Taro Yamamoto
Before Reiwa Shinsengumi there was about fifteen years of screen work. Taro Yamamoto appears across Japanese film and television from the mid 1990s onward, in youth comedies and dramas like That's Cheating! The Biggest Plan in History? (1996) and Woman in Witness Protection (1997), and then in the part that travelled: Shogo Kawada in Battle Royale (2000), the watchful older boy in a class ordered to fight each other to the last.
The films that followed sit at the odd end of the Japanese industry rather than the commercial middle. He worked for Takashi Miike on Izo (2004) and for Seijun Suzuki on Princess Raccoon (2005), took a supporting role in the zainichi drama GO (2001), and turned up in the vampire gangster picture Moon Child (2003). The mainstream jobs are there too, in the disaster drama 252: Signal of Life (2008), the gambling thriller Kaiji (2009) and the wrestling biopic Rikidozan (2004), but the pattern is a character actor rather than a leading man.
The credits here stop around 2012. Yamamoto moved into politics and founded Reiwa Shinsengumi, the anti-establishment party he still leads. He served in the House of Councillors representing Tokyo until resigning in 2026, sat in the House of Representatives from 2021 to 2022, and ran unsuccessfully for governor of Tokyo in 2020. There is a small coincidence sitting in the filmography: he played Harada Sanosuke in the NHK historical drama Shinsengumi! in 2004, years before he gave a political party a version of the same name.
Movies (23)
- Battle Royale (2000)
- My Way (2011)
- Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009)
- Izo (2004)
- GO (2001)
- Princess Raccoon (2005)
- Get Up! (2003)
- Rikidozan: A Hero Extraordinaire (2004)
- The Triumphant Return of General Rouge (2009)
- Love of a Thousand Years - Story of Genji (2001)
- Perfect Education 4: Secret Basement (2003)
- Woman in Witness Protection (1997)
- That's Cheating! The Biggest Plan in History? (1996)
- The Boat to Heaven (2003)
- Moon Child (2003)
- Red Moon (2004)
- Run Ichiro Run (2001)
- Goemon Rock 2: Rose and Samurai (2011)
- Shooting Film is Battleground: Making of BATTLE ROYALE (2001)
- Rain of Light (2001)
- 252: Signal of Life (2008)
- The Millennial Rapture (2012)
- July 7th, Sunny Day (1996)
TV (5)
Where to start with Taro Yamamoto
Start with Battle Royale. It is the reason his name reaches outside Japan, and Kawada is the best-written part he had: quiet, competent, the only person on the island whose calm looks earned rather than performed. From there the interesting route is the strange one. Izo is Takashi Miike at his least house-trained, a film that abandons chronology entirely, and Princess Raccoon is Seijun Suzuki turning a folk tale into a musical with the colour pushed all the way up.
GO is the straight drama of the group, sharp about ethnicity and belonging in Japan, and the one to watch if you want him in something serious. For genre, Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler is a gambling thriller built on escalating stakes and Moon Child is a vampire crime fantasy that works better than it should. Shinsengumi! is the period television, a long NHK commitment to one of the most retold episodes in Japanese history.