Tabu Kenzô

Tabu Kenzô (born Tabu Yasutarô) was a reliable Japanese character actor active across nearly six decades.

Before the outbreak of the World War II, he peacefully ran a clothing store in his native Kyoto. He only pivoted into pursuing an acting career after returning home from his active military duty. Tabu was a short, bald-headed man who intelligently flaunted his distinct, natural Kansai dialect to his advantage throughout his career. Between 1935 and 1993, he appeared in well over 150 feature films, splitting his efforts comfortably as a contracted player for both Toho and Daiei studios.

He is best known to genre fans globally as the cynical, impatient business developer aggressively demanding the cleaning of the flooded industrial park in Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), and as the sneering leader of the Earth-based alien infiltration squad in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965).

Tabu passed away from a metastatic brain tumor in 1993 at the age of seventy-nine.