Los Angeles Magazine (Jan 2004)
(Thanks becn_4 for sharing)
JUST AS HE TOWERED ABOVE TOM CRUISE'S DISILLUsioned Civil War captain in The Last Samurai, so now the Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, over six feet, is dominating the midget windmills, burbling volcanoes, clapboard chapels, and pirate schooners of the Castle Park miniature golf coarse in Sherman Oaks. Stripped of the somber makeup and cloak that transformed him into an aging yet robust samurai, Watanabe reveals himself as a pleasant 44-year-old wearing a lime green shirt, dark glasses, and a sparse goatee. His lips are chapped from perhaps too much trumpet practice.
His assistant Asako is along to translate and to keep what will be a laughably lopsided score between Watanabe and myself. But Watanabe's English is good, cobbled together as it is from long-ago high school lessons, Last Samurai voice coaching, and a month of immersion in L.A. life. He chooses to handle the bulk of his own dialogue this hazy afternoon. Teeing off with a fine ricochet shot that places him in tapping distance of a hole in two, he explains his technique on the links. "My style is like a professional golfer all the time," he says, "just not the score."
Although today marks his introduction to the miniature version, Watanabe has been a golf aficionado for years. The sport has afforded him release from the bloodshed and occasional ritual suicide that have marked his roles in various shogun-era Japanese television dramas during the last 20 years. As he tees up at the first cockeyed hole, Watanabe draws parallels between the allure of samurai epics and American westerns. "No cell phones, no fax, no Internet," he says, stroking his way to a sure birdie. "Sometimes, life-and-death situations." He cracks a bemused smile as I promptly smack one off the Astroturf in the general direction of a gingerbread hut. "Don't hit it so hard," he says. "Gently, this way. Gently."
Raised in the Niigata Prefecture--snowbound winter country hard by the Sea of Japan--Watanabe aspired to be a professional trumpet player. One of his fine arts teachers, however, suggested that Watanabe take up dance, principally because he was tall and powerful. "Years ago in Japan, most everybody was short and could not lift women over their heads," Watanabe says. "If you were bigger, you could lift them up and be comfortable." Watanabe declined dancing. Daunted by the rigor and expense of studying music at a university, he turned to acting at 19. Three years later he made his TV debut on a Japanese show called Unknown Rebellion.
When Watanabe first took up golf, he says, he might occasionally stay awake at night, ruminating over his flubs on the links. "Now I have a change of mind. When I was reading a book about golf, I found a great word for my new attitude:
'Same walk, same smile.' If you keep up your pace of how you walk through 18 holes and don't forget to smile the whole time, you can get a good score. It's like life and like work--movie work and acting work. It's the same. Every day's okay. No problem." By way of demonstration, he struts on an imaginary treadmill, club jauntily at his side, as chipper as a satisfied Scotsman scaling a hillock.
In The Last Samurai, his first major American feature, Watanabe plays the heroic leader Katsumoto, who resists late-19th-century rifles with medieval swords, and Western-style expediency with the morality of the dying Bushido warrior code. For his character, he drew inspiration from the historical figure Saigo Takamori, the adviser to the Meiji emperor who later led a samurai revolt against modernism. "Saigo had a big heart," Watanabe says, "like a catcher on a baseball team."
Watanabe lends the kind of regal weight to his role that Toshiro Mifune, star of Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, brought to the camp of James Clavell's Shogun. As in that 1980 American TV miniseries, Watanabe's ostensible function is to provide some major life enhancement for the castaway Western hero--Cruise this time instead of Richard Chamberlain. Like Mifune, Watanabe's massive presence overpowers that of his Anglo pupil. Watanabe adored Mifune. "Mifune could express three different emotions with one action," he says of the late actor. "He was impulsive, and his speed took the audience with him." Watanabe's greatest professional regret is that he never acted opposite Mifune.
Watanabe's daughter has done fashion modeling, and his son has followed him into acting. He can look on and be proud of them, but he says, "I can't teach acting to different generations. I wasn't taught acting. I learned only by watching." He says it isn't his place to tell his children what they should do or how they should do it. Taking a piece of paper, he writes out the Chinese character for "parent." "It shows a parent up in a tree, staring down at the child," Watanabe says. "You look and do not talk."
On every hole Watanabe adheres to his gentle putting method. His yellow ball sputters up a ramp leading to a midget lighthouse like a marathoner with both knees blown, then dribbles back down past his teeing-off point. He is jubilant, though, when my ball does the same thing. "Oh, you missed your chance." He lines up the bulbous rubber tips of his black Adidas before the tee and grins. "My chance."
When the game is over, he surrenders his club and gives this new pastime all the gravity it deserves. "This is the first time ever hit a golf ball through a lighthouse. When I get back to Japan, I'm going to become the first Japanese miniature pro golfer.
" Exiting through Castle Park's video arcade, we pause to play a round of Terminator 2. "Excellent, excellent!" Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice applauds us as we drop in our coins. We man our twin Uzis and stare across a postapocalyptic America. Soon enough, I run out of ammunition and am slaughtered, but Watanabe, deadly accurate, fights bravely on alone for a few minutes, holding back the terrible future.
