[1] It was only after the Pacific War, when the post-war shortages created a demand in films that Matsuda really began his vocation as a Benshi.
In 1947 he found himself part of a troupe of itinerant benshi travelling around Kyūshū, whose burgeoning coal mining industry had attracted a lot of workers to the region.
With the 1923 Kanto earthquake and the War, a vast number of films had already been destroyed, but even worse was the complete laissez-faire attitude of the major studios to their own product.
In 1948, he officially took up his name as the second Matsuda Shunsui and in the same year he was awarded the top prize in the national Film Narrator's Competition.
He can also be seen in full flow providing the narration for the silent film fragment in Kaizo Hayashi's homage to this golden age, To Sleep So As To Dream (Yume Miruyoni Nemuritai, 1986).