Eiji Funakoshi

Eiji Funakoshi was born in Tokyo on 17 March 1923 and died on 17 March 2007 — the same calendar date, eighty-four years apart. I have read a lot of these entries, and that coincidence still stopped me. His defining work is Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, in which he plays a starving Japanese soldier adrift in the collapsing Philippines campaign. It won him Best Actor from both Kinema Junpo and the Mainichi Film Concours, and it is not a performance you enjoy so much as survive alongside him. What I admire is the choice itself. A leading man of that era could have coasted on presence and melodrama; he instead let himself be hollowed out on camera, playing hunger as something that erodes a person rather than something you act out. Japan honoured him with the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1989. He is not the name that comes up first when Western audiences discuss Japanese cinema of the fifties, and that seems to me an oversight worth correcting.

Name (English)

Eiji Funakoshi

Name (Japanese)

船越英二

Reading

ふなこし えいじ

Born

March 17, 1923 – March 17, 2007

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Boar

Origin

Tokyo, Japan

Occupation

actor

University

Senshu University

Awards & achievements

• 1989 Medal with Purple Ribbon
• Mainichi Film Award for Best Actor

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji%20Funakoshi
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%88%B9%E8%B6%8A%E8%8B%B1%E4%BA%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2068913

Tags

• Tokyo
• actor

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.