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Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril

Yuko Kawai

To cite this article: Yuko Kawai (2005) Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril, The Howard Journal of Communications, 16:2, 109-130, DOI: 10.1080/10646170590948974

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170590948974

Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

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Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the

Yellow Peril

YUKO KAWAI Department of English, Tokai University, Japan

The model minority stereotype is viewed as the most influential and pervasive stereotype for Asian Americans today. In this article, the author argues that this seemingly positive stereotype, the model minority, is inseparable from the yellow peril, a negative stereotype, when Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in main- stream media texts. The model minority�yellow peril dialectic is explicated with the concepts of racial triangulation and the ambiv- alence of stereotypes. Racial meanings for Asian Americans cannot be discussed without considering both local and global contexts. The author explores historical, political, and economic contexts of both the United States and Asia in which the two stereotypes were produced and reproduced, and examines how the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril operates in a Hollywood film, Rising Sun.

KEYWORDS Asian, Asian American, model minority, race, stereotype, yellow peril

The model minority is probably the most influential and prevalent stereotype for Asian Americans today. Gotanda (1995) contended that it is difficult to ‘‘situate this racial category [Asian American] without succumbing to the ‘model minority’ stereotype’’ (p. 98). F. H. Wu (2002) claimed that he is

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Asian and Pacific American Commu- nication Division, the National Communication Association, Miami, FL., November 2003.

I appreciate the insightful comments of Professor Ricky Lee Allen, Krishna Kandath, Bradford ‘J’ Hall of the University of New Mexico, and Dr. William Starosta, Howard University.

Address correspondence to Dr. Yuko Kawai, Department of English, 1117 Kitakaname, Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, 259-1291, Japan. E-mail: yukawai@keyaki. cc.u-tokai.ac.jp

The Howard Journal of Communications, 16:109�130, 2005 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1064-6175 print/1096-4349 online DOI: 10.1080/10646170590948974

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‘‘fascinated by the imperviousness of the model minority myth against all efforts at debunking it’’ (p. 40). Kibria (2002) also posited that ‘‘the model minority stereotype is undoubtedly pervasive’’ (p. 131).1

The model minority stereotype has been criticized by Asian American scholars because of its political implications (e.g., Nakayama, 1988; Osajima, 2000; F. H. Wu, 2002) and also because it does not tell a story that resonates with the lived realities of Asian Americans (e.g., Suzuki, 1977; Takaki, 1989). It is, however, also the case that the model minority stereotype has been eval- uated positively by Asian Americans. Cheng and Yang (2000), for instance, contended, ‘‘the model minority concept is not without its virtues; histori- cally, it helped turn around the negative stereotypes of Asian Americans and the enhanced the positive image of Asian Americans’’ (p. 473).

The model minority stereotype is argued by some to evoke negative implications such as racial hostilities and violence despite its seemingly ‘‘posi- tive’’ image that it creates for Asian Americans. F. H. Wu (2002) posited that ‘‘the model minority myth hurts Asian Americans themselves. It is two-faced’’ (p. 67). The 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and the violence against Asian Americans in the 1992 Los Angeles riots are raised as such examples (e.g., Feng, 2002; Osajima, 2000; Palmer, 1999; Takaki, 1989; F. H. Wu, 2002). These negative consequences of the model minority stereotype can be better under- stood by thinking that ‘‘the concepts of the yellow peril and the model minority, although at apparent disjunction, form a seamless continuum’’ (Okihiro, 1994, p. 141) in the sense that Asian Americans as the model min- ority is ‘‘a complementary, benign image’’ of the yellow peril (p. 139).

The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril is explicated with the concepts of racial triangulation (Kim, 1999, 2000, 2000�2001) and the ambivalence of stereotypes (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Cloud, 1992). Kim argued that Asian Americans have been historically and racially triangulated as ‘‘aliens’’ or ‘‘outsiders’’ with regard to White Americans but as ‘‘superior’’ in relation to African Americans. The former can be considered to be corre- sponding to the yellow peril stereotype that describes Asian Americans as ‘‘foreigner foreigners’’ who divert from U.S. dominant cultural norms, are economic competitors, and thereby undermine the White nation. The latter can be considered to be tied to the model minority stereotype that celebrates Asian Americans as the model minority group who, unlike other racial minority groups, move ahead only with their own effort in U.S. society. The latter thus supports ‘‘colorblindness,’’ a dominant racial ideology in the post- civil rights era (Kim, 2000). Asian Americans as the model minority and the yellow peril relate to the ambivalence of stereotypes, which means that stereotypes are ambivalent because they entail contradictory meanings simultaneously (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Cloud, 1992). When Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in media texts, their portrayals are ambi- valent. If they are depicted mainly either as the model minority or the yellow peril, their representation entails the conflation of the two stereotypes.

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Racial meanings involving Asian Americans need to be examined both locally and globally as Nakayama (1997) argued that ‘‘we cannot understand the experiences and histories of Asian Americans outside of the context of both domestic and international contexts’’ (p. 15). In addition, racial stereo- types necessitate being explored historically because race is a social and thus historical construction (Omi & Winant, 1994). Racial meanings cannot be completely local because they are concerned with legitimizing Western colo- nialism and imperialism and also constructing West=White identities (Okihiro, 1994). Racial stereotypes of the yellow race do not distinguish yellows here from yellows there—Asian Americans from Asians, Chinese from Japanese, or Koreans from Vietnamese; that is, stereotyping Asian Americans is both Asian and American.

Hyphenated designations, such as ‘‘Asian-American,’’ have been ques- tioned by intercultural communication scholars because they create a bound- ary between minority groups and White Americans and marginalizes the former (e.g., Chen, 2004). When exploring Asian American people’s identi- ties, it may not be appropriate to stress the inseparability of Asians and Asian Americans. It cannot be denied that due to the confusion of the two, Asian Americans have been marginalized being seen as ‘‘not fully American’’ or ‘‘not fully Asian’’ (Chen, 2004). For examining racial stereotypes, however, it is crucial to look into the tight connection between the two because this is what is problematic about racial stereotypes that summarize people of culturally diverse groups as one racial group. Although in this article, I use the terms Asian and Asian American interchangeably, this only indicates the inseparability of Asians and Asian Americans in racial stereotyping.

Both historical and present U.S. and Asian contexts influence the con- struction of Asian American stereotypes. The yellow peril concept is said to have been most popular in its dogmatic forms in the first half of the 20th century (Palumbo-Liu, 1999). The model minority stereotype is believed to have been originally constructed in the 1960s. Both stereotypes were revived in the 1980s

2 under the global and local contexts that the United States had trade conflicts with Asian countries, Japan in particular and the Reagan administration started attacking affirmative action and welfare pro- grams. What does the revival of both stereotypes in the 1980s under these global and local contexts suggest?

This essay has two major purposes; one is to explicate the relationship between the model minority and the yellow peril stereotypes through tra- cing the two stereotypes historically; the other is to examine how the model minority�yellow peril dialectic is produced in a 1993 Hollywood film, Rising Sun (Kaufman & Kaufman, 1993). The story unfolds in the background of Japan’s economic threat to the United States and ‘‘Japan- bashing’’ in the 1980s. I believe that Rising Sun is an appropriate media text to examine the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril con- sidering the revival of the model minority and the yellow peril in the

Model Minority and Yellow Peril 111

1980s. This film is regarded mainly as a yellow peril movie that deals with economic threat to the United States posed by Japan (Lee, 1999). The point of using this film as a text lies in examining how a media text that appears to reproduce the yellow peril stereotype also engages in reproducing the model minority stereotype.

THE YELLOW PERIL

The idea of the yellow peril is a racial stereotype that has been constructed in the west. It has a longer history than the model minority stereotype in the United States. Although the term the yellow peril is believed to have been named and popularized by German Kaiser, Wilhelm II in the late 19th cen- tury (Thompson, 1978), its root can be traced back to the medieval threat of Genghis Khan and Mongolian invasion of Europe (Marchetti, 1993). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the West feared the yellow race as a menace that would threaten the domination of the White race, which stemmed from the large population size of East Asia, China’s potential mili- tary and economic power, and Japan’s rise as an imperial power after Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese war in 1885 and Russia in the Russo- Japanese war in 1905 (Okihiro, 1994; Thompson, 1978; W. F. Wu, 1982). Okihiro (1994) pointed out that ‘‘the idea of the yellow peril does not derive solely from the alleged threat posed by the yellow race to the white race and their ‘holiest possessions’—civilization and Christianity—but from non-White people, as a collective group, and their contestation of white supremacy’’ (p. 120). The yellow peril referred to cultural threat as well as economic, political, and military threats to the White race.

In the United States, the yellow peril signified the fear of Asian migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Laffey, 2000). Asian immigrants’ dif- ferent bodies and cultures were perceived as a great threat—the yellow peril—to American identity as the country of the White race and Western civilization (Lee, 1999). White Americans perceived people of Asian descent or ‘‘Orientals’’ as inassimilable foreigners who ‘‘would eventually overtake the nation and wreak social and economic havoc’’ (Fong, 2002, p. 189). Overlapped with the image of East Asia’s large population size and the emergence of an Asian imperial power, the presence of ‘‘Oriental’’ faces in the United States evoked among White Americans an alarm that the yellow race might overtake the White nation by outnumbering and out-powering the White race. The yellow peril stereotype led to the exclusion of Asian immigrants and to the U.S. colonization of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines (Lee, 1999). An American version of the yellow peril provided a justification or rationale for excluding Asian immigrants and continuing U.S. westward expansion beyond the west coast of the United States to the Asia and Pacific region (Okihiro, 1994).

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Not only U.S. domestic but also international contexts influenced the yellow peril stereotype (Wu, 1982). As Japan revealed its ambition to become an imperial power and conflicted U.S interests in the Asia and Pacific region, the yellow peril came to mean Japan. In particular, the 1941 Pearl Harbor bomb- ing by Japan during World War II inflated the yellow peril stereotype and led to the detention of Japanese Americans in concentration camps (Okihiro, 1994). In the world of Hollywood films, Fu Manchu served to enhance the yellow peril stereotype: a person who ‘‘possessed superhuman intellect and ambition’’ and also ‘‘was subhuman in his immorality and ruthlessness’’ (Fong, 2002, p. 190). After World War 2, the communist takeover of China in 1949, the Korean War, and the subsequent Cold War replaced Japan with China as the embodiment of the yellow peril; Chinese Americans were targeted as the main suspects of treason and espionage (Zhou & Gatewood, 2000).

THE MODEL MINORITY

Two articles published in 1966 by mainstream media are seen to be respon- sible for constructing the model minority stereotype (Lee, 1999; Okihiro, 1994; Osajima, 2000; Zia, 2000). The first model minority myth article, ‘‘Suc- cess Story, Japanese-American Style,’’ (Petersen, 1966) was published in New York Times Magazine on January 9, 1966. At the end of the same year, on December 26, 1966, an article titled ‘‘Success Story of One Minority in U.S.’’ that focused on Chinese Americans appeared in U.S. News and World Report. The two articles celebrated Japanese and Chinese Americans as the model minority groups who had close family ties, were extremely serious about education, and were law-abiding (Kawai, 2003).

By stressing that Asian Americans were succeeding through making efforts on their own despite their racial background, the model minority stereotype produces a ‘‘colorblind talk,’’ the most influential racial ideology in the post-Civil Rights Movement era (Kim, 1999, 2000). Colorblind ideology ‘‘furthers racial power not through the direct articulation of racial differences but rather by obscuring the operation of racial power, protecting it from chal- lenge, and permitting ongoing racialization via racially coded methods’’ (Kim, 2000, p. 17). The word colorblind was first used in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan, opposing the ‘‘separate but equal’’ doctrine, stated that ‘‘our constitution is color- blind. . . . In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law’’ (quoted in F. H. Wu, 2002, p. 146). Harlan’s statement was meaningful at a time when people of color were officially segregated. Yet, in the post-1965 era, the idea of colorblindness has been appropriated by conservatives to rhetorically disguise ‘‘fundamentally racial claims’’ (Kim, 1999, p. 17). Critical race theorists argue that the ideology of colorblindness abstracts individuals from social and historical contexts and attributes the consequences of racial

Model Minority and Yellow Peril 113

inequality to individual under-performance without acknowledging insti- tutional racism (Guinier & Torres, 2002). Thus they challenge the concept of race as a formal and neutral category and, at the same time, advocate understanding the importance of race in U.S. society.

The model minority stereotype is constitutive of colorblind ideology in the sense that Asian Americans’ ‘‘success’’ is used to deny the existence of institutional racism and to ‘‘prove’’ that U.S. society is reasonably fair and open for racial minority groups to move up the social ladder. For example, in the U.S. News and World Report article, it is stated that ‘‘at a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes [sic] and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone else’’ (‘‘Success Story,’’ 1966, p. 73). The author of the New York Times Magazine article insists that Japanese Americans succeeded ‘‘by their own almost totally unaided effort’’ (Petersen, 1966, p. 21). The two media texts uplift Asian Americans without referring to the historical context that, unlike African Americans who were forced to come to the United States, ‘‘Asian immigrants start off relatively privileged’’ because most Asian immigrants are voluntary immigrants (F. H. Wu, 2002, p. 52). Through abstracting each minority group’s different social historical contexts, the model minority stereotype functions to ‘‘[legit- imate] status quo social institutions’’ (Nakayama, 1988, p. 71).

Therefore, depicting Asian Americans as the model minority simul- taneously serves downgrading other racial minorities as ‘‘problem’’ minorities (e.g., Kim, 1999, 2000; F. H. Wu, 2002). The two 1966 articles starts and ends with the comparison between Japanese or Chinese Americans and African Americans; thus even when they were not directly compared in the articles, the articles could be read as if they constantly compared the two groups (Kawai, 2003). As F. H. Wu points out, ‘‘each commendation of Asian American is paired off against a reprimand of African Americans’’ (p. 62). It was not an accident that the articles portraying Asian Americans as the model minority appeared first in the mid-1960s. Osajima (2000) contended that the construction of the model minority stereotype was motivated to send ‘‘a distinct political message to the nascent Black Power Movement,’’ which claimed that ‘‘America was fundamentally a racist society, structured to keep minorities in a subordinate position’’ (p. 451). Besides ‘‘surface’’ meanings such as ‘‘academic and economic high achievers,’’ the model minority stereo- type contains ‘‘deep-structural’’ meanings such as supporting colorblind ideology and dividing racial minority groups.

The model minority stereotype was not constructed only in U.S. dom- estic contexts. Palumbo-Liu (1999) postulated that Japan’s re-emergence as ‘‘a newly hegemonic economic power’’ in the 60 s filtered into the model minority stereotype-making process (p. 171). Also it was not a coincidence that the first Asian ethnic group depicted as a model minority in 1966 was Japanese Americans. After World War 2, the United States was concerned

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about the spread of communism in Asia following China and North Korea and thus supported Japan’s economic recovery with massive financial aid. Between the 1950s and early 1970s, taking advantage of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, Japan experienced extremely high economic growth. In 1964, Japan became the first non-White nation-state to host the Olympic Games and to be admitted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Asian Americans were made as the model minority partly because Japan re-demonstrated its willingness and ‘‘ability’’ to go along with the West=White.

THE DIALECTIC OF THE MODEL MINORITY AND THE YELLOW PERIL

The model minority stereotype seems to be opposite to the yellow peril stereotype in the sense that the former is regarded as ‘‘positive,’’ whereas the latter as ‘‘negative.’’ The two stereotypes, however, are inseparable. Lee (1999) pointed out that ‘‘the model minority has two faces. The myth presents Asian American as silent and disciplined; this is their secret to success. At the same time, this silence and discipline is used in constructing the Asian American as a new yellow peril’’ (p. 190). Okihiro (1994) further explicated the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril:

It seems to me that the yellow peril and the model minority are not poles, denoting opposite representations along a single line, but in fact form a circular relationship that moves in either direction. We might see them as engendered images: the yellow peril denoting a masculine threat of mili- tary and sexual conquest, and the model minority symbolizing a femin- ized position of passivity and malleability. Moving in one direction along the circle, the model minority mitigates the alleged danger of the yellow peril, whereas reversing direction, the model minority, if taken too far, can become the yellow peril. In either swing along the arc, white supremacy is maintained and justified through feminization in one direc- tion and repression in the other. (p. 142)

People of Asian descent become the model minority when they are depicted to do better than other racial minority groups, whereas they become the yellow peril when they are described to outdo White Americans. On one hand, Asian Americans as the yellow peril embody ‘‘foreignness’’ and ‘‘mas- culinity’’ that threaten U.S identity as a White, Christian nation; on the other hand, Asian Americans who make efforts to succeed silently and diligently— without demanding or protesting anything—symbolize ‘‘the model minority’’ and ‘‘docility’’ or ‘‘femininity’’ and confirm colorblind ideology. Considering Lee (1999) and Okihiro’s (1994) arguments, it is possible to think that the construction of the model minority stereotype is tied to creating a less threate- ning face of the yellow peril.

Model Minority and Yellow Peril 115

THE REVIVAL OF THE MODEL MINORITY AND THE YELLOW PERIL IN THE 1980s

In the 1980s, the yellow peril and the model minority were resurrected (Kim, 2000; Osajima, 2000; Shim, 1998). The return of the yellow peril stereotype occurred under the deteriorating trade relationship between the United States and Asia in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The economic ‘‘success’’ of Japan and so called Asian ‘‘tigers’’—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—were infused into the pre-war yellow peril stereotype to create the renewed yellow peril—Asian Americans as ‘‘unfair’’ economic competi- tors (Shim, 1998). White’s (1985, July 28) long article (8,225 words) that appeared in The New York Times ‘‘The Danger from Japan’’ exemplifies a depiction of Japan as the yellow peril. The ‘‘Japan-bashing’’ in the 1980s often used Pearl Harbor analogies and metaphors such as ‘‘Honda, Toyota, Pearl Harbor’’ or ‘‘the second Japanese invasion of the United States’’ (Tuan, 1998, p. 44). The ‘‘success’’ of non-White people was immediately interpreted as a threat and was attributed to unfairness. When so-called ‘‘Japan-bashing’’ was rampant in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Dutch and the British owned more U.S. real estate than the Japanese (Espiritu, 1992). Although the media mostly ignored European investment in the United States, they highly publicized Japanese ownership of U.S. property and stirred Americans’ protest against it.

Besides Japanese and Chinese Americans, the model minority stereotype of the 1980s accommodated other Asian ethnic groups such as Asian Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese, whereas Asian economic successes were spotlighted in the media.

3 In the 1966 model minority articles, Asian Ameri- cans were portrayed as the model minority in comparison with other racial minority groups, African Americans in particular. Such a comparison does not remain applied only between Asian Americans and African Americans but spills over comparison between Asian Americans and White Americans as well.4 As early as in 1971, Newsweek published an article titled ‘‘Success Story: Outwhiting the White’’ in which it was argued that Japanese Americans ‘‘on nearly all levels of conventional success. . .not only have outshone their minority groups but. . .have ‘outwhited’ the whites’’ (‘‘Success Story: Outwhiting,’’ 1971). In 1985, the author of a Time magazine article posited that Asian American household income exceeded ‘‘not only that of American families in general. . .but also the level reported by whites’’ (Doerner, 1985). In 1986, in a Fortune magazine article ‘‘America’s Super Minority,’’ it was claimed that Asian American children ‘‘outscore white’’ in various academic, cognitive, and intelligence tests, and ‘‘got A’s more often and failed less than whites’’ (Ramirez, 1986). The ‘‘successful’’ image of Asian Americans outdoing not only other minority groups but also White Americans unsettled the predominance of the White race and triggered fears.

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RACIAL TRIANGULATION

The model minority�yellow peril dialectic is tied to the concept of racial triangulation. Kim (1999, 2000, 2000�2001) argued that Asian Americans have been racially triangulated with African Americans and White Americans: Although Asian Americans are valorized as the model minority and are posi- tioned to be superior to African Americans, they are ostracized as immutably foreign in comparison with White Americans. As a result, throughout the U.S. history ‘‘Asian Americans are, on the whole, persistently less advantaged than Whites and more advantaged than Blacks in the American racial order’’ (Kim, 2000�2001, p. 37).

In 1879, a former U.S. consul to Japan, who also traveled to China testified, ‘‘I think the Chinese are a far superior race to the negro [sic] race physiologically and mentally’’ (Spoehr, 1973, p. 198). Around that time in California, a White was considered worth 2 Chinese and a Chinese worth 2 Blacks (Kim, 1999). After the Civil War, Southern industrial elite and plan- tation owners, no longer being able to exploit slave labor, imported the Chinese as cheap labor source in order to ‘‘punish the Negro [sic]’’ (Zia, 2000, p. 36). The model minority stereotype that emphasized Asian Americans’ solid family ties appeared immediately after Moynihan’s 1965 book The Negro Family that attributed African Americans’ opposite family structure to the cause of their poverty (Kim, 1999). The resurgence of the model minority stereotype in the 1980s also coincided with ‘‘the explosion of works on Black ‘underclass’ in the 1980s’’ (Kim, 1999, p. 121).

On the other hand, people of Asian descent have been treated as ‘‘less American’’ or ‘‘forever foreigners’’ who have been subjugated to racially moti- vated exclusion and discrimination such as the exclusion of Asian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the internment of Japanese Ameri- cans, and the recent racial profiling case of Wen Ho Lee. During the O.J. Simpson trial, in a book Judge Lance Ito was referred to as ‘‘HIRO-ITO’’; his sketch was accompanied by a poem that ‘‘HIROSHIMA, NUKE JUDGE ITO=BANZAI, BANZAI, NAGASAKI=USE HIS HEAD FOR BACKYARD HOCKEY’’ (quoted in Kim, 1999, p. 127). In the 1998 winter Olympics women’s figure skating competition, MSNBC headline reported the gold medal winner of the competition as ‘‘American beats Kwan,’’ although both Tara Lipinski, the winner, and Michelle Kwan were American (Tuan, 1999, p. 40).

THE AMBIVALENCE OF STEREOTYPES

If racial triangulation provides an explanation of the communication context in which the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril is played out, the concept of the ambivalence of stereotypes (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Cloud, 1992) is useful to explain the dialectic in the world of discourse. Berg

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(1990) examined various definitions of stereotypes: Stereotypes indicate cognitive mechanisms for making sense of the world (social psychological perspectives), pre-existing categories in culture (sociological perspectives), ways of differentiating self from the world (psychological perspectives), fetishism (psychoanalytical perspectives), or dominant ideologies (ideologi- cal perspectives). Although these perspectives explain stereotypes differently in terms of how stereotypes operate, all of them associate stereotyping with meaning-making processes.

Making difference is crucial for making meaning. Meanings are made through making a boundary between things in order to classify them. Dyer (1979=2000) argued that ‘‘the most important function of the stereotype’’ is ‘‘to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it’’ (p. 249). Although defining boundaries is a necessary process to construct meaning, stereotyping, which goes through a similar process, is problematic because it ‘‘tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power’’ (Hall, 1997, p. 258). That is, people are not equal in deciding boundaries; a certain domi- nant group has more power to do so, and the meaning (stereotype) that the group creates tends to win consensus. Stereotyping does not simply involve making difference; it simplifies, fixes, and exaggerates the meaning (Hall, 1997).

Stereotypes are ambivalent as they contain contradictory messages simultaneously (Bhabha, 1983=1996; Hall, 1997). The contradictory charac- teristics of stereotypes are pointed out by various communication scholars (e.g., Berg, 1990; Hall, 1997: Hughes & Baldwin, 2002). For example, whereas the stereotypical image of Black men as ‘‘childish’’ has been con- structed under the histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, another stereotype, the ‘‘macho’’ image of Black men, has been also pervasive (Hall, 1997). Latina=Hispanic women are also contradictory stereotyped as both ‘‘the halfbreed harlot’’ and ‘‘the female clown’’ that neutralizes the overt sexual threat posed by the former in Hollywood films (Berg, 1990).

Furthering Condit’s (1989) argument that media texts are not polysemy but polyvalent, Cloud (1992) contended that racial stereotyping in media texts is not polyvalent but ambivalent: ‘‘images of racial difference in popular culture are not polyvalent, subject to any number of possible evaluations. Rather, they are often ambivalent; responses are contained within a binary meaning system’’ (p. 314; emphasis in original). Stereotypes are subject to a binary meaning system rather than to a meaning system with many possible meanings because stereotyping is more rigid than a simple meaning-making process and also tends to involve power inequality. Bhabha (1983=1996) explained this point using the concept of fetishism that ‘‘allows for the possi- bility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official and one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division’’ (p. 50). Currently

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the yellow peril can be considered as a stereotype that is a secret, archaic, and original stereotype of Asian Americans, whereas the model minority can be regarded as official and progressive, which supports colorblind ideology.

Thinking about the yellow peril and the model minority dialectically, however, does not mean fixing one as official and the other as secret or one as archaic and the other as progressive; it implies grasping the dynamics of the ways in which the two stereotypes operate in media texts. That is, the model minority stereotype is not always official; there are cases that the yellow peril is official, while the model minority is secret. In addition, the two stereotypes may not be distinctively represented; they are blended and create a little more complex meaning. Such cases are exemplified in Rising Sun.

ANALYSIS

I analyze a Hollywood movie, Rising Sun to examine how the model minority�yellow peril dialectic is produced in the media text. Rising Sun, a bestseller book written by Michael Crichton, was published first in 1992; the film version was released in 1993. The background of the story is a time like the 1980s when the United States had trade frictions with Japan. At that time, Japan had a large trade surplus with the United States and was purchas- ing out popular real estates such as Rockefeller Center and large corporation such as MCA, CBS Records, and Columbia Pictures. The story unfolds around a gigantic Japanese corporation, Nakamoto’s purchase of an American semi- conductor company, Microcon, and a murder that occurred in the building of Nakamoto in downtown Los Angeles. Two police detectives, John Connor, a White detective played by Sean Connery, and Pete Smith, a Black detective played by Wesley Snipes, are assigned to investigate the case. John Connor, an ‘‘expert’’ of Japanese culture who understands the Japanese language, takes the lead in the investigation and solves the case in the end.

Asian Cowboy as the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril

The starting scene of Rising Sun is very suggestive. The scene starts with several cowboys riding horses in the dusty, dry, and desert looking land that reminds the audience of the old American West. White cowboys, who dressed in bright colors, were towing a White-looking woman with black hair who was tied up with a rope on the horse. Suddenly an Asian-looking man, who is dressed identically with the White cowboys but totally in black, appears and stares at the cowboys from behind. At this point, audiences realize that this scene is part of a karaoke videotape. Eddie Sakamura, a Japanese big business owner’s son, is singing with the videotape in a karaoke

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bar. The karaoke videotape continues to show the Asian cowboy chasing the White cowboys, attacking them in a ‘‘cowboy style,’’ and saving the White woman.

The Asian man dresses exactly like the White cowboys—a cowboy hat, boots, trousers, and a shirt—except that his clothes are totally black, whereas the clothes of the White cowboys are bright colors. He looks like one of the cowboys except for the color of his clothes. The color difference between the Asian cowboy and the White cowboys indicates a typical binary opposition: white=black refers to good=evil. Compared with Black skin, Asian com- plexion is more difficult to distinguish from that of Whites; thus the Asian man is dressed in black to maintain the binary oppositions—East=West, black=white, and evil=good.

The twist is that the Asian cowboy is not represented as a bad guy. He not only follows the same rule by dressing in a similar way with the White cowboys but also plays a ‘‘saint’’ who fights against ‘‘villains’’—White cowboys—to save a woman. Although he is portrayed as a ‘‘model cowboy’’ by assimilating to or even ‘‘out-cowboying’’ the White cowboys, he does not indicate a completely good guy due to the color of his clothes and the setting. The cowboys and the old American West are well-recognized signifiers for the westward expansion of White America; the Asian man interrupts what the White cowboys (i.e., westward expansion) try to achieve. What the Asian cowboy indicates is the yellow peril who is ‘‘an apt imitator of Western material progress’’ (London, 1999, p. 441) and eventually attempts to surpass the West=White. The ‘‘copyist’’ or ‘‘imitator’’ image of the yellow race has always been part of the yellow peril discourse (Thompson, 1978; Okihiro, 1994). Another important aspect of this scene is that the Asian man ‘‘takes away’’ a woman from White men. The yellow peril stereotype in the Holly- wood films of the early 20th century stressed the fear of miscegenation, especially the threat posed by Asian men to White women (Marchetti, 1993). The Asian man in the film is a ‘‘good’’ guy in the sense that he is will- ing to assimilate to the White rules of the game (i.e., dressing exactly like the White cowboys do and attacking them in a ‘‘cowboy style’’) but is a ‘‘bad’’ guy who disrupts what the White cowboys attempts to achieve (i.e., taking away their woman).

The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril is personified in the Asian character. Unlike the earlier version of the yellow peril, the Asian man’s appearance does not signify immutable foreignness as he acts like White cowboys; yet he does not divert completely from the early yellow peril stereotype in the sense that he appears to ‘‘mimic’’ the White cowboys and is depicted as a person who takes a woman away from them. He also represents the model minority stereotype in the sense that he con- forms to the ‘‘White norms’’ by following the ‘‘norms’’ of White cowboys in Hollywood western movies and saving a woman from ‘‘villains’’ as if he were a cowboy in the these films starred by White men. Although the

120 Y. Kawai

model minority in the 1960s just ‘‘does better’’ than other minority groups, the Asian cowboy ‘‘does better’’ than the White cowboys and threatens them by interrupting the White cowboys’ business. In this scene, the model minority and the yellow peril stereotypes are conflated with each other, which produces a character who is not simply the model minority or the yellow peril but both.

Japan=Japanese as the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril

In the film, Japan (and the Japanese) serves both the model minority and the yellow peril. The film depicts Japan as a super affluent and super high-tech entity: the giant building of Nakamoto company equipped with latest tech- nologies, a Japanese high-tech company office building in which an array of high-tech equipment—including a dancing robot—is highlighted, expensive Japanese restaurants, golf-courses, and wealthy private houses. A main location of the film, Nakamoto corporation’s building, is enormous, domi- neering, glittering, and towering into the sky. The building is furnished with elevators that speak in Japanese and tells passengers which floor they are, state-of-the-art video cameras that put every single room and event under surveillance, and expensive furniture and decorations.

In contrast to the affluence of Japan, America is portrayed as poor and ordinary. American scenes are set on the streets with homeless people, a poor neighborhood in which only African Americans and Latinos appear, and an ordinary apartment complex in which Smith, an African American police detective, lives. The following scene shows an example of direct com- parison between Japan’s affluence and America’s poverty: On the way from examining the room of the murder victim, Cheryl Austin, a White woman with blond hair, Connor says to Smith in the car, ‘‘Business is war. We are in the war zone.’’ Immediately after the lines, the camera cross-cuts to Connor and Smith in the car, to homeless people standing in the rain on the street, and to the gigantic building of Nakamoto: homeless people— America—are compared with the enormous building—Japan. By relating and relaying these two scenes, the film tries to create a message that Japan is to blame for America’s problems.

Japan’s ‘‘superiority’’ is consistently stressed throughout the film. After Connor and Smith saw the murder scene, the Japanese expert, Connor, says to Smith, ‘‘In Japan, criminals are expected to be caught. Convictions run about 90 percent. Here, it’s closer to 70.5 percent. They think we are stupid. They think we are corrupt. They are not often wrong.’’ An African American security worker who watches over every room of the Nakamoto building through surveillance cameras, explaining the equipments, says to Connor and Smith, ‘‘There is nothing like this in this country—yet. This is all next- generation.’’ The security worker continues to say, ‘‘Around here, if some- thing does not work or I’ve got a problem, I tell somebody, and they fix it.

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It is not like when I was working at GM. This is different here.’’ These dialogues that compare Japan and the United States seem to elevate Japan over the United States: Japan’s conviction rate is higher than that of America, Japanese technologies are more advanced than those in the Untied States, Japanese people are more efficient at their work.

Uplifting Japan, however, does not create a positive image of Japan because while stressing the ‘‘superiority’’ of Japan, the film exaggerates the foreignness of Japan. At the Nakamoto party scene, Japanese women wear kimonos, powder their face in extremely white like geishas, and speak only in Japanese. An Asian-looking waitress puts on a simple black dress also makes up her face like a geisha and delivers drinks to the party guests with- out showing any emotion at all as if she wore a noh mask. Japanese senior company executives who pose for a photo with White women are all extremely shorter than these women and are dwarfed. Japanese customs such as bowing and apologizing are also exaggerated in the film. As two White men enter the Nakamoto building, they say, ‘‘One thing you have to remember is the custom here is bow when you are bowed to.’’ They jokingly repeat the sentence together whenever they bow to Japanese quests in the party. In front of the building, the red carpet is spread and women with kimonos whose faces are powered, again unnaturally white, bow to party guests by saying ‘‘Irasshaimase (welcome).’’ When Ishihara, an employee of Nakamoto, delivers the disk that Connor and Smith are looking for, he apologizes to Connor speaking in Japanese and bowing, ‘‘Doomo sumima- sen. . .Doomo sumimasen (I am very sorry).’’ He bows so many times and repeats the phrase almost crying. In addition, the otherness of Japan is exa- cerbated by having Japanese characters switch their language back and forth from English to Japanese and English translations are not provided. Because the meaning is unclear when Japanese characters speak in Japanese, their foreignness becomes intensified to audiences lacking much knowledge of the Japanese language.

Traditional intercultural communication concepts such as individualism= collectivism, power distance, and high context=low context are also used to exaggerate Japanese otherness. For example, in the meeting scenes with Nakamoto and Microcon, all people of Nakamoto wear the same dark suits, whereas Microcon people put on different kinds and colors of suits. In an expensive Japanese restaurant in which Connor and Smith meet with Yoshida, the president of Nakamoto, a White American employee of Nakamoto cuts into the conversation between Connor and Yoshida. Yoshida and his right-hand man Ishihara stared at the American employee without saying a word in order to show their resentment. These ‘‘cultural’’ binary oppositions function to construct the racial other in the film.

The exaggeration of foreignness is an important feature of the yellow peril stereotype. The yellow body tends to be smaller than the white body, bowing and apologizing are Japanese customs, and Japanese people speak

122 Y. Kawai

the Japanese language—what is depicted in the film is not completely false. The problem is, however, the excessive emphasis and essentialization of dif- ference in the film. As Nakayama (2002) posited, ‘‘difference is a driving force for narration"; in racial meaning, ‘‘difference must be concrete in such a way that it appears substantial and concrete’’ (p. 93). Racial stereotyping involves not only creating difference, which is indispensable for constructing any meaning but also exaggerating and fixing difference in order to make a sub- stantial and concrete other. At the beginning of the 20th century, an Ameri- can popular novelist Jack London (1999) in his article ‘‘The Yellow Peril’’ introduces the following comment of a woman who had lived in Japan for a while: ‘‘It seems to me that they [the Japanese] have no soul’’ (p. 443). London continued to argue that ‘‘it [her comment] serves to illuminate the enormous difference between their souls and this woman’s soul. There was no feel, no speech, no recognition. This Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so different, so totally different.’’ (p. 443). The White woman could not feel that Japanese people were also human beings like her, could not understand their language, and could not recognize simi- larities between her and the Japanese, who were soulless creatures and thus less human.

While the foreignness of Japan is stressed in the film, Japan cannot be completely foreign. The main Japanese characters—Japanese business- men—all dress like American counterparts, play golf, use latest technologies, and work in a modern environment: They are very foreign and very assimi- lated to U.S norms simultaneously. Although the emphasis of foreignness has been also part of the model minority stereotype, unlike in the yellow peril stereotype, foreign culture is seen as a factor that makes them successful in U.S. society (Kim, 1999; Okihiro, 1994). The film portrays Japan as a ‘‘high achiever’’ in the world of business (the model minority) even by ‘‘out- performing’’ the United States, the most powerful capitalist nation in the world (the yellow peril). It also represents Japan as a threatening entity that operates in a different cultural system extremely different from the U.S. system (the yellow peril), which at the same time makes Japan succeed economically (the model minority).

RACIAL TRIANGULATION Stereotyping Japan=Japanese as the model minority and the yellow involves racial triangulation. When Smith and Connor find themselves chased by Eddie Sakamura’s friends, Smith drives his car into a ghetto-like neighbor- hood filled with poorly maintained houses and streets. People who appear in the neighborhood are mostly young African American men and a few young Latinos. Smith stops his car and greets the African American youths hanging out on the street. Telling them a made-up story that Smith and Connor are being run after by the Japanese because they left a sushi

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restaurant without paying, Smith asks the African American youths for inter- vention. Eddie’s friends, who are depicted as Japanese gangsters, are surrounded and threatened by these young men and run away giving up chasing Smith and Connor.

The scene of African Americans attacking Japanese overlaps with that of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in which that Asian Americans were attacked by African Americans and Latinos. The original novel of Rising Sun, pub- lished in 1992, neither suggests that Smith is African American nor includes this particular scene (Crichton, 1992). The film was first shown in theaters in 1993. Although it is not known whether the scene was included because of the riot, the point here is that after 1992, the signifier that African Amer- icans attack Asians cannot help but evoke the incident. The riots occurred after a ‘‘not-guilty’’ verdict was given to the White policemen who were charged with beating Rodney King, an African American man. Although it can be argued that the preceding racial tensions between Korean Americans and African Americans in the area contributed to the occurrence of the riot, the Rodney King case was not caused by Asian Americans. One of the most publicized conflicts occurred in 1991 in Los Angeles when a Korean storeowner, Soon Ja Du, shot to death a fifteen-year old African American girl, Latasha Harlings because of an unpaid $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Superior Court Judge Karlin put Du on probation with a $500 fine and 400 hours of community service (Park, 1999). This extremely light sentence angered African American communities in South Central Los Angles.

Mainstream media are believed to be responsible for turning the Rodney King case, a White racial issue, into an Asian�Black racial issue (Lie & Abelmann, 1999). After the not-guilty verdict was delivered on April 29, 1992, ABC-TV repeatedly showed the videotape of Du shooting Harlings first and then the videotape of Rodney King being beaten by the White policemen (Min, 1996). The media framed the riot as an inter-racial conflict between Asians and Blacks because such a portrayal ‘‘resonates with underlying American ideological currents, which pit Asian Americans, as a model min- ority, against African Americans, as an urban underclass’’ (Lie & Abelmann, 1999, pp. 79�80). Kim (1999) argues the implication of this case as follows: ‘‘by valorizing Korean immigrants and defending them against Black ‘agita- tors,’ the media once again used Asian Americans and the norms of color- blindness to protect White privilege from a Black Power challenge’’ (p. 126). The Rodney King case, which was undoubtedly motivated by White racism, was re-contextualized as an inter-minority conflict in which ‘‘urban underclass’’ African Americans attacked ‘‘model minority’’ Asian Americans, and White Americans disappeared from the scene. White Americans became ‘‘neutral,’’ African Americans became ‘‘villains,’’ and Asian Americans became ‘‘victims.’’ White racism was covered-up and became invisible, while racial minority groups were divided as they fought each other.

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A similar meaning is produced in that scene of the film. Smith says to Connor, ‘‘We are safe here, senpai.5 Rough neighborhoods may be America’s last advantage’’ as he drives into the poor neighborhood and asks African American youth for help to save them from Japanese gangsters. Although Lee (1999) posited that this scene implied ‘‘the notion of a black and white alliance against an alien’’ or ‘‘a new alliance that restores national unity against the alien’’ (p. 215), the meaning produced here is more complex. The neigh- borhood in which mostly African American young men appear suggests that poor neighborhoods signify darker-skinned minority groups. This scene trig- gers a question: Whose advantage is Smith talking about? It is surely an advan- tage for White America to have African Americans to protect its interests. This scene—that people who protect America from an alien are described to live in a ghetto—captures the reality of institutional racism in which African Ameri- cans are used for sustaining White America, while they live under poverty. Because Smith, an African American, speaks for White America, this scene makes institutional racism invisible. If Smith were a White, he could not go into the poor neighborhood and ask for intervention, the scene of African Americans attacking Asians would not be possible, and the line spoken by Smith would convey the racially charged meaning more obviously.

The Japanese who are attacked by African Americans are not ‘‘victims’’ like in the model minority stereotype but ‘‘villains’’ or the yellow peril who try to retaliate against Conner and Smith, the American heroes, for Eddie who signifies Japan. At the same time, Asian affluence is contrasted against Black poverty. Although these Japanese are portrayed as gangsters, they are still ‘‘model’’ gangsters who put on nice suits, drive a neat car, and run away without causing any trouble when they are threatened, whereas their African American counterparts are depicted as opposite. In addition, the Japanese characters are associated with ‘‘passivity’’ and ‘‘docility,’’ which are part of the model minority stereotype (Kibria, 2002; Okihiro, 1994), even when they are gangsters. Moreover, taking into account the consistent emphasis of Japanese affluence in contrast to American poverty throughout the film, this scene can provide an idea that Black poverty resulted from Asian affluence.

The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril creates a mean- ing that the yellow race is a menace not only for the White race but also for the Black race in the United States. Asian Americans are ‘‘bad’’ to White Americans because they are the yellow peril. So is the case to African Americans because Asian Americans are the model minority. Like the 1992 riots, while having Asians and Blacks fight each other, this scene makes Whites become invisible and neutralized and thereby produces a colorblind situation that sustains White privilege and hinders interracial solidarity to challenge the privilege.

The film includes a symbolic character against interracial solidarity. Jingo Asakuma grew up in Japan as a child of an African American father in the air force and a Japanese mother who worked at a noodle shop. She

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is a girlfriend of Connor and helps his investigation of the murder case. What is striking is her left hand: it is deformed. This signifier—a child of Black and Asian parents has a deformed hand—can mean a warning against an alliance between minorities: A mixed child of two people of color will be deformed or will have an ‘‘imperfect’’ human body; interracial alliance will lead to negative consequences.

CONCLUSION

Both local and global contexts have influenced the production of the yellow peril and the model minority stereotypes. In the past, the increasing number of Asian immigrants—non-Christian and non-White ‘‘other’’—in the United States and the rise of an Asian imperial power contributed to the construction of the yellow peril stereotype. The model minority stereotype was initially produced in the contexts in which racial minority groups stood up for racial equality and the institutional transformation of U.S. society, and Japan re-emerged as an economic power. The revival of both stereotypes in the 1980s coincided with the rise of Asian economic powers and also the Reagan administrations’ attack on affirmative action programs that were indebted to the Civil Rights Movement. The model minority stereotype has fed and been fed by the yellow peril stereotype in various social and historical contexts of both the United States and Asia. When Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in media texts, the model minority and the yellow peril stereo- types are blended, and ambivalent meanings are produced.

The ambivalence of Asian American racial stereotyping indicates the ideological characteristic of stereotyping. Ideology as a system of shared meanings needs to be hegemonic in Gramsci’s (2000) sense. Gramsci posited that in order for a particular group to control society, using coercion is not sufficient; it is necessary to persuade people to follow their ideas and pro- duce consent, for which accommodating contradictory meanings is impera- tive. Likewise, for stereotypes to be influential, they have to be ambivalent to also look ‘‘attractive’’ even to the stereotyped.

The point of viewing the model minority and the yellow peril stereo- types as a whole—not opposite and separate entities—lies not only in under- standing the characteristics of stereotypes but also in being conscious of the political implications of the model minority stereotype that seems to be ‘‘positive’’ and currently more ‘‘official’’ than the yellow peril stereotype. Stereotype as ideology can have actual effects on the stereotyped people as Berg (1990) postulated that ‘‘one of the saddest aspects of stereotyping is that out-group [the stereotyped] members may begin to believe and accept the stereotype’’ (p. 299). Because of the ‘‘positive’’ appearance, the model minority stereotype is more seductive for people of Asian descent in the United States to internalize the stereotype.

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Under the current form of globalization in which neo-liberalism has gained prominence (Fitzsimons, 2000), colorblind ideology that closely relates to neo-liberalism (Delgado & Stephanic, 2001) provides a theoretical support for conservatives to argue against the existence of institutional racism and attempt to eliminate affirmative action programs.6 In addition, colorblind ideology obscures Asian Americans’ relative privilege. Kim (2000�2001) contended:

When Asian American scholars, activists, and advocates argue that Asian Americans are minorities, too, deserving of equal consideration with Blacks, they abstract from history and decline to explore the ways in which Asian Americans are, on the whole, persistently advantaged rela- tive to Blacks. (p. 38)

It is true that all Asian American ethnic groups are not equally advanced: the poverty rate of Americans of Southeast Asian ancestry is still as high as or higher than other racial minority groups. Yet, it is also the case that ‘‘with blacks at the bottom, there is every indication that any migrants have a good chance both of being above the nether end of society and of experiencing some mobility’’ (Prashad, 2000, p. 163). By seeing the two stereotypes as one, it will become more difficult for people of the yellow race to accept the model minority stereotype and enable us to critically view the position of the yellow race in U.S. racial relations.

The ambivalent meanings of Asian Americans are not totally fixed. As local (U.S.) and global (Asian) contexts change, meanings regarding Asian Americans also change. These contexts, however, do not change without human practices including communication acts. Making ethical meanings for Asian Americans involves developing ethical racial relations with all other racial groups and creating more possible meanings by turning the ambivalent meanings of Asian Americans into polyvalent meanings.

NOTES

1. Kibria (2002) included an independent chapter dealing with the model minority stereotype but not

other stereotypes in her book Becoming Asian American.

2. See Shim (1998) for the revival of the yellow peril stereotype and see Kim (2000) for the revival of

the model minority stereotype.

3. On the other hand, people from Southeast Asia, especially Hmong immigrants, tended to be left

out. For example, Southeast Asian immigrants are labeled as the superminority’s poor cousins (Ramirez,

1986, p. 156).

4. The New York Times Magazine article of 1966 already contains comparison between Japanese

Americans and Whites in terms of occupation, income, and life expectation.

5. Senpai means the senior person. Connor teaches Smith about the senpai-kohai relationship in Japa-

nese culture. Smith calls Connor senpai, and Connor calls Smith kohai, the junior person.

6. The elimination of affirmative action programs has occurred since the 1990s in California, Texas,

Florida, and Washington (Steinberg, 2003).

Model Minority and Yellow Peril 127

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