Age: 53
male
James was born in Yokohama and raised in rural Yamagata, Japan. He moved to the U.S. after high school and earned a BA in literature from Wheaton College and an MFA in acting and directing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. James is based in NYC, working as an actor, director, translator, and writer. Many fans know him as Robert Minoru from Marvel's Runaways. He has originated many roles on and off Broadway, including Sarah Ruhl's The Oldest Boy, Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out (2003 Tony Award for Best Play), A Girl on the Appian Way, John Guare's A Few Stout Individuals, and Julia Cho's Durango. His credits also include characters in world-premiere stage adaptations of literary classics, such as Yunioshi in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's on Broadway and Toru in Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle at the Edinburgh Int'l Festival and the Singapore Arts Festival. In 2004, he voiced the Chinese Triad leader, Wu Zi Mu, in the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He later also voiced an undercover police officer called Charlie in Grand Theft Auto IV and the expansion pack Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. For the stage, he has directed My Friend Has Come for the Asian American Writers Workshop, Dancing with the Bird at the Japan Society in New York, "Clippy and Ms. U" for Ma-Yi Studios, and Ready or Not and It's a Jungle Out There for the 52nd Street Project Playmaking series. He made his filmmaking debut in '11 with Lefty Loosey Righty Tighty, which won Best Feature in the DIY film competition at Northside Festival, a trendsetter art festival in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. James was the conceiver of the theater benefit "SHINSAI: Theaters for Japan" which took place on March 11, 2012, the one-year anniversary of the disasters in Japan, with participation from nearly 100 theaters, internationally. He also collaborates frequently with Japanese artists, translating award winning contemporary Japanese plays and subtitling major Japanese studio films. James is also a martial artist with black belts in judo and aikido.
Sessue Hayakawa was a Japanese Actor who was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the silent film era of the 1910s and 1920s. He was Hollywood's first sex symbol as woman flocked to the theaters to see his broodingly handsome good looks. However due to Anti-Miscegenation laws he was always cast as either a sexually dominant villain or a forbidden love. In one of his first movies The Cheat he rapes the protagonist after branding her with a cattle iron. He hated always being typecast as a villain saying once "My one ambition is to play a hero". He briefly founded his own production company but it ended after his business partner called him a racial slur. He eventually became so frustrated with the racism of early Hollywood that he left in 1922 to act in Japanese and European Cinema. He returned in 1949 and in 1957 he stared in his most famous role as Colonel Saito in Bridge on the River Kwai for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He died in 1973.
