Sessue Hayakawa’s stardom wasn’t so much limited by or at odds with the “Yellow Peril” racist fears of the early 20th century as it was propelled by it. Hayakawa became, for a period between 1915 and 1921, one of the highest-paid and most popular actors in Hollywood, off of being villainous foreigners in films such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915). This fits right in with the stereotype of Yellow Peril villains: Asian, male, menacing to white women, diabolical, etc. However, Hayakawa’s screen image, and persona, were much more complex than that, and that was also related to the Progressive era benevolent racism which preached assimilation for immigrants, even non-white immigrants. Scholar Daisuke Miyao, who has written extensively on Hayakawa, refers to his star image as representing “a successful assimilation narrative of Asian immigrants”; the same is true of his sympathetic roles, where he sacrifices for white American love interests who he proves his nobility to but ultimately cannot win because of presumed immutable racial differences. His villainous roles, like other Yellow Peril stereotypes, represent the opposite: the overwhelming “Asianness” of unassimilated immigrants, who cannot or refuse to assimilate and therefore present a threat to white Americans as a whole.

Hayakawa, after an early life in Japan, first attracted attention when he starred alongside his wife Tsuru Aoki in Thomas Ince’s The Wrath of the Gods in 1914. The following year he appeared in his most famous film (aside from his Oscar-nominated supporting role in The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957), The Cheat, which Gina Marchetti describes as a combination rape/lynching fantasy. Hayakawa’s role, as a Japanese ivory merchant (later changed to Burmese in the intertitles after Japanese-Americans protested the film’s racism), depicts him as the perfect immigrant: successful, wealthy, running in the circles of elite white New Yorkers, seemingly Americanized in all respects, and above all, a sexless threat to the female lead, played by Fannie Ward. The movie takes a sharp turn into Yellow Peril melodrama when Ward, having lost money and in desperate need of a loan, agrees to have sex with Hayakawa in exchange for him lending her the money. When she attempts to back out of their agreement, Hayakawa attacks her and, in the scene that became particularly famous and controversial, brands her on the shoulder as one of his “possessions” before being shot by her husband, who dramatically saves the day. In the final scene, Ward’s husband goes on trial for the shooting, but Ward saves him from jail by showing the crowded courtroom the brand on her shoulder. This incites a lynch mob who attempt to kill Hayakawa, who is only protected by the court officials. White supremacy restored and the Yellow Peril defeated and defanged (Hayakawa is injured and at the mercy of others), the couple walks out of the courtroom in an embrace. Roll credits.

While Hayakawa made many movies as a romantic leading man, especially after he formed his own production company in 1918, The Cheat looms large in not just his career, but film history more generally, because of its stark depiction of the hysterical racism of the 1910s as well as the effect it had on Hayakawa’s career. The film dramatizes the relationship white Americans had to Asian immigrants, but also to Japanese people and Japan itself more broadly. As Marchetti explains, which I think is worth quoting at length,

“This ambivalence toward Japan and the Japanese finds its way into the depiction of Hishuru Tori [Hayakawa’s character]. Both brutal and cultivated, wealthy and base, cultured and barbaric, Tori embodies the contradictory qualities Americans associated with Japan. Like Japan itself, Tori is powerful, threatening, wealthy, and enviable; however, his racial difference also codes him as pagan, morally suspect, and inferior. Moreover, just as Japanese attempts to assimilate Western technology and material culture to strengthen itself economically and militarily during the Meiji era posed a threat to American domination of Asia, Tori's attempts to adapt to and adopt elements of Western society also pose a threat to America's conception of itself. Like any new Asian immigrant seeking to assimilate into the mainstream, Tori threatens America's definition of itself as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.”

This ambivalence is reflected in the audience reception: audiences praised Hayakawa’s naturalistic, supposedly “Zen-inspired” acting, and he was a critical darling for decades after this, even while condemning his character and identifying with the violent reactions of the white courtroom observers at the film’s ending. Most notably, too, white, female fans turned Hayakawa into a sex symbol, treating him with a kind of fan obsession that prefigured the craze for Rudolph Valentino in the 1920s (many film writers compare the two for this reason, and for the fact that both played similar roles as Valentino often played racialized, foreign men.) Writer DeWitt Bodeen referred to Hayakawa’s fame as involving “fiercer tones of masochism as well as a latent female urge to experience sex with a beautiful but savage man of another race” compared to Valentino, while Marchetti points to the contradictions in his character, both threatening and sadistic while also highly vulnerable and ultimately powerless at the end. In this way, Hayakawa’s villainous roles allowed him to become a major star while also reinforcing preconceived notions of Asianness, Asian masculinity, and Japanese-ness in particular.

While Hayakawa’s heroic roles are comparatively less-remembered, they often featured him playing a sympathetic young man who is usually Asian (or occasionally Pacific Islander, as in his role as a Hawaiian man in The Hidden Pearls in 1918.) Hayakawa’s characters express a desire for a full-blooded “American” identity, but can never achieve it because they lack the prerequisite for the title: whiteness. Despite this, they are portrayed as self-sacrificing, well-mannered, and completely lacking in the sexual dominance and violence of The Cheat. They usually also see their Americanness as achievable through the love of a white American woman, who they ultimately end the movie without at the closing title, unlike the romantic heroes played by white actors like John Barrymore or Wallace Reid. As I noted earlier, these roles also expressed Yellow Peril fears, but in a way that assuaged Progressive whites. The Yellow Peril could ultimately be conquered—but only if Asians could appropriately conform to Americanness and accept their position as subordinate to white Americans.

On a last note, I’ll go back to Hayakawa’s career off-screen. Hayakawa was married to fellow Japanese actress Tsuru Aoki, who he appeared with in several films. The couple’s personal lives were often the subject of fan magazine articles and interest, usually with racialized overtones. In a 1916 Photoplay article quoted by Miyao, white writer Grace Kingsley stresses Hayakawa’s Otherness—referring to his “tilted eyes” and reassuring readers he does not live in a “papier-mache house amid tea-cup scenery”—but also how American he is, how comfortably he has assimilated to his adopted country with his Los Angeles bungalow and his stylish clothing “according to American standards.” Since Hayakawa’s personal life was nearly indistinguishable from that of white stars of the same era (aside from touches like his unique acting method or naming his dog “Shoki”), he could be accepted by white audiences as a major celebrity as well as a sex symbol. That was until 1921, when his popularity began to decline due to a mix of reasons; Miyao points to a new rise in nativism, epitomized by the 1922 Ozawa case which ruled against naturalized citizenship for a Japanese immigrant, which led to a decline in films featuring Japanese characters. At this point, the Yellow Peril still existed, but the more Progressive trend of desiring assimilation rather than complete elimination for immigrants had been abandoned, and studios and audiences no longer found Hayakawa as intriguing, either as hero or villain. He would continue working for the next few decades, usually abroad, until making a late career comeback of sorts as a character actor in the 1950s. With that, Asian actors nearly disappeared from American screens, with small exceptions like Anna May Wong.

The role of Asian characters in American cinema is a huge topic, unsurprisingly, and with recent rises in anti-Asian racism new attention has been paid to it. If you’re interested in more on Hayakawa, I would recommend Daisuke Miyao’s 2007 book Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom as well as his article “Sessue Hayakawa: The Mirror, the Racialized Body, and Photogenie”. Gina Marchetti’s book Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction is a good exploration of Asian-white relationships in Hollywood cinema. Sumiko Higashi’s work on Cecil B. DeMille also explores The Cheat in more detail with attention paid to Hayakawa’s role and the racial dynamics at play in the film.

I love that the adjective photogenic was created just for Hayakawa by the French, to describe how exquisite his face looked on film, as if the cameras adored him. He was, indeed, photogenie.

And it was Sessue who first established the smoldering stare that came to define the male idols of the silent film era, not Rudolph Valentino. The movie that put Valentino on the map, The Sheikh, was originally intended for Hayakawa, but he turned it down (he'd started his own production co by then so he could play better roles). So Valentino was cast as the lead, and he very obviously emulated Hayakawa's distinct look and his very still, deeply brooding expressions, which I like to call Resting Tsundere Face, lol. Hayakawa was the top notch heart throb so Valentino did his best to imitate/look like Hayakawa. It's all quite obvious in the images of the time, and very easy to see who did what first.

And Hayakawa was the one who really made the public hungry for a star with an exceptionally athletic build, with broad shoulders, excellent posture, and a more muscular build than all the thin white guys popular at the time. Hayakawa was a serious athlete who knew jujitsu, he was a strong swimmer, and on and on. Spend a little time around skilled martial artists and you'll quickly see how they move differently, with much greater balance, and a very different way of shifting weight and setting each foot down. Very calm, elegant, and with a sort of spring-loaded stealth, so you get the feeling they could pounce at any second. I'm sure it contributed to all the white girls swooning when they watched him on screen. So when Valentino was creating his look, he strived to achieve the smoldering stare paired with a swimmer's body. Thank you, Sessue Hayakawa!

So glad you posted this, OP. Excellent choice!