A Word from Yoshiki Onoda on Television ("Mimizu no Kawagoto")

Today I'm going to test your attention span with a post that is almost entirely text, because I've got an issue of TV Drama from June of 1962 that features a short piece authored by Yoshiki Onoda. I think it’s appropriate to describe what we’ve got here as basically an op-ed. (The title is an idiom, it literally means "Earthworm's Ramblings".) I’ve got no way of knowing if writing like this was a regular thing that Onoda did, since I’ve never seen any other issues of this magazine, but considering how prolific a television director he was, I would assume that he did contribute to more publications than just this. What I'm giving you here is a quick machine translation, so don't take it as gospel, but from what I can tell it seems alright.

This is basically Yoshiki Onoda saying that he wants television networks (and those financially invested in them) to actually give a damn about producing art that matters to people instead of basing every decision on what drives ratings up and makes the most money. It's very interesting to read input from someone within the industry during a time when television was causing a massive shift in Japan's media landscape, and if you've ever seen any of Onoda's work, this gives some nice insight into his creative philosophy. Given that he'd just recently left Shintoho after its collapse, at this point in time he was in a bit of a better position to produce the kind of work he wanted to make, rather than be a studio-contracted director with little creative freedom.

_______

While theatrical cinema is currently trending toward larger scales and evolving into a form of spectacle, television films, by contrast, interact with viewers exclusively through the cathode-ray tubes found within the home.

Consequently, the limitations inherent in these smaller-scale films that are brought directly into the intimate circle of family life are accompanied by an even greater set of constraints. Unlike live dramas, film should offer the potential to expand the scope of dramatic expression with greater freedom and richness. The depiction of character environments, psychological nuances, and visually lyrical compositions should, in theory, powerfully instill in viewers both an aesthetic sensibility and a profound sense of reality.

Therefore, it stands to reason that television films should surpass live dramas in quality; yet, what accounts for the continued stagnation of the medium?

As television stations expanded their programming lineups, they could no longer rely solely on live broadcasts. This naturally led to a recognition of the necessity for filmed content - a need initially met by a flood of imported foreign television series. Over time, however, this influx paved the way for the rise of domestic television production. Today, driven in part by foreign currency considerations, the volume of imported content is gradually declining, resulting in the mass production of domestic television films. Given that round-the-clock broadcasting is said to be just around the corner, it is an entirely natual progression that the volume of domestic television films will continue to rise in the future.

As practitioners involved in the creation of television films, we earnestly home that broadcasters will move beyond their current mindset: one in which they produce telvision films merely out of unavoidable necessity. Rather than simply relying on film as an easy default option, we urge them to cultivate a strong, affirmative awareness: the realization that precisely because the medium is film, it offers unique capabilities and creative possibilities that are otherwise unattainable.

One of the primary reasons for the aforementioned stagnation, simply put, is that the production companies themselves have fallen into a state of merely fulfilling a "necessity". One aspect of this situation stems from the fact that, since television is typically watched in the living room - a space that is always brightly lit and fosters a sense of close intimacy between the screen and the viewer - there is a prevailing expectation for works that the entire family can enjoy together. However, if this expectation remains the sole standard, television cinema stands no chance of ever truly evolving. It would serve only to contribute to the "dumbing down" of the masses. While some argue that this constitutes the fundamental difference between theatrical cinema and television cinema, I do not share that view.

Indeed, the more intimate the connection between the visual medium and the viewer, the less difficult it should be to penetrate the viewer's inner world. Consequently, the fundamental natural of dramatic storytelling itself should, by rights, remain essentially the same regardless of the medium. Is it not the true mission of television cinema - which has found its way into the very heart of the home - to inspire viewers to contemplate life with earnestness, to feel a boundless moral indignation toward social ills, and to discover the joy of living life with a forward-looking spirit? Relying solely on home dramas¹ cannot possibly fulfill this mission. To dismiss the possibility of such depth on the grounds that "viewers lack the intellectual capacity" is an overly conservative mindset that serves merely to perpetuate the status quo.

Every television station should realize that it bears an obligation to elevate the cultural and intellectual standards of its viewers. I can only hope that, by taking a step forward beyond rigid constraints and embracing the imperative to fulfill this duty, the future will bring forth a continuous stream of truly exceptional television productions. Finally, television possesses a trump card which is held as an absolute, sacrosanct dogma: viewer ratings. Based on these results, programs are often reshuffled or canceled with alarming ease. From the perspective of nurturing and fostering the growth of television cinema, I earnestly implore all television stations and their respective sponsors to refrain, as much as possible, from wielding [viewer ratings as a] formidable and often destructive weapon.

1 Light family-centered sitcoms or soap operas.

女房を早死にさせる方法 / Nyobo o hayajine ni saseru houhou / How To Make Your Wife Die Early [1974]

Release date: June 1st, 1974[?]

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Miyoko Akaza, Shigeru Oya, Yukiko Kobayashi, Akihiko Hirata, Michiko Tsukasa, Kenzo Tabu, Hisao Toake, Chiharu Kuri, Naoko Yusa, Chikako Natsumi, Koji Wada et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings.

____

Hell of a title, there.

This is a follow-up to our look at Susumu Kodama's unreleased The Woman I Chose, and, like that film, How To Make Your Wife Die Early also went unreleased following its completion. Unlike The Woman I Chose, though, this one eventually did get shown in theaters; it seems like it began production around January of 1971 and was finished a few months later, but it took three more years before audiences would get to see it.

Early draft script dating from January 1971.

I'll copy-paste Kinema Junpo's synopsis from its early May 1971 issue here wholesale, since it's the only plot description we're going to get:

Shunichi and Yumiko Kudo [Natsuki & Akaza, respectively] are about to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. Shunichi is an architectural designer, and Yumiko was a fashion model in the past, but lately their relationship has started to [sour]. Moreover, Shunichi is devastated to learn that his mentor, Dr. Ishimatsu [Toake], has married a woman younger than Yumiko. At this time, Shunichi meets Yoko [Tsukasa], the daughter of the owner of the drive-in "Route 70," and his ["seven-year itch"] resurfaces.

Yokoyama [Hirata], Shunichi's colleague and a globe-trotting architect, scoffs at Shunichi. Yokoyama, a self-proclaimed playboy and bachelor, whispers devilishly that Shunichi's freedom allows him to have a love affair with Yoko, and teaches Shunichi various ways to commit the perfect crime of slowly killing his wife. 

Meanwhile, Yumiko reunites with her friends from her modeling days: Maki [Yusa], Nana [Kuri], and Kyoko [Natsumi]. Maki had just recently lost her husband, who was twenty years older than her, but her expression is surprisingly cheerful. Are they after the inheritance?

Maki may have killed her husband through some clever means. If Maki demanded sex every night, it would have been very effective on her husband, who had a weak heart. Nana and Kyoko smiled devilishly at the prospect of reuniting with Yumiko. They were jealous of Yumiko, who had been the most popular girl in her prime and seemed happy even after marriage, and plotted to destroy her family life. They taught Yumiko how to get rid of her husband and introduced her to the playboy Michio Kihara [Wada]. However, the murderous intent that had been instilled in her by others naturally faded with time. And before long, their peaceful married life resumed.

A peculiarity that I've noticed while reading reviews on sites like Kinenote and Filmarks is that sometimes users will randomly decide to review a movie that they watched not recently or even semi-recently but just at any given point during their life, even if "any given point" means "thirty years ago". Thanks to Kinenote user 銀夢来夢, who saw the movie in 1974 and reviewed it in 2013, we can learn about what Toho was doing with this movie when they finally got around to releasing it:

I watched this on June 23, 1974, at the Toho theater in Kochi. It was distributed by Toho. At the time, it was often shown as part of a double feature in regional theaters. The film shown alongside it was "Three Old Women" [Sanbaba], also distributed by Toho.

So, from the sound of it, this movie's release was a matter of "somebody go tell the intern to dig around in storage, we need another movie for our double bill". Three Old Women wasn't the only movie it double-billed with, either; in 1974 it also played alongside another Yosuke Natsuki feature called Awesome Guys [Sugoii yatsura]. I've found some indication that the Awesome Guys double-bill may have actually taken place in March which would push the official release date back a few months, but I'm not certain about any of that (which is why I've put a load-bearing question mark next to the release date).

Yoshio Shirasaka adapted the film to the screen from two works written by Junji Ishigaki titled Ten Ways to Make Your Wife Die Early and Ten Ways to Make Your Husband Die Early, serialized in Weekly Asahi. Ishigaki seems to have primarily been a medical writer, and his other works have titles such as Introduction to Sexual Medicine, The Ethics of Nursing, 365 Days of Health, and - most relevant to our current examination - How to Make Your Husband Last a Long Time and How to Make Your Husband Strong and Long-Lasting. The overwhelming majority of Ishigaki's work is concerned with subjects like healthy diet, raising children, sexual hygiene, and family planning, so given that context, I'm not sure what to make of this movie. Possibly he published his Weekly Asahi articles as a joke?

In any case, we do have a picture of Hirata's character, Yokoyama, and, uh, well.

Computer... [sighs] enhance.

A slightly different version of the same poster with a less cropped picture of Yokoyama is out there as well:

This poster has been folded in half but we don't care about the other half.

And we've also got another picture of him from a lobby card that looks slightly better, although I have to say I think this is his worst on-screen facial hair so far:

Bad fake beard aside (which is nothing new; see Fantasy Paradise and Crazy Big Explosion... hey, those are both Crazy Cats movies, maybe Watanabe Pro had it out for him), it's very interesting to see how in the 1970s, as the film industry was imploding and Toho's system of exclusive contracts was falling apart, Hirata started to be cast in comedic roles, something that would never have happened 10-15 years earlier in his career. It's nice to see him get away from being typecast as scientists/villains, although those kinds of roles would still continue to be associated with him for the rest of his life and beyond.

There are a few other lobby cards for sale online as well as some stills which are catalogued as being held in the Toei Eigamura Library. I sent in an inquiry asking if these could be viewed digitally but they cannot. In any case it's possible these stills are just the same lobby cards that are already available online.

Despite being shelved initially and then relegated to the second half of a double-bill three years later, somebody evidently kept prints around, because I've found reports of a few theatrical screenings: One in 2006, an unconfirmed one in 2010 (can't confirm locations of these two), and in the early 2000s Laputa Asagaya showed it as part of a festival celebrating the work of Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote the film. Laputa must have really been digging around for the deep cuts, because compared to some of Shirasaka's other work - Giants and Toys, The Beast Must Die, Blind Beast, Kon Ichikawa's Olympics movie, etc - this is the smallest of small potatoes. A Filmarks reviewer writing in January of 2025 says they saw the film at Toho Cinemas Shibuya, but I'm not sure if that means it screened in 2025 or if, as mentioned above, the reviewer saw it some other time and just decided to write about it in 2025. If it did screen last year, that would be lovely as it would confirm that prints are extant and good enough to be viewed.

This still showing the film's production crew confirms that shooting was wrapped in spring of 1971 (we can just barely make out "1971" on the sign being held up by the guy with the glasses who kind of looks like Shin Kishida.)

Mentions of the film on social media, more than anything else, proved to be instrumental in getting a feel for how people remember this movie today and learning about its screening history. Despite its obscurity, it seems like a lot of people were engaging with the movie specifically when Laputa showed it as part of their Shirasaka festival. Twitter user @kasamatu_kun says "[...]I, too, am a devotee who rushed to see 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early' at Laputa Asagaya Late two decades ago, lured by the appearance of Miyoko Akaza." @rikako_ki, on the other hand, describes it as "an incredibly boring movie[...]the epitome of a B-movie," but a movie doesn't necessarily have to be good for us to want to see it.

The weirdest reference I've managed to find online is from a Filmarks review that namedrops it in reference to an American beach party movie from the 1960s called Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. User KyoSiroの感想・評価 says: "Susan Hart is absolutely adorable and full of playful mischief in her role as the ghost watching over the proceedings. Her entrance scene utilizes a composite visual effect - superimposing blue-tinted film footage - reminiscent of Director Susumu Kodama's 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early'." Considering how obscure and little-known this movie is, that's a pretty random comparison to throw out there. Also, I really can't imagine why a movie like this would use composite filming.

Well, anyway, I hope this post was informative, because now I'm probably on a watchlist for Googling "how to make your wife die early".

俺の選んだ女 / Ore no eranda onna / The Woman I Chose [1976]

Release date: Unreleased; some sources claim a release date of December 11, 1976

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Raita Ryu, Chieko Matsubara, Chieko Naniwa, Daisuke Katō, Keiji Yanoma, Kunihisa Mizutani, Kon Ōmura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Bontaro Miake, Masao Shimizu, Sadako Sawamura, Akihiko Hirata, Chikako Natsumi et al.

Availability: None.

____

I've been writing about films from the '50s and '60s a lot lately, so for our this and our next post, we're going to take a look at some from the 1970s. I know most of what I talk about here is obscure, but this one takes the cake: It was never released at all!

By 1976, Toho's system of exclusive contracts for actors and staff had been dead for about five years. That doesn't mean, however, that The Woman I Chose is full of B-listers; obviously, we can see that there are some decently famous names in the cast: Hirata's Taiyo ni Hoero! co-star Raita Ryu and the very prolific former Nikkatsu actress Chieko Matsubara - who is still working at 81 years old - headline, with a few other distinguished folks like Seiji Miyaguchi (Seven Samurai) and Daisuke Katō (Yojimbo) backing them up. It's also worth noting that this is one of Kunihisa Mizutani's few roles before he retired from acting to take care of his family's camera business. (Mizutani of course played foil to Hirata's Mr. K in Warrior of Love Rainbowman.)

Ryu was already a regular on Taiyo ni Hoero! at this point, and audiences for this film (had they ever existed) would have been familiar with him from the show. In fact, the tagline on the above poster pretty unambiguously makes reference to Ryu's character on Taiyo ni Hoero!, whose nickname is "Gori" (gorilla):

Whose wonderful girlfriend is that?

She belongs to me - a guy like a gorilla!

A human-hearted comedy that paints a picture of tearful love through laughter! 

Toho had planned to release - and, from what I understand, made the film for the sole purpose of releasing - The Woman I Chose on a double bill with Mother of the Cliff, but the then-popular Inugami Family was chosen instead, which seems to have sentenced our movie to obscurity forevermore. Another point that makes this film's relegation to the dustbin all the more regrettable is that Kyu Sakamoto, though not being credited, makes a special appearance. This movie is included in his filmography on his official website, and some promo stills of him do exist, but even his fame couldn't get this movie out there - perhaps another indication of just how bad the film industry was circa 1976.

Susumu Kodama, the director of this film, was much more prolific in television, having worked on the very popular What is Youth? back in the 1960s, which kicked off Toho's series of Youth [Seishun] school dramas. We can see some more of the influence television had been having on the film industry in the fact that The Woman I Chose is officially listed by Toho as having been produced by their television department despite having been planned as a theatrical release, with sales handled by the film department. This is the second of two theatrical films Kodama directed that were unreleased, and next time, we'll be taking a look at the second one, which, despite being shelved, did eventually make it to theaters.

Hirata is credited as playing a character named "Kuroda", but since this character is not mentioned in the film's synopsis (published in Kinema Junpo's late February 1977 edition), we can know nothing about him whatsoever. His role is likely quite small, as he doesn't appear on any posters, and although there are a fair number of promotional stills out there, none of those feature him, either. Since Ryu's character works in advertising and the plot does seem to heavily involve some miscellaneous business drama, I'm going to guess he plays somebody's boss, but that's pure speculation. 

Does Toho still have this movie? That's what I'd like to know. After 50 years, if it's never been digitized or taken out of storage, I highly doubt the print is in decent condition, and considering the ups and downs Toho has been through, it's very probable that nobody currently working at the company knows where the movie physically is. Even I'm having trouble drumming up any optimism about this one ever resurfacing. But hopefully, my writing about this film in English for the first time can bring it out of total obscurity by at least some small degree.

Koto no Tsume, Revisited (or: Koto no Two-me)

This is just a quick post to make mention of something I'm extraordinarily excited about. Recently, I was contacted by someone who had read my post about Koto no Tsume (which we're henceforth going to call Last Days of the Samurai) and asked me if I was interested in subtitling the movie, since they actually had a copy of it. That's the kind of thing you don't have to ask me twice!

You can now, for the first time in close to 70 years, watch this movie with English subtitles here. Massive thanks to kagetsuhisoka for proofreading and re-timing the entire thing after Aegisub let me down.

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I can say more about it. Last Days of the Samurai is a very emotionally fraught film, but in terms of its visuals, it's quite the bare-bones affair: there are maybe two or three sets (which could very well have been re-used from another production), the whole thing takes place over the span of about two days, and it has a relatively small cast, out of which surprisingly few people have speaking parts. Hirata's character Ushioda only has a couple of lines; his role is basically to be salty about the whole affair and then eventually die off-screen, and yes, as seen above, when we first see him he is shaving Yu Fujiki's face, which is, uh, interesting? Again, not as fun as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, but I do always enjoy these roles where he gets to be angsty as I think he plays that particular emotion very well.

I find it kind of unusual that Ushioda isn't referred to by name in the film - as in, there's no point where anybody directly addresses him using his name (his name is mentioned, but only when he's off-screen). The same goes for most of the miscellaneous ronin. Looking at the Toho News sheet I included in my last post, it seems like the actors did have their characters' names written under their pictures in promotional materials, but aside from that, you wouldn't be able to tell who the less-prominently-featured members of the cast were meant to be playing.

As for the rest of the cast, this film feels mostly like a vehicle for its three leads (Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi and Koshiro Matsumoto), and they really hit it out of the park. There's not much of a script to work with, here, and the storyline is well-trodden territory, but Ogi and Nakamura as the star-crossed lovers especially give a very evocative performance, and Matsumoto pulls off his role with exactly the strong sense of dignity that was no doubt intended. (We may recall Senjaku Nakamura getting all his teeth pulled out in Yagyu Secret Scrolls.) 

Takanori Ushioda's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Anyway, if all of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can now judge the film for yourself. It's a pleasure to know that this is out there in a format more accessible to English-speakers, so I hope you'll give it a look-see. The link, again, is here, the movie is available as both an mp4 with burned-in subtitles and as a higher-quality mkv.

Hyappatsu Hyakuchu Gaiden: Literally Just The Entire* Previously Unavailable International Export Version

*Technically not the entire dub, since about 10 minutes are missing due to censorship, but as of a few days ago the number of available minutes of this dub was zero, so.

I had basically finished up my research into Ironfinger and its international export versions when I found something interesting: An eBay listing for an Indian VCD claiming to have an English-dubbed version of the film. I knew the original Frontier Enterprises dub was currently considered lost/unavailable, so this caught my eye, but I thought "Nah, why would it be on an Indian VCD? It's probably just an original dub done in-house by the distributor, I’m not gonna spend money on that."

And then I thought "...unless?"

So, anyway, here, available online for the very first time (as far as I'm aware) is the international export version of Ironfinger.

I’m keeping the seller's name off of this because I don't know if he wants to be associated with, ahem, unofficial merchandise. But "DJ", you know who you are.

People who know more about these things than I do have pointed out that it is clearly identifiable as Frontier Enterprises' work by the cast of VAs. Akira Takarada is voiced by Burr Middleton and Susumu Kurobe is voiced by William Ross. I'll add more names as I fill out the full roster (which I hopefully will do). You'll be able to see right away the the dub is in very poor condition and about ten minutes are missing due to censorship, but some people are working right now on a reconstruction using the Japanese print, so it's likely a proper version in decent quality will be available soon.

Edit: The surgery was a success! The reconstruction is complete! Watch the dub in much, much better quality here.

We're actually very lucky that this is from India, because Indian films are required to show their censor certificate (or at least all the ones I've seen have been), and we can glean a great deal from this certificate. Using Google Lens to translate, I was able to find out that the certificate itself was issued in August 1977 with an expiration date of August 1987. This means that the Frontier dub has been kicking around India for close to fifty years while the rest of the world knew nothing. That's... kind of astounding to me, honestly. It's also intriguing that we can see there is English writing in the upper left-hand corner that says "recertification". Was this movie being shown in India even earlier?

We can also see by the big "A" for Adult that this was given India's equivalent of basically a PG-13 or a soft R: it's for adult audiences only, but you still can't show nudity.

Now, lastly, I know what you're all wondering: Does Yumi still call Komori "Mr. Only-Interested-In-Men" in the English dub? The answer is no, she does not; she calls him "Mr. Handsome of Aonuma".

100th Post Special: １００発１００中 / Hyappatsu hyakuchu / 100 Shot, 100 Killed (aka Ironfinger) [1965]

One hundred posts! I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

In any case, to celebrate my hundredth post (and Akira Takarada's birthday), let's take a good, long look at 100 Shot, 100 Killed, or Ironfinger, as it's better known to audiences outside of Japan. Before we get started, though, if you haven't heard the full version of Akira Fuse's theme from the movie, do yourself a favor and listen to it on YouTube here; it is leaps and bounds better than the version used in the movie.

Thus soundtracked, let's begin by looking at some of the films that influenced Ironfinger. This post will, to no one's surprise, run very, very long, but I aim to make it worth your while.

Influences, part I: The Name's ボンド... ジェームズ ボンド

The first Japanese translation of a James Bond novel came in 1957, when Hayakawa Shobo published Live and Let Die as part of their "Hayakawa Pocket Mystery" series. The novels were published out-of-order; Casino Royale, chronologically the first Bond novel, wasn't published in Japanese until 1963. Japan first saw Bond on screen that same year, in Dr. No, retitled "007 is the Number of Killing" and released as a road show. Surprisingly, according to Wikipedia, ticket sales were very poor; the film grossed only 57.8 million yen, which didn't even place it within the top ten foreign films distributed in the country that year.

For whatever reason, audiences decided to give it another shot when From Russia With Love came to town the next year, and that film grossed 260.8 million yen - a drastic improvement that would become a pattern. Goldfinger¹- the third entry in the James Bond series - premiered in Toho-owned theaters on April 1st, 1965 and grossed 706.32 million yen, making it the highest-grossing film of that year period, even including domestically-produced films.

Thus far, every Bond movie released in Japan had multiplied its gross returns by about four times the previous one, and Toho managed to capitalize perfectly on that success by releasing Ironfinger at almost the same time as the fourth Bond movie, Thunderball, which again brought in a mind-boggling profit. Raking in over one billion yen, Thunderball was Japan's top-grossing film of 1966 (its December 1965 release made it count for the next year). 

Two years after Ironfinger, Bond himself would come to Japan on-screen in You Only Live Twice, the production of which was assisted by Toho (they provided soundstages, personnel, and Mie Hama and Akiko Wakabayashi as Bond girls). I could say many things about the film and its source novel's depiction of Japan, Japanese culture, and Japanese people, but its Japanese Wikipedia page does a better job than I ever could by succinctly describing several aspects of it as "absurd" and "unrealistic".

However, while Ironfinger does clearly tie itself to the Bond series through its title and the timing of its theatrical release, the film that arguably inspired much more of its overall style and tone is a relatively lesser-known French-Italian co-production called That Man From Rio.

Influences, part II: The Name's Belmondo... Jean-Paul Belmondo

One has only to watch Goldfinger and That Man From Rio back-to-back (as I did during research for this post) to see that Rio clearly had a much larger influence on Ironfinger in almost every respect. Jean-Paul Belmondo's performance as Rio's protagonist, unassuming train concierge/aviator/international man of mystery Pvt. Adrien Dufourquet, is very physical, taking advantage of his height to portray a character who almost comes off goofy and awkward at times but is, despite outward appearances, capable of holding his own in almost any situation. These are all things that are also true of Akira Takarada's performance as Andy Hoshino, and I'll eat my hat if Takarada wasn't studying Belmondo in preparation for his role in Ironfinger.

And it's not just Belmondo's acting that Ironfinger obviously takes a cue from: the fast-paced, zany yet self-aware tone of Rio feels like a blueprint for Ironfinger's similarly frenetic tempo. There is even a scene in the back quarter of Rio where Dufourquet steals a small passenger plane that, as far as I'm concerned, Ironfinger was paying direct homage to with its own prop plane chase scene.

Phillipe de Broca's That Man From Rio premiered in Japan in October of 1964, and both it and Belmondo were enormously popular in Japan at the time (JP Wikipedia states that he was equally as popular in the country as Alain Delon but had more male fans). Belmondo influenced a number of Japanese productions where characters were modeled after him - again, there's no way Takarada wasn't looking to him for inspiration. Most notably, Belmondo was a direct inspiration for the manga Lupin III, and in fact when Belmondo's films began airing on television², Yasuo Yamada - by far best known as the voice of Lupin - became his exclusive Japanese dubber.

The line between all of these influences (though Ironfinger takes more from some than from others) is a closed circle, considering That Man From Rio was itself intended to be a bit of a Bond send-up. To get a more comprehensive picture of everything that went into Ironfinger, we'd have to conduct a full examination of the history and breadth of the spy genre within Japanese cinema - Bond did not invent the spy/crime movie, and neither of the two films we've just looked at were the first time Japan became acquainted with the genre - but such an examination is unfortunately outside the scope of this article.

So, for now, we'll leave it at that and move on to discussing the film itself.

Discussing The Film Itself

Ironfinger was released to laserdisc in 1997 (image credit to sinekon on Ameblo). Fun fact: That is a real rifle and it was gifted to screenwriter Kihachi Okamoto by Toshirō Mifune.

Although Ironfinger bears clear influences from other, contemporary films, in order to properly appreciate it on its own, I want us to set those associations aside, at least a little. Focusing too much on them runs the risk of distracting from the fact that the crew Toho assembled to work on this movie were some incredibly talented people, whose particular creative tendencies were perfectly suited to produce a zippy, eye-catching crime movie - Bond and Belmondo influences or not.

The film was directed by Jun Fukuda, whose style is all over it, but I would argue that Ironfinger's overall vibe owes as much if not more to the combination of Fukuda and Kihachi Okamoto as screenwriter than simply Fukuda alone. Okamoto's movies have an instantly recognizable look and feel to them no matter what genre he's working within, and although he only co-wrote the screenplay, I think something of his distinctive style shows through in the actual aesthetic of the film itself.

Okamoto's co-writer on the screenplay was mystery and sci-fi writer Michio Tsuzuki, who deserves mention as well. After the war, Tsuzuki worked on editing translations of French mystery novels and then began translating English mystery novels on his own, despite his inexperience (at the time) with the language. Tsuzuki's involvement with Ironfinger is extremely apropos, considering that he was working for Hayakawa when the company was producing the first Japanese James Bond translations - although I'm not certain if he was involved with Bond in any way before being brought on to co-write Ironfinger.

Looks can be deceiving: Ironfinger is so well-outfitted (despite a few reused sets) that it's very easy to believe actual overseas location shooting was used; in reality, the entire film was shot within Japan.

The film's cinematography and overall aesthetic are top-notch. Ironfinger's art director, Kazuo Ogawa, worked on many projects that reflect the typical style of 1960s Japanese cinema; he contributed to a lot of Crazy Cats films and Hitoshi Ueki's Japan's No. 1 ___ Man series, as well as two of Toho's Seishun TV dramas (among many other things). Cinematographer Shinsaku Uno is a much more obscure character, with only a few credits to his name and none of them particularly well-known, but he does a remarkably good job with Ironfinger despite being kind of a nobody. One thing I particularly appreciate is that the two rival crime families are color-coordinated to match their names, with the head of the Aonuma gang wearing blue (ao) and the head of the Akatsuki gang wearing red (aka). Komori, the Aonuma hitman who we'll meet shortly, even wears a blue tie and has some blue trim on the breast pocket of his suit. 

Ironfinger's boppy 1960s soundtrack was created by Masaru Sato, who really needs no introduction since you've most likely heard his work if you've seen more than one or two Japanese movies. As mentioned above, Akira Fuse sings the theme song, which was written by Tokiko Iwatani. Iwatani may not be a household name to Western audiences, but she's enormously important within the history of Showa-era pop music and composed lyrics for the likes of Yūzō Kayama, Hiromi Go, and The Peanuts. Within Japan she was also enormously prolific within the field of translating stage performances into Japanese. (Jesus Christ Superstar!)

From Toho's official DVD release. Splash text reads (in part) "Is this the Japanese 007!?"

In terms of acting, the star of the show is obviously Akira Takarada, although the movie would not be what it is without an excellent ensemble cast backing him up. Takarada's physicality is what sells the role, I think - he rarely spends a moment sitting still, even when he's tied up by some villain or another. Takarada himself has looked back on this role fondly in interviews, and it's considered by fans to be one of his best; his oft-mistranslated "Mr. 100 Shots" line in Godzilla Final Wars is, in the original Japanese, a reference to this role, inserted at the behest of director Ryūhei Kitamura.

Many reviews of Ironfinger that I've read tend to agree that Akihiko Hirata's character is really underused. Hirata plays Komori³, a hitman for the Aonuma family, one of two rival gangs both vying for the same shipment of firearms. Komori almost acts as a foil for Hoshino, or at least he would have if his character had been a little more developed. Hoshino's also a hitman, as we learn at the end of the film, but Hoshino is nothing but an impenetrable shield of bravado under which his true identity lies, whereas with Komori, what you see is what you get. And what you see is a really ruthless killer who carries a pocket flask full of acid.

This off-white pinstriped suit Komori wears for the first half of Ironfinger is one of my favorite suits Hirata's worn on film. It also ties into the color-coding of the two rival gangs, because after Aonuma dies (and it starts to become clear Komori wasn't only working for Aonuma), we see Komori in a plain grey suit without the blue accents.

The last thing I'd like to note before we move on is that while Takarada seems to have learned his French lines phonetically⁴, Hirata actually learned French in military school and had planned to become a military attaché to the French embassy if there hadn't been a war. That was about 20 years before Ironfinger, so I have no idea how much of that he retained, but he certainly had familiarity with the language at the very least. He has fewer French lines than Takarada, but to me (someone who knows absolutely no French) I think he does sound a little more natural in his delivery.

With that on our minds, let's take a look at Ironfinger on the international stage.

A Parisian in America (and Romania, Italy, Brazil, etc): Ironfinger Goes Global

"Squirm as a girl takes over!"...?

Ironfinger's entrance into the United States market is somewhat murky. Its first mention in English-language print material dates back to volume 9 number 2 of UniJapan Film Quarterly, published in 1966. This seems to be the first time the "Ironfinger" title was associated with the film. In 1968, the film was included in volume 13 of Toho's Toho Films catalog of movies available for purchase and screening to distributors in the U.S., also under the Ironfinger title. An English-dubbed version, produced in Tokyo by Frontier Enterprises, was offered; I am uncertain at what point English subtitles were created for the movie, but as we'll see shortly, in its brief U.S. theatrical run, it was shown with subtitles, not dubbed.

Up until now, the full Frontier Enterprises export version has been considered unavailable. We're going to explore that dub further in its own separate post because, as it happens, I found it on a bootleg Indian VCD. Like, the entire thing. I am not joking.

We might also have some scanty evidence that the film was briefly considered for marketing under a different title: TohoKingdom user Terasawa notes here that a film titled "Last Man From Paris", mentioned in a Variety article about Toho's deal with Henry Saperstein, might very well be Ironfinger. Given that the title "Last Man From Paris" evokes That Man From Rio (if you squint), I'm inclined to agree with that speculation.

While Saperstein may not have succeeded (if he ever actually tried?) in bringing Ironfinger to American shores, he was (unfortunately) instrumental in cross-pollenating Japan's Western-influenced spy movies back into the Western market by way of his involvement in what would eventually become What's Up, Tiger Lily?. Saperstein acquired the rights to Key of Keys, an entry in Toho's International Secret Police series and, when text audiences reacted well to it, attempted to bring in Lenny Bruce to write English comedy dialogue for a re-dubbed version. Bruce refused, which led Saperstein to hire Woody Allen for the project instead. (As a sidenote, Google's AI overview claims that Ironfinger is part of the International Secret Police series, which it most definitely isn't.)

Oddly enough, some of our earliest English-language marketing for the film comes from Singapore. Thanks to the National Archives of Singapore, a government-run website, I've managed to dig up a promotional flyer for the film produced bilingually in Chinese and English. I'm going to guess this ad copy may have been used for other English-speaking markets as well, and I'll reproduce it here in full because it is so rare (and, honestly, weird... tell me this doesn't sound exactly like it was written by ChatGPT):

ACTION: Does it have a limit? Not in Toho, where action pics are loaded with every twist, every hook contributing towards satisfying the audience's gourmand craving for filmic feasts claiming a maximum of high-strung movement in adventure. 

Toho, like many other first-class production firms in the world, has for years created action-thrill-suspense films tailored to fill the routine-thinking movie-goer's demands for that which will transport him for brief hours to the unattainable world of heroicism[sic] and hair-trigger action the average male secretly longs to live in. Needless to say, Toho's audiences are never disappointed.

And then came 007.

Not to be outdone, Toho undertook still another new approach to the problem of action-adventure film production. And the answer was IRONFINGER.

Replete with thrills, spills, action, special effects, arch killers, intrigue, truly inventive methods for slaughtering unwanted citizens and, of course, sex - all presented in a humorous vein - IRONFINGER is another milestone in the careers of director Jun Fukuda and Kihachi Okamoto, director by trade, who wrote the tightly-woven script.

IRONFINGER is a ruthless character, target for killers throughout the world, who operates an illegal gun manufacturing plant on an island not far from Manila. Humor gets underway, when an attempt on the life of the Interpol agent sent from Paris to check out the operation results in the death of the wrong man. Sex, with the dainty appearance of a curvy murderess. Action and hair-raising adventure never cease, as two gangs of cutthroats butcher each other in gauche attempts to seize the weapons.

Akira Takarada, credited with such brilliant performances as the elder brother in Toho's classic DIFFERENT SONG, stars as the Interpol agent. And lovely Mie Hama, costar of the Italian-French-Japanese coproduction LES PLUS BELLES ESCROIQUERES DU MOND, is cast as the oversexed killer.

In color, of course, IRONFINGER boasts a score by the gifted Masaru Sato, the great Kurosawa's first choice as a composer, a man honored with music credits for such prize-winning masterpieces as Kurosawa's YOJIMBO and RED BEARD.

Warm inside in winder, cool inside in summer, just right in spring and fall is not enough, exhibitors have got to book good pictures to lure that reluctant audience into the theater. Toho's IRONFINGER will help them solve this problem.  

While Ironfinger never received a wide U.S. theatrical release, it did play in at least a few theaters stateside. In June and July of 1971, the film made its rounds through Hawaiian theaters, first at Toho's Honolulu location and then at the Mamo theater in Hilo, which appears to possibly have been running a nudie show at the same time. The film was hyped a little in the May 24th issue of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and the blurb kind of makes it sound like it's a brand-new film, so I think it's pretty safe to say that this summer 1971 release was probably the first time it had played with English subtitles anywhere.

While America was faffing about, many other countries got the film much earlier. France was the first, and released it under the title "Chasseur d'Espions" (with the alternate title "Traquer d'Espions") in November of 1966. 

That most exotic and mysterious of locales, Canada, got the film starting in April of 1967 with a second run in 1968. I have found quite a few Quebecois ads for it. It seems never to have been screened on its own; the ads I've found show it running as part of a double- or even triple-bill.

Are we really still advertising "in color!" as a selling point in 1967?

Italy seems to have gotten the film in 1968, and an Italian dub was produced for the occasion. The entire dub isn't extant as far as I know, but you can see clips here and here. Interestingly, Italy was also showing the film on TV; I've found TV guide listings for the film from 1979, 1980, and 1981. While most countries that imported the film screened it under more or less a transliterated version of the title "Ironfinger", Italy decided to forge their own path and retitle the film Colpo grosso a Manila, or "Big Heist in Manila".

I have some questions about the way Italy does things.

I'll close out this section (and the post at large) with the film's most ephemeral international release: its Romanian run in November of 1970 at Bucharest's Moşilor theater, which you can see with your eyes here. Not a lot of information to be gleaned about that.

"Please Excuse Us": The End

Ironfinger is still fairly obscure to most people outside of Japan - a fact that I tend to forget, because in my heart, it's a smash hit. The film and its sequel are both licensed by Janus Films and available for streaming on the Criterion Channel with some very good subtitles which are, as far as I've seen, currently the only set that exist. If you haven't already seen the film and I've managed to entice you, you've got no excuse not to go check it out. 

Screenshot taken seconds before absolutely nothing disastrous happens at all.

_______

1 Goldfinger the book had been available in Japanese translation since 1960.

2 There is, as is often the case, A Copyright Situation™ with Belmondo's filmography in Japan.

3 "Komori" is phonetically identical to the Japanese word for "bat" (as in the animal), but Komori's name is written with different kanji. This probably means nothing.

4 The source I got this from did not cite a reference, hence the "seems to have". "[Actor] learned their lines phonetically" is a claim that REALLY pisses me off when people throw it around without verifying it, so I want to be very clear that I don't know this for certain.

琴の爪 / Koto no tsume / Koto Plectrum [1957]

Release date: July 13th, 1957

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Senjaku Nakamura, Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi, Shin Morikawa, Haruo Tanaka, Kojiro Matsumoto, Someshou Matsumoto, Akihiko Hirata, Yu Fujiki, Ikio Sawamura, Sachio Sakai et al

Availability: No home media release; infrequent television broadcasts. Now available on archive.org.

____

Edit: Since writing this post, I’ve been given a copy of the film and subtitled it. You can watch it here. I’m leaving this post as is for posterity but do be aware that it is outdated since the full movie is now available.

We've beaten the drum and played the flute, now we're going to pluck the koto with this obscure little 50-minute-long film.

The first thing to know about this movie is that it's directly related to Chushingura, the story best known worldwide as "47 Ronin". While the incident itself took place in the early 1700s, the background of Koto Plectrum dates back only to the 1930s, to a series of Shin Kabuki plays written by Seika Mayama collectively titled Genroku Chushingura. These plays were produced and staged over a seven-year period starting in 1934 and ending in 1942. Koto Plectrum is an adaptation of the last story in the cycle, and its full title is Genroku Chushingura - Oishi's Last Day. For a pretty detailed report on an actual stage performance of this story, see here; you'll need a translator extension if you don't read Japanese, but it seems to translate fairly coherently.

Koto Plectrum was an installment in a surprisingly little-known series of films that Toho called their "Diamond Series". These were very short films (usually under an hour) that were adapted from stories by well-respected authors and were made on a small budget. The first film in the series was Will-O'-The-Wisp, directed by Yasuki Chiba and starring Daisuke Kato; virtually none of the films that follow have had any lasting Western name recognition save for Nobuo Aoyagi's The Living Koheiji which is known to kaidan nerds such as myself. While these were small films, they did not lack for stars; their casts boasted some of Toho's most popular actors at the time.

The cast of our movie is filled with kabuki actors, the most prominent being the two Nakamuras and the two Matsumotos, one of whose career took a bit of an odd turn: Someshou Matsumoto started out on the stage and then left to become a screen actor in the mid-1950s, taking some very small roles in some very recognizable films such as The Human Vapor, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Crazy Big Adventure, and Onibaba, just to name a few.

Speaking of small roles, Hirata plays Takanori Ushioda, also known as Matanojo, a real-life personage who was (obviously) one of the 47 Ako ronin. Matanojo inherited a 200-koku fief and was known to be skilled with a spear; not much about his personal life outside of his involvement with the raid seems to be available. I haven't been able to find any mention of this character in reviews of the film, so I really can't tell you anything about how Hirata plays this role or how involved his character is with the plot (probably not very). I think it's fairly safe to say that whatever he does in this movie is not as cool as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, because in that one he gets to carry Kira's head.

We have a grand total of two pictures of Hirata in this role, and neither of them are very good.

Laputa Asagaya I'm begging you please use images that are larger than 200x200

...we'll need to "computer, enhance!" that second one...

am I your favorite purveyor of grainy images? please say yes

While there are a fair amount of reviews of the film out there (generally middling; mostly written by kabuki fiends who know their stuff) from its various screenings and television broadcasts - some as recent as last year - there is, as far as I know, no footage of the movie itself available online and not really even any stills. Oddly enough I was able to dig up a bizarrely high-quality behind-the-scenes photo from an obituary for Chikage Ogi on [checks notes] a sports website:

...but, really, there's scarce little mention of this out there, although it has apparently been digitized, which means it could be released on DVD if Toho saw fit. 

Another odd thing to note is that this film is on Letterboxd (which itself is surprising) under the English title "Last Days of the Samurai". This title seems to have been more or less arbitrarily chosen; it's the kind of phrase you hear tossed about in reference to various events and media, and was also the English title of a more famous film, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai. While the film did have a Western release (again, this is very surprising to me), it was not under that title; the export title was instead Chushingura Hero, which will provide our segue into talking about this film's life outside of Japan.

Most probably the film played in other theaters, but the only record of it in Hawai'i that I can find is a few showings throughout Februrary of 1958 at the Kapahulu in Honolulu. It played on a double bill with 1956's Engagement Ring which does appear to also have been one of Toho's Diamond features. 

Quite soon afterward, in March of 1958, the film played in Los Angeles' Adams Theater; I can find virtually no information about this. It seems to have played on a double bill during this run as well, potentially with Floating Clouds which if you ask me is just not really very fair to Koto Plectrum.

After this initial 1958 run, the Rio Theatre in San Francisco showed the film in March of 1961 under yet another English title, A Samurai's Last Hour, on a double bill with Saga of the Vagabonds. And look! Look!! They actually name our man in the cast! (For Vagabonds, not Plectrum, but still, this is rare to see.)

The final American run of the film I can confirm was when it finally made its way into the Toho La Brea in January of 1962. While the film itself first showed in Western theaters in 1958, America seems to consider 1962 its "official" release date, and you'll still see that listed as its year of release in various corners of the internet. I guess a movie doesn't matter until it plays in Los Angeles?

In 1962 our film was included (under the title "Last Day[sic] of Samurai") in the Academy Award Reminder List of Eligible Releases, a booklet given to members of the Academy that - as the name would imply - lists every film eligible for an Academy Award that year. Now, Koto Plectrum was, of course, nowhere even remotely near being nominated for an Academy Award, but it is very interesting to know that members of the Academy were aware of it, and perhaps thought about it for a moment before moving on to whatever else was popular that year.

And now, today, where is this movie? Nowhere. Can you and I watch it? No. From Oscar eligibility to total (Western) obscurity in 64 years...