Hollywood has a long history of sending white dudes to Japan to A) fall in love with a local hottie and B) somehow save Japan itself, and that irksome trend shows no sign of ending, to my dismay. The latest Caucasian hero set to do so is LOST’s Matthew Fox, who’s signed on to play real-life figure General Bonner Fellers in Peter Webber’s Emperor, a “nail-biting political thriller” about post-World War II diplomacy…and Fellers’ love affair with a Japanese woman. Sigh. Of course.

I’ve got no problem with stories about Americans in Japan, or interesting cinematic studies about cultural exchange or ninjas or whatever. But why, when Hollywood looks to Japan, must it so often come down to a white man immersing himself in Japanese culture, always through the love of an exotic Japanese flower, then becoming the one person upon whom the fate of the Japanese people, their code of honor, etc. rests?

In 1958 said hero was John Wayne – the quintessential icon of American masculinity – playing real life diplomat Townsend Harris in John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha. Harris, appointed Consul-General to Japan in the late 1800s, is known for opening the isolated nation to trade with the U.S., indelibly heralding the onset of modern Japan. Legend has it Harris’s treaty negotiations were greased by the assignment of a teenage geisha to his bed, a rumor dismissed as fabrication that nevertheless figures heavily into the film, because how could it not?

A decade later, even super spy James Bond went native, so to speak, donning “ethnic” make-up to blend in with the Japanese in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. He plays house with Kissy Suzuki, then saves Japan (and, okay, the entire world) from evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld.…