Giacomo Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" is one of most beloved operas of all time. Musically rich, dramatically taut and shamelessly wringing every last drop of sentiment from its tale of innocence betrayed, it shows Puccini at the top of his form. Yet its seductive beauty and the emotional immediacy disguise some of the more troubling aspects of this story -- aspects that become increasing difficult to ignore when it is performed in Japan.
The story is most clearly a critique of callous Western colonialism, as represented by Pinkerton, a U.S. Navy officer who marries Cio Cio San, a Japanese woman from Nagasaki, and later abandons her. But it has also been accused, with various degrees of justification, of misogyny and racism, and of perpetuating a legacy of cultural misrepresentation and Western superiority.
The opera, composed in 1904 at the height of the craze for all things Japanese that swept through Europe at the turn of the 19th century, shows a thoroughly European, specifically Italian, vision of Japan, a vision that would have been just as exotic to the Japanese at the time. It's hard not to imagine a Japanese audience being baffled by it. More insidious perhaps is the opera's enduring fantasy of Japanese women as self-sacrificing and, the helpless victims of cruel and powerful Western men.