Yoko Minamida

Japanese actors make English ones look like slackers. 168 credits is just normal. It’s kind of amazing to me. It also means that it’s simply impossible to get a grip on Japanese media, or even just the works of one specific person, without going out of your way to do so. And if the person in question mostly does genres that don’t appeal to you, they’re necessarily going to be a blindspot for you. She also spent a lot of time working as an MC on Japanese TV. My English-language sources don’t give me a lot of information on that, and friends, I’m not learning Japanese for this column.

What I can tell you is that Minamida started her career in the ‘50s, a fascinating time in Japanese film. Her best-known films from those days are depressing historical epics. Also in 1956, she starred in Season of the Sun, wherein she played an upper-class girl being wooed by a sullen high school boxer. Apparently this launched a trend of similar movies. Did she make more of them herself? I don’t know; I don’t have plot summaries of them.

Obviously, her appearance this month is based on her role in the classic ‘70s Japanese horror movie Hausu, in which she was one of two professional actors. I haven’t actually seen the movie myself, not being particularly fond of horror movies (Gillian, don’t you write about horror figures every October? Shut up), but the plot is wild. The movie is apparently supposed to invoke memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with director-producer Nobuhiko Obayashi being from Hiroshima and having lost, per Wikipedia, all his childhood friends in the bombing. Wow did that sort of thing influence Japanese cinema.

She is, thereby, one of the people for whom it doesn’t matter what else she did in her career. Princess Yang Kwei-Fei may be celebrated by fans of classic Japanese film drama, but a lot more people have doubtless heard of Hausu. She made a Sonny Chiba movie about hunting a man-eating bear. She made what appears to be a movie sort of like a Western but set in Northern Japan. She made about eight billion period pieces. She made huge numbers of movies with pretty well no information I can find other than the poster. But it doesn’t matter, because she was Auntie Karei.

Her personal life appears to be a little disheartening. She was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and cared for by her husband, actor Hiroyuki Nagata, who made a documentary about the experience. Other sites I found, however, emphasize that he’d been publicly unfaithful to her for years, and boy I’m sure Japanese culture was sympathetic to her and never made it seem like it was her own fault. I’m quite sure she’d be happier knowing she was remembered for her acting.