The Hindu : Dying for a living

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 03, 2004

International

International

Dying for a living

KYOTO, APRIL 2. Seizo Fukumoto has died 20,000 deaths. He has been gored and gunned down. His bloodied body has slammed into trees, tumbled down stairs and crashed through doors.

As Japan's top ``kirareyaku,'' which translates into ``sliced-up actor,'' Fukumoto dies for a living. When Japanese directors need somebody to kill, he is the man they call. It is a specialty that does not bring stardom. Though he is highly respected by fellow-actors and acknowledged by his peers as the best in the business, Fukumoto, 61, is an unknown.

The Japanese movie industry has been dominated by two genres: samurai period pieces and gangster movies. Both have lots of violence, bloody fights and high-profile killing, and that kept actors in Fukumoto's line of work busy. But with film studios and television networks opting increasingly for low-budget, modern dramas over feudal and gangster scripts, Fukumoto has found himself the practitioner of a dying art. ``There are only a few other full-time actors like me left at Toei studios. When I joined, there were hundreds,'' he said.

Fukumoto started as a teenager. At 15, he left his rural home for a job in Kyoto, which he quit for one as an extra in a studio. Within a year, he had a part in a 1959 film. But he was stuck doing corpses. Eager to be in fight scenes, he learned swordplay. His first fight scene came in 1963, but it did not go smoothly. As the camera rolled and the star actor bore down on him with a 90-cm-long blade, Fukumoto froze — and botched his part. Eventually he became a regular in dozens of samurai films and TV shows, playing villains because his high cheekbones, arched eyebrows and heavy eye shadow made him appear sinister.

In one movie after another, he met his maker. Fukumoto reckons that he has been killed more than 20,000 times — fans say it is at least twice that number — in thousands of TV appearances and nearly 100 movies over his 45-year career. But he cannot say for sure. Scripts often crammed in several killing scenes, which meant Fukumoto would die as one character and reappear later as another to get slain again. In his 2001 autobiography, which has sold 80,000 copies, Fukumoto said he learned by studying stuntmen. But his hero was Charlie Chaplin, whose over-the-top antics were a useful model because Japanese death scenes are stylised, featuring actors who shudder violently and flop to the ground when killed.

Being around so much bloodshed — albeit staged — has not made him immune to the prospect of his own end. ``I stage death for a profession. But, like anyone else, I'm afraid of death.''

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