Doragon ikari no tekken—a post-colonial moment

The presence in the Japanese popular consciousness of Japan's Chinese neighbours was ambiguously heightened in the first half of the 1970s. It brought delight, for example, when Japan Airlines, putting its first jumbo jets into service in 1971, pioneered the long-haul journey not just for Japanese tourists, but to great public excitement, visiting Chinese panda bears, KanKan and RanRan.Footnote ¹⁸ The relationship of air travel to the Japanese awareness of China should not be underestimated. Indeed, it was not a Japanese who crooned the lyrics to the 1974 super hit Kūkō [Airport] to confirm how emotionally invested mass air travel had become: ‘From the window of the jet misty from the rain’ sobs its singer-heroine, ‘I tell you goodbye; please return to her side, and I’ll go to a faraway town’.Footnote ¹⁹ This was Taiwanese songstress, Teresa Teng who created something of her own phenomenon when, in 1974, she was selected as the best new singer that year by the Japanese record industry. In fact, Teng's Kūkō only confirmed a ten-year-long trend. Starting in 1964 with the lifting of foreign travel restrictions, the initial trickle of Japanese travellers overseas—just under 130,000 that year—surged to nearly one-million by 1971.Footnote ²⁰ One of their favoured destinations was Hong Kong, so much so that by 1971, they replaced the Americans as Hong Kong's top tourist target market. The price wars on package tours that Japanese travel companies launched help to explain the city's popularity, as does the pull of its eclectic Chinese image.Footnote ²¹ Hollywood films like Richard Quine's Sūji Uon no sekai (The World of Suzy Wong) had set in the imagination a decade earlier Hong Kong as a world of ‘sampans and skyscrapers…a city that’ as Marchetti argues of its cinematic rendering, ‘promises romance, adventure, and a pleasurable respite from the boredom and constraints of the everyday’.Footnote ²² With mass tourism, however, the eccentric mix of the anachronistic British colonial presence set against the cacophony of Kowloon, was updated with the attraction of spending-spree shopping jollies in modern stores, beacons of the emerging Hong Kong. This was a Newly Industrializing Economy that like other similar Chinese enclaves—Singapore and Taiwan—was attracting as much as two-fifths of total Japanese foreign development investment.Footnote ²³ The listing of flagship companies like Hitachi, Matsushita Electric, and Sony on the Hong Kong stock exchange in the 1970s confirmed the Japanese commitment to this market.Footnote ²⁴ But in that decade, Hong Kong ceased to be just a residence for select salaryman expats and their families as confirmed by the establishment of the Hong Kong Japanese School in 1966.Footnote ²⁵ Mass air travel enabled millions of Japanese to experience the fantasy of this particular version of China.

Much of this would be overshadowed, however, by President Nixon's announcement in July 1971 to visit the People's Republic of China and the subsequent normalization of American-Communist Chinese relations in February 1972. More ‘Nixon Shocks’ followed such as the abandonment of fixed exchange rates, which forced a 17 per cent upward re-valuation of the yen, but the U-turn on China was particularly humiliating. Demonstrating Prime Minister Satō's apparently insignificant stature in the eyes of the Americans—this, despite his success in seeing Okinawa returned to Japanese sovereignty in 1970—his government had not even been consulted. Unfortunately for Satō who would fall, due in part to Nixon's activities, the embarrassment was all the more stinging given the vocal public backing he had expressed for America's anti-communist policies in Asia.Footnote ²⁶ China had apparently managed to chip one of the foundation stones of the postwar Japanese-American security settlement without even a nod on the part of the Americans to their key Pacific ally.

If the ‘Nixon Shocks’ confirmed Japan's subordinate position in America's neo-colonial order, the spectre of China roused was also visualized as an attack on Japan's former colonial empire. In Tekken, Bruce Lee's Chen lays waste an entire school of Japanese martial artists whose members are not only vanquished in their own colonial concession, but single-handedly at the hands, literally—and feet—of Hong Kong's most famous son. In one of the kung-fu film genre's classic fight scenes, images of Japanese swords snapped and Japanese balls bashed are crucial steps that, according to Teo, choreograph the ‘legitimate anger of a subjugated colonial’.Footnote ²⁷ Lee's assault on Japanese virility tapped into a post-colonial anger worldwide. His own diasporic situation—born in America and suffering America's anti-Chinese racism—spoke not only to his compatriots in the global Chinese diaspora, but to erstwhile colonial populations, the displaced, and the dispossessed. Film critic Matsuda Masao, commenting on the massive ‘karate [sic]’Footnote ²⁸ trend that was ‘found no matter where one went in foreign countries’, was particularly struck by the reaction of audiences in Western immigrant quarters, by the proliferation of Chinese-stylized signage advertising kung fu in Beirut's backstreets, for example, or in the cinemas of Montmatre, Paris, whose largely Arab and black audiences exploded in ecstatic cheers to Lee's on-screen entrance.Footnote ²⁹ Lee's vengeance was not simply a racial affirmation. It was a potently gendered assertion of non-white race; the histories of war, imperial subjugation, economic privation, and transnational migration, all inscribed onto the bodies of men were re-charted anew. Jachison Chan observes in his seminal semiotic analysis of Asian-American popular culture, ‘Lee's films appeal to audiences of diverse cultural backgrounds because, in part, he constructs a Chinese American masculinity that ostensibly conforms to what Robert Connell calls a hegemonic masculinity’:

In so doing, memories of racial subjugation were momentarily rewritten and avenged, or in Chan's analysis, a ‘revisioning and mythologizing of the past’ that ‘resists the historical and political domination by foreign countries’.Footnote ³¹

But, what was the Japanese response? In fact, the reaction was fraught with ambivalence and is worth recounting here. Consider, for example, a round-table discussion reviewing Tekken that was published in July 1974 in Japan's premiere film journal, Kinema Junpō (literally, ‘Cinema Tri-Weekly’), and that included key players in its Japanese distribution and critical reception: kickboxing actor, Kazama Ken; film critics Ono Kosei and Matsuda Masao; film producer Kuroi Kazuo; Towa Studio's Marketing Department Chief Shimizu Kaoru, and Kinema Junpō's Chief Editor Shiroi Oshio.Footnote ³² At six pages, this discussion was substantial, and its detailed citation provides us with an important primary historical document in this analysis.

It is Lee's striking retort to Japanese colonialism which headlines the discussion to betray an awkwardness at being denied a sympathetic viewing position. ‘Japanese Bad Guy Film’ reads the first byline to tackle head-on the Japanese bad-guy ‘problem’, a theme which is threaded through the entirety of the proceedings. In depicting the humiliating defeat of the Japanese villains, the opening entry explains how this film not only ‘puts the Japanese in the role of a complete baddie’, but in this story set in the era of Japan's colonial management of China, Tekken is understood to epitomize a kind of cinema coming out of South-East Asia in which Japanese are commonly featured in this negative way. There then follows various responses that, in their analyses of the film, reveal an attempt to anticipate deep-seated anxieties on the part of the reader, and wrestle with these by deploying a variety of parrying strategies. Take, for example, film critic Ono, who appeals to the film's style to offset any vexed feelings: stressing how he ought to feel discomfort at how horrible the Japanese nasties are, he nevertheless thought the film was ‘so cool!’. Others like Matsuda and Shiroi hinted at umbrage, for instance, at the inaccuracies in portrayal—the ‘quite dreadful’ way that they wore their judo uniform, for instance—and yet, so laughable were these inaccuracies that it was ‘difficult to feel any real offence’. Still others worried about a wider impact. We have already encountered how Kuroi Kazuo advised Raymond Chow not to worry about the reaction in Japan; to which Shiroi replied, ‘there is a necessity for us to face up to the fact of this kind of image of Japanese in South-East Asia’.Footnote ³³

Altogether, these responses reveal a complex interaction of sometimes conflicting emotion and impulse. Doubtless, these were all the more pertinent given fresh memories of vociferous anti-Japanese demonstrations against Japanese economic influence and unresolved wartime sentiments that greeted Prime Minister Tanaka on his tour of South-East Asia earlier that year, not to mention widespread protests in Hong Kong refuting Japanese claims to sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.Footnote ³⁴ Bemusement, discomfort, resentment, annoyance, uncertainty, and guilt all commingle to define, in Monma's appraisal, shokuzai ishiki (sense of atonement), a troubled ‘sense of atonement’ specific to Japan's postwar that politically inflected culture, especially when politics flared concerning China and Korea.Footnote ³⁵ In this post-colonial angst, an emotionally fraught sentiment that accompanied a confrontation with history, the spectre of memory haunts the present, and unsettles an ordered postwar to show the postwar order as ‘the unstable edifice of increasingly brittle and empty national identity’.Footnote ³⁶ Paul Gilroy here describes Britain in the 2000s. But to the extent that Japanese de-colonization was so forceful, swift, and unequivocal only to be followed by a ‘strange seclusion’ in which Japan ‘withdrew from the world…locked in an almost sensual embrace with its American conquerors’,Footnote ³⁷ postwar Japanese identity, too, emerged through an ‘inability to mourn the loss of empire and accommodate the empire's consequences’.Footnote ³⁸ Without doubt, the Japanese and British experiences of de-colonization share little similitude. Their pole positions as vanquished and victor in war are nevertheless mirrored in the contrasting responses to the human legacy of their imperial adventures: ‘The immigrant is now here because Britain, Europe, was once out there’ observes Gilroy; but in Japan, the immigrant is visibly not despite Japan having been out there in Asia.Footnote ³⁹ Yet, when Shiroi acknowledges a need to face up to Japan's past in response to Lee, is not Gilroy's diagnosis apropos? ‘Our perverse logic of race, nation, and ethnic absolutism’ he writes ‘not only represent the vanished empire but also refer consciousness to the unacknowledged pain of its loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The cultural contours of post-colonial angst—Japan's ‘pan-China’ imaginary

One factor that complicated the emotion attending the Lee-Tekken phenomenon is surely the contradictory nature of China itself. On the one hand, China—the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—was highly differentiated in its conflicting politics, varying prospects for economic development, and divergent foreign policies. It is a fact of which the Japanese, whose own politics, economics, and international affairs were directly implicated, were fully aware. Yet, an argument is to be made that this differentiation, on its own, inadequately explains the almost visceral quality of the response. Rather, a cultural conception that blurs the nation-/city-/contested-state-configuration of China, is also at play. Which is no surprise, since cultural producers across the region, most notably in the film industry, were complicit in generating what Teo posits as ‘a kind of pan-Chinese internationalism’.Footnote ⁴¹ Bordwell elaborates with specific reference to the martial-arts genre: ‘Swordplay films might be shot in Korea or Taiwan, while kung-fu movies might take place in Malaysia or Thailand…Martial artists and actors from Southeast Asia and even Japan became stars in Hong Kong productions’.Footnote ⁴² In this light, inter-Chinese differences were softened into variegations of Chinese fantasy, which is not simply to say generic. Indeed, consider Japan, whose reaction, whilst awkward, nevertheless was animated by this pan-Chinese internationalism. Its own film industry may have sought to Japan-ize the kung-fu genre in the form of martial-arts actor Chiba Shin’ichi, a.k.a ‘Sonny’ Chiba and others. But when they took on imported if dubiously dressed Chinese martial artists,Footnote ⁴³ a highly affective and fun pan-Chinese masquerade of sorts was played out. For example, in popular culture more widely, we need only recall the example of Teresa Teng, a Taiwanese born to mainland Chinese parents, celebrated across the Chinese world, not to mention Japan where, as an enka (traditionalistic ballad) artist, she seamlessly performed the songs of ‘“Nihonjin no kokoro” (the soul/heart of the Japanese)’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Lee, Chiba, Teng, mass travel to Hong Kong, and even Nixon, all alert us to a pervasive if sometimes amorphous visual transnational pan-Chinese cultural presence that was heightened in Japan in the mid postwar era and especially the 1970s. Whilst Teng and Chiba suggest how Japan might interact with and even fit comfortably within pan-China, Lee reveals the flipside of a darker-coloured conception of China, one whose negotiation is awkward and fraught with ambiguity. Versions of history from across the region simultaneously cleave and collide in the cultural production and popular consumption of this pan-China to suggest that China was appreciated in the popular consciousness as something greater than the sum of its differentiated parts and certainly more than a cultural aesthetic. As it is woven through the fabric of everyday life—in the news of politics, foreign affairs, and economy, in the images and practices of popular culture—it inflects memory to shape confrontations with the past. It is this over-determined conception of China, a pan-China, which the Lee/Tekken phenomenon might be seen to invoke for many, that is at the heart of post-colonial angst.

According to Michael Baskett in his history of imperial Japanese film culture, ‘after defeat and de-colonisation in 1945, Japanese audiences defined the preceding decades of violent struggle solely in terms of war and not empire’, which perhaps explains the anxiety experienced when a visceral visual assault scripted by erstwhile colonial subjects and holding no punches was directed at the narcissism of Japanese imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁵ It was all the more stinging given that Japanese imperial braggadocio, as represented by Lee's Japanese judo foes, is shown up as fragile and folly.

This is not to say, however, that Japan's former empire was wholly absent in culture despite ‘a desire for closure for many to decades of imperial expansion’.Footnote ⁴⁶Tekken's intervention may have shocked audiences at the time, but the, narrative, visual, and moral themes it introduced actually had been explored in some Japanese quarters, for instance, in literature and art-house film—author Tamura Taijirō and his cinematic translator Suzuki Seijun—or in pulp fiction, such as the erotic writer Aki Teppei and his sometimes illustrator-collaborator Oda Toshimi. Let's turn to Aki, and especially Oda since, in their erotic imagination, inter-racial intercourse with the imperial past inspired fantastic if emotionally complicated scenarios, spectacles of sex and violence visualized in words and graphically rendered in image, which reveal in stark relief what was at stake in Japan's imagination of a vengeful pan-China, a post-colonial angst on which the Lee/Tekken phenomenon can be understood to have drawn.

Oda's artwork often accompanied Aki's stories in the fūzoku zasshi, the stock-in-trade pulp ‘magazines of customs’ pawned in backstreet porn shops and second-hand bookstores.Footnote ⁴⁷ Little known in the 1960s outside this sub-cultural genre, Oda and Aki have been the subject of renewed appreciation, featuring for example in Tagame Gengoroh's important collection of and commentaries on gay erotic art.Footnote ⁴⁸ Whilst a full discursive analysis of their corpus of works is out of the scope of this paper, let us consider a couple of images that accompanied Aki's novel Ryū (Dragon), and which was serialized in five monthly instalments in Fūzoku Kitan between November 1964 and March 1965. They not only alert us to important ways in which pan-China was imagined as Japan's ‘Oriental’ other, but, with reference to the Lee/Tekken phenomenon, they suggest some of the ways in which the cultural legacy of de-colonization was negotiated across the early-to-mid postwar era.

Ryū tells of the capture and torture of an Imperial Japanese Army Captain by Chinese soldiers in northern China. In the apparent appeals it makes to historical memory, it seems at first glance that this fictionalized account came with a serious attempt to spur reflection, the conflict between the Chinese and Japanese it depicts personifying wider ideological positions and power structures. Take, for example, the characters’ identities. The Army Captain goes by Arao, a name whose historical inspiration might include Arao Kiyoshi (1859–1896). As an advocate of a pre-eminent Japan leading Asia's enlightenment, this founder of the Kōakai (Raising Asia Society) in 1880 was, in the adulation of his disciple, Inoue Masaji, a ‘Giant’ of the Meiji era (1868–1912), who gave early form and expression to that imperialistic ideology of Japanese ultra-patriotic Pan-Asianism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Then there is Arao's Chinese captor who, dressed in military officer's uniform, is called Zhang. This is a notorious name in recent prewar Japanese memory since the assassination of Marshall Zhang Xueliang (1901–1928) by members of Japan's continental Kwantung Army in 1928 helped to usher in a period of regional instability, and ultimately, the Fifteen-Year War with China starting in 1931. Zhang, who was allied to the anti-Japanese Guomindang Chinese Nationalist central government, was portrayed in Japan as a villain of ‘machinations’ who ‘aimed at disturbing the peace and casting every region of Manchuria into a state of unrest’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As a leader of ‘bandits’, as Chinese warlords were commonly known, he was associated with ‘atrocities’ against ‘Japanese subjects and Japanese rights and interests all over Manchuria’.Footnote ⁵¹

Despite its historical posturing, the fanciful ‘what-if’ scenario of the Chinese upper hand is quickly and unambiguously seen to be a pretext for sado-masochistic porn. In Oda's accompanying illustration, we see our bidanshi (beautiful man)-hero Arao stripped to his massively bulging fundoshi (loincloth), restrained and suspended upside down, face wincing in anguish as he is flogged by Zhang.Footnote ⁵² For his part, Zhang is bared to his waist, his flexed torso emphasizes naked anger and muscular aggression. It is one Japanese imagination of the bodily pose that Chinese vengeance might take, one that, in strikingly similar if coincidental form a half-decade later, was made iconic by a ferocious Lee who—taking on his judo foes en masse to refute the Japanese epithet that China is the ‘sick man of Asia’—is bared naked to the waist; his muscular chest flexed as he brandishes his nunchuks.Footnote ⁵³

Arao then challenges, ‘You fiends who know nothing of a soldier's compassion, the compassion of men. I won't beg. If it's to be torture, then bring it on’ reads the hackneyed Fu-Manchu-meets-Nayland-Smith-style dialogue.Footnote ⁵⁴ To which a very Fu-Manchu-like Zhang—complete with evil slanting eyes and narrow moustache reminiscent of the depiction of Guomindang soldiers in the prewar boy's comics, Pokopen taishō Footnote ⁵⁵—cajoles, ‘We intend to study the source of this Nippon danji's [Man of Japan] power. It is said that when in fear, his balls contract up, but we want to watch how far your balls can be stretched during their torture’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Clearly, just as the nation, history, and manly hierarchy configure violence as racial and embodied in Tekken, so too does Ryū viscerally configure the sexually violent as racial. In both cases, the transgression of the national, historical, and masculine is a stimulant that blurs post-colonial angst; and in the anticipation of the physical contact that the threat of Zhang's torture or Lee's attack promises, a post-colonial ardour, lusty and aggressive, what the critic Shiroi identified as ‘ecstasy’, might also be roused in the reader/viewer.Footnote ⁵⁷

While Oda's illustration focusses on the story's two main characters, props that draw off an imaginary of pan-China are added that code racial difference as cultural. The column around which the ropes suspending Arao are leveraged is decorated with a swirling gilt Chinese dragon; the cornicing is bedecked in Chinese geometrical shapes.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such details act as a shorthand that efficiently evokes a Chinese setting with minimal fuss in the limited page-space that circumscribed Oda's illustrations. Yet, perhaps there is more to this artist's rendering of China than simply a call on clichéd images. In other of his drawings, for example, torture is rendered much more graphically, including images of red-hot iron pointers poised to prod the captive's bared testicles or penetrate his urethra.Footnote ⁵⁹ But, so too is the image of Chineseness much more intricately detailed, including Oda's cultural inscription of space—curving gabled roofs and pagodas—and cultural inscription of bodies albeit in a sartorial mishmash—Mao-suit tunics, Qing-era robes, women in tight qipao (collar-less dresses), and soldiers in Guomindang uniform.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Oda's imagination, China is not simply an exotic backdrop in which the Japanese and its subversive colonial ‘other’ act out their conflict according to the narrative logic of the scenes. Rather, as the elaborately painted porcelain pot holding the severed penises of former victims suggests, China, a timeless culture, is a threat. In the post-colonial angst and ardour that fires Oda's imagination and which, in Tekken, shapes the phallic-challenge of a Japanese-sword breaking Lee as a morality play of retribution, it has the power to emasculate its enemies utterly.

It is not just Chinese men who have their helpless Japanese victims literally by their ‘balls’. Unique in the corpus of Japanese male homosexual art is Oda's inclusion of women, which brings us to the second image from Ryū for consideration.Footnote ⁶¹ Taunting a naked Arao, arms secured by rope in full-nelson position, sat cross-legged with his back to the viewer, are three Chinese women: two are smirking and smoking cigarettes stood behind a bar elaborately painted in flower motif, whilst another, dressed in qipao (collar-less dresses) and coiffured in Chinese style, is seated on a chair; she waves a Chinese fan with one hand whilst swinging a cat-of-nine-tails-like cord attached to it with her other, and all the while, with her cutting gaze, she looks down upon and sizes up Arao positioned in front of her.Footnote ⁶² In Ryū, these women are prostitutes brought in for the pleasure of Zhang and his henchmen. They actively participate in Arao's humiliation—‘Why am I left naked? Nakedness is one thing, but this is nakedness without even a fundoshi (loincloth). Is this how you treat an officer?’Footnote ⁶³

Oda's inter-racial and inter-gender imagination can be read in a few ways that are central to understanding the gendered dynamics which can be seen to configure post-colonial angst. First, is the disruption of what is otherwise a homo-social equality and hence a potential homosexual affinity, so that the cock-fight between officers Zhang and Arao is never fully allowed to be an expression of masculine solidarity, a segregated world in which ‘the masculine…represents itself as a “separate world”, the survival of masculinity itself’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Never mind re-masculinization of culture, which Jeffords attributes to the war-hero film genre in 1980s America, Aki and Oda draw on such ‘primal fantasies’ as seduction and castration.Footnote ⁶⁵ Here the power of the gaze attributed to the male is reversed so that Arao—taunted and tempted by the prostitutes—is objectified. In this scene, two contradictory dynamics are equally at play. On the one hand, there is menace in the representation of loss of male control, the demystification of male power through the ‘unveiling’ of the phallic symbol, the penis,Footnote ⁶⁶ and in turn, a threat to patriarchal principle: ‘the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification’ writes Mulvey in her seminal essay on the male gaze which here describes a kind of gender commonsense, ‘hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’.Footnote ⁶⁷ On the other hand, there is a voyeuristic pleasure—perhaps of Arao, and probably of the engaged reader/viewer who is situated to identify with Arao—which is ‘complex, multiple, and fluid and addresses a male subjectivity which is both heterosexually masochistic and homosexually sadistic’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Turning to Tekken, even when considering the negligible presence of female characters, these two gendered dynamics—the power of the gaze or rather the contest over who wields it, and the power of a masochistic voyeuristic pleasure—nonetheless lay at the heart of some of the film's most iconic scenes: there is Lee's defiant pose of revenge as described above and which was accompanied by that furious scowl, a predator on the prowl whose eyes scan side-to-side to detect the slightest movement; or consider Lee staring directly at the viewer as he shoots almost out of the screen in the film's closing moment, a scene to which we will return in greater detail below. To be certain, the relatively minor presence of women in Tekken including even that of romantic interest played by Nora Miao, ensures that ‘homo-social equality’ is not disrupted as in Ryū. But, neither is an inter-racial masculine solidarity promised in the historical parable of a contest between a colonized pan-China and a colonizing Pan-Asian Japan, since the outcome of this contest must determine which is affirmed as masculine and dominant, and which is emasculated.

What Oda graphically depicts then, and what the Lee/Tekken phenomenon threatens, is the inversion of Japan's Orientalist gaze on China, and in turn, the assumptions that made the Japanese empire moral and ‘attractive’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Constructed through a set of binary oppositions premised on an axis of Japan's rising sun to the moon of China nights, Japan's New Order was projected as a mission civilisatrice that would liberate China and East Asia not simply from Western imperial rule. It would also free China from its own backwardness, its thousand-years old but moribund civilization that was increasingly barren, like the desert ‘no-man’s-land-like landscape’ of Manchuria.Footnote ⁷⁰ The theme of rescue is central to an anthropomorphic imagination which casts China as a ‘disreputable “woman” in need of redemption’.Footnote ⁷¹ Peter High, in his study of film culture during Japan's fifteen-year war with China, compellingly likens Fushimizu Osamu's classic propaganda film of 1940 Shina no yoru (China Nights) to the Taming of the Shrew. In the climactic moment when the protagonist, played by a dashing and gentle-faced Hasegawa Kazuo, a riverboat pilot supplying Japanese army troops stationed near Shanghai, strikes the wilful Chinese ‘fallen woman’ played by Ri Koran across the face, she is not only subdued but, in that moment when the ‘whip of love’ as the slap is understood makes contact, she—Ri, the embodiment of China—is transformed in her new found understanding of a ‘Japanese man's special sense of responsibility’.Footnote ⁷²

Fast forward a quarter of a century, and the positions are reversed, not only in Oda's and Aki's pornographic titillations, but in film, too. In Suzuki Seijun's 1965 film rendition of Tamura Taijirō's 1953 novella Shumpuden (Story of a Prostitute), Harumi, who is brought out to China to ‘comfort’ imperial Japanese soldiers, receives the ‘whip of love’ twice to no avail, this despite the fact that like Ri Koran, she too sings love ballads to the soldiers.Footnote ⁷³ To the contrary, the frenzied characterization—incarnated in an increasingly gorgon-like visage—that actress Nogawa Yumiko gives Harumi shows up as delusional the imperial New Order ideology spouted by Private Mikami. The apparent promise of salvation he seemed to hold out is as chimeric as Japan's imperial ambition which, in Suzuki's highly critical appraisal, is seen to scatter like desert sand in the wind.Footnote ⁷⁴ Note here, as in Oda's drawings, the aesthetic function that the Chinese backdrops give: a menacingly gigantic dragon fresco on the Sunrise Palace, a pagoda standing impervious to the battle scenes raging round, all shrouded in a gloomy monochrome that suggests the pervasiveness of a timeless China that cannot be tamed, a China menacing and indomitable, which, in inserting doubt in the hearts of the would-be conqueror's own women, enacts an epistemological castration of imperial Japanese ideology.

Like the dragons and pagodas that conjure Oda's China, Suzuki's depiction reverses the logic of Japan's Chinoiserie stereotypes in a strategy aimed at undermining the visual, cultural, and moral representation of the imperialist project. But, as Monma insightfully observes in his study of the Japanese cinematic representation of China and Korea, even though a critical appraisal of Japanese colonialism was realized in early postwar films—Monma cites another dramatization of Tamura's Shumpuden, director Taniguchi Senkichi's 1950 Asatsuki no dassō (Desertion at Dawn)—the stereotyping exoticization of China remained pervasive; it rendered the attempt to address and ultimately to salve shokuzai ishiki inadequate. From prewar to postwar, the stereotyping visual/audio shorthand hardly changed of wiry whiskered men and qipao-clad ‘China doll’ women, ramen noodles, sing-songey accents and gong-banging music, and, of course, pagoda-bedecked mountain scenery.Footnote ⁷⁵ To this list, Monma adds Bruce Lee and martial arts as the latest stereotype. Yes, since in the ‘Hong Kong film boom’ that followed Lee's introduction to Japanese audiences, the innovations of the kung-fu film soon were hardened into generic elements and then distilled into stereotypes. As Yau notes, most of the 28 Hong Kong films screened in Japan in 1974 contained either ‘dragon’ or ‘tiger’ in their title, and the novelty that so distinguished Lee's action sequences was quickly lost.Footnote ⁷⁶ More to the point, the quick demise of the ‘Hong Kong film boom’ meant that, aside from some die-hard fans, the pre-Bruce-Lee-‘Boom’ situation had largely returned in which the general public either regarded Hong Kong cinema as simply Chinese cinema, or were largely unaware of the Hong Kong industry.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is certainly the case that, in Monma's appraisal, shokuzai ishiki spurred the critical historical reflection that inflected some film production in the early postwar period. Yet, the crucial place of memory is nevertheless largely skirted in his analysis, by which I refer to an affective negotiation of sometimes highly conflicting impulse and feeling. In contrast to Monma's typology of stereotype which straightforwardly explains and slots in the Lee/Tekken phenomenon, memory requires us to approach race and the manliness it informs as more than an ethically calculated and knowing rehearsal of historical self-reflection, and a politics of gender representation. It is also impulsive. It can affirm or upset a moral sense of self and one's place within a moral history; it is an aesthetic that colours this moral history as beautiful or ugly. Central to this morality of memory is pan-China, stereotyped though it might have been in the images it holds out to entertain, stimulate, disorient, or trouble. To be certain, the racial-cultural contest over China that we saw embodied in the Arao/Zhang, Ri/Hasegawa, Mikami/Harumi, and Lee/Japanese-judo-school pairings was won ultimately in the historical record by neither country, with Japan being vanquished by the United States and China descending into years of civil war out of which emerged the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and on its own, Hong Kong. The historical fact of empire contextualizing the prewar melodrama, and historical logic determining the longer-term sense of racial hierarchy were rendered moot.

Yet, in the moral memory, a visual and cultural genealogy of pan-China can be seen to persist. This persistence was most conspicuous in our encounters with Oda, where the prospect of the colonized Chinese ‘other’ taking revenge on a Japanese whipping boy ‘foregrounds doubts about colonialism’, inciting angst and ardour.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to Steven Caton in his anthropology of Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean did precisely this in his 1962 ‘anti-imperialist, Orientalist epic’ which indelibly set in the world's cultural imagination, the visual and moral image of the imperialist being tied and tortured by the natives: Peter O’Toole's Lawrence, masochistically taking it for England in the whipping scene.Footnote ⁷⁹ This is an iconically erotic cinematic representation of postwar European de-colonization, and one that seems to have been widely appreciated in Japan.Footnote ⁸⁰ Captain Arao, flogged by Zhang, draws on similar postcolonial erotic ethics and aesthetic visual symbolism and, in the process, postwar moral memory, if not actual history, is scripted.

That is not all, since there is one further factor that must be emphasized. Oda's illustrations are fantasy. Indeed, Zhang and all his Chinese henchmen are stock characters in a highly-scripted performance. Its shunga-nalian excess (like the pre-modern shunga ‘erotic prints’, Oda's men sport genitals larger than their heads) is, as McClintock observes in her essay important for its counter-intuitive queer insight of the sado-masochistic scenario, ‘a theatrical, communal performance’ in which ‘the paraphernalia of S/M is the paraphernalia of state power, public punishment converted to private pleasure’.Footnote ⁸¹ We might replace ‘state’ here with ‘imperial’, but in re-approaching Oda's artwork, we should not downplay the affects of its theatricality. ‘S/M is haunted by memory’ writes McClintock,

In this reading, far from succumbing to the full force of post-colonial angst, Oda can be understood to tame the threat of pan-China. After all is said and done, the Japanese—artist and reader/viewer alike—are the subjects of this drama, and as McClintock rightly warns, ‘to argue that in S/M “whoever is the ‘master’ has power and whoever is the slave has not”, is to read the theatre for reality’.Footnote ⁸³

Enter, Bruce Lee. In contrast to Oda's fantasy, as well as the other Japanese cultural products that we have considered—Tamura's and Suzuki's Shumpuden renderings, Teng's Kūkō, ‘Sonny’ Chiba's Japan-ized kung fu, and the Japanese tourist destination of Hong Kong—the Lee/Tekken phenomenon re-staged pan-China. In the argot of McClintock's analysis, it ‘re-invented the memory’ of Japan's colonial ‘trauma’ not simply by reversing the racial, ethical, aesthetic, and moral logic of a Japanese-scripted scenario of the empire strikes back. Far from effecting ‘a delirious triumph over memory’, the empire stole the memory. In one sense, the Lee/Tekken phenomenon can be understood as the latest visual-cultural and moral expression of post-colonial angst in Japan. Yet, it was not only the moral visualization of the painful process of decolonization that made it shocking. Instead, it was the fearsome visage of Lee's visceral fury and the carnal violence of Tekken—a fury and violence that seemed to greet Japanese wherever they went in east and southeast Asia—which made it possible for audiences not only to imagine but feel, really, what an un-staged ‘loss of control’ might be like. Memory was re-ordered as truly perilous, and in the impact of Tekken and Lee, ‘symbolic power’ was put in jeopardy, that is, the power to define, understand, and claim Japanese race and Japanese manliness as moral and beautiful. It is also the power to know Japan's own history through the negotiation of one's own memory. For one surprising moment, it seemed that Lee had actually burst out of Japanese screens. In that moment, the full moral weight of Japan's colonial and post-colonial history, extending from prewar into postwar, overflowed with a visible excess of pan-Chinese vengeance, and the Japanese viewer could only sit and watch it unfold.

Enter the ‘New Man’

Of course, although not scripted by or for the Japanese, Tekken is also a fantasy. But, angst, in fact, had a flipside that generated a desire that was quite different from the power dynamics structuring Oda's imagination, yet that was potent in the construction of Japanese manliness. As seen above, even as the Kinema Junpō critics balked at and rationalized the unsympathetic portrayal of the Japanese, they nevertheless enjoyed a highly positive encounter with Tekken, or more accurately, Lee since, as Kuroi observes, Lee's entrance into Japanese popular culture kicked off a ‘Bruce Lee boom’,Footnote ⁸⁴ which was signified by Lee's nude torso, nunchucks, and his piercing screech like an incoming missile to signal his impending attack. It is clear that much of the appreciation was simply for the action. The superior movement and clarity of Lee's technique was innovative, and for kickboxer/actor and Bruce Lee friend, Kazama Ken, it was instructive for the special relationship it created between actor and viewer: from the body of Lee, a lithe muscularity whose power is explosive and immediate, a visceral energy is powerfully relayed to the body of the viewer.Footnote ⁸⁵

The impact of the film's novelty cannot be over-estimated: it defined genre internationally, whilst in Japan, which had its own martial arts films, it was genre-busting. Not that, for example, Kurosawa's 1943 eponymously titled Sugata Sanshirō was lacking in appeal, but its lead actor, Fujita Susumu was, in Shiroi's estimation, clearly acting his judo moves. And, anyway, its central ethic of the unity of spirit and action, a moral ‘path’ that forges the ‘heart’, was more suited to dramatic story-telling, something at which Japanese cinema allegedly excelled, in the opinion of the round-table discussants at least, over that of Hong Kong; or as Matsuda pointedly observed, ‘Bruce Lee's action scenes are not a sermon on spiritualism like in [Sugata Sanshirō]’.Footnote ⁸⁶ To be certain, the historical moment of its making explains the ‘spiritist’ moral tenor of Kurosawa's debut film, and it was because it chimed with wartime patriotism that it made it past the censors.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, the apparently incongruous citation of Kurosawa's film, by then a three-decades-old monochrome classic, throws up a cultural contrast in which the value of body-over-spirit, rather than the reverse as in wartime Japan, is understood by the Kinema Junpō discussants as a measure of progress. The appeal of Tekken is not simply about the novelty of the kung-fu film. Rather, Lo Wei and Bruce Lee together gave it a sleekness of pace and form so that the rendering of Japanese spiritual modernity overcome by a Chinese bodily discipline imagines a new modernity of action. For the round-table discussants, the Chinese body is positioned as an ‘other’ to maintain a kind of Orientalist logic, but with a twist. Far from highlighting Japanese civilization and enlightenment against the relief of an arcane martial-arts mysticism and Middle-Kingdom mystery, it is a 1970s pan-Chinese modernity, neither Western nor American-izing,Footnote ⁸⁸ characterized by speed and power that, stripped to its cultural essence, configures this new Orientalist vision and its exotic appeal.

Its allure was also homo-erotic, which is not to say that Bruce Lee's flexing nude torso so straightforwardly explains his sexual allure. Whilst Leon Hunt observes that the martial arts film more generally ‘was one of the few vehicles in which a gay Chinese man could see male bodies on display’, Stanley Kwan in his important essay on gender in Chinese film takes a more euphemistically queer approach. For him, scenes of manly posing and manly battle enact male-male seduction and male-male intimacies, expressions of male-male erotic intercourse by proxy that cross the divide of sexuality to defy conventional definition.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is a complexity that befuddles many a viewer. Case in point, consider the struggled attempt of Kenken, male master of the whimsically entitled blogsite Nettaisei renkiatsu (Atmospheric Pressure of Love in the Tropics), to define the feelings Bruce Lee arouses in his male admirers. Suggestively stating that ‘Bruce Lee fans are overwhelmingly male’, he confirms that ‘To normal, so-called straight men, [Bruce Lee] isn't a sexual object, it seems to be with a different kind of feeling that I detect. It is a feeling somewhere between “love” and “like”’.Footnote ⁹⁰ From eros to philia, there is located an intensely fraternal homo-social love, a blokey ‘mateship’ bonding together tough guys, what in Chinese might be known traditionally as haohan.Footnote ⁹¹ In the filmic language of the gaze, this male-male arousal is what Paul Willemen in his analysis of another masculine film genre, the Western, identifies as a ‘fundamentally homosexual voyeurism (almost always repressed)’.Footnote ⁹² Steve Neale takes us one step further, positing that conflict, combat, violence, and death are not simply narrative outcomes, they are the working out of the sado-masochistic logic of homosexual voyeurism: ‘the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that male look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed’.Footnote ⁹³ Or, rather, the male look is re-directed towards the neutralizing effects of ‘male struggle [as] pure spectacle’, since in the struggle, man-to-man maiming and mauling—‘highly ritualized’ in ways not dissimilar to the scenes of literal sado-masochism in Ryū—‘displaces’ an eroticization of the body and male-male intercourse.Footnote ⁹⁴ For the male viewer, he need not have to grapple with any ‘repressed homosexuality’, and instead, he can gaze fetishistically and identify narcissistically with the man on screen in post-colonial ardour.Footnote ⁹⁵

It might appear on first reading that the Kinema Junpō discussants similarly view Bruce Lee in this way, attributing the ‘brilliant impact’ of the film to, in Shiroi's lustful description, the actor's ‘radiant body’, the ‘body in which ecstasy is seen most beautifully and strongly’, on the one hand, and the displacement of eroticism through violence in the ‘ecstasy of his combat skills’ on the other.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet, unlike Willemen and Neale who adjust and deploy Laura Mulvey's important theory of the male gaze to describe how an audience might consume the male, the round-table discussion emphasizes the production of the spectacle, alerting us to the wider—and very global—historical-cultural context in which the erotic male spectacle that is Bruce Lee acquires its force of meaning.Footnote ⁹⁷

The first of these relates to the filming of the male. Pointing to genealogies of cinematic artistry including Italian neo-realism, the French nouvelle vague (new wave), and cinema verité, the discussants attribute a powerful realism characterizing Lo Wei's filming style in which ‘Bruce Lee's attraction is incredibly shown up’, to developments of camera technique and technology; they point specifically to innovations in high-quality colour wide-screen. In truth, Lo Wei's realism was highly constructed. Like the 1960s auteurs, what Willemen defines as ‘an all-male group obsessed with man's relation to nearly everything’ and whose images were architected through ‘lateral, fragmented lighting and bizarre camera angles’, Lo Wei's use of ‘stop-motion’ like sequences, slow-motion, and close-ups highlighted Lee's form and action in spectacular ways.Footnote ⁹⁸ Consider, for example, Tekken's closing shot, mentioned above, in which Lee is seen to attack head-on his assassins firing at him: the scene is frozen, Lee in mid-flight, and in a powerful use of subjective camera shooting to resonate within the viewer the scene's full emotional impact, Lee's face of fury, contorted in defiance, glares directly out of the screen to the audience.Footnote ⁹⁹ But, this is not an empty spectacle, a visual image simply of man in action and a logical conclusion to the narrative. Rather, as Matsuda comments, the film has an ‘uncanny, legendary mood’, which makes Tekken's last scene ‘impressionistic’, all the more inter-textually haunting given that Lee was dead by the time this film showed in Japan. Like many another spectacle of men in the films of the 1960s and 1970s, Lo Wei invites us—and especially men—to ‘look at the male figure: the male “in context”’, to gain ‘pleasure of seeing the male “exist” (that is, walk, move, ride, fight) in or through cityscapes, landscapes, or more abstractly, history’:Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Lee ‘exists’ in history, fights his way through and against colonial Shanghai, but in the hinted at brutality of the final scene—backtrack of guns firing—and the confirmation of his heroic death—rousing chorus soundtrack to a Western gun-fight march; ‘Here goes a true hero’—Lee/Chen transcends history to attain full manhood.

Full manhood might also be read as mythical, and in a sense, the conflict witnessed in Tekken is as much against other men as it is oneself. Commenting on Lee, who accompanied him to view Tekken, Kazama observes that it was ‘the film in which I felt his loneliness the most…’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Sadness and anxiety, these seem opposed to the ‘image of authority and omnipotence’ of the ‘narcissistic male image’ which Neale describes of the male spectacle.Footnote ¹⁰² Interestingly, Neale points to another early 1970s international male idol whose on-screen vulnerability was essential to the re-invention of filmic manliness in the latter half of the twentieth century, French actor Alain Delon. To be certain, Lee's Tekken rebel Chen does not immediately call to mind, for example, Delon's gangster Jef Costello in Melville's Le Samourai (1967).Footnote ¹⁰³ But the unlikely comparison is nevertheless instructive. Notwithstanding the explosive popularity of both in Japan, we can see in these male stars an affinity of manly qualities which cinema had re-invented to define ‘the modern masculine if not human condition in the twentieth century’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To name a few—we turn here to Jacqui Miller's useful typology of nouvelle vague manlinessFootnote ¹⁰⁵—there is a diehard adherence to a personal code of male ethics: mirroring Costello's idiosyncratic a-social bushidō (‘way of the samurai’) warrior code is Chen's Confucian principles of loyalty and honour, which in turn, inform Tekken's muscular and very modern Chinese nationalism. There is also a single-minded professionalism that demands extreme perfection in the execution of their job or craft and that makes them dangerous: as a hitman, Costello is deadly; and on a mission to avenge the death of his master, Chen is lethal. Ethics and professionalism are responses to the affliction of modern alienation: to Costello's self-enforced, career-imperative anti-social solitude, we are presented with Lee's graphically inscribed colonial subjugation and abjection from his own Chinese territory, for instance, the park in which dogs and Chinese are forbidden to enter. Of course, much of this can be explained by male taciturnity in film noir gangster flicks or the kung-fu film-genre's stock-in-trade disciple-avenges-master’s-death plotline.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet, there is more, something personal, what Willemen finds in common with many 1960s auteurists, ‘heroes ceaselessly trying to eradicate the memory of some real or imaginary “hurt” experienced’, and in turn ‘the hero pursued by a name’. For Costello, the name is his own, the authorities in pursuit. For Chen, hurt comes at the death of his master, school, city, and nation, and once again, the name is his own, the colonial authorities in pursuit. That is not all, because the isolation that drives Chen is the same loneliness which haunts Lee, a very modern displacement as a result of globalization, a search for identity that is also a search for home, a Chinese integrity in colonial Shanghai, or trapped betwixt and between, home in America or Hong Kong.

The discovery of male nudity

Finally, the new man came with a refurbished body. This was not the hulking frame replete with distended veins and neck thick-as-head that Arnold Schwarzenegger was then epitomizing as Mr Olympia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This physical form would come into its mainstream-own a decade later in the form of Sylvester Stallone's Rambo who helped to ‘remasculinize’ America in film at least.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Rather, in Delon and Lee, the image is of a physique sleek and slim, fit, tempered, and toned rather than bulgingly massed, whose form re-signified brute force as speed, precision, and power, and in turn, sleekness and the modern man.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It also re-inscribed these male images as beautiful. Whether it was Delon's mesmerizing face, the face of an Ice-Cold Angel and the face of Japan's D’urban fashion house, or Lee's body which ‘embodied the ecstasy of the flesh most beautifully and strongly’, beauty was central to a critical shift in Japanese popular visual culture, the discovery of male nudity.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Not that men had not bared their bodies previously. The scandalous Taiyōzoku (Sun Tribe) films of the mid-1950s featured one of that decade's most sexually-appealing actors, Ishihara Yūjirō, whose 182 cm towering frame was offered up in various states of undress: his boxer's wife-beater-garbed body lasciviously gazed upon by Minamida Yōko in Furukawa Takumi's Taiyō no kisetsu (Season of the Sun, 1956), or stroked hungrily by Mie Kitahara's vamp-on-beach, waves crashing in from eternity to here in Nakahira Kō's 1956 Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit in the United States or Juvenile Jungle in international release). Reminiscent of James Dean's Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray 1955), the sex and violence of Ishihara's rebellious characters caused many Japanese men to affect the Taiyōzoku gangs’ trademark abrasiveness, a manliness that was naïve if overflowing with fighting spirit.Footnote ¹¹¹ It-ō Kimio, in his study of popular-cultural myths of masculinity, identifies this manliness as represented by Ishihara as an ‘American-styled model of masculinity that hadn't been seen before in Japanese cinema’.Footnote ¹¹² Crucially, it was also visually embodied as partial- to near-full male nudity presented to stir female sexual desire, only recently democratized and empowered during the Allied Occupation (1945–1952) through the discovery of kissing in films.Footnote ¹¹³

What was different in the late 1960s and 1970s was that male nudity for its own visual pleasure became the express subject of debate. Morimura Masao in his study of Japanese male celebrity recalls the clarion call issued by Josei jishin in the late 1960s: ‘The appearance of the male nude in Japanese weekly women's magazines, what's wrong with it’, it challenged.Footnote ¹¹⁴ And thereafter, bit-by-bit, boundaries were pushed and prudishness was shed; and within a half-decade, the initially demure subject-matter, for example, man in shower, made way for increasingly boat-pushing photospreads, like Josei jishin’s January 1975 all-nude feature on male hosts.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The legal scandal it caused, which coincided with a similar ‘obscenity’ case on the exposure of men that year involving Barazoku, Japan's first commercial magazine catering to male-male sexuality,Footnote ¹¹⁶ suggests that these challenges to male propriety effected a certain discomfiture. Male stars became male sex symbols, or in the lingo that female-reader polls uncovered, ‘a man I want to sleep with’, ‘sexy man’, and so on.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The objectification of the male body for the consumption of women—and men—was also the consumerization of sexuality and as the legal wranglings suggest, the ‘common sense’ understandings of the Japanese male as inviolable and in control were violated.Footnote ¹¹⁸

What kind of man was the object of this newly empowered female gaze? Recalling the taut forms of Lee and Delon are, according to surveys in women's magazines at the time, the ‘anti-social, taciturn lone wolf’ tough guy Takakura Ken, as well as butch bad guys like martial artist/actor ‘Sonny’ Chiba.Footnote ¹¹⁹ To these must be added the likes of singers Gō Hiromi and Sawada Kenji, whose boyish cuteness softened masculinity to the point of androgyny, or in the case of ‘sexy’ Sawada—Julie as he nicknamed himself—‘monosex’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Surely related is the appearance in the 1970s of new girls’ manga ‘incorporating characters with large eyes and cute faces,…linked to themes of romance and the inner spiritual world’.Footnote ¹²¹ Their stories of homosexual love imagined a reworked aesthetic of masculinity, the ‘beautiful youth’ or bishōnen. Their exploration of male vulnerability, in speaking to female desire,Footnote ¹²² were the most graphic illustrations of the ‘passive sexualization’ of the male, which is not unrelated to the emotional uncertainties—hurt and the search for a name—that were embodied in the sleek form of Lee's and Delon's new man, as we encountered above. The exaggerated performance of male aggression they depicted was certainly muscular and assertive, a kind of performative prophylactic apparently shielding the male body on display from the violence of the gaze, and yet—in common with pop star and manga cuties—it is precisely their male body on display, its physicality affectively re-signified, that ‘openly invit[ed] a desiring look’.Footnote ¹²³

The naked male body on display also openly invited a re-appraisal of race. Consider the recollection of Ōtsuka Takashi, one of Japan's most prominent gay advocates, and the near epiphany he experienced at first encountering, as a high school student, Yatō Tamotsu's 1966 Taidō (The Way of Body),Footnote ¹²⁴ a photo study of male Japanese body builders: ‘This guy, Yatō, also stares at men's bodies just like me’Footnote ¹²⁵ he writes. The palpable sense of revelation that one detects in Ōtsuka's recounting of this episode has much to do with a recognition of his own homo-erotic desire. But, that is not all, for when he continues, ‘there are people in Japan like this, too’, men who present nude men in ‘such beautiful form as this,’Footnote ¹²⁶ he alerts us to a desire for an image made in Japan by Japanese for Japanese of a Japanese man, beautiful in his revealed body, and hence, the recognition of oneself.

The importance of this development in the visual culture of the male body cannot be overemphasized. It challenged the pre-eminence of the white body, for example, the American beefcake images of body-building models seen ubiquitously to adorn Japanese publications catering to homo, as male-male sexuality was known, including the Adonisu no kai (Adonis Club) newsletter in the latter half of the 1950s, through to the fūzoku zasshi of the 1960s, and even into the 1970s in the homo magazine Sabu, which specialized in homo bondage and sado-masochism.Footnote ¹²⁷ With its direct references to ancient Greece and Rome—for example, George Quaintance's 1956 ‘Spartan Soldiers Bathing’ which appeared on the front cover of Fūzoku kitan in July 1961—American beefcake drew on images of Western antiquity, and in the process, it appropriated the authority that an entire cultural genealogy of Western civilization might lend.Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed, for Ōtsuka, the first encounter with male nudity was in his junior high school library which housed a photo collection of Western art including Roman and Greek statues, and within that, Michaelangelo's white marble statue of David for which he confesses a ‘special intimacy’.Footnote ¹²⁹

In Yatō and especially in the homo magazine industry that was launched with the publication of Barazoku in 1971, Japanese models predominated. The male nude was stripped of its whitewash, a post-colonial gesture in which the power of ‘whiteness’ to ‘speak for the commonality of humanity’, an unmarked universal principle, was visibly disrupted.Footnote ¹³⁰ Whilst Dyer rightly posits that ‘raced people…can only speak for their race’,Footnote ¹³¹ this act of speaking for one's own race is of critical significance. Which returns us to Lee, whose example is instructive. Stripped to his impressive ripped torso, his attack on Japanese men in Tekken, not to mention many others throughout his films, had manifold impact for his fellow Hong Kong compatriots: his spectacle fed the desire of an emergent Chinese middle class who went to ‘gaze at “healthy” bodies, and realised their subconscious need for worshipping the muscular beauty’; it chimed with attempts of the colonial government in Hong Kong to shift local identification away from the People's Republic of China; and of greatest significance, his ‘sublime muscles’, refuted a ‘history of “feminizing” Western representations of Chinese men’.Footnote ¹³²

In Japan, something similar occurred when Japanese male nudity was posed and then re-set as a norm of desire for women and men alike, so that Japanese-ness could now signify manliness itself for its now potent bearers. It is a gesture that is all the more important given that, in Yatō's case at least, the choice to feature Japanese models in a product to be marketed in Japan and the United States was a conscious one, or as Richard Hawkins in his fascinating essay on the photographer convincingly notes: ‘It was a twofold attempt to fortify Japanese men themselves—undiluted by the appearance of any other race—and to represent the empowered, uncompromised accomplishments of these Japanese men to the West. Such a considered intention toward representation is, in effect, political’.Footnote ¹³³

Conclusion Bruce Lee: paragon of Japanese manliness

This micro-genealogical survey charting the embrace of male nudity in Japanese visual culture throughout the late 1960s to the early 1970s exposes some of the main fault-lines over which manliness was increasingly contested across the postwar period. Globally emergent and generated through cinematic technological advance and entertainment marketing strategies, the new man opened his vulnerable soul by baring his beautiful and often very violent body to invite erotic appreciation and court sexual desire; he challenged masculine propriety by setting norms of manliness anew. The likes of Lee and Delon, as well as home-grown stars like Takakura, Chiba, Gō, ‘Julie’, and a host of others, not to mention Yatō's many body builders, were all generated by the concurrently flying sparks of an electrical current circuiting around the world and charging a visual culture of men internationally. But intriguingly, they could be consumed in potently parochial ways that stylized the manly sense of self of their own compatriots. Indeed, whilst Bruce Lee's diasporic persona charged ethnic resentment and empowerment in America, throughout the Third World, and in diasporic enclaves of the First, it did the same in Hong Kong, whose men defined a new pan-Chinese manliness.

Japan's new men did something similar: they stoked the consumption of robust male health and potency; they were Japan's own, made in Japan or in the case of Delon, turned Japanese; and finally, they interrogated what Igarashi Yoshikuni identifies as the foundational narrative of the Japanese postwar, according to which both the nation and its men, including the top man the emperor himself, were ‘feminized’ by the conquering, occupying, and neo-colonizing force of a ‘masculine’ America: ‘the relationship between the United States and Japan in the postwar melodrama is highly sexualized’ writes Igarashi; ‘the drama casts the United States as male and Hirohito and Japan as a docile female, who unconditionally accepts the United States’ desire for self-assurance’.Footnote ¹³⁴ It would be a decade and more before Ishihara Shintarō—Akutagawa Prize-winning novelist whose Taiyō no kisetsu (Season of the Sun, 1955) inspired the film which visualized rebellious Taiyōzoku male nudity—would proclaim in a swipe at American hegemony that Japan can indeed say ‘No’.Footnote ¹³⁵ But, the ‘remasculinization’ of Japan was well underway by the early 1970s. Instead of the technological spectacle of Rambo masculinity whose muscles morph into a machine gun,Footnote ¹³⁶ the rehabilitation of Japan's hitherto vanquished men comes to be signified by the salaryman-suited kigyō senshi, Japan's ‘corporate warriors’ poised to challenge American supremacy.

And, then there is Bruce Lee in Tekken, whose vanquishing of the Japanese enemy in such spectacularly stylized violence, reveals momentarily how contested the history of Japanese manliness could be. ‘Re-masculinization’ can certainly be understood as an impulse challenging America's subjugation of Japan, a post-colonial desire to re-write or at least re-direct the history of Japanese feminization. But, it is post-colonial in another way. In giving such visceral form to anti-Japanese sentiment then seething in Japan's former colonial territories, Lee set the Japanese viewers in a paradoxical and potently uncomfortable position. Not even Oda's graphic sado-masochistic Chinese imaginary could generate this level of angst since as we saw above, his was a fantasy made in Japan. Rather, Lee pricked a moral memory, and in the wave of emotion and impulse that followed, the prospect was held out of what it might feel like when Japan's Orientalist logic that imagined China as Japan's ‘other’ is reversed. It did not help that America, for its part, easily presumed Japan's compliance to the authority of its Pacific order which seemed to shift its focus; Nixon's China policy demonstrated as much. And despite Prime Minister Tanaka's mission to East and Southeast Asia, pan-Asian and Third World identification was not on the cards; the Japanese were unambiguously historical villains, whose reputation was little rehabilitated.

So unequivocal and disturbing was the image of Lee's defeat of his Japanese foe that even more recently Tekken fans in Japan can be seen to preface with a palpable unease their discussions with the burdened disclaimer on Japanese filmic bad-ness: Higashimori Jion, blogmaster of the ‘Revelations of a Film Buff’ [Eiga baka mokushiroku] site opens his critique of Tekken with the plea ‘Don't say “I hate this film because the Japanese are the villains”’; SxS describes how ‘as a Japanese, it is a difficult feeling’ because—and in contrasting green and extra-large font—‘the Japanese are the villains’; Hero-K gives Tekken a top rating of 10, which is in spite of the fact that, as stated in his opening lines, the Japanese are not only ‘unambiguously the bad guys’, but moreover, these ‘really shitty wanker Japanese…appear in droves’, which is not to say, as the last lines make clear, that it is not fun; and finally, recalling the concerns of Raymond Chow 40 years earlier and citing the case of Lee in Tekken, Chinese Director Xu Ji Zhou initially expressed doubt over the Japanese reception of his 2011 film, Yong bu mo mie de fan hao (Indelible Designation), depicting the Japanese enemy in China's 1930s war of resistance, fearing that it would not even be broadcast in Japan.Footnote ¹³⁷ Such is the near-script-like regularity of this pattern—vexed proviso followed by apology—that the response to Tekken and Lee evokes. And, such is the extent of the post-colonial angst that accompanies the imagination of an anti-Japanese pan-China, that it constitutes a highly affective discursive pattern, one whose durability is explained by numerous and highly visual genealogical threads weaving together an emotively potent pan-Chinese imaginary across Japan's modern history.

How beautiful Bruce Lee is. His toughness and chiselled muscularity matched by the grace, speed, and deadliness of his skill to kill; and yet, standing alone against history in film, and be-straddling two continents in a diasporic crossing so that ‘here’ is never quite ‘home’ whether in America or in Hong Kong. He speaks to the problematic figure of the dankai (baby boomer generation) male, himself often separated from home as a result of Japan's postwar urbanization which took him away from his rural hometown. On the one hand, he epitomized and apparently benefited from a system of lifetime employment and company-based welfare. On the other, he was ‘bound, hand and foot, to their company…neglecting family life’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The lauding of the salaryman, Japan's postwar supermen, was belied by a kind of Habermasian alienation; the highly rationalized postwar systems and structures of impersonal institutions—the nation, its bureaucracies, mass consumption, and mass-media—undermined the democratic public sphere that promised to emerge in the mass protests of the 1950s, and individuals’ voices turned inwards and were rendered silent, save for an odd sentimental karaoke moment. Speaking of the enormously popular Abashiri bangaichi yakuza films of the 1960s, which ‘symbolically addressed the all too real problems faced by men in their everyday lives’, Standish poignantly observes, ‘Hence the enormous popularity of the sentimental theme-song sung by Takakura Ken from the Abashiri series, which…echoed from myriad karaoke bars’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Lee's Chen in Tekken did not sing, but he kicked ass, even if this ass was Japanese, and in the cinematic moment, the prospect of male solidarity amongst the audience was proffered, one that promised, if fleetingly and angst-filled, ‘remasculinization’.

According to Meyda Yegenoglu (1998), ‘the constitution of Otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ And, was it ever sexual? The critic Shiroi, confessing to his Kinema Junpō fellow discussants, is enrapt. He describes Lee's body and skill in terms of a ‘distinctive ecstasy’ and devotes a whole section to exploring ‘the secret of the ecstasy’ of Lee, and in the climax of his adulation, Lee's anti-Japanese violence becomes a sex act: ‘This film captures that precise moment when, after the [anti-Japanese] onslaught is completely over, the tension of his flesh melts in release, and accompanying a sigh of breath, he returns to his body. It's incredible. After it's all finished, it's like being empty. It's like the comedown after the ecstasy of sex’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ It is not clear whether Shiroi then lit a cigarette, but such was the beauty and charisma of Lee's new post-colonial man that, in Japan and around the world, for one explosive moment at least, everybody was kung fu fighting.