Carl Corley’s The Scarlet Lantern: Asian Representation in 1960’s America

By Jiewei Li (2024)

Introduction

Orientalism and stereotypes were present within Asian representation in American romance fiction, including Carl Corley’s 1960’s novel, The Scarlet Lantern. Published in 1966, Corley’s The Scarlet Lantern depends upon stereotypes to Orientalize and fetishize Japanese culture and his Japanese characters. The novel itself, a story about an American Marine who develops romantic relationships with a Japanese brother and sister, will serve as the principal primary source in this study. Corley’s scrapbook from his time serving as a Marine in Iwo Jima will supplement the primary source evidence. The novel itself will serve as evidence of how Corley incorporated those stereotypes; the scrapbook’s material, ranging from personal narratives to newspaper clippings, will serve as evidence of how these stereotypes were prevalent during Corley’s lifetime. Relevant to this discussion is the academic discipline, Orientalism, or the discipline that analyzes how the Occident (West) frames the Orient (East) in relation to itself in a colonial process.[1] To Orientalize is the process by which Western structures frames the East and its objects in relation to Western empire.[2] Contemporary geopolitical conflicts and constructs of race can help explain how Corley’s novel Orientalizes two main objects: Japanese culture and Japanese characters. Some stereotypes Orientalize Japanese culture. Other stereotypes Orientalize and fetishize Japanese characters.

Media Clippings

Contemporary attitudes and Corley’s personal experiences in Japan likely influenced the novel’s depiction of Japanese people. Although published in 1966, Corley sets the book in the aftermath of World War II (WWII). He did not specify an exact timeframe, but the novel’s events occur during General MacArthur’s occupation of Japan in the wake of the Allied Powers’ victory, roughly the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s.[3] Parallel to Erik Shannon (the American Marine and the novel’s hero), Corley served as a Marine in Iwo Jima. In the context of the novel’s setting and the character and author’s involvement in WWII, it is possible the novel reflects attitudes towards Japanese people from the period of 1940-1966. During WWII, the American government infamously interned Japanese American citizens as collective punishment for Pearl Harbor, and much of the antagonism resulted from racist assumptions of white supremacy.[4] With the justification of an act of war, the American government enacted war crimes against Japanese Americans. However, these attitudes were widespread and not isolated to the government.[5] During Corley’s lifetime, racist, violent, and paternalistic sentiments were prevalent in American governmental policy and popular attitudes.

Scrapbook material from Corley’s own time fighting in World War II (WWII) reflects the contemporary media attitudes towards Japanese people. The scrapbook includes many newspaper clippings covering the war. Many clippings referred to the Japanese as “Japs.”[6] More recent scholarship analyzes how “Jap” was a slur to dehumanize Japanese people during the war.[7] Dehumanization was a pattern within these clippings. Several newspapers printed pictures of dead bodies, captioned “dead Japs.”[8] Arguably, printing photos of faceless, Japanese corpses for consumption in American media divorced the soldiers from their dignity. To some degree, this dehumanization was likely the result of the sheer positioning within the war—that the Japanese were America’s opposing soldiers and active enemy in war. However, the media did not merely position the Japanese soldiers as enemies: contemporary quotes from soldiers and media rhetorically dehumanized the soldiers. One military leader described the Japanese soldiers as “fighting like demons.”[9]Perhaps hyperbolic, but the description of Asian people as “demonic” contributed in some measure as a dehumanizing stereotype. In colonial discourses, the Western imagination connotes demonic behavior with barbary, savagery.[10]Demonic behavior is less civilized, so the Orient is therefore less civilized. Colonial logics must create this distinction because the Western imagination defines the West as what it is not: to create a “unified American self,” it is essential to “other” the Orient.[11] To define American soldiers in contrast to the Japanese soldiers, to valorize the American soldiers, the military leader described the Japanese soldiers as “demons.” The media and soldiers Orientalized Japanese soldiers.

Corley’s Personal Experiences

The scrapbook includes not only media clippings but also Corley’s personal writings and pictures, indicating his own attitudes toward Japanese people. Corley even titled one scrapbook page, “The Enemy: Our Little Brown Brothers,” in reference to Japanese soldiers.[12] During WWII, the Japanese soldiers indeed were the “enemy,” but the reference to Japanese soldiers as “little” is paternalistic, emasculating, and othering. The description of “little” refers to physical inferiority. The Japanese soldiers are little, in contrast to the large, white, masculine Americans. The stereotype of Asian men being physically inferior is dangerous because it is linked to the stereotype that Asian men are effeminate.[13]Denoting Japanese men as “little” and therefore effeminate is paternalistic. The reference to Japanese soldiers as “brown” was a reinforcement of and reminder of racial hierarchy. “Brown” is a reference to race, to the “brown Oriental.”[14] This “brown Oriental” was a mark of racial difference from Corley and his fellow white soldiers. This distinction of racial difference is another example of how Corley “othered” the Japanese soldiers. This paternalistic and racist depiction perpetuates the construction that Asian populations are a “subject race” that the West dominates with moral superiority and civilization.[15] Beyond merely the media’s negative portrayal of Japanese soldiers, Corley himself held some degree of prejudice against Japanese soldiers.

Perhaps the negative attitudes were the result of Corley’s personal tragedies. Corley noted several of his friends dying during the war. The scrapbook includes many news clippings of fallen soldiers, and Corley also provides personal accounts. In poems and notes, Corley grieved for his friends Tommy and Cisco.[16] In a poem, Corley described how “on the bloody sand, Cisco lay dead.”[17] Strikingly, this personal poem parallels a story from the novel. As Erik Shannon’s character shares with the Japanese siblings (Tara Hanna and Tara Rasha) his experiences fighting in Iwo Jima, Shannon describes his friend “Cisco who was flopping in the sand, […] he was dead almost before I reached him.”[18] A soldier by the same name falls to Japanese fire in Corley’s own life and his novel. The death of his fellow soldier lingered with Corley, two decades after the war. Corley himself had negative experiences in 1940’s Japan that could have influenced how he constructed his novel.

1960’s Attitudes

In the 1960’s, more contemporary to the book’s publishing, America’s racist attitudes shifted to become seemingly more favorable, but new stereotypes arose. In the Cold War era, Americans reframed the narrative around Japan and Japanese people. Rather than the enemy, after General MacArthur’s “successful” occupation in Japan,[19] the Japanese were allies, “junior partners” to the American cause of preventing communism.[20] Thus, Americans began to view Japan more favorably; only after the country’s policies acquiesced to American interests. However, deeper analysis of Japan’s junior partner-hood with America reveals colonial domination that predicates itself upon racist assumptions. The stereotype of Japan shifted away from one of the hypermasculine kamikaze soldier[21] and towards an “effeminate” east, and “effeminate” Asia. Colonial politics are gendered. Orientalism poses the East as “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine.”[22] As the hypermasculine Americans won victory over the weaker Japanese soldiers and as General MacArthur imposed dominating martial rule[23] over the citizens in the aftermath of that victory, the perception was that Japan was submissive. It was as if the masculine West dominated “the feminine East.”[24] Japanese men were too weak to maintain power over their country and their women. The colonial logics were not only existent in theory; rather, they ingrained themselves in the more general American psyche. In the 1960’s, Japanese-American activist Richard Aoki experienced how Americans increasingly stereotyped Japanese American men as “effeminate” and “passive.”[25]Negative stereotypes and racism against Japanese people shifted from demonic kamikaze soldiers to submissive, vulnerable, and feminine subjects who would yield to American interests.

As 1960’s American perceptions characterized Japanese men as more effeminate, 1960’s American perceptions characterized Japanese women as submissive. As American soldiers occupied Japan, many married Japanese wives; however, until 1950, as a result of Asian exclusion policy, Japanese war brides were not allowed to immigrate to the United States.[26] Once those floodgates opened in the 1950’s, 80% of Japanese immigrants to the United States were the wives of white American soldiers.[27] In contrast, during the same period, the vast majority of Chinese war brides were married to Chinese American soldiers, Korea war brides to Korean American soldiers, and Filipina war brides to Filipino American soldiers.[28] Within the specific context of occupying Japan, white American soldiers dominated not only the physical land and the government but also the women. Out of step with the trends from other Asian countries. In the same manner in which colonial logics argued that the East is “subservient and feminine,” these logics also depicted Asian women as “exotically sexual, as obedient.”[29] The American perception of Japanese war brides aligned with these colonial logics. In media, fiction starting from the 1950s began to depict these Japanese war brides as traditional housewives who served their husbands, and American culture seemingly embraced these Japanese women.[30]Throughout the postwar era, white America tacitly accepted Japanese women with the caveat of their conformation to the stereotype of the submissive housewife.

Orientalizing Japan

            In the context of experiencing active duty during WWII and living through the periods during which racial attitudes towards Japanese people shifted, Corley wrote his characters in Tokyo, Japan, but his depiction of the city and its culture is Orientalizing and harmful. From when Erik Shannon lands in Tokyo, his Western gaze exoticizes the city and its people. The language is dehumanizing, describing Tokyo as “this maze of oddly groomed flesh.”[31] Shannon refers to the citizens of Japan as “flesh” rather than people—bodies rather than people. The dehumanizing language others the Japanese citizens. Shannon cannot conceive of difference; he can only comprehend what is dissimilar from himself as “odd.” Anything that is not familiar is “other.” Even as he explores Tokyo and encounters the various different people on the street, his white gaze Orientalizes the citizens. When Shannon encounters an older Japanese man, Shannon exoticizes the man’s physical features, describing him as “ageless” with “his parchment-like face, … the set of his elongated teeth under tight lips, … the slit of his eyes, like a serpent’s.”[32] He categorizes the ways in which the man’s phenotypical appearance is different from his own—yet the categorization not only emphasizes racial difference but also conforms with what are stereotypically considered “Asian features.” The “slant” of eyes is a way of abstracting “Asian-ness,” or signaling something as Asian without explicitly labeling it as such.[33] Notably, Shannon simultaneously notes how striking the man’s features are in their difference to his own yet generalizes Asian appearances to be uniform. As he spends more time in Tokyo, Shannon comments that “to a westerner, most of the oriental faces seem all too similar.”[34]Contradictory in the sense that Asian features are so different and exotic yet commonplace. Shannon perpetuates Asian inscrutability, or an “Orientalist discourse [that] flattened, homogenized, and objectified” the Orientalized person.[35]Inscrutability renders the Asian person as unintelligible. Shannon erases the possibility of Asian individualism, collapsing and flattening Japanese identity. He generalizes because he believes the Japanese conform with his perception of them. He simultaneously Orientalizes and dehumanizes.

Throughout the novel, despite his torrid affairs with the Japanese siblings, Shannon does not gain cultural competency. He continues to cling to his presupposed assumptions. Upon arriving in Tokyo, Shannon presumed that the Japanese people resented his presence, that they were stuck in their old, traditional ways.[36] Tara Hanna and Tara Rasha proceed to open their home, traditions, culture, and religion to him—sharing the tradition of their family’s ancestral lantern that is a symbol of resilience.[37] Nevertheless, even after the siblings shared sacred traditions with Shannon, Shannon laments that “Japanese religion is too closely identified with authoritarianism and empire.”[38] The Japanese religion to which he refers is the pre-war State Shintō, or a religion that shaped government policy, ancestral traditions, and morality—pillars integral to culture.[39] He casts judgement on a culture that Tara Hanna and Tara Rasha welcomed him into. The judgement implies that Japanese religion is something to abandon. This depiction of Asian culture as backwards is a common trend within books depicting Asian characters during Corley’s time. Analysis of similar, contemporaneous novels featuring interracial relationships between white men and Asian women also present the Asian culture as being regressive.[40] Then the novels seem to equate Asian-ness as regressive-ness. It is as though Asian-ness is “something that must be rescued from itself.”[41] It is as though Asian-ness “must be abandoned” for these relationships to work.[42] Within this logic, as Shannon Orientalizes and deems Japanese culture to be inferior, he seems to argue as though Tara Hanna must abandon her Japanese-ness. He not only Orientalizes the culture but also wants it to be palatable to his own.

Orientalizing Țara Hanna

Beyond simply Orientalizing the Japanese culture, the novel also Orientalizes and fetishizes the Japanese characters. From the moment Shannon meets Tara Hanna, he is instantly, inexplicably attracted to her. Just as he categorized the features of the older Japanese man, Shannon categorizes Tara Hanna’s features: “Her dark lashes display that stamped almond slant … Her stature is petite, almost doll-like.”[43] Corley’s illustrations corroborate this description, depicting Tara Hanna as a Geisha in a traditional kimono, holding a fan, with slanted eyes.[44] Kimonos, fans, and slanted eyes are ethnic signs to convey some idea of nationality—Corley’s  illustration abstracts Asian-ness from ethnicity to aesthetic.[45] This process of abstraction is both reductive and exaggerating: Corley creates his idea of what Japanese looks like based on stereotype. Once again, Shannon relies on stereotype, only within this instance, stereotype concerning petite Asian women. Scholarship concerning novels from this period argues that when authors write romance novels starring non-white characters, the only two choices are “invisibility or stereotype.”[46] In this case, Corley depicted Tara Hanna as stereotype, which Shannon is attracted to. Once he meets her, he describes his need to possess her, own her and her beauty.[47] He appreciates her beauty despite their difference, so much so that he desires to possess her. However, that desire to possess is a desire to dominate, to force Tara Hanna to submit.

Orientalism scholarship examines similar romance novels and examines how white men’s love for Asian women is not a transcendence of racism. Rather, it is racism and colonial logics in action. The images of Asian women as so exotic, beautiful, submissive, as a “pining Geisha” are depictions of the feminine, subservient East ripe for the taking for the masculine, dominant West.[48] The Japanese woman is so different, exotic, exciting that she is desirable; nonetheless, she is so submissive that she will conform to what the white man desires her to be. Shannon even explicitly admits to fetishizing Tara Hanna, calling her “this American male dream personified,”[49] in an admission of what society now terms “Yellow Fever.”[50] He sexualizes and objectifies her as sexual fantasy rather than a person, and the sexual fantasy derives itself from her physical appearance as an exotic Asian woman. Recent scholarship in Asian studies examines why the fetishization of Asian-ness is harmful, and these theorists explain that American assertions that they love Asian women are not a hidden desire but an open and accepted one. Despite the invisibility of Asian women in the public sphere, Yellow Fever is disproportionately visible and evidence of the carnality with which Americans fetishize Asian women.[51] Yellow fever is Orientalism in action. The fetishization of Asian woman is evidence of the desire in difference, the fantasy of the unknown. Shannon merely participates in this historical trend of the West’s “unbridled imagination”[52] of “a favored locus of European pornography.”[53] Shannon is not isolated in his Orientalist understanding of Japan. Rather, he is a symptom of a larger colonial legacy.

Orientalizing Țara Rasha

Markedly, Shannon not only Orientalizes and fetishizes Tara Hanna but also her brother Tara Rasha. At the mid-point in the novel, Shannon has yet to form a connection with Tara Rasha, and Shannon decries Tara Rasha as a “demanding Imperialist who possesses the mind of a kamikaze fanatic.”[54] Just as the depiction of Asian women is stereotypical in many romance novels, scholarship notes that the depiction of Asian men is often stereotype or parody.[55]A kamikaze was certainly a prevailingly parody of Japanese people in the wake of WWII.[56] Rather than understand Tara Rasha’s hesitance to accept Shannon, Shannon chalks up all of Tara Rasha’s grievances to extremist understandings of Japanese militarism. However, just a few pages later, Shannon also fetishizes Tara Rasha. Shannon describes Tara Rasha’s face as a “timeless, ageless face. His is the face of a savage. [A] sensuous beauty, like a work of antique art.”[57]Shannon now extends the description a step further as to describe Tara Rasha’s face as that of a savage, a dehumanizing descriptor. Yet, Shannon also notes Tara Rasha’s beauty as  desirable. Remarkably, Shannon also describes Tara Rasha as feminine. At several points, Shannon comments that Tara Rasha is so alike his sister, even in femininity. At one point, Shannon remarks that Tara Rasha “embodied the essence of femininity even more than those of real women.”[58] As discussed, that Asian men are more effeminate, weaker than more masculine white men was a stereotype that gained traction in the 1960’s. Shannon simultaneously fetishes Tara Rasha’s features as feminine and denotes them as that of a savage—fetishization and exoticization in conjunction with dehumanization, a complicated site of Orientalist logics.

Implications

Overwhelmingly, Corley’s novel depicts Orientalist, racist, and colonial understandings of Japanese culture and people. However, the harm does not exist merely on the page. The issue with the publication of such novels is the impact that media can have on its audiences. Romance novel historical scholarship has argued that when popular fiction depicts Western hegemonic themes and features blatantly colonial and Orientalist culture, this popular fiction can create an audience that “absorbed messages of the supremacy of white […] lives.”[59] For impressionable readers, such popular fiction perpetuates harmful, racist ideas and props up white supremacy. Print media is an influential form of cultural capital: print media is a site of cultural production.

Conclusion

American perceptions of Japanese people shifted from more blatant racism in the 1940’s to more subtle racism in the 1960’s, but the prejudice remained, nonetheless. These prejudices manifested in Corley’s 1966 novel—in how he wrote about Japanese cities, people, and culture. To Corley’s credit, there are interesting points in the novel wherein Shannon’s character interrogates the nuances of war and conquest (to varying degrees of enlightenment), and the novel has fluid depictions of sexuality and gender. These themes would merit further study. However, the harm in Orientalizing an entire country and its people in media is a necessary interrogation. Orientalism exists not only within active imperial conquest and governmental policy because Orientalism predicates itself upon soft power and cultural fascinations. Print media is a site ripe for Orientalism, and it is imperative to question and study its manifestations.

[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 2.

[2] Said, Orientalism, 5.

[3] Carl Corley, The Scarlet Lantern (San Diego: Publishers Export Co, 1966), 7.

[4] Roger W. Lotchin, “A Research Report: The 1940s Gallup Polls, Imperial Japanese, Japanese Americans, and the Reach of American Racism.” Southern California Quarterly 97, no. 4 (2015): 399–417. 400.

[5] Gallup polls from the midst of WWII indicated that two-thirds of respondents would refuse to patronize Japanese merchants or hire them as domestic workers (Lotchin 400). Similarly, disparate attitudes towards American enemies, Japan and Germany, reveal racial discrimination. The polls indicated that American sentiments were more lenient toward German punishment after WWII than Japanese punishment, with more respondents favoring “destruction” as the policy toward Japan than Germany despite significantly more respondents indicating that they believed Germany was a bigger threat to America (Lotchin 413, 410). These attitudes were not isolated to governmental policy but also regarded cultural stereotypes. Overwhelmingly, 82% of American respondents answered that the believed the Japanese to be “more cruel at heart,” in comparison only 18% of respondents answering the same assessment for the Germans (Lotchin 415). The poll indicates that respondents made a broad-scale generalization that Japanese people were “crueler.” However, some of the answers for how the United States should respond after the war were more violent. In fact, 13% of respondents answered that the United States should “Kill all Japanese people” after the war (Lotchin 414). While an insignificant number in comparison to the majority of Americans who did not favor the elimination of all Japanese people, the violent sentiments against the Japanese were existent. Respondents used markedly more violent language to describe punishment for Japanese military leaders than German military leaders (Lotchin 415).

[6] Karen A. Keely, “Dangerous Words: Recognizing the Power of Language by Researching Derogatory Terms.” The English Journal 100, no. 4 (2011): 55–60. 57.

[7] Molly Martin, “Racism on the Job: An Interview with Ann Leong and Alison Ebata: [1].” Tradeswomen, no. 2 (1982), 8.

[8] Scrapbook, 1940-1945, 39100506, box 26, Carl V. Corley Papers, 1930s-2002, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC (hereafter cited as Scrapbook, Carl V. Corley Papers).

[9] Scrapbook, Carl V. Corley Papers.

[10] Said, Orientalism, 60.

[11] Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 6.

[12] Scrapbook, Carl V. Corley Papers.

[13] Isaac Burt, Andy V. Pham, and June H. Hyun, “Reexamining Asian American Masculinity and

the Model Minority Myth through a School-Based Counseling Group,” Professional School Counseling 25, no. (2021), 1-11. 2.

[14] Teo, Desert, 201.

[15] Erin S. Young, “Saving China: The Trans Formative Power of Whiteness in Elizabeth Lowell’s Jade Island and Katherine Stone’s Pearl Moon,” in Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, ed. William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger (London: Routledge, 2016), 215.

[16] Scrapbook, Carl V. Corley Papers.

[17] Scrapbook, Carl V. Corley Papers.

[18] Corley, The Scarlet, 79.

[19] Michio Kitahara, “Douglas MacArthur as a Father Figure in Occupied Japan After World War II.” International Social Science Review 64, no. 1 (1989): 20–28, 20.

[20] Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2000), 53.

[21] Diane Fujino, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki On Race, Resistance, And a Paradoxical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 94.

[22] Said, Orientalism, 138.

[23] Kitahara, “Douglas,” 21.

[24] David Mura, “Asia and Japanese Americans in the Postwar Era: The White Gaze and the Silenced Sexual Subject.” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (2005): 604–20, 610.

[25]Fujino, Samurai, 94.

[26] Don K. Nakayama, “Asian American Surgery: A Short History of Immigration, Naturalization, and Refugee Laws and Policies that Brought Asians to America.” The American Surgeon 89, no. 12 (2023): 6452-6459, 6456.

[27] Espiritu, Asian, 56.

[28] Espiritu, Asian, 56.

[29] Mura, “Asia,” 608.

[30] Mura, “Asia,” 611.

[31] Corley, The Scarlet, 7.

[32] Corley, The Scarlet, 8.

[33] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 3.

[34] Corley, The Scarlet, 34.

[35] Vivian Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Durham: Duke University Press 2022), 2.

[36] Corley, The Scarlet, 7.

[37] Corley, The Scarlet, 53.

[38] Corley, The Scarlet, 119.

[39] Jun’ichi Isomae, “The Conceptual Formation of the Category ‘Religion’ in Modern Japan: Religion, State, Shintō.” Journal of Religion in Japan 1, no. 3 (2012): 226-245, 240.

[40] Young, “Saving,” 206.

[41] Young, “Saving,” 206.

[42] Hsu-Ming Teo, “Cultural Authenticity, the Family, and East Asian American Romance Novels.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9, no. 1 (2020): 1-28, 24.

[43] Corley, The Scarlet, 15.

[44] Atomic Butterfly Manuscript, 39100506, box 2, folder 1, Carl V. Corley Papers, 1930s-2002, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.

[45] Bow, Racist, 2.

[46] Teo, Desert, 294.

[47] Corley, The Scarlet, 16.

[48] Mura, “Asia,” 608.

[49] Corley, The Scarlet, 19.

[50] Bow, Racist, 7.

[51] Bow, Racist, 7.

[52] Bow, Racist,. 10.

[53] Teo, Desert, 58.

[54] Corley, The Scarlet, 70.

[55] Teo, Desert, 293.

[56] Fujino, Samurai, 94.

[57] Corley, The Scarlet, 73.

[58] Corley, The Scarlet, 88.

[59] Hsu-Ming Teo, “The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories.” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 13.

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