Ryūhei Ueshima

Ueshima is the comedian I would point to if someone asked me why Japanese variety television works at all. As part of the trio Dacho Club, he built a career on being the one who gets pushed, dunked and humiliated, and he did it for decades with a discipline most viewers never noticed. Repeating the same gag until an audience cheers for it rather than tires of it is far harder than inventing a new one. At 162 cm he was usually the smallest presence in the room, and he used that, taking the losing role so the younger performers could win. He came from a small town in Hyogo and somehow his comedy belonged to the whole country. When he died in 2022, something ordinary and load-bearing went missing from the screen.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Ryūhei Ueshima

Name (Japanese)

上島竜兵

Reading

うえしま りゅうへい

Born

January 20, 1961 – May 11, 2022

Origin

Kasuga, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan

Height

162 cm

Occupation

actor / owarai tarento / tarento / comedian

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Ox

Blood type

AB

Agency

Ohta Production

High school

Saisei Engineering High School

Works summary

Appearances

97 (1987–2022)

By year (titles with a known year)

1987: 1, 1992: 1, 1994: 1, 1996: 1, 1997: 1, 1998: 2, 2000: 1, 2002: 1, 2004: 4, 2005: 3, 2006: 2, 2007: 2, 2008: 6, 2009: 4, 2010: 7, 2011: 3, 2012: 4, 2013: 2, 2014: 8, 2015: 4, 2016: 5, 2017: 3, 2018: 1, 2019: 4, 2020: 2, 2021: 4, 2022: 5, year unknown: 15

Debut work

Pao-Pao Channel

Filmography / notable works

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryuhei%20Ueshima
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8A%E5%B3%B6%E7%AB%9C%E5%85%B5
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11358929

Tags

• Hyōgo Prefecture
• actor
• owarai tarento
• tarento

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. Works and profile fields sourced from Wikipedia reflect content as of 2026-08-26. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.