Kan Mikami once beat the crap out of David Bowie.
Mikami's dustup with the Thin White Duke occurred in the Pacific War saga "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (1983), in which he had a small role opposite Bowie as the sadistic Lt. Ito. Bowie's fame was then at its "Let's Dance" peak; Mikami, by contrast, had lost his audience and largely given up on the singing career that had made him a star a decade earlier when he played at the Nakatsugawa Folk Jamboree — Japan's answer to Woodstock.
Mikami turned to writing and acting, performing in the mid-'70s in the plays and films of his mentor and friend, the avant-garde dramatist Shuji Terayama. Around that time, Kinji Fukasaku — the don of realist yakuza movies — offered him a role in one of his films, "Shin Jingi Naki Tatakai: Kumicho Saigo no Hi" (1976). Mikami found himself cast as a mobster assassin.