Tamlyn Tomita

Tamlyn Naomi Tomita is a Japanese-American actress. She made her screen debut as Kumiko in the 1986 film The Karate Kid Part II, later reprising the role in the television series Cobra Kai in 2021. She is also widely known for portraying Waverly in the 1993 drama film The Joy Luck Club. Throughout her career, she has performed in independent films, studio features, and numerous television productions.

Tomita was born on January 27, 1966, on a U.S. military base in Okinawa and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father was a Japanese-American who was in an internment camp during World War II before becoming a LAPD officer, and her mother was of half-Native Okinawan and half-Filipino descent. Tomita graduated from Granada Hills High School and attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to study history, aiming to become a history teacher. In 1984, while a junior at UCLA, she was crowned queen of Nisei Week. This led to an audition for The Karate Kid Part II after being asked by 1963 queen Helen Funai.

In film, Tomita earned major roles in features such as Come See the Paradise (1990), The Joy Luck Club (1993), Picture Bride (1994), and Four Rooms (1995). In the 2000s, her film work included a lead role in Robot Stories (2003), playing Janet Tokada in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), starring in the Brazilian film Gaijin 2: Love Me as I Am (2005), and appearing in Only the Brave.

Her television career began with daytime soap roles, including Santa Barbara in 1988, followed by General Hospital in 2008 and Days of Our Lives in 2012. She appeared in the 1993 pilot movie for Babylon 5 as Lt. Commander Takashima and was a series regular on The Burning Zone from 1996 to 1997. Over the years, Tomita made guest appearances on shows such as Quantum Leap, Living Single, Murder, She Wrote, Chicago Hope, Will & Grace, Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Criminal Minds.

Tomita also established longer recurring roles on popular series, including 24, JAG, Eureka, Heroes, Law & Order: Los Angeles, Glee, Teen Wolf, How to Get Away with Murder, and Chasing Life. In 2016, she was a series regular on the Epix drama Berlin Station, and from 2017 to 2019, she held a recurring role on the ABC medical drama The Good Doctor.

In 2020, Tomita took on the recurring role of Commodore Oh in Star Trek: Picard, and in 2021 she returned as Kumiko in Cobra Kai. Beyond her screen credits, she released a solo album titled Sweet Surprise exclusively in Japan. She is married to actor Daniel Blinkoff, with whom she founded the Outside In Theatre in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.