This project originates from my Master’s thesis, “Yamashiro: Imagined Home and the Aesthetics of Hollywood Japanism, Memory Contained in Architectural Space '' at the University of Southern California in 2018. Inspired by a course taught by Miya Elise Desjardins at the University of Southern California titled Japanese Visual Culture, Housed in L.A., this project would not have been possible without the mentorship of scholars in the field of Asian American studies, Japanese art history, architecture, design, and gardens in California. I deeply thank Miya Elise Desjardins, Kendall H. Brown, Sonya S. Lee, and Lon Kurashige for their guidance in locating source materials and nurturing my academic interests in graduate school. I also thank Rika Hiro for her editorial support in transforming excerpts from my graduate work into a forthcoming essay in the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, UH Press.

Abstract:

In 1911, cotton barons and Asian art collector brothers Eugene Elija Bernheimer (1865-1924) and Adolph Leopold Bernheimer (1866-1944) arrived in Los Angeles from New York with an extensive collection of decorative art and antiques amassed between the late 1880s and early 1900s on their travels to Asia. Mainly acquired in Japan and China, their collection comprised ukiyo-e prints, silk paintings, Buddhist sculptures and wall paintings, wood carvings, jades, bronze sculptures, furniture, and “Oriental” goods.1 It was this very collection that launched their quest to design and construct a palatial home suitable to display their art objects in an aesthetic manner (fig. 1.1). After purchasing the land from Hollywood developer H. J. Whitley, the Bernheimer brothers constructed a Japanese castle atop Whitley Hill in Hollywood on a twelve-acre lot in 1914, nostalgically naming it Yamashiro, which means “Mountain Castle” in Japanese. More than a century later, today the original structure of Yamashiro operates as a trendy Japanese and Pan-Asian cuisine restaurant. Since September 2012, Yamashiro and its surrounding grounds, known as the Yamashiro Historic District, have been protected as a state-registered historic landmark.

At a time when Hollywood and other mainstream media industries are being called upon to urgently reassess and correct old xenophobic Orientalist tropes in American cinematic productions, Yamashiro can provide the historical lens required to understand how such constructions and representations of Asian visual culture were disseminated in American film and media. Yamashiro came to exist as a direct result of the Bernheimers’ enchantment with Japanese (and broadly East Asian) aesthetics. In order to explore how their home and collection architected certain public perceptions of Japan, we must first mindfully consider the making of Hollywood, not as a geographic enclave, but as a cultural symbol of the sensational, fantasy, and make-believe. The design and construction of Yamashiro coincided with the start of Hollywood as a major economic industry and the arrival of a larger American Japanism movement in the American West. This led to a Hollywoodified imagination of American Japanism, a “cinematic Japan” that I would like to call by the neologism “Hollywood Japanism,” a form of Japanism uniquely distinct to Los Angeles.6 Hollywood Japanism evolves the current understanding of American Japanism by suggesting a need for deeper consideration of regional identity and influence of Hollywood as an American cultural industry.