Shibuya Tenma
Shibuya Tenma's career splits cleanly in two. It began in 1993, after he came home from college in the United States, and the first stretch was Japanese throughout: stage work including Romeo and Juliet, television drama, and film, among it Takashi Miike's yakuza picture Agitator, where he plays Shintani. He trained as a classical dancer as well.
The turn came in 2006, when he visited China for the first time and moved his working life into Chinese-language production. That single decision explains almost everything else on this page. He is Colonel Sato in Ip Man, one of the Japanese officers in an occupied city. He is a Zero fighter pilot, also named Sato, in Air Strike. He is Lieutenant Hosoda in Saturday Fiction, Ota in 731, and a Chiayi citizen representative in KANO, the Taiwanese baseball film set under Japanese rule.
It is a specific and slightly uncomfortable niche: the credible Japanese officer in Chinese and Taiwanese films about the war and the occupation, played by an actor whose other public role is cultural exchange work. He has held it for the better part of two decades, across productions running from wartime spectacle to art cinema.
Movies (6)
TV (2)
Where to start with Shibuya Tenma
Most viewers will have met him in Ip Man, and that is the right introduction. A hugely popular martial arts film only works if its Japanese officers are played straight rather than as cartoons, and Shibuya plays Sato straight.
For the earlier Japanese half of the career, Agitator is the pick, a long, cold Takashi Miike yakuza film that is much harder going than Ip Man and much more interesting. KANO is the outlier and probably the best film on the list, a Taiwanese baseball story that treats the colonial period with more patience than the genre usually allows.
After that, Saturday Fiction is the art-house option, Lou Ye shooting wartime Shanghai in black and white. Air Strike and 731 are the two war pictures, the first an ungainly international co-production, the second recent and grim. Television completists have Borrow Gun and The Line.