Masatoshi Hamada, the Downtown straight man Netflix cast as Koji Yakusho’s rival

Masatoshi Hamada

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 11, 1963 Naniwa-ku, Osaka, Japan
Occupation	Comedian, television presenter and actor
Known for	Pokémon the Movie 2000

Kankuro Kudo spent the whole of pre-production half-convinced that Masatoshi Hamada would never actually show up. He only believed it when he saw a prop photo from the shoot: Hamada as a “sauna prosecutor”, wearing a haircut Kudo described as shocking. What surprised him more came later, on the monitors. In Did Someone Happen to Mention Me?, the Netflix comedy Kudo wrote for Koji Yakusho, Hamada plays Mibu, the bankable star whose success eats at Yakusho’s fading stage actor, and Kudo said that, contrary to the image, Hamada gave “a very serious and sincere performance”.

The image is the whole question. For four decades Hamada has been the tsukkomi of Downtown, the straight man whose job was to knock Hitoshi Matsumoto’s absurdities back to earth, often with an open palm to the back of the head. Matsumoto was cast as the genius and Hamada as the hand. And the hand has a rule about acting: he takes screen credits under the registered spelling of his name, with an older form of the first character, so that if a role fails it fails on him alone and never on the duo. For the past two and a half years, with Matsumoto gone from broadcast television, he has been protecting a partnership that has had only one of its members on air.

He was born on 11 May 1963 in Naniwa-ku, Osaka, and grew up in Amagasaki, in Hyogo. His father was a house painter who worked on the Soviet pavilion at Expo ’70 and named his son after Yoshinori Hirose, a star of the Nankai Hawks baseball team. Hamada and Matsumoto became friends in their second year of middle school. After a run of trouble, Hamada was packed off to a strict boarding high school, failed the interview to become a professional boat racer and, almost by accident, picked up a flyer for Yoshimoto’s new comedy school, NSC. He talked Matsumoto into enrolling with him. They joined its first Osaka class in 1982.

Their manzai was slow when the boom of the time was fast, and the veteran Yasushi Yokoyama dismissed it as the small talk of street punks. Kansai disagreed. The afternoon show 4-ji desu yo-da made them local stars from 1987, Yume de Aetara took them to Tokyo the following year, and in 1989 Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! began a run that is still on Nippon TV. From 1994 Hamada spent eighteen years needling J-pop royalty on Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ, and one of his guests, Tetsuya Komuro, produced him as H Jungle with t. Their 1995 single WOW WAR TONIGHT sold more than two million copies. In 2004 he sang Chicken Rice, a Matsumoto lyric set to music by Noriyuki Makihara.

The acting career that Netflix is now treating as a comeback was real. In the 1990s Hamada carried prime-time dramas: Jinsei wa Jōjō da alongside Takuya Kimura, Ryōma ni Omakase! with Hamada as Sakamoto Ryōma, and in 2001 Ashita ga Aru sa, a salaryman comedy that became a film the following year. He also became the Japanese voice of Shrek, through four films. Hosting gradually took over. Prebat!!, Junk Sports, the radio and TV franchise Gobu Gobu and the New Year blind-test special Geinōjin Kakuzuke Check made him an unusually efficient MC. He was known for wrapping Downtown DX in about seventy minutes of tape when most studio shows record double their airtime.

That efficiency hides an awkward truth he has never bothered to deny. The man who recruited Matsumoto into comedy says he does not watch M-1, the contest his partner judges, and Matsumoto has mocked him on air for it. Hamada’s comedy is not a theory but a reflex, built on the slap, on rough handling of junior comedians and on insults he aims at senior stars and later apologises for off camera. Japanese television has spent recent years tightening its rules around exactly that kind of humour. In June 2026 Hamada told his radio listeners that variety TV had stopped being funny and urged the industry: “Let’s go back to the old days.” The nostalgia is sincere, and it is also the weakest part of his case. He made it while his own partner remained absent from the networks over a scandal of a very different order.

That scandal set the terms of Hamada’s last three years. In January 2024 Matsumoto suspended his work after the weekly Shūkan Bunshun published allegations of sexual misconduct at private gatherings; he sued the publisher for defamation, then dropped the suit later that year. Hamada stayed on air and said little. In August 2024 he admitted that he wanted to quit while he was still healthy, but that for his partner’s sake he had to hang on for now. In March 2025 Yoshimoto announced that he was stepping away on doctors’ advice after months of poor health. He returned on 2 May with a handwritten note that read, roughly, “Right, let’s go”. Downtown DX ended in June 2025 after almost 32 years, and his Yomiuri TV vehicle Hamachan ga! followed in September.

Matsumoto came back on 1 November 2025 through DOWNTOWN+, a subscription service Yoshimoto built around the duo. Hamada’s work there has been solo, including a monthly karaoke show, Hamada Utakō, which began in June 2026. As of mid-2026 the service had not put the two men on screen together. His first solo art exhibition ran from October 2025 to January 2026, and in May 2026 TV Asahi gave him his first show under his own name at the network in 26 years, a series in which athletes such as Atsuya Furuta and Ai Miyazato chart the highs and lows of their lives.

The Netflix series, released worldwide on 22 October 2026, is his first drama since 2010. At the press event, director Fuminori Kaneko said Hamada spoke to the crew in polite Japanese, and co-star Hiroshi Yamamoto had never seen him sit through a wait in silence. Yakusho, who shares a confrontation scene with him, said he had expected someone far more frightening.

Off screen, Hamada has been married to the actress Natsumi Ogawa since 1989. Their elder son is Hama Okamoto, bassist of the rock band OKAMOTO’S, who played on his father’s 2012 single Love Letter under the credit “someone’s son”.

Next comes a first: a solo band concert, announced on 17 October as part of DOWNTOWN+’s first anniversary, with dates still to be confirmed. The comedian who says he wants to retire while he is healthy keeps adding new stages, and the question he leaves open is whether he is holding on to Downtown or finally building something of his own.

Tags: actors, comedians, Koji Yakusho, Did Someone Happen to Mention Me?, Masatoshi Hamada, Downtown

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