Tatsuya Nakada recieves distinguished service mention

[Alex Zahlten]

Hi,

papers report that actor Tatsuya Nakadai is one of the 15 people declared a "person of distinguished service" this year (I'm not sure what the official translation is); these are announced annually by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), taking cues from the Bunkacho. The "medal of culture" (bunka kunshou) for five people is announced at the same time. I'm not completely sure, but I think the medal of culture (culture medal?) needs to be additionally approved by the cabinet.

Tatsuya Nakadai has worked with an amazing breadth of directors, from Akira Kurosawa to Masaki Kobayashi, Heinosuke Gosho and many others, but he had an especially close working relationship with Kihachi Okamoto.

While I know that Ken Takakura was also named a "person of distinguished service" in one of the previous years, does anyone know if a member of the film world has ever recieved the culture medal? Also, since have film world members started being mentioned as persons of distinguished service. With the tradtitionally low status of the film industry in Japan I can't imagine that it has been very common.

Here is the link to the article on the Asahi Shinbun home page:
http://www.asahi.com/culture/update/1026/TKY200710260366.html

Alex
-- 
alex at nipponconnection.de

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