Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (田川 洋行, Tagawa Hiroyuki, born September 27, 1950) is an American actor, sports physiologist, martial artist, and stuntman of Japanese descent.
The power of Hollywood, as we know, is that it can create these images in people's minds, and they live with those images for their whole life.
Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand.
Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set.
Native Americans say, "It's a good day to die," and samurai live their life to die honorably, so that kind of energy creates a certain mindset of reactiveness with control to a point. And after that, it's gone.
I was clear: "I don't want to play businessmen with bifocal glasses and cameras, so if you're going to give me an Asian bad guy to play, then I'm going to give you the baddest Asian bad guy you've ever seen, and you're not going to forget that I was in the film. "
Half my family was from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other half was U. S. Army, and I was raised on Army posts during my childhood, so I pretty much began my life with a split-brain sort of thing.
American comedies about Asians have never been funny to me. That always kind of pissed me off.