Graphic designer Art Irizawa became an unlikely TV celebrity as Fuji on ‘Super Dave’

TORONTO – Graphic designer Arthur Irizawa never aspired to be a celebrity before he landed a role on the television comedy “Super Dave” as Japanese stunt co-ordinator Fuji Hakayito.

By middle age, Irizawa already had a successful career bringing life to some of Canada’s most prominent brands with his artwork. And yet none of that work resonated quite like playing second banana on the hit 1980s show, a role he landed by happenstance.

Irizawa, who died last fall at age 86, wasn’t a man who sought attention despite being notable to a generation of viewers. His family said that’s one reason why his passing at a Toronto long-term care facility on Sept. 29, 2022 was kept mostly among those closest to him. A memorial was held last December.

“Dad was a very private person in many respects, although anyone who really knew him wouldn’t say that,” said his daughter Rayna Nishidera.

“He was so outgoing, a joy to be around.”

Born on Vancouver Island in 1935, Irizawa came of age during a period of great tumult. As a young boy, he was forcibly detained with other Japanese Canadians at the Tashme Incarceration Camp in British Columbia, after the attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.

When the war ended, Irizawa moved to Toronto and later attended the Ontario College of Art — now known as OCAD University. Hired in the 1960s by influential design firm Stewart & Morrison Ltd., he drafted logos for consumer items, including candy bars and body care products.

Working under branding artisan Hans Kleefeld, whose Bank of Montreal logo is one of the country’s best-known, Irizawa handled the typography for various BMO items, such as cheques and withdrawal slips.

Irizawa remained deeply connected to his heritage, joining the board of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in 1974. He designed the organization’s 1977 centennial logo commemorating the arrival of the first documented immigrant from Japan.

By the mid-1980s, Irizawa’s career was headed in the unlikeliest of directions thanks to an agent friend in the entertainment industry. They heard that U.S. comedian Bob Einstein was on the search for a Japanese man to cast in “Super Dave,” which was filmed partly in Ontario, and encouraged Irizawa to try out.

The series revolved around Super Dave Osborne, an Evel Knievel-esque stuntman first played by Einstein on 1970s variety shows, and later on “Bizarre,” a sketch comedy co-produced by CTV and U.S. cable channel Showtime.

The running gag was Super Dave’s failure to land any of his ambitious stunts without incredible failure and some kind of exaggerated injury. Occasionally his sidekick Fuji would make a brief appearance played by a different actor.

When “Bizarre” ended its run in 1986, Einstein saw a chance to give Super Dave his own series. He wanted to hold auditions to recast the role of Fuji, presenting him as the optimistic klutz to Super Dave’s overconfident buffoon.

McAleer added that trip cancellation insurance usually includes trip interruption insurance for travellers for who have to return early from for reasons outside their control.

“I said: ‘I’m not an actor.’”

That didn’t seem to faze Einstein, who died in 2019. He instantly warmed to his new Fuji at the audition.

“The Super Dave Osborne Show” debuted in 1987 and ran for five seasons on Global TV and Showtime. Positioned as a slapstick comedy about the daredevil and his death-defying stunts, it featured popular musical guests, including Ray Charles, Celine Dion, k.d. lang and Blue Rodeo.

Then there was Irizawa. Dressed in a navy blue hat emblazoned with the letters “FUJI,” he played his character as a man of few words spoken in a thick Japanese accent that wasn’t his own.

“It’s the accent that makes it funny,” Irizawa insisted in his real voice during the 2019 interview.

“Because without it, me speaking like this, it can be anybody. It doesn’t have to be a guy named Fuji anymore.”

“Super Dave” aired weekly which gave Irizawa a certain degree of public recognition.

“He kind of grew into the role and accepted it,” said his daughter.

“He had these Fuji baseball caps and would wear them from time to time. (When people recognized him) they’d say, ‘Hey aren’t you…’ and then he would put on the accent.”

However, not everyone was pleased with Fuji, one of the few Japanese representations on television during that period.

When Fox Television launched the Saturday morning cartoon series “Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire” in 1992, some viewers took issue with the animated version of Fuji, which Irizawa voiced.

Kenyon Chan, an Asian-American child psychologist and member of the Fox Children’s Network advisory board, said the sketches were uncomfortably close to caricatures of Japanese people in Second World War cartoons.

In a letter to Fox executives, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Chan detailed his problems with Fuji’s illustrated appearance, which included a protruding lip, “slit eyes” behind enormous glasses and a heavy Japanese accent that evoked the “worst stereotypes I have ever seen in the media.”

Fox responded by working with Irizawa to film live-action sequences that opened each episode, an attempt to humanize the character. But the animated series was not renewed for a second season.

Irizawa continued to play Fuji in the years that followed, appearing in the live-action “Super Dave” show until it ended in 1999. He returned for the straight-to-video movie “The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave” a year later.

He also played small roles in a number of other Canada-shot films, including ski comedy “Out Cold,” and live-action versions of “Dudley Do-Right” and “Mr. Magoo,” but largely retired from the industry.

Friends and family know Irizawa for what he achieved outside of television.

He loved the outdoors, delighted in jazz — once planning to open his own jazz bar — and owned an extensive smoking pipe collection, with one often dangling from his mouth as he challenged pals to a game of poker.

Irizawa had three children, two sons and Nishidera, with his ex-wife, Edith. And while the couple legally separated, they maintained a close friendship and lived together in their later years.

“My mom and my dad went through difficult times, but I guess at heart they were always the best of friends,” recalled Nishidera.

“He had two sons, and so (mine) was a special bond. I was his little bear – he called me bear growing up. And the life lessons he taught, they did stick with me.

“He was all about living life to the fullest.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 20, 2023.

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