Eijirō Tōno

Tono (1907 to 1994) worked for more than fifty years and appeared, by Wikipedia's count, in nearly 250 films and over 400 television programmes. The earliest credit listed here is from 1944 and the last from 1990. In his early years he acted under the name Katsuji Honjo.

Western audiences know him as the face Kurosawa and Ozu reached for when a scene needed an ordinary man. In Seven Samurai (1954) he is the kidnapper in the barn, the small desperate criminal whose standoff early in the film sets up everything it goes on to argue about what a samurai is for. In Yojimbo (1961) he is Gonji the tavern keeper, the only man in town with any sense, scolding a hero who will not listen. In Tokyo Story (1953) he is Numata, an old friend drinking through an evening of quiet disappointment about his own children, and Ozu came back to him for Early Spring (1956), Good Morning (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962), where he is Sakuma, the former teacher nicknamed the Gourd.

The range runs wider than those two names suggest: Kobayashi's The Human Condition (1959), Imamura's Pigs and Battleships (1961), Shinoda's Pale Flower (1964), Okamoto's Kill! (1968), entries in the Zatoichi and Miyamoto Musashi series, and Admiral Nagumo in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In Japan his most famous job was television, as the title character in the long-running jidaigeki series Mito Komon, which is not among the credits listed here. His last film credit here is Juzo Itami's Tales of a Golden Geisha (1990).