'Unconditionally' brings geisha to AMA

Sunday night (24 November 2013)  I wasn't watching the American Music Awards. I'm not a fan of people, too often women, acting like spoiled teenagers trying to get someone, anyone's attention by bad behavior.  So I missed Katy Perry going geisha to promote her new single "Unconditionally."

Tuesday, I read Jeff Yang's blog entry on the matter. There where things that made me cringe and that's not just because of Katy Perry.  Yang's title surely is a lift for businesses like the Scottsdale, AZ "Geisha A Go Go" which gets a good rating in Urban Spoon and even has a Facebook page.

Really, if anyone wants unconditional love, get a dog. Not a cat, not your mother. A dog. My dog always loves me even when I'm putting him on a diet. He even becomes needier. Even after people dump their dogs at the animal shelter, some really loyal dogs keep looking for their best-beloved master until their last breath.

As for your mother,  if she's like mine comes with a martyr complex chained to well-practiced passive-aggressive ploys to evoke guilt and/or shame, there's nothing unconditional about that. Japanese may have a shame culture, but I get the best of both--European-centric American guilt combined with Japanese filio-piety shame. That's some very restrictive apron strings.

What boggles the mind is that men think a woman, any woman, would want to center their world around them, especially when entertaining me is part of their commercial enterprise. Yet I feel the need to correct some parts of Yang's column as well as comment on Perry's performance.

Calling Katy Perry's performance Cirque du Sayonara is a disservice to the French Canadians who have given us back the circus in a guilt-free manner. We can enjoy the circus without feeling bad about the animals. PETA won't be protesting. PETA members may even be in attendance. Now those French in France...they do have some part of the blame for America and Europe's infatuation with sexually-easy Asian women.

The original Madame Butterfly was Japanese, she was the creation of a French man (not unlike "Miss Saigon") and she wasn't a geisha. The naval officer Pierre Loti wrote a semi-autobiographical novel in 1887 called "Madame Chrysantheme."  John Luther Long's short story, "Madame Butterfly" followed in 1898. The Giacomo Puccini opera premiered in 1904.

This is very different from the musical "Miss Saigon" whose protagonist is a pure prostitute and she must be saved by a man, preferably a white man. That kind of story gets filed under "white man saves the world" variant of "white man saves the girl." "Miss Saigon," was written by French man Claude-Michel Schonberg and Tunisian-born Alain Boubil and was supposedly based on the Puccini opera "Madame Butterfly."

As Yang states, "Miss Saigon" does portray white men as saving an Asian women from evil and just wimpy Asian men.  All too true and from my experience, some men see themselves this way when they try to find the Asian girl of their dreams. There are men who specifically seek an Asian bride.

In all of these incarnations--Madame Butterfly and Madame Chysantheme, the Japanese woman was a disposable wife. She was treated like a prostitute--bought for temporary pleasure and convenience. She was not a geisha. I suppose men can look at foreign women, particularly non-white, as disposable wives, but that's not what a geisha is.

A geisha is an entertainer and an artisan. She has to entertain men and she usually, like all artists, needs a sponsor. Usually that involves sex. You need to have a pretty sizable bank account to have a monopoly on your favorite geisha. A good geisha is aware of the nature of commerce, her business. One wonders how well Katy Perry knows her business. Was this her ploy of getting attention? Then mission accomplished.

In her AMA performance, Perry gets on stage dressed in a kimono with long fluttering sleeves that suggest a young girl, typically one that has never married. Her eyebrows don't have that accent grave and aigu upward slant that I detailed in my (dia)critical essay but if you check out the performers around her, their make up took up that Fu Manchu makeup folly. The costume includes white tabi socks, but has a Mandarin collar (that's Chinese in case you're knowledge of geography and ethnicity is limited. She has the slit skirt that is typical of China or Vietnam.  So the costume designer has crossed the kimono with the cheongsam (qipao) and Perry walks as if she's in an Vietnamese ao dai which would conceivably be split up to her waist.

Having worn all three, a slit makes it easier to walk but Perry needed lessons on walking with a slit skirt. Slit skirts don't go well with tabi socks. Ao dai and cheongsam usually have pants under them. Remember Asian women were wearing pants before it was proper for American and European women. Japanese women also wore pants (monpe) at times for things such as farm work. You can't, after all, work in a kimono.

If you don't know how to walk in a kimono, you will give onlookers some unfortunate crotch shots. I'm not sure who to blame for the backup dancers providing crotch shots in the Perry performance. Performer? Costume designer? Choreographer?  If you need help on the kimono walk, I suggest watching onnagata in kabuki. That's how I learned. The traditional feminine walk of a kimono-wearing Japanese woman is distinctive and it takes practice.

Perry's performance suggests she is in Japan. The background of red torii gates and bonsai trees with the gigantic Hokusai-esque wave on fans are suggest Japan. Her performance included five-petaled confetti which I suppose were meant to be cherry blossoms, except cherry blossoms are not usually orange or yellow. In poetry, cherry blossoms represented samurai and the brevity of their lives. In general, cherry blossoms symbolize something ephemeral. Red torii gates also have a place in love stories and a different kind of foxy ladies than we'd talk about in America.

Her pre-show Instagram shows her with her hands pressed together in a salutation that is probably more Thai than Japanese. Although should you be visiting a temple or shrine, hands pressed together as in prayer can be seen in Japan. I don't think Perry's kimono/cheongsam pose is about prayer. She seems more like she's making that stereotypical "ah so" greeting.

The geisha has specific dress codes as did courtesans (a different category in pre-Meiji Japan). Hollywood wouldn't know that considering the travesty that was the 2005 blockbuster movie, "Memoirs of a Geisha." If the book was a betrayal of a real geisha by the author Arthur Golden (it was the subject of a lawsuit), then the movie was a betrayal of American-Japanese relationships by falling back and supporting old stereotypes, including that World War II tradition of having Chinese actors portray the main Japanese characters (Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh portrayed the main female roles to Japanese actor Ken Watanabe's portrayal of the protagonist's true love).

What was the problem? Japanese actors weren't Japanese enough? The Steven Spielberg produced film was directed by Rob Marshall and the dance in the movie had almost nothing to do with Japan or the geisha culture.

The geisha certainly does capture the imagination of American men but the definition that Americans have of the geisha says more about Americans and their prejudices than it says about Japan. The Merriam Webster doesn't define a her as compliant. That's our connotation.

Somehow the American stereotype of the geisha makes Japanese women seem more compliant--even among Asian women. Yet why do Americans and Europeans insist on seeing Asian women as compliant sexual objects when they have and do have women of courage and strength. Is this a remnant of old imperialism, the Orientalism that the late Edward Said wrote about?

The retired geisha who Golden used for information wasn't exactly compliant. She, Mineko Iwasaki of Kyoto, sued Arthur Golden and his publisher Alfred A. Knopf over the 1997 book. Iwasaki then wrote "Geisha of Gion," her autobiography that was published in 2002.

The geisha don't represent Japanese women. They are only a small segment of the Japanese population just as the samurai class was.  When we think of the United Kingdom, we have the formidable Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. However, when Americans and Europeans think of the first novelist in the world (Murasaki Shikibu) or the courageous woman warrior Tomoe Gozen, concubine of Minamoto no Yoshinaka or the crafty and politically astute Masako Hojo?

As for geishas, have movie-goers forgotten that 1976 Japanese-French production "In the Realm of the Senses"? "In the Realm of the Senses" is based on a real case where a Japanese woman. Sada Abe, sliced off the penis of her lover, Kichizo Ishida. According to her sister, the real Sada Abe did want to become a geisha, but only worked briefly as an apprentice before becoming a legally licensed prostitute. This penis-slicing was pre-Bobbitt, occurring in 1936. She also took his testicles. American Lorena Bobbitt maimed her then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt in 1993.

Japanese women aren't all geisha and even geisha aren't compliant, even when confronting a man or even a white man. Having a geisha require money, more than you'd need for a prostitute.

Is what Katy Perry did racist? If her costume was food, we might see it as a creative fusion unless it was done out of ignorance, then it would be mishmash Orientalism. Yellowface has continued to be acceptable in movies as we saw in "The Last Airbender" or "Cloud Atlas." Then we also has a whitewashing of history where East Asians and especially East Asian Americans are whitewashed out of history--major (e.g. the movie "Emperor") and minor (e.g. the movie "21"). Not much has changed since Mickey Rooney was Mr. Yuniyoshi in the 1961 "Breakfast at Tiffany's."   Perry's performance was an update of old-style Orientalism that rolled up East Asia into one confused image of the compliant woman.  Just because other women have done it doesn't make it okay.

If you want unconditional love, you can always buy it. Try the local animal shelter or a reputable breeder and you can find a dog (try a beta or an omega and not an alpha dog) who can provide you with unconditional love. Yes, I would have preferred seeing a dog (and not a bitch of the human kind) at the AMA performance and it would have been perfect symmetry against Miley Cyrus' cat.

If you want unconditional love, don't look for it in Japan or East Asia. Don't look for it in my cousins who were born and raised in Japan. The women in Japan and Asia are human beings not disposable paper dolls and they have the same faults and weaknesses, virtues and strengths as women everywhere.



"Unconditionally"

Oh no, did I get too close?
Oh, did I almost see what's really on the inside?
All your insecurities
All the dirty laundry
Never made me blink one time

Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
There is no fear now
Let go and just be free
I will love you unconditionally

Come just as you are to me
Don't need apologies
Know that you are worthy
I'll take your bad days with your good
Walk through the storm I would
I do it all because I love you, I love you

Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
There is no fear now
Let go and just be free
I will love you unconditionally

So open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart and just let it begin
Open up your heart

Acceptance is the key to be
To be truly free
Will you do the same for me?

Unconditional, unconditionally
I will love you unconditionally
And there is no fear now
Let go and just be free
'Cause I will love you unconditionally (oh yeah)
I will love you (unconditionally)
I will love you
I will love you unconditionally