There are two types of actors: ones who disappear into their roles and ones who make their roles disappear into them, playing versions of themselves in film after film.

Ryo Kase is the former type, having portrayed everything from the sardonic punk pal of a ditzy heroine in Satoshi Miki's 2009 comedy "Insutanto Numa (Instant Swamp)" and the trash-talking gang lieutenant in the new Takeshi Kitano yakuza flick "Outrage Beyond," to the painfully sincere young man unjustly accused of groping a woman on the train in Masayuki Suo 2007's courtroom drama "Soredemo Boku wa Yattenai (I Just Didn't Do It)" — a performance that earned him a shelf full of acting awards.

Abroad, however, Kase is probably best known for his role in Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006) as Shimizu, a Kempeitai (World War II-era military police) private who is sent to the hellhole of Iwo Jima as punishment for quietly disobeying a superior's brutal order. He also played the ghost of a Japanese tokkotai (kamikaze) pilot who appears to a young couple — a funeral-obsessed boy (Henry Hopper) and a terminally ill girl (Mia Wasikowska) in Gus Van Sant's 2011 drama "Restless." The former film was a smash hit in Japan, if not Stateside, while the latter unfortunately made a quick exit from theaters.