Aju Makita

Aju Makita never sought the spotlight. She was seven years old when she started appearing in TV commercials because her older brother was doing it too. Her mother wanted her to have something to do after school, and child modeling seemed like a comfortable option.

In 2012, Hirokazu Kore-eda chose her for the series Going My Home. The director saw something in her that others overlooked. She wasn't the typical Japanese child actress who overacts to please the camera.

She was simply there.

The Gaze of a Thousand Meters

Her characters often carry burdens that don't match their age. In 2016 she shot After the Storm, and two years later she joined the cast of Shoplifters. They were supporting roles, but necessary for the dramatic machinery of Kore-eda's films to work.

And that's how she learned to handle silence. Because in Japanese cinema, the space between words matters more than the dialogue itself.

Before turning twenty, she had already worked with some of the heaviest names in the domestic industry. But she kept a careful distance from fame and social events.

Naomi Kawase's Leap Into the Void

Her change of direction came in 2020 with True Mothers. Playing Hikari, a teenager who gives up her baby for adoption, demanded an unusual level of technical maturity. The camera stayed close to her face, searching for a crack that never appeared.

Naomi Kawase is known for her suffocating shoots. She made Makita live as the character for weeks before filming began. She had to feel the weight of loneliness in a remote province, cut off from her real family.

She won Best Supporting Actress at the Mainichi Film Awards for this role.

But she didn't change the way she chose scripts after the awards.

Expanding Across Platforms

In 2023, she appeared in the Netflix series The Days, about the Fukushima disaster. She played the daughter of the nuclear plant director. It was a dry shoot where the drama stayed contained under layers of protective suits and gas masks.

During 2024, she premiered The Parades and the film Happiness. In the latter, she plays a student with a terminal illness who decides to spend her last days living normally. The film avoids sentimentality and focuses on the everyday details of the end of life.

The production of Happiness took 35 days of intense shooting on natural locations.

Makita still lives in Kanagawa and avoids the industry's big parties in Tokyo. On the set of 9-Tails in 2024, she asked not to receive preferential treatment over the rest of the technical crew.