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What’s the matter, princess? I got a birthday present for you.” Akemi shows she can handle herself and we don’t care that the White guy gets roughed up. He tells his friends, “The Jap is mine” and getting on stage while Akemi’s singing, he snarls, “Show me how a Japanese twerks. She decides to do karaoke but while she’s up on stage she’s heckled by a blond dude with yellow fever. She’s told, “If you get any more of these you can join the yakuza.” That should be a hint. Today happens to be Akemi’s birthday and she decides she needs a tattoo. “Your life may depend upon one blow, a single blow,” he tells her. “You must leave your grief and anger,” she’s told. He’s the kind of patient that no one wants because he beats up the orderlies and the nurses until someone drugs him.Įlsewhere in the same city, Akemi, who was brought to her sensei (teacher) when she was six, is practicing kendo with wooden swords. He has patches on his face and his right arm is in a cast. In the greenish light of a dingy hospital, a White guy wakes up. Then the film jumps to the present day in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The boy doesn’t survive but the girl is taken away along with the sword. The temple appears to be, if I remember correctly, the Kinkakuji which is in Kyoto and not Osaka. There’s samurai armor and a sword on display and the family decides to take a photograph in front of a temple. The film begins 20 years ago in Osaka, Japan with a formal family gathering near a temple. That’s all the history you need to know for this Brazilian flick. Racial prejudice resulted in the formation of cultural communities. The Japanese were already being turned away from the United States and eventually anti-Asian immigration acts would be passed (included the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907) making it nearly impossible to immigrate to the US so Japanese started immigrating to South America, including Brazil. After trying to attract Europeans which lost traction because the plantation owners wouldn’t shake the slave owner mentality and expected laborers to accept poor working conditions, Brazilians turned to Japan. The end of African slavery in Brazil where coffee was a major export resulted in a labor shortage. You might be shocked to learn that the largest community of Japanese descent outside of Japan exists in Brazil.
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I spent most of the film wondering if it is ever wise to use the word “princess” for a culture like Japan that has an aristocracy with actual princesses or why we’re viewing what looks to be the Kinkakuji in the initial scenes. Fans of pop star Masumi who plays the titular character Akemi or of Jonathan Rhys Meyers who is Shiro may find this worth seeing, but there’s little else to recommend here.