When Nakadai Tatsuya, one of Japan’s most celebrated actors, decided that his young student’s surname was too dull for the stage, he reached for an unlikely inspiration. Hashimoto Koji — as the actor was called then — had been working at a Tokyo municipal office before auditioning for Nakadai’s acting school. The word for such an office in Japanese is yakusho. The stage name followed naturally, carrying with it a wish: that this unknown clerk’s range of roles would one day be as wide as