The ‘Bond girl’ who threatened to jump out of a window if she didn’t get the part
The archetype may have been forced to move with the times to avoid becoming an outdated and offensive relic, but the James Bond franchise has existed for so long that any female actor who gets cast in any of the movies will be dubbed a ‘Bond girl’ right from the off.
Whereas it was previously viewed as a badge of honour that many stars wholeheartedly embraced, the shifting sentiments have seen it become treated as a more dismissive tag that labels a cast member as little more than eye candy, irrelevant of who the character they’re playing is and what function they serve in the story.
Back in the 1960s, though, producers and audiences alike knew that Bond girls were largely there to do one thing, and one thing only. It was an accepted part of the canon, but then again, so were globetrotting escapades. Everyone expects 007’s latest adventure to traverse the planet, but You Only Live Twice was set primarily in a solitary nation.
Sean Connery’s fifth outing as the debonair secret agent may have shot interiors at Pinewood in the United Kingdom, but the majority of location shooting and the entirety of the narrative unfolded in Japan. The casting net was tossed far and wide in the hopes of enlisting local performers, which very nearly ended in tragedy.
One of the conditions laid down by the Japanese government was for the female leads to be played by local performers, something the production was happy to oblige. Mie Hama was hired to play Kissy Suzuki – who married Bond as part of an undercover operation – while Akiko Wakabayashi was brought in as ally Aki.
Both stars were sent on a crash course to master conversational English ahead of shooting, but Wakabayashi fared much better than Hama. In fact, the latter was struggling so greatly that the production team was ready to replace her with somebody else who could master the required dialogue.
When Hama was informed of the decision, she threatened to throw herself out of a hotel window. As director Lews Gilbert recalled, at first, he didn’t believe it was a serious situation until co-star and Tiger Tanaka actor Tetsurō Tamba informed him that she was fully prepared to go through with it.
“The next morning I asked Tamba, ‘How did it go with Mie?’. Tamba told me, ‘Mie had lost face, and feels that she is a disgrace to her family and will jump out of her hotel window tonight,'” Gilbert was told, per The Telegraph. “‘You can’t be serious’, I said to Tamba. ‘Oh yes, she is 100% serious. She will jump’, he said. Well, that really scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want a young woman’s death on my conscience, nor did the producers want that kind of publicity. So I told Tamba to tell her to stay, and that she would be in the movie.”
The compromise was that he swapped Hama and Wakabayashi’s roles, with Suzuki having a lot less dialogue than Aki, which meant her English didn’t need to be perfect. That still wasn’t good enough in post-production, where Hama was overdubbed by German actor Nikki van der Zyl, but it could have been a lot worse.
