Kazuko Yoshiyuki
Kazuko Yoshiyuki is an actor, born 1935.
Sixty-four years separate the first and last films on this list, which is the headline before any single role is. Yoshiyuki (1935 to 2025) begins here with My Second Brother in 1959 and ends with Yudo: The Way of the Bath in 2023. She was an actress, a voice actress and an essayist, and her filmography reads as a tour of postwar Japanese cinema taken one supporting role at a time.
The early stretch is studio work: The Sleeping Beast Within and Jungle Block in 1960, a woman worker in Foundry Town, then the genre years, a wife in Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival and Aya Tokunaga in Lady Snowblood 2. Nagisa Oshima cast her twice, as Seki in Empire of Passion in 1978 and again in Taboo two decades later, which is a considerable endorsement from a director with no interest in comfort.
What she became in the last third of her career was Japan's grandmother. Masao's grandmother in Kitano's Kikujiro. Jiro's grandma in Cyborg She. Toki in Ponyo and the nanny in When Marnie Was There, both for Studio Ghibli. Tomiko Hirayama in Tokyo Family, then Tomiko Hirata in What a Wonderful Family! and its sequel, near-identical names for the same warm, unsentimental matriarch. She was still working in her eighties, in The Forest of Wool and Steel and The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, and she died in 2025.
Movies (56)
- Juvenile Wife (1980)
- Ponyo (2008)
- When Marnie Was There (2014)
- Kikujiro (1999)
- Cyborg She (2008)
- Taboo (1999)
- Empire of Passion (1978)
- Premonition (2004)
- Tokyo Family (2013)
- Amagi Pass (1983)
- Yudo: The Way of the Bath (2023)
- The Miracles of the Namiya General Store (2017)
- Double Bed (1983)
- Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura (2017)
- Jungle Block (1960)
- Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007)
- The Last Three Times We'll Meet (2020)
- Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974)
- The Forest of Wool and Steel (2018)
- A Heartful of Love (2005)
- The Little House (2014)
- The Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (1983)
- What a Wonderful Family! (2016)
- What a Wonderful Family! 2 (2017)
- Brighter Days (2025)
- The Great Japanese Pick-Pocket Club (1969)
- My Second Brother (1959)
- Hold Me and Kiss Me (1992)
- Kidnapping Blues (1982)
- The Hidden Trail of the Beasts (1981)
TV (8)
Where to start with Kazuko Yoshiyuki
For a first watch, take Kikujiro: a Kitano road film about a boy looking for his mother and the useless adult who takes him, and Yoshiyuki plays the grandmother whose absence sets the whole trip going.
For the late-career signature, Tokyo Family is a modern reworking of the most famous Japanese family drama ever made, and she is the mother at the centre of it. What a Wonderful Family! is the same ensemble doing comedy, which is worth seeing straight afterwards.
The animation is where most Western viewers have heard her without knowing it: Ponyo and When Marnie Was There, both Studio Ghibli, both roles built on an old woman's voice carrying the film's reassurance.
For the hard stuff, Empire of Passion is Oshima at his most unforgiving, Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance is the 1970s revenge picture, and The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is the gentle late one.