Furthering the cause of Sino-Japanese friendship

The picture on the left is one of a series posted to the Chinese Internet forum Tianya Club, labelled "Zhang Ziyi's nude performance as Japanese geisha (including totally nude movie stills)".

The Tianya posting includes several poor quality images which purport to be Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe performing a sex scene from the film Memoirs of a Geisha, due for release in U.S. theaters in December this 2005. Danwei has no source to verify the authenticity of the images.

The pictures are accompanied by a nationalist rant, castigating Zhang Ziyi for dropping her pants (脱裤) with a Japanese man and acting as a Japanese prostitute.

Ho hum.

Other sensitive types getting their knickers in a twist about Zhang Ziyi can be found at the International Movie Database (IMDB) discussion board about Memoirs of a Geisha linked below, where some withering flower has written a post titled Chinese Playing Japanese... Similar to 'Black Face.

The withering flower thinks that it is racist and Euro-centric to cast Chinese actors as Japanese because only dumb Europeans think that Japanese and Chinese look the same. Perhaps the withering flower has not visited the web site All Look Same and tried to identify the origins of 18 people from Korea, China and Japan. Good luck sucker!

UPDATE: Variety's Asian film blog Kaiju Shakedown says:

The screenshots with fire in the background are from Kinji Fukasaku's HOUSE OF FIRE, and another eagle-eyed reader says that the screenshot without fire in the background is from a Hong Kong softcore flick called HIDDEN DESIRE.