Hana Sugisaki: The Life Story Behind Japan's Rising Star

Some actresses win attention with noise. Hana Sugisaki wins it with quiet. Watch her in the bathhouse film that made her name, and you will see what I mean. She plays a schoolgirl whose mother is dying, and she does not cry loudly or beg the audience to feel sorry for her. She washes dishes, she carries towels, she looks at her mother with eyes that hold too much for a girl her age, and the pain of the whole story lands in those small, ordinary actions. That is her gift. She can make a room feel heavy without raising her voice, and she can make a single look carry a whole history.

She was born in Tokyo in 1997, and she has been working since she was a little girl. Most children who start that young either burn out or get stuck playing the same sweet part for ever. Sugisaki did neither. She moved from advertisements into television, from television into film, and from film into the hardest job in Japanese television, the lead of a morning drama that runs for months. Along the way she voiced a witch in an animated film, she held a sword in a samurai story, she played a woman who cannot speak about her past, and she played a girl who takes care of a dying mother. None of those characters resemble each other, and that is the point. She chooses parts that are different from the last one, and she lets each one change her a little.

This story follows that path. It begins with a small girl on advertising sets in Tokyo, it passes through a bathhouse in a small town, a witch’s cottage, a blood-soaked road in old Japan, and the theatre world of Osaka a hundred years ago, and it ends with an actress in her late twenties who is still picking the hard roles. Her life so far is not a story of sudden fame. It is a story of patience, of learning to be still, and of trusting that honest work will be noticed in the end.

A Small Girl on Advertising Sets in Tokyo

Hana Sugisaki was born on 2 October 1997 in Tokyo, under the name Hana Kajiura. Tokyo in the late 1990s was a city of neon, trains, and television studios, and a child with a bright face could find herself in front of a camera before she had even started school. That is what happened to Sugisaki. She began appearing in advertisements while she was still very young, standing under hot studio lights, smiling on cue, and learning to wait quietly while adults moved equipment around her. For most children, that would be a strange and tiring world. For her, it became a second home.

Advertisements teach a young performer lessons that no classroom can teach. A commercial lasts only seconds, so every look matters. The child must understand what the director wants, remember where to stand, and give the same smile again and again without letting it go stale. Sugisaki learned all of this before she was ten years old. She learned to take direction without sulking, to stay still when she was bored, and to find something real inside a made-up scene. Those early jobs paid little attention to her as a person, yet they trained her eye, her patience, and her ability to listen, and all three would matter enormously later.

As she grew older, small parts in television dramas followed. She played daughters, classmates, and young versions of older characters, the kind of parts that most viewers forget by the next episode. But each part gave her a new set to walk onto, a new director to watch, and a new adult actor to study. She saw how the best performers prepared, how they waited between takes, and how they treated the crew. She was collecting an education without realising it, one short scene at a time, and she was doing it while still going to school, still doing homework, and still living the ordinary life of a Tokyo schoolgirl.

Her family kept her grounded through those years. She was not pushed into the spotlight as a novelty, and she was not dressed up as a little adult. She worked, and then she went home. That balance protected her. Many children who start early lose their childhood to the job, and they arrive at eighteen exhausted and unsure who they are without a camera pointed at them. Sugisaki arrived at eighteen with her curiosity intact, ready to be tested by bigger parts, and that readiness is one of the reasons her adult career has lasted.

The Bathhouse Film That Made Critics Stop and Look

The film that changed everything was Her Love Boils Bathwater, released in 2016. Sugisaki was eighteen, and she played Azumi, the teenage daughter of Futaba, a woman who learns she is dying and decides to reopen the family bathhouse before her time runs out. Rie Miyazawa played Futaba, and the film belonged mostly to her, yet it was Sugisaki who gave the story its ache. Azumi is a girl who has been hurt by her family, who has learned not to expect much from the adults around her, and who slowly begins to trust her mother again as they scrub floors, boil water, and serve customers together.

There is a scene where Azumi simply watches her mother work, and the whole film seems to sit in her eyes. Sugisaki did not need big speeches to show what the girl was feeling. She showed it in the way she held a bucket, in the way she hesitated before speaking, and in the way her face changed when her mother laughed. Critics noticed. The film became one of the most talked-about Japanese films of the year, and Sugisaki’s performance was singled out again and again as the quiet heart of it. She won a Japan Academy Film Prize for her supporting work in the film, and suddenly the girl from the advertisements was being spoken about as a serious actress.

What made the role so hard was its stillness. Azumi does not explain herself. She does not tell the audience what she wants. She keeps her feelings locked away, and the actress must let the audience see them anyway, through small signs. Sugisaki understood that. She had spent her childhood learning to be still on sets, to listen, to watch, and now that training paid off in a part that asked her to do almost nothing and yet reveal almost everything. It was the first time many viewers had really seen her, and what they saw was a performer who trusted silence.

The success of the film opened doors, but it also set a trap. An actress who is praised for playing a sad, quiet girl can easily be offered the same sad, quiet girl for the next ten years. Sugisaki refused that path. Her very next choices were louder, stranger, and completely different, and that refusal is what turned a promising performance into a real career. She did not want to be the girl from the bathhouse for ever. She wanted to be an actress who could be anyone, and she set out to prove it.

Giving Mary Her Voice in a Witch’s Cottage

In 2017, a year after the bathhouse film, Sugisaki took on a job that used none of her face at all. She voiced Mary Smith, the heroine of Mary and the Witch’s Flower, the first film from Studio Ponoc, a new studio started by people who had worked at Studio Ghibli. The film was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, and it told the story of an ordinary girl who finds a strange flower, gains the power of magic for one night, and is taken to a school for witches. It was a big, colourful adventure, full of flying broomsticks, talking cats, and wild chases through the sky.

Voice acting is a different skill from acting on camera. There is no face to help you, no hands, no costume, and no set. The whole character must live in the voice alone. Mary is curious, stubborn, clumsy, and brave, and she changes a great deal over the course of the story. She starts as a bored girl in the countryside and ends as someone willing to risk everything to save the people she loves. Sugisaki had to carry all of that with sound alone, and she had to do it take after take in a recording booth, matching her voice to drawings that were still being finished.

She succeeded because she understood Mary as a real girl, not as a cartoon. Her Mary sounds unsure when she is unsure, excited when she is excited, and frightened when she is frightened, and the audience forgets that they are listening to a recording. Children who watched the film loved Mary, and adults noticed something else, which was that Sugisaki could hold a whole film together without ever appearing on screen. For an actress of nineteen, that was a remarkable second act to follow a prize-winning drama, and it proved that her range was wider than anyone had guessed.

The film also connected her to the world of animation at the highest level. Studio Ponoc had been founded by Yoshiaki Nishimura, a producer from Ghibli, and the film carried the hopes of everyone who loved that studio’s work. To be chosen as the voice of its first heroine was a sign of trust. Sugisaki repaid that trust with a performance that was warm, lively, and completely unforced, and Mary remains one of the most fondly remembered parts of her early career.

A Sword, a Girl, and the World of Blade of the Immortal

Also in 2017, Sugisaki stepped into a world that could not have been further from a witch’s cottage. She played Rin Asano in Blade of the Immortal, a samurai film directed by Takashi Miike and based on a long-running manga. Rin is a young girl whose parents are murdered by a gang of swordsmen, and she hires Manji, a swordsman who cannot die, played by Takuya Kimura, to help her take revenge. The film is full of blood, snow, mud, and long fights, and it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which is one of the biggest stages in world cinema.

Rin is not a warrior. She is an ordinary girl who has been thrown into a violent world, and she is frightened, angry, and determined all at once. Sugisaki had to play that mix while standing next to some of the most famous faces in Japanese film, and while filming fight scenes that were long, physical, and exhausting. She trained with a sword, she learned how to move in the heavy clothes of the period, and she learned how to keep her character’s fear visible even when the camera was full of flying blades. It was hard, dirty work, and it was nothing like the quiet bathhouse or the recording booth.

What is striking about her Rin is that she never tries to look tough. She looks like a girl who is out of her depth, and that is exactly what makes her brave. She keeps going because she has a reason to keep going, not because she enjoys the fighting. Sugisaki let the audience see the cost of every step Rin took, the shaking hands, the tired eyes, the moments when she wanted to stop. In a film full of men showing off their skill with a sword, she gave the story its human centre, and that is a harder job than any fight scene.

The film travelled the world, and with it, Sugisaki’s name travelled too. People who had never seen a Japanese morning drama and people who had never watched an animated film about a witch now knew her as the girl with the sword. In the space of two years she had played a grieving daughter, a witch, and a girl seeking revenge, and no one could say what she would do next. That unpredictability became her trademark, and directors began to think of her not as a type, but as an actress who could be trusted with anything.

Ochoyan and a Year Inside Osaka’s Old Theatre World

The biggest test of her young career came from television, and it lasted for months. In 2020, Sugisaki was chosen to lead Ochoyan, the NHK morning drama, playing Chiyo Takei, a girl who grows up in poverty in Osaka and becomes an actress in the world of popular theatre in the early twentieth century. A morning drama is a huge commitment. It runs for around six months, with a new episode almost every weekday, and the whole country watches it over breakfast. The lead actress carries the show on her shoulders, and if she is not good, everyone knows it by the second week.

Chiyo’s life is a hard one. She loses her mother young, she works as a servant, she is treated badly, and she finds her way into the theatre, where she learns to act, to sing, and to survive in a world that is often unkind to women. Sugisaki had to play Chiyo from a teenager into a grown woman, and she had to do it in the Osaka dialect, which is not her own, and in the manners and clothes of a Japan that no longer exists. She spent months preparing, learning the dialect, learning how people moved and spoke in that world, and learning the songs and routines of the old stage.

The work was relentless. Morning drama filming starts early, runs long, and leaves little time for rest. Sugisaki was in almost every scene, and she had to keep Chiyo’s spirit alive through hundreds of pages of script. She did it by finding the joy in the character. Chiyo is poor and unlucky, but she is also funny, stubborn, and full of life, and Sugisaki let that humour shine through even in the sad scenes. Viewers fell in love with Chiyo, and the drama became one of the most warmly remembered morning dramas of recent years.

Ochoyan proved something that the films had only suggested, which was that Sugisaki could carry a story for months, not just for two hours. She could grow a character slowly, day by day, in front of millions of people, and she could keep them coming back. It also showed her range in a new way. The same actress who had been silent in the bathhouse and frightened in the samurai film could now be loud, funny, and full of Osaka energy. After Ochoyan, no one could call her a quiet actress any more. She could be quiet when the part asked for it, and she could fill a room when the part asked for that instead.

Ichiko, 52 Hertz, and Roles That Ask Hard Questions

After the morning drama, Sugisaki turned to films that ask difficult questions. In Ichiko, released in 2023, she played the title role, a young woman whose life begins to fall apart when a secret from her past comes to light. Ichiko is a film about identity, about the papers and names that decide who a person is allowed to be, and about what happens when the story a person has told about herself turns out to be untrue. It is a slow, serious film, and it rests almost entirely on Sugisaki’s face. She has to play a woman who is hiding something, who is frightened of being found out, and who is still trying to live an ordinary life, and she does it with the same stillness she brought to the bathhouse, only now it is the stillness of an adult.

A year later she starred in 52 Hertz Whales, released in 2024, playing a young woman who has lived a life of silence and who tries to find her voice again. The title comes from the idea of a whale whose call is at a frequency no other whale can hear, a creature that sings and is never answered. Sugisaki’s character is like that whale. She has been hurt, she has stopped speaking about what happened to her, and the film follows her as she slowly learns to trust another person and to speak again. It is a gentle film, and it asks the audience to be patient, to listen carefully, and to understand that some wounds take years to heal.

These two films show what Sugisaki looks for now. She is not chasing big action films or easy romantic comedies. She is choosing stories about women who are in trouble, women who are hiding something, women who must find the strength to speak or to keep going. She is drawn to characters who are not simple, and she is willing to let a film be slow and quiet if the story needs it to be. That is a brave choice for an actress in her twenties, because quiet films do not always make money, and they do not always win prizes, but they are the films that people remember.

She has also appeared in other work along the way, including a supporting part in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister and newer television projects such as The Royal Family, and each of those jobs added another colour to her work. But it is the hard, quiet films that define this stage of her career. They show an actress who is no longer proving that she can act. She is now deciding what kind of actress she wants to be, and the answer, again and again, is one who takes the difficult part and trusts the audience to follow her.

Awards, Quiet Fame, and the Choice to Stay Private

Sugisaki has been honoured for her work, and the honours matter because they came from her peers and from critics, not from a popularity contest. Her Japan Academy Film Prize for Her Love Boils Bathwater was the clearest sign that the film world had accepted her as a serious actress while she was still a teenager. Other prizes and nominations followed as her films travelled to festivals and as her morning drama won viewers across Japan. She does not collect awards loudly, and she does not talk about them much, but they sit behind her name now, and they give directors confidence when they offer her a difficult part.

Her fame is a strange kind of fame. She is well known, she is recognised on the street, and her films are watched by millions, yet she lives a private life. She rarely shares details about her personal life, she does not court gossip, and she lets her work speak for her. In a world where many young stars build their careers on social media and on being seen, Sugisaki has built hers on being good. That choice costs her some attention, and it probably costs her some money, but it has bought her something more valuable, which is freedom. Directors offer her parts because of what she can do, not because of who she was photographed with last week.

There is also a quiet discipline in the way she works. She does not take every job that is offered. She takes a few, she gives each one her full attention, and then she disappears for a while to prepare for the next. That rhythm is unusual in Japanese entertainment, where many stars work constantly, moving from one drama to the next without a pause. Sugisaki’s rhythm is slower, and it shows in the work. Her performances feel considered, as if she has thought about the character for a long time before the camera started rolling, and that thoughtfulness is something the audience can feel even if they cannot name it.

The price of this way of working is that she is sometimes out of sight, and people wonder what she is doing. The reward is that when she returns, she returns with something worth watching. She has never been in a hurry, and that patience, which began on the advertising sets when she was a small girl learning to wait quietly, is still the centre of her career.

Where Her Work Is Heading Now

Sugisaki is now in her late twenties, and she stands at an interesting point in her life. She has already done the things that most actresses spend a whole career trying to do. She has led a morning drama, she has won a major film prize, she has voiced an animated heroine, she has carried a samurai epic, and she has played the lead in serious, quiet films about women in trouble. There is very little left for her to prove, and that freedom gives her choices that few performers her age enjoy.

What she does with that freedom will decide the next part of her story. She could move into bigger international work, and her films have already been seen at festivals around the world. She could take on more stage work, and her theatre training from Ochoyan would serve her well. She could become a director one day, or a producer, or she could simply keep choosing the hard film roles that she loves. Whatever she chooses, the pattern of her career so far suggests that she will choose slowly, she will choose carefully, and she will choose the part that frightens her a little, because those are the parts that have always brought out her best.

Her legacy, even now, is easy to describe. She showed that a child who starts in advertisements can become a serious actress without losing herself. She showed that quiet acting can be powerful, that a look can do the work of a speech, and that a performer does not need to shout to be heard. Young actresses in Japan watch her and learn from her, and directors trust her with the parts that other actresses might turn down. She has built a career that is hers alone, one careful choice at a time, and it is still growing.

The next time you watch one of her films, watch her eyes. In the bathhouse, in the witch’s cottage, on the road with a sword, on the Osaka stage, and in the quiet rooms of Ichiko and 52 Hertz, the story is always there, in the way she looks at the world. That is what makes Hana Sugisaki worth watching, and that is why her story is still only at its beginning.

My Take:

I have watched Hana Sugisaki’s films with a feeling I do not get from many young stars, and that feeling is respect. Not the loud kind of respect that comes from a big box office number, but the quiet kind that comes from watching someone do a hard job well, again and again, without showing off. Her Love Boils Bathwater is the film I think about most. I have seen many films about dying parents, and most of them ask the actors to cry, to shout, to make a big scene so the audience knows this is the sad part. Sugisaki does the opposite. She washes a dish. She looks at her mother. She says almost nothing. And I felt more in those small moments than I have felt in whole films built around tears. That takes a kind of courage, because an actor who holds back is trusting the audience to meet her halfway, and many actors are too frightened to do that.

What I admire most about her is that she has never taken the easy road. Think about her choices. She wins a prize for playing a sad girl in a bathhouse, and the easy road would be to play sad girls for the next ten years, collecting money and praise for doing the same thing. She did not do that. She went and voiced a witch. Then she went and picked up a sword. Then she spent months learning an Osaka dialect for a morning drama. Then she played women with secrets so heavy they could barely speak. Each time, she chose the thing she had not done before, and each time, she risked failing in public. I think that is the real mark of an artist. It is easy to be good at one thing. It is much harder to keep starting again, to keep being a beginner, to keep saying yes to the part that scares you.

I also think about how she started, and I feel a kind of sadness for the childhood she gave up. She was working on advertising sets before she was ten years old. She was learning to smile on cue, to stand where she was told, to wait while adults moved lights around her. That is not a normal childhood, and no matter how well her family protected her, she missed things that other children got to have. She missed lazy afternoons. She missed being unnoticed. She missed the freedom to be bad at something without anyone watching. And yet, when I watch her act, I do not see a person who is bitter about that. I see a person who took what that childhood taught her, patience, listening, stillness, and turned it into her greatest strength. That is a remarkable thing to do with a difficult start in life, and I think it says a lot about who she is.

There is something else I want to say, and it is about privacy. In the world we live in now, famous people are expected to share everything. They are expected to post photographs of their breakfast, to talk about their relationships, to let strangers into their homes. Sugisaki does not do that, and I respect her for it. She has kept her personal life her own, and she has let her work do the talking. I think that takes strength, because the pressure to share must be enormous, and the money to be made from sharing must be tempting. But she has decided that her life belongs to her, and her films belong to us, and that line is a healthy one. I wish more famous people drew it. When I watch her films, I am not thinking about gossip. I am thinking about the character. And that is how it should be.

Her performance in Ochoyan taught me something about stamina. A morning drama is not a film. A film is a sprint, a few months of hard work and then it is done. A morning drama is a marathon that lasts for half a year, with new pages every day and a whole country watching. To carry that, to keep a character alive and growing for that long, takes a different kind of strength. Sugisaki did it while learning a dialect that was not her own, while playing a girl who grows into a woman, while singing and acting on a stage that belonged to another century. I think about the mornings she must have woken up tired, the days when the lines would not stay in her head, the weeks when she must have wanted a holiday. And she kept going. That kind of persistence is not glamorous, and no one writes songs about it, but it is the thing that separates a star from an actress. She is an actress.

I also want to talk about Ichiko and 52 Hertz, because these are the films that show me who she is becoming. These are not easy films. They are slow. They are about women who have been hurt, who have secrets, who cannot speak. A lot of actresses would avoid these parts because they do not make you look beautiful, they do not make you look clever, and they do not give you a big speech to win an award with. Sugisaki chose them. I think she chose them because she cares about the women in those stories, and because she believes that a quiet film about a woman in trouble is worth making. That belief matters. Films like these do not change the world, but they change the person who watches them, and I think Sugisaki knows that. She is using her fame to tell stories that would otherwise not be told, and that is a good use of fame.

When I watch her in Mary and the Witch’s Flower, I hear something I did not expect from an actress known for silence. Her voice is full of life. Mary is a girl who is bored and restless, and then suddenly she can fly, and Sugisaki makes you feel that rush of freedom in her voice alone. There is no face to help her, no hands, no costume, and yet the character feels completely real. I think that job is harder than people realise, because on camera an actor can use their eyes, and in a recording booth there are only the words. She gave Mary a voice that sounds like a real girl, not like a cartoon, and children who watch that film believe in Mary at once. That tells me her talent is not in her face. It is in her understanding of people. She knows how a girl of that age thinks, how she hopes, how she is afraid, and she can put all of that into sound alone.

Blade of the Immortal showed me another side of her, and it surprised me more than the voice work did. The film is violent and muddy and cold, and she is a young girl standing in the middle of it with a sword she barely knows how to hold. What I remember is not the fighting. I remember her face after the fighting, tired and frightened and still going on. She did not pretend to be a warrior. She played a girl who had lost her parents and who had a reason to keep walking, and that honesty made the whole film feel human. In a story full of men who cannot die, she was the one person who could feel pain, and the audience felt it with her. That is a strange thing to say about a samurai film, but it is true. The heart of the film is a girl who is afraid, and Sugisaki never hid that fear.

I keep coming back to the way she listens on screen. Most actors want to speak. They want the line, the speech, the moment. Sugisaki seems happiest when she is listening to someone else. Watch her in the bathhouse film when her mother is talking. Watch her in Ichiko when someone is asking her a question she cannot answer. Her face is doing the work, and you can see her thinking. That listening is a skill, and it is rare. It comes from her childhood, I think, from all those years on sets where a child is told to wait and watch. She learned to pay attention, and now that attention is the centre of her acting. The camera loves a face that is truly listening, because the audience starts listening too.

There is a lesson in her career for any young person who wants to do creative work. She did not chase fame. She chased good parts. She did not take every job. She took a few, and she gave each one everything she had, and then she went away to prepare for the next. That slowness looks like a weakness in a world that rewards people for being everywhere at once, but it is really a strength. Her work feels considered because it is considered. She has thought about the character for a long time before the camera starts, and you can feel that thought in every scene. I would rather watch one film like that than ten films made in a hurry.

I also think she has changed what a young Japanese actress is allowed to be. Before her, a girl who started in advertisements was expected to stay pretty and safe, to smile for the camera and never take a risk. Sugisaki broke that pattern. She played a girl who scrubs floors. She played a girl who carries a sword. She played a woman who cannot speak about her past. She played a girl from a hundred years ago who sings on a stage in Osaka. None of those parts asked her to be pretty. They asked her to be true. And because she was true, audiences trusted her, and directors trusted her, and now other young actresses can take harder parts because she showed it was possible. That is a legacy worth more than any prize.

If someone asked me where to start with her films, I would tell them to begin with the bathhouse. Watch it once for the story, and then watch it again just for her. Notice the small things. The way she holds a bucket. The way she waits before she speaks. The way her eyes change when her mother laughs. Those details are the whole performance. Then watch Ochoyan if you have the time, because there you will see her laugh and be loud and full of life, and you will understand that the quiet girl from the bathhouse can do anything. Then watch Ichiko, and sit with the silence of it, and ask yourself what you would do if your whole life was built on a secret. That is the journey she offers, from grief to joy to a kind of hard-won peace, and it is worth taking slowly.

I wonder sometimes what her childhood self would think if she could see where she is now. A small girl on an advertising set in Tokyo, smiling on cue, waiting while adults moved lights around her. Would she believe that one day she would lead a morning drama watched by millions, that she would stand at Cannes, that she would voice a witch for a new studio, that critics would call her one of the finest actresses of her generation? I think she would be surprised, and I think she would also recognise something. The patience is the same. The stillness is the same. The willingness to listen is the same. She did not become someone else. She became more herself, and that is the best kind of success.

Her choice to stay private also makes me think about what fame is for. So many stars now treat fame as a job in itself, something to feed every day with photographs and updates. Sugisaki treats fame as a side effect of the work, not the work itself. The work is the film, the character, the story. Fame is just what happens afterwards, and she does not seem to care much about it. I find that restful. It means that when I watch her, I am watching a person who is there for the story, not for herself. And it means that the next time she appears, it will be because she found a story worth telling, not because she needed to be seen.

The Royal Family and Our Little Sister show that she can also fit into an ensemble, that she does not always need to be the centre of the story. That matters too, because some stars cannot share a screen. They need every scene to be about them. Sugisaki can step back and let another actor shine, and the film is better for it. That generosity is part of why directors like working with her. She makes the people around her better, because she listens, because she reacts honestly, because she is not competing with anyone. A film set is a team, and she behaves like a team player.

Looking ahead, I am curious rather than certain about what she will do next, and I like that feeling. She could go abroad and work in other languages, and her face and her stillness would travel well. She could return to the stage, and the training from Ochoyan would serve her there. She could direct one day, because she clearly understands story and character better than most actors. Or she could keep doing exactly what she is doing now, choosing quiet, difficult films about women in trouble. Any of those paths would be worth following, and the fact that I cannot guess which one she will take is a compliment. An actress who is easy to predict has stopped growing. Sugisaki is still growing, and that is the most exciting thing about her.

What I take away from her story, in the end, is simple. You do not need to shout to be heard. You do not need to be everywhere to matter. You need to choose well, to work honestly, to listen, and to be patient. Hana Sugisaki learned those things as a small girl on advertising sets, and she has spent her whole career proving that they are enough. She is still young, and her best work may still be ahead of her, but what she has already done is enough to earn her a place among the finest actresses Japan has produced. I will keep watching, and I will keep listening, because with her, the quiet moments are the ones that stay with you longest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Hana Sugisaki’s birth name?

She was born Hana Kajiura on 2 October 1997 in Tokyo, Japan, and she began working in advertisements while she was still a small child.

Which film won Hana Sugisaki a Japan Academy Film Prize?

She won the prize for her supporting role as Azumi in Her Love Boils Bathwater, the 2016 film about a dying mother who reopens the family bathhouse.

Who did Hana Sugisaki voice in Mary and the Witch’s Flower?

She voiced Mary Smith, the heroine of Studio Ponoc’s first film from 2017, an ordinary girl who finds a magic flower and is taken to a school for witches.

What character does Hana Sugisaki play in Blade of the Immortal?

She plays Rin Asano, a young girl whose parents are murdered and who hires Manji, a swordsman who cannot die, to help her take revenge.

What is Ochoyan about, and who did Hana Sugisaki play in it?

Ochoyan is the NHK morning drama from 2020 in which she played Chiyo Takei, a girl who grows up poor in Osaka and becomes an actress in the world of popular theatre in the early twentieth century.

Did Hana Sugisaki appear in Our Little Sister?

Yes, she had a supporting part in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, a family drama about four sisters living together in Kamakura.

What is Hana Sugisaki’s acting style known for?

She is known for quiet, natural acting built on stillness and listening, letting small looks and ordinary actions carry feelings that other actors would show with loud speeches.