During the early months of World War II, Hollywood studios produced a number of anti-Japanese propaganda films. As John Dower and other historians have shown, public bitterness toward Tokyo, catalyzed by the Pearl Harbor attack, was aggravated by the racial difference of the Japanese and the savage nature of combat in the Pacific. Film producers sought to tap into the hostile public mood with sensational productions. A number of these, notably the Monogram production “Let’s Get Tough!” and Twentieth Century Fox’s “Little Tokyo, U.S.A.,” included negative portrayals of Japanese Americans as spies for Tokyo.
Another wave of anti-Japanese propaganda films appeared around the end of the war, once Nazi Germany was on the way to defeat and Japan emerged as the nation’s remaining wartime enemy. This time, established studios steered away from making hate films. Instead, a selection of small independent producers green-lighted projects such as “Blood on the Sun” and “Tokyo Rose.” In some cases, production on these films had not wrapped by the time that fighting in the Pacific ceased in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result, these films opened to less critical acclaim and public attention than their earlier counterparts.
One of the most curious of these latter war propaganda movies, and the most extreme in its image of Japanese Americans, was Ben Mindenburg’s film “Samurai.” Mindenburg, a longtime independent Hollywood producer and the past president of the American National Pictures company. His sole previous producer credit was for “The Scorched Earth,” a 1942 documentary on the Japanese occupation of China, which used a compilation of American, British and other news reel clips to tell the story of wanton Japanese aggression and the heroic resistance of the Chinese.
Sometime during World War II, Mindenburg came up with the story for the film that would become “Samurai.” He selected Raymond Cannon, a one-time silent film actor and journeyman filmmaker, to direct. As with other wartime films featuring “evil Japanese,” Japanese roles were primarily portrayed by Chinese American actors. Mindenburg produced it through a tiny studio, Cavalcade Pictures.
“Samurai” starts with Japan and the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. In the ruins of Tokyo, two American medical missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Morey (played by Fred C. Bond and Barbara Wooddell), find a young orphan, Ken Kenakichi (Ronald Siu). They adopt Ken as their son and bring him back to San Francisco, sending him to elite schools in the United States. While painting along the shores of the Pacific, young Ken meets a Japanese Bushido Priest (Luke Chan) who is actually a Japanese secret agent. The film’s narrator intones how the priest instills in him emperor worship and the code of the samurai: “In traditional America, along its western coast, innocent-looking temples like these bale human monstrosities of deception. Here the fanatical order of bushido has reached across the Pacific to pay homage to samurai. Samurai — a symbol of the God of War; a creed of hate, lust, and death.” Ken trains in Europe as both a doctor and an artist. He comes back to San Francisco and shows his “abstract” paintings, which attract the interest of art lovers, but are in fact cleverly concealed maps of American defense installations. (Despite arriving in the United States as a small boy and being raised by white Americans, the adult Ken manages to speak imperfect English).
Ken returns to his homeland (lying to his parents that he has been named curator of Japanese art for the San Francisco Golden Gate exhibition).
Once in Tokyo, he meets the head of Japanese military intelligence and divulges his new espionage technique with the hope of receiving an assignment. However, because of his American parents and his deep knowledge of bushido, which is unusual for someone brought up outside Japan, he is suspected of being an American spy, and followed by the dreaded Black Dragon Society. He is sent on a mission to Shanghai, where he is brought before the local branch of the Black Dragon Society. There — in a possibly unconscious comic relief role — the actor playing the Japanese spy chief says angrily to Ken, “Ah, you are an American. You call yourself a Japanese American. What are you doing here? Causing more trouble?
Haven’t I got enough trouble with all the crazy Chinese?” He then tells his henchman, “Why do you bring this spy here? Why don’t you just shoot him? Can’t you see how busy I am?”
Ken makes good with his Japanese superiors by taking propaganda pictures doctored to show Japanese benevolence in China, so as to deny Japanese atrocities. Sent to Beijing, Ken consults General Sugiyama, the Japanese occupying general who is preparing plans for the conquest of America. There is a bit of sex business — within the limits of the Hollywood Production Code — where the general tests Ken’s devotion to the cause by getting drunk with him and then leaving him alone with a white blonde prisoner, over whose body he leers suggestively, while the general attempts to ravish a Chinese woman.
The general is apparently satisfied with Ken’s ability, as he orders Ken to “organize the Japanese in the United States into a semi-military organization so we can carry out our plans.” He provides Ken with a document appointing him governor of California, the appointment to be made official on the day that Japan conquers the United States.
Ken returns to San Francisco. By using Japanese American fishing boats, which surreptitiously meet Japanese freighters to obtain explosives, he smuggles in maps of the coast. He orders the barn of a Japanese truck farmer to be used as a storehouse for explosives and weapons.
Ken’s white brother Frank discovers his commission as governor and leads their parents to Ken’s studio, where they discover the evidence of spying. Ken pretends to be working as a double agent for the American government, but once Frank goes to alert the police, he stabs his white parents. He then drives off and attempts to seek refuge with the priest. However, when the priest learns that the planned Japanese invasion of California to take place together with the Pearl Harbor attack has failed and the Japanese spies have all been arrested, he commits seppuku. Ken is caught in a shootout with police and killed by them.
“Samurai” was filmed in early 1945, and in April 1945 it was announced as opening for limited release in San Francisco. The Alameda Times reported that the film showed how “the Jap dogma of Shintoism was covertly taught in California secret schools by the Japanese American agents for many years before the war,” To nobody’s surprise, the Times added that the new film had been “Endorsed by grand officers of the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West.”
The film opened for general release in late August 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender. A foreword was added to the film’s beginning, stating that the film’s purpose was: “to reveal the brutal Jap unmasked, exposing the defiant, arrogant, beastly code of the samurai, which must be classified as a perverted mentality under the standards of civilized behavior.”
Reviews in the New York press were brutal. The New York Times critic “T.M.P.” (Tom Pryor) referred to “Samurai” as “an example of opportunistic film-making that the screen could best do without.” While he praised the good intentions of the filmmakers, he complained that the film was simply anti-Japanese propaganda that made no attempt to discover why the Japanese were evil. “At this late hour, a motion picture should do something more than just shout ‘the Japanese are brutal, scheming beasts.’” Critic Dorothy Masters, writing in the Daily News, was even more contemptuous of the film, calling it a “feeble and incompetent damning of the Japs…An insult to emotion and a disgrace to cinema.” Masters quipped that the film left her feeling so sorry for everyone connected with the production that she couldn’t actually concentrate on the story or feel anything about the villain. Masters likewise deplored the “sexsationalism” in the film’s advertising campaign. “Lurid posters of about-to-be-ravished girls adorn the lobby, but the film doesn’t live up to this promise, either.” The Los Angeles Times, though it described most of the acting (generously) as wooden, at least found the film to contain a useful element — its depiction of Japanese spy methods.
“Samurai” soon disappeared from view. The producer and director never made another film, and it proved to be the last starring screen role for its lead actors. The film has been shown sporadically on television over the years. What its history reveals is not only the many ways in which film producers sought to incite racial hatred for profit, but also that critics and audiences were not merely passive — they could and did protest depictions they thought of as inadequate and racist.
Greg Robinson, Ph.D., author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans” and “A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America,” is a professor of history at l’Université du Québec À Montréal. He can be reached at robinson.greg@uqam.ca. The views expressed in the preceding column are not necessarily those of the Nichi Bei News.
Greg Robinson, Ph.D., author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans” and “A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America,” is a professor of history at l’Université du Québec À Montréal. He can be reached at robinson.greg@uqam.ca. The views expressed in the preceding column are not necessarily those of the Nichi Bei News.
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