INTERVIEW : Beyond the Stereotype : Comedian Tamayo Otsuki can dish out the superficial ethnic jokes, but her thoughts about her hard road to American prime time run deep

On the surface, there doesn’t seem much to recommend Tamayo Otsuki as anything special beyond her own publicity bio’s introduction of her as “America’s only Japanese comedienne.”

Part of that generic non-distinction is owed to Otsuki herself. On her talk show appearances, she’s told Pat Sajak and Joan Rivers and Rick Dees and Byron Allen the same three or four jokes, which tend to sound like everyone else’s jokes with a Japanese twist. (“I left Japan to get away from Japanese businessmen. But they’re all here now.”) She plays cute and bashful in the manner of a geisha’s fluttery, beguiling deference. Even her supporting role on ABC’s “Davis Rules,” though smoothly competent and on the designated mark, plays to type instead of character.

But it only takes a few minutes in Otsuki’s company to realize how calculating she’s been in deciding how much of herself to give to the American celebrity machine. At 31, she has tooled an image to fit a requirement, and it has little to do with her actual experience, which is more the stuff of high drama than frivolous comedy.

What little she’s done has taken her far. Farther than expected. “I miss friends from junior high school I’ve known all my life,” she says. “I feel isolation. Before, it was, ‘Hi, Tamayo, how are you? We worry about you so far away in America.’ ” (Later she would explain that the Japanese popular conception of America has a prowling pistolero on every street and a rapist behind every bush.) “Now it’s, ‘I have to go, the baby’s crying. We’re not living a dream like you. We have a life to keep up.’ They’re right. I have a dream-reality life. They have a reality-reality life. But I feel more lonely.”

A visible pall of Angst drew over her face. Otsuki expresses nothing in half-measure. The first impression she conveys on meeting is a sharply boisterous demeanor, and an extraordinary physical strength. The first is common to self-made figures--or people in the process of creating themselves--as a way of dominating a proceeding. The second comes from a lifetime of training in the martial art of kendo.

Her interview was conducted in her publicist’s office. She wore black leather-and-suede, calf-high boots and a smart-looking, chocolate-colored skirt-and-blouse ensemble, topped off with a short suede jacket. Her black hair was loosely swept up and tied in a black and yellow scarf, bumblebee colors. When she spoke, her emotions visibly filled her out, like a dancer. She used her long, graceful arms and tapering hands in non-stop expression. She has a hard, sharp laugh, which sometimes cracks against the walls from the force of her exuberance and other times sounds hollow, like a sonic barrier put up to buy time for her thoughts.

Otsuki has been a regular on the stand-up scene for the past few years, shuffling her material out of a deck of popular American and Japanese stereotypes with jokes such as, “I didn’t feel good all day; I got up on the wrong side of the floor,” and “The Japanese Playboy magazine doesn’t have a nude centerfold; instead it has a picture of a Toyota pick-up.” She’s worked her way up to opening for headliners such as Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight and the Pips, and before her role as Miss Yamagami, the vice principal on “Davis Rules,” she secured a career toehold in the TV pilot “Elysian Fields” and the 1987 feature film, “Mortuary Rules.”

Otsuki may be ready for a step up in visibility. “My experience with her is that she’s delightful, funny and bright,” said Ellen Falcon, who directs “Davis Rules.” “She hasn’t been asked to play subtext yet, but I think she’s capable. It’s a matter of bringing her along.”

The step has been a long time coming, and even if her manner weren’t so forceful, the circumstances of her life alone would have to reveal a driven character. Imagine a young Japanese woman, alone and uninvited, with no prospects and $100 in her purse, coming to fearsome America on a chance in 1981.

“I met a Mexican kid on the plane,” she recalled. “His mother took me in. They lived in Pico Rivera. Then I took apartment in Japantown for $60 a month and enrolled at the Eubank Conservatory of Music and Dance at 54th and Crenshaw. That lasted four months. I looked in Yellow Pages for agent. I called Pussycat Theater for job because they had the largest ad--I didn’t know what Pussycat Theater was. I tried to get an agency. Agent would say, ‘You got SAG card, resume and 8 x 10?’ ‘What is 8 x 10?’ I say. There’s no way for them to explain me.”

Otsuki’s English, first picked up during an 18-month stay in Cambridge, England, has only been moderately refined during her years in the United States. Articles and prepositions tend to drop out of her speech, which is peppered with her own odd locutions. But she’s an educated woman--she was an economics and history major at Kansei Gakuin University--and she’s given a great deal of thought to the problem of Japanese identity as a reflection of her own.

“I grew up in Osaka,” she said. “It’s the Brooklyn of Japan--Oh, where’s the worse place, where the Yakuza would be? Detroit? It was like that. My father owned a thermostat factory. In the postwar time, there was confusion of attitudes. Before World War I, Japan was completely isolated. No communication, nothing, for nearly 100 years. The society had four levels: the samurai, the farmers, the factory workers, the merchants. Below that, people were literally thought of as human animals. Everybody was stunned after Commodore Perry came. Then, after World War II, when MacArthur came, we completely lost our identity. We had never lost a war. Now we had a new American-brought Constitution. Democracy. No more obvious discrimination between people. Women no longer had to walk behind men, or ride different trains.

“But still, Japanese struggle with these two identities, the traditional and the modern. Japan still has the houses of the shoguns, and the temples, from the 1600s, and people still visit them. My parents’ house is 100 years old, typical. In Los Angeles, a house from 30 years is considered old. You saw it in the war in Iraq. Some in Japanese government say, ‘It’s America’s war.’ Others say, ‘It’s time for a change. America helped us.’ The society is still very strict. Only in the last five or six years have people asked, ‘Why do we have to work so hard? We don’t know life.’ Everybody has a role. I didn’t know anything about life until I came here.”

The inner lives of Otsuki and her parents are still informed with the cataclysm of war. “I do have a joke about American parent saying to kid, ‘When I was your age I walked miles to school in the snow, uphill.’ ‘Big deal,’ I say. ‘My parents say, ‘When I was your age we had two nuclear bombs dropped on us.’ My father and his people were so scared from the bombs and the planes overhead that they didn’t have time to cry, to mourn for their dead. My mother was born in Hiroshima. I hung out there, went to the museum a lot. You know, when the bombs hit, people had their skin literally melt off their bodies and they’d still be alive. How amazingly horrible it was.”

Otsuki had taken off her jacket. If you want fluff, she’ll give you her coy routine. Now, however, she needed more room to express herself. “I make a stupid joke. ‘The homeless couldn’t ask for a quarter, because everybody was homeless.’ After I hear things like that I can’t complain about anything, anything . Afterwards, everyone was impressed by American things. If I had a Budweiser at home, it was a big deal. Just because we think we have it over America, technology-wise, America has something we could never have. You take care of 150,000 Iraq hostages? Only America would do that.”

Otsuki had been a precocious student throughout her school career. Asked why she took up kendo, she replied: “I didn’t want my father to intimidate me. He hit me. He was loud, strong. He screamed at me. He had such rage. He feel the war destroyed his life. All plans and dreams put aside. He lost his passion.” When asked if that was the reason for her radical decision, she said: “Radical reason! Yes!” And laughed for a full 15 seconds. “I do everything for my father. I run away to make him happy. Not be screamed at. Just be loved, be closer. Oh definitely. Eighty percent of my father’s life is me. That’s a big thing in Japan, parent’s expectations about kids. Especially for No. 1 son. In old four-level society, if no son, the family can’t carry on.”

Otsuki had enjoyed watching stand-up in Osaka, though she didn’t at first think of it as a professional venue for herself (“There’s a difference in Japanese stand-up. It’s usually a team, like your Abbot & Costello. You put partner down, not strangers. We don’t point our knife to outside.”) She did enjoy singing, however, and once she made it clear that she had no intention of taking over her father’s business, she went to work in a karaoke bar, setting music on a turntable for customers, and singing herself. Her battle with her father was protracted. “I wanted my own life. Japan moves just like a river. Everyone is water in river. No one jumps out. The younger people are trying to make a new Japan. Like them, I said: ‘I’m gonna do what I’m good at.’ ”

Her stay in England was a compromise with her father, who was terrified of the specter of American violence swallowing up his daughter. She returned home for a brief period as a tour guide before beginning her struggle in America, where she eventually found work as a stripper in the City of Commerce.

“I got very curious,” she said, unself-consciously. “I thought, ‘My father’s not here. I can do anything.’ I was stripper for three years. I liked it, making money for being a woman. It was nice lingerie, good exercise. $12 an hour. People say nice things. At first I was scared, but the very first night I walked past the bar and a guy gave me his whole wallet. ‘What’s this bribe for?’ I wonder. But it’s not bribe to do something. It’s tip. What is this ‘tip?’ This is pretty good money. But--” Otsuki’s face grew pensive--”It’s very sad for anyone to have to feel liked in that situation. Something is missing in growing up. It’s a need. Sadly, I enjoyed the low-class compliments. I still go there now, as visitor. It’s businessmen in suits.”

Then, “I became mistress. Ha! Ha! He was lawyer. I became crazy about him. He had a wife in Anaheim. I was convenience. I hated him. Couldn’t trust him. He had other women. I was really miserable, for three years. Disgusted with myself.”

However, Otsuki credits him during that period with teaching her more about dress and makeup and how to present herself. He also took her to the Comedy Store, and after she jumped offstage at the strip joint one night in a fit of pique, it was to comedy she turned, first by taking a joke-writing class, then by showing up at potluck nights to work on the technique of making people laugh.

Technique and attitude were enough to get her by, and she admits it. “There’s pressure to make people laugh quickly,” she said. “TV wants you to laugh every 20 seconds. To start, you have to do five-minute spots. You can’t help but take shortcuts through uniqueness, artistic-ness. The original people don’t get discovered. When I start out I say, ‘Oh, you want five minutes of jokes? I’ll do that.’ ”

Her once great-and-good friend Sam Kinison, with whom she spent two years, is an example. “I see him struggle, trying to get on Letterman with five minutes. But that’s not him. He needs time to get across. I’d like to do longer work. I’m going to Hawaii to perform. I told the club owner, ‘I have a story. I need 45 minutes, to show more reality, more compassion.’ I want to be a better person, not run way from the bad side of myself, the fault side.”

(As a sidelight, when asked about her personal involvement with Kinison, she said: “I love Sam. He has a lot of sweet qualities, but a lot of dark sides he doesn’t want anyone to see. He tested me, brought women in front of my face. If it happened now, I’d just slap him. I was weaker then.”)

According to Otsuki, she won her role on “Davis Rules” on the strength of a face-to-face meeting with executive producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner. “It was difficult at first. It’s responsibility. If they give me a line I know I wouldn’t say, I just ask dialogue coach, ‘Was that OK?’ The director gave me a lot of space. I feel like in her eyes she didn’t know if I could act or not. But I see it’s not just me, it’s the harmony with the others. I worried about lines, cues. Then I realize there’s no such thing as you have to say a line a certain way. I always felt there was some style I was missing. It’s like you’re a guitar, feeling out of tune. Then you become in tune.” How long did that take? “We shot 13 episodes. I begin feeling OK in the 12th.”

Otsuki still doesn’t have an agent, and has no specific plans beyond the ABC series other than making the auditioner’s rounds. She still has a lot to think about. “I feel strong if I can laugh at myself,” she said. “It’s easier for me to forgive other people than myself. I’m working on forgiving my father. Maybe I took him wrong. I want to develop a more positive perspective.

“I’m glad I left Japan. I could never have understood it if I’d stayed. So many people of my generation are desperate, feeling like you’re running and going nowhere if you’re not president of company by 35. Most people can never get there. I get desperate sometimes. You realize you fall off the track sometimes. You have to enjoy what’s happening and get back on.”