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.

____

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.

"Zero Pilot" Goes West

Today we're going to take a look at this somewhat odd VHS release of Toho's 1976 Zero Pilot, originally titled Ozora no Samurai ("Samurai of the Sky"). The reason why I say that this is odd is because the English-dubbed tape pictured above is the only physical release of this movie in the United States. You can get a Japanese DVD for relatively cheap, but if you don't speak any Japanese and want to watch it, your only option is to endure the dub.

So the main thing to know about this movie is that it's based off of the life of former flying ace Saburo Sakai. That this film was (at least at one time) readily available to an English-speaking audience is somewhat apropos, considering that Sakai's life and wartime activities were brought to such an audience in 1957 via Samurai!, an autobiography ghostwritten by Martin Caidin. The reliability of Samurai! has been called into question, and Sakai himself states that the 64 kills Caidin ascribes to him in the book - a number also given on the back of the VHS box - is not an accurate reflection of his actual record. I should emphasize, however, that Zero Pilot isn't based on any specific work by Sakai, but rather a kind of general overview of his life. 

Although we're mostly looking at the overseas release of this movie and not its production history, I would be remiss not to mention that the film was financed by Taikan Productions. Taikan was ostensibly a production company, but really it was a religious organization formed as an offshoot of Tenka Ikka no Kai ("One Family Under Heaven"), a company founded by a dude named Kenichi Uchimura that was absolutely, 100% a pyramid scheme. This kind of thing was getting to be such an issue in Japan in the late 1970s that new laws against pyramid schemes were enacted, resulting in the dissolution of Tenka Ikka no Kai and the jailing of its founder for three years.

Moving swiftly on... despite its incredibly shady financing, the people who worked on the actual movie did their absolute best, and the result is definitely up to Toho's reputation for remarkable special effects. Godzilla fans will recognize the name of Zero Fighter's SFX director, Koichi Kawakita, for whom this was his first time in a directorial role. Toho was really going through it in the 1970s, but even so, no footage or miniatures were reused, and Kawakita's attention to detail is what saves this from being a totally forgettable film. It's also kind of fun to see old Toho regulars like Ren Yamamoto and Yoshio Katsube still sticking it out even while the studio was faltering.

One area where Zero Pilot is unfortunately pretty forgettable, though, is within Akihiko Hirata's filmography. This is one of his "show up, look authoritative, explain some stuff, and then leave" roles, and his cumulative screen time amounts to around three minutes (I did count). His English dubber's vocal style is best described as "drunk and belligerent". The only really notable thing about this role is that it's the only time Hirata and Hiroshi Fujioka - best known by far as Takeshi Hongo AKA Kamen Rider Ichigo - ever crossed paths.

Hirata and Fujioka do share the screen directly in several scenes, which I find more amusing than I probably should. Here is an annotated screenshot that you can use to annoy your friends who don't watch tokusatsu.

Moving even more swiftly on, let me now begin talking about what I actually made this post to talk about: the tape.

So I guess the most pressing issue on my mind here is who exactly is responsible for that dub. Well, ultimately, the answer to that is Toho themselves, considering they exported an English-dubbed version of it in 1984 (trailer here). But in terms of who actually executed the dub, that would be the Matthew Oram/Barry Haigh group, a Hong Kong-based outfit who should be very familiar to Godzilla and Shaw Brothers fans. Among many other roles, Matthew Oram himself dubbed Dr. Mafune in the English version of Terror of Mechagodzilla. In Zero Pilot Oram dubs Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but for whatever reason the export trailers feature Barry Haigh voicing Sakai instead.

What is very, very strange about this English dub is that it actually features alternate footage. Two entirely separate versions of the film's bookending scenes were shot, with the export version featuring Hiroshi Fujioka sporting a mustache and the Japanese cut having him 'stacheless. This kind of sounds like something I just made up, but you can see it for yourself here.

(...did that say "OBAN International Finance Group"?)

Although the dub itself was commissioned and produced closer to the film's 1976 release, it didn't make its way onto VHS until ten years later, in 1986. (Zero Pilot itself was first released to home media in 1983 with subtitles for the Dutch market.) The Combat Video VHS is what the kids refer to as a "big chungus" (Godzilla, King of the Monsters! for scale):

The 1986 Combat Video VHS release was not, however, the first time the dub was heard on American shores. The film ran throughout March of 1984 and into April at Los Angeles' Kokusai/Crenshaw theater. During this theatrical run it was shown on a double-bill with Nomugi Pass, which also features Hirata in a very small and somewhat silly role (all his character really does is get grossed out by how badly silk-spinning mills smell). I don't technically know for certain that Zero Pilot was shown dubbed, but considering Toho were responsible for exporting it and they'd already had a dubbed version sitting around since the '70s, it seems pretty likely to me that they would have given the dub to American distributors.

Most everything I've talked about so far is not terribly obscure information, but Combat Video itself is a bit harder to get a bead on. "Combat Video" is in fact not the name of a specific label, but an offshoot/series/arm/??? of a larger outfit called Video City Productions, an Oakland-based distributor active throughout the 1980s (specific dates elude me). Video City was no stranger to Japanese war films, also releasing Toei's Port Arthur (featuring our man as well) and The Imperial Japanese Empire in 1985. Other illustrious titles distributed by the company include Crazy Fat Ethel 2, SS Hell Camp, White Cannibal Queen and The Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

You know... I'm kind of just... starting to wonder if this tape might not actually have been officially licensed by Toho.

What in the who?

In the interest of brevity, and because I originally intended to restrict the scope of this post to just the Combat Video VHS, I'm not going to go over the film's release in other countries, but it actually did make it quite far. Just to give a quick summary: West Germany was the first to receive Zero Pilot a remarkable matter of weeks after its Japanese release, followed by Sweden and Finland the next year, Denmark in 1978, Portugal in 1979, Spain in 1980 and finally Hungary in 1991. I think it's fairly safe to say that despite being a Japanese product, this movie was at least in some way intended to be palatable to an international audience. We can tell that Toho was considering how it would be received overseas by the fact that they catered Hiroshi Fujioka's facial hair to their intended viewers' perceived taste.

On that note, I'll leave you, but before I do, let's just take a nice long look at the German DVD release of Zero Pilot, which for some unknown reason decided to give Akihiko Hirata top billing despite, as mentioned, only having three minutes of screen time.

I won't disclose whether or not I searched this up on eBay and bought a copy.

兄とその妹 / Ani to sono imoto / A Brother and His Sister [1956]

Release date: September 19th, 1956

Director: Shue Matsubayashi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Ryo Ikebe, Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Keiju Kobayashi, Eijiro Yanagi, Akihiko Hirata, Daisuke Kato et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Infrequent theater screenings; most recently in 2015.

____

Recently we had a look at Summer in Eclipse, so now let’s see about the film it played on a double-bill with (in some theaters, at least). With its all-star cast - Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa and Ryo Ikebe all playing off each other, whew - it’s surprising that there’s so little coverage of this movie out there. Unfortunately that means the amount of information I can give you about this one will be pretty limited, but let's see what's up anyway.

A Theater SS News pamphlet showing A Brother and His Sister playing alongside Summer in Eclipse.

Our director, Shue Matsubayashi, does not need much of an introduction; he was a bit of a Toho workhorse, producing some big hits for them such as The Last War, Storm over the Pacific, and The Imperial Navy. For a long time I made the mistake of associating Matsubayashi specifically with war dramas, since those are his most well-known films, but he did also make light comedies and romances as well: he directed quite a few entries in Toho's Shachō [President] series, and some one-offs with goofy titles such as Oddball Nippon and Dimple of Tokyo. A Brother and His Sister was the first film Matsubayashi directed under his contract with Toho.

A Brother and His Sister is a remake of Yasujiro Shimazu's 1939 film for Shochiku of the same name, which is usually referred to in English under the slightly different title A Brother and His Younger Sister. This film is, from what I've seen, generally regarded as a classic within the wider canon of Japanese cinema; see this for better context than I could give it. Since the earlier film is readily available, I've watched it in the process of writing this post. Obviously this was very useful for familiarizing me with the plot of the earlier film, but because I don't have the later film to compare it to, I can't say how similar or different they are.

I will say that the earlier film is so much a product of 1939 and is so modern for its time in ways that would not have had the same impact as they would in 1956 - men and women talk about issues of marriage and gender roles freely, and the lead character, Mamiya (Shin Saburi in the original), is utterly respectful of his younger sister Fumiko (Michiko Kuwano) and her ability to make her own decisions and live an independent life - that, unless the entire purpose of the remake was to examine the way gender roles and society had changed in the 17 years since the original's release, I'm not really sure what the point of remaking it was. The original film also ends on a fairly imperialist note, with the protagonist being hired on at a firm that is in the process of expanding into Manchuria and further into mainland Asia; this was, as I understand, removed in the remake.

(The original also has a funky organ soundtrack that I doubt the remake could replicate.)

Tsukasa, Ikebe and Hara.

Ikebe may be the star of this movie, but we are not, sorry to say, a Ryo Ikebe fanblog. Akihiko Hirata plays Michio, the role that Ken Uehara filled in the 1939 film, and having watched the original I can say that Michio is an inveterate flirt, or at least as much of an inveterate flirt as one could be on film in 1939. I had no trouble whatsoever imagining Hirata in this role. Ostensibly, Michio also speaks English; in the 1939 film this is only referenced in conversation as an important plot point (Fumiko speaks English as part of her job as a typist, and overhears Michio talking about her in English when he thinks she can't understand him, which leads to an essentially one-sided romance and a marriage proposal) and not shown on screen. Having not seen the remake, I'm not sure if it's still the case that characters are established as speaking English without us actually hearing them speak English.

Regardless, I see a lot of people assume that Hirata could not speak English or had to learn his lines phonetically due to his heavily-accented English performance in Latitude Zero, but personally I think there are way too many movies where he speaks English and sounds fine for him to have been doing all of that phonetically. He actually does seem to confirm that he knew some English - but perhaps didn’t have a very high opinion of his skills - in an interview where he's asked if he's seen the American version of Godzilla '54 and he answers "Yes, I was surprised at how good my English was."

Getting down off my soapbox, I have to admit that signs do point towards no one in the remake speaking English either, as no reviews I've found mention Hirata's English performance in this film. I also haven't been able to drag up any pictures of him as Michio, despite it sounding like he has a fairly prominent role.

Laputa Asagaya - Showa film nerd holy land - played the film thrice: once in 2003 as part of a Yoko Tsukasa film festival, once in 2007 as part of a Shue Matsubayashi film festival, and once in 2015 as part of a Setsuko Hara film festival. (Where is the Akihiko Hirata film festival?) It also played at the Shin Bungeiza in 2015 alongside A Good-Natured Couple, another 1956 Toho film starring Ikebe.

It's too bad that this one hasn't had more attention given it, because Matsubayashi is a very good director and I would think it would be interesting from a film-historical standpoint to look at a post-war remake of an esteemed pre-war film. For some reason, English-language sources seem to have decided that the 1956 film is called "Ani to sono musume" instead of "Ani to sono imoto", which is... not correct... like, at all... but that is the title it is listed under on IMDb as well as what turns up the most results in a Google search. It doesn't seem to have ever had an English-subtitled release anywhere outside of Japan, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had a small run in Hawai'i in the 1950s; it seems like the kind of thing that might have been shown over there.

Well, now you and I know about it, at least.

丼池 / Dobuike [1963 & 1968]

drawing by Kisaku Ito for the 1963 set plans

Background

Today we're going to look at three separate performances (and one film adaptation) of the same play. As I mention nearly every time I write about a stage play, it's difficult to research plays because there's usually not a wealth of visual evidence for them, and my area of interest is, of course, confined to a time before everybody had a camera in their pocket. But I'm pleasantly surprised that I was able to find a decent amount of information and images this time, so this post will run a bit longer than my other stage play posts.

What does "Dobuike" mean? I'll copy/paste Kotobank's definition, because it is as clear and concise as you're going to get: "A pond located in Minamisenba, Chuo Ward, Osaka City. It was filled in 1874. Before World War II, furniture wholesalers and textile wholesalers were crowded along Dobuike-suji, which faced the pond. Formerly known as Ashiike". 

The plays we're looking at today were written specifically for the stage; they are not adaptations of older literary works or traditional theater. The author/director of Dobuike was Kazuo Kikuta, who is so prolific and esteemed within his home country that to give a brief overview of his career in English feels almost insulting. Kikuta began as a playwright in the mid-1920s, working closely with Roppa Furukawa and his troupe, and then joined Toho in 1936. He left Roppa's troupe due to creative differences in 1943 and eventually became one of Toho's foremost stage directors in the 1950s. Kikuta was an enormously significant figure in the world of post-war Japanese stage musicals, and among many other achievements, he acquired the rights to My Fair Lady and became the first Japanese person to stage a Broadway musical. Many of his works focused on Osaka, including Dobuike.

I would encourage you to research Kikuta yourself if this sounds interesting to you - his career is far more expansive than I can cover here. Somehow, despite his domestic fame, he doesn't have an English Wikipedia page, but maybe some of you read French?

The Play (and the Movie)

The play is set in a back alley off of Dobuike-suji, where textile wholesalers do business. Masa Kanazawa, a woman with ten years of experience as a shop clerk who's just been cheated out of her life's savings, seeks a loan from Katsumi Muroi, the president of Muroi Trading, so that she might start fresh at a co-op trading center. To this end she meets with Sadahiko Kanemitsu, head clerk of the Sonoda firm. Katsumi is not in the business of giving out loans freely, and insists on carefully investigating the circumstances of her borrowers beforehand. To quote the synopsis from the booklet accompanying the Umeda Koma Stadium performance: "When we lend, we look like the Salvation Army; when the payment comes due, we look like vampires".

Chūhei Sonoda, president of the Sonoda firm, approaches Katsumi to arrange for a loan to a business in Minami-Kyūhōji. Initially Katsumi refuses, but then "Old Lady Matsuko", the firm's primary financier, steps in and asks Katsumi personally to provide the loan. This is not out of kindness, however; to quote the synopsis again, Matsuko says "You don’t necessarily have to drive them into bankruptcy; just strip them of their rights, transfer the business to someone else, and pocket the difference."

Then, a woman named Umeko Murata appears, asking for a financial consultation with Matsuko. Matsuko refuses, able to see through Umeko and recognize that she herself intends to bleed the local merchants dry, but Umeko forces the matter. Umeko is denied a loan from Katsumi, and through desperation, she winds up exploiting the weakness of Masunaga, a section chief at Iiyama Manufacturing, for women.

Katsumi, meanwhile, seeks to get out from under Matsuko's auspices by any means necessary. Finally, she comes up with an idea: Muroi Trading is to begin offering "Treasure Investment" certificates in the form of promissory notes, a scheme wherein the firm takes their customers' money and invests it in high-yield ventures that promise good returns. This would otherwise be illegal if it were not set up in the form of a "loan relationship": the customer gives money and receives a promissory note in return. The Treasure Investment concept proves enormously lucrative. Katsumi is able to break free of Matsuko, and even leaves her fiancé to focus solely on moneylending.

Although, to me, that sounds very serious and complicated, Kikuta ends his introduction in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet by wishing his audience "an enjoyable day filled with laughter", so it's possible the actual play is more light-hearted than the synopsis makes it out to be.

In September of 1963, Toho released a film adaptation of Dobuike, which was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, written by Giichi Fujimoto, and based off of Kikuta's original story. The main four actresses again reprised their roles, with a few new additions (notably Kenji Sahara). What's surprising to me about this movie is that, despite how detailed and colorful the sets appear to have been, the movie itself is in black-and-white.

Since we don't have any video from any of the plays, watching the movie would be our only chance to see Kikuta's original story performed with a live cast. Unfortunately, the movie is as obscure as the plays: it's been broadcast on television a few times, but never released to streaming or physical home media.

As for the main cast, it's a bit difficult to break it all down thanks to Dobuike having been staged so many times, but here's my best shot:

• Mitsuko Mori plays Masa Kanazawa in both 1963 plays and the 1963 film; Yuko Hamaki plays Masa in the 1968 Imperial Theater performance.
• Isuzu Yamada plays Umeko Murata in all three plays; Michiyo Aratama plays Umeko in the film.
• Aiko Mimasu plays Matsuko Taira in every version.
• Yoko Tsukasa plays Katsumi Muroi in every version.
• Akihiko Hirata plays Sadahiko Kanemitsu in all three plays; Keiji Sada¹ plays Sadahiko in the film.
• Kenzo Tabu plays Chūhei Sonoda in the Umeda Koma Stadium performance, and Ganjiro Nakamura II plays Chūhei in the film; the casting for this role in the other two plays is unknown to me.

I gather that Dobuike is Women's Business™. In Kikuta's aforementioned introduction, he highlights the main four actresses first, and then just kind of says "oh yeah and I guess the guys are pretty good too". Hirata himself is not mentioned at all in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet aside from once, in a review, and it's a similar "and he is also there" statement. (Reviewers also were not shy about blatant spoilers, and as such I know that the story does not end well for Katsumi.)

Anyway, we'll move on now to the plays themselves. 

The Performances

1963 / Geijutsu-za [Arts Theater]

The first stage adaptation of Dobuike opened on New Year's Day, 1963, and ran into February; exact dates elude me. I'd imagine there's a booklet for this performance floating around somewhere, but I haven't seen any copies, if so.

The Geijutsu-za was a relatively small theater (to us, anyway) with a seating capacity of 750, located on the 4th floor of Toho's headquarters in Yurakucho, Chiyoda ward, Tokyo. It was directly managed by Toho - another thing foreign to us, since in America production companies cannot own theaters due to anti-trust laws. As of 1963 the theater was only 5 years old. Mitsuko Mori, one of the stars of Dobuike, appeared frequently in plays staged at the Geijutsu-za: she made her debut at the theater in 1958, and when it closed in 2005, she starred in its final performance.

The art director for this version of the play was Kisaku Ito, whose beautiful drawings for the set design you can see here. I really would recommend taking a look at them, they are absolutely gorgeous. Kikuta both wrote and directed this performance, which was staged by Toho. Ito died just five years after staging this play; his Wikipedia page doesn't note a cause, but he was only 67.

1963 / Umeda Koma Stadium

This second performance was staged at the Umeda Koma Stadium (now the Umeda Arts Theater) in Osaka, with involvement from Toho, and ran from June 1st to June 26th. I got my hands on a pamphlet for this performance and uploaded the entire thing to Internet Archive. As usual for my scans, they're not very good, but you should still be able to read the text, if that's what you desire.

Kazuo Kikuta again directed the play, and Kisaku Ito again handled the art direction, though we have no pictures of the set design apart from what's in the booklet. 

There actually are a lot of pictures of Hirata's character Sadahiko in this booklet, which I was not expecting. I'd been assuming his role was relatively minor, but he seems to have had a lot of scenes. Considering this, it's not surprising that Hirata didn't appear in the movie adaptation; after performing the same role twice a day (there was a matinee and evening show for this run) every day for a month, twice within one year, he was probably sick of it. (His friend Motohide Katayama recalls him mentioning that he preferred to act on film rather than the stage, because he found playing the same role over and over fairly boring.)

I will now direct your attention to his funky sweater:

1968 / Imperial Theater [Teikoku Gekijō]

We have some inside information about this run of the play courtesy of Makoto Kobayashi, a Toho stage actor who I have mentioned here before and who is still active online in his 90s. (In the above picture, Kobayashi is the guy standing around looking intimidating.)

I'm sorry, I just need to reiterate that. Makoto Kobayashi is blogging. He's 92 and he's blogging. He's a Showa-era Toho-contracted stage actor who is 92 years old and he is blogging about his career with perfect clarity. Toho fans, you all should be paying attention to this guy.

Anyway, this second run of the play ran from December 2nd to December 27th with largely the same cast. Kobayashi notes that during one performance one of the actors (Kinzo Takahashi) accidentally bumped into a piece of stage equipment during the show and made a hole in it, which made Isuzu Yamada and Aiko Mimasu laugh so hard that the play came to a stop for a few moments. Kobayashi also mentions that he fell asleep on stage while performing his role as a detective hiding out in some bushes. (He says that he did get scolded, but admits sleeping on stage feels really nice.) Kobayashi also has a pamphlet from this run of the play that I've never seen for sale or auction before.

Kazuo Kikuta was still credited for the original work, but for this run of the play Junji Tsumura directed.  I can't find much out about Tsumura; he may have been under Toho's employ, as the only other credits of his that I can dig up are other plays staged at Toho-owned venues, but I don't know anything for sure.

Conclusion

At some point I am going to have to figure out how to write a proper segue into an ending.

______

1 Toho casting department: "Okay, for our character Sadahiko we need somebody with either 'Sada' or 'Hiko' in his name, no exceptions."

火曜サスペンス劇場「受験地獄」/ Kayō sasupensu gekijo: Juken jikogu / Exam Hell [1982]

Release date: Aired on January 12th, 1982

Director: Masaharu Segawa

Studio: Produced by Kokusei Broadcasting and NTV

Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.

Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts.

____

It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.

Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo

Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, which first appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".

While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".

The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from, so don't take this as representative - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his belief that he'll never get into university.

If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).

Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.¹ (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)

Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor. These do seem to have been his actual prescription glasses; they're very distinctive and he wears them in basically everything around this time.

In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father² Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake Hirata's role is played by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.

(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sato in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui, which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)

Lot of graphic design choices going on here.

The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. That doesn't mean it's gone entirely unseen since its initial broadcast, though: I've been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, so there's likely been others as well. For a short time, presumably as a result of one of these recent broadcasts, the full movie was even on YouTube (unfortunately the page was not archived), which means someone out there probably has it as a DVD-r in their desk or a file on their computer.

You can also find an original song from the 1982 version called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so yours truly is probably going to do the thing at some point.

That's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky we have this much information about it - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time.

_____

1 That is, one of the only ones to HAVE a remake, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only others I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007. (You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)

2 Which is ironic considering that in real life he was Masahiko's brother.

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

Release date: July 13, 1956

Director: Kunio Watanabe

Studio: Toho

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

Availability: Available on DVD from Amazon JP and streaming on Prime Video (Japan-only).

____

[This is a revised and expanded version of a post that was originally published on April 1st, 2024.]

Today we're going to take a look at the third entry in Toho's long-running "Shachō" ("company president"; henceforth President) series, which is comprised of 33 films released across 14 years, plus 6 that are considered supplemental/tie-in works. The President series may not have garnered as much international recognition as Toho's tokusatsu films, but salaryman comedies like this and prolific, long-running series such as the Ekimae ("front of [train] station") series were the studio's bread and butter during the 1950s, although the concept began to fizzle out in the 1960s and finally collapsed in 1970s along with the studio system.

The President series starred Hisaya Morishige as the president of a company - a different company each time - and Keiju Kobayashi as his secretary, with Kobayashi playing straight-man to Morishige's goofy president. One thing I find interesting about the series is that the names of Morishige and Kobayashi's characters change between films. I'll be honest here and admit that this is the only entry in the series I have actually seen (many such cases), so I can't tell whether the actors play different characters in each separate film, or if they're the same people, just with new names. Norihei Miki, Daisuke Kato, Frankie Sakai, Asami Kuji and Yoko Tsukasa were also staples of the series.

Considering that there were well over 30 of these films made, it's somewhat surprising that Fighting President is the only time Hirata found his way into the President series, and even more surprising that his role in this movie amounts to basically a walk-on. He appears in two scenes, and that's if we're being very generous and counting two people looking at a photograph of his character ("chotto handsome, dessho?") as "a scene". George Luiker, an actor of Armenian and Estonian parentage, also guest stars in Fighting President for the first of what would be four appearances in the President series. Luiker of course later went on to star alongside Hirata in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

As I said, this is the third entry, so we're still pretty early into the series, and things are just now starting to take shape that would influence the rest of the films. For example, this is the first time Asami Kuji appeared as the president's wife, and it is also the only time Kunio Watanabe was in the director's chair; most - but not quite all - of the following films were directed by either Shue Matsubayashi, Toshio Sugie, or Yasuki Chiba. Within Japan, this movie was released on a double-bill with Madame White Snake, which most definitely had more staying power in the Western film canon than Fighting President did. 

Kunio Watanabe (left) with Hisaya Morishige. Credit to @tnmiyako38.

I want to stay on the subject of Watanabe for a minute, because his Wikipedia page makes him out to be something of an interesting character. Born in 1899, he became a left-wing activist in college, got fired from his first job for spurious reasons, and then met the then-head of Nikkatsu, who hired him on as an actor even though he wanted to direct. Watanabe finally did become a director throughout the 1920s and joined Toho in 1936, at which point his politics had evidently changed; when Toho had a wee spot of union trouble Watanabe led an anti-communist right-wing movement and was vocally anti-union. Following that he joined Shintoho in 1947 and directed their first picture. His Wiki page states that he had a habit of throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it, which I didn't think was a thing anybody actually did outside of cartoons. He also had twelve siblings.

Ryōzō Kasahara, Fighting President's screenwriter, has a far terser Wikipedia page in terms of personal detail but a filmography that speaks for itself: not only did he pen most of the entries in the President series but also Toho's Sazae-san series, Eizō Sugawa's stellar You Can Succeed, Too, a few of the more famous Crazy Cats/Hitoshi Ueki films and a couple of Wakadaisho movies.

English title translation issues have always plagued the President series. When these movies were released (or even just mentioned) in English-speaking markets, they were usually assigned titles that were some variation upon "Three Gents" or sometimes "Five Gents": Aloha Three Gents, Five Gents Prefer Geisha, Three Gents Go West, Hail the Three Gents, etc. Oddly enough, newspaper reviews and publicity from the time when these movies were being exported (early to mid-1960s, mostly) use the English and Japanese titles interchangeably, and a few President movies seem to actually have been shown under their Japanese title with no translation provided at all.

Within a two-week period in mid-December 1958, Honolulu's Kapahulu theater brought out three Toho hits (or semi-hits): Fighting President, 1956's Hesokuri Shachō under the title "The Frugal President", and - unrelated to the President series, but relevant to our interests - Zoku-Zoku Oban under the title "Mr. Fortune Maker". The English title of the movie we're looking at today comes from that Hawaiian theatrical run. I originally published this post using the title Stuart Galbrath gives it in his magisterial Toho Studios Story, "Company President in High Spirits", but since Fighting President seems to have been handed down by Toho themselves, I've decided to use that one from now on instead. ("Harikiri" is a word that means "enthusiastic", "go-get-'em", "hyped", etc. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ritual suicide.)

France also got involved - the only country I'm aware of aside from Japan and the United States where this film has been released - and re-christened the film "La Vie trépidante des décideurs: l'ardeur au travail", which literally translates to "The Fast-Paced Lives of Decision-Makers: Zeal for Work". Fighting President was screened in France a few times, in fact: once in 2008, once in 2012, and just recently, in February of 2026.

But wait, the title confusion gets worse... You will not find this movie on IMDb under either Fighting President or Company President in High Spirits, but instead "Three Generations of Company Presidents". I have not been able to determine where this title came from. I honestly think, unless I'm missing some international release where it ran under that title, that this could very well be the result of a translation mix-up, since this was the third entry in the President series.

But wait, it gets even worse... 1959's Zoku Shachō Taiheki is on IMDb as "Three Generations of Company Presidents Part II". Not only is Zoku Shachō Taiheki very much NOT a sequel to Fighting President, it's actually a sequel to the first Shachō Taiheki, which is a completely different movie.

You see why I said English titles are a problem with this series?

We'll wrap things up there before it gets any more convoluted, but I'm also going to retain my live commentary from the original version of this post (under a jump cut; slightly revised as well) for posterity's sake.