(4 of 8)
"My father he was gone," Miyoshi explains. "I mean, he die. We have little temple in house, and everybody live there, even after die. They always with us. I put money in temple for my father, but my mother said, 'Your father say that it's all right you spend.' So I bought coal for stove."
Whenever there was something special like sweets in the house, it was offered first to the dead in the temple in "God's Room." "We have to leave it with them one day, then we could have it," Miyoshi says. But the hungry girl could not wait a whole day knowing that there was candy in God's Room. She would succumb to temptation and open the temple, despite her fear of ancestral punishment. "I prayed: I have to have this. I got to have this candy. I'm going to take this candy, so please don't grab me.' " Then she would snatch the candy and run. "I really think they going to grab me."
Right in the Eyes. Nights, Miyoshi would listen to the local U.S. Army radio station, to Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee and Doris Day, and try to copy them. After her graduation from school, her teacher took the class to a hotel, gave them a lesson in how to use a knife and fork; then they were deemed ready for the world. But the professional bands were not ready for Miyoshi ("They thought I was the little country bear from Hokkaido"). Eventually, though, she became a hit on Japanese radio and TV. For three years she hardly ever had a day off. Then she decided she must see America.
What little money Miyoshi had when she hit the States, she promptly spent on presents for her family. Night after night she would sing in some small nightclub, say a polite "Thank you" (her only English words at the time). She felt lost; even the strange food bothered her. She sent to Japan for squid, waited until everyone in her apartment house had gone to bed, then cooked the dried delicacy on an electric stove. "They all get up and say, 'What's that awful smell?' "
Miyoshi's live-wire agent booked her all over the country—in nightclubs, auditoriums, small-town theaters. Then she got on Tennessee Ernie Ford's TV show and Arthur Godfrey's morning show. On the Godfrey show, Miyoshi was noticed by Warner's casting director, who brought her to Josh Logan, who hired her for the role of Katsumi in Sayonara.
On the strength of her Academy Award for her Sayonara performance, Miyoshi began to get up to $2,500 a week for singing dates on the road. Jerry Lewis offered her $50,000 for a part in his new movie, Geisha Boy, then R. & H offered her $1,500 a week to play the part of Mei Li in Flower Drum. Pliant and outwardly submissive, yet inwardly serene and sturdy, Mei Li was Miyoshi. Now married to a former TV director, Win Opie, Miyoshi is certain that she wants to continue living in a land where it is really all right to look people in the eyes. "Is nice look at eyes," she says solemnly. "Get to know people that way."