White Girls in Asia: Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation”

I’m here to write about a subject near and dear to me—white girls in Asia. They’re a specific subgroup, different from the white American girl abroad in Europe, and their journeys vary based on which part of Asia they travel to, China being different from Thailand being different from South Korea, etc.

Within the realm of film, perhaps one white girl in Asia reigns supreme: Sofia Coppola’s Charlotte from Lost in Translation. The dreamspace of Coppola’s Tokyo has influenced young women for twenty years now, her Charlotte the stand-in for anyone who’s ever felt lost, alienated, undone upon entering the world at-large and finding there cacophonous choice presented before them as they try to figure out who they are.

In its centering of Charlotte, it is also an Orientalist film, othering its Japanese characters within their own country. There’s a bit of a push-pull at the heart of it: to convey Charlotte’s melancholy, the world around her needs to feel strange and unknowable, but this often comes at the expense of Japan and the Japanese characters, tipping Charlotte and the film itself into an unsympathetic, Orientalist mode. It’s a delicate balancing act that viewers have differing opinions on. While some see the film as irredeemable, others see a story that doesn’t tell us in certain terms that it thinks its leads are good people.

As many other, more qualified writers have tackled Lost in Translation’s Orientalism, I’m here to do something a little different, to look at the film as the prime encapsulation of the phenomenon of the white girl in Asia, something that I’ve been many a time. Coppola’s film gets so perfectly the search for the self that occurs in these scenarios, the attempt to define oneself against a place so different from one’s own, the desire to find answers in a place that won’t readily give them because that’s not its purpose. Asia doesn’t exist to dispense wisdom and clarity of direction to young white women—but that won’t stop them from trying to get it to. (I would know, I’ve tried.)

At the open of Lost in Translation, we meet Charlotte confined to the hotel room she shares with her husband, a photographer on assignment who at best neglects her and at worst sees her as a nuisance. Charlotte is an especially young newly-ish wed, having just graduated Yale in the spring and tagging along because she doesn’t exactly know what she does yet. She strikes up a friendship with fellow disillusioned traveler Bob that hovers on the border of platonic and romantic as they both navigate their respective crises of self from the vantage point of the Park Hyatt Tokyo.

I’ll leave aside Bob here, played by Bill Murray, for the most part. A washed-up actor in town to shoot a Suntory whisky campaign, he stars in the film’s more overtly ‘comical’ scenes that are more often just difficult to watch, and generally isn’t what has drawn people to this movie for so many years—that would be Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson)’s story.

She is almost comically without purpose, listening to audio tapes called “A Soul Search: Finding Your True Meaning” written by some balding man with a PhD—the ideal dispenser of life advice for a twenty-two-year-old woman. She wanders around a Buddhist temple in Tokyo for a short time, then returns back to her hotel to tearfully call a friend and tell her she didn’t feel anything. It’s silly and overly dramatic—of course you didn’t feel anything, you have no idea what’s going on there. But it’s also instantly recognizable, that feeling of grasping at straws to find anything that will wake you from listless ennui, waiting for that jolt of connection, of surprise, of newness, of anything.

She conveys her lost-ness to Bob later on in the film after they’ve become closer. Laying next to each other in bed, fully-clothed, a therapy session rather than pillow talk, she tells him, “I’m stuck. Does it get easier?” “No,” he replies. Then after a beat, “Yes.” She continues, “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be. I tried being a writer, but I hate what I write. I tried taking pictures but they’re so mediocre. I mean, everyone goes through a photography phase.” Even she realizes that she’s so ordinary, that maybe every girl in the history of the world has felt what she’s feeling now, maybe even said exactly what she’s saying now. (If not photography, then watercolor or calligraphy or cave-painting.)

Those experiments with art form and self-expression, with what is going to define you to the outside world, feel right in college, in this period of your life when figuring things out is prized. In college and even high school, exploration is paramount, a designated time and space to kind of fuck around and try new things. After graduating, those questions are supposedly more sorted; now is the time to contribute to society, to make real decisions, to subjugate exploration to productivity.

Instead, Charlotte is still in the student mindset, even if she’s not an actual student like many white girls in Asia. Freshly post-grad with an Ivy League philosophy degree, she clings to people, experiences, and behaviors that will make her feel like she’s still in college. Without that environment, her self as she knows it, particularly as she formed it over the last four years, is gone and in its place a confused person with nothing real to hold on to. Out in the real world, she’s just a girl who hasn’t made a name for herself yet, who hasn’t yet attached herself to what she ‘does’—a young woman who’s mostly, in society’s eyes, the wife of an up-and-coming fashion photographer.

We can see her attempt to slip back into the academic mode when she and her husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), run into Anna Faris’ Kelly, an American actress in Tokyo for a press tour. Bubbly and loud, Kelly is everything Charlotte isn’t. Kelly chats with the couple, telling them she’d given a fake name to the hotel concierge—”Evelyn Waugh.” When she leaves, Charlotte’s first remark, slightly disdainful, to her husband: “Evelyn Waugh was a man.” He chides her that not everybody can go to Yale. Expecting him to join her in the jab, the way one might gossip about a classmate who has no idea what he’s talking about, she’s instead greeted by the reality of the world outside the campus, where those details count for less, and pointing it out makes you snobbish, not worldly-seeming.

She’s able to reclaim that collegiate feeling more so with Bob, who she spends increasingly more time with as the film goes on. They talk, mostly, not about projects and trends but about life and relationships and identity, core dorm room conversation topics. This older man dotes on her the way a too-familiar professor might, giving her the attention she’s lacking otherwise. With him, she’s witty, and fun, and desirable, again. Bob provides her that reminder of who she felt like before graduation, even as she still probes her experience in Japan for some meaning as she moves ever forward into the future.

Prompted by that uncertainty of self, Charlotte alternates between two modes in Japan, the first being the voyeur—the culturally respectful but shallow observer from afar. She hopes that through her constant taking in of Japan, she’ll finally feel something click, she’ll have a moment that reconnects her to her lost sense of self. It’s why she goes to the Buddhist temple where she is shocked to realize she feels nothing, or why she drops in on an ikebana class at the hotel, or wanders into an arcade one evening. She hopes that in doing these things, she’s going to find something that resonates with her. She’s going to place a flower and realize that there’s something she is good at, or stand at the entrance of the temple and smell the incense around her and feel at peace. She’s looking to quiet the incertitude within herself, and hoping that this country might offer that to her, whether that’s by suddenly feeling like she’s on the same wavelength with its more calming, traditional facets or by losing herself amongst the noise and color while watching young people play Dance Dance Revolution.

Her time there is instead defined by loneliness, the persistent lack of connection, exacerbated by her inability to participate in the world she finds herself in. Ikebana is the only one she attempts to participate in, rather than only viewing it from afar. She sees the other women in the class working with such purpose and such understanding of what they’re doing, meanwhile we see her awkwardly place a few flowers with the instructor’s help. At the temple and arcade, she’s entirely passive. (At the temple, this makes sense, but isn’t it weird to go to an arcade and not play any games?) The film’s cool tones and quietude reinforce Charlotte’s inability to connect, showing her distance from what and who she is observing. That she expects to merely observe and find personal enrichment through it is a hallmark of any Western tourist in Asia, aching for spiritual enlightenment through the littlest of efforts.

When not venturing outside the hotel’s walls, Charlotte spends much of her time sitting on her window ledge staring out at the city, alone. She’s not really excited by it, or scared of it, more just wistful, unsure of what to do with it. So many towers, so many windows, so many rooms, all different shades of grey and brown and beige. It’s overwhelming, a terrifying choose-your-own-adventure. In another building, a different hotel, an apartment, she’d be another person. There are so many possibilities, but they’re hidden from her, opaque. They’d require more than just empty observation to crack them open.

Eventually, she does explore one of those possibilities, living out one of the lives contained in those rooms. She and Bob meet up with a mutual friend of her husband’s, Charlie. Charlie is a Tokyo local, and they meet up with him at a great party. The music is cool, the lighting gorgeous, the people young and beautiful and artsy. It’s one of the few times in the film that Japanese characters aren’t presented as inscrutable, but rather enviable, even if there is some Othering happening (repeated mentions of surfing are meant to surprise, I guess). Charlie, Charlotte, and Bob move from the party to a chic bar to an apartment hangout, smoking in the living room and lying on the floor taking Polaroids with some other artsy friends. They end up at karaoke, a big group in a private booth.

But even at the end of this night, Charlotte sits alone outside the karaoke booth, smoking. She rests her head on Bob’s shoulder, the pit inside her still unresolved. She’s had a fun night, approximating here in Tokyo the kind of endless night of parties and bars that a young person can have in New York, rather than confining herself to her hotel and some listless excursions. Yet even as a full participant in her life again, there’s still something missing—a night out is only a blip, she still has herself to contend with in the morning.

So when being the voyeur, and even the participant, hasn’t helped her locate her self, she turns to the other classic mode of the young white person in Asia: the bad student. With Bob, she often turns into this ‘bad kid,’ the class clown, the one whose parents sent them to study abroad for their own enrichment but who could not care less about language learning or cultural understanding or anything besides cheap beer and unsupervised nightlife. Together, they can snicker at weird food, at Japanese accents, at strange TV shows and strip clubs. Having stubbed her toe in her hotel room, Charlotte shows Bob at a sushi counter, taking her bare foot out at a restaurant. They joke about black toe being on the menu at one of these joints, and then rush to the hospital, loudly communicating in English with the staff as though they’re the heroes in some kind of farce. Bob is like Charlotte’s id, encouraging her worst impulses and reassuring her that she doesn’t have to make sense of this place.

That jolt of connection from earlier that Charlotte had been searching for, she finds in Bob, in their immediate recognition of not only their shared alienation as foreigners in Japan but the loneliness in each other. That connection enables her to both indulge in the relief of an ‘oh yeah, fuck this place’ attitude that every foreigner gets in Asia at some point, but to talk about her lost-ness with someone she barely knows, in a place she barely knows. What draws them together is their similar inability to articulate who they are now at this point in their lives. Amidst a separation and here for a commercial shoot, is Bob a husband? Is he an actor? For Charlotte, is she a writer? A photographer? A wife? Anything? They find themselves at these points in a place totally foreign to them, and as time goes on, realize they’re not going to discover meaning through their surroundings but only through each other. “Let’s never come here again, because it would never be as much fun,” Charlotte tells Bob one night, drinking sake and watching La Dolce Vita in his hotel room.

In a way, they’re relieving Japan of the burden to perform for them, but then Tokyo is increasingly used as a backdrop, a playground for them to run through, often literally, as they dash through traffic holding hands or commandeer a wheelchair to rush into the hospital. Not looking to Japan for answers is a step in the right direction, but seeing themselves as the main characters there might not be productive either. In their final scene, they stand and embrace, stopped in the middle of a busy street as pedestrians pass them by. They’re stuck in their own moment, oblivious as the world moves around them. It’s a beautiful shot, as well as one that captures the moment of being abroad in Asia as a Westerner—oftentimes the study of the place forsaken for the relationships with fellow foreigners there, forgetting one’s original purpose.

No matter what of this movie hasn’t aged well, or wasn’t great to begin with, the ending is still exquisite, still suffused with longing the moment it begins to set in, longing at inception. It distills the complex position of the white girl in Asia, that push-pull of discovery and ignorance, of openness and judgment, as well as the blind centering of oneself, into one brief scene. Charlotte never finds what she’s looking for, but she wasn’t meant to there.

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