And if you think the Japanese cannot portray themselves as very cruel, check out Teruo Ishii's Joy of Torture films. In these two gore classics from the '60s, victims of feudal lords are roasted, splayed, beheaded, crucified and otherwise inconvenienced. We are the beasts your own movies told you we were. An American might warn foreigners about inferring too much from the gruff heroes and idiot pranksters of Hollywood pictures. A Japanese person, when asked about that nation's cinematic self-portraits, can sagely reply that it's only a movie.
Most films are more eloquent about their makers' intentions than about their society's ills.
And films about a foreign culture say more about local fears than about the country in front of the camera. Long before Japan was a wartime enemy of the U.S., American movies displayed the Japanese as an alien people, with a culture as remote and, in the old phrase, inscrutable as Mars. Hayakawa was the movies' first ambassador from this remote empire. In 1915 he played an Eastern dude in Western garb in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat. This role, however defamatory, made Hayakawa a star.