Muga Takewaki

Muga Takewaki was born in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture in 1944 and died in 2011. He won the Elan d'or Newcomer of the Year award in 1965 — meaning the Japanese film industry had already picked him out while he was barely into his twenties. He studied at Aoyama Gakuin University and went on to a long career across film and television. For readers outside Japan, the Elan d'or is worth explaining: it is an industry award for newcomers, and winning it in the mid-1960s put you in the same starting cohort as the last generation of stars produced by the old studio system. What strikes me is not the early prize but what came after it. Plenty of newcomers win something at twenty-one and are gone by thirty. Takewaki kept working for decades, which is the harder and less glamorous achievement. He died at sixty-seven, with the name still recognizable to anyone who grew up watching Japanese television in that era.

Name (English)

Muga Takewaki

Name (Japanese)

竹脇無我

Reading

たけわき むが

Born

February 17, 1944 – August 21, 2011

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Monkey

Origin

Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

actor / film actor

University

Aoyama Gakuin University

Awards & achievements

• 1965 Elan d'or Award for Newcomer of the Year

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muga%20Takewaki
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%AB%B9%E8%84%87%E7%84%A1%E6%88%91
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6932063

Tags

• Chiba Prefecture
• actor
• film 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.