him. After being slapped into declaring her love, she apologizes for anti-Japanese statements, and in a true Pan-Asian union, the two are married and lived happily ever after. The film was and still is very controversial in China, with most Chinese feeling especially humiliated by the face slapping scene with its suggestion that all one has to do is slap around a Chinese woman to make her love one. The Japanese historian Hotta Eri argued the cultural nuances of Shina no yoru were lost on Chinese audiences. In Japan, as part of a ploy to infantize the population, the Emperor was always portrayed as a hermaphrodite figure, being both the mother and the father of nation at the same time, with his/her loving subjects as perpetual children unable to think very much for themselves, thus requiring the Emperor as the parent of the nation to do all the necessary thinking for his/her loving subjects. At the same time, the Emperor as a god had such awesome responsibilities to deal with that he had to delegate some of his power down to mere humans so he could focus on more important matters. In both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, officers routinely slapped the faces of the men under their command when giving orders, which was portrayed not as an exercise in petty humiliation, but as an act of love, with His Imperial Majesty's officers acting as the surrogates for the Emperor, who had to discipline his "children" by having their faces slapped all the time. Hotta wrote that the scene where the Japanese hero slaps the face of the Chinese woman until she declares her love for him was seen in Japan as a romantic gesture, as a sign he cared for her, just in the same way that officers of the Imperial Army and Navy showed the Emperor's "love" for his subjects serving in his Army and Navy by slapping their faces all the time. Yamaguchi herself in a 1987 interview stated she did not feel the controversial face-slapping scene was an exercise in humiliation for her character, calling it a very romantic and moving scene. However, Hotta observed that Amakasu did project a Pan-Asian message in the film, with its Chinese heroine marrying the Japanese hero, and moreover, it is clear that the Japanese hero is the dominant partner in their relationship, which was meant as a metaphor