PROFILE : When Worlds Collide : Playing dual roles in the new Broadway play ‘Shimada,’ Mako embodies the cultural conflicts that are widening the gap between East and West

Recently, Mako sat in his dressing room at the Broadhurst Theatre, the actor’s mild-mannered demeanor in sharp contrast with the insights he was offering into one of the most incendiary topics of the day.

“I think American businessmen have learned their lesson,” he said. “In the past, maybe they’ve been fooled by the stoic surface of their adversary. But now they know they’re no more polite than the French or British. They’re as bloodthirsty and ruthless as anybody else.”

The adversaries, in this case, are Japanese businessmen, one of whom Mako portrays in “Shimada,” the drama by Australian playwright Jill Shearer that opens Thursday on Broadway. This production, co-starring Ellen Burstyn, Ben Gazzara and Estelle Parsons, comes five years after the play originally premiered in Melbourne. But its larger themes of the economic warfare between Japan and the West are as relevant as today’s headlines of “Japan bashing” or the neon signs of Japanese multinational corporations that dominate Times Square, just a few paces from the theater where “Shimada” is in previews.

In the play, just such a Japanese multinational, in the person of Toshio Uchiyama, makes a bid on a bicycle factory in a small Australian town with which it hopes to manufacture and distribute motor bikes. The factory is on the brink of insolvency and the owner’s widow (Burstyn) is determined to do business with the Japanese. But Uchiyama encounters fierce resistance. Not so hot on the idea are Denny, the acid-tongued shop steward (Parsons), and Eric (Gazzara), the vice president who helped found the company with his best buddy at the end of World War II after they were liberated from a Japanese POW camp.

“See ‘im struttin’ through the factory with his bum stuck out as if he owned the place already,” says Denny contemptuously as she spies the gray-haired executive touring the place with calm deliberation. Eric’s take on him is far more explosive. He is convinced that Uchiyama is in fact Shimada, the cruel commandant of the POW camp, who loses face in a bitter confrontation with one of the prisoners and is prevented from retaliating by the news that atomic bombs have been dropped on Japan and that surrender is imminent. He vows revenge “even if it takes 100 years.”

Playing the dual roles of Uchiyama and Shimada as the drama segues between 1945 and the present day, Mako is the point man for the Japanese perspective in the thicket of thorny issues that Shearer’s play raises, not the least of which are the stereotypes and misperceptions that burden both the East and West in their business dealings. That dialogue of late has become mired in the simplistic--and at times inflammatory--language of posturing politicians and corporate heads, leading in isolated cases to physical violence against Japanese by frustrated and threatened American laborers.

“That’s why I wanted to do this play,” said Mako, in jeans and work shirt, sipping coffee as he propped his feet on a dressing-room chair. “This subject matter is so (relevant) that I hoped people would have to confront their own feelings in the theater, rather than sitting in the comfort of their living room, hearing on television that Lee Iaccoca said this and some stupid Japanese government official said that. Now is the time for people to talk about it. It seems a little bit late, actually.”

Naturalized an American citizen in 1956, the 58-year-old actor, who attained prominence in the film “The Sand Pebbles” and the Broadway musical “Pacific Overtures,” was born in Kobe, Japan, and came to this country at the age of 15. He said that while he had occasionally experienced overt racism directed against Asians (“You go into a bar and someone wants to hassle you”), he had never found it alarming until recently. He naturally felt threatened when in February a Japanese businessman was slain in Camarillo Springs, near the Ventura County home where Mako lives with his wife, actress Shizuko Hoshi, with whom he has two daughters, 27-year-old Mimosa and 23-year-old Sala. (It was initially suspected to be a hate crime, but investigators have since backed away from that theory.)

“My daughter, Mimosa, was very scared that it happened so close by,” he said. “And I tried to tell her that it could happen any time anywhere. People in Beverly Hills have no greater sense of security. But it started me thinking more about the problem.”

All of which contributed to Mako’s preparation for his return to the Broadway stage for the first time since his appearance in “Pacific Overtures,” the 1976 Stephen Sondheim musical for which he received a Tony Award nomination for his multiple roles as reciter, emperor, shogun and an American businessman. As the reciter, Mako served as the conscience of the musical about Commodore Perry’s belligerent overtures to Japan in the 1860s, commenting wryly on American gunboat diplomacy. A similar East-West clash was the theme of Robert Wise’s 1965 film “The Sand Pebbles,” in which Mako received an Oscar nomination for his role as Steve McQueen’s protege, a Chinese engine-room coolie.

Indeed, the cultural collisions in “Shimada” are a consistent theme in Mako’s career, not only in the roles for which he has become famous, but also as a founder and member of East West Players, a group of Los Angeles-based Asian actors, dancers, directors, writers and designers that he helped found in 1965 and with whom he had a long association until his resignation in 1989. The company has often explored the stormy confrontations between East and West, so it was somewhat surprising that when asked what, in his opinion, is the most commonly held misperception of Asians by Westerners, Mako responded: “That we’re not a confrontational people.”

By that, he explained, “we’re not confrontational in the way that non-Japanese often depict us, this picture of the submissive Oriental. But what we have in ‘Shimada’ is the idea that the Japanese businessmen are looking for a fight and that they accept this fight as the challenge of a lifetime, preparing for it physically, psychologically and emotionally. They don’t often reveal their feelings. But to think that they’re not confrontational is to miscalculate the strength of the adversary.”

The actor, who prepared for his role in “Shimada” by reading Japanese business journals and talking to many executives, said that in his research he became slowly aware of mistakes being made by both sides in their aggressive pursuit of the upper hand in business negotiations. He said he saw the role of Toshio Uchiyama as a journey of sorts, from the confident and deliberate man who steps onto the stage at the beginning of the play to the saddened but enlightened figure at the end--a journey that reflected, to some extent, his own journey as an actor over the last couple of decades.

In 1949, on the boat to the United States to join his mother and father who had left him, at age 5, in the care of his grandparents in Japan, Mako said that he fantasized of America as the rich and powerful victor of World War II. In fact, he discovered his parents--both Impressionist painters--eking out a meager existence on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and was shocked and surprised to see bums panhandling on the Bowery. Abstract Impressionism was all the rage in the art market at the time and his parents were decidedly untrendy. “Their work wasn’t in demand,” he said, “and I knew they were in it for the long haul. I was another mouth to feed and I wanted to earn money right away. I became a good little capitalist and dreamed of owning a motor bike.”

Mako said that it was less a question of assimilation (“I couldn’t do very much about the way I spoke, or the way I looked or the way people automatically assumed things about me as an Asian”) than that he simply didn’t want to be bothered with anything having to do with Japanese language and custom. But one day, he recalled, his father got very angry at him. “ ‘You don’t know the assets and legacy you were born with,’ he told me. ‘You’re a fool if you let them erode.’

“My father was not a traditionalist at all,” he said. “He came from the Kagoshima region of Japan, which was one of the most feudal of areas, but also famous for giving rise to free-thinkers. Both sides resided in him and both sides reside in me, too, I think.”

Mako studied architecture at Pratt Institute in New York, but then one day a classmate asked him to design sets and do the lighting for an Off-Broadway children’s play and he became hooked on the theater. “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 service, he shuttled between Korea and Japan where, mindful of his father’s advice, he reimmersed himself in Japanese culture, particularly in theater. Upon his discharge, he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse on his GI Bill, finally moving permanently to California in 1960. “I had always had a romantic vision of California from the movies,” he said. “And my parents had since moved there from New York. I thought it was better to go there rather than back to the grimy, dirty city.” Once embarked on a career as an actor, he soon discovered the limitations of being in a profession in which Marlon Brando, Alec Guinness, Mickey Rooney and Sydney Greenstreet played leading Asian roles with prosthetic makeup and a pidgin accent while Asian actors were relegated to walk-on roles as butlers, gangsters and No. 1 sons. For a number of years, the actor--who by then had shortened his given name of Makoto Iwamatsu--worked in small roles in television (“McHale’s Navy,” “Ironside,” “MASH”) and movies (“The Sand Pebbles,” “The Hawaiians,” “The Killer Elite”).

“To put it bluntly,” he said, “if I have to do a supporting role, that’s a form of racism. Look at a film like Alan Parker’s ‘Come See the Paradise.’ Why should we have to spend most of our time focused on Dennis Quaid as opposed to getting to know the members of the Asian family? Just because we rely on his name as marquee value?”

In 1965, in an effort to redress the visibility problem of Asian actors in Los Angeles, Mako and six others--Beulah Quo, James Hong, Pat Li, June Kim, Guy Lee, Yet Lock--founded East West Players. “We needed a place to voice our ideas, thoughts and feelings,” he said. “There has been a lot of activity among blacks and Hispanics in theater, but we have always lagged behind. One of the reasons is numbers. Another is the sheer diversity among Asian groups.”

Over more than two decades, Mako directed and performed in plays, and staged one which he wrote, “There’s No Place for a Tired Ghost,” about the Japanese-Americans in World War II who died while they were in California internment camps. “I was always fascinated by that part of history because had my parents been living in California at the time, they’d have been placed in them. I felt out of it because, unlike so many of my friends, I had not had that experience and so I started asking questions. What interests me now about it is the so-called revisionism that’s going on. That there are certain right-wing elements who are trying to deny that it ever happened or that there were no guards placed around the camps or that they weren’t encircled in barbed wires. Like those revisionists who insist the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

Actress Beulah Quo (TV’s “Marco Polo” and “General Hospital”), said that Mako was responsible for the “professionalism” of the East West Players, which has always been based in the Silver Lake area--first in a church basement before moving to its present location on Santa Monica Boulevard. “When we started, Mako insisted on workshop training,” she said. “He was the one who brought in the teachers and set the standards of discipline and hard work for the place.”

In 1989, Mako resigned from the East West Players because of differences with the board of directors. Actress and current East West Artistic Director Nobu McCarthy, who co-starred with him in the 1987 Michael Uno film “The Wash,” said that many people were upset when Mako resigned. She recalled that before East West Players, “Asian actors had absolutely no control over our destiny. We really were at the mercy of the Hollywood people. It played an important role in giving us the confidence and opportunities to develop our craft. It gave us a home and I think, artistically, it added another style to the mix of theater in Los Angeles.”

Mako himself is not quite sanguine when evaluating the gains that Asian actors have made since the founding of East West Players. In fact, he maintained that while more Asian actors may be working than when he entered the business, the quality of material has not changed. “Maybe it’s even gotten worse,” he said. “When you do have Asians in lead roles, it’s frequently in movies about violent gangs like the Yakuza, Japanese Mafia, prostitution and that kind of thing.”

Nor is Mako particularly hopeful for the future. He recalled wryly how his entire career is often synopsized into a caption when he’s making the rounds in Hollywood. “I go into a young film director’s office these days and he says, ‘Hey man, I know who you are. I grew up watching ‘McHale’s Navy.’ ‘ And I think, ‘Oh boy, here we go again.’ ”

Not that working in Japan has any more appeal for Mako than working in Hollywood. In the early ‘70s, he went to Tokyo to co-produce and star in a Japanese film, “Silence-Shinmoku,” and found the experience “very unpleasant.” The Japanese, apparently, are masters at what he called “beating around the bush” before they get to signing on the dotted line. It is worse, he maintained, when you’re Japanese-American.

“At least in America, I’d be classified as someone representing the Third World,” he said, “but in Japan, I was considered to be from another planet, from the Fourth World. They pay top dollar for Hollywood stars, both black and white, a little less for top Japanese stars, and I was somewhere near the lowest rung.”

But even if the opportunities for Asian actors remain limited in America, there is a new aggressiveness of sorts among them to voice their complaints and redress the inequities of casting. The furor over the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a non-Asian, in the role of the Eurasian engineer in the Broadway musical “Miss Saigon” was a case in point. Closer to home, Sala Iwamatsu, Mako’s younger daughter, who is featured as a bar girl in “Miss Saigon,” said that while her father tries to keep business and family life separate, he has occasionally offered her some advice.

“He instilled in me and my sister a lot of traditional family values,” she said. “But he also wanted to make sure that we were treated with respect in the business. I remember he wrote at the end of one letter, ‘Don’t take s--- from anybody.’ ”

Mako himself said that he now is far less likely to suffer in silence when confronted with what he perceives to be racist or stereotypical attitudes, particularly in the projects with which he becomes involved. Invariably, he said, he often encounters the latter whenever Western writers write about the East. “You really have to do a tremendous amount of research before you can even hope to depict characters and situations which are foreign to you,” he said, bringing up “Pacific Overtures” and its director, lyricist-composer and book writer as a case in point. “Hal Prince, Sondheim and John Weidman went to Japan on a tour for two or three weeks. Hou much can you pick up in that amount of time?”

Mako even took some pokes at his dual role in “Shimada,” though the writer had spent nine years as the executive assistant to the Japanese consul in Brisbane, Australia. “Shimada, the camp commandant, is very one-dimensional,” he said. “But that’s understandable since he really is a distorted figure in Eric’s imagination. But Toshio’s character . . . personally, I have a little problem with it. It’s not that well-written.”

As an example, he cited a moment in the play when Toshio evokes a poetic metaphor from a Noh play to explain his feelings to associates of the bike factory. “It’s such a roundabout way of saying things,” he said with some exasperation. “But that’s something that non-Asian people like to hear. I think of it as the ‘fortune cookie’ way of writing.”

The actor, however, said that such reservations are minor compared to the importance of communicating the hopeful message of the play that some amicable meeting ground can be established between Japan and America. In fact, “Shimada” is the first play on Broadway that is offering simultaneous translation into Japanese. And Nobunao Furuyama, an Osaka land developer, has put up nearly one third of the $1.5-million budget because he believes it is important to repair some of the public relations damage which Japan has sustained in the United States over the last decade, this according to Richard Seader, who with Paul B. Berkowsky is producing the play.

Asked in what way he believed that the play can help allay those tensions, Mako responded that “Shimada” dramatically illuminates the fact that Japan has been able to make such strong economic gains because it has been spurred on in part by the indignity and humiliation it endured following the war. He made the point that throughout history--from Commodore Perry to Gen. MacArthur--the East had not only learned lessons from the West, but also improved on them.

“There is the sense,” he said, “that the East accepts Western influence but also goes one better with it. To the extent that Americans are now feeling humiliated by Japan, it can only make them leaner and more efficient in their competition. The play makes the point that maybe the West has become complacent and flabby. It’s more convenient for politicians to blame Japan but maybe we ought to be pointing at ourselves.”

And what can the Japanese learn from the play? “This is what I tried to do with Toshio in the last couple of scenes,” he said. “Hopefully, his journey ends with him realizing that he has a lot more to learn about the West, that it is not just enough to give gifts of Scotch and porcelain dolls and offers of big money buyouts. At the end, he goes off to regroup, reassess, start again.

“Maybe,” the taciturn actor added after a pause, as though he might be applying it to his own career, “he has learned something useful for himself and his children.”