Asuka Kudo

Asuka Kudo (Japanese: 工藤阿須加, born 1 August 1991) is a Japanese actor and presenter from Tokorozawa in Saitama Prefecture, signed to Papado. He also farms, which is not a hobby he picked up for publicity.

He grew up in a sporting household. His father is Kimiyasu Kudo, the pitcher who later managed the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, and his sister Haruka is a professional golfer. He is the eldest of five children. He played tennis seriously enough to aim at turning professional, but a shoulder injury in high school ended that. He has never played baseball.

Food interested him early, partly because the household ate around an athlete’s diet. In his final year of high school he read Akinori Kimura’s book Miracle Apples, was moved by it, and enrolled at the Tokyo University of Agriculture intending to farm. He left before finishing, because acting had arrived in the meantime.

His debut came in 2012 in the NTV drama Risou no Musuko. In 2013 he appeared in the NHK taiga drama Yae no Sakura as Yamamoto Saburo, the heroine’s younger brother, and in Shomuni 2013. The following year brought a role with an odd symmetry to it: he was picked from around a hundred auditionees for TBS’s Sunday Theatre drama Roosevelt Game, playing Kazuya Okihara, a pitcher on a corporate baseball team, which is to say his father’s position. That May he threw the ceremonial first pitch at Seibu Dome wearing his father’s old number 47, and clocked 114 km/h without ever having played the game.

He took his first leading role in 2018 in The Black Company, and between October 2018 and March 2021 was the Wednesday personality on NTV’s morning programme ZIP!. In 2021 he started farming for real, on land in Hokuto, Yamanashi Prefecture. He has said the pandemic convinced him that waiting until he had the money or the time would mean never starting.

His screen credits include Asa ga Kita (2015), Your Home Is My Business (2016), Radiation House (2019), Kyojo (2020), Burn the House Down (2023) as Kiichi Mitarai, both Golden Kamuy productions (2024) as Hajime Tsukishima and The Right to Judge (2025).

He plays Shinya Kubota in The Boy and I Who Will Break Up in 100 Days.