His landlord during the 1976 Broadway season was Jerry Orbach. The men were up against one another for the Tony for Leading Actor in a Musical. Mako was up for Pacific Overtures, and Orbach was up for Billy Flynn in Chicago. They both lost to George Rose, who played Professor Henry Higgins. Mako said he was awakened at 4:30 the morning after the ceremony by Orbach, who was yelling, “Hey, Mako! What the [expletive] happened? We lost to a [obscene gerund] revival!” The really disheartening part is that he won basically no awards. His entire IMDb awards and nominations page consists of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for The Sand Pebbles, which I haven’t seen, a lifetime achievement award from the Big Bear Lake International Film Festival, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1939, when he was six, his parents left for the United States to study art, leaving him with his grandmother in Kobe, Japan. They had been critics of the militarism of their homeland, and they’d had run-ins with the secret police. During the war, they took the pseudonyms Taro and Mitsu Yashima to protect their families, as they helped the US in the Office of Strategic Services, including by producing propaganda leaflets to be distributed to Japanese troops. They were not reunited with their son until 1949. (His parents would go on to be successful producers of children’s books, and his father appears to have been one of the early experimenters in the graphic novel format.) They’d been given permanent resident status by an Act of Congress; Japanese citizens still could not be naturalized.

So those are the two things about Mako that astounded me so much I had to be sure to share them. Obviously, we could also talk at length about his career. Although he initially studied architecture, the acting bug bit him during his military service in the ’50s, and he is one of many talented people to have gone through the Pasadena Playhouse in its years as a drama school. His career lasted nearly fifty years, about as long as he was a US citizen.

Though he was also frustrated at the roles available to him. He said that, when people told him they remembered him from McHale’s Navy, he found it frustrating—after all, it was set during the war and involved playing various Japanese soldiers and sailors trying to kill Our Heroes. (I guess. I don’t actually like that show, and I know there wasn’t a lot of combat, but come on.) He formed the group East West in order to combat the stereotypes; it fostered not only Asian-American actors but Asian-American playwrights, encouraging them to find their voices by giving them a stage on which to present them.

I’m not sure how he would’ve felt by the fact that my first memories of him involve M*A*S*H. I assume it’s more personality than he would’ve gotten as “The Third Japanese Soldier.” At least his characters had some dignity and often a sense of humour. Speaking of which, of course, he was so beautifully cast on Avatar: The Last Airbender as Uncle Iroh, who was probably my favourite character anyway. Not to mention his brief appearance on Columbo, which has made a few of us wish for a whole episode that was just Kanji Ousu hanging out with Columbo, maybe solving a murder. But I guess we can’t have nice things.

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