Pearl Harbor sort of pissed me off. The Last Samurai was at least entertaining, but still... Now, Memoirs of a Geisha? With Pokemon, Nintendo, anime, horny salarymen, whorey schoolgirls and their underwear in vending machines served to me from TV and every corner of the internet, I was looking for the next bit of Japan in western mass media to be a little less stereotypical. Why not something like Kikujiro, or Waterboys, or even Tora-san? Why not a story in Japan, instead of a story about Japan? Maybe it's too much to ask right now, but I've almost had enough of being the cultural 'other.' But still, I haven't seen the movie, and maybe my second-generation Nikkei perspective is distorting. So I took a look at some user reviews on Yahoo! Japan for Memoirs of a Geisha, or Sayuri as it has been retitled, to find out how the movie was being received there, and there are different takes on it. Maybe it was just me constructing myself as the 'other.'

The average rating as of now is 3.2 stars out of five.

These bits were translated by me, and were chosen to show some range in opinion. The page is accessible from here: http://moviessearch.yahoo.co.jp/detail?ty=mv&id=321931


"The problem isn't the casting, but the movie's overall 'cheapness.' Even foreigners who watch this without preconceptions will probably find it cheap. I'd have liked them to decide on whether it was meant to be fantasy or realistic fiction." -eiga_shumi_2005 (2 stars)


"This was too awful. The casting, production, script, the background research.. everything was awful. It was a grand mockery of Japanese culture, and completely unable to express the beauty of the kimono. The movie truly made me sad." -wye_eyw (1 star)


"I hope that the people who will see this movie don't watch this and think "this bit is wrong and that thing is not right", but immerse themselves in the world of Rob Marshall's "Sayuri." ... Even after the movie ended, the world of "Sayuri" didn't disappear so easily from my heart; this is what makes this movie special." -shopen100 (5 stars)


"It turns out that Japanese and Chinese are quite easy to tell apart. I thought about why, and I realized that expressions, and the style of acting are different. But Zhang Ziyi's expressions and acting were in a Japanese style.

Incredible.

Japanese people will find many things strange, like maiko being called geisha, but I think this is done intentionally for American audiences. Still, Japanese will find out many deep, interesting facts they didn't know about Japan's past too." -yutakasaito2004 (5 stars)