All,
I was channel-cruising last night and came upon a vintage episode of "Hawaii Five-O" from the late Sixties. I remembered seeing it originally; I was still a schoolboy and had just started training in budo. It stuck in my mind because it was one of the first times I ever saw Japanese martial arts on TV.
The plot was as threadbare as the knees of my oldest hakama. Japanese saboteur planted just before 7 December is locked up in a mental asylum before he can carry out his assignment of blowing up oil tanks near Pearl. Escapes decades later and, delusional, believes it is 6 December and he must do his job and of course, the fellows at 5-0 must thwart him.
So many details were cheesier than a L'ami du Chambertin epoisse. The actor playing the role was as Japanese as I am, with a pathetically fraudulent makeup job. Worse than Sean Connery's in "You Only Live Twice." Supposedly a Japanese ninja, he goes through some sort of shouting, gesticulating ritual with a pair of Okinawan sai(!) to prepare him for his task.
Even so, I was struck by the fact that, due to actors of Japanese ancestry and the series being filmed in Hawaii, Japanese words were pronounced correctly. This was probably the first time the word "ninja" was spoken on Western TV--and ironically probably the last time it was spoken correctly and not as the "nen-ja" we hear constantly today. "Shuriken," and "karate" were also pronounced correctly.
It will be almost impossible for younger readers here to understand what it was like at that time for those of us doing some kind of budo. The average American recognised the word "karate" but could not have told you how it differed from judo. Certainly no one outside the budo community or Japanese-American minority here would have known what a ninja or a shuriken was. Watching that episode nearly four decades later, it was an interesting trip back in time.
Cordially,