Ryusei Yokohama, the karate champion who fought his way out of the heartthrob role

Ryusei Yokohama

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 16, 1996 Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Your Eyes Tell, Kokuho, The Village
Awards	2 Japan Academy Film Prize · Mainichi Film · 3 Hochi Film · Tokyo Drama

Ryusei Yokohama has spent most of his career being underestimated because of the very thing that made him famous. The face sold photo books, filled magazine covers and put a pink-haired delinquent on prime-time television; for one year his name topped Yahoo Japan’s search awards. What the face hid was a Kyokushin karateka who prepares for a role the way a fighter prepares for a bout, and who spent the better part of a decade proving that the poster boy could carry a film. He has won that argument. The question now is what he does with the authority it bought him.

He shares his name with the port city where he was born, and the surname is real, not a stage invention. A scout stopped him in Harajuku on his first family outing there, while he was still in primary school, and Stardust Promotion signed him. For years the agency came second: he has said he skipped many lessons for new recruits because the dojo mattered more, and he became a world youth champion before he had a single lead role.

He was born on September 16, 1996, and his family left Yokohama for Saitama when he was a few months old. The karate title came in 2011, at the International Youth Karate Tournament, in the boys’ under-55kg division. His television debut followed in Kamen Rider Fourze, playing the best friend of a character played by Ryo Yoshizawa, a pairing that would return under very different lights. In Ressha Sentai ToQger, the Super Sentai series that aired in 2014 and 2015, he played Hikari, the cool-headed ToQ 4gou, did most of his own action, and asked for an episode built around karate. Then the work stopped. He has described roughly a year without jobs after the series ended, failing audition after audition and wondering whether he had chosen the wrong life.

The way out came in 2019 with A Story to Read When You First Fall in Love, a TBS romance in which he played Kyohei Yuri, a pink-haired delinquent cramming for university entrance exams. It won him the Tokyo Drama Award for best supporting actor and a mass audience. He followed it with the mystery hit Your Turn to Kill and his first prime-time lead in Panda Judges the World, topped the Yahoo! Search Award that December and, in 2020, collected the Japan Academy Film Prize for newcomer of the year. The industry had found a heartthrob; Yokohama spent the next years refusing to stay one.

The turn was deliberate and physical. In Lee Sang-il’s The Wandering Moon, opposite Suzu Hirose, he played a possessive, violent boyfriend, a part that earned him the Hochi Film Award for best supporting actor in 2022. He dyed his hair silver to play the gambler in Usogui, took a scuba licence for the TBS diving drama DCU, and trained in boxing for more than a year for Takahisa Zeze’s One Last Bloom, passing the Japan Boxing Commission’s professional test in June 2023. Above all he found a director. Michihito Fujii cast him in the anthology DIVOC-12, the Netflix series The Journalist and a village thriller in 2023, which together with the boxing film won him the Hochi award for best actor.

Their next collaboration made the case in full. In Faceless, released in November 2024, Yokohama plays Kaburagi, a young man sentenced to death for a murder that shocked the country, who escapes and stays free for 343 days; every witness who meets him describes a different man. The performance swept the season: the Hochi best actor prize again, the Mainichi Film Award for best lead performance and, in March 2025, the Japan Academy Film Prize for best actor, with Fujii taking best director for the same film.

The following year was his biggest yet. NHK gave him the lead in Berabou, the year-long taiga drama broadcast abroad as Unbound, in which he played the Edo-period publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo across 48 episodes. Months later he reappeared in cinemas opposite Yoshizawa in Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho, as Shunsuke, the heir to a kabuki dynasty who watches an outsider take the place he was born to. Kokuho premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, became the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film ever released at home and reached the Oscar shortlist as Japan’s international feature entry. He also turned up in the Netflix series Last Samurai Standing as Toya Tenmyo, its most unhinged swordsman.

Not every measure of that year flattered him. Berabou closed with an average household rating of 9.5 percent in the Kanto region, the second lowest in the history of the taiga format, even as NHK reported record streaming numbers for it. Kokuho was Yoshizawa’s film first: at the Japan Academy ceremony in March 2026 it won ten prizes, including best actor for Yoshizawa, while Yokohama received one of the Excellent Supporting Actor awards, the academy’s nomination tier, and the top supporting prize went to Jiro Sato. There is also a habit in the Japanese press of treating his licences and training regimes as the review. The boxing test makes a better headline than the acting it was meant to serve, and the acting is the better story: Faceless works because he makes one fugitive believable as a string of strangers.

What has changed this autumn is who is choosing the material. You, Like a Star, Fujii’s adaptation of Yuu Nagira’s novel about two teenagers on an island in the Seto Inland Sea and the fifteen years that follow, exists because Yokohama wanted it to: he had long hoped to see the book filmed and proposed it to Fujii, his collaborator on six earlier projects. He shares top billing with Hirose for the first time. The film was selected for the Busan International Film Festival and opened in Japan on October 9, 2026, debuting fourth at the weekend box office. A week later TBS launched LOST10, an original Friday-night suspense series from the screenwriter Sadoko Okudera, who also adapted Kokuho, and the director Ayuko Tsukahara. Yokohama plays Ogoma, a detective unpicking a mountaineering disaster in Hokkaido, opposite Shun Oguri; it is his first solo lead in a prime-time serial, and it opened with a 9.0 percent household rating.

Off screen he gives away little. He calls himself a homebody, names Tomokazu Miura, Go Ayano and Takayuki Yamada as the actors he looks up to, and keeps his private life out of interviews.

LOST10 runs through the autumn season on TBS, and You, Like a Star heads into further Asian markets after Japan; this spring he also voiced a guest role in Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway. The difference now is that the actor the industry once sold as a pin-up is choosing his own projects.

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Tags: actors, Japanese cinema, Michihito Fujii, Ryūsei Yokohama, You, Like a Star, KOKUHO, Ryo Yoshizawa

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