Race as technology and blurred national boundaries in Japanese imperialism: Nessa no chikai/Vow in the Desert

ISSN： 2040-3534

Source： Transnational Cinemas, Vol.3, Iss.2, 2012-10, pp. : 211-230

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Abstract

This article critically engages with the politics of the gaze and the melodramatic mode in Nessa no chikai/Vow in the Desert (Watanabe, 1940). Staged in the Chinese mainland during the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945), this adventure-melodrama film features `border-crossing' multilingual actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko (aka Li Xianglan or Ri Ko-ran) and the Japanese male star Hasegawa Kazuo. Japan's cultural adaptation to western hegemony through technology, i.e. `modernization', was a hybrid process and interconnected with similar endeavours by their counterparts in the Chinese mainland. I argue that the film was a site for Japanese film-makers to assert their entitlement to modern technology in general, and the cinematic gaze in particular. While architectural metaphors and actors' bodies anchor the phantasm of modernized national self, the gaze at the actress's body is orchestrated so as to blur national identities and mediate film spectators' longing for whiteness and the West.