Do we like Takeshi Kitano?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent on the page we can see, with one contested gay-marriage quip in 2012, and honest about his industry's ugly side.
Takeshi Kitano is two people at once. On Japanese telly he is Beat Takeshi, the comedian and presenter, and behind the camera he is the director of hard-edged crime films like Violent Cop and Brother. France gave him its Legion of Honour, with a former culture minister praising his work for getting audiences to laugh at absurdity.
The one proper stoush on his record is from 2012. On a TBS current-affairs show he quipped that supporting gay marriage would lead to supporting marriage to an animal, and activists were upset. He later told AFP he had only meant people who love their pets very much. Where you land depends on whether you read that as a bad joke or as a put-down; either way it was a poor look.
Harm check: that 2012 quip is the only thing we found, and we found no remarks against trans people, migrants or women from him, nor any climate or vaccine conspiracy talk. He also doesn't appear to be keeping dodgy company in his recent films. His latest big project, Kubi, is a samurai epic he wrote from his own 2019 novel, with Ken Watanabe attached early on.
What he did with that film is the interesting bit. Kubi puts male-male relationships front and centre, and he said earlier films about that period never showed them. In a BFI interview he said queerness in Japanese society has diverse patterns, and the film played in the Cannes lineup in 2023. That is a long way from the 2012 joke, and it's worth giving him credit for it.
On the troubles side, the only other item we saw is that a man in his 40s was accused over a pickaxe attack on a car carrying Kitano in Tokyo in 2021. Nobody was hurt, and Kitano was the target, not the accused. We didn't find any allegations against him of bullying or mistreating people.
Nothing fresh turned up on him lately that we could confirm. There have been reports he might make Kubi his last film as director, but that came from a 2021 magazine story his agency wouldn't comment on, and the 2026 retirement and marriage rumours were all gossip-site stuff, so we've left them alone.