Died at 76
male
Yūsaku Matsuda was a Japanese actor. He was born in Shimonoseki, to a Japanese father and a Zainichi Korean mother. He became an actor when he was 23 as a rookie police officer for the 1970s Japanese TV detective drama called Taiyō ni hoero! Apart from this role, his other defining role on television was in Tantei monogatari. He featured in many other TV shows and movies. He won the award for best actor at the 8th Hochi Film Award for Detective Story and The Family Game. He specialized in physical action movies. The 1989 movie Black Rain — directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia— opened the door for Matsuda as an international actor. However, shortly after he made this movie, he died due to bladder cancer. He was survived by his second wife and three young children.
The story follows a team of pirate mercenaries known as the Lagoon Company, that smuggles goods in and around the seas of Southeast Asia in the early to mid 1990s.[4] Their base of operations is located in the fictional harbor city of Roanapur in east Thailand near the border of Cambodia (somewhere in the Amphoe Mueang Trat district, likely on the mainland north/northeast of the Ko Chang island or on the island itself).[5] The city is home to the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triad, the Russian mafia, the Colombian cartel, the Italian mafia, a wide assortment of pickpockets, thugs, mercenaries, thieves, prostitutes, assassins, and gunmen. The city also has a large Vietnamese refugee population following the Vietnamese refugees exodus after the Communist takeover of Vietnam in 1975. Lagoon Company transports goods for various clients in the American made 80-foot (24 m) Elco-type PT boat Black Lagoon. It has a particularly friendly relationship with the Russian crime syndicate Hotel Moscow. The team takes on a variety of missions—which may involve violent firefights, hand-to-hand combat, and nautical battles—in various Southeast Asian locations, even going as far as Phu Quoc island of Vietnam. When they are not working, the members of the Lagoon Company spend much of their down time at The Yellow Flag, a bar in Roanapur which is often destroyed in firefights.
