I was reading this article on Wikipedia earlier today, and I found this line particularly interesting:
[Sessue Hayakawa's] popularity, sex appeal, and extravagant lifestyle (e.g., his wild parties and his gold-plated Pierce-Arrow) may have fed tension within segments of American society and led to discriminatory stereotypes and the desexualization of Asian men in American productions, something that continues to today in Modern Hollywood,[6][7][8] as exemplified by the controversial character of I.Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast At Tiffany's.
So, how true is this argument? Or how big a factor did this play into the current perception of Asian men in modern American popular culture? I assume that WWII, Korea, and Vietnam would have had to have a defining impact as well.
That is not credible. I'm very familiar with Hayakawa Sessue's history, and I think they're attributing far too much importance to one person, and in fact they are mistaking an example of a phenomenon, for the phenomenon itself. Discriminatory stereotypes and desexualization of Asian men in Western texts and art existed far before Hayakawa came along. You can read a lot about it in Edward Said's Orientalism. Asian men were considered since at least the 19th century to be effeminate and weak, yet sexually voracious and a threat to white women, being behind a whole "white slavery" (i.e. sex trafficking of white women) conspiracy in which they kidnapped beautiful young white virgins for their perverted purposes. In Hayakawa, people with such anxieties about "the yellow peril" found a concrete example from their perspective that they could point to, since he was so clearly a sex symbol and attractive to women, yet even in his roles, he played someone sexually dangerous. But the stereotypes pre-existed Hayakawa and they grew more angry and aggressive following Hayakawa's most famous period due to various issues that had nothing to do with Hayakawa and everything to do with global politics.