At the age of eighteen, Sessue Hayakawa was the young son of a noble Japanese family. His ancestors were samurai. Like many youths his age, Hayakawa dreamed of one day having a glorious army career, fighting for the Imperial Navy and kicking some foreign butt in the name of the Emperor. However, a day before he would enroll, he was dared by his friends to dive to the bottom of a deep lagoon. An excellent swimmer, he managed, but when he came up, he had a terrible headache. A doctor told him he had ruptured his eardrums. As a result, he failed his Navy physical…
Having disappointed his samurai father, young Sessue went home to his parents and locked himself in his room. Alerted by the frantic barking of the loyal family dog, his father knocked on his son’s door. Silence. Without a moments doubt, he kicked in the locked and barricaded door. Inside he found a gruesome sight… Sessue was stabbing himself, attempting to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. By the time his father managed to wrestle the dagger from his hands, he had stabbed himself a staggering thirty times… Carrying him in his arms, as fast as he could, he rushed the young man to the nearest hospital where, miraculously, his son survived.
It took some time for him to recover from his gruesome injuries. When finally he did, he was sent by his family to America under the guise of studies. In reality, it was to distract him and give him a sense of purpose again. Now that he could no longer find the glory he was after in the Navy, maybe he could find glory elsewhere?
Once he made his way to America, Hayakawa soon became mesmerized by moving pictures. He knew he could never live the heroic life he wished to live anymore, but a new dream was born… to portray such heroics for an enormous, foreign audience and be ‘The Man’ again. Always in need of genuine exotic faces, he soon got his chance and immediately became an overnight sensation.
The public found him broodingly handsome, devilishly attractive. He emitted a sense of danger that the female audience in particular could not get enough of. However, Hayakawa was still an Asian male. And as a non-white man, his on-screen and off-screen success was seen as a threat by many white men. Especially when he played, at times, a romantic lead rather than a villain. He carried himself with the air of an actual aristocrat, as he was an actual aristocrat. And it made him into the Asian equivalent of Rudolph Valentino. No one could stare at a girl more menacingly, more sexily. Or simply light a cigarette with the same class and nonchalance.
His success carried on off-screen as well… Sessue got a lot of attention from female admirers. And he slept with a lot of beautiful Hollywood starlets, showgirls and actresses, extras… producers wives… you name it, he got it! At some point his Japanese wife and him even adopted some kids he fathered by Irish showgirls — he was particularly fond of Irish showgirls. He made no secret of the fact that two of his three children he fathered by white women, causing quite a scandal in his day and age of rampant racism and xenophobia.
Refusing to be a ‘model minority’, the young Samurai soon became a regular Hollywood ‘bad boy’. A very hard-working one, at that, but a bad boy nonetheless. Rumors of his legendary sexual prowess began to spread all throughout Tinseltown. Before Brando and James Dean were even born, there was Hayakawa, showing them the ropes. Big katana energy through the absolute roof.
Insecure Westerners came up with a variety of demeaning stereotypes about Asian men, stereotypes that had not existed until that day. When Sessue came to town, an ‘oriental’ man was seen as an exotic, dangerous lover. He came, saw and conquered and stole their women. So they must diminish him. Demean him, and his entire race. Reduce him to villainous, sexless parts. Him and all Asian men after him. For a time, men were as scared of ‘the Yellow Man’ as they were of the Black Male. All those jokes about Asian masculinity, the supposed size of their manhood? Wasn’t a thing before Sessue Hayakawa came to the scene — his influence and appeal was that powerful.
His career, nonetheless, carried on steadily from the 1910s until the 1960s, well into the color era. One of his last and most memorable roles was that of the brutal and strict camp commander in Bridge Over The River Kwai in 1957. In his heyday, between the 1910s and 1920s, Sessua Hayakawa made, on average, 2 million dollars a year. Corrected by inflation, this would be about thirty million today. A staggering amount by early Hollywood standards. Hayakawa was, by far, the highest earning star in his day and age, outearning for a while even the likes of Charlie Chaplin.
Sessue Hayakawa was often challenged for fights by jealous husbands, boyfriends or just your everyday American male threatened by his romantic and commercial success. He would always roll up his sleeves and fight them, right there and then. Trained in the martial arts of the East, the Samurai’s son would without fail whip some sense into them. Once, in the Mojave Desert when filming a Western, Hayakawa even challenged dozens of stunt doubles to a fight, defeating each and every one of them — and this was AFTER a night of rather heavy drinking! Wherever he went, he carried the torch for millions of Asian men. He defended them. He represented them. And he did so bravely, with unmatched bravado in a time where what he did was labeled miscegenation and literally against the law.
Nowadays, Asian males in Hollywood movies seem typecast as nerdy characters. Bespectacled. Sexless. They rarely ‘get the girl’, even the ones good at fighting like Jackie Chan are rarely given a romantic interest, and if they are given one, she is always Asian and not a white or black girl. Sessue Hayakawa didn’t play that way… he proved that, as an Asian man, you could be tough, unapologetically macho and you could get the girl, beat the bully and make something of yourself without ever falling into just another stereotype.
He paved the way for all the Asian actors to come. Without him, I doubt there would have been a Bruce Lee. Or even a Jackie Chan. Perhaps they would have made it big in Hong Kong, but it’s Hayakawa who first showed that a man can make it in Hollywood, even if he happens to be ‘an oriental’. In fact he was seen as so sexy, so manly, that the beauty standards for men changed because of him… those ‘hunter eyes’ you see on male actors like Clint Eastwood? They weren’t a thing before. Before, actors had big, bright eyes. Make-up would highlight the size and wideness of a man’s eyes. Along comes this actual, real-life samurai, stealing the hearts and virtue of countless American women and all of a sudden, squinted-eyes cowboys and tough guys á la Eastwood, Bronson and Pallance are all the hype.
Sessue Hayakawa should have died at 18, having stabbed himself thirty times. Instead, some higher force miraculously kept him alive for almost seventy more years. He died in 1973 at the age of 87, one of Hollywood’s toughest actors ever to grace the silver screen with his magnetic presence. He changed Hollywood forever, and in the end… was shamefully forgotten.
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