Hiroshi Kitamura (William & Mary): My Geisha and Hollywood's Filmmaking in Cold War East Asia Film Studies Speaker Series: "When Shirley MacLaine became 'Japanese': My Geisha and Hollywood's Filmmaking in Cold War East Asia"

When Shirley MacLaine became ‘Japanese': My Geisha and Hollywood's Filmmaking in Cold War East Asia

Hiroshi Kitamura
William & Mary
March 12, 2025

My paper is an attempt to understand the changing relationship between the US and Japan during the Cold War through an analysis of My Geisha. Released in 1962, this Paramount film told the story of a US filmmaking crew that goes to Japan to make a film version of Madame Butterfly. Yet instead of treating the “East” and the “West” as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable entities as seen in Puccini's Orientalist opera, the film presented a story of cross-cultural filmmaking in a way that celebrated the postwar formation of US-Japan relations.

I use this international and transnational text to, first, shed light on Hollywood's “runaway productions,” which grew in number after 1945 as US studios sought to find ways to utilize their international assets and cultivate foreign markets by involving overseas studios, personnel, and fans. A study of runaway filmmaking in Japan will be of value because much of the existing literature focuses on Europe. My other goal is to elucidate the changing politics of Orientalist representation. My Geisha is an example of a recalibrated Orientalism, as it renders MacLaine—a white woman, and a Japanophile in real life—as an Orientalist subject who, in the film, tricks her husband to think that she is a Japanese geisha while forming a close bond with Japanese friends. The narrative, additionally, presents the Japanese as active agents in constructing the film's Orientalist representations, and in doing so, it challenges the idea that Orientalism is a purely Western imagination of an idealized and romanticized East. These findings, I argue, reveal that My Geisha represents a “new” practice in Hollywood filmmaking that grew in the early post-World War II era, as the geopolitics of the world were being reframed under the Cold War.