NEW FROM SHISEI-DO PUBLICATIONS! Eastern Jewel: Japan's Mata Hari - The Life and Death of Yoshiko Kawashima, by Hayato Tokugawa, in a new, revised edition. Now available for reading and for free download (for a limited time on Scribd at:
www.scribd.com/doc/48131055/Eastern-Jewel-Japan-s-Mata-Hari-Revised.
Our most popular essay published on the Internet and soon to be a "stand-alone" book.
The name Mata Hari conjures up images of an eye-catching, exotic woman, operating as a secret agent during World War I, and using her powers of seduction to mine military secrets from her many lovers and contacts. The name fires the imagination and stimulates images of the classic femme fatale. Devotees of classic cinema will almost certainly turn their minds to images of Greta Garbo in the 1931 film based on the life of Mata Hari: commercially Garbo's most successful film.
A perhaps equally evocative term (albeit stereotypical), especially to people who grew up in the United States during the period of the 1920s through the 1950s, is that of the “dragon lady.” Typically, she was an East Asian woman, characteristically either Chinese or Japanese, found in popular fiction, who was identified and objectified romantically and erotically as being alluring, wicked, scheming, and troublesome. Even though the use of “dragon” or “dragoness” appears in dictionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to identify a forceful Asian woman, the actual term “dragon lady” did not appear until its introduction in the 1930s by Milton Caniff in his popular adventure comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and his characterization of Lai Choi San, a female Chinese pirate of the South China Sea.
A slightly earlier version of the “dragon lady,” one that was more tangibly romantic and erotic, appeared in American cinema during the 1920s and early 30s; particularly in the early films of Anna May Wong, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931). Many men, and women, on both sides of the Pacific found her roles, and the image of the classic “dragon lady” as a source of innumerable erotic fantasies.
Sociologists and various social activists have, and will continue to write on the subject of whether or not the characters of Mata Hari and the “dragon lady,” as portrayed in literature and films, are misogynistic or sexist. Certainly one could also do so here, but then, that would not be nearly as much fun.
Political correctness aside, one might ponder the possibility of the synthesis of Mata Hari with the character of the “dragon lady” into one person. Well, such a person did in fact exist, and while obscure in the minds of most people, she possessed the distinctiveness of both and uncanny similarities to one in particular, both in time and in circumstance.
