Director Chad Stahelski probably thought he was making a simple statement.
In an interview published by Collider last week, the filmmaker best known for the “John Wick” franchise said that in his upcoming film adaptation of the blockbuster 2020 game Ghost of Tsushima, he aims to use an entirely Japanese cast speaking Japanese.
On its own this is hardly a controversial statement; Japanese productions do it every day. But the massive success of Ghost of Tsushima, a game set in feudal Japan and developed by American studio Sucker Punch Productions, puts added pressure on Stahelski to tread carefully. Through his choices, he has a unique chance to probe the already delicate sea change happening in Hollywood casting — by focusing on language, not just on ethnicity or heritage.
More and more, Hollywood is making room for entirely Black, Latinx or Asian casts. And Stahelski’s statement represents considerable progress in an industry legendary for casting white people in Japanese roles.
Still, there are wrinkles to consider. In response to the interview, actor Yuki Matsuzaki, who has appeared in “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “The Man in the High Castle,” raged on Twitter, using Stahelski’s claim as a springboard to criticize Hollywood’s casting of Japanese roles more generally (as of Aug. 19, his comments have been retweeted more than 17,500 times). In particular, Matsuzaki railed against the treatment of biracial Japanese actors by both Hollywood and the Japanese entertainment industry.
THREAD: I've worked in Hollywood for 20 years, and also helped them cast "Japanese" actors for the past few years. I watched up-close how racist they are when it comes to casting Japanese characters, and I cannot stay quiet anymore. 1/
— Yuki Matsuzaki 松崎悠希 (@Yuki_Mats) February 26, 2022
It’s easy to see how casting for a Japanese “look” can very quickly fall into a racist and essentialist trap. That’s why casting for language proficiency presents an intriguing alternative, one that could get closer to another kind of authenticity. English, the great flattener of culture, allows Lana Condor, an American actor born to ethnically Vietnamese parents, to play a biracial Korean-American teen in the “To All the Boys I've Loved Before” movies, and for Henry Golding, whose parents are Anglo-British and Malaysian, to play a Vietnamese refugee in “Monsoon.”
Hollywood’s power in the world, and the massive blunt instrument it wields called the English language, means that diverse casting can widen the economic possibilities for minority actors. Casting through a language, as Stahelski has a chance to do, however, narrows hiring opportunities for actors considerably while allowing for a more aurally true-to-life experience.
Inclusion and authenticity are not necessarily at odds, but they sometimes make strange bedfellows. A cast of native Japanese speakers would mean Zainichi (ethnic Korean residents of Japan) and biracial or multiracial Japanese folks could be cast in Stahelski’s adaptation, while also potentially shutting out second-generation Japanese actors in the U.S. who don’t sound as fluid. Language fluency is much harder to disguise by a hair and makeup department, and to a native-speaking audience, bad intonation is as glaring an error as a stick-on mustache flapping in the wind. Of course, there’s no perfect, elegant solution; casting for fluency will bring out language purists and could exacerbate accentism.
Still, casting for language could be a useful exercise, and not just for Stahelski. For creators and viewers more broadly, listening for authenticity and not just looking for it might help break habits of assigning identity based on a collection of superficial qualities — and force us to consider the full complexities of representation.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.