Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

4. Oriental Buddies and the Disruption of Whiteness

The specter of the unborn child of Blade Runner’s Deckard and Rachael, a mixture of human and machine, recalls the largely forgotten figure of the “television child” introduced by Marshall McLuhan a little over forty years ago at a television studies conference in Austin, Texas. In his paper McLuhan associated the nonlinear mode of watching TV with the East (Asia) and the linear mode of reading books with the West (United States and Europe).1 He concluded that North American youth, assumed to be of European descent, were becoming more Asiatic through their exposure to television.According to McLuhan, The television form of experience is profoundly and subliminally introverting, an inward depth, meditative, oriental. The television child is a profoundly orientalized being. And he will not accept goals as objects in the world to pursue. He will accept a role, but he will not accept a goal. He goes inward. No greater revolution has ever occurred to western man or any other society in so short a time.2 The troubling cultural reductions in McLuhan’s theorizing aside, his image of youth orientalized by the new medium of the time bears some resemblance 83 4 Oriental Buddies and the Disruption of Whiteness Everyone around me is a total stranger Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger Everyone That’s why I’m turning Japanese I think I’m turning Japanese I really think so —The Vapors, “Turning Japanese” to current news coverage bemoaning the rising number of U.S. adolescents, mostly male, who are “addicted” to video games and the Internet.3 Descriptions of this demographic resemble those of technologized Japanese youth known as otaku, a derogatory term loosely translated as “geek.” Karl Taro Greenfeld provides the following description of the otaku, which reads like a darker, post-Internet version of McLuhan’s “television child”: “The otaku may be the final stage in the symbiosis of man and machine. Their points of reference are all derivative of computers, mass communication, and media. And their technology-generated world is unfamiliar terrain, a new frontier where the morality and ethics of the old world no longer apply.”4 In a fascinating twist of cultural appropriation, the otaku label became a badge of honor among hard-core U.S. anime fans, a phenomenon I discuss in the next chapter, where I trace the development of oriental style as a response to the popularity of certain East Asian media forms and genres such as anime, video games, and martial arts movies.5 In this chapter I lay the groundwork for that discussion by looking at changes in dominant perceptions of East Asians and Asian Americans in the 1980s, which facilitated the incorporation of these Asian media imports in the following decade. As should be apparent by now, Asiaphilia and Asiaphobia form two sides of the same ideological coin, orientalist misrepresentations of East Asia used to secure the tenuous centrality of whiteness as the racial and cultural norm. The Vapors’ one-hit wonder pop song “Turning Japanese” (1980) provides a good example of this racist dialectic from that period. Its lyrics encapsulate the ambivalent forms of exoticization and identification that Japan’s growing visibility generated among U.S. youth. Rumored to be slang for masturbation (playing on the idea that Western eyes squinted in orgasm resemble “slanted” Asiatic eyes), the expression “turning Japanese” constitutes the song’s manically repetitive refrain. Outside this refrain and the oriental flourishes that punctuate its synthesizer-heavy musical backdrop , however, “Turning Japanese” appears to have little to do with Japan, fixated as it is on an alienated, presumably white male’s obsession with a photograph of a presumably white girl. Like other popular songs of the period, such as The Cure’s “Japanese Whispers,” Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” and David Bowie’s “China Girl,” “Turning Japanese” activates an updated fantasy of technologized East Asia to showcase alternative, orientalized white male identities. 84 • ORIENTAL BUDDIES AND THE DISRUPTION OF WHITENESS More specifically, the song foregrounds a sexually perverse and socially challenged male who fantasizes about his crush object as he consumes her image. The mechanistic, marginalized masculinity displayed here resembles historical stereotypes of East Asian men in the United States. Although the narrator is not a sympathetic character (especially for women and Asian Americans), the song is sung from his point of view, so it is reasonable to assume that listeners are supposed to identify with...