第1回 アマチュア連合特撮大会 / 東宝半世紀傑作フェア (1st Amateur Union Special Effects Tournament / Toho Half-Century Masterpieces Fair)

Who's ready for another post full of scanty info and blurry photos?

I've recently become aware of something that I'm deeming the OG G-Fest: "Japan Special Effects Fan Club G", a tokusatsu fan club in Japan that has held a gathering called "Latitude G Operation" every year (when not canceled by record snowfall) since 1981. The formation of the fan club coincided with the first Amateur Union Special Effects Tournament, held at Nakano Public Hall in August of 1981. There as guests were Ishirō Honda and Akihiko Hirata.

I'd read that Hirata was active in fan conventions a few years before his death but I wasn't sure about the specifics of that. I don't have a lot of information about the tournament as a whole, so I’m mostly making this post to throw up some rare photos that you otherwise would not be able to find without Googling some incredibly specific keywords.

First off here's his autograph on a pamphlet from the event. This evidently sold at online auction for about ¥18,500/$120USD.

that sure is a signature

Here are some photos from the event, cribbed from a pamphlet. I'm really sorry these are in such terrible quality, but that's all I got. They apparently also screened the '54 Godzilla as part of this event.

we REALLY need someone to upload better scans of these. like, that's only two of the most important people in tokusatsu, no big deal

Honda was also a guest of the 2nd tournament in 1982; I don't believe Hirata was there, but check out this pamphlet featuring a little Serizawa doodle:

The reason why he wasn't there may have been because he was at the Toho Half-Century Masterpieces Fair, hanging out with Godzilla & company (NB Tanaka and Godzilla tenderly holding hands):

cool guys club L-R: Kenji Sahara, Tomoyuki Tanaka, Gigantis the Fire Monster, Ishirō Honda, Akihiko Hirata, Hiroshi Koizumi

I have even less information about the Toho Half-Century event than the SFX competitions, but it's pretty much what it sounds like: a gigantic film festival that ran from December 4th to the 17th commemorating Toho's many major hits. I'm not sure if this was the same early-'80s re-screening of Godzilla that Hirata attended dressed as Dr. Serizawa, but I don't believe it was.

Little bit sad to think that the only person from the above photo who is still alive is Kenji Sahara. And Godzilla, of course. Godzilla never dies.

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image sources:

1: https://www.funbid.com.hk/yahoojp/auctions/item.php?aID=s1071122042&p=

2-3: https://aucview.com/yahoo/p622130522/

4: https://ameblo.jp/gara999/entry-12510107657.html (very interesting blog post in general, I recommend translating it)

5: https://aucfree.com/items/h441525946

"What does your URL mean?"

It's not like this blog is getting thousands of visitors a day (I'm not getting any, AFAIK), but in the event that somebody stumbles upon this blog and is curious about it, it might be a good thing to have an easily available post explaining my URL. I admit I could have chosen something more obvious, but I get a kick out of this one, and here's why.

Enban Sensō Bankid [Flying Saucer War Bankid] was a 1976 tokusatsu television series produced by Toho. It was Toho's attempt to cash in on the brand-new (at the time) Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, which would become the foundation of the super sentai series. Bankid follows a team of children and teens who, led by their tutor, use their secret identities and fleet of aircraft and vehicles to fight against invading aliens (the Bukimi Seijin, literally "Bukimi Planet People" or I guess "Bukimians"). The Bukimi are led by an unseen commander (shirei) named Guzare, who ends most episodes by chastising and then summarily exploding whatever poor Bukimi had failed to invade the Earth that week.

For 25 episodes, Guzare exists as a disembodied voice (played by Kiyoshi Kobayashi), until episode 26, the series finale, when he finally gets fed up with how ineffective his underlings have been and comes down to Earth himself to have a little chat with Bankid. This is the first and only time in the series that we actually see him. Guzare's human form is played by Akihiko Hirata, and the getup Toho put him in is... well, it's a lot:

i really think toho loved putting him in shitty wigs more than any of their other actors

God, I haven't watched this episode in so long, but it still gets me. The show is good, actually, but incredibly cheap; the face actors double as the suit actors and there's two yellow "rangers" because I guess that's just what their suit budget allowed for.

So yeah, that's... that's why I have this URL. I really do recommend watching Bankid, it's never been subtitled but it's a ton of fun. The episode formula is consistent and entertaining every time: there's always a person who turns out to be a Bukimi in disguise, and every episode usually has a nice satisfying moment where one of Bankid "unmasks" them. The Bukimi were designed by Tohl Narita of Ultraman fame, so they look cool (no, really), and the opening theme is an absolute ripper. And to cap it all off there's whatever is going on in the final episode. Maybe this is where Gerard Way got that jacket from.

(Also, the promo still [from Rainy Night Duel, aka Kuro-obi Sankunishi, aka Black Belt Romance of the Three Kingdoms] that I use for my header image is currently for sale, you should buy it before I do.)

DOUJINSHI.

In the Kinema Junpo article/interview I posted recently, I was extremely intrigued by the passing mention of doujinshi focusing on Akihiko Hirata. (Doujinshi are basically fanzines that the government gets kind of mad about sometimes. Japanese copyright law is very strict.) So I've been poking around online to see what I can find... which is not that much. We're talking about self-published, generally middling-quality zines, many of which are at minimum 40 years old, so there's not going to be a ton out there on the internet, but that just makes the images I do come across more fun to look at. I'll update this if and when I find new things.

強引愚我道堂本舗 猫目銀四郎 呆然一発! [Daitetsujin 17 doujin, year unknown]

god look at it

As is typical for Mandarake, this listing had only one image, and I can't find parallels anywhere else on the internet. It's weird that the photo is so crisp; it appears to be a scan or screenshot, whereas most other doujin listings are just photographs of the item. I have absolutely no idea what this is; Googling the title turns up nothing and every translator I chuck it into gives me something different. But oh man.

猫亭通信 #1 [Nekotai Tsushin issue #2, August 1985?]

This is an issue of a tokusatsu doujin and it appears to have been a memorial issue for Hirata published the year after he died. If I'm understanding things correctly, Ishirō Honda himself actually contributed something to this. Again, Mandarake only gives me one picture, so I know nothing about the content of the doujin. (I do know the exact photo that drawing is based off of, but I don't have it to hand right now.)

ゴジラ復活委員会 [Godzilla Resurrection/Revival Committee, various, 1980s]

photo shows issues 1-3 of the doujin and issue #15 of the newsletter (far right)

I could probably make an entire post about the Godzilla Resurrection Committee. They published a doujin that was, according to some, pretty high-quality for the time. It's actually fairly difficult to find information about the committee in general, which is surprising given how important they were, and even harder to find scans of their doujin. I'm including this because I reckon Hirata was involved with the committee at some point, since I believe they were the folks responsible for those pictures of him (✌️) dressed as Serizawa again to promote a re-release of the first Godzilla movie in the early '80s that just kind of make me sad.

参考資料 鋼鉄王 1 特集 [The King of Steel, issue 1[?], 1984]

This is... an Iron King doujinshi that has a memorial for him for some reason? He was never in Iron King but I guess that's how big an impact his death had on the wider tokusatsu fan community. Can't find pictures of the actual article, unfortunately.

轟天号 第4号特集 [Gotengo, issue #4, 1981?]

A nice tokusatsu doujin. Got a kick out of this one because of the "candid picture somebody took of their high school teacher" vibe. The text says "Recently he has become 'the old man of Pittashi Kan-Kan', but our image of him is still the nihilistic Dr. Serizawa." The picture is from an amateur special effects tournament. (More on that later.)

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image sources:

1. https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1131593345&ref=list&keyword=%E5%A4%A7%E9%89%84%E4%BA%BA%EF%BC%91%EF%BC%97&lang=en

2. https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1053359150&ref=list&dispCount=240&categoryCode=030503&lang=en

3. https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/k154243529/

4. https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/o1131200178?conversionType=yac_item_bottom_recommend_list

5. https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/c1079371651/

火曜サスペンス劇場 - 地底の殺意 / Kayō Sasupen'sugekijō - Chitēno satsui / Tuesday Suspense Theater: Underground Murderous Intent (1983)

Release date: July 5, 1983

Director: Yoichi Maeda

Studio: NTV with cooperation from Shochiku Eizo

Cast: Masakazu Tamura, Kyoko Kobayashi, Hiroko Shino, Keiko Orihara, Ryusuke Oki, Akiko Sodeki, Yoshiko Otowa et al

Availability: Home media release of this specific film is unknown. If you are as desperate as I am, you can peer into the past with Wayback Machine and watch it via a dead link here. (Be patient with it.)

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Today we're going to be looking at the only feature-length film I've managed to dredge up that includes Yoshiko Otowa in the cast. And I really did dredge it up: I used Wayback Machine to resurrect a deleted YouTube video (which was actually the second of two links that I found, the first was gone for good) and watched the entire thing that way. I know this is kind of a "don't you have anything better to do?" post, but I do have something better to do - sleep, it is 12:45 AM - and I'm choosing to do this instead. And you know what? I'm super excited about it.

For those of you just tuning in, Otowa is Hirata's younger sister. I talk about her and what is probably her most well-known credit here. Her work is obscure and sparse; in the late '50s and '60s she was frequently in films directed by their older brother, Yoshiki Onoda, but she never appeared in anything alongside Hirata. (The Onoda Venn diagram is surprisingly complicated.) After that she did a few things in the '80s and then mostly fell off the map.

Some background: "Tuesday Suspense Theater" was not a "television series" in the usual episodic sense of that term, but a series of made-for-TV films directed by and starring many, many top names of the time. A longer explanation of the series would just take up space since it's been running for so long and includes so many titles, a lot of which are pretty much lost media. (Although I will say you should watch Obayashi's Lovely Devils, it's an underrated gem of his.) This particular film also stars Masakazu Tamura of Nemuri Kyoshiro fame. This will be my first time seeing him out of a chonmage.

The link I posted includes commercials, which is always fun. I think we all love retro Japanese TV ads. I assume, because of the ads, that the video was ripped from a VHS recording somebody made during the original airing (as far as I know this was never rebroadcast). It's in atrocious quality, but what do you expect from a YouTube link that was literally brought back from the dead.

The film begins with a couple, Tomoyuki Katsuhara and his wife Katsumi (played by Tamura and Shino, respectively), returning to their apartment after an extended trip to Spain. The atmosphere is immediately off, and Katsumi finds a trap door under their kitchen floor that hadn't previously been there, leading to a small hole with a ladder. There are rumors that the guy renting their apartment in the interim, Nogawa, was a bit... odd, to say the least (we get a fantasy montage of him doing stuff like tying his girlfriend to a balcony and killing kittens). The film seems to set us up to think he had something to do with the trap door.

Otowa's character is one of the perennial nosey housewives who often congregate outside apartment buildings in older Japanese films. Her character is the one responsible for the nasty rumors about Nogawa. It took me a minute to figure out who she was even though I'd seen her in Comedy Trio because she's a bit older in this, but as soon as I saw her in profile I was like oh yep. 

imoto

Katsumi tries to tell her husband about the hole, and about Nogawa, but she gets a firm "baka" response, of course. But Katsuhara does go down into the hole with a flashlight and discovers something written on the wall: the name "Tatsuo Sasamoto" scrawled over with Xs. Both this and Nogawa's general weirdness turn out to be red herrings.

pictured: hole dispute

Nogawa comes over while Katsumi is alone and is generally a creep to her. I didn't catch much of what he said, but he seemed to know something about the hole under the kitchen floor. When Katsuhara comes home, his wife again attempts to talk to him about the hole, but he continues to be dismissive; this is when the jackhammers come out. Katsumi has men over to dig up the floor, but they don't find anything immediately. When she's down there alone, though, she finds a wristwatch and then a necklace buried in the dirt. She recognizes the necklace as belonging to a woman her husband used to date, and as she tries to pull the necklace up, she unearths... a skeleton!

this film is now 💀CERTIFIED SPOOKY💀

Katsuhara returns home and Katsumi confronts him, and he admits that the skeleton is who she thinks it is: a woman, Akiko - actually a coworker of Katsumi's - who he'd been seeing. We get a lengthy flashback that ends with Katsuhara and Akiko arguing and him strangling her in maybe the least dramatic murder scene I've ever watched. He picks up the phone, presumably thinking about turning himself in, but then decides instead to be reasonable and carve a hole under his kitchen floor to hide her body in. As one does. Back in the present, he confesses everything to his wife.

future skeleton on the left

They then decide to both commit suicide with red wine and opiates. Buuuut first we get a long Spain montage. There's flamenco dancing, that's nice, I always like to see flamenco dancing. There's also bullfighting, which is... markedly less nice.

Katsuhara wakes up from the suicide attempt, but Katsumi doesn't. He, of course, drags her body down to the hole under the kitchen. Katsumi eventually does wake up too, after she's been thrown into the hole with no way of escaping. Her husband can hear her calls for help, but he piles furniture over the trap door and ignores her. After a while she figures out she can make a good deal of noise banging on a pipe, and the whole building hears it - while Katsuhara is out feeling sorry for himself due to murdering two women, Katsumi is managing to summon the authorities despite being locked in a hole. The film ends with Katsumi in an ambulance and Katsuhara in the back seat of a police cruiser, tailing her.

big surprise for this Ultraman stan: that's Kitajima [Shūsuke Tsumura] from Taro on the left, behind Tamura

I gotta admit this is not the best movie ever. It has a few fun scenes, but on the whole, it's "get home from work and fall asleep in front of the TV" cinema. It could just be because I thoroughly read every scrap of plot summary I could find beforehand to prepare myself for watching something I would only half understand, but none of the twists and turns feel very surprising. From the moment that Katsumi finds that hole, you know she is going to end up in it eventually. Everything in between is just a lot of stuff. Nobody reacts to anything in a reasonable way. It's all TV-land dramatics and filler.

But I still had fun. If nothing else, this was definitely the oddest way I've ever found and watched a movie. I'm scheduling this to post on a Tuesday for authenticity's sake.

抱擁 / Hōyō / The Last Embrace (1953)

Release date: March 11, 1953

Director: Masahiro Makino

Studio: Toho

Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Yoshiko [Shirley] Yamaguchi, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hiroshi Koizumi, Sachio Sakai, Ren Yamamoto, Toyoko Takegawa et al

Availability: No home media or internet streaming release. No known screenings within the past 15 years.

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I should have made this post last month for the film's 71st anniversary, but better late than never, I guess.

As you can tell from the text above my blog's contact form, I have not seen this movie and am fervently searching for it. I've gone down many avenues, including contacting several individuals and institutions about it, but with no luck. I am certain, however, that the film is not lost, as screenings have taken place since the film's initial release¹. Toho also produced an English-subtitled version², but I'm unaware for what purpose. I will readily admit that there isn't anything particularly special about this movie in and of itself, apart from it having been Akihiko Hirata's very first film role, but that alone is enough to make me want to see it.

So I can't watch this thing, at least not currently, but what I can do is dump everything I know about it into, as far as I know, the only extensive English-language post about it on the internet. If I ever do get lucky enough to watch it, I will, of course, make a new post about it. There's also a Kinema Junpo issue with an article about the film from when it first came out, and if I lose my fool head and buy that issue, I'll make a new post about it as well.

extremely crusty poster

Masahiro Makino may not be a name with the same kind of Western recognition as Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu or someone like that, but he was an extremely prolific director, and before that, in the 1910s and '20s, he was also an extremely prolific actor as well. This means Makino was involved in Japan's film industry pretty much from its very beginnings - which makes sense, since his father was Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director. The Last Embrace was produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, as many Toho films were, and the script came from an original idea by Tanaka and Toshio Yasumi, who was also a frequent scriptwriter for Toho.

As for the cast, it's all your usual Toho guys (and some gals), but fairly early in their careers³ for everyone except Mifune (for whom this was his 30th film) and Shimura. Yoshiko Yamaguchi has a bit of a cult following, from what I understand, and it's her presence in this along with big star Mifune that gives me any hope at all that somebody still cares about this movie enough to upload it to the internet someday.

Yamaguchi's character seems to be the protagonist of the film. According to the plot summaries I've found, Yamaguchi plays a woman who lived in the mountains and was set to be married before her fiancé was killed in a sudden avalanche. She then moves to Tokyo, where she frequents a bar along with a group of poets, and meets a yakuza who looks like her dead fiancé (Mifune plays both roles). I am assuming Hirata has a very small role in this - he's probably one of the poets from the bar Yamaguchi hangs out in. His character's name is given as "alias Sandaime", which would imply some yakuza association, but I think that is probably not the case as the group of poets seem to all have aliases. I've seen some posters with his name on them, but some without as well, and I haven't managed to turn up a single actual image of him from the film.

While the film itself is irritatingly elusive, its theme song, sung by Yamaguchi, is on YouTube for your delectation. There's a nice slideshow of images from the film and pictures of Yamaguchi that plays during the song, along with lyrics in Japanese. It definitely sounds 71 years old.

shoutout to the person who reblogged this on tumblr and just tagged it "#men"

Some odds and ends to finish this off: Here is a post (in Japanese) from someone who has actually seen the movie. I believe this person saw the 2008 screening mentioned in my footnotes. Mifune's website has a bunch of pictures of him from the film here. In the process of researching this post I found a blog dedicated to Yoshiko Yamaguchi, and I feel a deep connection with the person who runs it as someone who is blogging in English about an actor with little presence in Western film discussion.

That's it! That's everything I know! I've seen every film Hirata was in in 1953 save for this one and that really chaps my hide. I know for a fact that people other than me are looking for this, though, so I remain hopeful that I'll watch it someday.

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¹ A 2008 screening at the Shin-Bungeiza theater in Tokyo is confirmed from a user on Kinenote, and this blogger, writing in 2021, claims a screening about ten years ago. I have confirmation of a screening at the almighty Laputa Asagaya theater in 2005 as well. (What hasn't been screened at Laputa, honestly.)

² Galbraith, Stuart. The Toho Studios Story. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

³ Hirata was actually part of Toho's fifth New Face group (in 1950, at around age 23), but did not get any film roles until early 1953.

Columbo post.

Columbo post?

Columbo post.

As many people reading this blog are probably aware, the American detective series Columbo became a smash hit in Japan very soon after its original broadcast. The series began airing on NHK in 1972, and was broadcast regularly until 1981 and then sporadically throughout the 1980s and later, remaining popular today. Columbo was voiced by Asao Koike until his death in 1985, at which time the role was taken over by Taro Ishida.

So I've got other things to say, but first let's talk about Columbo. The episode we're looking at here is season 7, episode 4, "How to Dial a Murder", broadcast in Japan as 攻撃命令 [Attack Order]. This is one of the rare cases in which everything I'm talking about is readily accessible: for Americans, the episode is streaming on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and [opens my trench coat to offer you an archive.org link] here if you hate streaming services. In Japan, if you have a Hulu account, you can access the episode there. Unfortunately, Hulu Japan is region-locked, and the only other place to watch it is as a 22-minute clip on NicoNico, which I guess is better than nothing. Here you go. I watched the original episode and then the clip of the dub, which was really fun. Hirata dubs the killer, and it reminded me a little of his guest role in episode 20 of Operation: Mystery.

The Japanese dub of Columbo is one of Hirata's two voice acting roles. The other was a 1968 French/Italian/Mexican production called Le Rapace (known in English as Birds of Prey, released in Japan as ベラクルスの男 [Man of Vera Cruz]). Hirata dubs the lead role, originally played by Lino Ventura. I would love to make a separate post about Le Rapace, but I don't think there's enough info about it to constitute its own post. The dub was made for a broadcast of the film on Nippon Television sometime in November 1974, and I doubt it ever received a home media release. There are some VHS tapes for sale or rental online, but they're all subbed, not dubbed. I actually watched the film for research purposes (in the original French and Spanish, with English subtitles) and it was surprisingly good. Ventura's character is a French hitman who arrives in Mexico to carry out a political assassination, and as he doesn't speak Spanish, he has no lines for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's not the kind of thing I typically watch, but it was interesting.

It's surprising to me that these two things were Hirata's only voice acting roles. In my opinion he had a very recognizable, distinctive voice and manner of speaking, but I admit some bias there due to having seen nearly 100 of his films at this point. 

I'm creating a new tag for voice acting/dubbing in the hopes that I might turn up that dub of Le Rapace (or anything else) in the future.

はりきり社長 / Harikiri Shachō / President Harikiri (1956)

Release date: July 13. 1956

Director: Kunio Watanabe

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Yoko Tsukasa, Yasuko Nakata, Norihei Miki, Akihiko Hirata, George Luiker et al

Availability: Available on DVD from amazon.co.jp.

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This is the third entry in the long-running "Shachō" (company president) series, none of which, as far as I know, are subtitled or even really known about in the West. The series is comprised of 33 films released across 14 years, and there are also six films considered supplemental/tie-in works. Harikiri Shachō is the only Shachō film Hirata had a role in, so it's the only one I've seen. Morishige plays Heitaro Okanda, the president of a bicycle manufacturing company, and Kobayashi is his secretary, Kazuo Suyama. The dynamic between the two is what makes a lot of the humor in Harikiri Shachō and, I would assume, the rest of the series. Morishige thinks he's the straight man, but he's really the comedy relief, and Kobayashi is the more relatable everyman.

And that's harikiri, not hara-kiri; nobody disembowels themselves in this film. "Harikiri" means something like "with all one's might", at least according to Papago.

Who's ready for ✨business✨? No subtitles here so I gotta put my thinking cap on. There is actually a little bit of English in this! But not much.

Okanda is newly married to a former chanson singer named Chieko (Asami Kuji) at the beginning of the film. His company, Taiyo Bicycle, also brings in a young woman named Harue (Yoko Tsukasa) for her English skills, so that she can work in the export department and speak with overseas buyers. Suyama is quite taken with her.

Dropping in on this series as an outside observer is really interesting. Even without being familiar with the context, I can tell Morishige is putting everything into his performance as the president. He might come off comedic sometimes, but when he gets up on a platform and starts giving a speech about selling bicycles - even though his secretary has to jump in and correct things here and there - he sounds like the president of a country, not just a company.

unrestrained summer fun

Taiyo Bicycle has to keep expanding, and Okanda goes to Sengoku, the president of one of the company's shareholders, to ask for a loan. Sengoku brings Okanda to his home for a traditional dinner and a night of entertainment, but Okanda has trouble fitting in as he doesn't smoke or drink excessively due to some kind of heart problem. It is a pretty bogus time.

pictured: pretty bogus time

Okanda escapes, but Suyama, who stays behind, finds out that Harue, the new hire who caught his eye, is the daughter of the host's landlady. While the bad vibes continue in the other room, Suyama and Harue sit down in the kitchen to drink coffee (with straws?) and Harue tells Suyama that Sengoku also has a son named Takao:

actual quote from the movie: "chotto handsome, dessho?" [roughly: "kinda handsome, huh?"]

Then there's a beauty pageant, because there's always a beauty pageant. A lot of pretty girls ride around on bicycles and have their measurements taken by Okanda and his staff; the effort gives Okanda a nosebleed. They also have a parade with all the contestants.

they really are not selling bicycles like they used to anymore

The winner, a girl named Momoko (Yasuko Nakata), gets to hang out in the president's office, sit behind the desk, smoke cigarettes, stuff like that. Unfortunately this was scheduled pretty poorly, and George Marner, the representative of an American company looking to contract with Taiyo Bicycle, comes in as Momoko is putting on her bodice with assistance from the president. He's immediately a mega creep to Momoko before getting down to business, with Harue translating. His fascination with Momoko will continue until he exits the film.

White boy George suggests a cycling trip with Okanda and all of the other Miss Cycle contestants to test out their products. There's some mambo music, everybody shakes a leg, much better vibes than the super awkward dinner with Sengoku earlier.

guest star: this cow

(I looked up George Luiker, the actor who plays George, and apparently he is the child of Estonian and Armenian parents and had grown up in the Soviet Union before becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen and taking the name Joji Ruikawa. This was his first role. He is fluent in Japanese, which his character hides from Okanda for some reason, but when it comes time to try to impress Momoko, all bets are off.)

Hirata's character, Takao, finally enters the picture while Okanda and everyone are on their cycling mini-vacation. I'm really not sure what the point of this character was; both him and Suyama are photographers, so it seems like there's a setup for a love triangle, but Takao is in one scene for about 30 seconds and doesn't get brought up again, so... alright.

Okanda's wife, meanwhile, discovers photos of her husband at the Miss Cycle pageant, measuring some other girl's thighs. Later she also catches him getting into a car with Momoko. At the same time, Suyama attempts to confess his love to Harue, and she's SUPER not into it. He gives a rousing speech, from what of it I could understand, and at the end asks her to marry him, but she wants absolutely none of that. Or... does she? You know the movie is from the '50s when it takes the girl slapping the guy and telling him to get lost a few times for her to realize she actually does like him after all.

Eventually Chieko ends up at the same nightclub as Okanda and Momoko. There's more mambo music. Okanda mistakes some random white guy for George Marner. On the dance floor Okanda gets too into it and loses his shoe while mambo-ing with Momoko, and it's Chieko who finds it for him. They go home and she confronts him with the pictures. He tries to explain (and calls her "o-baka-san" in the process - I did not realize there was basically a polite way of calling somebody an idiot) but she throws him out of their bedroom.

Okanda goes back to Sengoku, who won't listen to him anymore, and Marner leaves for America. All seems lost and Okanda goes up to the roof where Suyama catches him and thinks he's about to commit suicide - he's not, but Suyama delivers a pep talk anyway and it puts the wind back in Okanda's sails. He makes up with Chieko, too, and soon he gets a telegram from Marner, agreeing to the contract. The film ends with Harue and Okanda leaving for America to meet with him.

This was a good time. Odd pacing, though, with everything taking a sudden downturn and then getting wrapped up all within the last fifteen minutes. There's a surprising amount of fanservice for its time, and it gets kind of gross, with Momoko calling Okanda "papa" and him being overly friendly with her, and then having to explain it to his wife, even though none of it was romantic. It's a really dated movie. 

Still, fun! Older comedies are sometimes a lot easier for me to watch as a non-Japanese speaker because the exaggerated physical humor makes the plot easier to follow. Seeing Keiju Kobayashi that young was also funny, since I'm used to him playing very serious, mature characters. I don't know if I'd watch 33 of these movies, but it would be very interesting to see the evolution of the series, especially toward the late '60s, because this one seemed so solidly a product of its time that any kind of societal change would render its premise untenable.

Hirata's in this for literally one scene (if you don't count the photo of him Harue shows Suyama), but we're used to that around here. 

大日本スリ集団 / Dai Nippon suri shūdan / The Great Japanese Pick-pocket Club (1969)

Release date: November 22, 1969

Director: Jun Fukuda

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Norihei Miki, Wakako Sakai, Noriko Takahashi, Minori Terada, Kunie Tanaka, Daigo Kusano, Hideo Sunazuka, Akihiko Hirata et al

Availability: Streaming and available on DVD from amazon.co.jp.

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Jun Fukuda is a director who really does not get enough appreciation outside of his Godzilla films (which he was notoriously hard on himself about). I was looking forward to watching this one because the cast is pretty much entirely actors who I'm a fan of - in fact, I had copy/pasted a list of cast members that I found online into this post, but once I actually started watching the movie, I had to amend the list, because it turns out there were even more actors I'm a fan of in it than what I read online.

Also, in the time between when I got this DVD in the mail this morning and when I'm writing now, late at night, I found out Minori Terada had died. So this one goes out to him. Seeing him in Ultraman Blazar was really unexpected and it was a damn good final role. RIP. Everybody go watch The Human Bullet.

No subs for this one. I shall use all of my brainpower to attempt to grok the plot.

Funakoshi (Kobayashi) and Hiradaira (Miki) are old pals who served in the army together, but one of them is now a pickpocket and the other is a detective who hates pickpockets. Hiradaira calls Funakoshi "danna" (sort of a "my lord"/"sir"-type form of address) and Funakoshi calls Hiradaira "Hira-yan" ("-yan" is, from what I understand, a familiar/informal suffix), which tells you a lot about the dynamic between the two.

Hiradaira has a pickpocketing ring that employs many goons, two of which are played by Hideo Sunazuka and Akihiko Hirata. Hirata's character is called "France" for reasons I cannot determine. The pickpocketing ring also has newer members, lower in hierarchy, who are subjected to harsh training, like dipping their fingers into boiling water to condition them into having faster reflexes. 

pictured: goons

Funakoshi, meanwhile, is working out a plan with his fellow cops to take down the pickpocketing group. We learn through a brief flashback that his grudge against pickpockets stems from childhood. Funakoshi also has a daughter, Akiko (Wakako Sakai), who seems friendly with Kunie Tanaka's character (a coworker of Funakoshi). Hiradaira has three children as well: two under 10 and an older son from a previous marriage named Heiichiro, who is played by Minori Terada.

google translate is incredibly insistent on calling him "minori agriculture"

Hiradaira's group doesn't exactly operate in the dark; France and his other fellow pickpockets hang out at his house with his wife (played by a very beautiful Noriko Takahashi), who is also in on it, and entertain Funakoshi during a get-together for war veterans. France does card tricks (and steals wallets) and Hiradaira's wife does a burlesque-type dance; very Fukuda.

actually kind of a proto-mr. k outfit going on here

At the get-together, Funakoshi asks Hiradaira to pickpocket something from Akiko as he's concerned about her. Hiradaira steals a letter out of her purse that turns out to be a marriage certificate. Akiko is involved with a man named Shiroyama who has a wife and children. I'm not clear on context - is she attempting to marry him? Attempting to break up his marriage? Funakoshi doesn't approach his daughter about this directly, which in my opinion is his first and biggest mistake. 

Funakoshi eventually tails France into a pachinko parlor and actually manages to cuff him, but he escapes. After a genuinely exciting pursuit France ends up accidentally hit by a car. Hiradaira is now down his best goon, but up one motive for revenge.

(Even France's wife never refers to him as anything but "France", which is... strange. Imagine an arty, highbrow American mafia movie where the widow of a mafioso continues referring to her dead husband as "Frenchy" even during dramatic moments. That's how this feels.)

Anyway, Hiradaira exacts revenge by telling Akiko about how her father asked him to steal the marriage papers. Akiko runs away from home because of this - we don't see it directly, but Funakoshi confronts Hiradaira with a letter Akiko wrote to say she was leaving. The two of them hash it out physically, Funakoshi angry about his daughter and Hiradaira angry about France's death. I really like the awkward length of their fight scene, and the way it's capped off with a shot of Akiko's letters drifting off in the breeze, as if to say the reason for the fight was unimportant and that at that point they were just fighting for fighting's sake.

Funakoshi ramps up the crackdown on his former friend's pickpocketing ring, and Hiradaira ramps up his pickpocketing operations, enlisting a pool of underlings to steal wallets during a parade and making off with loads of cash. Both Akiko and Heiichiro return home, but Akiko tells Funakoshi that she's not there to stay. She leaves, and writes Funakoshi another letter saying that she's going to Brazil. Funakoshi, meanwhile, has retaliated against Hiradaira by calling the boss of his son's gang and telling him Heiichiro has betrayed them. As per yakuza rule, this means Heiichiro has to cut off one of his fingers.

The film basically ends when Hiradaira storms Funakoshi's office and is in such a state of rage over his son's fate that he has a stroke. It's an abrupt ending that sounds comical on paper, but - like most things in this movie - really just doesn't register as funny. Funakoshi later catches Hiradaira on the street trying to steal somebody's wallet even in his enfeebled condition, and Hiradaira begs him to arrest him, but Funakoshi agrees to place him in a nursing home instead.

hey Tora-san fans, look who it is!

Odd movie! Odd vibes! Going in, I expected one of Jun Fukuda's typical outlandish comedies, and while the vibrant cinematography and '60s culture was still present, the humor was not. To me, the storyline just felt mean: these two men are in such a deep feud with each other that it spills over into their personal lives, and they both essentially ruin each other's families. There's also a weird undercurrent of overly controlling fatherhood here - like, "oh, yeah, you told my daughter I was sneaking around and eavesdropping on her private life, but you're the one at fault for telling her, not me for doing it." As I understand it, this was adapted from a novel and co-directed by Jo Aizawa, which may account for the watering-down of Fukuda's usual directorial style. It is good, but not what I expected, and also difficult to understand the nuances of if you're not following the dialogue 100%, which I wasn't.

So if you're watching this one I'd highly recommend not going in expecting a comedy and instead readying yourself for a complicated drama about two people who used to be friends tearing each other's lives apart. It's not bleak or anything, but there's really no humor at all. Hirata looks sharp as hell, though, and does card tricks, so, you know, worth admission.

キネマ旬報 1979年10月下旬号 / Kinema Junpo, Late October 1979 Issue

I won this on Yahoo! Auctions, although I don't think "won" is the right word to use, considering that literally no one but me bid on it. The seller had marked it as "dirty/damaged", which might account for the lack of interest, but honestly, I've bought "like new" books online that are nastier than this magazine. It's not dirty at all, it's just 45 years old.

Anyway, if kinenote.com is to be believed, this is the only article Kinejun has run that is entirely about Akihiko Hirata, not just a movie he was in. The occasion appears to have been a re-release of many major Godzilla films and other Toho tokusatsu works that year (which was the 25th anniversary of the first Godzilla film.)

I'm not sure if this has ever been uploaded online, either as scans or just the text, so I'm including both the original in Japanese and a machine translation which I have typed up and made more readable by fixing pronouns, sentence structure, you know, the kind of stuff that gets garbled in machine translations. It's still not very good, but it does make sense sometimes. The photographer is credited as Koji Nishikawa, who I'm assuming also did the interviewing and wrote the article.

Visualize me cringing while trying very hard not to break the spine by putting this in my scanner...

Okay, here we go. This will be a wall of text. Not sorry. The article seems to be formatted like an essay interspersed with interview quotes from Hirata, which I've put in quotation marks or after en-dashes. When a film title is mentioned, I've given the international title in brackets. Notes are at the bottom of the post.

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   The familiar music of Akira Ifukube begins to play. The Toho logo appears. The names of the staff are listed, including producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. The names of the actors follow, and finally the director, Ishirō Honda. Meanwhile, intermittent applause echoed throughout the venue.

   It was a sight to behold at Japanese theaters where all the masterpieces of Toho special effects were screened at once during the month of August under the title "The Complete Works of Godzilla Movies". The final episode, in which older films were screened daily, was particularly lively.

   The audience is very diverse, ranging from elementary and junior high school students, to old men you might see at a film center, to young housewives with small children. All of them turned to the screen and gave generous applause. When the spaceship came out, they applauded. When the robot came out, they applauded again. The children also clapped. I thought they were clapping without knowing why, but then they started shouting things like "Moguera will appear soon!" so it turns out that even they know what's going on. Kids these days even study old movies. Personally, I was so moved by the aerial battle scenes in [The War in Space], which I rewatched for the first time in a while, that I was almost brought to tears. The excitement of seeing a rocket fighter modeled after the X-15, an experimental aircraft of the time, pop out of the pages of children's comics and fantasy art and engage in actual battles in outer space on the screen is indescribable. What's more, this is just a dream dreamed up by Japanese people, and that's where things like Star Wars come from. It can be much more exciting.

   I don't have much time to write about this, so I'll leave it at that and write about the Godzilla movie from that day.

   Akihiko Hirata was the actor who received the loudest applause during the "Complete Works" screening. "That seems to be the case. I received a letter from a fan who said there was a lot of applause when Hirata-san appeared on stage. I thought, that's strange, and shook my head [laughs]."

   Hirata-san has appeared in 7 of the 15 films in the Godzilla series alone. Including other works, he has appeared in about 30 Toho special effects films.

 - Have you seen the overseas version of Godzilla?

 - Yes, I saw it. I was surprised at  how good my English was [laughs]. During the height of the Godzilla movies, I received a lot of fan letters from America and Southeast Asia. 

   Recently, he has been receiving fan letters and doujinshi¹ from all over the country. There are also countless magazines on the market that feature Godzilla movies. So when I showed one of the books to Hirata-san, he said "Wow, that's so nostalgic... It's a monster movie, the fact that it's black and white and has a documentary feel makes it even more powerful. After all, I think the first Godzilla movie is the best. Godzilla's personality and appearance have changed since the movie became colored. When I was filming it, I didn't know why, but now it feels like a classic. The people who made it didn't know whether it was made from the sea or from the mountains², so I guess they had three newcomers do it. The special effects scenes take place after the main story is almost over. What are we doing here? I don't know. When Godzilla appeared, I was told to look at him, but where was he? I guess I should watch it [laughs]. What I thought was difficult was the time-lapse photography of dolls. That's right, they took the photo by moving the Godzilla doll little by little. The doll is about 1 meter tall."

   This is the first time I've heard that stop-motion animation³ was used in Godzilla.

 - If there were to be a new Godzilla movie, would you want to do it again?

 - I'd love to appear, but I'd like to see someone who isn't a children's idol make one.

   Hirata-san has played many genius scientist roles, starting with Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla 1954. The latest work in the series even won a Nobel Prize. [this didn't translate well, but it's referring to Professor Miyajima from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla]

   "I'm really weak in science, but... yeah," he says with a wry smile. In [Ebirah, Horror of the Deep], he wore an eyepatch similar to Serizawa's and played the role of a one-eyed military man. He really suits the character.

   "That's a lot, I wonder if he's right. I still remember what Yoshikata Yoda told me a while back, that there aren't any actors who can play ordinary people. I felt like I could do anything, but there are a lot of difficult roles."

   That's no wonder. Looking at Hirata-san's background, it seems that he is quite far from an ordinary person. Born in Keijo, South Korea⁴ in 1927, before he knew it, he returned back home⁵. After receiving a strict, Spartan education, he entered the Tokyo Army Infantry School in 1945.

   "I had no intention of becoming a soldier at all. When I was a child, I admired Beethoven and wanted to become a composer. When I was in elementary school, I thought I would go to the University of Tokyo and become a businessman. That's what I thought. My older brother went to kindergarten twice and failed both times. It was really difficult, after all. Also, I had a distant relative who was an army general. Someone told me that I had to become a soldier, and I was reluctant to do so. I just accepted it and went in..."

   His older brother is Yoshiki Onoda, who worked for Shintoho and is currently active in television. 

   Just before the end of the war, Hirata entered the military academy. There was a plan to move the Imperial Headquarters into the mountains of Nagano in preparation for a decisive battle on the mainland, and the Imperial Guard was conducting exercises at the foot of Mt. Asama. He was an elite soldier.⁶

   

 -When did the war end?

 -Hmm, it's a blank now. Of course, I thought I would die before the war was over.

   He was discharged from the military in a daze. After attending first high school and then the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, he joined Mitsubishi Corporation. He decided that he did not want to work for anything called the government again, so he joined a private company.

   "In the military, I was isolated from [word that would not translate, possibly "culture"?] and I was taught only to die for the country and the emperor, and I don't know anything about it. It's a strange story, but I didn't know anything about sex[...]⁷

   As a reaction to this lifestyle, when entering the University of Tokyo, he did not study much and focused on acting and dancing. He made his first stage appearance at the May Festival and was said to be the first Daikon actor to perform since the University of Tokyo Research Institute began. At first, he was completely unfazed, thinking it was something like this. The house was used as a dormitory for Shintoho staff and actors. He started dating filmmakers, and while he was in school, he worked part-time as an assistant director.

   Yoshiko Kuga first appeared opposite Ryo Ikebe in Nobuo Nakagawa's [Lynching]. Currently, she is Hirata-san's wife.

   "She's short, so it's good. When she needs to speak properly, she stands on a table. [this passage is not translating well] That's why I can do it. I'm going to take a look at that table. I'm trying so hard to hold it back, it's ridiculous. Sure [laughs] I remember that. But the other side doesn't remember it at all."

 - So how did you two meet?

 - Co-starring in Hiroshi Inagaki's Siege of Osaka Castle. I went to the location in Gotemba. The weather was not good so filming was extended for about 10 days. During that time, we played mahjongg to kill time and we became good friends, and that's about it.

   Hirata-san is a former military officer who graduated from the University of Tokyo, and Kuga is the daughter of a former duke. The setting is dramatic, just like Gone With the Wind, in which Hirata-san played Ashley...

   "That's not true. He was a poor duke. However, since the peerage system disappeared, there are no dukes or [word that is not translating]. When I'm at home, I always wear rags. You should be a little more polite. Okay, I don't know if that's rude to the host. I get in trouble when people come over, so I'm in a hurry. We look like a beggar couple [laughs]."

   When the two of them are at home, they just laze around and do nothing. Hirata-san is silently reading a book. His wife is alone. "Yeah, I see," Hirata-san chimed in. It's happiness. The answer came back immediately: their wedding anniversary was October 9th, 1960.

   I go outside and take photos. The way Hirata-san stands tall and takes long strides, he would look straight out of a movie if he were wearing a military uniform.

   "I can't get rid of it, it's just my old habits..."

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¹ I would literally sell a kidney to own one of these doujinshi.

² Not sure what this means exactly, maybe it's an idiom that isn't translating?

³ In the original text this is referred to in kana as "dynamation".

⁴ Seoul. This blog does not endorse colonialism.

⁵ AFAIK sometime between 1927 and 1932. He was the only Onoda sibling to have been born in Korea.

⁶ I'm not sure how accurate this translation is, considering he was only around 18 when the war ended, but okay.

⁷ I'm omitting a sentence here out of tact. Hirata says something about the tape after this and it seems like he might not necessarily have wanted the interviewer to put it down in writing.