An eastern western in terms of genre is constructing the western through eastern eyes. Likewise, spaghetti western is the Italian perspective of western cinema and there are other familiar national culinary labels. This week’s screening of Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) by Takashi Miike centres its notion on Japanese way of looking at the western “western”. The film implements western elements and tropes meshed in with some tints of Japanese style. This includes the vintage Japanese temple-like buildings, Asian actors speaking heavy-accented English dialogue as well as the use of Samurai swords. Metaphorically speaking is how an eastern chef cooks a western dish, in which the dish has a specific eastern ‘taste’. Like some of those dishes, Sukiyaki Western Django has a certain unsatisfactory result (through a subjective perspective) possibly due to the mixture of eastern and western components.

Khoo (2013) explored “when all of these ingredients are thrown together, does the film create something new?” Having Tarantino and English dialogue in the film represents a cross-pollination of film sources between east and west. Furthermore, as I attended Stephen Teo’s talk on Asian cinemas, he pointed out a theory that we can apply as “Rasa Sentiment” or taste. So the main idea of this theory is;

Film is the food

Cooking is the construction

Rasa is the taste which generate emotions

Can we then look at eastern western as an eastern colonization of the western, or is it the other way around? Or does that colonization go both ways?

Instead of colonisation, is it simply a cross-contamination (or as Khoo mentioned, a “cross-pollination”) between the two industries?

 

Khoo, O 2013, Asian Studies Review, “Bad Jokes, Bad English, Good Copy: Sukiyaki Western Django, or How the West Was Won”, Routledge, vol. 37, no. 1, pp 80-95.