This article appeared in Tokyo Weekender Vol. 2, 2025.
To read the entire issue, click here.
Growing up surrounded by rice paddies and mountains in the rural city of Sano, Tochigi Prefecture, Kurumi Nakata yearned for the unknown world of Tokyo. An exotic place that appeared in the Ai Yazawa manga books she read, it had the aura of a distant land. From a young age, she knew it was where she was supposed to be.
With no place to go after school, Nakata spent lots of time in her bedroom, which she covered with pictures of movie stars and models from the magazines she pored over. At the time, she was an impressionable teen enraptured by fashion styles that didn’t seem to exist in her hometown. Wanting to share her passion, she started a blog and subsequently made connections with like-minded individuals. She then happened to visit the famous Bunka Fashion College entrance ceremony, as her friend was attending.
That chance encounter marked the beginning of Nakata’s foray into the creative world she had once only imagined.
Making Her Debut
The Bunka Fashion College entrance ceremony is an event that feels less a formal rite of passage and more a spectacle of self-expression, with new students arriving in inventive, bold and eye-catching looks that showcase their sense of personal style. “There were many photographers there because it’s basically more like a fashion show than an entrance ceremony,” recalls Nakata. “I was just a high school student who was visiting in the hope of seeing some vibrant outfits. Then, someone from the magazine Zipper snapped my picture … Being a girl from the country who had been reading that magazine since I was 10 — it felt like a dream.”
From there, Nakata began to chase her aspirations more earnestly. At age 18, she moved to Kawasaki to live with her grandparents. Though not officially in Tokyo, it was close enough, and allowed her to model part time at night while studying during the day. Her ultimate goal was to work in movies, so she enrolled in the cinema department of Nihon University College of Art, which she was drawn to mainly because of award-winning screenwriter Kankuro Kudo, who also attended the college. It was his stories that sparked Nakata’s interest in acting.
It wasn’t a straight path to films, though — after graduating, she worked mainly as a model and supplemented her income with sponsored posts on her social media pages. Her first significant TV appearance came not as an actor but in more of an advisory role as she featured alongside her sister, Minori, in the popular reality TV series Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City.
The premise of Terrace House is straightforward: Six strangers — three men and three women — live together in a stylish home, navigating romance, friendship and career ambitions. Unlike many Western reality shows, the cast members are all free to come and go as they please, and can even have friends and family visit. Kurumi was just in a few episodes; she’d occasionally stop by the house to visit her younger sibling and give her dating advice. Despite this lack of airtime, she made a big impression on both viewers and the panel, with many calling for her to be a regular on the show.
One of her most memorable moments came during an event that’s become legendary among Terrace House viewers: The Meat Incident. Minori’s on-show love interest, Tatsuya Uchihara, had received a premium cut of wagyu beef from a work client — which Minori and a few other cast members cooked and ate without his knowledge. Outraged by the slight, Uchihara retreated into his room and refused to emerge or speak to anyone. It was only after Kurumi visited the house that he opened up.
“I always seem to be the advisor,” she says, laughing. “It was a big surprise to get that kind of attention for Terrace House, as I was just a viewer who popped in for a couple of minutes here and there to support my sister. I didn’t expect anyone to notice what I did, but I’m glad they did.”
A Long-Awaited Breakthrough
Although Nakata had started receiving quite a bit of recognition, she never lost sight of her ultimate dream: acting. She refused to let her growing profile cloud her vision. “Things weren’t going as I’d planned. I went to Tokyo to work as an actor, but I wasn’t getting any jobs, and most of my money was coming from Instagram,” she recalls. “That wasn’t why my parents paid for me to go to college.”
Her breakthrough role finally came in 2018, in the oddly titled true story, A Banana? At This Time of Night?. The movie centers around Yasuaki Kano (Yo Oizumi), an eccentric individual who suffers from muscular dystrophy. Nakata plays Kana, the best friend of Yasuaki’s crush, Misaki Ando (Mitsuki Takahata).
She impressed with her performance, and has seen steady progress in her career since, both as an actor and model. Listening to her speak, it’s evident how grateful she is for the opportunities she’s been given. She mentions how fortunate she was to be cast in the second season of Alice in Borderland, despite only being in one short scene. Even the unsuccessful auditions that used to get her down, she now takes positives from, using them as motivation to keep pushing her on to the next level.
“If I fail to get a part, it means they were looking for someone different, which is fine,” Nakata says matter-of-factly. “There will be other opportunities. Honestly, I feel very lucky with the roles I’ve been given. The one I’m proudest of so far was playing a thief in Kumokiri Nizaemon, a historical drama on NHK. It’s like an Edo-period version of Ocean’s Eleven. It was a big part, and I’d never been in a historical drama before, so there was a lot to learn before, such as how to dance and wear a kimono. I loved being involved in that.”
If Nakata needed any advice before taking on the role, she didn’t have far to look. Her husband, Tadanobu Asano, has appeared in several historical productions, including Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi, Martin Scorsese’s Silence and as Kashigi Yabushige in Shogun, for which he won a Golden Globe. The pair met around a decade ago at a live house, where he was playing with his band and she was performing in an idol cover dance group. They announced their marriage on social media in 2022.
“He’s always biased, telling me my performance is amazing,” says Nakata with a smile. “The advice he gives me is to keep on practicing, as nothing comes easily. He knows how determined I am.
“Working as an actor has been my ambition since I was daydreaming in my room as a child,” she continues. That sense of ambition has carried her a long way — and it doesn’t seem to be fading anytime soon. “My big goal is to appear in a major Japanese drama or film, on the scale of something like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. I know Shogun is an American production, but I think it showed that there are great stories here and that, more than ever before, people want to watch them, even if it means having to read subtitles. I just hope I can be part of something that big someday.”
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