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Of all operatic characters, the most influential on American popular culture was Cho-Cho-San, the title character of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This chapter surveys the large repertoire of Butterfly songs, which, like the opera, allegorize the United States' flexing of imperialistic muscle in the Far East as a love story between a powerful American man and a powerless Japanese woman. Unlike the opera, these popular songs, of which “Poor Butterfly” emerges as the most important, explore a wide range of alternative readings of that allegory, from validating Pinkerton as hero, not villain, to empowering Cho-Cho-San.

This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.

In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the making of this classic film, and Cary Grant’s discomfort working alongside these two very temperamental personalities. It considers the crucial element that von Sternberg brought to Cary Grant’s image: his razor sharp hair parting. It also offers accounts of the making of Hot Saturday (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932), and, in the process, the slow but steady improvement in Grant’s acting and on-screen presence.

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.