I’m not sure if you speak Japanese but Connery’s is not just silly, it is legendary.

People perhaps don’t remember how remote, unfamiliar and insignificant Japan was in the late 60s, to western people. Air travel was very expensive.

My parents-in-law, who lived in Tokyo at that time, remember the film as being one of the events that helped put Japan into international consciousness. The others being the Tokyo Olympics and marriage of John and Yono.

“Lost in Translation,The Episode 1”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amnpKeRivMI&feature=PlayList&p=8741BFDF0D17E1D3&index=26

Nor was his makeup. Incidentally, one fun thing about that movie is they are driving from Tokyo south to check up on Osato, in the special custom-built Toyota 2000GT that Toyota build for the film, it is amusing for someone who knows Japan to see that for some reason they head north to go south. I forget the exact tourist attraction they drove by, but it was obviously just for the Travel Brochure aspect of the film.

http://news.3yen.com/2008-11-02/james-bond-in-japan-radio-drama-version-of-you-only-live-twice/

By all accounts, Connery had a miserable time filming in Japan and wore a permanent scowl. He was getting tired making the Bond films and found the attentions of the Japanese press and Japanese fans very intrusive to the extent that one photographer tried to get shots of him in the toilet.

I listened to the DVD commentary track for the film some years ago and Tetsuro Tamba, who died in 2006, played a key role in handling the two Japanese actresses. Toho may have put up talent up for the jobs but the producers found most of the actresses badly wanting. They seriously considered rejecting them all and using Asian Americans or Hong Kong Chinese instead. They eventually plumped for Mie Hama and Akiko Wakabayashi but soon ran into trouble.

Mie Hama was chosen to play the role of Suki but couldn’t master the dialogue. Tamba was told over dinner that she would have to be fired and was asked to break it to her. He allegedly came back and said that she would accept the decision without complaint but would have no choice but to commit suicide. The shocked producers asked if he could do anything. Tamba came up with the compromise where Hama would play Kissy Suzuki, swapping roles with Wakabayashi who instead played Tiger Tanaka’s agent Suki – except she managed to rename the character Aki. The producers say they still don’t know whether Tamba told them the truth or conned them.

It was quite common for the Bond producers to dub characters. Gert Fröbe’s Goldfinger was dubbed and Tamba’s own dialogue in “You Only Live Twice” was spoken by Robert Rietty. Consequently, Hama didn’t actually have to speak English well but her performance fell somewhere between the two: it didn’t look natural enough to be successfully dubbed but wasn’t comprehensible either. She also had a problem later with the swimming scenes because she had cramps. The woman you see swimming in the film is actually Diane Cilento, Connery’s wife at the time, in a black wig.

Ironically, the producers were told that the biggest miscasting, as far as Japanese audiences were concerned, was Tamba himself because he was far too young to be the head of the country’s secret service.