I think it's called acting...it's not about ethnicity or nationality or what continent you're from. Nicole Kidman plays American or British characters all the time, but she is neither. For shame! What are they thinking? It's insane.

Being an actor means disappearing into your character, yes. In Hollywood it doesn't matter if you're white, Black, Asian, Latino, whatever, so long as you're a good actor. With the right makeup artist you can be any race you want. I just question movies that have a cast full of ethnic minorities (or people of color, for all you PC activists), and yet have direction/creative/production teams that are (presumably mostly) white. Memoirs of a Geisha is one immediate example. The Color Purple is another. I feel like movies like these are usually marketed toward the socio-economic majority (i.e. white) as a sort of tourist guide into a foreign land or culture. Aspects of certain cultures that aren't deemed financially attractive are cut-out in favor of box-office revenue, usually giving casual viewers a one-dimensional glossy representation of that culture. For Nicole Kidman, because she's white, she's never going to be defined by her ethnicity.

Blah... Okay, enough mindless rambling.

I shouldn't be so quick to judge Memoirs of a Geisha however; I haven't even seen the movie yet, and I really want to!

To the producers' credit, they tried pretty hard to find a suitable Japanese actress to portray Sayuri, auditioning many that tried holding the same amount of screen presence and grace as the character in the book, but none of them could compare to Zhang Ziyi who, as a trained ballet dancer, was considered near-perfect for the role of a geisha.

Yes, I totally agree that all asians look the same. I can't even tell which one is which. And I'm both Chinese and Japanese!