Tatsuya Nakadai, Winner of This Year’s Toshiro Mifune Award, at the Screening of “Hachiko Monogatari”!
2015年10月15日(木) Report
Kyoto International Film and Art Festival 2015 began 15th October with “Hachiko Monogatari,” one of movies from the section “Special Screening in Kyoto,” held at Yoshimoto Gion-Kagetsu. The drama is based on the heartwarming true story of Hachiko, a faithful dog who continued to wait at Shibuya station for his master a university professor, long after his death. The cast includes Tatsuya Nakadai, Kaoru Yachigusa, Toshiro Yanagiba and more.
In the cast greeting, lead actor Tatsuya Nakadai, winner of the The 2nd Toshiro Mifune Award, came up to the stage. With Kei Shimizu as an emcee, Nakadai shared his stories about the shooting.
“I started my career when I was 18 years old, and I will be 83 years old on 13th December this year,” he said. When he started to talk, the audience gave him a big round of applause. And he continued “I have been working 60 years, so I was thinking the time to stop is coming soon. But today, I got the award that has my most respected actor’s name on it, here at KIFF. He is like my teacher, and I got his award, so I changed my mind and feel I should continue.”
“I am surprised that KIFF has reborn with such a big scale from the last year. I remember I won Best Supporting Actor Award for ‘Hitokiri’ of Shintaro Katsu in the Kyoto Film Festival before.”
The movie starring Nakadai “Hachiko Monogatari” has been a large hit, earning $17,000,000 income and achieving the best sales in the year of its release, 1987. Later it was recreated in Hollywood as “Hachi: A Dog's Tale,” which opened in Japan as well.
Nakadai said, “to tell you the truth, I don’t like animals so much, but it looked fascinating that Seijiro Koyama was the director and with Kaneto Shindo’s script so wonderful, I decided to join. Before I also worked for director Kon Ichikawa’s “I am a Cat” by Geiensha, in 1975. Most likely when we have animals or children actors, the director cares only about them, not the adult actors,” he said to the audience’s amusement.
He continued, “Hachiko is a very good Akita Inu breed. We trained with the dog to make him follow me when I pat my thigh. In the beginning he didn’t follow me at all, but I tried a dog trainer’s advice to play with the dog by getting down on all fours. 20 days later, finally Hachiko had been tamed, so I was very happy and started to love him. I felt a premonition that the film will be wonderful one.”
He was scared of dogs because of his experience of being bitten on his right cheek by when he was in the first year of junior high school. But through “Hachiko Monogatari”, he lost any fears to dogs.
In the end of the greeting he happily showed, “I got this scarf as the gift for the Toshiro Mifune Award.” And he continued, “The movie was shoot 30 years ago, so I look very young. I am organizing the smallest actor school in Japan Mumei Juku for 40 years, and sometimes my young students are surprised to watch my past films.”
