I really wish we knew more about Hatsumomo, because i would have loved it if we were told about her past and maybe why she was like that and about what happened to her after that, but not just rumours. This may sound stupid but in the book, during the war, i really missed Hatsumomo and Pumkin, I wanted to read about them and about what they were doing, i know it tells us a little but..still.....

there are a few other characters i missed, like korin and satsu!

im right there with you ichi-han, those four were my absolute favorite characters, espeaciially pumpkin....

I think its hard not to like them, and miss them!

exactly, in my opinion pumpkin was prettier than sayuri.....what do you think?

Hmmm..i dont know! Pumkin deffinatly looked more like a maiko but sayuri was pretty, she was too quiet for my liking though.

sayuri was too...well...Chinese for my taste....pumpkin made a more convincing looking maiko,.....

Wasn't the actress that played Pumpkin actually Japanese? Her features weren't as angular as Gong Li's, Michelle Yeoh's, and ... what's-her-name.. Zhang Ziyi.

On a funny side note, My friend from China actually dislikes those actresses because she stated that for any actress to make it big in China, they had to start off in pornography first. She complained about how all of Marshall's big pics for the movie were whores... especially Zhang Ziyi. I thought that was hilarious.

Thats interesting and yeah the actress that played pumpkin is Japanese, her name is youki kudoh. I wouldn't surprise me that gong li was in pornography, shes a bit skanky looking. but i don't know about Michelle yeoh? she seems more conservative than all the others....and bai ling the actress was in playboy if we want to really call that pornography.

Mmmm, i thought that Mameha didnt look japanese! And i could never imagine Zhang Ziyi doing those type of movies! She really doesnt look the type, she is quiet and plain not out-going and over done! I have to say though that i think Gong Li is absaloutly stunning, i dont think any woman could complain if they looked like her!

Zhang Ziyi has done a variety of movies, with Memoirs of a Geisha being the one of the the tamer ones, not her usual style. Almost all of her big hits have been action movies, in which she said little, fought a lot, and tried to look cute doing it (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House of Hidden Daggers). I've never been impressed with her roles that involved more indepth acting. She's also been involved with several scandals, one of which included Gong Li... which added to the gossip of them working together during Memoirs (I wonder if Marshall did it on purpose to add hype to the movie, which is a pretty cheap trick if he did). Zhang Ziyi also has some less than... respectable photographs on the internet.

As for my friend's claim, I can't read the Chinese websites to back it up, but she said that it was a generally held belief for a fair amount of Chinese people that for the actresses to make it big, they did some sleazy movies first. This might not be true, but if beliefs don't have to be...

I think that was one of the things that contributed to why so many Chinese people had problems with the movie. In China, the idea that geisha are prostitutes is very widespread, so the idea of taking Chinese actresses instead of Japanese actresses to make a movie about prostitutes was insulting to the public (especially when the idea of sex was already so closely tied to their own actresses). Once you also add the still lingering anger towards Japan for the atrocities they committed during the war, especially the comfort women (add that to the idea of a supposed movie about prostitutes), it all became really heated, to the point where China banned showing the movie at all.

...Which is why I really don't get Marshall's arguments for Chinese actresses. He just banned his movie from the biggest population in the world, for actresses that, while extremely beautiful, don't even have the features that are desired in a geisha.

I think that, even though memiors of a geisha won oscars, Zhang Ziyi did a really bad job of it. When she was supposed to show her true emotions she didnt make them seem real enough! When she was with the chairman in the last scene, she didnt act like he was the man she loved since she was about 9/10. And when she is kneeling in front of mameha it says in the dvd that the director didnt tell her mameha was going too storm of like that, so some of the emotion would be true, but if that happened and i didnt know i would be like 'What??' not start getting sad about it, because thats what she did, she got upset because she stormed out!

What are comfort women?

comfort women were prostitutes in china during the Manchuria war era as well as later years.

Aww..now there's smething i didnt know! Thank-you Tachi-san!

Off topic but, I love Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi! I have SO many of their films. I didn't really like them in this kind of film though.