[1] Ryū was born in Tamamizu Village, Tamana County, a rural area of Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu, the most southerly and westerly of the four main islands of Japan.

His parents hoped he would succeed his father as priest of Raishōji, but Ryū had no wish to do so and in 1925 dropped out of university and enrolled in the acting academy of the Shōchiku motion picture company's Kamata Studios.

During this time he appeared in fourteen films directed by Yasujirō Ozu, beginning with the college comedy Dreams of Youth (1928).

He was in Keisuke Kinoshita's Twenty-four Eyes (1954) and played wartime Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki in Kihachi Okamoto's Japan's Longest Day (1967).

From 1969 until his death in 1993, he played a curmudgeonly but benevolent Buddhist priest in more than forty of the immensely popular It's Tough Being a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo) series starring Kiyoshi Atsumi as the lovable pedlar/conman Tora-san.