Source: © JAPAN Forward

Sayonara, Bondo-san: Sean Connery’s Japan

Peter Tasker, Arcus Research for JAPAN Forward

~You only live twice, or so it seems
One life for yourself, and one for your dreams~


From the theme song of “You Only Live Twice.”

Sean Connery, who passed away in late October, inhabited the role of James Bond in a way that none of his successors could match. From the very first shot of him in the very first Bond film, Dr. No, at a casino table with a cigarette draped from his mouth, he exuded an ironic cool that contained a core of menace.

That was helped by the fact that Connery was a hard nut in real life. The son of a truck-driver and a cleaner, he had worked as a bricklayer and bouncer. In his pre-Bond years, he punched out Johnny Stompanato, the gangster boyfriend of Hollywood star Lana Turner, who was making trouble on a movie set. For the Bond films, the tattoos that Connery had acquired in the Navy – “Scotland Forever” and “Mum and Dad” – had to be concealed.

Left: July 29, 1966, during filming the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice,” on location in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo, FILE) / Right: Actor Sean Connery during filming of “You Only Live Twice,” on location in Tokyo, Japan. | © JAPAN Forward

Connery had the same animal magnetism as Toshiro Mifune in the films of Akira Kurosawa’s golden era. And just as Mifune’s alpha male credentials were affirmed by facial hair in the samurai films, so Connery’s were established by his plentiful chest hair – a source of particular interest to Japanese women, according to Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service.

You know what it is about you that fascinates them, don’t you? It’s the hair on your chest. Japanese men all have beautiful bare skin.

Tiger Tanaka, in You Only Live Twice

For the film version of You Only Live Twice, Connery and the rest of the production team arrived in Japan in July 1966, just a few weeks after The Beatles had completed their series of concerts at the Budokan. Connery stayed at the Tokyo Hilton, now the Capitol Hotel Tokyu, in room 1007.

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By - Ben K.

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