In the 1910s, in a deeply segregated United States, white women reportedly threw their fur coats over a muddy puddle so a Japanese actor's shoes would stay clean. This episode uncovers the extraordinary life of Kintaro Hayakawa, known to the world as Sessue Hayakawa, from a wealthy family in Chiba Prefecture where a ruptured eardrum ended his naval career and a failed seppuku attempt nearly ended his life.

The conversation examines the likely myth of his University of Chicago football days, his start on a Little Tokyo stage, the 500-dollar-a-week bluff that producer Thomas H. Ince accepted, and the 1915 Cecil B. DeMille film The Cheat that made him Hollywood's first male sex symbol of Asian descent. It then follows the gilded cage of citizenship and marriage laws, the typecasting he fought by founding Haworth Pictures with a million dollars ...