"High octane kung fu action": Examining racialization in The 2nd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and Fantasia '98: Toronto Festival

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 2000 by Michael Ma

The 2nd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

100%, the feature film debut of Canadian director Eric Koyanagi, was shown on the opening night of The 2nd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. A traditional narrative film with three plots intersecting Tarantino style, it plays on the notion of what it means to be Asian in contemporary urban America. In an interview, Eric Koyanagi said that while growing up in Burlington, Ontario he was oblivious to being Japanese and had no sense of Asian identity. After relocating to California to attend film school at USC at Los Angeles Berkeley, however, he slowly developed an intense interest in and "affinity to all Asians" (Koyanagi). He understands that for many Japanese of his father's generation, "to become more Canadian meant to assimilate and to be middle class and model citizens" (Koyanagi). He has since come to understand that their "[Japanese] identity is kind of suppressed and safe and assimilated," at least publicly; he remembers his family always being "very Japanese at home, but not in the street" (Koyanagi). Koyanagi's political cultural interest in writing an Asian script for a feature film was a response to this perceived repression. He intended to show that Asians have an existence in North America beyond the stereotypes of compliance and excellence at math. Koyanagi explains that the "three strong male Asian characters" written for the screenplay were, in a sense, "Asian male role-models that [he] didn't have while growing up" (Koyanagi). Already Koyanagi seemed to identify with something pan-Asian; when asked if his understanding of an innate, shared Asianness was no more than shared differentiation from the culture at large, he responded, "The racism we feel ... you're not Japanese are you? [I respond, no] ... is the same. We all eat rice [he laughs]. We've all been located in North American society as Asians, so whether you choose to be or not is not the point" (Koyanagi). His statement implies that if we have been named as Asian, then we must accept and respond to that naming. Koyanagi further suggests that the very contemplation of identity "is an issue of luxury that only middle class kids can afford because kids in the ghetto know who they are" (Koyanagi).

It would seem that for Koyanagi, dramas of ethnic difference take place on a stage erected on notions of culture, custom and race presumed to exist for all Asians, whether they acknowledge them individually or not. In his remarks, Koyanagi seems to recognize a socio-cultural structure that exerts racial identity upon the individual, yet his project has no interest in breaking this structure down. If his remarks are understood in relation to his film, then the film can be understood as an intensification of race and not an investigation of racialization; the film speaks only to the manner in which an unreconstituted subaltern subject responds to his or her racialization, which is through unexamined cliches of racial recognition and self-empowerment.