| Madame Butterfly Japan has had a mixed relationship with foreigners. Truth and fables tell of relatively recent efforts to keep steep walls up between local and "foreign" culture, while old stories remember monks who rowed boats to bring back Buddha and complex bureaucracy. Many of Japan's most interesting cultural traditions emerged as Japanese people interpreted foreign culture for themselves. Occasionally, the reverse happened. Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly is the most well-known Western tale of Japan-foreign intercultural mixing gone awry. "Captain Pinkerton" and "Madame Butterfly" have come to stand for Western stereotypes of Japanese women, colonial conduct of Western men in Asia, and the difficulty in reconciling Japanese and foreign relationships. The common version of Madame Butterfly introduces us to an American Naval Captain Pinkerton on an extended stay in Japan. There he expects to take up a local Japanese woman as a bride-away-from-home, evidently a custom for visiting foreign men. He is arranged to marry "Cho-Cho-san" a young lady whose family has fallen financially and so she must sell herself in this way. In spite of the pecuniary basis for this union, love arises in at least one heart, and the Japanese woman finds herself longing for the rather boorish Captain as he leaves. His promise to return cheers her, as she is pregnant with his child, unbeknownst to him. Finally he returns, in the company of his primary wife, so the Japanese woman gives the foreign couple her son and kills herself. |
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