128 the attractive empire
dissolves into a montage of indiscriminant shots of dancing and drinking, set to
an increasingly faint jazz melody. Unable to fi nd his roots in the urban decadence
of either Berlin or Tokyo, Teruo returns to his parents’ farm, where he experiences
an epiphany. Plunging his hands deep into the rice paddy, he intently smells a
handful of earth as his father smiles approvingly and says: “It’s good earth but . . .
it’s become very old.” Teruo decides to remain in Japan and marry Mitsuko, and
Gelda returns to Germany. In the fi nal scene, Teruo and Mitsuko and their baby
son have immigrated to Manchuria, where Teruo happily farms the “new earth”
with a new tractor, under the protective gaze of an imperial Japanese soldier.
Upon his arrival in Japan, Fanck personally selected Itami Mansaku, father of
the late fi lm director Itami Juzo (Tampopo, A Taxing Woman), to coscript the fi lm
and serve as a consultant, based on the latter’s work in period fi lms. Ironically,
Itami’s fi lms had until then humorously criticized precisely those sorts of govern-
ment ideologies that Fanck wanted to propagate, and Itami was determined to
prevent the fi lm from becoming either an Orientalist travelogue or outright Nazi
propaganda.
75
Itami’s fears proved to be well founded, for it soon became clear
that Fanck’s vision of the “true” Japan bore very little resemblance to the one in
which most Japanese lived.
76
Fanck’s obsession with exterior shots of the natural
beauty of Japan’s countryside contrasted with his slipshod, uneven representa-
tion of the urban metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka. Similarly, Fanck’s treatment
of his actors, in particular sixteen-year-old Hara Setsuko, who played the role
of Mitsuko, is indicative of the sort of matter-of-fact racism that Fanck would
later be accused of. In a lecture to the Japan Motion Picture Foundation, Fanck
stated that he had Hara speak her lines in German “in her own style,” which he
suggested was grammatically incorrect but produced an “inexpressible charm
for us [Germans] when we heard her pronouncing the German language with
a foreign accent. In other words, she made a better impression than if she had
spoken German fl uently.”
77
Fanck once said that he liked Japanese actors because he did not have to talk to
them; they “just understood” what he wanted.
78
Considering that most of Fanck’s
work until that time was in the mountain fi lm genre, where human actors are
often relegated to a secondary status below the iconic status of natural settings,
which were the true protagonists, his fascination with natural landscapes and
relative inattention towards his actors does not seem unusual. But Fanck’s attitude
created friction between himself and the Japanese crew, who felt that Fanck’s vi-
sion of Japan and the Japanese was demeaning as well as symptomatic of Western
stereotypes. This friction eventually led the Japanese producer to demand that
the fi lm be reshot in two separate release versions, a “German version” shot and
edited by Fanck and an “international version” edited and partially reshot by
Itami. This only complicated matters. Some critics complained that Itami’s ver-
sion was not Japanese enough, while others argued that it was more “inconsistent,
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