Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan’s most famous actors, found an unexpected inspiration when he decided that a young student’s last name was too boring for the stage. Koji Hashimoto (as the actor was called at the time) worked at Tokyo City Hall before auditioning for Nakadai’s drama school. This type of office is called a “yakusho” in Japanese. This stage name was chosen naturally with the hope that the role of this unknown clerk would one day be as wide as possible.
Forty-eight years later, Koji Yakusho arrived in Udine to receive the Golden Mulberry Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Far East Film Festival. The winner was Wim Wenders, and the name more than lived up to its promise.
For the government, this award carries special weight. “It’s like I’m a horse in a race. It’s like someone is giving me the last whip of love,” he told Variety. “It means I still have work to do and can go a little further.”
The career that earned him the whip began not in film but in period drama television. His break came when he played the volatile 16th century warlord Nobunaga Oda in the NHK Taiga drama, which aired for the better part of a year. This role aired when Yakusho was 26 years old, and was the first role that allowed him to make a living solely as an actor. “Until then, I was studying acting and working part-time,” he said during a master class at the festival.
His transition to film was thanks to Juzo Itami, who cast him as the mysterious man in white in Dandelion after spotting him in a TV drama wearing a similar suit. The 1985 Noodle Western became a cult classic overseas, especially in the United States, and enjoyed a long run despite underperforming locally. What Mr. Yakusho remembers most vividly was a scene that went beyond his intentions. His character bleeds to death and during filming he hits his face on an iron bar and really starts bleeding. “They asked me if I should go to the hospital. But the character was supposed to be bloody and die, so I asked them to keep rolling,” he recalled. The filming continued with the government office lying in the rain, bleeding in earnest, until a woman passing by, convinced she had witnessed a murder, tried to call the police.
It was director Shohei Imamura’s “Unagi” that put him on the world stage. When the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, Imamura had already left France, although he had little interest in attracting media attention. He left the government office and spent the day holed up in a hotel room in Paris trying to secure a flight home. He attended the ceremony and was called to the stage by Catherine Deneuve. “I felt that some of the audience members might have mistaken me for Shohei Imamura,” he recalled. “So my opening words were, ‘I’m not Shohei Imamura.’ And when the audience laughed, I relaxed a little.”
The mid-1990s was a pivotal time. In 1996, the government office produced three films: the near-silent “Sleeping Man,” Masayuki Suo’s “Shall We Dance?,” and the yakuza film “Shabu Yokudo.” He credits the discipline required in the first film, long stretches of minimal dialogue where meaning had to be created through stillness and pauses, to have directly unleashed the gentle precision of his performance in “Shall We Dance?” What I didn’t expect was “Shall We Dance?” It eventually reached Wenders, who often watched it with his family at Christmas. Yakusho said, “If it wasn’t for ‘Shall We Dance?’, Wim Wenders would never have known about me.”
Decades later, that connection led to Perfect Days, which won him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. For the government, this experience crystallized something fundamental about the technology. “I go to movie sets and just follow people’s lives,” he told Variety. “You follow them to portray a living human being.” His guidelines for choosing roles are similarly distilled. “Overall, what I’m interested in is beauty,” he said. “I want to be a part of beautiful movies, beautiful stories, movies with beautiful people. The beauty I talk about is very broad, and it could also be the beauty in a Yakuza movie.”
Physical preparation has always been central to his process. For “Shall We Dance?,” he trained for four months in ballroom dancing, practicing his steps in costume in a corner of the set of a period drama he was simultaneously filming. For “The Eel” he studied barbering. In “Under the Open Sky,” she practices sewing at home and ends up breaking her sewing machine. The goal is always the same. “I want to instill the technique into my body to the point where I lose consciousness during the performance.Whether it’s dancing or cleaning the toilet, if I only think about the technique, I can’t perform the important part.”
Now 70 years old, he speaks openly about the demands of age. “Filmmaking is hard,” he said. “When I play a 70-year-old, I feel like I need the physical ability of someone at least five years younger to survive filming.” But he sees age as an asset as well as a constraint. It’s a living texture that can’t be faked, and he believes it’s what allowed him to perform on “Perfect Days” in a way he wouldn’t have been able to do earlier in his career.
He has a new project in the works, a small film directed by someone with a CGI background, scheduled to begin shooting in June, but he declined to name. He also has ambitions behind the camera. His only directorial effort, 2009’s “Toad Oil,” left him humbled by the demands of the job, but “I realized how difficult the job of director is,” he said. But since then, he has continued to write scripts with friends, continue to promote the project, and continue to develop the project. The obstacles are consistent. Investors will only commit if he stars in the film himself, and the productions he wants to make are small and resolutely non-commercial. “The film I want to make is not a big commercial film, so I can’t raise money for it. I can’t ask my staff to work for free,” he said.
Given the achievements of Japanese cinema in recent years, he is quietly optimistic about the generation that will follow his generation. “There’s a new generation of directors coming up, and they have talent,” he told Variety. “I sincerely hope that the production companies do not kill the talent.”
When it comes to lifetime achievement honors, officials choose to read them as accelerations rather than conclusions. He said the horse still had some ground to cover.
