Koji Yakusho, the star who made a career of men nobody notices

Koji Yakusho

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 1, 1956 Isahaya, Nagasaki, Japan
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Memoirs of a Geisha, Babel, Perfect Days
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · 2 Japan Academy Film Prize · Tokyo International Film Festival Best Actor · Medal with Purple Ribbon · Far East Film Festival Golden Mulberry (lifetime achievement)

Early in Did Someone Happen to Mention Me?, the Netflix comedy Kankuro Kudo wrote around him, Koji Yakusho plays a celebrated actor who flies home from London and discovers that Japan has forgotten his face. The joke only works because the opposite is true. Few faces in Japanese film are harder to forget, and yet Yakusho has spent four decades lending his to men the world looks straight through: a salaryman sneaking off to ballroom lessons, a detective worn down by murders he cannot explain, a quiet man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and asks nothing of anyone. The series turns that career into slapstick and asks the question it has always posed. How does an actor become the most decorated star of his generation by playing people nobody notices?

He was not meant to act at all. Kōji Hashimoto, the youngest of five brothers, grew up in Isahaya, in Nagasaki Prefecture, finished technical high school and moved to Tokyo to take a job at the Chiyoda ward office. A friend took him to see Tatsuya Nakadai in Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, and the clerk decided to change his life.

Mumeijuku, Nakadai’s acting school, took four applicants out of roughly 800 in 1978, and the 22-year-old clerk, born on New Year’s Day 1956, was one of them. Nakadai also gave him his name. Yakusho is the Japanese word for a government office, a nod to the desk he had left behind, chosen as a wish that his range would grow wide.

Television made him first. In 1983 he played the warlord Oda Nobunaga in NHK’s year-long historical drama Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the following year NHK gave him the title role in Miyamoto Musashi. For much of the 1980s he was a handsome swordsman in period costume. Juzo Itami cast him as a gangster in a white suit in Tampopo, a small part in a film that travelled far.

The turn came in two years that rewrote his reputation. In Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? he played Shohei Sugiyama, a salaryman with a mortgage who spots a woman at a dance-studio window from his commuter train and signs up for ballroom lessons in secret. The film set off a ballroom boom in Japan, earned $9.5 million in the United States and was remade in Hollywood with Richard Gere in his part. Within a year came The Eel, Shohei Imamura’s story of a man paroled after killing his wife, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s police procedural about a string of murders with no visible motive, which brought him the best actor prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Both Shall We Dance? and The Eel won him the Japan Academy Prize for best actor.

Cure opened the longest partnership of his career. With Kurosawa he went on to make Charisma, Pulse, Doppelganger, Retribution and Tokyo Sonata, and the pairing gave Japanese horror one of its most unsettling devices: a decent, reasonable face slowly losing its grip. Hollywood came next, with Memoirs of a Geisha and Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Babel, in which he plays the father of Rinko Kikuchi’s deaf teenage daughter. In 2009 he directed his only feature so far, Toad’s Oil, and a year later he led Takashi Miike‘s 13 Assassins as the samurai who assembles the band.

The easy reading of Yakusho is that he is Japan’s everyman, and it sells him short. When the Far East Film Festival in Udine honoured him this spring, its programmers called him the Japanese Tom Hanks, a comparison that captures his popularity and misses the menace. Yakusho has played a violent, corrupt detective in Kazuya Shiraishi’s The Blood of Wolves and a killer who keeps changing his confession in Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s The Third Murder. The same misreading hangs over his most celebrated film. Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days grew out of The Tokyo Toilet, a design project for public restrooms in Shibuya, and some critics asked whether it was an extended advertisement for those buildings, or found the contentment of Hirayama, the cleaner he plays, too tidy to believe. Wenders answered that the film was not about toilets. Yakusho’s performance is the stronger answer. The final shot holds on his face for minutes as he drives to work, and joy and grief pass across it in turn without a word. No advertisement asks for that.

That film crowned a late run that most actors never get. Miwa Nishikawa’s Under the Open Sky cast him as a former gangster trying to rejoin society after thirteen years in prison, and the role won him best performance at the Chicago International Film Festival. On Netflix he played Masao Yoshida, the chief of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, in The Days, and on TBS he played Nogōn Beki, the enigmatic leader at the centre of the hit series VIVANT. Then, in 2023, Perfect Days brought him the best actor award at Cannes, the first for a Japanese actor since Yuya Yagira in 2004. He also served as an executive producer on the film, which went on to an Oscar nomination for best international feature. His fourth Japan Academy Prize for best actor followed, tying Ken Takakura’s record.

He has not slowed down. Mamoru Hosoda keeps returning to his voice, from the gruff swordsman Kumatetsu in The Boy and the Beast through Mirai and Belle to Scarlet last year. In April 2026 Udine gave him its Golden Mulberry for lifetime achievement, along with a seven-film retrospective. In August he appeared in Tetsuya Nakashima’s long-delayed thriller The Brightest Sun, opposite Hidetoshi Nishijima. On 16 October came Children Untold, Nishikawa’s drama about the war orphans she discovered while researching Under the Open Sky, in which he and Yuko Tanaka play an old fishing couple who give runaway children a place to sleep. Six days later Netflix released Did Someone Happen to Mention Me? worldwide, with Yakusho as Gen Takasegawa, the first Japanese actor to lead a production at Shakespeare’s Globe, and the comedian Masatoshi Hamada, back in scripted drama after 16 years, as his rival.

Away from the screen, Yakusho keeps his life private. He has been married since 1982 to a former actress from the Mumeijuku company.

At seventy he is playing a man desperate to be remembered, and the casting is the punchline. What Kudo’s comedy gets right is the hunger underneath. Yakusho’s best work has always lived in that space between being seen and being overlooked, and the series suggests he is still curious about what an actor is worth once the audience stops counting.