You May Not Kiss the Bride 

It is under the moonlight. A shoji screen is shining white on a dark corridor of a Japanese-style house. A young married woman has just fainted hearing that her stock investment has failed. She is Caucasian and she is carried by a Japanese man. The Japanese man slowly leans toward her limp body, her skin strikingly alabaster. He is stealing a kiss from her!

This is one of many sensational scenes in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 film melodrama, The Cheat, in which Sessue Hayakawa played the role of the Japanese man, Hishuru Tori, and Fannie Ward portrayed heroine Edith Hardy. As the story progresses Edith wakes from unconsciousness, and Tori, a rich art dealer, offers money to her in exchange for her body! She accepts. Later, though, when she tries to return his money after her husband’s success in the stock market, Tori assaults her and brutally brands his mark on her shoulder. Edith fights back and shoots Tori in the shoulder. Knowing everything, Edith’s husband decides to take the fall in order to save her name, and he is arrested for attempted murder. During the trial, Edith confesses the truth, and the excited courtroom audience attacks Tori.

Many popular audiences of cinema remember Japanese actor Hayakawa for his Oscar-nominated role as a frowning Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Yet, Hayakawa was a movie star in the United States long before that and was the only Asian matinee idol of the silent era. His sensational performance as a sexy villain in The Cheat propelled him to super-stardom at a time when the American public supported segregation and mixed marriages were illegal in many states.

When The Cheat was released the emerging Hollywood film industry was trying to gain cultural legitimacy among middle-class audiences. Movie stars were meant to assert that the cinema was morally a “healthy phenomenon,” compared with the scandalous theater world, according to film historian Richard deCordova. In December 1918 Motion Picture magazine announced five winners of the “Motion Picture Hall of Fame” popularity contest—Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Harold Lockwood, William S. Hart, Wallace Reid, and Francis X. Bushman—who were, wrote Richard Koszarski in An Evenings Entertainment, a “clean-living group of all-Americans.” Hollywood stars embodied the “American way of life.” Ethnic stars had to be model minorities who were willing to assimilate to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant customs. At the same time, their status had to be clearly differentiated from white Americans. Sexual relationships between the characters played by white actresses and ethnic stars, no matter how heroic, were off limits in order to avoid any moral panic around miscegenation.

The no-kiss policy was one of the conspicuous strategies adopted by the Hollywood film industry in order to construct ethnic stardom without seriously threatening middle-class morality and race relations in American society. How was this no-kiss policy exercised in The Tong Man (1919)? In this Romeo and Juliet-type story set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Hayakawa plays Luk Chan, a Chinese hatchet man for the leader of a powerful secret society. Luk Chan falls in love with Sen Chee, “a Juliet of Chinatown” and daughter of a wealthy merchant of opium trade. Luk Chan's boss, who desires Sen Chee for himself as well as her father’s fortune, orders Luk Chan to kill the father. Instead, Luk Chan tries to protect Sen Chee and her family, but Sen Chee is kidnapped and her father is attacked. Just before the father dies he erroneously tells the police that Luk Chan is the murderer. Eventually, Luk Chan rescues Sen Chee and they escape to China.

Throughout The Tong Man any sexual implication is excluded from the love affair between Luk Chan and Sen Chee. Above all, a kiss between the lovers is persistently avoided. (Interestingly enough, Helen Jerome Eddy plays Sen Chee; though she wears a Chinese dress, she does not look Asian, especially given her blonde hair and light make-up.) Even after exchanging passionate words, they simply hold each other cheek to cheek. Whereas many films of this period fade out or cut to other scenes when couples start kissing, in The Tong Man a kiss between the Japanese actor’s character and the white actress’s is not even suggested. They never so much as start to kiss. In the finale, on the deck of a boat, their honeymoon trip, so to speak, they merely embrace each other in silhouette.

Hayakawa became a superstar for his role in The Cheat in large part because of his sensational “stolen” kiss with a white woman. Yet throughout his lustrous career after The Cheat, he was not allowed to kiss his onscreen girlfriends, fiancées, or brides. Thus, the Hollywood film industry used the no-kiss policy to hint at romance and passion—important aspects of the American way of life—without offending moviegoers or causing scandal. With this device among others, such ethnic stars as Hayakawa symbolized successful assimilation into Euro-American culture.

West Goes East

Ironically, a completely opposite strategy was adopted in Japanese cinema during the Post-World War II Allied Occupation (1945-52) for the same purpose of promoting the American way of life. Kissing scenes were encouraged by David Conde, the head of the Motion Picture and Theater Division at the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) of General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation (GHQ). Conde thought “on-screen kissing” was symbolic of the democratic reforms mandated by the Occupation, according to Christopher Gerteis, author of “The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor’s Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan.”

Japan’s social, economic, political, and cultural system went through a hundred-eighty degree turn after the defeat of World War II. Films were made under the strict guidance of GHQ. On November 19, 1945, only three months after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Nations on August 15, CIE made a list of thirteen banned topics in films, including militarism, ultranationalism, feudalism, and anti-democractic messages. The goals of the Allied Occupation were to abolish the militarism and ultranationalism that had prevailed in Japanese politics and culture before and during the war, to educate Japanese people with American-style liberalism and democracy, and to reconstruct Japan as a favorable ally to the United States, the bulwark of Western capitalism and democracy, under Cold War conditions. This was especially urgent since the U.S. government feared the spread of communism in Asia after the 1949 Chinese Revolution. GHQ believed that the goals could be achieved by way of a conversion of the Japanese people: from pre-war imperialistic and colonial aggressors, to victims of the war (according to Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto in Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema). GHQ’s strategy was simple: differentiating “good” democratic Japanese from “bad” militarist Japanese. Wartime militarism was regarded as overwhelmingly evil. It was distinctive from innocent Japanese people as victims, victims who were free from responsibility for their country's jingoistic history.

The eventual “democratization” of Japan should be celebrated as a radical new beginning that would emancipate Japanese people from being victims of militarism to being participants in the American way of life. Onscreen kissing, which was “snipped by the censors” from prewar Japanese cinema as a representative of corrupt Western culture, became a symbol of this transformation, wrote Walt Sheldon in The Honorable Conquerors: The Occupation of Japan 1945-1952. Hatachi no seishun created quite a stir, as the first Japanese film to show a kiss. After that, according to film scholar Kyoko Hirano, Japanese screens were filled with films with kissing scenes, even though some regarded this phenomenon as too sensational and vulgar.

GHQ prided itself for its role in defending international laws, family values—and the white American heroine in Three Came Home (1949), starring Claudette Colbert. Kissing between Hayakawa and the actress was still considered a taboo to be avoided. Nevertheless, the GHQ utilized Hayakawa’s international fame to promote the American way of life. In one interview article in a Japanese magazine, Hayakawa told a renowned Japanese actress, Tanaka Kinuyo, who was about to go on a trip to the United States, how to behave there. He said, “You must forget the Japanese way of thinking and behave confidently. . . You might be surprised how frankly American people speak and behave, but once you get used to it, you will feel comfortable.” As Hayakawa embodied the image of a model minority as a non-Caucasian star in early Hollywood, he played a role of an instructor of the American way of life in post-World War II Japan.

Daisuke Miyao is assistant professor of Japanese film at University of Oregon and author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). Miyao is currently writing a book on transnational history of cinematography and cinematographers.