Asian American Empowerment - Marshall Defends Controversial 'Geisha' Casting Decision

©2005 Los Angeles Times
March 7, 2005

KYOTO, Japan -- Every move Komomo makes is rooted in Japanese ritual.

The way her body sinks to kneel, or how she uses just the fingertips of her right hand to slide open the wood-framed Japanese doors. The way she moves like smoke across the room on her dancer's toes.

Inside this cramped "okiya," a household where aspiring geishas such as Komomo study the way dance, music and conversation can spin an enchanting mood, every action is a piece of performance art based on Japanese tales whispered down through generations.

"The dances are not just action; they are stories from our history, and you have to know that history to express it," says Koito, a retired geisha who owns the "okiya" and watches over Komomo with a mentor's possession. "You really have to understand Japanese culture to understand geishas."

Bottling the Japanese essence is the challenge facing American film director Rob Marshall and producer Steven Spielberg as they try to bring Arthur Golden's best-selling 1997 novel, "Memoirs of a Geisha," alive on screen. Marshall, of "Chicago" fame, and also a former resident of Penn Hills and Squirrel Hill and a graduate of Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland, recently finished shooting and has begun editing the estimated $85-million-budget movie, now scheduled for Christmas release.

But long before audiences have even seen a trailer, "Memoirs" has generated an underground controversy over the director's decision to cast non-Japanese actresses in the three leading geisha parts. From the opaque alleys of Kyoto's geisha districts to Internet movie chat rooms and the cast of the movie itself, the decision has created unease over what kind of footprint Hollywood will leave on this iconic element of traditional Japanese culture.

Declaring that "my only criteria was who's the best person for the role," Marshall chose China's Ziyi Zhang ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") to play Sayuri, the fictional Japanese girl snatched from her humble fishing village and taken to a Kyoto "okiya" where she becomes the most celebrated geisha of the 1930s.

Marshall then cast Gong Li, perhaps the most recognizable international Chinese star of her generation, as Sayuri's conniving rival, Hatsumomo. He picked Malaysian Michelle Yeoh, also of "Crouching Tiger" fame, to play the guiding mother figure, Mameha.

And he salted his vision of Japan's imperial age with supporting actors and extras from a multitude of Asian ethnicities.

The choice of a pan-Asian cast raises hard questions about the way Hollywood views the world outside America. By using Chinese actors in quintessential Japanese roles, has Marshall become the Quiet American director, an innocent abroad, shaving the edges off human diversity to produce an imagined Japan for an American audience that doesn't know the real thing?

Or is it a progressive act, as Marshall says, nothing more sinister than hiring the best-qualified actors, regardless of ethnicity, to do what actors do: act?

"Geisha is a part of Japan's eternal culture," leading Chinese director Chen Kaige ("Farewell, My Concubine") said at a symposium on Asian values at Japan's Kobe University last November. Chen has directed Gong in three movies, but he sharply criticized Marshall's decision to cast her and other non-Japanese actresses as geishas.

"Every action you make, how you walk, how you use a Japanese fan, how you treat people and what kind of facial expressions you have when you talk is going to be expressed based on your Japanese cultural sophistication. ... For Hollywood, however, this does not matter. For them, there is no difference between Japanese and Chinese."

The studio responded to Kaige's comments by pointing out that he once expressed an interest in directing the film. Golden, the author, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Marshall counters by saying that he is proud of what he calls "nontraditional casting."

"I'm not doing a documentary of the geisha world -- this is a fable," the director says. "I'm very proud of an international cast. It is a celebration of the Asian community. I think it brings the world together."

"Memoirs of a Geisha" is set during the 1930s imperial period in Japan, when Japanese troops were marauding across Asia, conscripting tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean men into slave labor and forcing "comfort women" to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.

Ironically, the military government used geishas as a propaganda tool to spread the notion that Japan had united the countries of Asia in one happy pan-Asian family. In the late 1930s, Kyoto's annual springtime Miyako Odori dance celebrated such monstrous events as the Japanese conquest of Nanking, where thousands of Chinese civilians were killed in a slaughter that is still a pulsing wound between the countries.

"That's something I can't speak about because I don't know the relationship there," Marshall says. "That's not what I'm doing. I'm re-creating a work of fiction as a filmmaker ... my focus is bringing this to life."

Others argue it is critical that Hollywood pay attention to the subtleties of history and politics. The rest of the world is judging American values, they say, and one of the criteria is whether Americans can see foreign cultures as something more than a pretty backdrop, more than an exotic stereotype to be appropriated and marketed.

"Americans are too often oblivious to distinctions between Asian cultures, and Hollywood should not be encouraging that," says Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University who was a consultant on Golden's book. "History has to be recognized. The world is watching us, to see how we see them."

Marshall acknowledges that casting a movie of mixed cultural complexion was not his original preference. The director says he spent a year searching for a Japanese actress with the combination of dancing skills, beauty and English proficiency to play Sayuri.

"She also had to be someone who could hold a movie, carry it on her back," Marshall said. "I felt like I was casting Scarlett O'Hara."