While Hollywood has a long tradition of demonizing Muslims, Japanese filmmakers have taken a decidedly more benign approach

As news and pictures of the torture at Abu Ghraib began filling front pages in Britain and the United States, Robert Fisk of The Independent wrote that among the factors contributing to the hatred of Western soldiers for their Iraqi prisoners was the "poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people."

Popular as that pernicious stereotype has proved with filmmakers and cinemagoers in America, it's generally been a non-starter in Japan. Despite the alacrity with which Japanese studios normally peruse the outside world for usable villains, they have evinced surprisingly little interest in the heavily bearded devilry supposedly peculiar to the world of Islam.