Cobra Kai's Final Season Pulls Back The Curtain On A Beloved Karate Kid Character

This article contains spoilers for "Cobra Kai" season 6.

The specter of Mr. Miyagi has always loomed large over "Cobra Kai." The TV sequel to the "Karate Kid" movies takes place 40 years after the events of the 1984 original, focusing on Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) teaching a new generation of kids about karate.

From the beginning, the show followed the original film's themes of the bond between teachers and students and the influence the former hold over the latter. We see this in both the trauma Johnny tries to overcome from his years under Kreese, but also how much Daniel has put Mr. Miyagi up on a pedestal. Really, every aspect of Daniel's life, from his personality to his values, are all shaped by Miyagi's teachings. His car dealership's logo is a bonsai tree and his dojo is at Miyagi's old house, which Daniel inherited from his sensei. Plus, he constantly talks about Miyagi's infinite wisdom when being condescending toward everyone around him — especially Johnny.

Though Miyagi looms large over the show's characters, even though most of them never actually met him, "Cobra Kai" actually kept Daniel's old sensei largely off limits for its first five seasons. Even when Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), the son of Miyagi's best friend, came back into the fold, the focus was on his relationship to Daniel and not really anything related to Mr. Miyagi.

That changes in the first part of season 6, which just released on Netflix. Throughout the course of these five episodes, we learn that Miyagi is not exactly the man we believed him to be.

We first meet Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) as the maintenance man in the apartment complex Daniel and his mom move into in the first "Karate Kid." During the movie, we find out that Miyagi once lived in Hawaii, where he got married. But after WWII began, Miyagi and his pregnant wife were put in an internment camp at Manzanar. While Miyagi was off fighting for the U.S. army, his wife died in childbirth because there were no doctors on-site to help. This tragic backstory was deepened in "The Next Karate Kid," the oft-forgotten fourth movie in the franchise that replaced Ralph Macchio with Hilary Swank. That film opens with Mr. Miyagi being honored for his service in the war, all while the presenter talks about the horrors of Japanese-American interment camps.

However, apart from this and some vague information we get about Miyagi's childhood in Japan during "The Karate Kid Part II," we've known very little about the man up to this point.

In the third episode of "Cobra Kai" season 6, Daniel discovers a hidden box in Mr. Miyagi's old apartment. The box includes a newspaper clip of a story about the police looking for a man who committed robbery and assault — one identified as Keisuke Miyagi. They also find a fake passport and later discover that Miyagi was involved with a shady boxing gym. We even find out that he fled the U.S. after the alleged robbery.

The fake name is actually a clever nod to a decades-long mystery about Miyagi's true name, which has actually changed with every movie. The first film identifies him as Hideo Miyagi, but "Part II" changes this to Nariyoshi Miyagi, the name used on Miyagi's gravestone in "Cobra Kai." The name Keisuke, meanwhile, wasn't mentioned at all until "The Next Karate Kid."

In time, Daniel also learns that Miyagi participated in the global karate tournament Sekai Taikai after uncovering his team leader headband, which is coincidentally covered in decades-old blood. The knowledge that Miyagi wasn't the saint Daniel thought him to be shakes him to his core, throwing him off balance in the process.

The thing is, though, Miyagi was never a saint and Daniel only saw one side of his old mentor. In "The Next Karate Kid," we see Miyagi's unfamiliarity with training a young woman, and he makes plenty of mistakes. His teachings about balance, forgiveness, and inner strength are all clearly not just from a man who suffered immensely in his youth, but a man who has taken several missteps. Learning that he actually had some things he regrets only humanizes him and makes his teachings more poignant.

"Cobra Kai" is a show about teachers and students, and how the wrong teacher can forever mess up a student while the right one can save a person. Making Miyagi more than a perpetual magical foreigner who serves his white pupils achieve their potential by making him a complicated, flawed individual is one of the best things this show has done for the franchise.

"Cobra Kai" season 6, part 2 will begin streaming on November 28, 2024, with the third and final part arriving in 2025.