Reiko Douglas, 1936–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

It is not entirely clear who was exploiting whom in Reiko Douglas’s unlikely rise to fame. With her far older American husband, comic Jack Douglas, she made her first U.S. television appearance in 1961 wearing a traditional kimono on The Jack Paar Show. The comic appeal was her almost incomprehensible responses to Paar’s questions, which were “interpreted” by her husband. Yet Reiko’s charm—and the strong suspicion that she was very much in on the joke—led to her becoming a regular on U.S. television talk shows well into the 1970s for hosts Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, David Frost, and Johnny Carson.

Reiko Hashimoto was born “inside a 350-year-old temple in Kanazawa,” said BroadwayWorld.com, as the daughter of a Buddhist priest who abandoned his vows after falling in love “with a young geisha girl in training.” Sent away at age 15 to study acrobatic dancing, she formed a group called the Tokyo Can Can Girls before going solo in 1952. She came to the U.S. in 1955, and was eventually booked in a Los Angeles nightclub as the opening act for Douglas. Smitten, he fulfilled his promise to help her with a visa problem by taking her to City Hall in 1960 and prompting her to say “I do” at the right moment.

Reiko Douglas played a central role in a series of comic memoirs by her husband in the 1970s, said The New York Times, such as Benedict Arnold Slept Here, built around “their disastrous attempt to run an inn in Maine.” By then she had “helped disarm a xenophobic public” distrustful of the Japanese in the wake of World War II—even as she “capitalized handily on American parochialism of the day.”