Hiroshi Akutagawa

Hiroshi Akutagawa (1920-1981) carried a name that would have flattened most people. His father was Ryunosuke Akutagawa, arguably the most canonised short story writer in modern Japanese literature, and Japan's most prestigious literary prize bears the family name. Choosing to perform in public under that surname takes a particular kind of nerve. He built a career of roughly thirty years as a stage and film actor and as a director, appearing in work by Shiro Toyoda, Tadashi Imai, Heinosuke Gosho, Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima. That list is not a coincidence. It spans the studio establishment and the New Wave that set out to demolish it, which suggests directors of wildly opposed temperaments all wanted him. The theatre, though, seems to have been where he lived. That he moved into directing tells me acting alone did not satisfy whatever he was after. He died in 1981 at sixty-one, remembered on his own terms rather than his father's, which was probably the whole point.

Name (English)

Hiroshi Akutagawa

Name (Japanese)

芥川比呂志

Reading

あくたがわ ひろし

Born

March 30, 1920 – October 28, 1981

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aries / Monkey

Origin

Tokyo, Japan

Occupation

actor / impresario / director

University

Keio University

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi%20Akutagawa
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%8A%A5%E5%B7%9D%E6%AF%94%E5%91%82%E5%BF%97
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11614741

Tags

• Tokyo
• actor
• impresario
• director

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.