Cobra Kai 's Yuji Okumoto thinks Chozen and Silver could have been friends in another life

Fire and gasoline do not mix — and if they do, it's definitely not a friendly interaction.

So when Cobra Kai villain Terry "you're playing with fire" Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) crosses paths with honorable karate master Chozen "and I am gasoline" Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto) in season 5, things are bound to get heated. The ponytailed millionaire preaches a brutal, Way of the Fist style of karate, and he's got big plans to build an empire in the Valley and beyond. Chozen, meanwhile, wants to help Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) keep the kinder, gentler Miyagi-Do way alive.

Still, Okumoto thinks that if Silver and Chozen had met at another time — perhaps a time where there were no dueling karate dojos in the Valley — they might actually have become buds.

"Terry and Chozen are very similar in certain respects," says Okumoto. "They both come from that martial arts world, so there's a certain respect for senseis, and you feel this bond. Who knows, if they were not on different sides of this conflict, then they would probably be able to hang out together. They have a lot of things in common." Of course, the actor acknowledges that "Silver still has a lot of things to work out" — understatement of the year — while "Chozen [already] had the time to be able to figure out what true martial arts is about."

Okay, so a Chozen-Silver bromance is not looking likely this season. At least the Okinawan badass finds a kindred karate spirit in fellow reformed bully Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). "The dynamic between chosen and Johnny's character is explosive," says Okumoto. "He's a seasoned actor, and so much of that chemistry is built in already, because I've known Billy for so long. But this is the first time we actually got a chance to [work] together." (Though both met on set of Karate Kid Part II, Okumoto and Zabka didn't share any scenes.)

As viewers saw in the season 5 trailer, Chozen and Johnny team up to kick a little Cobra Kai butt this season — which is one of the reasons Okumoto started training six months before production began. "When you're 20-something years old doing Karate Kid II, it's a lot different than when you're in your sixties and trying to do all these crazy fight scenes," he says. "Thank God I had a really good trainer up here in Seattle, Wash., who really worked me out really well, and stretched me a lot. So when the time came to jump on the set and do all these fight scenes, I was pretty prepared to take care of business."

Cobra Kai season 5 is streaming now on Netflix.

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