Teru Shimada
Teru Shimada (島田輝 Shimada Teru, born Akira Shimada (島田明 Shimada Akira); November 17, 1905 – June 19, 1988) was a Japanese-American actor. A Nikkeijin (first-generation Japanese-American), Shimada emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s to follow in the footsteps of his idol Sessue Hayakawa, where he began acting in theatre before finding a steady career playing supporting roles in Hollywood films. After being interned during World War II, Shimada found a career resurgence starring opposite Humphrey Bogart in the 1949 film, Tokyo Joe. Shimada subsequently appeared in many films and television series throughout the 1950s and 60s. He also appeared in an episode ("And Five of Us are Left") of the 1960s American television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in 1965. That year, he also made a guest appearance on Perry Mason as Dr. Maseo Tachikawa in "The Case of the Baffling Bug" and as Ito Kumagi in the 1962 episode "The Case of the Capricious Corpse". In 1970, he had had a leading role in an episode of Hawaii Five-O ("The Reunion"). Arguably his most well-known role came in 1967, when he was cast as Mr. Osato, a SPECTRE agent in the 1967 James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. He later retired in the mid-1970s following appearances in Barnaby Jones and The Six Million Dollar Man and died in Encino, Los Angeles, California in 1988. Early life Shimada was born Akira Shimada (JP: 島田明) in the city of Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, in the Kantō region of Japan. His birth date has been variously reported as both 1905 and 1906. Shimada was intrigued from early childhood by the tales of the entertainers who would visit the home of his artist grandfather, whom he visited frequently and briefly lived with. The young Shimada regularly went to the movies, and idolized cowboy star Tom Mix. After seeing Japanese expatriate actor Sessue Hayakawa in a Hollywood film, Shimada decided to emigrate to the United States to become an actor. He arrived in San Francisco in March 1924, knowing no English, on a student visa. While Shimada ultimately attended two years of college, his determination to become an actor never changed, and he remained in the United States after leaving college (during which time he was technically an illegal alien). He worked for some time as a janitor at the Granada Theatre, where he began taking acting lessons. In the following years, he moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself as a hotel clerk and then a pressman for a Japanese-language newspaper. Career 1930s Shimada's first professional acting role was as a valet in a Los Angeles production of Hale Hamilton's play Dear Me in 1929. He enrolled in acting courses at the studio of Katherine Hamil, and subsequently starred in a student production of The Flower of Edo, a one-act play about Japan. In June 1931, he headlined a class show in Los Angeles's Jinnistan Grotto theater, performing scenes from Melchior Lengyel's play The Typhoon. As