Swallowtail Butterfly

Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory has posted an entry about the movie Swallowtail Butterfly directed by Iwai Shunji. The movie is one of my favorites for a number of reasons. It is, as Shaviro notes, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic movie set in Japan (Yen town) and it is full of ambiguous identities. Shaviro concludes with, “The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.”

I am a big fan of this rather odd movie but not everyone finds this movie to be a celebration of multi-ethnicity and a condemnation of Japanese society…

Aaron Gerow in Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (87-93) takes a much more critical look at the movie. He admits that, “at first glance Swallowtail Butterfly appears to be part of a series of films critiquing the myth of a homogeneous Japan by focusing on its ethnic minorities” (88) and that it can also be seen to represent “border-crossing” and “fluid identities” which is, of course, what I love about the movie. However, Gerow argues that the movie reconstructs the nation in a terms of a postmodern consumer culture and often portrays the Asians in the movie as a utopian idyllic community devoid of reality. Also, as Shaviro notices, there is not a single Korean in this multi-ethnic Japan, a startling absence considering their importance.

During the course of his argument Gerow makes some interesting points about the movie. On occasions when the Chinese are portrayed in their familiar exotic Oriental environments, there are no subtitles. Gerow believes that “for all its multicultural celebration” the movie, “reveals a deep-seated fear of Asia and presents the Japanese subjectivity to conquer it.” (89) He also looks closely at the issue of how furusato or hometown/native place is treated and the homelessness of the characters searching for a home. The upshot of this discussion is that Gerow feels the movie has an entrenched “conservative nostalgia…in part through having foreigners yearn for the same maternal place as Japanese.” (92) This, he concludes, contributes to, “creating a new Japan amid the detritus of the postcolonial era, a space where all can become Japanese by buying into the image of furusato.

My own feeling is that Gerow is too harsh. For example, it is difficult to see how the “new Japan” of the movie bears any resemblance to the kind of homogenizing nation which bore so many contradictions for Japan in the modern period. If pure “native” Japanese still hold power in Yen Town, this is revealed to the audience through their corrupt and cruel roles as villains. The yearning for a furusato by the minorities in the movie is a very real emotion, felt by many of us who have trouble identifying with any one place (such as myself) or when we do, being rejected as members of that community (many minorities and immigrants all over the world).

It is not resolved by identifying with some reified Japan, but instead left without resolution, in the movie as it often is in life. The attachment to Yen town and the primacy of money as the currency of legitimacy and power are hardly substitutes and I would argue the emphasis of these themes do more to erode traditional associations with the nation than to reconstruct them.