Mako, 72, Opened Doors to West for Asian Actors

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The New York Sun

Mako, among the earliest Japanese actors on both the New York stage and Hollywood screen, died Friday at his home in Somis, Calif. He was 72.

In the 1966 film “The Sand Pebbles,” he played the Chinese character Pohan who spoke pidgin English, called the white sailors in the movie “master,” and treated them as such. The portrayal earned Mako an Oscar nomination, which he used to continue his push for better roles for Asian American actors.

In his first performance on Broadway, in 1976,Mako won a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical, for multiple roles in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Pacific Overtures.” Set in 1853, the play explores U.S.Commodore Matthew Perry’s push to open Japan to foreign trade and visitors for the first time in 250 years.

In an acting career that spanned more than four decades, Mako was a familiar face in film and television. He appeared in series including “McHale’s Navy,” “I Spy,””M*A*S*H,””Quincy,”and “Walker, Texas Ranger.” In films, he was a Japanese admiral in “Pearl Harbor,”and a Singaporean in “Seven Years in Tibet.” He was Akiro the wizard in “Conan the Barbarian” and “Conan the Destroyer” movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But Mako had a larger view of the possibilities for Asian-American actors.

As artistic director of the East West Players, a Los Angeles-based theater company he founded in 1965, Mako trained generations of actors and playwrights. He brought to the stage classics including Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” and lesser known contemporary works. He devoted the entire 1981 season to works discussing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The series coincided with the opening of a national discussion on internment reparations. It was a risky endeavor, but Mako said it was crucial.

Mako was born Makoto Iwamatsu in Kobe, Japan, on Dec. 10, 1933. When Mako was 5, his parents left Japan to study art in New York. Mako stayed behind to be raised by his grandparents.

Because his parents lived on the East Coast, they were not interned during World War II. They ended up working for the U.S. Office of War Information and were later granted residency. Mako joined them when he was 15.

A young Mako had a plan to become an architect and enrolled at the Pratt Institute. But that plan changed when a friend asked him to design a set and do lighting for an off-Broadway children’s play. Mako was hooked: “That’s when the trouble began,” he said. “I was out of class so much that I lost my draft deferment.”

During his two years in the military, he traveled to Korea and Japan and reimmersed himself in Japanese culture. After his discharge, he moved to California and studied theater at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Mako used the prominence the Oscar nomination for “The Sand Pebbles” gave him to address the dearth of parts for Asian Americans in general.

“Of course, we’ve been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West,” Mako said in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “That’s the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes — waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain.”


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