003–6, 1018.
71
Motion Picture News 19.6 (8 Feb. 1919): 919, 924; Moving Picture World 25 Jan.
1919: 541–42; Variety 7 Feb. 1919: 53.
72
Wid’s 26 Jan. 1919: 23.
73
Variety 7 Dec. 1917: 50.

DOUBLENESS: AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPANESE MEN95

Wid’s 6 Dec. 1917: 775; Los Angeles Examiner 3 Dec. 1917, SHE.
Moving Picture World 24 Aug. 1918: 1153–54; New York Dramatic Mirror 14
Sep. 1918: 412; 19/26 Oct. 1918: n.p., SHE.
76
Wid’s 26 Jan. 1919: 23.
77
Daniels, Asian America 150; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns ofAmerican Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1988) 265.
78
Motion Picture News 14 Feb. 1920: 1712–13; Moving Picture World 13 Mar.
1920: 1841.
79
Wid’s 14 Mar. 1920: 17.
80
Exhibitor’s Trade Review 6 Mar. 1920: 1442.
81
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature 3 (1910–1914) (New York: Wilson,
1900– ): 126; 5 (1919–1921): 77.
82
1911–1920 index 338.
83
“The Motion Picture Hall of fame,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 16.11 (Dec.
1918): 12; “Popularity Contest,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 20.11 (Dec. 1920):
94.
84Photoplay Journal July 1919, SHE.
85
Moving Picture World 15 June 1918: 1615.
86
Parish and Pitts 14–15.
87
1911–1920 index 407.
88
Another interesting stereotypical aspect in the ﬁlm is the fact that Bond’s life issaved by Japanese women several times. This may stem from a stereotype of devoted
Japanese women. Another is a volcano, which not only appears in the sensual titleback but occupies an important place in the ﬁlm’s narrative. One of the ﬁrst featurelength silent ﬁlms which depicted Japan was The Wrath of the Gods (Reginald Barker,
1914), a story of an eruption of a volcano in Japan.
7475