Yūsaku Matsuda
[1] Several manga, anime and video game characters are based on him, including Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star, Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, Aokiji in One Piece, Wabisuke in Summer Wars, and Jubei Yagyu in Onimusha 2.His career as a screen actor started in 1973 with a role as a junior police officer in a TV detective drama called Taiyō ni Hoero!Director Ridley Scott and co-stars Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, and Kate Capshaw praised his professionalism and performance, despite his suffering.He died shortly afterwards, after making a final appearance in a special television drama with Florence Griffith-Joyner, in which he was supposed to run against her, but was unable to do so because of his illness.Books, films, television specials, and other products, such as scale models of his most famous characters,[6] continue to appear long after his death.However, extremely unhappy in America, malnourished, unable to speak English, and feeling himself the victim of discrimination, he returned to Japan.[7] He changed his citizenship from Korean to Japanese while he was starring in Taiyō ni Hoero!, with the help of Michiko, whose father was a member of the Liberal Democratic party who was head of the then-Prime Minister's support office.[4] After his death, his first wife, who had experienced him ignoring an ear infection until it required surgery to prevent deafness, wrote that she suspected that he did not actually realize the seriousness of his illness.A month after he was admitted, Matsuda died at 6:45 PM JST on November 6 at the age of 40, at a Tokyo hospital.[11] In the video game Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, the hero Jubei Yagyu was modelled after Yūsaku Matsuda.