Narrating the new Japan

The Hero of Liao-Yang, produced by the Biograph Company in 1904, stands as one of the earliest precursors of a production cycle that the Moving Picture World in 1910 would label the 'Japanese invasion', referring to a number of motion pictures that satisfy the fascination of the 'occidental mind' with things Japanese or tap the 'connection, sentimental or otherwise, between the United States and Japan.' 1 However, rather than The Hero of Liao-Yang's place in the broader strain of cinematic Japanophilia, it is this film's more immediate historical context that concerns me in this essay. When it was released in September 1904, this two-reel rendering of an episode from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) was as unmistakably topical as a daily newspaper's political cartoon, a public affairs lecture on the Lyceum circuit or a war correspondent's dispatch from the front. It is not surprising that Biograph found the Russo-Japanese War to be a marketable and readily filmable subject for a narrative two-reeler, for the early twentieth century (also the era of Madame Butterfly -in the form of the 1898 Long novella, 1900 Belasco play and 1905 Puccini opera) was as preoccupied with Japanese masculinity as the World War II years and the yen-never-sets 1980s. 2 Although the Russo-Japanese War could be said to have ushered in the twentieth century, it no longer has the symbolic resonance, much less the timely relevance, it once did, when the strategic manoeuvres and deployment of modern weaponry by Russia and especially Japan were much debated in the American and European popular press and poured over by professional military observers. Yet this war remains a remarkably rich (and largely ignored) historical site for exploring the politics of cross-cultural representation and the tangled skein of 1 'The Japanese invasion, ' Moving Picture World, vol. 6, no. 21 (28 May 1910), p. 873

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