Protest against film Rising Sun in Times Square (New York City)

Protest against film Rising Sun in Times Square (New York City)

July 30, 1993: CAAAV summer interns Jonathon Sung Bidol, Ginny Moon, and Julia Wang gather over one-hundred demonstrators outside Times Square’s Criterion Theater to protest Philip Kaufman’s racist film, Rising Sun, on its opening day. “Rising Sun! Raising hate!” the crowd chants.^[1] “JAPANESE MEN SLEEPING WITH WHITE WOMEN! GET THE LYNCH MOB,” reads one protestor’s sign.^[2] Staged in conjunction with dozens of other demonstrations across the United States, this protest aimed to “educate moviegoers about [Rising Sun’s] insidious stereotyping and the potential for anti-Asian violence its xenophobic message promotes.”^[3] The film, which follows two detectives as they investigate the murder of an escort at a Japanese company in Los Angeles, characterizes Japanese men as amoral, sexually-deviant foreigners determined to take over American institutions.^[4] Such insidious anti-Asian depictions redirect attention from internal causes of American economic problems and project blame onto “conniving” outsiders who look and act differently from white Americans.^[5] CAAAV’s protest against this stereotyping reflects an enduring commitment to fighting systemic and institutional racism, the root cause of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., and the organization’s awareness that hate crimes are often fueled by anti-Asian representations in American culture.^[6]

Founded in 1986, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities (formerly the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence) was created in response to rising anti-Asian violence across the U.S., particularly following the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin. A large part of CAAAV’s early activism centered on developing “a deeper analysis of the root causes of [anti-Asian] violence,” including the fact that such violence is neither random nor uncommon. Rather, it’s the result of centuries-long anti-Asian racism, which has become codified in the American legal system and in American culture.^[7] This entrenched racism is often expressed in anti-Asian representations; although Asian people have lived in the U.S. for centuries, they remain marginalized and othered, “seen as exotic, barbaric, and the perpetual foreigner,” even if they are naturalized or were born in the U.S.^[8] As the organizers of CAAAV’s anti-Rising Sun protest recognized, these racist caricatures directly fuel anti-Asian violence.

In October 1987, for example, flyers portraying Asian business owners and homeowners as homicidal mobsters and conniving religious cult leaders were plastered across Bensonhurst and Gravesend, Brooklyn. This directly resulted in a spate of anti-Asian violence, including street harassment, vandalism of Asian-owned property, and beatings of Asian American youth. As the organization would do upon Rising Sun’s release, CAAAV explicitly challenged these anti-Asian representations. CAAAV founders Mini Liu and Monona Yin publicly condemned city officials’ refusal to take anti-Asian racism seriously, collecting over one-thousand signatures on a petition that protested the NYPD’s response and collaborating with a multiracial coalition of community leaders to address racial violence in South Brooklyn.^[9]

Such activism illustrates CAAAV’s critical analysis of the root causes of anti-Asian violence and the strategic actions it takes to address systemic and institutional racism. Today, CAAAV continues to combat anti-Asian representations and hate crimes as the COVID-19 pandemic inflames anti-Asian racism. In advocating for poor and working-class Asian immigrant and refugee communities and protesting against anti-Asian representations, CAAAV supports and empowers some of New York City’s most vulnerable residents and provides them with essential services and resources during a particularly dangerous time for Asians and Asian Americans.^[10]

Notes

^[1] “Rising Sun! Raising Hate!,” The CAAAV Voice 5, no. 2 (1993): 3, accessed March 14, 2021, http://caaav.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Voice_Fall_1993.pdf.

^[2] “Rising Sun! Raising Hate!,” 3; “Protest against film Rising Sun in Times Square (New York City),” CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities Digital Archive, accessed March 16, 2021, http://maggie.hosting.nyu.edu/caaav/admin/items/show/1091.

^[3] “Rising Sun! Raising Hate!,” 3.

^[4] “Rising Sun (1993),” IMDb, accessed March 14, 2021, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107969/; “Rising Sun! Raising Hate!,” 3.

^[5] “Rising Sun! Raising Hate!,” 3.

^[6] “History of CAAAV,” CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, accessed March 14, 2021, http://caaav.org/about-us/history-of-caaav.

^[7] “History of CAAAV.”

^[8] Vivian Wong et al, “Archives (Re)Imagined Elsewhere: Asian American Community-based Archival Organizations,” in Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion, ed. Mary A Caldera and Kathryn M. Neal (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2014): 114.

^[9] Vivian Truong, "From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987–1995," Journal of Asian American Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 66-68.

^[10] “Our Work,” CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, accessed March 14, 2021, http://caaav.org/our-work.

circa 1993

Helen Stec

This post was completed as coursework for HIST-GA 3901 Community Archives, taught by Maggie Schreiner, in the Archives and Public History MA program at New York University.

Copyright is held by CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities.

Photograph

CAAAV_1567