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Now it was very rare. It hardly ever happened, but there is a kind of curious, quiet history of some of these films, often cut, often having the songs removed playing in the US. And it never resulted in any kind of significant impact, and certainly didn’t, as we know, happen in China or in Russia, where a figure like Raj Kapoor became a major star. There was no translation of those stars into a North American context. One of my points again is that still hasn’t happened to this point. Shah Rukh Khan is a major star in the Indian Diaspora, but he’s not a star for an audience outside of that audience.

In Sayonara, for example, Marlon Brando plays a troubled US pilot who falls in love with an independent young woman who performs in the gender-bending Matsubayashi theater. 30 And in South Pacific, American nurse Nellie Forbush must learn to forge cross-cultural familial ties with her French lover and his interracial children, allegorizing US involvement in the Pacific. 31 But Wayne’s global star persona dramatically complicates these romantic and cross-cultural power relations in The Barbarian and the Geisha.

The scene, after all, perhaps indicates a kind of post-war concession to Japanese audiences, who get to defeat the unwanted American presence in battle, while still engendering a kind of mutual respect—in the scene, Wayne is not enraged at the man for being sneaky but rather surprised and respectful of the man’s skill. And the fact that this respect comes from a rejection of brute force and a tough masculinity (where Wayne excels) while embracing a clever, flexible, adaptive masculinity indicates the kind of future that the film sees for Japan’s relationship to modernity and militarism, that is, a rejection of militaristic and imperial aspirations.