Takahisa Zeze’s Sukiyaki Premieres as Tokyo Film Festival Opener

Sukiyaki opened the 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival on Monday.

Directed by Takahisa Zeze, the film centers on composer Hachidai Nakamura, played by Junichi Okada, and lyricist Rokusuke Ei, played by Tori Matsuzaka. The story follows their collaboration with singer Kyu Sakamoto, portrayed by Taiga Nakano, to create a song that became a global pop culture phenomenon.

The film depicts the 1961 release of the track, originally titled “Ue o Muite Aruko.” Nakamura, a jazz pianist struggling with debt after rockabilly overtaken the genre, partnered with Ei, a radio writer who had never composed lyrics before. They wrote a rockabilly score for a 1959 Toho movie. Ei’s lyrics drew from the failed Anpo protests against the Tokyo-Washington security treaty, using the act of looking upward to keep back tears.

Sakamoto received the sheet music only two hours before the premiere at Tokyo’s Sankei Hall on July 21, 1961. Unrehearsed, he performed the four-beat song in an eight-beat rhythm and shifted into a minor key on an ad lib. These deviations added to the song’s distinctiveness. It became the Music Life best domestic song from November 1961 to January 1962, selling 300,000 copies in Japan.

British label Pye Records brought the track overseas after Louis Benjamin heard it during a 1962 visit to Japan. He gave it to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, who recorded an instrumental version that reached the British top ten in February 1963. Capitol Records later released the original Japanese version under the title “Sukiyaki” in the United States on May 3, 1963. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in June 1963, making Sakamoto the only Japanese artist to achieve a U.S. No. 1 until BTS’s “Dynamite” in 2020.

The single sold more than 13 million copies worldwide, topping charts from Australia to Norway. Toshiba reissued the song in Japan with the title “Sukiyaki” in katakana and the legend “global hit!” as the country’s economy posted double-digit growth. The track became a source of national pride for a public still recovering from wartime defeat and occupation.

Decades later, Janice-Marie Johnson of the R&B group A Taste of Honey recorded a cover that topped the Billboard R&B chart and reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 1981. Johnson contacted Ei in Japan for a rough English translation to build her version. Her lyrics were later used in the 1985 hip-hop track “La Di Da Di” by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick.

Sakamoto died on August 12, 1985, when Japan Air Lines flight 123 crashed into a mountainside in central Japan. The Boeing 747 suffered catastrophic mechanical failure 12 minutes after takeoff from Tokyo to Osaka. Of the 524 people on board, 520 were killed, making it the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in aviation history. The song is played at the annual memorial service.

The film opens in Japan on Christmas Day, reuniting the on-screen trio that Sakamoto had expressed a desire to bring together before his death.