By E. Graydon Carter

Compared with Tamasaburo Bando,

Dustin Hoffman was a raw ingenue in Tootsie. Though only 33, Bando is already a master onnagata, a man who plays female roles in the centuries-old art of Kabuki. So apposite are his opposite-sex portrayals that he is the object of study by aspiring actresses and real-life geishas seeking to refine their feminine ways. "To act as an onnagata, "he says, "is to try to create an ideal; what I as a man would consider to be the ideal woman." Bando has also done non-Kabuki work, including heralded performances as Lady Macbeth and Desdemona. But his dream role was created by Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois, of course.

Perhaps Actor Kiyoshi Atsumi deserves a rest, along with his fans. The celebrated star of the polysequel Tora-San movies has just finished his 31st, an assembly linelike creativity that puts Sylvester Stallone and George Lucas to shame. In each Tora-San film, Atsumi, 55, noodles around in the same wildly checked, double-breasted leisure suit and porkpie hat, playing a middle-age Walter Mitty pitted against the vicissitudes of modern Japan. And with each film, some 4 million Tora-trekkies line up at the box office. His latest fan is a big one: IBM has cast him for a new series of Japanese ads. "Computers in a way are like Tora-San," says Atsumi. "They are dedicated to the well-being of people." Actors (and ad-agency copywriters) are the same the world over.

To the rarefied world of music instruction, Shinichi Suzuki long ago introduced such standbys of Japanese industrial thought as volume, logic and enthusiasm. Suzuki began developing his learning-through-imitation method of teaching violin more than three decades ago. Today he is 84, and his world-famous technique is 300,000 students old (two-thirds of them in the U.S.). Suzuki begins by having his students, many of them just three or four years old, watch those in the classes ahead of them. After a couple of months, they are given empty, miniature violin cases and chopsticks for bows, to get the feel of what they will be doing later. Students graduate to a violin, one-sixteenth normal size, and finally to the real thing. Simple, efficient and, more important, effective. Says Suzuki: "You can call me chief of an amateur violinist mass-production plant."

When the national tax office released its latest annual figures on Japan's highest income earners (yes, such matters are made public), the top sports figure was Tatsunori Kara, 25, the star third baseman for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, who makes $720,000 from his baseball salary and commercial endorsements. Hara has attained a status level that outstrips his statistics, though these are not unimpressive. He is currently hitting .300 and is second in home runs in the Central League with 19, after 76 games. How does Hara think his team might fare in the U.S. big leagues? "The gap between the American and Japanese pro game," says he solemnly, "is like the nutrient gap between a giant beefsteak and a bowl of rice."

The sassy pertness that marks the style of many young, contemporary female vocalists has obviously impressed Seiko Matsuda, 21. She might well be the Olivia Newton-John of Japan. Seiko has what her countrymen describe as the girl-next-door look (if you happen to live in a suburban Osaka apartment complex) and, to be polite, a less than major lyrical talent. But since 1980, her twelve albums and 13 singles have brought in more than $125 million, boosting her own income from records to half a million dollars a year. Pressing on while her pressings are hot, she has starred in two movies, The Legend of Plumeria, about a student in love, and The Tomb of the Wild Chrysanthemum, about a farm girl in love. If anyone wants to make Grease Japanese, the only casting problem would be John Travolta's role. --By E. Graydon Carter This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.