Playwright and director Masahiko Akutsu, known as a debater in the 1969 confrontation between Yukio Mishima and the University of Tokyo's Zenkyoto student movement, died on Oct. 27 of acute myocardial infarction, his agency said. He was 80.
Alpha Agency announced the death on its official website. "Akutsu Masahiko passed away on October 27 from acute myocardial infarction," the company wrote, thanking those who had supported him. The funeral was held with close relatives, the agency's actors and its staff.
Akutsu founded Alpha Agency in 1976 with Aoi Nakajima and Hiromi Bandai. Bandai met him at the University of Tokyo, where Akutsu ran the Komaba theater troupe, and supported him for the rest of his life, the agency said. In 1978 the three formed the company Homo Fictus ACT & AOI, for which Bandai produced every performance.
"Alpha Agency could not have come into being without the existence, the resolve and the passion of these three people," the agency wrote. It said it felt "a deep loneliness" at losing him in the year the company marks its 50th anniversary, and that those left behind would return to their founding aims and carry on his resolve.
Akutsu's name reached a wide audience through "Mishima Yukio vs. Todai Zenkyoto," the record of a 1969 debate at the University of Tokyo in which the novelist faced student activists. Akutsu appeared as one of the movement's spokesmen, arguing against Mishima in a session that has since been read as a defining clash between postwar Japan's literary establishment and its radical student left.