)[3] Her adoptive parents took her to performances of both classical Japanese stage arts like kabuki and bunraku, and western ballet and opera.

[a] Between 1937 and the end of the war, she acted in about 20 films, including works by directors Yasujirō Shimazu and Shirō Toyoda.

[9] Notable post-war film appearances were in Keisuke Kinoshita's Morning for the Osone Family (1946) and in Ozu's Late Spring (1949).

[4] Her most important film roles included that of Shige, the elderly couple's hairdresser daughter in Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953),[4][10] Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums (1954),[10] and Tadashi Imai's An Inlet of Muddy Water (1953).

On stage, she was successful as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (the first person to perform the role onstage in Japan[12]), as Gertrude in Hamlet and as Asako Kageyama in Yukio Mishima's Rokumeikan.