Nanako Matsushima: abroad the Ring heroine, at home television’s safest bet

Nanako Matsushima

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 13, 1973 Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	When Marnie Was There, Ring, Grave of the Fireflies
Awards	Élan d'or · Hashida · Golden Arrow · 2 Academy Award · Nikkan Sports Drama Grand Prix

Outside Japan, Nanako Matsushima is the woman who presses play. As Reiko Asakawa, the reporter who watches a cursed videotape and then has seven days to work out what she has unleashed, she carried Hideo Nakata’s Ring across borders and into the wave of Japanese horror that followed it. At home, that film is almost a footnote. There she is the actress a network calls when a prime-time slot cannot be allowed to fail, and the largest audience she ever drew tuned in to watch her play a woman who barely moves her face.

That split is the best way into a career now well into its fourth decade. Matsushima grew up in Yokohama’s Tsurumi ward and spent her teenage years in Zama, Kanagawa. Near the end of her first year of high school, scouts from the fashion magazine ViVi picked her out as a reader model, and she had to talk her parents round before she could accept. By eighteen she was one of the magazine’s exclusive models, and that same year she made her acting debut in a TBS drama.

Commercials did more for her than those first roles. A teriyaki burger spot for McDonald’s got her noticed, a swimsuit campaign for Asahi Kasei followed, and a Nissan car advertisement built around a single drawled line multiplied the offers. A recurring part as the butt of a Fuji TV variety sketch made her face familiar to a mass audience before she had carried anything on her own. She was twenty-two, born in Yokohama on 13 October 1973, when the call that changed that came from NHK.

In 1996 she beat roughly 2,000 hopefuls to the lead of the morning serial Himawari, her first starring role. The producers took her out for eel after the audition; a producer later told her the meal was a test, because the part had eating scenes and they wanted to see how she ate. Within a year she had also become the second face of Matsushita Electric’s “beautiful older sister” advertising campaign and topped a poll of the country’s best-liked actresses.

The run that followed is hard to match. In 1998 she took her first film lead in Ring, which earned her a Japan Academy Film Prize nomination for best actress, and that summer she played the earnest young teacher Azusa Fuyutsuki opposite Takashi Sorimachi in Great Teacher Onizuka, whose final episode drew a 35.7 percent rating. In 1999 she fronted three hit serials, among them Kyumei Byoto 24 Ji, the Fuji TV emergency-room drama in which she played the young doctor Kaede Kojima beside Yosuke Eguchi. Yamato Nadeshiko, in 2000, cast her as a flight attendant hunting for a rich husband and passed 30 percent. The snowbound thriller Whiteout brought a second Japan Academy nomination, and in 2002 she shared the lead of NHK’s year-long historical drama Toshiie to Matsu with Toshiaki Karasawa. No actress before her had headlined both an NHK morning serial and one of its flagship historical dramas.

She married Sorimachi on 21 February 2001, and the two held a joint press conference at Fuji TV that the tabloids treated as the arrival of the century’s first celebrity couple. Their daughters were born in 2004 and 2007, and Matsushima stepped back from serial work while they were small. Both of her returns to full-time drama, in 2005 and in 2009, came through the same emergency ward of Kyumei Byoto 24 Ji.

The weakness in her legend is the yardstick used to build it. Matsushima’s career has been narrated almost entirely in ratings percentages, a currency that rewards reliability and punishes risk, and for long stretches she was cast to deliver the number rather than to be tested. Her most interesting choices came when she cut against the warmth that sold advertising. In a 2005 television adaptation of Grave of the Fireflies, she played the aunt whose coldness drives two children who have lost their mother out of her house, a part she later admitted she had at first not wanted to take. The work that built her reputation lives on Japanese network schedules, while Hollywood’s 2002 remake, The Ring, handed her most exportable role to Naomi Watts.

The biggest test of the image came in 2011 with I’m Mita, Your Housekeeper. Akari Mita is a domestic worker who carries out any instruction, however absurd or harmful, with the same flat “Understood”, a line Matsushima delivered 88 times across the series. The final episode reached a 40.0 percent household rating, the first Japanese drama this century to cross that mark, and Mita’s stock phrases spread into offices and classrooms. Her largest success was built on the removal of everything that had made her popular.

The years since have been steadier. She worked again with Jun Matsumoto on Lucky Seven, went to Cannes with Takashi Miike‘s Shield of Straw, and voiced Yoriko Sasaki, the anxious foster mother in Studio Ghibli‘s When Marnie Was There. She returned to the NHK morning serial in 2019, 23 years after Himawari, and in 2023 played the mother of Matsumoto’s Tokugawa Ieyasu in the network’s historical drama. Since the start of the Reiwa era that year, with child-raising easing off, she has taken on serials more regularly. In 2024 the couple reunited on screen in a special revival of Great Teacher Onizuka, and in 2025 she joined Anpan as the mother of the hero modelled on the Anpanman creator Takashi Yanase.

The current year has been her busiest in a long time. From January to March she led Okome no Onna on TV Asahi as a veteran investigator at Tokyo’s regional tax bureau, her first serial lead on that network. Over the summer she came back as Azusa in the new Great Teacher Onizuka series led by Sorimachi. On 12 October, Fuji TV relaunched Kyumei Byoto 24 Ji for a sixth series, its first full run since 2013 and the first time the franchise has aired in the network’s Monday 9pm drama slot, with Eguchi and Matsushima together again for the first time since a 2010 special.

Kojima now runs the emergency centre as its deputy head, charged with training young doctors whose views on work no longer match her own, and Matsushima has said she intends to play her a little looser around Eguchi’s Shindo this time. The series airs on Monday nights through the autumn. Twenty-seven years after she played the trainee, the role asks her to be the teacher, and every episode will be read, as her career always has been, through the ratings.