First Naturalized Japanese to be featured in a major Hollywood production

Nick Zappetti, American "mafia boss of Tokyo"

A few years ago, I reviewed the excellent book "Tokyo Underworld" by Robert Whiting, which featured an Italian-American by the name of Nicholas aka Nick Zappetti who immigrated to Japan after The War and became a bit of a minor kingpin in the legitimate (and illegitimate) recovering economy of the State of Japan during the "anything goes" days of the black markets. One of his big contributions to the post-war creature comforts of Tokyo, especially if you were a soldier (or spy) stationed in Japan, was his American-style Italian restaurants that featured American style pizza (contrary to what Americans believe, the common U.S. versions of pizza is no more authentic than Japanese style pizza).

I featured the book on this site because Zappetti was one of the early pioneer Americans who would naturalize to Japanese, becoming 小泉二コラ {KOIZUMI Nikora}. While he was definitely not the first to do so — not just Asians, but westerners have been doing it as early as 1896 during the Meiji Era (明治時代 {Meiji jidai} 1868…1912) of Japan — he was arguably one of the most high profile and controversial characters to have done it during Japan's modern 20th century era.

In the previous post, I mentioned that Hollywood, including Martin Scorsese, was interested in adapting it for the big screen (or small screen) with Warner Brothers. However, like many projects where the option is bought from the book author but it never gets made, it got stuck in production hell.

It appears now that many of the roadblocks that deviled it in the past have been resolved and it may be made into one episode for the modern streaming era, or perhaps a series.

As Nicola — "Nikora" in ローマ字 {rōmaji} (Japanese approximated with Latin letters) — is a major character in the first Tokyo Underworld book, it would be reasonable to expect the person to make an appearance in the series as well.