From the beginning, M*A*S*H tended to use recurring actors to play the various minor characters. Even if your character didn’t get a name, you probably had a relatively steady job as a corpsman or a nurse or what have you, the quiet background characters who did the work that the named characters weren’t doing. This only makes sense; it saves time casting, and after all, in a MASH unit, you’d have the same people there quite a lot of the time, provided we weren’t talking about the wounded. And, as the series went by, more and more of the characters were given names and personalities; I actually own a cookbook ostensibly written by Igor.
But probably the best developed of the non-Houlihan nurses was a short woman, self-described on the show as “part Chinese, part Hawaiian,” with a Japanese last name that might not have ever been mentioned. Her first appearance is on season two, episode one, on the episode “Divided We Stand.” She appeared on 187 episodes, all told, including at least one focused on her own character, something that happened more and more often as the series went by. The character’s name was Kellye Yamato, and the actress is Kellye Nakahara.
She hasn’t done a lot else. Clue, of course, where she’s the cook. (Chinese again; in Hollywood, all East Asian ethnicities are vaguely the same.) A total of fourteen TV shows and seven movies. But so what? We all still remember, right? Except someone I know who’d never even heard of the show until my best friend showed it to her to cure her pop culture deprivation.
She’s probably the second-best developed female character in a series that could be a bit of a sausage fest. What’s more, she gets to take down Hawkeye Pierce in the days when he was already a strong voice of modern liberalism, ’70s style—in the place where his credentials were the weakest, at that. She was able to stand up to him and say, “You think you treat the other women well because you say things they want to hear, but you to that to get into bed with them, and we all know it. And you don’t want to sleep with me, so you ignore me. That’s not okay.” It’s a lesson the character needed to hear, and it was part of the show’s slow distancing of itself from the first few seasons—and the movie, where women were treated even worse.
She is also one of a handful of recurring characters on the series who were an ethnic minority, and that’s quite nice. Both actress and character are from Oahu, with the character being explicitly from Honolulu and neither the IMDb page nor the Wikipedia page for the actress giving information that specific. Then again, the character could be doing what I’ve always done, and giving the city closest to the place I’ve lived that people have heard of! Anyway, she’s the only Asian-American recurring character on the series, one of the only two nurses who isn’t white. (The other is a black woman named Ginger, played by Odessa Cleveland. There’s also a character played by Pat Morita who appeared twice, but Captain Sam Pak was Korean on the show.) She’s a small reminder that there are more than just white people in the US military.
I like Nurse Kellye a lot, and I wish there was more to Kellye Nakahara’s career than one TV role and one movie role where she basically doesn’t talk. She seems to have the life she wants—she’s even into local cultural stuff in Pasadena, California, where I went to high school—but I can still wish for the chance to see her do more.
