beyond the wide world's end

(I posted this earlier this evening on Tumblr, but I thought I'd go ahead and repost it here as well.)

Okay, this is the thing about Pacific Rim for me. I am a Japanese-American woman. I’m half-Japanese — my mother is Japanese, my father is Caucasian, but visually I read as some kind of Asian. (Sometimes people are very confused because, middle name aside, both my first name and my surname are European; my surname is actually an English noun.) Now, I don’t want to get into the fairly common assumption that all East Asians look alike (hint: we don’t) or the equally common assumption that if you come from some ethnic background that isn’t white European, you should be completely fluent in whatever language that happens to be (I’m about an eighth Swedish, but no one demands to know why I can’t speak Swedish: people do demand to know why I don’t speak Japanese, what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with my parents, why have I failed to be a proper ethnic minority) or, ha, even other Asian languages (no, dude, I can’t read those Chinese characters for you).

Okay, though. Here’s the thing about Pacific Rim. I’m a 23-year-old Japanese-American woman. I watch, if not a lot, a fair number of movies a year. ( I can’t think of a single big name movie where the lead female Japanese character is actually played by a Japanese actress. )