Detroit Opera House’s ‘Madame Butterfly’ looks to ‘kill the white men’s fantasy of Asian women’

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Philip Groshong, Cincinnati Opera

This production of Madame Butterfly turns it into a virtual reality fantasy.

Calling Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly problematic would be an understatement. 

The wildly popular Italian opera takes place in Japan when a 15-year-old Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San (aka Madame Butterfly), falls in love with an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki named B.F. Pinkerton. The two are married and have a son but Pinkerton goes back to the United States. When he returns to Japan with his new American wife, he intends to adopt the child and raise him back home without Butterly. Butterfly commits suicide in the end.

Not only is the opera offensive in its portrayal of Japanese women as exotic and submissive, but it also fetishizes Japanese culture and reinforces stereotypes. Some productions have even included white actors in “yellowface.” But not this time. When Madame Butterfly comes to the Detroit Opera House this October, it’ll be helmed by an all-Japanese and Japanese-American creative team.

Directed by Matthew Ozawa with a set by design collective dots, this production of Madame Butterfly reinvents the tragic opera while putting the fetishized white male gaze of the original production on full blast. In this version, the piece is presented as Pinkerton’s fantasy in a virtual reality setting.

Kimie Nishikawa, one of the members of dots, tells Metro Times the creative team decided to play up the stereotypes in the opera to satirize the original material.

“Instead of turning the story into like giving one of the characters agency, we actually zoomed out even a little bit more, saying this doesn't have anything to do with Japan,” she says. “It was all these European white men fantasizing about this Japanese woman who was 14, and so we’re like wait a minute. That’s the concept, that this is not real. That this is all a fantasy.”

The set and lighting are also designed to look similar to a video game. 

“Some East Asian folks might be surprised like, why are they doing this? Why are they accentuating the stereotypes of East Asian culture? But actually what we're trying to do is reinforce how absurd the libretto is,” Nishikawa says. “A lot of operas were focusing more on how beautiful the music is, which it really is beautiful, but when you look at the libretto, it’s really horrifying.”

In one scene, Pinkerton is trying to figure out Choi-Choi-San’s age and guesses that she’s either 10 or 18, before realizing that she’s actually 14. This leads to a song about 14 being the age for toys and candy, which turns Pinkerton on, as Nishikawa explains.

“I don't think Madame Butterfly in its original way should be performed,” she says. “Wherever a company wants to do it, I think they need to do the work and question it, and really try to update it in their own way. But banning this opera, I don’t necessarily agree with either.”

Nishikawa grew up in both Japan in the United States. She lived in the U.S. from the ages of two to 10 and then returned to Japan. She says she had a hard time empathizing with the characters in Madame Butterfly because it was clear they were written from a white male’s perspective. 

The Madame Butterfly opera is based on a play by David Belasco which was adapted from a short story of the same name by John Luther Long. The story was reportedly based on a secondhand account from Long’s sister whose husband was a Methodist missionary in Japan. Reportedly, neither Puccini, Belasco, nor Puccini had ever been to Japan before writing.

Kristen Choi, who plays Cio-Cio-San’s servant Suzuki in the production, says instead of Butterfly killing herself in the end, she’s “killing the white man's fantasy of Asian women.”

“I want the show to make a statement for our community, especially in the opera industry,” she says. “We need to kill this narrative so that we can open the door to have more real stories of the Asian community... If this is what people think is Asian culture, and we don’t get other stories told, they’ll never really know the real identities of our community.”

Choi has been in at least 10 other productions of Madame Butterfly and says the opera itself isn’t offensive, but oftentimes directors don’t do enough research on Japan to create an accurate portrayal.

Nishikawa says Madame Butterfly is extremely popular in Japan and Choi suspects it’s because it's always cast and directed by Japanese people. This run of Madame Butterfly is the first time it’s being done in the U.S. with an all-Japanese and Japanese-Americann creative team.

The singers, chorus, and musicians of the Detroit Opera will be conducted by Kensho Watanabe. Alongside Nishikawa, the team also includes two other Japanese/Japanese American women, Maiko Matsushima on costume design and Yuki Nakase Link on lighting design. 

Nishikawa hesitated at first to be involved in the opera but says the team found a way to give Japanese women a voice with this new update.

“We are really pointing a finger at the white male gaze and how problematic that is,” she says. “Because we’re doing that I feel that we are seen, that we were able to put a lot of our voices as Japanese women into the piece… and, in the end, there’s a more focused light on Butterfly herself as a modern East Asian woman.”