Word: hayakawas
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...Hayakawa's renown declined in the early '20s, and Hollywood ignored the Japanese for two decades. The war brought them back, more virulent than ever. The ad line for the 1943 film China read: "Alan Ladd and twenty girls - trapped by the rapacious Japs!" In the POW drama The Purple Heart, American airmen are tortured and executed for not ratting their pals. War movies reveled in a grim picture of the superhuman, subhuman foe - propaganda at its most lurid. As Bruce Jackson, who had been a World War II marine, wrote ironically in 1995: "Japs, as we learned from...
...Long before Japan was a wartime enemy of the U.S., American movies displayed the Japanese as an alien people, with a culture as remote and, in the old phrase, inscrutable as Mars. Hayakawa was the movies' first ambassador from this remote empire. In 1915 he played an Eastern dude in Western garb in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat. All slim smiles and secret sneers, he seduces gullible Fannie Ward with a private loan; later he drops his suavity, attacking and then, gosh, branding...
...This role, however defamatory, made Hayakawa a star. Critics cheered his subtle, Zen-influenced acting, more suited to film than the broad theatrical gestures of most stars. Audiences loved his sharp good looks and the animal elegance with which he took charge of a woman. Thereafter he played nobles and villains, whom the leading lady finds instantly attractive but must ultimately renounce (unless she was played by Tsuru Aoki, another Japan-born Hollywood star who was, for 47 years, Hayakawa's wife). In a society as officially white as America in the 1910s, Hayakawa was a pioneer: the first Japanese...
...Vidor's Japanese War Bride and Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo) as well as in Japan (Kurosawa's Scandal). Later she was elected to several terms as a Liberal Democrat to Japan's parliament. Pretty dramatic, eh? No wonder her life story inspired a Tokyo musical. (So did Hayakawa...
...latest movie, Brother, Takeshi comes to Los Angeles to teach the boyz in the hood some killer moves. Now if he could just drive over to Beverly Hills, he might become the new century's answer to Hayakawa - a Japanese guy who can call his own shots, kill anyone who blinks and, hell, if he wants to, get the girl...