Kōji Mitsui was a Japanese movie, TV, and stage actor. He appeared in more than 150 films from 1925 to 1975, including 29 of Kinema Junpo’s annual Top-10 winners and three of its Top-10 best Japanese films of all time.
Career
The son of a Shochiku movie theater owner, Mitsui joined the studio in 1924, making his film debut in 1925 under the name Hideo Mitsui. His short stature, soft features, and expressive face and voice suited him for rebellious “younger brother” roles, and he appeared as a youth lead in many silent and early sound films, notably in several Yasujirō Ozu classics and as a regular in the “Yota” film series. Mitsui eventually left Shochiku, returning in 1948 as Kōji Mitsui and transitioning into character roles. In 1954 he joined other Shochiku performers to create the Madoka Group, a film production company intended to bring stability to their profession. Like many popular character actors of post-war Japan, Mitsui occasionally headlined minor films but most often shone in key supporting parts. In 1957, Akira Kurosawa borrowed Mitsui from Shochiku to play the pivotal role of Yoshisaburo the gambler in The Lower Depths, whose final line in the film—annoyed that the suicide of one of the characters has ruined their party—is “always shocking, always devastating when viewed,” and Mitsui's delivery, which breaks the fourth wall, is “absolutely on target: ironic, cruel, funny, horrible.” Kurosawa subsequently borrowed Mitsui for five more of his Toho films. Mitsui often played drunken scenes, notably as a “one-scene wonder” in Kurosawa's Red Beard. Life sometimes imitated art; confronted by director Kaneto Shindo over increasingly unusable takes during a drinking scene, Mitsui said, “What’s the difference between doing what you say and actually doing it?” Notoriously, he was the actor who drunkenly called Kurosawa a “coward” at his home for not wanting to make any more movies following the failure of 1970's Dodes'ka-den, after which the director tried to commit suicide—and a horrified Mitsui rushed to his side. In 1971, Mitsui underwent gastric ulcer surgery, further affecting a film career that had slowed by the late 1960s. He increasingly guest-starred on television programs, having appeared on more than 100 shows by the time he played his final role in 1978. When he died in 1979, among the survivors was his younger brotherTadao Mitsui, a renowned anatomist who had studied as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Washington.
Awards
In 1957 Mitsui won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths as well as his performances in two films directed by Minoru Shibuya, Kichigai buraku and Seigiha . That year he also won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths and Kichigai buraku. With these two awards for The Lower Depths, Mitsui was able to distinguish himself among the top performers in Japanese cinema, whom Kurosawa had selected and dress-rehearsed on-set for 60 days to create the ultimate acting ensemble.
Legacy
Mitsui's portrayal of the lazy nihilist in The Lower Depths is well-remembered as a showcase for his improvisational talents and his “strange and yet hypnotic,” “oboe-like,” “beautiful voice with its unique charm and sense of rhythm.” The film's final act becomes a tour de force for Mitsui, who mockingly impersonates Bokuzen Hidari, leads the remaining denizens in song, and ends the film with his brutal remark. According to frequent co-star Kyōko Kagawa, he was “fabulous” in the film and “great in any role.” Mitsui's largest part for Kurosawa after The Lower Depths was the lead journalist who comments on the wedding reception that opens The Bad Sleep Well ; his role as a sarcastic observer was noted by Kurosawa scholar Donald Richie to parallel traits of Yoshisaburo the gambler in the prior film, and Mitsui's “particularly enthralling” performance helped to associate his legacy with sardonic characters as well as boozy ones. Mitsui was a voice actor in Japan's first sound cartoon, Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka, and appeared in Japan's first color film, Carmen Comes Home. A star of Ozu's 1934 original silent version of A Story of Floating Weeds, he was stunt-cast in the director's own widely acclaimed 1959 color remake, Floating Weeds, which Roger Ebert named as one of the ten greatest films of all time. In media coverage of the 2017-2018 TV Tokyoreality series “The Supporting Actors,” which featured six popular character actors living together, the stars repeatedly cited Kōji Mitsui as a major influence and an example of a distinctive and superlative member of their profession. At a 2017 event, the actor Tatsuya Nakadai stated that during the filming of Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, he felt added pressure having to deliver a 10-minute monologue because Mitsui was in the scene. The two also appeared onscreen together in Kobayashi’sThe Human Condition and The Inheritance, as well as Okamoto’sBattle of Okinawa ; in 1975, Nakadai appeared in a stage production of Gorky’sThe Lower Depths as the gambler character who was closely associated in Japan with Mitsui’s portrayal in Kurosawa’s 1957 film version. In addition to his many performances for prominent directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu, Kobayashi, and Kinoshita, Mitsui is best known to Western audiences as the duplicitous village elder in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Oscar-nominated Woman in the Dunes, for which he received above-the-title billing on the original film poster along with stars Eiji Okada and Kyōko Kishida.
