Hayakawa was well known as a linguistics professor and author in California.

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2005)

The lead Japanese actor in the film, S.I. Hayakawa, was not only a prominent actor but a writer and professor of linguistics at San Francisco State University. He was teaching there in 1973 when Hawaii was becoming a largely Japanese island and when many Asian immigrants were living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. He was the chief spokesperson for the elimination of English as the sole official language of both the islands and mainland of the U.S.A.
Here's a quote from an article written about his quarrel with the U.S. government's policy of closest association with Great Britain: "The late semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, the movement's elder statesman, never tired of quoting Theodore Roosevelt at his most intolerant: 'We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house' ([1919] 1926: XXIV, 554)."