I find this amusing:

Language Problems on 'Geisha' Set

Chicago director Rob Marshall is finding filming on his latest movie Memoirs of a Geisha complicated, because his cast all speak different languages. Sony Studios refused to cast non-Asian actresses in the big screen adaptation of Arthur Golden's best-selling book about the life of a Japanese geisha, and boasts Chinese Ziyi Zhang and Li Gong, Malaysian Michelle Yeoh and Japanese Cary-hiroyuki Tagawa and Ken Watanabe amongst its stars. An insider on the Japanese set tells American gossip site Pagesix.com, "They hired a 'Pan-Asian' cast. So now they have Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian actors and they have had to hire a load of interpreters, especially since there are like 15 Chinese dialects. It is costing a lot of time to do anything." Producer Lucy Fisher and Doug Wick adds, "We have a Chinese and Japanese interpreter. The movie may or may not be a day over schedule, but we are brilliantly on time for an epic and on budget."

(This is from the IMDB.)

You know what would have made their lives easier? Going with a Japanese cast instead of a "Pan-Asian" one...

My thought exactly.

I hear they have some pretty good film directors in Japan, too.

They make it sound so virtuous to have an all Asian cast.

Well I suppose it is a good thing that they chose to cast Michelle Yeoh and not, you know, Kate Bosworth, but yeah. Asian !=Japanese.

Heh, I was reading the pasted paragraph and wondering why Michelle Yeoh would be a language problem, as her English is at least passable, but then I remembered there was the rest of the cast for her to try and communicate with....

I think Michelle's English is more than passable -- she's fluent.

Language problems on the set aside, I'm wondering what's the big difference between a Chinese actress playing a Japanese character and, say, a Spanish actress playing an Italian character?

Or a Welsh actress playing an Hispanic character.

Signed,
Took me a while after Mask of Zorro to realize Catherine Zeta-Jones was not Hispanic, despite the complete lack of appropriate accent.