Tokyo Film Festival to Open With Sukiyaki, the Story of a Song That Conquered the World

The 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival will open with Sukiyaki, a drama from director Takahisa Zeze about the 1960s song that became a global hit. The track came to symbolize Japan's recovery from postwar devastation and humiliation.

The film centers on composer and jazz pianist Hachidai Nakamura, played by Junichi Okada, and his partnership with lyricist Rokusuke Ei, played by Tori Matsuzaka. It also follows singer Kyu Sakamoto, played by Taiga Nakano, who turned their mix of a jaunty melody and plaintive lyrics into an unlikely worldwide pop phenomenon.

Nakamura's path to the song was rocky. An ill-fated recital left him struggling with debt and addiction as rockabilly overtook jazz. He was rescued by a partnership with Ei, a radio writer who had never written song lyrics, when the two were hired to write a rockabilly score for a 1959 movie from Toho. The same company is distributing the new film.

In 1961 the pair wrote "Ue o Muite Aruko," which means "I look upwards as I walk." Nakamura blended traditional Japanese scales, jazz chords and American pop influences. Ei's melancholic lyrics were inspired by the failure of the mass Anpo protests to block a Tokyo-Washington security treaty that kept a large American military presence in Japan. Looking upward, in the song, is a way to keep tears from falling.

Sakamoto was brought in on short notice for the premiere at Tokyo's Sankei Hall on July 21, 1961, and received the sheet music only two hours earlier. Without rehearsal, he drifted into a minor key on an ad lib, sang the 4-beat song as an 8-beat and came in a beat late, imitating the Japanese balladeers he had grown up hearing. Those quirks added to its distinctiveness. Released as a single, it was Music Life's best domestic song from November 1961 to January 1962 and sold 300,000 copies.

The song reached the West after Louis Benjamin of Britain's Pye Records visited Japan in 1962 and fell for the melody. He passed it to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, whose instrumental version, titled "Sukiyaki," reached the British top ten in February 1963. One account says Benjamin chose the name after eating the hotpot dish in Tokyo, while another says Ball picked one of the few Japanese words he knew because the original title seemed too difficult.

A U.S. release of Ball's version and an instrumental cover by Billy Vaughn made little impact, so Capitol US gambled on the original Japanese recording under the "Sukiyaki" title. It reached stores on May 3, 1963, and in June topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks. That made Sakamoto the only Japanese artist with a U.S. No. 1 and the song the first from Asia to get there. No other Asian artist repeated the feat until BTS's "Dynamite" in 2020. The single topped charts from Australia to Norway and eventually sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.

Toshiba reissued the single in Japan once people there realized the world was whistling along to a song in their language. The new cover added "Sukiyaki" in katakana and the legend "global hit!" Japan's economy was then growing at double-digit rates and companies like Sony and Toyota were becoming global brands, so the song's success fed national pride. Covers followed in Chinese languages, Spanish, German and French. In 1981, A Taste of Honey, led by Janice-Marie Johnson, took its version to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 3 on the Hot 100. Johnson's lyrics were later used in Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick's 1985 song "La Di Da Di."

Sakamoto died on August 12, 1985, aboard Japan Air Lines flight 123 from Tokyo to Osaka. The Boeing 747 suffered catastrophic mechanical failure twelve minutes after takeoff and crashed into a mountainside in central Japan, killing 520 of the 524 people on board. His song is played at the annual memorial service. It was revived after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, appeared in the Ghibli film From Up on Poppy Hill, and was played at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021. The film Sukiyaki opens in Japan on Christmas Day.