Halloween Special: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The H-Man

Part I: The Men Behind The H-Man

The staff of The H-Man.

The screenplay for The H-Man was written by Takeshi Kimura (also known under his birth name Kaoru Mabuchi), who had already written several screenplays for Toho by the time the film was released in 1958. Within the field of tokusatsu, he'd contributed Rodan and The Mysterians, but he had also penned noted wet blanket Farewell Rabaul in 1954, and Red Line Base in 1953, a film which was postponed due to its perceived anti-American sentiment.

You can usually tell when a Toho movie has a Kimura screenplay (as opposed, for example, to Shinichi Sekizawa, frequent contributor to the Godzilla series and purveyor of more light-hearted fare). Kimura's work tends to be fairly pessimistic, with a focus on the monster as outcast, although in volume 4 of Toho's SF Special Effects Film Series books, he himself stated that he "does not know where [his] own style lies". I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze the guy or anything, but one does have to wonder if Kimura's nihilistic tendency was at all influenced by having been in prison for ten years.

The H-Man's director, Ishirō Honda, needs no introduction if you know anything whatsoever about tokusatsu or really about Japanese cinema at all. I believe survivorship bias affects Western perception of Honda's work quite a bit - he also directed romances and dramas, but most of his other pictures are not available outside of Japan, so to most Western fans, he is associated solely with tokusatsu. Nevertheless, his style as a director also tends to be more introspective than his fellow Godzilla helmsmen, which makes him a perfect compliment to Takeshi Kimura.

Instrumental (sorry) to the overall atmosphere of The H-Man is Masaru Sato's deeply spooky score. Sato is a rare breed in that he was unbelievably prolific (just scroll down his JP Wiki page to see how many soundtracks he composed), but the quality of his work is consistently very good. Those delightfully offbeat doyoyoyoiiii! noises you hear throughout The H-Man were achieved by Sato recording plucked piano strings and doubling it with woodwinds.

And, of course, you've got Eiji Tsuburaya in charge of the special effects - another figure who needs to introduction. We're going to give The H-Man's effects further examination in the next section, so we'll skim over him for now.

Before we move on, though, if I may, I'd like to set the scene a little. This is the spooky season, after all, and a post about such a dark, stylish movie as The H-Man deserves some ambiance.

You used to date a nightclub singer. Now you don't know what you are. Dimly, you recall something terrible and wet crawling up your leg - did you once have legs? - and you remember pulling out your gun and shooting at it, though you knew it was too late. But you still have a will, even if you've become something else. Even in your altered state, you're not helpless as you watch the gang you once ran with close in on your girl. And if you can see them, you can touch them - like that thing touched you...

Part II: The Primordial Ooze: Creating The H-Man and Its H-Men

You KNOW whoever drew this was having a great time.

Although I've made it seem like the driving force behind The H-Man was Takeshi Kimura, there is a ghost behind the film, and that ghost is named Hideo Unagami.

Hideo Unagami - sometimes also called Hideo Kaijo - is kind of an interesting figure: he was contracted by Toho as an actor for bit part roles, but he would frequently bring scripts to Toho's planning department while still acting as well. Among a few other things, Unagami was responsible for the infamous Bride of Godzilla? script, which, if filmed, would have been a sequel to Godzilla Raids Again. None of Unagami's scripts were ever adapted directly, but he had an influence on several of Toho's late-'50s tokusatsu pictures.

Unagami, while acting in The Mysterians, was inspired to write a script titled Liquid Man Appears, which he brought to Tomoyuki Tanaka. Tanaka read the script and favored it very highly, choosing to adapt it to film - only Unagami passed away in November of 1957, before his idea could be realized. (His costar Yoshio Tsuchiya attributes his death - by heart attack - to the stress of wearing his Mysterian suit, which I can confirm does suck.) Unagami received posthumous credit for his work on The H-Man.

The content of Unagami's story treatment is pretty much entirely unknown to us. What elements were added by Kimura and which were original to Unagami's script cannot be determined. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, but with such a splendid final product, it's hard to really wish things had gone any differently.

The original title of the film, of course, is Bijo to ekitai ningen, or "Beauty and the Liquid People". 

Manufacturing setpieces. (Unfortunately I can't tell what exactly is being manufactured here.)

So now we have the story about the goo people, but we need to actually make some goo people. As per a press release written by Eiji Tsuburaya:

For the creation of the Liquid Men we decided to use gelatin and cellophane which we crumpled before flattening into a solid mass. We also used organic glass[...]which is more transparent and colorless than gelatin. We could have used whatever we had thought would do the job, but finally we decided to avoid using things that audiences might recognize, although we did want the forms of the things to look somewhat human.

Gelatin and cellophane is straightforward enough, but I had no idea what "organic glass" was and, not being a chemist (though I do know a fine one; shame he died so young), I had to look it up. Organic glass is "a fully synthetic plastic material available in a vitreous state [that] consists of macromolecular organic compounds which do not follow any principle of periodic arrangement and are hence amorphous."

From what I can gather, the organic glass Toho was using to depict their liquid humans had to be cut up and then melted to achieve its vitreous state, which, according to Keizo Murase, was one of his first jobs after joining Toho's special effects department. After it had been liquified, sets were built on a slant so that the goop would ooze and roll the way Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects crew wanted it to. For scenes where the liquid people take on humanoid form, wet organic glass was sandwiched between two (solid) glass panes, which were then manipulated so that the organic glass inside would slip around and give a shifting, seething appearance.

Another thing you may have noticed while watching The H-Man is lighting: it's a noir film, after all, so maintaining the perfect level of darkness at all the right times is crucial to the movie's overall atmosphere. We hardly ever mention lighting technicians when talking about a film, so I'd like to give credit to Toho's Tsuruzo Nishikawa, the man responsible for The H-Man's distinctive look. His direction did make things difficult for the special effects department, who had to figure out how to make their work still come out well in low lighting, but the movie is all the better for Nishikawa's creative use of shadow.

We'll move on shortly to looking at what happened to the movie once it was completed and distributed across the world, but before we do, we're going to get introspective.

You are a nightclub singer. Your boyfriend is a gangster, or at least he was until recently - he's vanished, and hasn't even contacted you to tell you he needs to lay low for a while. You're peripherally aware that there have been strange deaths in the city: people disappearing right out of their clothes, no bodies ever found. A few weeks ago, you were just another girl trying to make a living, but now you find yourself caught between the police and your boyfriend's less-than-reputable associates - both asking questions you don't know how to answer...

 

Part III: What Is An "H-Man"?

The reason why I love Toho's "Transforming Human" series so much is specifically because of the sense of empathy entangled with horror that they convey - as opposed so strongly to contemporary American monster movies. None of the transformed humans in these Toho films are entirely at fault. The mushroom people in Matango are a cautionary tale more than anything; Sudo in Secret of the Telegian is, honestly, objectively right, if overzealous and warped by his own vengeance; Mizuno in The Human Vapor really didn't ask for any of that. The liquid people of The H-Man are no different. These are victims: completely innocent humans altered beyond recognition thanks to the actions of men who never met them or even spared them a thought.

The H-Man, like Godzilla, was heavily inspired by the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, in which the crew and cargo of a tuna fishing boat were irradiated, and the crew subsequently sickened by fallout from the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test. It should be noted that Lucky Dragon was operating well outside the declared danger zone of the test. Very often, when people talk about this, I hear the claim that the boat wandered into a known restricted area by accident. In reality, this incident was so heinous specifically because the Castle Bravo test was much bigger than anticipated, and hence the declared boundaries of the danger zone were too small.

The most horrifying thing about the liquid humans is that there are suggestions throughout the film that they retain their human will and memory. It's likely, if you've only seen the English dub of The H-Man, that you have a very different idea of the liquid humans. The English dub excises any reference to the H-Men retaining their memories and renders them little more than monsters to be feared because they might eat you. This is an entirely different angle from how they come across in the Japanese. There, the liquid humans terrify not only because they can kill you, but because there is virtually nothing standing between you and becoming one of them. Some sources even indicate that the liquid human who attacks Uchida in the sewers at the end of the film is Misaki, the liquified gangster played by Hisaya Ito.

We should remember that, although The H-Man might resemble contemporary "atomic terror" films, it does have very specific origins. Whatever else you may think of it, it's a movie that lays out its cycle of cause-and-effect quite clearly.

In what follows, we're going to take a look at how such an esoteric movie was marketed and received after it left its native country.

You once were a human. You could have been anyone. Fisherman, gangster, cop, dancer. Now you are slime. You know you are slime, and yet you remain you, with all of your memories and impulses. Only, now, when you act on those impulses - the instinct to seek help, to find the nearest living human and reach towards them, desperately - terrible things happen. As it sinks in what has become of you, you cannot fully blame your fellow humans for their fear and revulsion. And yet you still feel, somehow, as if you're one of them...

 

Part IV: Goop Across the Water: The H-Man Worldwide

Writing this section was difficult. The H-Man had theatrical runs in so many countries, and each of them was unique, with funky posters, interesting marketing, and a selection of critical reviews to either point and laugh at or vaguely agree with. I can't include everything, or we'd be here for the next century. So how do I choose what to put in?

I guess we can start with the American release, because there's more information about it than probably anything else. I should mention up front that there is one chapter in The H-Man's initial US theatrical run that I'm holding back - this is because it's so delightful that it deserves its own post, which will go up next week.

Obligatory "It's in Tohoscope, not Eastmancolor, yes, they have basically the same specs, but they're different, blah, blah."

Columbia Pictures has been in control of American distribution of The H-Man since its stateside premiere on May 28th, 1959; they retain rights to the film even today. You can check out an original American trailer here, but it's in such bad quality, you might get motion sickness. As you'll see in the post to follow, The H-Man lingered in American theaters quite a bit. It was shown in several states starting in late May and going on through June, with some drive-through showings even later in the summer, usually alongside a cheesier Western horror flick like The Woman Eater.

My ability to go through contemporary reviews is hampered significantly by the ridiculous monetization and gatekeeping of newspaper archives, but that doesn't mean we have nothing. Here is a contemporary review from Motion Picture Exhibitor, written in June of 1959. MPE was a periodical geared towards theater owners, rather than theatergoers, so their reviews tend to take a slightly different tack.

The H-Man –––– MELODRAMA, 79m

Columbia

(Japanese-made) (Dubbed in English) (Eastman Color) (CinemaScope)

Estimate: Good horror entry.

Cast: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa, Koreya Senda, Mitsuru[sic] Sato. Associate producers, Tomoyuki Tanaka; directed by Inoshiro[sic] Honda.

Story: Japanese citizens begin to disappear and scientists believe that effects of A-Bomb tests have created a liquid monster capable of disintegrating humans. Police scoff at the idea until it is proven experimentally. The monster reaches the city and creates considerable panic until it is trapped in the sewers and burned out of existence.

X-Ray: The Japanese have certainly learned the knack of the science-fiction and horror combination, and fans of such films who don't demand much sophistication with their horror should be happy with this one. The Japanese cast is adequate, and the color and wide-screen photography quite acceptable. It is in the field of special effects that these Japanese features excel, however, and this one is no exception. The liquid monster disintegrates victim after victim before the audiences[sic] eyes; so hats off to special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, whoever he is[...sic]. The story is not much and some of the characters and situations are pretty unbelievable by American standards. The emphasis, however, is on the horror and special effects, and in these fields the film does fine. Screenplay is by Takeshi Kimura.

Ad lines: "A Puddle In The Street... A Spot On The Wall... Watch It Closely And If It Moves, Scream For Your Life! You're Face To Facelessness With The H-Man"; "Big As An Entire City! Deadlier Than Anything You Have Never Seen!"

We've got Variety's review of it as well, which is also geared more towards industry insiders, hence why you'll often see reviewers discuss how a film should be "exploited" (= sold/advertised).

The H-Man

(WIDESCREEN–COLOR)

Good story well made. Pic is exploitable.

Hollywood, June 2.

Columbia release of a Toho production. Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka. Directed by Inoshiro Honda. Screenplay, Takeshi Kimura, from original story by Hideo Kaijo; special effects, Eiji Tsuburaya; camera (Eastmancolor) Hajime Koizumi; sound, Choshichiro Mikami and Masanobu Migami. Previewed at Columbia, May 28, '59. Running time, 79 mins.

Actors: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa, Koreya Senda. Bitzuru[sic???] Sato.

"The H-Man" is a filmy green monster created from a slimy liquid that dissolves human beings as it oozes through Tokyo like jellied consomme. The Japanese Toho Production is well made and seemingly more thoughtful than the company's two other U.S. summer releases (Metro's "The Mysterians" and Warner Bros.' "Gigantis") and Columbia will be able to exploit good bookings with the widescreen, color production.

The story is reminiscent of last year's Paramount release, "The Blob," and while recollective science-fiction addicts may pooh-pooh the idea of an Oriental copy, they should be pleased indeed with the quality of the replica. It abounds in fewer special effects than either "Mysterians" or "Gigantis", but its one effect - namely, the disintegration of the human body - is skillfully and terrifyingly adept.

"H-Man" is as timely a[sic] Strontium 90 in describing how hydrogen bomb tests have reduced living things to a gelitanous[sic] mass which, in turn, can dissolve any other living tissue it touches. The liquid lives, and, to stay alive, seeks a repast mostly composed of the heroes, heroines and heavies of this picture. Once the authorities believe those who have seen the nuclear monster, it is a comparatively simple matter to do away with it via a manmade holocaust

Yumi Shirakawa, as a delightful looking nightclub entertainer, is excellent, as are Kenji Sahara, as the chief detective, and Akihiko Hirata, as a scientist. The Takeshi Kimura screenplay (from an original story by Hideo Kaijo) is effective, and Inoshiro Honda's direction takes full advantage of the story, the special effect (directed by Eiji Tsuburaya) and the terror generated by both. Tomoyuki Tanaka produced, with the technically excellent production aided by Hajime Koizumi's cinematography, Takeo Kita's art direction, Masuru[sic] Sato's music and the sound by Choshichiro Mikami and Masanobu Migami. Culturally, it is unfortunately the West has made such inroads in the Orient that a Japanese picture, such as this one, looks more like an American film with Japanese actors.

Potentially the only time we've ever had to clarify that no, Hirata does NOT play the scientist in this one.

These are both surprisingly favorable reviews, but I would posit that critics writing for industry-focused publications might have slightly more open minds as regards international pictures than writers whose job is not tied to the industry itself. National Parent-Teacher calls the film an "often ludicrous, occasionally pathetic, but nonetheless thought-provoking parody of grade-C American science-fiction thrillers", and the New York Tribune's reviewer called it "A good-natured poke at atom-bomb tests." I don't think the point of the movie could have flown any higher over that reviewer's head if it was shot out of a cannon.

The Indianapolis Star refers to the H-Men themselves as "palatable little creature[s] who look like mint jelly and [are] twice as good as 'the bubble machine'." I have no idea what any of that means.

I think that'll serve us for the American release, so let's move on now to the next country to receive the film, which was West Germany. There's nothing too remarkable about it, and the German dub is fully extant and available on Blu-Ray and DVD for German consumers (check out the trailer here as well), but the notable thing about this movie's half-life within Germany is that it has a strange tie to what is considered the country's first pulp horror novel.

Yes, that is just a completely unedited H-Man lobby card.

Published in 1968, The Horror Creeps Through Bonnard's House was the first entry in the Larry Brent series of pulp horror books published by "Dan Shocker" (a pseudonym of Jürgen Grasmück). Not only is its title a direct callback to the German title of The H-Man, which translated to The Horror Creeps Through Tokyo, its cover - when first published as part of Silver Crime, a long-running series of monthly novels - was lifted directed from a German lobby card for the film. Oddly enough, from what I can tell, the novel itself has nothing whatsoever to do with The H-Man: Larry Brent is a kind of James Bond ripoff with supernatural powers, and Bonnard's House appears to be about vampires.

Many countries deemed The H-Man unsuitable for children. In the UK it received an "X" rating, which at the time indicated that no children under 16 were allowed in theaters. (Evidently the UK reconsidered; the film was reclassified with a "12" rating when released to home media in 2020.) France and Finland did the same in not allowing children under 16 to see the film. This makes it funnier that the United States did pretty much the exact opposite, with some theaters even showing the film as a double-feature "kiddie matinee" alongside a more lighthearted picture. (To be fair, though, the US cut does remove a lot of content parents may have found objectionable, like gang violence.)

Sweden produced hands-down the best poster from any country in the world for their release of The H-Man (under the title "Fasans monster" or "Monster of Horror"):

Brazil's newspaper advertising for the film solved my eternal gripe about people using Tohoscope and Eastmancolor interchangeably by saying "hey, what if we call it both?":

Check out the peepers on that H-Man!

And - though we are not touching home media releases in this article due to space constraints - this French VHS tape of the film has potentially my least favorite cover art of anything I've ever seen in my life.

Yes, that is a white man. No, there are no white people in The H-Man.

Post-initial-release screenings do continue around the world, although I'm not sure how frequently; I've heard anecdotal reports of TV syndication in Mexico and in Finland it apparently played at a film festival as recently as 2024.

Posters are cool and all, but one of the most intriguing episodes in The H-Man's adventures outside of its home country comes with no visual evidence to back it up at all: getting boycotted in Indonesia. From a November 1964 issues of the Surabaya Press Summary, a digest of the most pertinent headlines culled from thirteen Surabaya newspapers and summarized in English:

SHOWING OF AMERICAN FILM FURSTRATED[sic]

A showing of American film scheduled to be held in Banjuwangi and Irama theaters at Banjuwangi has been frustrated by the local "committee for boycotting American films. It was "The H Man", a Columbia production with Japanese actors. The boycott of the film was initiated by the committee and conducted by the masses with the support of the Pantja Tunggal. To fool the people, the words Columbia Pictures had been erased, and the name of a Japanese producer was printed on them. 

I mean... okay.

I think that's basically it for international releases - if I went into any more detail I might have to make a separate post, and it wouldn't be that interesting anyway, so we might as well end it here. 

You are a scientist. You are a scientist, and you don't want to believe your own hypothesis. But in the past decades, man has created horrors that nature could never have imagined: nothing, it seems, is beyond the realm of possibility anymore. You have an explanation for the Tokyo liquefaction deaths, if only the police would listen. Since the Chief Inspector is an old friend, you were sure you could get him to see reason, but either he's more stubborn than you'd estimated or - you fear - your theory is too far-fetched. If he won't come around soon and lend the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's formidable strength to your cause, you don't know what might happen next...

Conclusion

What can we learn from The H-Man? I'll tell you one thing I've learned: not everyone likes this movie as much as I do, which is a bias that I find difficult to put away when I'm trying to do critical analysis of the film.

But aside from its quality as a work of fiction, I think the thing we can all learn from The H-Man is largely the same as what we can learn from Godzilla. Godzilla is a nuclear nightmare, the trauma of a generation writ large and exorcised on-screen. Godzilla is also, sometimes, a big friendly dinosaur with a goofy son. The H-Man took direct inspiration from the exact same circumstances that birthed Godzilla, and while it never transitioned into defanged commodification the way Godzilla did, it's also still a horror movie. It has green goo and a bunch of scantily clad ladies and some suave gangsters with cool guns and stuff. It's a movie that's been called silly and boring, it's a movie that's been ridiculed, it's a movie that's been badly dubbed and chucked onto drive-in theater screens alongside whatever trash theater owners assumed was in the same caliber as it.

So here's what we learn from The H-Man: A movie can be an exploration of trauma at the same time as it is a movie that's fun to watch and will hopefully put a little thrill into you.

Anyway, I hope that's everything you've ever wanted to know about The H-Man. 

You are a police inspector. An old friend has recently shown up on the doorstep of your precinct at exactly the wrong moment during what seemed like a routine narcotics case. Now he's making some truly outlandish claims and getting a bit too friendly with one of your persons of interest. You like the guy, but god, you're starting to wish he would leave you alone. After a while, though, he wears you down. You don't want to see logic in these things he keeps trying to thrust at you - irradiated life-preservers, insane stories from half-coherent sailors, melting frogs - but something about his own conviction begins to convince you. If he is right, though, you don't want to think about what it means for Tokyo - and for the rest of the world...

____

Sources: 

Brothers, Peter H. Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009.

Toho SF Special Effects Movie Series vol. 4. Toho Publishing Department, 1985.

Godzilla and Toho Special Effects Official Mook vol. 36. Kodansha, 2024.

www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/organic-glass

Silverman, Ron. Review of The H-Man, directed by Ishiro Honda. Variety, 3 June 1959, p. 6. 

Review of The H-Man, directed by Ishiro Honda. Motion Picture Exhibitor, 3 June 1959, p. 19.

Zero Pilot Gaiden: The German Dub

Guten tag!

As it happens, I did in fact acquire a German DVD of Zero Pilot as mentioned at the end of my post about it, and I’ve uploaded the entire German dub to Internet Archive here. This DVD was such a nightmare to get a hold of that I wanted to make it worth my while by turning it into a whole post, so let's find out more about the German release of this movie together.

(This German dub isn't particularly rare - it's available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV in Germany, but you can't watch those if you don't have a German account.)

As I've said, Zero Pilot's German release came startlingly quick on the heels of its Japanese premiere: while Japanese audiences first saw it on October 2nd of 1976, Germans got it just weeks later on October 26th, under the title Sturzflug in die Hölle (literally "Nosedive/Free Fall Into Hell"). Oddly enough I can't really find any information about this initial German run, because I haven't been able to turn up any German newspaper articles or other media relating to the film. I even ran through some old issues of Der Spiegel looking for mentions of it, which was... fun? I think? I don't really know what it was.

Very interestingly, I've also found evidence that Germany MIGHT have had the earliest home media release of the film in addition to the earliest theatrical run: an issue of Weltluftfahrt seems to indicate that the movie was available as of 1982 - one year earlier than its Dutch VHS release - from ITT Schaub-Lorenz in Pforzheim. I'm not amending this to my previous post about the film, because I'm not entirely sure if I'm interpreting my sources right - from everything I can find out about ITT Schaub-Lorenz, they manufactured radios and televisions and whatnot, and I don't see any indication that they distributed films. If they were selling Zero Pilot, though, they had an entirely different cut from any of the others featured on German home media, because the publication gives its length as 92 minutes, which, as we'll see, is much longer than the DVD releases.

You can see some of the original German lobby cards for the film here (scroll down a bit). Most of the lobby cards have pictures of airplanes or Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but our man did make it onto one, albeit from the back:

On right, in foreground. (Look, just trust me on this.)

In addition to its theatrical run in Germany itself, the film was also shown a few times in Liechtenstein, first in January and February of 1978 and then again in October of that year. During the latter run, the same publications that were advertising Zero Pilot were also advertising some weird movie I've never heard of called Star Wars. Too bad that one didn't make any lasting impression!

As far as I can tell, Zero Pilot was first released to DVD in 2008 under its Sturzflug in die Hölle title, followed by another DVD release in 2009 as Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf ("Skull-and-Crossbones Bomber Wing") and one as Samurai Kamikaze in 2015. It also seems to frequently be packaged with other war movies in cheap 3-film DVD sets, some of which have shoved it alongside Umberto Lenzi's The Biggest Battle, Giuseppe Vari's A Place in Hell, Bitto Albertini's The War Devils and a movie I can't find anything out about called Operation Barbarossa. While the DVD I have says "Samurai Kamikaze" on the cover, as you'll see, the title card in the actual video file reads "Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf".

Multiple different severely truncated versions of the movie have been featured on these various DVD releases, with the 2008 one being the worst, at 78 minutes, and our 2015 version only barely better at 82. This seems to be the version used by Amazon and Apple Video, since they both give a running time of 81 minutes. You can find a list of the German voice cast here.

White guys on the cover of your Japanese movie about a Japanese pilot in the Japanese army is certainly a choice.

Now, for the thing about all of this that is really funny to me: for whatever reason, the 2015 DVD release (this is the one I've gotten my hands on) associates the movie very strongly with Akihiko Hirata, despite - I will stress this again - his being in the movie for under three minutes. It's not even like his name is first in the cast alphabetically or anything.

Poland does this too, on possibly the ugliest poster ever featured on this blog:

At first I thought "Well, maybe he was popular in Germany?" but finding that Polish poster has made me lean more towards believing that the reasoning behind this is because people don't know what he looks like (or at least can't put a name to a face). Maybe, once one distributor slapped his name first in the cast for whatever reason, everybody else went "yeah, his name is first, that means he must be the guy who plays the dude" and just rolled with it.

Anyway, I've gotten off the rails and did not even really intend to make a full post about this in the first place, so I'll leave things there. It's unfortunate to see how this movie has been treated in Germany (packaged with random war movies and sold for incredibly cheap), because even though it's not a particularly memorable picture, Koichi Kawakita's work on it deserves more respect than it's getting. Hiroshi Fujioka wore that fake mustache for you, Western audience! You could at least appreciate the film!

カネボウヒューマンスペシャル: 小児病棟 / Kanebo Human Special: Shouni byouto / Kanebo Human Special: Pediatric Ward (1980)

Release date: December 3rd, 1980

Director: Shintaro Sobue

Studio: NTV

Cast: Kaori Momoi, Ryuuzou Hayashi, Etsuko Ichihara, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Tanie Kitabayashi, Midori Kiuchi, Eri Ishida, Shiro Kishibe, Akihiko Hirata, Minori Terada, Senri Sakurai et al.

Availability: VHS release, no official streaming; available on archive.org in full. (You will want to fix the aspect ratio in VLC.)

____

What we're looking at today is fairly rare: as I've mentioned many times, most of the work Hirata did towards the end of his career(/life, I guess) was in television, but very, very little of it is preserved. Fortunately, though, due to both its individual popularity and its place in a long-running series which was also popular, Kanebo Human Special: Pediatric Ward stuck around.

(Do note that this is entirely unrelated to the other "pediatric ward" movie Hirata was in, which is the 1983 Monday Wide Theater original Tearful Pediatric Ward. It's not surprising that he'd be in two of these, considering he got cast as a doctor all the time.)

Kaori Momoi plays Hatsuko Yamazaki, a nurse who, along with her friend Reiko Ogawa (Midori Kiuchi) is transferred into a pediatric ward. Yamazaki's troubles are initially limited to dealing with unruly children, but while she's still new at the job, she's taken to a private room and shown a baby boy who was born without hands, feet, or the use of his eyes, ears, and speech. At first, she's disturbed by the boy (who the hospital nicknames "Taro"; the go-to generic male name in Japan), even describing him as a "lump of flesh", but she quickly develops a deep affection for him. While everyone else at the hospital considers him barely human and certainly beyond help, Yamazaki cares for Taro, advocates for him, and treats him like a person.

Now, of course, if this were real life, every single person working at this hospital would be in massive trouble. Taro's parents end up in the picture midway through, and when his mother demands to see her son (whose real name is Junichiro), hospital staff shows her a random baby who supposedly is too fragile to leave his glass-walled room, and then eventually tells her the baby died. Yamazaki also takes Taro on a little excursion outside the hospital at one point, during which she discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her, which is the only part of the movie that felt really ridiculous.

But, in my opinion, any good daytime TV drama about a pediatric ward should have you yelling "No, girl! Don't steal that baby!" at the screen at least once.

I was honestly so captivated by this fake soundstage park at dusk.

What surprised me most about this movie is that it is actually good. I was expecting it to be your standard sappy daytime drama, but Momoi elevates the whole thing beyond what it might otherwise have been. Her rapport with "Taro", played alternately by a big blanket (for shots when Yamazaki is carrying him) and a deeply disturbing anatomically-correct dummy, is highly believable. And it's not just me saying this is a good one: Pediatric Ward had the highest viewership rating for a drama special in the Kanto region in 1980.

(A word about that dummy: according to Yomiuri Shimbun, staff became so attached to it that at the conclusion of filming, the dummy was ritually purified and then given a funeral. As we'll see, Yomiuri Shimbun had a vested interest in Pediatric Ward, so you can decide whether or not to trust them yourself, but I don't see why someone would make that up.)

Unfortunately Akihiko Hirata's role in Pediatric Ward amounts to basically a cameo; a single brief scene where he plays a surgeon named Dr. Tanigaki. His is not the only cameo, either - Senri Sakurai of the band Crazy Cats (who I have featured quite frequently here) also has a very brief appearance as a guy who's trying to jump off the hospital roof. Some other notables with slightly larger roles are Minori Terada as Taro/Junichiro's dad and Shiro Kishibe as a technician. Etsuko Ichihara, a favorite actress of mine, also has a role as a nurse, but it's not her best work and honestly I didn't even recognize her at first.

Not how you're supposed to wear that, but okay.

Pediatric Ward was the very first installment of the Kanebo Human Special series of TV movies, which ran for 20 years and was solely comprised of adaptations of works that had won Yomiuri Shimbun's "Women's Human Documentary Award". The lone sponsor of this series (and supporter of the award itself) was Kanebo Corporation, a huge-ass company who got its start in the 1880s producing textiles and eventually reached its tentacles into other industries such as cosmetics, food, and everyday goods. Kanebo Human Special was only one of many programs sponsored or co-sponsored by the corporation.

Yomiuri Shimbun and Kanebo's intent with their documentary award - the winners of which were the source material for each production in the Kanebo Human Special series - was specifically to highlight the role of women in society and in building the future. In fact, only women applicants were allowed. This focus on women is very noticeable in Pediatric Ward, which has essentially no important male characters, aside from Yamazaki's useless boyfriend and a doctor with main character energy. 

The original work that the TV movie was adapted from was published in Yomiuri Shimbun in May of 1980 as a serial novel, and then collated in book form in October. Considering our movie came out in December, that's a pretty quick turnaround from serial novel to book to movie. The TV adaptation changes the ending: in the original, Taro dies. The main character's name is changed as well. Not having read the book, I can't say whether there were more changes than those.

Egawa based some of the patients who appear in her novel on real people, but notably, she actually visited them to obtain their consent before writing about them. (It's unfortunate that this is notable, but many writers wouldn't even bother.) Egawa was also a regular participant in strikes meant to draw attention to the problem of nursing shortages, but was conflicted about these strikes due to feeling that they amounted to abandoning patients in need. This was what led her to write Pediatric Ward and participate in Yomiuri Shimbun's contest: an effort to find other ways of publicizing issues within nursing that didn't require leaving her patients.

Book version of Pediatric Ward featuring Kaori Momoi.

After hearing that the entirety of the Kanebo Human Special series was sponsored by a large corporation, one may assume that their intent was purely profit-driven, which may have been the case later, but from what I can gather it sounds like the production of Pediatric Ward was a matter of personal investment over profits. Several people who worked on getting the novel onto television screens were concerned that its subject matter would be too off-putting, but the Kanebo director whose idea it was to adapt the work told his production team to basically just do the thing without considering ratings (absolutely anathema for TV networks in Japan; see Yoshiki Onoda getting salty about it). 

The script for the TV adaptation was written by Akira Hayazaki (real name Yoshisuke Tomita), a prolific screenwriter who was apparently very good friends with Tora-san's Kiyoshi Atsumi. Hayasaka himself has been depicted in docudramas twice, played by Ken Ishiguro and Kei Yamamoto. As for the movie's director, Shintaro Sobue, I can say basically nothing; he seems to have worked in television for at least thirty years (between 1968 and 1998) but no biographical information about him has come to light in my research. Sobue may also have directed Hirata in Downtown Story, but Downtown Story is unfortunately one of a few series where I've been unable to determine how often or when Hirata appeared in them, so it's possible they never crossed paths.

The score - which is, to be honest, weird as hell; I was getting Vangelis vibes - was done by Jun Fukamachi, a fairly well-known synth/jazz composer who collaborated with Casiopea. There doesn't seem to have been any separate release of his score, which is too bad; it's great.

Pediatric Ward was released to VHS in 1987 (also sponsored by Kanebo); this remains its only home media release and tapes seem to be very expensive from the few I've seen up for sale or auction. I'm not sure about re-broadcasts - I found one source that seemed to suggest networks didn't want to re-air this due to its subject matter, but that source was most likely only speculating.

Normally here is where I'd say "That's about all I can give you for this one" and end the post, but I've actually got an issue of Kinema Junpo on order that contains a review of Pediatric Ward. I will have to add that in after this post has already been published because it's not in my hands yet (you know how it is with Neokyo), so watch this space if that sounds vaguely interesting to you.

(And, yes, this is going in my Crazy Cats tag.)

花の中の娘たち / Hana no naka no musumetachi / Girls in the Orchard [1953]

Release date: September 15th, 1953

Director: Kajiro Yamamoto

Studio: Toho

Cast: Mariko Okada, Yoko Sugi, Keiju Kobayashi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Eijiro Tono, Fumiko Honma, Sachio Sakai, Shoichi Hirose, Akihiko Hirata, Mitsue Tachibana, Kazuko Ran et al.

Availability: No physical media release. Streaming in HD on JP Amazon. Available in full on Internet Archive with English subtitles.

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The first thing to know about Girls in the Orchard is that it was Toho's first full-color film. It's always been surprising to me how obscure it is, considering that - Toho hasn't even put it out on DVD (yet), although it is available on Amazon. It's also somewhat surprising that I've neglected to write about it for so long, since it is a personal favorite of mine. Let's fix that, and wish this movie a happy 73rd birthday, which is today.

Fairly risqué poster (by 1953 standards, at least) for an incredibly tame movie.

It is necessary at this juncture to provide some background on the history of color film. The first really widely-used color film was of course Kodachrome, introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935 and, relevant to our current discussion, available in Japan starting in 1936. Around the same time, in the mid-1930s, Japan had a pretty good thing going with chemical development domestically as well: Fujifilm, now a worldwide conglomeration, was founded in January of 1934 as a spinoff of Dainippon Celluloid.

Japan's first domestically-produced color reversal film was not, however, a Fujifilm product. In 1941, the company Rokuosha began manufacturing their Sakura Natural Color Film, sold by the company that would later become Konica. Rokuosha's film used the same development method as Kodachrome - which Rokuosha had spent five years researching - but to avoid patent issues, they chose to use a development method where color development was controlled by exposure instead of by chemicals. Ironically, Kodachrome would itself switch to this method later.

Obviously some stuff was happening in the 1940s, so Rokuosha was forced to suspend film production until 1948, but by that time Fujifilm had also gotten their game on, releasing Fujicolor Reversal Film (sometimes just called "Fuji Color Film") in 1948. This is what Girls in the Orchard was shot on. Fujicolor's descendant, the Fujichrome line, was launched in 1972 and still continues down to this day. The most recent product, Fujichrome Provia, is quite expensive on eBay and, from what I've heard, lauded by film enthusiasts.

To discuss the first color motion picture ever made in Japan, we have to dial back all the way to 1937, when Dai Nippon Natural Color Film produced Thousand Stitches (Senninbari) using foreign-made stock. Long considered lost, Thousand Stitches was rediscovered in 2003 during a reorganization of the Russian State Film Archive and restored by IMAGICA Ltd. Japan's first effort at producing a color film on domestically-made stock would unfortunately not be so lucky: 1945's Song of Spring (Haru no uta), produced using Fujicolor while still in its prototype stage, was destroyed in an air raid just before completion. Daiei would make another attempt in 1947 with Cabaret Flower Basket (Kiyabare no hanakago), but for unknown reasons this film was shelved and never screened.

Since previous efforts were pretty fragmentary and largely do not survive, Shochiku's 1951 film Carmen Comes Home (Karumen Kokyo ni kaeru) is generally considered Japan's first domestically-produced color film, also shot with Fujicolor. Ironically, both Carmen Comes Home and Girls in the Orchard share similar thematic elements, but treat them much differently: while Carmen involves a girl from the city embarrassing her rural family with her newfangled ways, Girls depicts a girl living in the country who desperately wants to move to the city. Following Carmen, Shochiku released their second color film in January of 1953: Natsuko's Adventure (Natsuko no bouken), an adaptation of a Yukio Mishima novel. This all leads us to Girls in the Orchard.

Issue 68 of Kinema Junpo, published in late July, featured some very rare behind-the-scenes pictures from Girls in the Orchard in its gravure section. (No, not that kind of gravure.) I own this issue, and decided to scan it, even though sticking a tattered 76-year-old magazine in my flatbed scanner gave me the agita, so here's the full 2-page spread:

The accompanying text goes over everything I've already discussed about color film and provides a short synopsis, which is available elsewhere, so it's not really worth quoting. We'll move on.

In the early days of color film (and even more so with black-and-white film), actors had to wear makeup tinted in very specific, unrealistic colors in order for their faces to photograph well. The Wikipedia page for Carmen Comes Home notes that Shochiku staff were actively learning during production what colors did and didn't come out good, and that the actors were not used to the kind of makeup they had to wear for this production. One can assume this was the same for Girls in the Orchard, since both were shot using Fujicolor. You can read more about makeup for early film here, although (as with many things...) it seems to have been written with only white people in mind.

As you can see, both the makeup and the sets used in the film were clearly designed to showcase what Fujicolor could do, similar to the way 3D movies often feature conspicuous scenes of stuff being thrust at the camera:

Makeup for the actors was not the only problem with color film that Toho's staff had to deal with: lighting was also an issue, since the film stock required the set to be much brighter than otherwise, and lighting technician Toshio Takashima recalls passing out on set due to the heat. Lead actress Mariko Okada also later said that there were so many reflective foil panels required to light close-up shots that it was almost blinding. All in all, despite this movie being such a milestone, Toho (and perhaps the industry as a whole) seems to have regarded color film technology as not quite ready for use at scale yet.

An interesting side note about this movie is that Toho's sponsor for it, Lion Corporation, who makes hygiene products, is still very much in business and you can buy their stuff. You will notice their Green Lion toothpaste pop up here and there throughout the movie.

This was, rather obviously, Akihiko Hirata's first role in a color film, but it's also one of his first roles in general, being the 4th of 5 films he appeared in during his first year of professional acting in 1953. He plays Kitakoji, a student (another side note: in 4 out of those 5 movies, he plays a student) from a Tokyo music school who comes to stay at the orchard run by the family of Mariko Okada's character, Momoko. Momoko seems to alternately have a really bad crush on Kitakoji and hate him a little, since he represents everything about refined, high-class Tokyo living that she wishes she had.

I like this role, even though Kitakoji doesn't do much aside from driving around a tiny car full of junk and playing the flute. It's a nice role for Hirata specifically, too, considering that he was very musically inclined in real life and did play one or two instruments (although I've never heard anything to indicate the flute was one of them).

He is so 25 years old in this.

Speaking of music, the soundtrack for this film was composed by Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, a Vietnam-born French violinist and composer who happened to be visiting Japan in 1952-53. Gallois-Montbrun doesn't seem to have done soundtracks for any other Japanese film, so I have no idea how Toho managed to snag him for this one. I'm not sure if the film's cast would have had any knowledge of the soundtrack ahead of time, but I can guarantee that Hirata would've been super into Gallois-Montbrun doing music for this film if he'd known about it, since he was himself a classical music nerd.

As one might be able to guess just from considering the age of the movie and the rapid growth of the Tokyo metropolitan area, the rural pear farm that Girls in the Orchard takes place in and around is no longer so rural today. While I haven't been able to find an exact filming location, the movie is set (and, I believe, filmed) around the Tama River, which separates Tokyo from Kanagawa. That the Ishii family grows pears is not just random: there are so many different cultivars of pears grown around the Tama River region that there is a Wikipedia page for "Tamagawa Pear".

You can also read (with a translator extension) a lovely blog post here from someone who went to visit the area where Girls in the Orchard was filmed. What is unfortunate, though, is that the author notes that the protection of the land and its pear orchards for agricultural purposes will end "in a few years", and since that post was written in 2019, I'm not sure if the orchards are still there today or have been built over.

Hiroshige Utagawa's "Autumn Moon over Tamagawa".

Now we can move on to looking at how this film was received, both within Japan and without. Kinema Junpo, Japan's oldest and most influential film magazine, featured Girls in the Orchard in five separate issues in 1953. Undoubtedly Girls was also covered in other film publications, but Kinema Junpo is both the most prominent and the only one I'm aware of that maintains a database. Unfortunately, I only own four of those five issues, but the first mention of Girls was only an introduction, which probably just meant a synopsis and a list of the cast & crew.

I usually wear gloves when handling my old books and magazines to protect them, but with issue 79, the gloves are for my own protection. I don't know what that is on the cover but it's yucky.

We've already looked at issue 68 above, so we'll stick to what was published in issues 73, 76, and 79. Issue 73, from September, doesn't really have anything interesting for us - it's mostly just a lengthy synopsis - but it does provide us our only published mention of Akihiko Hirata and his character. Since nothing else about the introduction is original, I'll only quote that part (hey, at least I'm open about my biases):

[...]Momoko herself harbors feelings for Kitakoji (Akihiko Hirata), a music student boarding at the Ishii home. He stirs romantic feelings in Momoko by playing the flute for her, but his words and actions eventually reveal that he is an outsider - someone who does not truly belong in this rural setting. He appears somewhat frivolous, so the audience grasps the author's perspective on him from the start. Ultimately, the scenes capturing the pastoral rapport between Momoko and Katsuzo are more successful than the interactions between Momoko and the music student.

 Let's look now at Kinema Junpo's review of the film from issue 76, published in October and written by one Heiichi Sugimoto. I will quote it here in full.

This is the third color film, and like the previous two, it is a cheerful, amusing work. Interpreting color as something bright and liberating, and selecting subject matter that reflects this, demonstrates a rather elementary approach to color, though it is also a safe choice. Yet, the very fact that color is used consciously here - and this film is particularly deliberate in that regard - is significant.

At a basic level, it seems easiest to view color as representing mundane everyday life. As lipstick symbolized the secular world in contrast to the heaven of Stairway to Heaven or the convent in Black Narcissus, and as the city’s colors were contrasted with the countryside in Carmen Comes Home, this film also juxtaposes the city and the countryside. However, just as the contrast between the city and the mountains of Hokkaido was blurred in Natsuko’s Adventure, there is no real color-based contrast here either. This is because, when Japanese people perceive color as "beautiful," they unconsciously link it to "scenery," leading them to choose locations like Mount Asama or the wilds of Hokkaido.

In this respect, however, this film goes a step further: it consciously attempts to isolate color from the rural landscape itself, rather than simply presenting the landscape as a colorful backdrop. The emphasis is placed on the colors of the countryside, rather than contrasting the countryside with a garish, "mundane" city. The successful use of color in these rural landscapes is likely due to the nature of Fujicolor; its somewhat muted rendering of color is perfectly suited to the soft, understated hues of Japanese scenery. One might even speculate that if our daily lives were captured using the flashy Technicolor of American films, the reality of our lives would fail to sustain such a palette, resulting instead in an unnatural appearance.

In this setting, garish elements like neon lights appear dull, while soft hues, such as those of rapeseed blossoms, cherry blossoms, and magnolias, look truly beautiful. Observing the specific color palette chosen for this film makes one wonder if our own lives are naturally lacking in artificial colors. One particularly interesting moment occurs when a young man from the city arrives and someone hurriedly hides a red loincloth hanging on a clothesline - I felt this revealed Director Yamamoto’s wit regarding the colors of our daily lives.

While seeing elements like carp streamers, a bride’s tsunokakushi headpiece, or the red-and-white curtains and scarlet felt rugs of a cherry-blossom viewing party in the film evokes a sense of familiar warmth, they are not necessarily remarkable in themselves. Yet, such attention to color schemes delights the viewer.

The human characters are essentially manipulated to showcase these visuals; the motivation for the woman who had moved to the city to return to the country youth is unnatural, and the story itself is mediocre at best. The film’s only spark of vitality comes from the spirited, comic-style performances of Mariko Okada, Keiju Kobayashi, and Eijiro Tono.

Can you imagine calling something "the third color film"? Not "the third color film directed by so-and-so", but the third color film made in your country ever?

The next and last mention of the film, from issue 79, released in December, is rather fleeting; it's described somewhat unfavorably in a conversation between four people named Daikuro, Ueno, Togawa and Shigeno. I'm not sure who these people are, but I thank them for their opinions.

Togawa: About Girls in the Orchard...

Shigeno: That was Toho's first color film, after all.

Daikuro: Is there anything else by Kajiro Yamamoto?

Ueno: Moth Lamp (Yuugato) and Girls in the Orchard... well, the color stands out first and foremost.

Shigeno: I was disappointed by the color. One would expect significant progress to have been made in the six months since Natsuko's Adventure. Yet, while there were areas where progress was evident, there were others where it was lacking, so, all things considered, it amounts to saying there was no progress at all.

Daikuro: There was a great deal of progress between Carmen Comes Home and Natsuko's Adventure.

Shigeno: Being able to shoot on sets might count as progress, but the tone shouldn't vary from shot to shot. I believe harmonizing the overall tone is the crucial thing.

Moving on to overseas reception, the film was known in America as early as 1954, when it was mentioned alongside other early color films from Japan in Japan Information, an official publication of the Japanese Embassy's Information Section. As far as U.S. screenings go, I don't believe there were any.

This film did, however, screen alongside several other early Japanese color pictures as part of Italy's 29th Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in 2015, using a print sourced from the National Film Archive of Japan. During this festival it was screened with English subtitles; these are, I believe, the subtitles that accompany my Internet Archive upload, but I'm not sure where the subtitles themselves originate from. Galbraith indicates in his Toho Studios Story that Toho themselves produced an English-subtitled version, but I would say the subtitles from the film festival do not read like they date to the 1950s.

Screenings within Japan are not really anything to write home about. There have been a few over the past decade or so, including one conducted by the National Film Archive of Japan in 2022, and a couple of television broadcasts as well, but like I said at the beginning, I don't feel like this film has gotten the attention it deserves as Toho's first full-color work. It's great that it's on Amazon, but I do wish Toho would put it out on DVD or Blu-Ray.

We'll end our discussion of this unfairly overlooked movie here, and I'll entreat you once again to go check it out for yourself via the Internet Archive link at the top of the post. The subtitles are quite good and now include translated opening credits as well.

Promo still cribbed from a closed auction - unfortunately just a promo, the movie doesn't include any scene like this.