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It followed a series of odd jobs in California: dishwasher, waiter, ice cream vendor, and factory worker. By 1914, Hayakawa writes, he earned $1,000 a week making movies, an amount he deemed sufficient to allow him to marry Tsuru Aoki, an American-raised Japanese stage and screen actress.Īccording to Daisuke Miyao, professor of Japanese language and literature at UC San Diego and author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke Unversity Press, 2007), Hayakawa’s turn to acting was in reality less dramatic. The play caught the eye of producer Thomas Ince, who turned it into a silent film. Dropping the name Kintaro for Sessue, he staged an English-language play with an all-Japanese cast. But, he wrote, after seeing a play at a Japanese theater in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo district, he canceled his ticket and joined the company, despite having no acting experience. Hayakawa claims to have left Chicago for California in 1913, intending to return to Japan. His myth making offers a lens on American and Hollywood culture during his lifetime. Hayakawa seems to have inflated and elaborated the University connections he wove into his life story, and his version of that story has stuck-leading the actor’s narrative to become embedded in the University’s as well. But Hayakawa appears on no team rosters-or anywhere else-in the Cap and Gown yearbooks of the day.

After using illegal jujitsu manuevers too many times, he writes, he was kicked off the team. He details his life on campus, including two seasons as a 132-pound tackle for the football team under coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. In his 1960 memoir, Zen Showed Me the Way … to Peace, Happiness, and Tranquillity, Hayakawa tells a very different story. The registrar’s office has no record of his enrollment in any courses held in Hyde Park. The following November he enrolled in two Principles of Political Economy correspondence courses offered by the University’s Home Study Program. Even harder to untangle is the star’s status as a UChicago alumnus.īorn Hayakawa Kintaro in 1886, the son of a wealthy fisherman in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, he came to the United States in 1907 to join his brother, who was fishing for abalone in California. Harder to know is the man behind the legend. Hayakawa’s place in motion picture history is well documented. Perhaps best remembered today for his Oscar-nominated 1957 performance as Colonel Saito, the Japanese commandant of the prison camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Hayakawa was the only Asian actor to play romantic leads in American silent pictures-although because of anti-miscegenation laws he always had to relinquish the girl in the final reel. A giant of the silent screen whose career stretched into the sound era, Sessue Hayakawa starred in more than 100 movies.

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