Early life and career Edit

Stardom Edit

Later career Edit

Racial barriers Edit

Hayakawa was in a unique position due to his ethnicity and fame in the English-speaking world. Due to naturalization laws of that time, Hayakawa would be unable to become a U.S. citizen[33] and because of anti-miscegenation laws he could not marry someone of another race.[34] In 1930, the Production Code came into effect which forbade portrayals of miscegenation in film. This meant that unless Hayakawa's co-star was an Asian actress, he would not be able to portray a romance with her.[30] Throughout Hayakawa's career, many segments of American society were filled with feelings of the Yellow Peril due to circumstances surrounding World War I and World War II.[35] This left Hayakawa constantly typecast as a villain or forbidden lover and unable to play heroic parts that would typically be given to white actors such as Douglas Fairbanks.[21] Hayakawa's popularity and sex appeal ("his most rabid fan base was white women")[7] upset many American men and exacerbated the Yellow Peril sentiments.[11][35][36] Communication scholar Anthony B. Chan described the American cultural attitudes of the time toward Asian countries such as China: Miscegenation, or the mixing of the races, with its horror of potential sexual relations between "yellow" Asian men and "white" European American women, threatened the masculinity of European American men so much so that the basis of Chinese–European American conflict became a contest of securing scarce resources, which in this specific case were European American women. The threat of the "Yellow Peril" in the eyes of European American men perpetuated the status of European American women as chattel, as product.[11] Hayakawa is historically seen as a precursor to Rudolph Valentino: both were foreign-born, typecast as exotic or forbidden lovers, and wildly popular during their time.[6] With the rising anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, the types of roles that Hayakawa usually played were gradually given to more Western-looking actors such as Valentino "who were not as threatening as Hayakawa in terms of race and sex".[8] In more than 20 films for Famous Players, Hayakawa was typecast as either the dangerous villain or the exotic lover who in the end would turn his female love interest over to the "proper" man of her own race.[37][38][39] This typecasting was the reason Hayakawa established his own production company in 1918, near the height of his American fame. At the time, he stated he wanted to be shown "as he really is and not as fiction paints him." As for his prior roles, he said, "They are false and give people a wrong idea of us [Asians]." Hayakawa desperately sought to show a more balanced and fair portrait of Asians. In 1949, he lamented, "My one ambition is to play a hero." In his autobiography he observed, "All my life has been a journey. But my journey differs from the journeys of most men."[24] Hayakawa's early films were not popular in Japan because many felt that his roles portrayed an image of Japanese men being sadistic and cruel. Many Japanese viewers found this portrayal—which made him popular in the U.S.—insulting. Nationalistic groups in particular were censorious.[40] Some Japanese believed that Hayakawa was contributing to increased anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S., and regarded him as a traitor to the Japanese people. After Hayakawa established himself as an American superstar, the negative tone in the press that regarded him as a national and racial shame almost completely disappeared, and Japanese media started publicizing Hayakawa's cinematic achievements instead.[41]

Personal life Edit

The Dragon Painter (1919) Hayakawa and his wife, Tsuru Aoki , in the film(1919) On May 1, 1914, Hayakawa married fellow Issei and performer Tsuru Aoki, who co-starred in several of his films. Hayakawa's first child, a son, was born in New York in 1929, to a white actress named Ruth Noble.[42] The boy was known as Alexander Hayes, but the name was changed to Yukio after Sessue and Aoki adopted the child and took him to be raised and educated in Japan. Later, Hayakawa had two daughters with Aoki: Yoshiko, an actress, and Fujiko, a dancer. Aoki died in 1961. Hayakawa later returned to Japan and dedicated himself to Zen Buddhism, becoming an ordained priest.[43] Physically, Hayakawa possessed "an athlete's physique and agility".[2] A 1917 profile on Hayakawa stated that he "is proficient in jiu-jitsu, an expert fencer, and can swim like a fish. He is a good horseman and plays a fast tennis racket. He is tall for a Japanese, being five feet seven and a half inches in height, and weighs 157 pounds."[44] Hayakawa was known for his discipline and martial arts skills. While filming The Jaguar's Claws, in the Mojave Desert, Hayakawa played a Mexican bandit, with 500 cowboys as extras. On the first night of filming, the extras drank all night and well into the next day. No work was being done, so Hayakawa challenged the group to a fight. Two men stepped forward. Hayakawa said of the incident, "The first one struck out at me. I seized his arm and sent him flying on his face along the rough ground. The second attempted to grapple and I was forced to flip him over my head and let him fall on his neck. The fall knocked him unconscious." Hayakawa then disarmed yet another cowboy. The extras returned to work, amused by the way the small man manhandled the big bruising cowboys.[6]

Death and legacy Edit

Filmography Edit

See also Edit