Born into a family of Mino-ware potters in Gifu’s Toki District, he completed studies at Reitaku Junior College before briefly teaching and then joining the Haiyuza Theatre Company. His screen debut arrived in 1957 with Tadashi Imai’s Jun’ai Monogatari, and a breakthrough came as a thuggish figure in Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960), leading to further collaborations on Sanjuro and Dodes…
