The soul of Cobra Kai: the extraordinary, heartbreaking life of Pat ‘Mr Miyagi’ Morita

Nobody – least of all Noriyuki ‘Pat’ Morita – would have predicted Mr Miyagi’s afterlife. Four seasons in and Cobra Kai, the Netflix sequel series that picks up from The Karate Kid films three decades on, is a sleeper smash. Starring the original leads – Ralph Macchio (as cute underdog turned smooth-talking family man Daniel LaRusso), William Zabka (school bully turned middle-aged burnout Johnny Lawrence) and Martin Kove (terrible tyrant turned even more terrible tyrant John Kreese), it’s an exhilarating rejuvenation. 

Morita played Mr Miyagi, the mild-mannered Japanese maintenance man/karate master in four films, beginning with 1984’s charming drama The Karate Kid. It was diminishing returns for the rest but Morita was solid throughout, a wise old man with a broken heart, a selfless, formidable mentor. Morita died in 2005, but the creators of Cobra Kai have ensured that his presence is keenly felt throughout.

There are constant references to Miyagi, both verbal and visual, many of them touching tributes, sensitively baked into the story, his mischief and wisdom both intact. “We view Mr Miyagi as a character on our show,” co-creator Josh Heald once said. “It’s a very powerful character.”

The character came late to Morita – he was 50 when Miyagi arrived. He’d had a lean few years before that, and a turbulent few decades. Having endured a mostly horrendous childhood, he hustled his way into the stand-up circuit in his early 30s, becoming an impressive sitcom star, and then fought his way into The Karate Kid, winning an Oscar nomination for his performance. But threaded in and out of his success was a life littered with turmoil.

Morita’s parents were from Kumamoto, Japan, itinerant farm workers who arrived in the US in 1912. They settled in Sacramento, California, and their boy Noriyuki was born in 1932. At two years old he smashed his lumbar and developed spinal tuberculosis, in and out of comas for years, stuck in a body cast from shoulder to knee until he was 11. Upon release though, in 1941, with the war having kicked in, an FBI agent escorted him directly from the hospital to an internment camp, where his parents, having been slung out of their home, were now imprisoned.

By all accounts, Morita’s years at these places were hellish. “They were America’s version of concentration camps,” he later said. And on top of the general degradation in the camps, the young Morita had spent the previous nine years in hospital with English-speaking people – in the camps, everyone spoke Japanese, which he couldn’t. He didn’t fit in. Some solace was found in the bootleg sake his grandfather made there – the 12-year-old Morita quickly developed a taste for it.

He married at 21, fathering the first of three daughters, and got work in computer operations at Aerojet General. But more horror was to come when, in 1956, he witnessed his father dying after being hit by a pick-up truck, his trousers catching in a wheel. He was dragged up the road for blocks. It’s no wonder that by his late 20s Morita was despondent and miserable, doing well at work but longing for something else. 

He loved watching comedians at San Francisco nightclubs, and decided to take a bite. He gave himself five years and aced it, lying his way in, telling bookers he was a stand-up from Sacramento. It was an unforgiving and often racist industry – “Japs ain’t funny,” one club owner told him – but with his self-deprecating, wise-cracking act he did well, soon being scouted by television producers and getting work in sitcoms. He had a five-year stint as diner owner Arnold on Happy Days, and appeared in The Odd Couple, MASH and Sanford And Son before work dried up.

By 50, he was doing anything he could to make money, taking whatever jobs he could, and writing copy for adverts. The Karate Kid seemed to come from nowhere. Despite Morita’s comic credentials, director John G Avildsen, who’d hit big with 1976’s Rocky, saw something in him for Miyagi. Producer Jerry Weintraub was dead against it: “We need a real actor,” he said. But Avildsen persisted, bringing Morita in for a screentest.

Having seen that, Weintraub u-turned, and watching the footage on YouTube you can see why – Miyagi is born there and then, fully-formed, this humble teacher with a knowing glint in his eye and a thick Japanese accent (Morita’s natural accent was American). 

The film’s screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen said that Morita embodied what he’d written – that Morita “created” the character. Morita infused much of himself into the role, from his humour to his perspective. “Although I hate to think that he talked like Mr Miyagi, he kind of did,” wrote his daughter Aly in Hyphen magazine in 2010. “When he wasn’t going off on one of his long-winded, self-absorbed soliloquies, my father spoke – without the thick Japanese accent – in ambiguous certainties.”

Miyagi’s more enlightened qualities owed a lot to Morita. Macchio says Morita had a “soulful magic” about him. Zabka said that as an actor, Morita mentored him; Zabka called him Uncle Pat, while Elisabeth Shue, who played Daniel’s girlfriend Ali, told Sports Illustrated that Morita was “a zen presence on the set. Everybody really looked up to him.” 

But as well as himself, Morita drew from others – from his stunt double, Fumio Demura, from his father, from his brother, and from the spirit of the men who made up the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the Japanese American combat unit that fought in World War II between 1943 and 1945. 

Morita is great throughout, but the scene in which, considerably drunk, he tells Daniel about his history, about the death of his wife and son during childbirth, is the anchor. The tragedy happened while they were in an internment camp, as Miyagi was fighting with his colleagues in the 442nd.

The interment camp material was of course, personal to Morita, and Miyagi’s wife was named Yuki, after Morita’s own (second) wife at the time, to provide even more resonance. Morita wanted to pay tribute to his heritage, and to the atrocity of those internment camps. When he finished filming the scene, the crew were crying. The Oscar nomination was well deserved.

After The Karate Kid, though, Morita’s troubles picked up again in earnest. He was given his own television series, as police detective Ohara, but it wasn’t a hit and was soon cancelled. Even The Karate Kid sequels were damaging, Yuki Morita told Sports Illustrated in 2010: “Things started to fall away. Our marriage was destroyed by it all. Everybody would mimic him – a karate kick or a Miyagi sensei thing. It became cult-like. It hurt him. It was a burden.”

His daughter Aly agreed, writing that the original film was as damning as it was rewarding, that it “ruined his sense of self and purpose. He would forever be branded Mr Miyagi, never allowed a chance to prove his mettle in Hollywood due to the lack of roles for ethnic actors.”

Kevin Derek, the director of a documentary about Morita called More Than Miyagi, expands. “After The Karate Kid it was all master this, sensei that. And you get to a certain age and you're not marketable and you take what you get, and I think the effect that had on Pat is that his drinking started getting worse.”

It did, exponentially, to the point that, as detailed in Derek’s documentary, in a segment that includes interviews with Henry Winkler and other Happy Days alumni, Morita was a wreck for 2005’s reunion of the show, slumped on his hotel steps when he should have been filming a skit, then eventually being driven to the set by this then-wife, Evelyn Guerrero. She weeps as she recalls how awful it was to see him in that state – he was so intoxicated during the filming that his contribution was unusable. 

As Derek’s documentary reaches that final act, it’s incredibly moving, and upsetting. “I didn't want to diminish his character,” says Derek of editing the material he had. “He was such a loving person and so many people look up to him.” Yet Morita himself wanted this story to be told in some form, telling Guerrero that it would be a good thing if it could “help one poor bastard with this disease.”

The footage of him in his final years is very sad to watch. “The weight and loneliness of fame ultimately destroyed him,” wrote Aly Morita. He had long been a self-confessed functioning alcoholic, who drank daily right through his 1980s glory days and beyond, putting vodka in his coffee, being drunk on set without people knowing. But by the end, the situation was hopeless.

Yet everybody in Derek’s documentary – including those who saw Morita at his worst – speaks of him fondly, compassionately and lovingly. “I’d like to be remembered for having touched a lot of lives in happy ways,” he said in a 2000 interview. 

He did that, and then some. And in Cobra Kai, both on screen with Daniel LaRusso’s karate students, and off, with the millions of kids around the world now discovering the character, both Miyagi and Morita are inspiring a new generation. It’s a legacy to be proud of.

Cobra Kai is on Netflix now. More Than Miyagi is available via iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Vimeo. More details at morethanmiyagi.com