A Discursive History of Hawai`i as Paradise in Japanese Cinema: Whose Dreamland Is It and What End Does the Dream Serve?

Abstract

Hawai`i occupies a special place in the imaginations of Japanese people. Ever since the end of World War II, Japanese media have portrayed Hawai`i as a paradisical dreamland. This does not mean the cultural meanings attributed to Hawai`i have remained constant over the past 70 years. Both the notion of ‘paradise’ and the content of the Hawaiian ‘dream’ have transformed along with changing socio-economic conditions and ideas about how Japanese people view themselves in relation to the outside world. This article examines Japanese films from the early postwar period to the present that portray Hawai`i as a ‘paradise’ in which ‘adoration’ and ‘yearning’ play out and ‘dreams’ are fulfilled. These cinematic discourses of ‘paradise’ and ‘dream’ first portrayed Japanese individuals as modern, wealthy national subjects during the postwar economic boom period that ended in the 1980s. In response to changing socio-economic conditions in the early twenty-first century, the dream of Hawai`i came to represent a more relaxed paradise and Japanese individuals were shown embracing an alternative ‘local’ lifestyle.

Notes

¹ The iyashi trend started as a reaction to Japan’s economic decline and ongoing stagnation in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s. See Matsui, Kotoba to marketing, 86–106.

² See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 193.

³ As early as 2000, Japanese media began declaring that the iyashi boom was ending with the arrival of a new trend called the hagemashi (encouragement) boom. See Matsui, Kotoba to marketing, 118. The ‘Ganbare Nippon’ (Cheer Up Japan) campaign, started after March 2011, marked a turning point in Japanese popular media and trends.

⁴ Exotic-looking white or Hispanic actors such as Dolores Del Rio were usually employed to represent island natives. See Reyes, Made in Paradise; Schmitt, Hawaii in the Movies 1898–1959.

⁵ See Yamanaka, Image no ‘rakuen’, 131–50.

⁶ See 442nd Regimental Combat Team Historical Society, http://www.the442.org/442ndfacts.html.

⁷ In the early 1960s, a famous television advertising campaign organized by a whisky-maker popularized the dream of visiting Hawai`i with its slogan, ‘Let’s drink Torys to go to Hawaii’, but in reality traveling to Hawai`i was far beyond the means of most Japanese individuals. The first JAL package tour, which departed 8 April 1964 (7 nights 9 days), cost 364,000 yen, at a time when the starting salary for university graduates in the government sector was 19,100 yen; see Japan Association of Travel Agents, https://www.jata-net.or.jp/voyage/1401_series01.html (accessed 27 November 2015).

⁸ Historically, there were no pineapple plantations near Waikiki. The Waikiki area was mostly swampland until it was developed from the late 1920s.

⁹ The Bon festival is a Japanese Buddhist/Confucian celebration of the return of ancestral sprits each summer. It is an annual occasion for family reunion and community bonding. Festival activities center around the Bon dance.

¹⁰ Cinema attendance peaked in 1958, but was reduced by half by 1963. See Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, http://www.eiren.org/toukei/data.html. Also see Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global, 29–39, for the way in which cinema functioned as an ideological apparatus in postwar Japan.

¹¹ The fourth film was produced in collaboration with Cathay Organization, a film production company based in Hong Kong and Singapore.

¹² See the bonus program by Kobayashi Noriichi in the Shachō gaiyuki sei/zoku hen (2010) DVD.

¹³ The Fuji-Sankei group also invested in films produced by David Puttnam (e.g., Memphis Belle, dir. Caton-Jones, 1990) and sent Japanese students to London to attend the UK National Film and TV School, where Puttnam was chairman of the board.

¹⁴ Interestingly, while Japanese characters are described as ‘Asian’ in this film, no other non-Caucasian characters are depicted, apart from one apparently Hawaiian bellhop at a hotel.

¹⁵ See Yamanaka, ‘TVCM ni okeru Hawaii no bunka hyōshō no tenkai’.

¹⁶ The strong yen made it cheaper to fly to Hawai`i than to take a domestic trip to the Okinawa islands.

¹⁷ Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon.

¹⁸ After the 1970s, travel agencies started developing package tours aimed at young female consumers and Japanese television gradually stopped depicting Hawai`i solely as a male fantasy. See Yamanaka, ‘TVCM ni okeru Hawai no bunka hyōshō’.

¹⁹ Matsui, ‘The Social Construction of Consumer Needs’, 6.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mana ni dakarete (2003) DVD cover.

²² An art-house hit film, Nabii no koi (Nabii’s Love, 1999), that came out before either Kamome shokudō or Mana ni dakarete, is regarded as an early example of an iyashi-kei film. It was set in one of the small southern islands of Okinawa.

²³ See ‘Mure Yōko hatsu no eiga’, and ‘“Kamome shokudō” Mure Yōko’.

²⁴ Yoshida, Honokaa Boy.

²⁵ See ‘Hawaii de no keikendan no shoseki’.

²⁶ See ‘Honokaa e no michi – Road to Honokaa Vol 1–3’.

²⁷ See ‘Fuji terebi to Dentsū’.

²⁸ It is the longest running movie series in the world according to The Guinness Book of World Records.

²⁹ The Tora-san character is also embedded in Japan’s cross-generational collective memory. For example, Takasaki Takuma, the producer of Honokaa Boy, produced a TVCM advertising campaign for Orangina (a French soft drink) in which he cast the Hollywood actor Richard Gere to play the iconic Tora-san character.

³⁰ Female protagonists in these films do not necessarily experience their losses as negative, however. For example, the female protagonist in Kamome shokudō only seems at a loss because she has rejected the gender roles prescribed for her by the Japanese patriarchal system.

³¹ ‘Roko’ is a Japanese interpretation of the English word ‘local’, which has a special significance in Hawai`i. See Yaguchi, Akogare no Hawai, 202–08.

³² See Fujikane and Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism.