I don’t know but I can tell you that my wife (she’s Japanese) says that his Japanese is terrible. He is probably reciting it mostly phonetically. He is definitely not fluent.

Yeah. I’m fluent in Japanese and recognized his phonetic deficiencies. Nonetheless, there are enough rapid fire exchanges between he and Hiro to make me wonder how he acquired as much as he did. Fewer people on earth are more particular about their mother tongue than the Japanese. Lee’s Japanese is not “terrible”. Naturally, it would have been better to use a native Japanese speaker. However, as Steven Spielberg is rumored to have found out when he considered directing Memoirs of a Geisha, there aren’t enough bi-lingual Japanese/English speakers in Hollywood who can act worth a damn.