Sure you could. I just mentioned Pat Morita; remember his KARATE KID II nemesis, the serious-minded businessman who spends all his free time practicing his killing-blow strikes, the better to face Miyagi in a deathmatch after all these years?
A quick check of IMDB says that’s Danny Kamekona, who earned his first credits back in the '60s as forensic scientist Che Fong on HAWAII FIVE-O. And in the '70s, when the time came for the last ROCKFORD FILES episode to be filmed, the plot involved Jim arriving in Hawaii and promptly getting drugged and robbed and framed for murder, which means Kamekona shows up as Sergeant Okemoto, the plainclothes investigator with a retinue of uniformed officers who – yes, Rockford, I do have a warrant; and, no, Angel, I don’t believe your clearly-making-it-up-as-you-go-along patter; and, yes, that right there is obviously sufficient evidence, so I’m ordering these men to book you for Murder One; and, no, I won’t drop the charges regardless of what army-buddy VIP you’ve used your phone call to bring in; but, yes, I will reluctantly release you into his custody and relay a tip that should prove useful in clearing your name.
(Ironically, while you’d expect that to be the cue for Rockford to out-sleuth the cops, he promptly gets shot by the bad guys who promptly get arrested, causing our hero to gripe from his hospital bed that he still doesn’t know who killed the guy, at which point it gets patiently explained to him by a professional and the episode ends.)
And then came the '80s, so cue Kamekona as Police Sergeant Akama on MAGNUM PI…
Likewise, consider Sato’s son from KARATE KID II, the answer to a question no one asked: what if Johnny had a better haircut, a creepier smile, and a defense against the crane kick? And cue Yuji Okumoto, fresh off appearing as a cop on TJ HOOKER. And after playing the did-he-or-didn’t-he killer in TRUE BELIEVER, he spent the '90s getting work as…
…well, sure, as a prosecutor in that TV movie about the Menendez brothers, because who the heck else is going to play Lester Kuriyama? And as a Yale-educated defense attorney on JAG, because, well, he’s plausible, is the thing; you believe him when he plays a sheriff or an FBI agent, and so you cast him as – well, no, not as Detective Kohanek on KINDRED: THE EMBRACED, but in the recurring role of Detective Kohanek’s boss, Lieutenant Kwan. (And, at that, as Lieutenant Sakagami in BLUE TIGER: a driven law-enforcement professional who hates him some Yakuza. “You know what really crawls up my ass? Assholes like you who give Asians like me a bad rap.”)
Since PIXELS is hitting theaters this weekend, I’ll note that Denis Akiyama featured prominently in the preview as Professor Toru Iwatani, the inventor of Pac-Man. And, from a quick look at IMDB, I see he was Detective Peter Ota in a flick with Gary Busey and Carrie-Anne Moss – the year after he played the cerebral Professor Asakura in EXTREME MEASURES alongside Gene Hackman and Hugh Grant, the year after he was the vicious Shinji menacing Keanu Reeves as JOHNNY MNEMONIC.
If you’ve seen the commercials for iZOMBIE, you probably know it’s about a zombie who passes for human while working at the Medical Examiner’s office: accessing the memories of the dead by eating their brains, and passing on her insights to the police department’s newest homicide detective, who doesn’t know her secret.
No, neither said zombie nor said detective happen to be of Asian ancestry. But said detective’s boss – Lieutenant Suzuki, as played by Hiro Kanagawa – yeah, he is; and he deduced her secret, too. (Note, too, that Kanagawa’s an old hand at this, having played Detective James Kai on dozens of COLD SQUAD episodes back when.)
speaking of racism - Jack Soo’s last name is really Suzuki. He had to imply he was Chinese rather than Japanese to get work in the pist WWII era. (Yes, he was in an internmet camp during the war)
Similarly, from the mid-90s through the mid-'00s, if the script called for a powerful late-middle-aged man in a suit, such as a CEO, an ambassador, or a crime syndicate boss, there was a 75% chance he would be played by James Hong. The other 25% of the roles were played by Tzi Ma.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Hayley Alcroft – who acts under the name Hayley Kiyoko, and plays live-action crime solvers who range from Velma Dinkley of SCOOBY-DOO fame to Raven Ramirez on CSI: CYBER. I don’t know what that means.
I don’t even know if that counts, so I’ll add that another actor who got work this past spring on CSI: CYBER was Hong-Kong-born Byron Chan – who acts under the name Byron Mann, and who you maybe remember as Detective Matt Sung on DARK ANGEL back in the '00s – after he was Ryu, in STREET FIGHTER, back in the '90s.
Using the rarely-invoked Are You Manlier Than Clint Eastwood clause, Toshiro Mifune acted under his own name during the '60s (HELL IN THE PACIFIC, with Lee Marvin; GRAND PRIX, with James Garner) and '70s (PAPER TIGER, with David Niven; MIDWAY, with everybody) – including RED SUN, as a samurai in the Old West tasked by the Japanese ambassador with tracking down the ceremonial katana stolen before it could be gifted to President Grant.
While he pretty well runs the gamut of detective skills in that one (he’s a perceptive guy who makes accurate deductions, engages in guy-who-knows-a-guy negotiations, and sneaks around to spy on folks after taking precautions to foil an outlaw bent on escape), I got some pushback upthread on my mention of Michelle Yeoh getting tasked with investigating a crime…
…and so I’ll make sure I’m now relevantly bumping the thread by adding quick mention of JAVA HEAT, with Ario Bayu as an Indonesian police lieutenant who not only does the whole Columbo bit by repeatedly noting the inconsistencies that pop up when he amiably questions people, but who also conducts his own electronic surveillance easy as getting the drop on a key suspect for to hold him at gunpoint.
(See, it’s the opposite of RED SUN, since here it’s the white dude who’s investigating with no local law-enforcement powers, and it’s the Asian fella who has the badge and the rank and can throw that guy around faster than you can say ‘pencak silat’.)
Ron Yuan had a recurring role as Medical Examiner Evan Zao on CSI:NY, and I still don’t know whether that counts, and I still don’t need to know, since he then moved on to playing Lieutenant Peter Kang, the head of the homicide squad on GOLDEN BOY.
Michael Sun Lee’s IMDB credits run the gamut from Officer Sato to Officer Tanaka, and from FBI Forensics Tech Wu to CSI Tech Mizumoto – and from playing a detective on HAWAII to playing a detective on HAWAII FIVE-O, but, c’mon, that’s shooting fish in a barrel, so I’ll add that he was also Detective Vince Vu in DEAD & NOWHERE.
(The guy has ‘cop’ written all over him, is what I’m saying; I could list half-a-dozen of his other law-enforcement roles, and still have yet more left to talk about.)
Speaking of HAWAII, it’s where Dann Seki got work back when playing the medical examiner – which maybe doesn’t count, but which still doesn’t need to count, since he soon followed up by playing Detective Ishimura on NORTH SHORE.
(He’s since moved on from playing an Admiral to playing an Emperor…)
Born and raised in New York, Michael Wong eventually carved out a niche for himself in Hong Kong, playing, well, Inspector Wong – and Inspector Koo, and Inspector Kong, and Inspector Lee, and et cetera – but while that post-'98 stuff over there doesn’t count, he was earning plenty of credits here before that: small-screen stuff like NASH BRIDGES and ONCE A THIEF, and big-screen stuff like THREE WISHES and KNOCK OFF.
(KNOCK OFF, of course, is the flick where Jean-Claude Van Damme is a sales rep who gets caught up in a CIA-versus-Russian-mafia clash in Hong Kong over a plan to flood America with cheap made-in-China products seeded with small-but-high-powered explosives; Wong, of course, was the guy they reluctantly settled for after – well, here, I’ll quote IMDB: “Jet Li was supposed to play the role of ‘Inspector Han’ but he turned it down last minute to do Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) instead.” And so Wong played Han, and just like that a decade and a half went by, and suddenly he got tapped to play the Police Chief in the latest TRANSFORMERS movie for obvious reasons.)
And, to continue on with that ‘brothers’ schtick as above, note that Russell Wong starred in his own TV series: BLACK SASH, where he played Tom Chang, who’d been an undercover cop for the SFPD until he got framed and spent years behind bars and by the time he got out his wife had divorced him and he’d lost custody of his daughter and now he mentors troubled youths as a philosophical martial-arts instructor.
In the pilot episode, one of his contacts tips him off about a crook’s whereabouts, and so Tom arrives right as the cops do – except our hero is more perceptive than the rest of 'em put together, since he notices what they all miss: said crook slipping away in disguise. Tom’s as good in a foot chase as anybody who ever leaped from a rooftop to land on a bus, and so he soon reaches the guy and overpowers him with kung-fu and drops him off with said hapless cops…
…which brings him to the attention of a bounty hunter, who offers Tom the chance to earn enough cash to hire a great lawyer in that upcoming custody hearing; Tom takes the job, and soon tracks down a cop killer – because, again, Useful Contacts All Over San Francisco plus Kung-Fu The Hell Out Of A Guy Before Playing Interrogator For The Win equals More Effective Than The Entire SFPD Put Together.
And while that earns him said money for said lawyer, Tom keeps playing investigator throughout the series – because, hey, those youths he’s mentoring keep getting in trouble with the law or stumbling across possible evidence of a crime or whatever, prompting him to break out his Bruce Wayne skills as often as Jessica Fletcher.
Oh, and the year after BLACK SASH hit television, TWISTED hit theaters.
Remember that one? Ashley Judd gets promoted to SFPD Inspector, and so meets her new partner Andy Garcia, and her new boss Russell Wong – who, as Lieutenant Tong, is the guy at Homicide who decides whether there’s enough evidence of a pattern to figure it’s a serial killer; and who decides whether to pull her off the case, even if Police Commissioner Samuel L. Jackson is her mentor; and who’ll personally take point at the latest crime scene, telling people just what to do with that dead body; and so on. He’s a decidedly hands-on kind of police lieutenant, is what I’m saying.
Tsutomo Shimomura is an Asian-American who wrote rather a lot of impressive stuff about himself in the book TAKEDOWN, which is why he soon got a producer credit when it got adapted into the big-screen movie TAKEDOWN, where wanted criminal Kevin Mitnick is played by Skeet Ulrich, and Tsutomo Shimomura – the guy who sees through said crook’s alias, deduces said crook’s general location, and uses electronic equipment of his own design to pinpoint said crook’s exact location before predicting and countering said crook’s attempt to jettison stolen goods between the knock on the door and said takedown – is, of course, played by Russell Wong.
