China Night (1940) is a wartime propaganda film made by Osamu Fushimizu. Widely-known as one of the three “continental goodwill films”, China Night features “a romance between a Japanese man and a young Chinese woman played by Li Xianglan” in an attempt to show “how…cultural differences and misunderstandings between different ethnicities and languages could be overcome” (Li, p. 83). This response will examine the tropes of romance and marriage in China Night to highlight how its depiction of an inter-ethnic heterosexual relationship naturalizes the Japanese presence in its colonies while creating a whitewashed fantasy of the Japanese imperial agenda in World War II that distracts its wartime audiences from the violence of “Japan’s colonial
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China Night, for example, contains the “typically gendered representation of the Japanese-Chinese relationship”, especially with its portrayal of “the latter being willingly dominated” (Hong, p. 126). In her analysis of the film, Freiberg (1996) argues that the feminization of China creates an imagined need for ‘her’ to be under “the subjugation and protection of virile, masculine Japan” – hence justifying Japanese imperialism in China. Furthermore, by drawing upon traditional Confucian notions of social relationships, the dominant position of Japan (personified as the masculine husband) is established as a “continuation of this natural order” that is widely-accepted by its Asian colonies (Kono, 2010). The iconic scene of Hase slapping Keiran in China Night and her love for him that was confirmed after this episode of violence is a clear instance of how propaganda movies depicted what was in reality Japanese “brutal military subjugation of the Chinese people” as simply Japan’s expression of ‘tough love’ or the subordination of a wife to her husband (Freiberg, 1996). This “parallel between the conquest of a woman and the conquest of land…through brute force combined with poetic courtship and diligent cultivation” serves to “transform the reality of Japanese armed aggression against China into a love story”, making the Japanese colonial project socially and morally acceptable to viewers of its time by constructing the imagination that “the Chinese had been subdued by love and superior Japanese virtues” instead of brute force (Li, p. 84; Freiberg,
China Night, for example, contains the “typically gendered representation of the Japanese-Chinese relationship”, especially with its portrayal of “the latter being willingly dominated” (Hong, p. 126). In her analysis of the film, Freiberg (1996) argues that the feminization of China creates an imagined need for ‘her’ to be under “the subjugation and protection of virile, masculine Japan” – hence justifying Japanese imperialism in China. Furthermore, by drawing upon traditional Confucian notions of social relationships, the dominant position of Japan (personified as the masculine husband) is established as a “continuation of this natural order” that is widely-accepted by its Asian colonies (Kono, 2010). The iconic scene of Hase slapping Keiran in China Night and her love for him that was confirmed after this episode of violence is a clear instance of how propaganda movies depicted what was in reality Japanese “brutal military subjugation of the Chinese people” as simply Japan’s expression of ‘tough love’ or the subordination of a wife to her husband (Freiberg, 1996). This “parallel between the conquest of a woman and the conquest of land…through brute force combined with poetic courtship and diligent cultivation” serves to “transform the reality of Japanese armed aggression against China into a love story”, making the Japanese colonial project socially and morally acceptable to viewers of its time by constructing the imagination that “the Chinese had been subdued by love and superior Japanese virtues” instead of brute force (Li, p. 84; Freiberg,