Tamlyn Tomita pops into pidgin as easily as she flashes her smile.
"Hey, we go grindz!" she says, explaining that she always calls on old friends for a meal when she visits here. She laughs, again with a smile that takes advantage of the best set of cheekbones this side of Daniel Dae Kim.
As a teenager 25 years ago, Tomita captured the hearts of millions of fans in "The Karate Kid, Part II" and began a fine career in movies and television. She is in town as a juror for the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Tomita’s linguistic ability, evidenced by her mastery of pidgin, suggests the work that she has put into her craft. She learned it while working on "Picture Bride," a film about Japanese women who came to Hawaii to marry men they had seen only in photographs.
"We were taught by this lovely native Hawaiian pidgin instructor and she taught us very well, because it was so good and ‘aut’entic,’ our pidgin, that we had to go in and rerecord and soften the pidgin," she said. "It was a little too — not understandable, and they didn’t want to subtitle it."
Tomita also speaks Japanese in the film — a "rough, unrefined brand of Nihongo" — which might seem easy since she was born in Okinawa. But her father was in the military and was stationed there, marrying a woman of Okinawan and Filipino descent. The family moved to Los Angeles when Tomita was an infant, and though she grew up hearing Japanese at home, it was not her first language.
Tomita was an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, when she got the role in "The Karate Kid, Part II." She had no acting or modeling experience but was accustomed to having her picture taken because of her title as Nisei Week queen — Los Angeles’ equivalent of the Cherry Blossom queen — a year earlier. The organizer of the pageant had urged several contestants to audition.
Many filmgoers were charmed by Tomita’s delicate performance of the Japanese tea ceremony. She had taken a tea course at UCLA, which gave filmmakers "a lot of comfort that I would be able to perform it with respect and not be schlocky about it, and not just going through the motions," she said.
The film was generally well-received, and Tomita admits the attention went to her head.
"I had to be knocked down by my family," she said. "They told me to have it in your head that it’s going to be over."
She tried to return to UCLA, intent on becoming a history teacher, but the acting offers continued and Tomita soon realized that acting and teaching history had many things in common.
"The thing I love about acting is that you get to study history — about the period, about the story you’re going to be involved in, research the kind of background you’re going to be in, whether you’re going to be from Aiea versus from Molokai or from Long Island or from Florida," she said.
She chose roles based not on pursuing stardom, but on the opportunity to tell a good story, saying her job "is to serve the story, first and foremost, than it is to serve the audience." That decision came upon the advice of Nobu McCarthy, who also appeared in "The Karate Kid, Part II" and developed a film career after one in modeling.
"She gave me that permission to not be glamorous," Tomita said. "She told me, ‘Get your foundation in what you want to do. And if you want to tell stories, if you want to act, get down and dirty and do it.’"
Tomita went on to take roles in films such as "The Joy Luck Club" and "Hundred Percent," as well as in a variety of television series. While her ethnicity was a key aspect of those roles, it was not in many others, an indication of what she called "a progressive continuum of just seeing actors play the character."
"We’re at that point where I can play characters named Tracy Minetti (in the television show "JAG") or Jenny Dodge ("24") and there’s no question," she said. "Maybe she married or she’s adopted, it doesn’t really matter because she’s not playing Japanese-American, she’s just playing an American who happens to be whatever descent she comes from."
She advises aspiring actors and filmmakers to watch a film three times: once normally, once without sound and once without looking at the picture.
"It’s trying to heighten the senses of what it means to tell the story," she said.
"Get a camera and shoot whatever story you want to tell. It could be two, three minutes. I love and adore stories that can be told in that amount of time."
She also advises actors to "take dance lessons — it’s almost more important than singing." Her first dance tips came from co-star Ralph Macchio on the set of "The Karate Kid, Part II," where she got her first "big, big, big lesson" from director John Avildsen.
"Acting is reacting," she said. "Just listen to what’s being said to you and then say your lines back. And then you just play around with it. It’s just the natural ease about communicating with somebody in the scene."
