Matsunosuke Onoe

, sometimes known as Medama no Matchan ("Eyeballs" Matsu), was a Japanese actor. His birth name is Tsuruzo Nakamura. He is sometimes credited as Yukio Koki, Tamijaku Onoe, or Tsunusaburo Onoe, and as a kabuki artist he went by the name Tsurusaburo Onoe. He gained great popularity, appearing in over 1,000 films, and has been called the first superstar of Japanese cinema.

Career

Onoe was initially an actor with an itinerant kabuki troupe. In his autobiography, he claimed that he had made his stage debut as early as 1880, in a performance given by the Tamizo Onoe company. Fascinated by the stage, he left his home by the age of 14 to travel with a troupe, and by 1892, he was acting under the stage name Tsurusaburo Onoe. In 1905, he adopted the more prestigious name Matsunosuke Onoe. ) that year. Onoe's troupe proved consistently popular, and Makino chose Onoe to star in his future movies.

Onoe starred in hundreds of films; the 1925 Araki Mataemon was advertised as his 1,000th film.

His films were silent, voiced-over by a live narrator (benshi) in the theaters. They largely followed the conventions of kabuki theater; for example, except for those made during the last years of his career, his movies featured male oyama actors in the female roles. Many of his films were shot at 8 frames per second, rather than the Western convention of 16 that was promoted by some Japanese modernizers, in order to save on film stock. Some critics have pointed to this economization, as well as to such elements as overexposure of some films causing the actors' facial features to wash out, as evidence of primitive film-making.