Yusaku Matsuda - Biography

Biography

Matsuda was born out of wedlock in Shimonoseki to a Zainichi Korean mother and a father, a probation officer, whom he never met. His mother, Kaneko Matsuda, originally Kim, deliberately wrongly recorded his birth year as 1950 on his birth records. She was a Korean who had married a Japanese man who died during World War II. After his death, Kaneko became a prostitute to support Yusaku's half brothers.

He grew up and was educated in Shimonoseki, attending Kanda elementary school and Bunyo Junior High School, before entering Shimonoseki Secondary School. In 1967, while at high school, at the urging of his mother, he stayed with his aunt in the city of Seaside in America for one year. He attended Seaside High School. However, extremely unhappy in America, malnourished, unable to speak English, and feeling himself the victim of discrimination, he returned to Japan. Because he was afraid of facing his mother, he went to stay with his older brother in Tokyo. He attended Honan high school as a night student and graduated in 1969. After graduating, he entered a theatre company called "Rokugatsu Gekijo", leaving in November 1969. In 1971 he joined a theatre group "Club Marui", then in 1972 he joined "Bungakuza". He met his future wife Michiko through Club Marui in May 1971. At the time he was working as a barman.

He changed his citizenship from Korean to Japanese while he was starring in Taiyo ni Hoero, with the help of Michiko, whose father was a member of the Liberal Democratic party who was head of the then-Prime Minister's support office.

In 1975 he was involved in two fracas, first with two journalists, and then with a student who attacked him with a wooden kendo sword because the student thought he was assaulting a woman. The student ended up in a hospital, and Matsuda received a suspended sentence for assault. This caused a major disruption in his career, with film studios and television companies dropping him.

He married Michiko Kumamoto in 1975 and had one daughter. They divorced in 1981 after six years of marriage. In 1983, he married Miyuki Kumagai, who he had started a relationship with in 1979, when she was 17, when she appeared in the Tantei Monogatari television series. They had three children. Two of the children, Ryuhei and Shota, became actors.

In 1988, Matsuda was diagnosed with bladder cancer, before shooting began for Black Rain. Matsuda refused chemotherapy, as he thought it would affect his ability to act in the film. After his death, his first wife, who had experienced him ignoring an ear infection until it required surgery to prevent deafness, wrote that she suspected that he did not actually realize the seriousness of his illness. During the filming, he was urinating blood. After shooting finished in March 1989, his cancer had spread to his spine and lungs, making it inoperable. On October 7, 1989, Matsuda was hospitalized. A month after he was admitted, Matsuda died at 6:45 PM JST on November 6 at the age of 40, at a Tokyo hospital. He was buried in Nishitama cemetery, in Akiruno, Tokyo.