Unclaimed
Ken Watanabe
Education & Learning
Ken Watanabe is a Japanese actor and author, known for dramatic film roles and for writing the problem-solving guide Problem Solving 101.
Biography
Ken Watanabe (渡辺 謙, Watanabe Ken; born October 21, 1959) is a Japanese actor best known for playing tragic-hero characters, including General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He has won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Actor twice, for Memories of Tomorrow (2007) and The Unbroken (2010). His film roles also include Batman Begins, Inception, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu. In 2014 he starred in Godzilla as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa and reprised the role in the sequel; he has voiced Drift in Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight. In 2022 he starred in the HBO Max series Tokyo Vice. He made his Broadway debut in April 2015 in The King and I and received a Tony Award nomination; he reprised the role at the London Palladium in June 2018, earning a Laurence Olivier Award nomination.
Watanabe also wrote Problem Solving 101, originally for Japanese schoolchildren, with the aim of shifting education from memorization to critical thinking by adapting techniques he learned as an elite McKinsey consultant. The illustrated guide uses logic trees, matrices and sample scenarios to teach decision making and became a surprise bestseller in Japan, attracting adult readers as well as students.
Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Excerpt, formatting adapted
Books by Ken Watanabe
Problem solving 101
Problem Solving 101 is an illustrated guide Watanabe originally wrote for Japanese schoolchildren to promote critical thinking over memorization, using techniques he adapted as an elite McKinsey consultant; it presents logic trees, matrices and sample scenarios and became a surprise bestseller in Japan.