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Bruce Lee: A visual poetics of postwar Japanese manliness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2013

JONATHAN D. MACKINTOSH
JONATHAN D. MACKINTOSH*
Affiliation:
Plymouth University, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Fist of Fury, starring Bruce Lee, debuted in Japan in 1974. Whilst its critical reception reflected its box-office success, a complex emotional reaction is nevertheless detectable towards the film's unsympathetic portrayal of the Japanese. This paper will explore this reaction and suggest that a post-colonial angst was piqued, one that betrayed fundamental shifts in current racial, erotic, cultural, moral, and historical understandings of Japanese manliness. At one level, the response to Lee is a hermeneutic cue into the manifold ways that this angst was constructed through contesting understandings of an emergent China and unresolved memories concerning failed imperial Japanese adventure. At another level, the phenomenon of Lee's Japanese reception points to longer-term shifts in the visual-cultural representation of masculinity: vulnerability as articulated in the cinema's ‘new man’, male nudity as ‘discovered’ in women's magazines, and most potently, modern Japanese manliness to challenge American neo-colonial hegemony. It is this panorama of masculinity that this paper seeks to open through an inter-disciplinary survey of a variety of media—film, pulp fiction, women's magazines, and homo porn; a panorama into which Bruce Lee exploded on screen, alerting us to the images and contradictory aspirations that script a visual poetry of Japanese manliness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1477 - 1518
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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7 Lee's Chinese screen-name translates as ‘little dragon’, and is the basis of his Doragon (dragon) nickname in Japan. Lee's first film The Big Boss was released in the United States as Fists of Fury. In order to avoid confusion, Lee's second film Fist of Fury was re-titled The Chinese Connection in the United States.

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19 K. Inomata and M. Yamagami, Kūkō, Polygram, 1974. Like the minato (port) and eki (train station), ‘mythic places’ of the enka (traditionalistic ballad) repertoire (Tansman, Alan M., ‘Mournful Tears and Sake: The Postwar Myth of Misora Hibari’, in Treat, John Whittier (ed.), Contemporary Japan and PopularCulture (Curzon Press, Richmond), p. 116Google Scholar), the airport similarly evoked parting, longing, and nostalgia. There was an extra dimension of meaning with Kūkō, however, since separation as performed by Teng might suggest, in this new age of mass tourism, parting at the end of a holiday, and even the exotic fantasy of an inter-Asian intermingling come to its end.

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29 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

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33 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

34 Bailey, Postwar Japan, p. 128. The shock felt at the vehemence of this reception is reflected in the founding of the Japan Echo in November 1974, a Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs-backed publication to promote a sympathetic understanding of Japanese foreign policy. On this objective, the self-reflection that the January 1974 events effected continues to be cited by the Japan Echo, ‘[T]he angry demonstrations that broke out during Prime Minister Tanaka's visit brought home the fact that these efforts had been too introverted’ (Japan Echo, ‘From the Publisher’, in Japan Echo, Vol. 37, No. 2, April (2010), http://www.japanecho.com/sum/2010/370216.html [accessed 18 June 2013]). The Action Committee for Defending the Diaoyu Islands was established in February 1971. This Hong Kong-located movement pushed for the repudiation of Japan's claims to what it called the Senkaku islands (R. Yoshida, ‘Hong Kong Expats: Senkaku Spat Nonissue—Latest Flareup over Disputed Islets Raises Issue of True Ethnic Identity’, in Japantimes.co.jp. 7 September 2012, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120907f1.html, [accessed on ‘Legacy’ website 18 June 2013]; K. Sakamoto, ‘Senkaku jōriku no Hon Kon han-Nichi dantai, “membaa wa kōreika, shikin mo nai”’, in Searchina website. 18 August 2012 http://news.searchina.ne.jp/disp.cgi?y=2012&d=0818&f=politics_0818_003.shtml [accessed 18 June 2013).

35 Monma, T., ‘Chōsenjin to Chūgokujin no sutereotaipu [The stereotypes of Chinese and Koreans]’, in Kurosawa, K., Yomota, I., Yoshimi, S., Ri, B. (eds), Nihon eiga wa ikiteiru – Dai 4 kan, ‘Sukuriin no naka no tasha[Japanese Film Lives – Volume 4, ‘The Other on Screen’] (Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo), pp. 147–149Google Scholar.

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39 Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, p. 100. See, also, Oguma Eiji who argues that the conception of Japanese homogeneity is a postwar invention. The invisibility of minority groups—especially former colonial subjects—is, in part, an effect of efforts to forget prewar imperialism (Oguma, E., Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: ‘Nihonjin’ no jigazō no keifu = The Myth of the Homogeneous Nation (Shin’yōsha, Tokyo), 1995)Google Scholar.

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46 Ibid.

47 Itō, Bungaku, Barazoku no hitobito - sono sugao to butai ura (The People of Barazoku – The Reality Behind the Scenes; Kawade shobō shinsha, Tokyo, 2006), pp. 6–7Google Scholar. The fūzoku zasshi can be understood as part of a global postwar genre of ‘pulp’ culture. Its explorations of the underbelly of society and cultures of ‘hard boiled’ criminality and perverse sexualities reveal a ‘cultural unconscious’ conditioned by war, ‘haunted by the knowledge of concentration camps and the shadow of the mushroom cloud’ (Stryker, Susan, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle Books, San Francisco), p. 7Google Scholar).

48 Tagame, Gengoroh, Nihon no gei erotikku aato, vol. 1, gei zasshi sōkan seiki no sakkatachi (Gay Erotic Art of Japan Vol. 1, Artists From the time of the Birth of Gay Magazines; Potto Shuppan, Tokyo, 2003), p. 185Google Scholar.

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51 Ibid.

52 The fundoshi semiotically conflates manliness, race, and nation to symbolize Japanese virility (Mackintosh, Jonathan D., Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan (Routledge, London and New York, 2010) p. 199Google Scholar).

53 The martial arts weapon known colloquially as ‘nunchuks’ from the original nanchaku consists of two sticks connected at one end with a chain.

54 Teppei Aki, ‘2: Konton no shō [2: The Chaos Chapter]’, Ryū (Dragon), Fūzoku kitan (Queer Tales of Sexual Mores), December (1964), p. 177.

55 Baskett, Attractive Empire, p. 44.

56 Aki, Ryū, p. 180.

57 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

58 T. Oda, untitled, in Fūzoku kitan, December, 1964, p. 179.

59 T. Oda, untitled, in Tagame, gei erotikku aato, p. 156. The victim in this image is identical in face and body to Oda's depiction of Captain Arao in Ryū. In addition to his high-gloss coffee-table book (ibid.), see Tagame's official website Gay Erotic Art of Tagame Gengoroh includes an entry dedicated to Oda's art including the image here referenced. The reader is advised that Tagame's site contains highly graphic images depicting violent sexual scenes.

60 It must be remembered that these images and the pan-Chinese culture they signify were also part of an international Chinoiserie that circulated globally traversing the prewar and postwar eras. Hollywood was certainly influential as Monma argues (Monma, Chōsenjin, p. 158), but not exclusively. Japan and Britain played their part, as in Enomoto Ken’ichi's 1940 big-budget musical, Songoku (The Monkey King), which choreographed landscapes and attire similar to those of Walter Forde's 1934 Chu Chin Chow. Based on the 1916 London West End hit, this British film screened at the Teikoku Gekijō in January 1935 featured Chinese imperial officials and masses of dancing Oriental women to wide public acclaim (Walter Forde, Chu Chin Chow, Gainsborough Pictures, 1934; S. Arabia, ‘Kūsō eiga kōkai risuto [List of Release Dates of Fantasy Films]’, in Eigajingai makyō/Cinema Incognita, http://eigajingaimakyo.web.fc2.com/kuusou/s-10.html [accessed 18 June 2013]). In both Forde's and Enomoto's works, China is embodied by the figure of the Oriental temptress who, notable in this era's cosmopolitanism, are played by two diasporically ambiguous actresses: to Chu Chin Chow's trans-Atlantically popular American-born Anna May Wong, there was Ri Koran, the Manchurian-born actress with a Chinese stage name who, unbeknownst to most was Japanese; to Wong's evil temptress that stoked British ‘Yellow-Peril’ Orientalist fears, Ri's masquerade as the ultimate ‘woman of the Orient’ stroked Japanese imperial desire (Stephenson, Shelley, ‘“Her Traces are Found Everywhere”: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the “Greater East Asia Film Sphere”’, in Zhang, Yinjing (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai: 1922–1943 (Stanford University Press, Standford, 1999), pp. 222–223Google Scholar).

61 It should be noted that, as Tagame observes, male homosexuality ‘coexisted with other sexualities in one magazine’ in the fūzoku zasshi's polymorphous pulp explorations of non-normative sexuality in the 1960s. Aki's novels like Ryū and his 1962 ‘masterpiece’ going by the Sinified-title Chu Chin Chow—all complemented by Oda's artwork—were fully in keeping with this ethos which ‘could attract both gay S&M fans and heterosexual masochists’ (Tagame, gei erotikku aato, p. 186), and hence, the inclusion of female characters.

62 T. Oda, untitled, in Fūzoku kitan, December, 1964, p. 183.

63 Aki, Ryū, p. 177.

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65 Williams, Linda, Screening Sex (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008), p. 236CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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70 Ibid, pp. 28–29.

71 High, Peter B., The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945 (The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2003), p. 278Google Scholar; Baskett, Attractive Empire, p. 62.

72 Cited in High, op. cit., p. 280. See also Igarashi, Y., Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford), 2000, pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

73 Seijun Suzuki, Shunpuden, Nikkatsu, 1965.

74 David Chute, Story of a Prostitute, DVD notes to The Criterion Collection (Story of a Prostitute), 2005. Mikami is played by Kawachi Tamio, whose handsome youthfulness is expressed in a gentle face and earnest manliness reminiscent of Hasegawa's China Night's Hase, and, it might be noted, Captain Arao as set against the angular facial features of Zhang. All three draw on a visual-moral idiom of what High identifies as nikudan (human bullet) valour, selfless loyalty, and suicidal heroism (High, Imperial Screen, pp. 33, 43). Importantly, however, the historical context of their making emphasizes highly differing appraisals: Hase is praised in the prewar period, whilst the futility of Mikami's ideology is critiqued, and Arao's stereotyped stoicism is pastiched.

75 Monma, Chōsenjin, pp. 146–149, 158–159.

76 Yau, Hon Kon-Nihon, p. 253.

77 Ibid., pp. 250, 253, 255. From its peak in 1974 when 28 Hong Kong films were screened, the total had quartered to just seven in the following year, and then four in the subsequent year. By the latter half of the decade, the ‘Hong Kong film boom’ which Bruce Lee sparked had ended except for a small ‘community of taste’ for Hong Kong, as Iwabuchi Kōichi latterly identifies this group of fans in his study of East Asian transnational cultural flows. These aficionados were versed in the nuanced styles of kung fu and especially its Hong Kong stars, directors, and producers. (Iwabuchi, Kōichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002), pp. 186–187CrossRefGoogle Scholar). These aficionados aside, however, it does not appear that a comparable level of appreciation grew in any enduring way amongst the wider public.

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81 McClintock, Anne, ‘Imperial Leather: Race, Cross-Dressing and the Cult of Domesticity’, in Lewis, Reina and Mills, Sara (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 642–643Google Scholar.

82 Ibid., p. 637.

83 Ibid.

84 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

85 Craig Reid, ‘Hiroyuki Sanada: “Promises” for Peace through Film’, in KungfuMagazine.com, http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=662 [accessed 18 June 2013].

86 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

87 Ibid; High, Imperial Screen, pp. 244; 377–378.

88 Yau, Hon Kon-Nihon, pp. 250–260.

89 Hunt, Leon, Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to “Crouching Tiger” (Wallflower Press, London, 2003), p. 54Google Scholar; Kwan, Stanley, Yang±Ying: Gender in Chinese Cinema—A Film by Stanley Kwan (British Film Institute, 1996)Google Scholar. Kwan's reading of masculinity in Chinese cinema is characteristic of his concerns as a gay film-maker. See, for example, Lim, Song Hwee, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2006), p. 153Google Scholar.

90 Kenken, ‘Otoko wa minna gei de aru [Men Are All Gay]’, in Nettaisei renkiatsu blogsite, http://blog.livedoor.jp/tropical_love/archives/493882.html [accessed 18 June 2013].

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93 Neale, Steve, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’, in Cohan, Steve and Hark, Ina Rae (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, London, 1993), p. 14Google Scholar.

94 Ibid., p. 17.

95 Ibid., pp. 14, 17.

96 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

97 One of the drawbacks of Willemen's and Neale's psychoanalytical approach is, as Sean Nixon critiques, its ‘inability to consider differences between masculinities’, hence ‘the failure to consider the organization of other forms of sexual desire in the cinema’ (Nixon, Sean, ‘Exhibiting Masculinity’, in Hall, Stuart (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1997), p. 320Google Scholar). In other words, the male viewer is axiomatically heterosexual and heteronormatively confirmed in his patriarchal status to wield masculine power.

98 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’; Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 37.

99 See, for example, Hunt who analyses the elements of Lo Wei's subjective shooting style (Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 37).

100 Willemen, ‘Looking at the Male’, p. 16.

101 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

102 Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, p. 13.

103 Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Samourai, Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique, 1967.

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105 Miller, ‘The French New Wave’, pp. 109–120. In her study of the influence of the French New Wave on Hollywood, Miller identifies and explores a number of characteristics to define masculinity including a personal code of male ethics, professionalism, surveillance, the construction of identity through commodities, and alienation.

106 Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, p. 52.

107 ‘Arnie’ had already won his two consecutive Mr Universe titles in 1968 and 1969 and was then currently in uninterrupted possession of the Mr Olympia title from 1970 to 1975.

108 Jeffords, Remasculinization of America.

109 According to Kazama, Bruce Lee kept secret a body-building style that, instead of emphasizing muscle-mass increase, developed the muscle sinews to release an explosive power (Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’). See also Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, pp. 52–53.

110 Samourai, ‘Alain Delon 70's Ads for D’Urban’, in Alain Delon—Still the Best. 12 July 2010, http://samourai.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/alain-delon-70s-ads-fordurban/, [accessed 18 June 2013]. Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.

111 Itō, Kimio, “Otokorashisa” no yukue: dansei bunka no bunka shakaigaku (Locating “Masculinity”: Cultural Sociology of Male Culture), Shinyōsha (Tokyo, 1993), p. 22Google Scholar.

112 Itō, “Otokorashisa” (Masculinity). Nor was it seen for long, since the Taiyōzoku were regarded as so ‘cynical, violent, sexually permissive, and suspiciously foreign [in] image’ as to be too scandalous even for Ishihara himself. In order to preserve his reputation, as Raine observes, Ishihara ‘lost the attitude and kept the body’ to achieve a ‘tuneful romanticism and tough-guy bravado’, and in turn, a post-Taiyōzoku Yūjiro boom in 1958 (Michael Raine, ‘Ishihara Yūjirō: Youth, Celebrity, and the Male body in Late-1950s Japan’, in Dennis Charles and Carole Cavanaugh (eds), Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, 2001, pp. 203, 211–213).

113 Hirano, Kyōko, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1992), pp. 154–170Google Scholar.

114 M. Morimura, ‘“Nete mitai otoko” no keifu (Genealogy of “Men I Want to Sleep With”)’. In Queer Japan: Tokushū—meiru bodi (Queer Japan: Special Collection –Male Body), Vol. 1, November (1999), p. 20.

115 Morimura, ‘“Nete mitai otoko”’, p. 20.

116 Itō, Bungaku and Fujita, Ryū, ‘Akarui tokoro e deyō to aruite kimashita: Barazoku jūnen no henshū urabanashi[I Have Walked to Come Into a Brighter Place: The Inside Story of Editing Ten Years of Barazoku]’. In Barazoku: henshūchō funsenki (Barazoku: Battle Notes of the Chief Editor) Dainishobō, Tokyo, 1986), p. 156Google Scholar.

117 Morimura, op. cit., pp. 19–20.

118 Sekiguchi observes that modern Japanese sports—which evolved against a backdrop of imperial rivalry with the Anglo-American West, the emergence of competitive capitalism, and war—not only idealized a large and muscular body, but it embodied spiritual qualities of self control, including the effacing of self expression, and dependence on authority (Sekiguchi, H., ‘Taiiku, supōtsu ni okeru “otokorashisa” – gendai kara mirai e [“Masculinity” in Physical Education and Sports – From the Present to the Future]’, in Asai, H., Itō, S., and Murase, Y. (eds), Nihon no otoko wa doko kara kite, doko e yuku no ka (From Where Have Japan's Men Come, To Where are They Going?; Jūgatsusha, Tokyo, 2001), pp. 75, 85–86)Google Scholar. The male body was also heteronormatively configured as ‘active’—a penetrator—to female passive receptivity—the penetrated (Tashiro, M., ‘Dansei no sekushuariti to seikyōiku [Male Sexuality and Male Education]’, in Asai, H., Itō, S., and Murase, Y. (eds), Nihon no otoko wa doko kara kite, doko e yuku no ka (Jūgatsusha, Tokyo, 2001), pp. 56–59Google Scholar). It was, therefore, not subjectable to a female gaze which might show up male vulnerability in its close scrutiny.

119 Like the characters depicted by Lee and Delon, Takakura's ‘realist’ yakuza gangster in the immensely popular Jingi naki tatakai (Battles without Honor and Humanity) similarly portrayed an ultimately futile battle against ‘monolithic organizations’ to problematize masculinity for the new man in the 1970s (Standish, Isolde, Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the ‘Tragic Hero’ (Curzon, Richmond, 2000), p. 189)Google Scholar. Itō, “Otokorashisa”, p. 23; ‘“Nete mitai otoko”’, pp. 18–19.

120 Itō, “Otokorashisa”, pp. 28–31.

121 Kinsella, Sharon, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Curzon, Richmond, 2000), p. 37Google Scholar.

122 See, for example, Aoyama, Tomoko, ‘Male Homosexuality as Treated by Japanese Women Writers’, in McCormack, Gavan and Yoshio, Sugimoto (eds), The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

123 Nixon, ‘Exhibiting Masculinity’, p. 304.

124 Taidō was one of a number of a series of published photo-shoots which Yatō produced including Young Samurai in 1967 and Otoko (Man) in 1972.

125 Ōtsuka, Takashi, ‘Meiru bodi aato o oikakete [Pursuing the Art of the Male Body]’, in Queer Japan: Tokushū—meiru bodi (Queer Japan: Special Collection –Male Body), Vol. 1, November (1999), p. 31Google Scholar.

126 Ōtsuka, ‘Meiru bodi’, p. 31.

127 Ever since Adonisu no kai (Adonis Club) which appeared in the 1950s, male nudity was central to the aesthetic and ethos of male-male sexuality. This regularly included photos of Japanese youths, for example, reclining against a rock or, in this underground magazine escaping the eyes of the censors, reclining with erection in the grass (Adonisu no kai, No. 3, November, 1952, p. 31; Adonisu no kai, No. 17, 1954, insert). Yet, as early as the mid-1950s, and certainly by the demise of Adonisu no kai in the 1960s, two trends are detectable: firstly, in the eight-to-nine pages featuring illustrations, an increasing proportion of these images came from America to include film stars and especially white, posing, beefcake, body-building models; and secondly, the Japanese camera increasingly favoured brawnier builds to the diminutively boyish bodies (Itō and Fujita, ‘Akarui tokoro e [To A Brighter Place]’, pp. 153–165) seen in the early 1950s to foreshadow eventually the increasing focus on body-built musculature, which Yatō's works often featured.

128 The appeal to classical antiquity was a legitimizing strategy cultivated and deployed by homo groups early in the postwar era promoting awareness and equality in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Mackintosh, Homosexuality and Manliness, pp. 97–104.

129 Ōtsuka, ‘Meiru bodi’, pp. 29–30.

130 Richard Dyer, White, (Routledge, London and New York, 1997), p. 2.

131 Ibid.

132 T. M. Lau cited in Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 54.

133 Richard Hawkins, ‘Young Samurai’, in Richard Hawkins homepage, July 2001, http://hawkinsology.org/ty/publ/pub1/publ1.html Richard Hawkins [accessed 18 June 2013].

134 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, p. 29.

135 See, for example, Mackintosh, Homosexuality and Manliness.

136 Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, pp. 13–14.

137 Higashimori Jion, ‘Doragon ikari no tekken’, shisho no ada wa ore ga utsu [Fist of Fury, Struck by the Revenge of the Master]’, in Eiga baka mokushiroku (Revelations of A Film Fool) website, 17 November 2005, http://www.jion-net.com/blog/2005/11/post-395.html [accessed 18 June 2013]; ‘Doragon ikari no tekken [Fist of Fury]’, in Chō-gokushiteki—Eiga hyōkakai [My Super-Hyper Personal – Film Review Club] ’, 17 February 2010, http://sxxs202.blog74.fc2.com/blog-entry-34.html [accessed 18 June 2013]; Hero-K, ‘Doragon ikari no tekken’, Niito obu za deddo (‘Fist of Fury’, NEET of the Dead) blogsite. 23 April, 2011, http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/yui_yuzuki_3365_3650/19686014.html [accessed 18 June 2013]; ‘Chūgoku kōnichi sensō dorama, jinbutsu no kyara wa nihon no anime/ge-mu sankō (China's Anti-Japanese War Drama, Characters Reference Japanese Animation/Games)’, in Japanese.China.org.cn, 24 August 2011, http://japanese.china.org.cn/jp/txt/2011–08/24/content_23273457_2.htm [accessed 18 June 2013].

138 Hidaka, Salaryman Masculinity, p. 7.

139 Standish, Myth and Masculinity, p. 181.

140 Meyda, Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998), p. 2Google Scholar.

141 Matsuda, et. al., ‘Doragon’.