Takeshi Kitano, the TV clown who made Japan’s coldest gangster films

Takeshi Kitano

Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Nikita~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). / CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 18, 1947 Adachi, Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Filmmaker, actor and comedian
Known for	Fireworks, Zatoichi, Sonatine
Awards	Golden Lion · Silver Lion · Asian Film · Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres · Officier de la Légion d'honneur · Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette

Takeshi Kitano has spent his working life as two men who share one face. At Sunday midday, Japanese viewers watch Beat Takeshi needle politicians on Beat Takeshi’s TV Tackle on TV Asahi. Abroad, the same man is the director of Hana-bi, a Venice winner about a taciturn ex-detective and his dying wife. He has never picked one; his latest film turns that refusal into a structure. Broken Rage follows an aging hitman through a crime thriller, then runs the story again, with the same cast, as slapstick.

The comedian came first, and he came from the bottom. Kitano grew up in Adachi, a working-class ward on Tokyo’s northern edge, the youngest of four children. His father was a house painter who, by his son’s account, lived like a yakuza; his mother was a strict disciplinarian who worked in a factory. Plenty of the neighbours were gangsters. He enrolled at Meiji University to study engineering and dropped out.

Kitano, born on 18 January 1947, was 25 when he drifted in 1972 to Asakusa, Tokyo’s old entertainment quarter. He ran the elevator at the France-za strip theatre and rose, under the house comedian Senzaburo Fukami, to master of ceremonies. With Kiyoshi Kaneko he formed Two Beat, a manzai double act in which Kaneko played the straight man and Kitano, now Beat Takeshi, did the damage. They reached television in 1976 and caught on with material traditional manzai avoided: his targets were the elderly, the poor, the disabled and the ugly, and broadcasters fielded complaints and cut lines. Solo, he joined Tamori and Sanma Akashiya in the so-called Big Three of Japanese TV comedy, and the obstacle-course game show Takeshi’s Castle, later sold as Humor amarillo in Spain and MXC in the United States, carried his face to audiences his films never reached.

Fame came with a temper. In December 1986, after a reporter for the photo weekly Friday injured a young woman Kitano was seeing, he and eleven members of his entourage, the Takeshi Gundan, went to the magazine’s offices at Kodansha, and the visit ended in assault. A Tokyo court gave him six months, suspended for two years, and he spent about eight months off his regular shows.

Cinema had shown how hard the clown would be to shake off. Nagisa Ōshima cast him as Sergeant Hara, a brutal prison-camp guard, in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, opposite David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Kitano slipped into a screening to watch the public take him seriously; they laughed the moment he appeared. From then on he played hard men. Directing came by accident: in 1989 Kinji Fukasaku left Violent Cop over his star’s TV schedule, and the distributor offered the comedian the chair. He rewrote the script and found a style nobody had taught him: a camera that barely moves, long takes in which little seems to happen, and violence that lands without warning or skips straight to its aftermath. Boiling Point and Sonatine, about a weary gangster killing time on an Okinawa beach while the trouble closes in, hardened it; Sonatine flopped at home and was embraced in Europe after Cannes.

In August 1994 he crashed a motor scooter and was left with partial paralysis on the right side of his face; he later called it an unconscious suicide attempt. He took up painting while he recovered, and after Kids Return, which borrowed from the manzai years, came Hana-bi, where the pointillist canvases credited to a paralysed former policeman are Kitano’s own. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1997, making him the third Japanese director to take the prize after Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki, and Kitano said that only then did Japan stop treating his films as a famous comedian’s hobby. Kikujiro, a road comedy in which he plays a layabout escorting a boy to find his mother, carries his father’s name.

The respectable version of this story, comedian turned auteur, flattens the man. The cruelty that made Beat Takeshi popular never left the films; it changed register. Kitano has said yakuza used to invite him for drinks after comedy-club shows and tell him about the big bosses, and his deadpan killers are cousins of the stage character who mocked the weak for laughs. His international career stalled, too. He was the teacher in Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, but his own Brother, shot in Los Angeles with Omar Epps and built to break abroad, met a tepid response. What won critics back was Zatoichi, a blind-swordsman revival he took on commission and, by his own account, made by the conventional rules instead of his own. It became his biggest hit in Japan and earned him the Silver Lion for best director at Venice in 2003. His most popular film is the one in which he set his method aside.

Success made him restless. Between 2005 and 2008 he made three surreal films about himself, starting with Takeshis’. In 2010 the Fondation Cartier in Paris gave his paintings a solo show, with a basement room looping twelve hours of his work as a TV host, and he went back to gangsters with Outrage. He closed that trilogy with Outrage Coda in 2017, the year he played Aramaki in the Hollywood Ghost in the Shell. France made him an Officier of the Légion d’honneur; Japan gave him the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018, the year he left Office Kitano, the agency he founded in 1988.

His late films argue with his own reputation. Kubi, adapted from his novel about the Honnō-ji Incident, premiered at Cannes in 2023 with Kitano as the warlord Hashiba Hideyoshi. He told the BFI that the theme he landed on was homosexuality among the samurai and that he felt the need to express that reality more honestly. Broken Rage, made for Amazon MGM Studios, premiered out of competition at Venice in 2024, a first for a Japanese streaming production, and reached Prime Video in February 2025. It runs about an hour, and he explained the title: it means breaking his own film career.

At 79, he is still a weekly fixture of Japanese television on Beat Takeshi’s TV Tackle and Sekai Marumie, and Prime Video has revived Takeshi’s Castle. No new feature has been announced. In 2023 he mentioned writing a script set in the bubble economy of the 1980s, when organised crime and show business were bound together: the Tokyo in which Beat Takeshi became famous and Takeshi Kitano learned how his gangsters should sound.

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Tags: actors, Japanese cinema, Takeshi Kitano, Nagisa Oshima, Broken Rage, Hana-bi

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