Is it only me? Maybe I'm a little bit racist -- on account of my own Latino and Japanese roots (both on my mother's side, as you wouldn't know it to look at me, my father's Viking-homeland ancestry overpowering other traits) -- but seriously, am I the only one who thinks Ken Watanabe and Jimmy Smits look awfully alike?

These are men of a generation, Smits (born in 1955) being by a mere four years the elder of the two (with Watanabe being born in 1959). There are, naturally, the purely ethnographic factors, the goldenness of skin, walnut-brown eyes, straight jet-black hair. But distinctions as well, both being of a formidable height as compared against their countrymen -- Smits at 6'3" and Watanabe just short of 6'1". The exhibit comparable frame and bearing, and though Smits may be a tad more square along the shoulders, both may be characterised by an overall fitness and preparedness for battle. And there is to each of them, an uncanny similar cut to the features of the face; square hairline just so slightly bowed at the center, the straight and subtly flared nose, the occasional wearing of an enviably coiffed moustache and goatee. One wonders from the corners of his eyes whether Smits has some unheralded Asian ancestry. Oh, and naturally both men exude a sense of a raw underlying sexuality, captured and set tightly coiled beneath a veneer of cultured civility, yet capable of being sprung at a moment.

Now I am not suggesting that if these men sat side by side you'd not know which was which, but if all men are cousins (as, indeed, all men ought to be taken), then these two surely could be brothers!!

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FERRASSIC