Chapter 5
Titipu Comes to America: Hot and Cool Mikados
Gilbert and Sullivan’s tuneful fantasies have become a symbol of a very English Englishman’s ironic humor. But not until the all-Race version of their most popular work is heard will Chicago theatregoers realize how American their operas can be.
Publicity report for The Swing Mikado
The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado reveal not only the close ties of blackface and yellowface but also how the racial dynamics of the opera depend on an imagined locale. Its new settings—an imaginary South Pacific island or a slick gold-and-silver futurism à la Hot Mikado—seem far away from the commodity-laden Titipu of 1885, but there is a similarly therapeutic effect in each, whereby racial play offers novelty, pleasure, liberation, and escape. The infusion of swing music and the pointedly African American casting of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado specifically relocate the opera from a fantasy of Japan to one of the United States, where blackness defines the hip new commodities of choice. The Japan of The Mikado, a space of exotic locale, fantastical characters, and tempting commodities, becomes the backdrop for the imagined amalgamation of black-and-white.
As we have already seen, there is actually a much longer history of innovative Mikados in the United States. Blackface minstrel parodies from 1885 onward adapted The Mikado to satirize American politics, such as in the characterizations of Carncross’s Minstrels: Alvin Blackberry, a “smart Coon, chairman of the Ward Committee”; Whatdoyousay, a Japanese “Black and Tan”; Grover Tycoon Cleveland, the “big Fly Coon from Washington”; a Japanese “no account”; and “as a special curiosity,” a “few honest New York Aldermen.”1 An advertisement for one of the several versions of The Mikado simultaneously running in Chicago in October 1885 listed Haverly’s Home Minstrels performing “Mr. R. N. Slocum’s new local burlesque on THE MIKADO,” High-Card-O!, whose characters included the “High-Card-O of Chicago, not so contented with life as he might be, because of the harrassin’ circumstances attending a late municipal election”; “Yankee-Pooh, his son, disguised as one of Haverly’s Minstrels”; “Ko-Ko-Nuts, a West Side Pawnbroker, High Sheriff of the Ninth Ward”; and “Waukesha, a middle-aged damsel from Wisconsin.”2
These early parodies all used the comic unruliness of blacked-up performers to satirize figures of authority. Minstrel burlesques of The Mikado, like other parodies of European opera, appropriated and mocked high art forms from Europe.3 From the 1890s onward, wayward productions of The Mikado increasingly emphasized a tension between the yellowface classic and the riotous and “barbaric” energies of blackface minstrelsy. These productions played openly on the possibilities for different racial contrasts of yellow and black: foreign and domestic, decorous and unruly, unintelligible and all too familiar. In doing so, they resituated the fantasy of Japan in the United States. More serious spin-offs, such as Mathews and Bulger’s 1899 “ragtime opera” By the Sad Sea Waves, described as “a mixture of airs from The Mikado and popular ‘coon’ songs,”4 also associate Gilbert and Sullivan’s quintessentially English opera with specifically American forms and locales.
Versions of The Mikado reset in the United States also circulated in Europe. One of the more notorious is described by A. H. Godwin in the Gilbert and Sullivan Journal as an “appalling travesty,” seen in a Berlin theater in December 1927:
Imagine Nanki-Poo Yankee-ised in flannels and blazer! Imagine Katisha entering in a real motor-car and in a tailor-made of bewildering pattern! One gets resigned to anything. Thus, the Charleston is jogged by a troupe of semi-clad damsels as the first act curtain falls. It rises on the second act to show an absolutely naked girl bathing. Clearly, she is meant to be Yum-Yum, and her conspicuous ablutions precede her adornment in bridal attire. . . . Usually Sullivan’s airs are used very much as we know them until they reach the sound and fury of a kind of ultra-jazz “tail piece.” This sends the trumpets and saxophones and other tortuous instruments crashing. In fairness I must say that the orchestral playing, like much of the chorus work, was at times unusually good, and some numbers I have never heard made half so impressive (and artificially impressive) in England. . . . In the “Wandering Minstrel” song a line of fantastically dressed girls indulge in a high-kicking parade. Evidently they are meant to be the troops of Titipu.5
Figure 18. Poster, Mathews and Bulger’s By the Sad Sea Waves (1898). Library of Congress.
Although its cast was white, this version bears more than a casual resemblance to the later Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado. Through the incorporation of jazz and African American–inspired dance forms such as the Charleston, The Mikado is liberated from its Victorian contexts and relocated to a fantasy of a black-and-white America.
The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado have a special place in this relocation. In the opening lines of Swing Mikado, the chorus of men defining themselves as “gentlemen of Japan / On many a vase and jar” changes to “high-steppers of afar / On many a screen and star.” The Mikado is transformed by its employment of recognizable bodies and tropes that have been already established as part of a black American context. In Hot Mikado the casting of tapper Bill T. Robinson also functions as such an icon; says one reviewer, “Bill Robinson’s rolling eye and beaming smile, his masterly dancing, his kindliness and his vitality climaxes a gay evening and gave it that extra lilt which comes from the presence of one of Broad-way’s most engaging and beloved comedians.”6 Thus the opera highlights a new racial message in which the “primitive” swing performed by African Americans both remodels a now-staid Victorian commodity and attests to visions of a “new world” of American racial harmony. Stephanie Batiste astutely remarks that both “‘Negro’ exoticism and swing” suggested that The Swing Mikado’s blackness was “a carrier of an American modern sensibility”: “both permitted the Federal Theater to mark The Swing Mikado with a particularly American stamp.”7
That both swinging Mikados received such warm success is no accident. Their black reimagining of Titipu is consistent with what Christina Klein describes as the larger cultural workings of Popular Front liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s; numerous musical classics were revised in what was deemed an American idiom, with such examples as Oscar Hammer-stein’s Carmen Jones (an African American adaptation of George Bizet’s Carmen) declared a “people’s triumph.”8 This liberalism opened the door for African American performers on mainstream stages and redefined the racial dynamics of American popular culture in fundamental ways.
What happens to the fantasies of Japan in this relocation? The swing versions of The Mikado were seen as hip improvements on an overly repressed classic, even as New Deal America with its more liberal race politics saw itself as improving a racist America of the past. As one reviewer of the Swing Mikado exalted in 1939:
In effect, the old “Mikado” becomes a juvenile antique. It should be stuffed and put in a museum, for now it’s as dated as a kiddy’s kite alongside of an Atlantic Clipper. Yes, sah! Harlem’s got Gilbert and Sullivan on the list—and they never will be missed.9
Left out of this equation, of course, are not only the problematics of black-face minstrelsy that we just illustrated but also any questions about the ethics of yellowface. If in the 1885 production one was hard pressed to find anything authentic about the Japanese Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, or Pooh-Bah, The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado banished Japan even further. Given the obsolescence of Gilbert and Sullivan’s quaint fantasy in the face of widespread anti-Japanese distrust and anti-Asian sentiment (the fear of the yellow peril that we will later describe in more detail), the emergence of this new Harlem-based Titipu seems fortuitous for fans of the opera. It allowed for the continued enjoyment of yellowface in a newly hybrid form, which embraced a fetishized blackness as the new soul of The Mikado.
Popular Front liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s drove the success of the 1938–39 swinging Mikados, but this type of adaptation had some striking reincarnations later as well. These are characterized by related spatial and musical shifts: Titipu becomes an Americanized racial playground in which interracial conflict can be romantically resolved, and the music is correspondingly reorchestrated to swing, blues, and other popular African American musical styles.
This distinctive racial reimagining of the opera does not confine itself to the 1930s. In this chapter, we will look at two striking examples of later productions with this same theme. The Swing Mikado begot The Hot Mikado, and a new spate of Hot Mikados, beginning with a production at Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.) in 1986, has kept this new vision of The Mikado as racially liberated very much alive. The newer versions of Hot Mikado, collaborations between director David Bell (who also adapted the book and lyrics) and composer Robert Bowman, openly cite the 1939 Michael Todd version as their inspiration. These new versions now seem to rival the popularity of the original in the English-speaking world. These new Hot Mikados stage themselves as racially liberal productions, prominently featuring black-and-white interracial romance and multicultural casting. Yet, as we will see, these productions also run into the same tensions suggested earlier insofar that they harbor some of the legacies of blackface minstrelsy as well as present stock images of Japan as a perpetually foreign and decorative entity.
In this chapter I cannot resist using as my other example a film that few (aside from diehard Gilbert and Sullivan fans) still remember and most think is better forgotten: The Cool Mikado. Set in a Japan still obviously under American cultural and military influence, this 1963 film also restages The Mikado with cool jazz rhythms and fosters fantasies of Japan as a space of racial recreation for the liberated American. What is fascinating about this obscure example is that once again the image of a hip and racially liberated America subtly informs the interactions, orchestrations, and dance sequences of the film’s blatantly revised and reorchestrated Mikado. Both these hot and cool Mikados pay tribute to a newly liberal understanding of race, mobilized in order to celebrate the benevolence and superiority of new racial orders, from the U.S. cold war influence in Asia to 1980s multiculturalism.
Hot Mikados, 1986 and After
In 1986 director David Bell staged the first of these contemporary productions at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. “I always liked the idea of a hip, multicultural version of ‘The Mikado,’ and I knew about the two competing versions that were created in 1939,” Bell told reviewer Hedy Weiss. “But when [musical director] Rob Bowman and I started to do research, we realized that there were no orchestrations or complete script to be found. And we really had to set about re-creating the wheel.”10 Bowman rewrote and developed his own arrangements with other rhythms in addition to swing, such as blues, gospel, rock, and soul. The 1986 Hot Mikado had critical success, and its revival at Ford’s Theatre in 1994 yielded a 1995 production at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End as well as plans, later aborted, for a Broadway run. Numerous professional and amateur Hot Mikados have since been produced widely throughout England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and the United States.
Although they do not use either the book, score, or any design elements of the 1939 version, these contemporary Hot Mikados claim Michael Todd’s production as well as The Swing Mikado as their point of origin rather than the 1885 Mikado of Gilbert and Sullivan. Within their advertisements, program notes, and reviews, The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado are hailed as better progenitors for these more multicultural times. In a review of a 2006 Watermill Theatre (Newbury, U.K.) production of Bell and Bowman’s Hot Mikado, Lyn Gardner makes this characteristic point:
“If Gilbert and Sullivan could see me now,” cries one of the hoofers in David Bell and Robert Bowman’s musical mugging of the 19th-century operetta. If they could it seems unlikely that they would entirely disapprove. Their timeless tale of Yum-Yum and would-be husband Nanki-Poo has been transposed to a Titty-poo [sic] that is more American than Japanese, where the three little maids seem to be gearing up for careers in pole dancing, southern-fried sushi is the dish of the day and the characters constantly seem surprised that they can read Japanese.11
These productions delve into the celebratory fantasy of a multicultural America in which African Americans are fully empowered to play both established classics and other races. Here both the subtle yet pervasive fetishism of African American hip culture as well as the playing of Japanese style (maintained as foreign and exotic) is an integral part of seeing African Americans as the true originators of culture. No longer is Titipu confined to Japan; instead, its association with other spaces, such as 1939 Harlem, with blackness, and with “exotic” and unrepressed spaces such as the nightclub and the streets, turns it into a much more familiar contemporary racial fantasy. Like its 1885 counterpart, this fantasy, rife with deviant sexuality and danger, is at the same time safe for domestic consumption.
However, there are important differences between the new Hot Mikados and their 1939 predecessors. Whereas the casts of the 1938–39 Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado were almost exclusively African American (Swing Mikado’s Edward Fraction being the exception), these more recent Hot Mikados have a pointedly multiracial cast, with white performers featured strategically in lead roles. This multiracial casting is not color-blind but carefully managed for effect. Rhoda Koenig writes, “In tune with today’s liberal multiculturalism” white actors were included in the 1995 London West End production, including a “charming Paul Manuel as Nanki-Poo,” whose father was played by African American Lawrence Hamilton, who coolly explained to the audience, “There’s not much family resemblance.”12 Thus these productions used strategic casting of these leads to reference (slyly) an imagined multicultural America family and more pointedly a fantasy of interracial romance, with the pairings of Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum and Ko-Ko and Katisha portrayed by black-and-white couples.
Responses to these productions confirm how in these Hot Mikados much of the focus stays on the portrayal of a harmonious marriage of black and white. If some of the attention is on African American performers who, as in the 1939 Hot Mikado, are thought to infuse Gilbert and Sullivan with new life and new rhythms, others note the ability of white performers to cross over into music imagined as quintessentially black, as in this assessment of the West End production: “[Sharon] Benson and [Alison] Jiear are the musical stars of the show. Jiear, who is white and plump, gives the kind of uninhibited full-throttle singing you still expect only blacks to deliver in hot jazz. Benson, who is glamorous and black, is fabulously authoritative in everything except the first half of her Act Two solo.”13 Occasionally there are Asian American cast members, such as Paul Mat-sumoto as Pish-Tush and chorus member/dancer Kiki Moritsugu in the 1994 Ford’s Theatre revival; however, these choices are nearly entirely overshadowed. These Hot Mikados still capitalize on the novelty and the implied racial progress inherent in staging black versions of The Mikado and in turn can avoid uneasy questions about the underlying racial representations of the Japanese. “Here was what ‘The Mikado’ needed,” writes Steven Winn of the San Jose, California, 1998 version, “an irreverent steam cleaning with lots of jazz, swing, blues, gospel and jitterbugging dancers in loud zoot suits.”14
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that these contemporary Hot Mikados, like their 1930s predecessors, seem to invite the same terms of racial commentary as The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado and even present new connections back to the traditions of blackface minstrelsy. For instance, in reviewing a 1993 Chicago production, Richard Christiansen describes how Felicia P. Fields as Katisha, in growling “Come over here, fool” to her terrified lover, is a “flashy red-hot mama”;15 and Alastair Macaulay describes Sharon Benson’s “big black-mama entrance” at the end of act 1.16 Rhoda Koenig finds that all the female roles have been similarly sexualized as well as racialized by “ghosts” of former performances:
On the female side as well, the casting alone does away with the coy, prissy sexlessness of G&S and their assumption that women over 40 are hideous viragos. Paulette Ivory, a delectable teddy-clad Yum-Yum, anticipates her marriage by wriggling voluptuously through “The Sun and I.” Sharon Benson’s Katisha has clearly stayed unmarried because she is too much woman for the men of Titipu. Mae West couldn’t improve on the way she tells us about her lovely left shoulder blade. The jitterbugging Little Maids shake everything shakeable and the arrangements are saucy and sensual—“Braid the raven hair,” as close as G&S ever get to fore-play, gets a lot closer as a rhumba.17
The playing of Katisha and Ko-Ko in these new Hot Mikados invites some of the same commentary as did The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado, foregrounding racial and gender typecasting familiar from blackface minstrelsy. As Eric Lott describes, these moments reflect the “white men’s fear of female power” characteristic of blackface performance and the “bold swagger, irrepressible desire, sheer bodily display” of the “minstrel man.”18 Other comments on the new version of the Hot Mikado evokes the specter of blackface as well; director David Bell praises the performance of Ross Lehman as Ko-Ko as “an homage to such great vaudeville comedians as Bert Lahr and Eddie Cantor, whose work Roo [Lehman] captures so brilliantly.”19 Like other Jewish stars of vaudeville and film, Eddie Cantor got his start in blackface minstrelsy; born as Israel Iskowitz, Cantor created his first blackface character, Jefferson, in 1912 for Gus Edwards’s Kid Kabaret, a show that earned him the attention of leading Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld. One of Cantor’s acts for the Ziegfeld Follies paired him with African American comedian Bert Williams. Cantor played Williams’s son; both men wore blackface.
While seemingly transformed into a multicultural romp, or even offered as a tribute to a history of African American performance, the contemporary version of the Hot Mikado does not run far from the minstrel mask. But its subtle associations, like so many contemporary reminders of blackface minstrelsy, are lost to most audience members. Such contemporary racial signifiers are carefully managed in order to avoid any offense. Blackness is staged in terms of its value as spectacle rather than as social commentary; these “hot” commodities might be easily displayed alongside those that point back to the japonaiserie of the 1885 Mikado. These Hot Mikados have not lost their addiction to fans, screens, pagodas, and other familiar objects, which become revamped along with the music. Reviewer Rhoda Koenig wrote of the West End production: “The fun starts right away, with a gang of hipsters in lime, fuchsia and tangerine zoot suits slinking out to stare the audience down. Then they whip out what look like flick-knives, which with a snap, become fans for the gentlemen of Japan.”20 Humor relies on the clever juxtaposition of exotic Japanese and African American signs and mannerisms. In the 1994 Ford’s Theatre production, the entrance of Ted Levy’s Mikado is signaled by a gong, but his first line is “Yo, what’s up?” Levy tap dances à la Bill Robinson but wears a cape with an oriental symbol. Returning from lunch, he sighs contently, “Southern fried sushi is what’s happening.” As Jeremy Kingston notes in his review of the West End production:
One of the jokes is the extreme remoteness of these Brooklyn and Harlem characters from anything oriental. When Paulette Ivory’s delicately provocative Yum-Yum wonders about her beauty “in my artless Japanese way,” the sheer madness of the phrase is achingly absurd. The dialogue Gilbert gave to Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah was rooted in English nonsense, and so there is a further, er, disorientation when a New York Jewish comedian and his black partner twitter on about the First Lord of the Treasury and the Lord Chief Justice.21
Thus racial meanings seem compounded, with the interracial marriage of black and white characters and music pointing the way toward a multi-cultural, even global America.
However, what is black and what is Japanese are still figured in very different ways, rather than as equal partners in contemporary multiculturalism. One of the many striking posters for the 1999 production of Hot Mikado by the Burgess Hill Operatic Society in Sussex, England, features a Statue of Liberty turned geisha, holding a trumpet and a fan and posed against a backdrop of rising sun, pagoda, and skyscrapers. The image of the Statue of Liberty suggests America as a nation of immigrants, yet its transformation into the geisha figure and its containment within the iconography of the Japanese flag undo any sense that what is Japanese might equally inhabit or define the national space of America.
If Hot Mikado serves as a vehicle for the celebration of a multicultural America, it does so by perpetuating clichés about Japanese foreignness. What is Japanese is still seen as exotic and unassimilable, in stark contrast to a melting pot of black and white. Reviewing the 1994 revival at Ford’s Theatre, J. Wynn Rousuck notes:
Figure 19. Poster, The Hot Mikado by Burgess Hill Operatic Society (1999). Designed by Duncan Taylor-Jones.
Granted, the characters are obviously American—not only in their speech and mannerisms, but also in their dress. Costume designer Jess Goldstein clothes the men in jewel-colored zoot suits and the women in kicky knee-length dresses. Bell explains this seeming incongruity with a joke. Handed an official document, Ko-ko, the Lord High Executioner, exclaims, “It’s in Japanese!” Then, after a head-scratching moment, he remembers, “We are Japanese.”22
It is difficult to catch anything more than a fleeting glimpse of a more substantive message about race. Although they claim to be their direct descendents, these Hot Mikados seem to erase the racial tension that so clearly informed the 1939 productions of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado. As the increasing prevalence of new Hot Mikados with all-white casts suggests, any deeper message about racial uplift, reconciliation, or triangulation is suppressed in favor of the staging of multiculturalism as a collection of shimmering costumes and memorable mannerisms. These Hot Mikados freely play with both blackface and yellowface as styles of dress, gesture, and dance, creating a musical version of the melting pot replete with hip black music, a nostalgic 1940s nightclub setting, and chic new versions of japonaiserie. This postmodern mixture of styles, with its “flashy ’40’s zoot suits wrapped with obis (sashes) for a neon kimono look” and “women dressed like the Cotton Club-comes-to-Tokyo,”23 does not seem to carry with it any history or political weight. This sets the stage for a purely stylistic hybridity, a pastiche seemingly devoid of any deeper meaning, as suggested for instance in Dan Hulbert’s review of a 1997 Alliance Theatre production:
We get a ravishing Daniel Proett nightclub set with a neon pagoda, gleaming chrome footbridge and trees made of Japanese parasols and fans; zoot suits and other 1940s costumes (by Nancy Missimi) of fantastic cuts and hues; opulent lighting by Diane Ferry Williams; gospel numbers in the Olympian voice of Atlanta’s Chandra Currelley; a top-banana comic turn by Tony Award nominee Joel Blum, with deft takeoffs on Jack Benny and W.C. Fields; and a tap solo by Joey Hollingsworth in the elegant tradition of Charles “Honi” Coles, backed by a thundering tap chorus. . . .
At this point you may wonder what this grab bag of wonders has to do with Gilbert and Sullivan, the clever gents who penned “The Mikado” in 1885. The short answer is, nothing. The longer answer is, who cares? Once it becomes clear that the G&S comic opera—itself a spoof of Victorian England in the guise of a story-book Japan—is just a flimsy excuse for Bell’s multicultural good time, you can stop trying to figure out “Mikado” and just go with its Colorado River-Style flow.24
Postmodern pastiche seems to leave Hot Mikados free to borrow from the legacies of both yellowface and blackface but without any apparent memory of their earlier meanings. The result is a sexier, hipper, presumably guilt-free Mikado. It is only after following a long and complicated history that one concludes that this erasure is not complete; that task done, the singing and dancing of the new Hot Mikado reveal a succession of more troubling ghosts.
The Cool Mikado
The recent spate of new Hot Mikados marks a transition to the new racial regime of multiculturalism, which makes itself legitimate by carefully managing certain kinds of racial visibility. Displays of cross-racial casting or of interracial romance, for instance, support ideals of the United States as a liberal and tolerant nation. The movement from 1885 to the 1938–39 Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado and to the Hot Mikados of the 1980s reveals a noticeable shift between different versions of racial utopias, from an exotic Japan to the “hot” settings of the South Seas to a black-and-white America defined by 1940s Harlem nightlife, zoot suits, hot dancing, and cool music.
Looking at the 1963 film The Cool Mikado helps us trace this movement back to an imagined Japan. The contemporary versions of Hot Mikado suggest that what is “hot” about this Mikado is its ability to celebrate American diversity; the performance of interracial harmony reworks the tired old opera, just as racial uplift and multiculturalism suggest the ability to overcome a history of violence and segregation. As the United States takes on the role of global power after World War II, this image becomes particularly necessary. As The Cool Mikado shows, post-occupation Japan can be refigured to serve as a kind of contemporary racial playground as well as a nineteenth-century “elf-land.” As with the “swinging” Mikados, music plays a key role in this transformation. The hot rhythms of swing have been modified into the cool styles of popular music, such as the jitterbug, cha-cha, and twist; nonetheless, this reorchestration adds a layer of eroticism and hipness onto the image of a modern Tokyo envisioned as a center of pleasure and opportunity for knowledgeable white visitors.
Serving mainly as a star vehicle for English and American comic actors Frankie Howerd and Stubby Kaye, who played Ko-Ko Flintridge and Judge Herbert Mikado, respectively, The Cool Mikado was largely panned by critics and dismissed by fans.25 With its awkward modernization of Gilbert’s plot and its sadly dated swinging sixties renditions of Sullivan’s music, it is no wonder that the film has been largely forgotten. But though dreadful by all accounts, it nonetheless demonstrates the ways that the racial utopias of The Mikado have been updated to reflect the image of the United States as a new superpower spreading its message of liberal tolerance around the globe. Melani McAlister argues that after World War II, a new “post-Orientalist” model for representing the Middle East emerged for American audiences. This was clearly affected by the radical expansion of U.S. political and economic interests abroad; the Middle East became seen as a kind of new American frontier, and U.S. intervention in that region was justified as a kind of “benevolent supremacy” that would replace older European models of direct colonial rule.26 Given this new context, no longer could simple models of orientalism as binary oppositions—East– West, masculine–feminine, foreign–domestic, us–them—hold explanatory power for encountering the Middle East.
In many ways, the older models for understanding Japan have likewise been fractured by World War II and the postwar occupation of Japan. The Japanese setting of The Cool Mikado is clearly unlike the japonaiserie of an earlier day, but elements of the queer and quaint still persist. The film was mainly made on a soundstage, with stock footage of Japan used to establish atmosphere at key moments. In the opening credits, different location shots are used to show both the quaint and modern sides of Japan: rural landscapes are interspersed with urban settings, and images of beautiful Japanese women wearing bathing suits and other Western-style clothing as well as kimonos bring the viewer into a setting that is both similar to the familiar decorative Japan and much more up-to-date.
Different attitudes toward Japan define the characters of the film. In the opening, Hank Mikado (the romantic lead, played by Kevin Scott) and Yum-Yum (Jill Mai Meredith) are regaled with tales of tourist adventures by the loud Charlie Hotfleisch (also played by Stubby Kaye). Charlie’s loud stories about tourist attractions and geishas clearly mark him as the ugly American, boorish and uneducated about Japan’s true charms. He is finally embarrassed into silence by Hank, who casually mentions his own considerable experience living in Japan. The remainder of the plot loosely follows the story (now following a gangster theme) and score of The Mikado, all the while exploring the differences between those who, like the ignorant Charlie, still cling to outdated clichés about Japan and those who, like Hank and Yum-Yum, are in the know. Through our introduction to Charlie, who doesn’t appear in the rest of the film, the film makes its defining distinction between the old images of Japan given over to tourists and the new cultured and cosmopolitan Japanophile.
The film suggests how characters such as Hank embody another kind of yellowface; though they do not dress as Japanese, they are associated with insider knowledge of Japanese culture, language, and custom. This contrasts with other comic characters in the film. The tourist Charlie Hotfleisch is joined in his boorishness by Hank’s friend Bernie (played by Bernie Winters), an Army soldier who loudly proclaims his erotic fascination with Japanese women, sings loudly in Japanese gibberish, calls Mount Fuji “Mount Fugo,” and forgets to take off his boots before entering the house, eventually putting his foot through the floor. If the film pokes fun at Japanese culture, it does so through these comedians, who mimic bows, bang gongs, and abuse local people. This satiric treatment of the ugly American is extended to the British soldier who does not bother to learn anything about local culture or customs. Both are contrasted with the suave urbanity of Hank, who moves confidently through the various locales and mixes easily with the locals, even singing “A Wandering Minstrel” with a group of “traveling musicians” that he has presumably found despite their growing scarcity. Ironically, that these traveling musicians, with guitars in hand, are played in yellowface suggests that they are meant to be “natives.” The other band members—white, black, and occasionally Japanese—who appear in the film do not wear racial makeup.
Likewise, Yum-Yum’s bleached blond hair and blue eyes conspicuously marks her as white, but at the same time she is shown as easily blending into her Japanese surroundings. The Three Little Maids wear dresses that are identical except for color, and Yum-Yum’s banter with Pitti-Sing (Chinese American Tsai Chin) and Peep-Bo (Japanese Canadian Yvonne Shima), played by performers with conspicuously Asian features but no Japanese accents, suggests little difference among them. When Yum-Yum in her boudoir tells Pitti-Sing about Hank, the latter’s slangy reply is “Ask him if he’s got a friend for me” and then “I know love is here to stay, but put some clothes on first, huh?”
Whether singing “The Sun Whose Rays” poolside in a tiny blue bikini or posed on the decorative bridge at the Mikado Nightclub, Yum-Yum too has gone native. As Hank waxes rhapsodic about his courtship with Yum-Yum, he suggests that both of them find common ground in their affection for this “adoptive” country: “We both had Japan.” Both hero and heroine show a cosmopolitan air that is in contrast to the smirking tourist Charlie Hotfleisch, the dopey Bernie, or the snide racisms of Ko-Ko, who treats the Japanese with contempt.
This emphasis on the superiority of the white Japanese cultural insider does not mean that the film has lost any traces of racism. Openly stereotypical portrayals, such as the buffoonery of Kenji Takaki in the supporting role of Ho-Ho, are certainly one of the reasons the film is so painful to watch. Like the sexism, embodied in the overdone role of the bombshell Katie Shaw (Jacqueline Jones) who does a striptease in front of Japanese male reporters, the racism is as flat and predictable as the bad cutout of Mount Fuji in the background. Each of these roles, whether of the different Japan experts—including comedian Tommy Cooper in a brief stint as Pooh-Bah, Private Detective—or of their unsophisticated, fresh-off-the-plane counterparts, lacks subtlety.
Nonetheless, the overriding preoccupation of the film with the urbane Japan insider who passes for Japanese says something interesting about this image of Japan as a new racial playground. In one of the film’s many departures from the opera, a fascinating split happens in the character of Nanki-Poo. The film reincarnates the romantic lead in the character of Hank but also inflects him through the new character of Nanki, played by dancer, choreographer, and television personality Lionel Blair. At first, Nanki might be seen as simply one of the many feeble attempts at yellow-face; played with a painfully stereotypical accent by Blair, he serves as a sidekick and go-between. But Nanki also seems key to what is considered cool about The Cool Mikado. In two of the most memorable song and dance sequences, the “Three Little Maids Cha-Cha” and the “Titwillow Twist,” he and his “Lionel Blair dancers” have a prominent role.
Whether shimmying up to the camera, cavorting with a fan, or kissing one of the chorus girls, Nanki is given a much more interesting role than just serving drinks or telling Hank that his courting of Yum-Yum is “vewy dangerous.” Likewise, his local coffee bar, called a “real swinging place” by Hank, similarly evokes the image of Japan as the hip new racial playground, inviting a host of not simply racial but also sexual transformations. Robert Lee has suggested that the depiction of Japan as “polymorphous, transgressive, and exotic” in a film such as Sayonara (1956) invests its leading characters with “a sexuality that is transgendered and unpredictably dangerous”; furthermore, oriental sexuality itself was often more generally “constructed as ambiguous, inscrutable, and hermaphroditic.”27 Nanki never gets the girl, but there is a similar polymorphous perversity in the sight of him dressed in tight vest, necktie, and pants and doing the same moves as his all-female chorus. Nanki’s appeal builds further on the imagining of Japanese sexual deviance. Nanki-Poo mutates into Hank and Nanki, the heterosexual American Japan expert and the somewhat more sexually ambiguous Japanese sidekick; in the glamorous Tokyo of the film, both emerge triumphant, and the racial playground of this Mikado is re-figured in terms not just of the quaint but also of the queer.
Perhaps the most memorable part of The Cool Mikado is its timely take on the practice of yellowface and Japan as a space of play for the liberated Westerner. It features a vision of a new opening of Japan that was made possible by U.S. victory and postwar occupation, by the airplane, and by a new racial sensibility. One short scene suggests a particularly American basis for how Tokyo can become this new racial playground. Even though by the time of the filming of Cool Mikado the American occupation of Japan had ended, the action takes place in a Japan where the presence of American military is omnipresent. Thus one of the most striking moments of the film is when a chorus of white American army officers sings “If You Want to Know Who We Are.” Following the song, their claim that “we are gentlemen of Japan” is explained by Hank: “They’ve been over here so long they’ve gone native.” Thanks to the U.S. military (still very much present), this post-occupation Japan has been transformed into a place that might attract tourists but holds its real rewards for those who “go native.”
To do Japanese is to partake of what also might be seen as an American vision of race. In both the hot and cool Mikados, Titipu becomes the racial playground in which a liberal conqueror teaches old racial regimes how to swing.