Sunday, January 16, 2011

Toshiaki Karasawa: 21st Century Boy


Toshiaki Karasawa has this week been doing Wonda coffee commercials on TV and on billboards around Tokyo, including a huge one I saw today at Shinjuku Station - which reminded my frazzled mind to put a link here to an article on this way cool guy that I recently tossed together for Forces Of Geek.

Karasawa is one of my favourite contemporary Japanese actors – alongside better-known types like Ken Watanabe, Kiichi Nakai, Koji Yakusho, Yusuke Iseya, Kenichi Matsuyama and Koichi Sato.

As I mentioned above, like most Japanese actors Karasawa has no qualms about appearing in advertising on tellies over here, and he’s popped up in some hilarious commercials for muscle-fixing shippu (a cold-patch reminiscent of the pain paste Deep Heat that's best known back in former Brit colonies like Australia and South Africa), and he sometimes gets into weird superhero garb to sell houses.

Now he's doing a coffee run. You can check out the commercials here.

Anyway, you can also read more of my wayward homage/diatribe, editorial errors and all (sorry, I hacked this together over New Year, so you can guess where my head space was), courtesy of FOG at Toshiaki Karasawa: 21st Century Boy.

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