It’s Time to Talk About Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The renowned late actor Mickey Rooney, wearing a fake tan, taped back eyes, and prosthetic buck teeth, parodies the character of a Japanese photographer, Mr. Yunioshi, in the 1961 feature film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Yunioshi is the upstairs neighbour of the iconic, glamorous protagonist Holly Golightly, played by Audrey Hepburn, and he only appears in order to interrupt the latter’s socialite life with noise complaints and threats of calling the police.

Rooney produces a dragged-out mockery of a Japanese accent in this role, becoming what Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang called ‘the godfather of the “Ching-Chong” stereotype’, which has endured for decades and conflates many kinds of Asian cultures and languages into one caricature. His walk is also a waddle, which makes him out to be both a temperamental toddler and a brainless fool, clumsily bumping into everything from his studio lights to the paper lantern hanging barely a meter from his pillow. The placement of this cliché object is also completely nonsensical, adding to the depiction of Yunioshi’s foreign ways as ridiculous.

He clearly serves as a device for comic relief, rendering his Asian presence laughable, subhuman, and a mere irritation to the more important plotline of Holly achieving white, middle-class femininity. Film critic Melissa Phruksachart brilliantly argues that ‘Mr. Yunioshi’s strangeness emerges from his impotence, his inability to restore order to his household’. He protests Holly ringing his buzzer at night because she always forgets to bring her keys, but his complaints are easy to dismiss when conveyed through Rooney’s parodic accent, painted-yellow complexion, and kimono – ‘all markers of his inability to embody a performance of whiteness and/or authority.’ Phruksachart further argues that this lack of authority is expressed in Rooney’s hysteria – a quality which has long been associated with the female body in film and literature alike.

The emasculation of an Asian man by Holly Golightly is crucial to take notice of as there has been a long standing tradition of feminizing Asian men for political purposes by US mass media. Bo Leungsuraswat points out that ‘the feminization and queering of Chinese immigrant men further justified their exclusion from the American cultural sphere on the ground that their existence threatened American family norms.’ Maintaining family norms are hardly a priority for Holly Golightly, who has abandoned her ex-husband and his children in favour of a cosmopolitan lifestyle in New York. However, this means that Yunioshi becomes the scapegoat onto whom the viewer displaces their disappointment in the protagonist’s deviations from family norms. Yunioshi embodies a domestic figure, contrasting Holly’s cosmopolitan independence, making him a surrogate for the female protagonist’s flaws and her move away from traditional modes of feminine existence.

At first glance, Holly is a refreshing subversion of gender roles: she is a commitment-phobe with an inability to be tied down, contrasting her main admirer, Paul Varjak, who is dependent on an older woman’s money, which he receives in exchange for sex. Mr. Yunioshi, therefore, represents an obsolete version of domestic femininity, which relies upon, in Phruksachart’s words, ‘a backward Orient to shore up American style modernity – in this case embodied by Holly Golightly in an emerging form of white female sexual independence.’

Chiung Hwang Chen notes how, ‘when not “disempowered” into a feminine figure, the Asian male was associated with opium addiction or qualities of cunning, malevolence, spite and evil.’ This description recalls the idea of ‘yellow peril’, a term coined in the nineteenth century to describe the feeling that East Asians posed an existential threat to Western civilization. The sentiment behind this racist colour-metaphor is reflected by the portrayal of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, which featured caricatures of Asian men that Rooney’s Yunioshi strikingly resembles. Even though his protests to Holly have no real power, he still manages to be established as the villain when he finally pulls through on his promise and calls the police on Holly, at which point he has broken into her apartment with the police, and hysterically demands her arrest.

The feminization of Asian men by US mass media was a way to concede entry into society for Asian immigrants, as it lessened the element of danger or threat previously ascribed to them. This representation has culminated in the forms of anti-Asian racism and stereotyping that still exist today, as Chen states, the image of ‘a “safe” and “harmless” model minority symbolizes a perception by white Americans of a feminized position of passivity and malleability of Asian Americans today.’’

Since the release of the film, Blake and Rooney’s Yunioshi has been one of the most enduring caricatures of the Asian presence in Western cinema. There’s no doubt that this film helped substantiate already rampant prejudices against Asian folk in the aftermath of World War II, particularly after the wave of propaganda in the United States that painted Japanese people as the enemy. But it’s a shame these scenes passed release especially being at the tail-end of the Civil Rights Movement, and shortly preceding the abolition of the exclusionary National Origins Formula (which removed people of Asian and certain other ethnic origins from American immigration policy) in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Even the author of the novella to which the film owes its name, Truman Capote said it was ‘the most miscast film’ he’d ever seen; “it made me want to throw up. Like Mick Rooney playing this Japanese photographer. Well, indeed I had a Japanese photographer in the book, but he certainly wasn’t Mick Rooney.” But while some critics and activists have argued for a banishment of the Yunioshi scenes from the film in order to redeem it, it’s clear that the interconnected racial and gender dynamics between Yunioshi and Holly make up an important reflection of America’s collective consciousness in the 1960’s, despite the progressive changes that shortly followed. The film blew up upon its release in 1961 and will always be a timeless classic, as people continue to turn a blind eye to, or even corroborate with, the dangerous ideologies underlying it.

Blake and Rooney have since shown regret and apologised for the representation of Yunioshi – in Rooney’s case it was after four decades of staunchly defending the role. And while this doesn’t reverse the harm already caused, we might consider other films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s – such as Broken Blossoms (1919), Shadows, (1922) and Flash Gordon (1936), which make questionable use of the Asian presence – to better contextualise our understanding of the treatment of Asian people by mass media, Hollywood and Western society, throughout history.

By contextualising these portrayals amongst the broader strain of yellow-face in Hollywood, and American society’s views in the 60’s, we can continue to provoke discussions about these films that seek to expose the problematic narratives of gender and race which made them so appealing to audiences, and which have culminated in the forms of anti-Asian hate we see today.

Sources:

Jeff Yang, ‘The Mickey Rooney Role Nobody Wants to Talk About Much’ in Wall Street Journal, April 8 2014.

Melissa Phruksachart, ‘The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi: Yellowface and the Queer Buzz of Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ in Camera Obscura vol. 32, no. 3 (2017)

Bo Leungsuraswat, ‘Badass, Motherfucker, and Meat-Eater: Kit Yan’s Trans of Color Slammin’ Critique and the Archives of Possibilities’ in Nineteen Sixty Nine: An Ethnic Studies Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2012).

Chiung Hwang Chen, ‘Feminization of Asian (American) Men in the U.S. Mass Media: An Analysis of The Little Ballad of Jo’ in Journal of Communication Inquiry vol. 20, no. 2 (1996)
Lawrence Grobel, Conversations with Capote (New York: New American Library, 1968)