I don't speak any Japanese or Mandarin myself, but judging by the fact that all the actors were Japanese, the Chinese they spoke (portraying Chinese characters) must not have been the most convincing.
Are there any native Mandarin speakers who can comment on this? I am kinda curious if it takes away on your enjoyment of this movie.
Their mandarin is definitely not modern standard mandarin. I just pretend they speak heavy accented mandarin because they are from the countryside.
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I do not know any Chinese but do have an elementary understanding of Japanese. It sounds to me that those Japanese speaking Chinese and those who portray Chinese characters who speak Japanese in both cases are generally speaking with heavy accents. As noted by the OP the actors were all Japanese and I assume that the director intended the accented dialogue to better convey to the intended Japanese audience the cultural and language difficulties of this interchange.
It would be natural that the actors portraying Japanese characters speaking Chinese might have a heavy accent but for those portraying Chinese characters there would have to be a conscious decision to render that dialogue in accented Japanese.
All Chinese language dialogue is accompanied by Japanese subtitles.
I'm a pre-intermediate level Mandarin speaker. A few of the whores in the film speak Chinese fluently, but as far as I could tell none of the men in the camp were speakers of any kind. My guess is they memorised some lines through a coach. Their delivery was very poor, and ridiculously slow. For me, this is the major distraction in the film.
share"A major distraction?" get a life. All of you. Could this aspect of the film matter any less? Hardly.
share"get a life" lol good reply to honest feedback.
do you speak mandarin? obviously not because it IS a major obstacle - the deliveries are awkward as *beep* (unnatural, spoken in ridiculous segments as if stuttering in between sentences - overall it's easy to tell that dialogue here was attempted by outsiders).
this was an unfortunate decision on the side of those in charge. It would have been preferable for all of it to be all in Japanese actually.
Yeah, I DO speak Mandarin. Lived in Taiwan for several years.
And while their Mandarin is obviously quite pedestrian, it is not a "major distraction." Might as well say the set design wasn't realistic enough and it was a "major distraction."
Throw a temper tantrum over delivery of Mandarin in a Japanese movie? Yeah, get a life.
Oh you lived in Taiwan for "several years" i guess you're an authority on the matter then rofl
who's throwing a temper tantrum but your whining about someone finding a fault over a legitimate complaint. GET A LIFE MORAN LOLZ
Are you kidding?
Mandarin is my mother tongue.
None of the whores in the camp speak fluent Chinese. They are all obviously Japanese actresses and are struggling to memorize the Chinese lines phonetically.
Any Mandarin speaker can immediately know that (it's not even close). And yet you think they are "fluent" and the male actors poor Mandarin a "major distraction in the film" for you lol.
I'm a native speaker. Yes their speaking is not good. I wanted to laugh each time hearing it. I remember some of them are OK but not major characters. The makeup and costumes are good. Kobayashi himself has been there during WWII. Japan occupied northeast China in 1930s and treated as a colony. Actually everybody has to learn Japanese during that time. That's why the character Chen speaks Japanese all the time. BTW I saw it on old VHS in 2007, haven't got the chance to see Criterion DVD. It's so wonderful to have their release. I really wish they could do Tokyo Trial which is not even available on VHS.
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I don't speak any Chinese or Japanese, but as someone who is familiar with the cinema from the two countries, I definitely felt like the 'Chinese' characters were a bit off both in their manner of speech and even just their basic appearance, and now that I see this topic, I understand why. I know that most Westerners can't tell the difference between Asians, but I'm surprised that a Japanese production, particularly such a famous and admired one, would try to pull something like that. It wasn't a huge problem, but it is pretty obvious to anyone interested in these cultures that the portrayal isn't authentic. I guess there were just different standards for this kind of thing in those days, same as there was in Hollywood.
shareThe usage of Mandarin here is a bit limited, sparse and "funny".
Not that convincing but still entertaining :)