Who does this guy think he is?

Talk-show-host? Painter? Poet? Film director? Wise guy? Takeshi Kitano is all of the above. And so much more. Matthew Sweet meets the king of Japanese pop culture

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Encounters of the atmospheric kind

In Japan, the functions performed in British culture by Graham Norton, Ben Elton, Simon Armitage, Julian Opie, Guy Ritchie and Michael Caine have, through some careful – and possibly merciful – act of downsizing, all been assigned to one furious, stocky bloke with impressive facial scarring and an excruciating taste in Hawaiian shirts.

Today, Takeshi Kitano's chest is a riot of hibiscus, rendered in the colours of vomited calzone. The rest of his frame is covered by a pair of baggy Bermudas, white cotton socks and open-toed sandals. There's a steady assurance in his gaze, something inappropriately serious about the way he lights one Lucky Strike from the next, but it's not enough to betray what everybody from the Sea of Othosk to Fukuoka knows: he bestrides Japanese popular culture like a colossus.

Takeshi currently fronts seven TV programmes, including a daily hour-long chat show in which he'll pick his nose or feign sleep if the studio guests start to bore him. He writes a column for a woman's weekly magazine and has produced over 70 volumes of satirical fiction, poetry and essays. He paints cute pop-art paintings. He's released several singles. He manages an amateur baseball team, for which he occasionally plays. Most importantly – as far as the west is concerned – he's directed nine movies (his aesthetic Yakuza flick Hana-Bi won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival), and starred in 13. Two of these, Battle Royale (an ultraviolent parable about an island of killer schoolkids which has caused a blaze of controversy in Japan) and Gohatto (a taboo-breaking tale of love between Samurai warriors in 1860s Kyoto) open in the UK this summer.

So what does he do at weekends? "I think all that list demonstrates is how half-heartedly I do the TV. There's nothing serious about Japanese television. I do absolutely foolish things, like running around the studio half-naked. Things that would be inappropriate in a film." And he laughs a wheezy laugh, like Deputy Dawg being tickled somewhere intimate.

Thanks to a prime-time mini-series based on his life-story, Japanese audiences know the Takeshi biography as well as they know the act. He was born in 1948 in the rough Tokyo suburb of Senju, to a father who did little but knock him about, and a mother who worked long hours to sponsor him through an engineering course at Meiji University. When he failed to get a job at Honda, Takeshi dropped out of college, blew his mother's money at the gambling tables, and had soon accumulated £17,000 in debts. After a year of sleeping rough, he found work as a lift operator in a strip club; the sort of place where a glazed comedian shuffles on to throw a few gags between the girlie acts. When illness felled one of these comperes, Takeshi stepped into the breach, and had soon founded, with a mate, a double act named the Two Beats – the reason why his acting appearances are made under the name of "Beat" Takeshi.

The rest of the world first saw him in 1983, when Nagisa Oshima – recovered stroke victim, quiz-show host and director of the notorious In the Realm of the Senses – cast him as Sergeant Gengo Hara, the deputy chief of the POW camp in which Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is set. The script demanded that Takeshi smack up Tom Conti with a big stick, bury David Bowie up to his neck in sand and griddle his head in the midday sun, and oversee the decapitation of a Japanese officer caught in flagrante with a Dutch prisoner.

Takeshi's unscripted activities, however, were comparably sadistic. Before agreeing to appear in Oshima's movie, the actor made a pact with Ryuichi Sakamoto, the actor cast as the camp's commandant: "I phoned him up and said, 'Hey, Mr Sakamoto, this guy Oshima is so notorious for screaming at the actors, why don't we make the condition that if he screams at either of us, we'll quit?' He agreed. The prerequisite was written into the contract. So I started to get my lines wrong on purpose, and I could see Mr Oshima's hand shaking with irritation and rage – but because of the contract he had to scream at the other actors whenever I said the line wrong. 'You were so bad! You made Takeshi make a mistake!'" He giggles at his own wickedness. "But I feel a bit guilty about his stroke. Probably my behaviour might have something to do with it."

Returning to work with Oshima on Gohatto, he found that the director's temper was no less apoplectic: this time, the rages were all focused upon one actor, whom Takeshi is too polite to name. Oshima's principal theme also remained unaltered: homoerotic jealousy within violent, all-male hierarchies. The archaic language of the script, however, and the stylised physicality it demanded, caused Takeshi – who, over the years, has perfected a slouchy, laconic style – more than a little difficulty.

"To tell you the truth," he confesses, "it's impossible to reproduce the physical movements of people from this era. A lot of what you see in the film is not particularly accurate. I wouldn't say this to Mr Oshima, but I'll whisper it quietly to you. A traditional Japanese dancing master would see through it immediately, but it wouldn't be a problem for most Japanese people."

Takeshi, however, can't resist ticking off the cock-ups. "One actor gets off the wrong side of his horse. Samurai, like cowboys, should always dismount from the left. And Samurai would never sit in the gap between two tatami mats. You never know when the opponent might sneak under the floor and stuff you in the ass. We did have a historical adviser on set, but I have a feeling that he's not as familiar with some of those things as myself." By the time you're reading this, the Japanese Lady Antonia Fraser will be out on her ear.

Gohatto (15) is released on 3 August