Arisa Nakano, the niece from Perfect Days who won her first best actress prize abroad

Arisa Nakano

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	2005 Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Perfect Days
Awards	Gawad Urian · Takasaki Film Festival Best Emerging Actor

The part was small. A teenager runs away from her mother’s house, sleeps two nights in her uncle’s cramped flat, rides along on his rounds of Tokyo’s public toilets and is collected by a chauffeured car before she has worked out what kind of man he is. Wim Wenders built Perfect Days around the silences of Koji Yakusho, and the niece, Niko, was the person sent in to crack them. Arisa Nakano, who had never acted before, did it with so little visible effort that audiences left the film asking who she was.

The fullest answer so far came from somewhere else. Her first best actress prize was handed out in Manila, for a Filipino film that reached Japanese cinemas long after the critics there had voted. At home she is still mostly known as the girl on the bicycle beside Yakusho. The films she has lined up suggest that is about to change, although not quite in the way the prize implied.

Nakano grew up in Tokyo, where she was born in 2005, and was working as a fashion model while still at school, starting in the pages of the magazine GINZA and moving on to advertising. That training matters more than it looks. A model learns to hold a frame without speaking, and Niko is a character who does most of her work by watching. Wenders’ film grew out of the Tokyo Toilet project in Shibuya, and its casting brought in a schoolgirl with no screen credits to play opposite an actor who would leave Cannes with the best actor prize. Her agency is étrenne. Off set she embroiders and makes accessories, and she has said she would like to try writing and drawing.

Perfect Days went on to represent Japan at the Academy Awards and was nominated for best international feature. Nakano’s share of its afterlife was modest and specific. The Osaka Cinema Festival gave her its newcomer award, and she recorded a cover of “Aoi Sakana”, a song heard in the film, as the first release of the Mágico project. Her next screen jobs were leads. In the Hulu Japan original I Still Want to See Dreams, directed by Ryo Sena, a university student who had won the platform’s young-creators competition, she played Yumeko Maeda, a student who wants to become a manga artist.

The decisive role came from the Philippines. Jaime Pacena II, a Filipino filmmaker with long ties to Rikuzentakata, made Kono Basho, released internationally as This Place, in the coastal city that is still rebuilding after the tsunami of March 2011. Gabby Padilla plays Ella, a Filipina who travels to Japan for the funeral of the father who left her family to work abroad, and who there meets his second family. Nakano plays Reina, the half-sister she has never met, a painter. The film follows two women grieving the same man from opposite ends of his life, each in her own way, in a city whose recovery runs alongside theirs.

The film premiered at the Cinemalaya festival in Manila in 2024, and at the 48th Gawad Urian, the awards of the Filipino film critics’ circle, Nakano won best actress in October 2025, in a field that included Padilla. A columnist for the Daily Tribune wrote that she won the final vote by a single ballot over Jenaica Sangher and called her the first foreigner to take the prize. Japanese audiences only got to see Kono Basho when it opened in their cinemas in February 2026.

There is a pattern in her filmography worth naming, and it is not entirely flattering to the industry around her. Nakano keeps being cast as someone defined by a relationship to the lead: a niece, a half-sister, a classmate, a younger version of another actress’s character. The quality critics praised in Niko, a presence that is quiet but hard to look away from, is exactly what directors look for in a performer they plan to place beside a bigger star. The Urian jury saw something different, an actress able to carry the emotional weight of a film, and they saw it in a co-production few Japanese viewers had heard of. Recognition in Japan, so far, has come for supporting turns.

That recognition is real. In Catching the Stars of This Summer, Tamaki Yamamoto’s Toei adaptation of the Mizuki Tsujimura novel, set in 2020 among high-school students who run an online stargazing contest when the pandemic shuts down their clubs, she played Madoka Sasano, a student on the Goto Islands, in a film led by Hiyori Sakurada. The role, shot largely at night, earned her the best emerging actor award at the 39th Takasaki Film Festival in March 2026. On television she joined the Kansai TV drama School Lawyer: Finding the Colors of the Stars, starring Hayato Isomura as a lawyer assigned to a newly merged high school, as the student Kitahara.

Two films now in the pipeline put her beside directors with serious festival standing. In In My Father’s Room, the novelist Maha Harada’s first film as a director, adapted from her own short story, Yu Aoi plays Satomi, a museum attendant piecing together the last years of her late father, played by Issey Ogata; Nakano plays Satomi as a girl. The film competed at San Sebastián in September and left with the FIPRESCI critics’ prize. It opens in Japan on 29 January 2027.

Later in 2027 comes The Blue We Touch, Hiroshi Ishikawa’s first feature since Petal Dance thirteen years ago, produced by Bitters End, the company behind Drive My Car. Nao and Erika Karata lead the ensemble. Nakano plays Nozomi, a classmate of an art student, played by Yuzu Aoki, who watches him change at close range. It is another observer’s part, written for the kind of attention she gives a scene. The question her next few years have to answer is whether a Japanese director will hand her the centre of a film, as a Filipino one already has.

Tags: actors, actresses, Japanese cinema, Koji Yakusho, Arisa Nakano, Perfect Days, Wim Wenders

Related People

Related People

Discussion