The two Crazy Cats Shimizu Jirocho movies: The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor [1966 / 1970]

Today we're going to take another look at the two Crazy Cats Jirocho movies, since they've both just received brand new English subtitles, which were a collaboration between me (edits, revisions, contextual research etc) and Prince Tyler (the initial script and timing). I had a blast doing these and I hope you have a blast watching them.

I did already write posts about both of these movies a few years back, but I'm taking those down because I aim for this post to replace and improve on them. We're going to cover a lot more ground this time. These films are assuming familiarity on the viewer’s part - familiarity that many non-Japanese viewers may lack - and I hope to assist with at least some of that in my “context” section at the bottom of the post.

Okay? Okay. Let's get started.

Production History

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay was shot in 20 days, which is unusually fast even for Toho, who were no stranger to cranking 'em out. This was due to the Crazy Cats themselves having an insanely busy schedule more so than anything Toho was doing, but it ended up being inconvenient for Toho as well: at the start of production, staff handed director Takashi Tsuboshima an unfinished script and basically told him "here, shoot this, we're already ready". According to JP Wikipedia, at the time filming began, the script only ran up until the middle of the first prison scene, which accounts for about 20 minutes of movie. After that, the script was delivered piecemeal day-by-day.

Pick-Pocket Bay was Tsuboshima's second time directing a Crazy Cats movie and his first time directing jidaigeki. I found out during my research that Tsuboshima was very fond of Enoken, which is interesting because the film's screenwriter Hideo Oguni also wrote for Enoken (along with contemporary comic Roppa Furukawa) during the late 1940s. Oguni had experience writing about Jirocho as well; for Masahiro Makino he wrote Shimizu Port pt. I and II in 1939 and 1940.

One result of Pick-Pocket Bay's rushed schedule was that Tsuboshima wasn't even 100% clear on the title of the movie during production. The movie was shot under the title "Musekinin Shimizu Minato", with the usual formula for Crazy Cats movie titles - the "Kureji no" before the rest of the title - having been forgotten until the in-house preview. Allegedly, staff also forgot to write a role for Hiroshi Inuzuka, which is why his character only shows up late in the movie for a single scene. One wonders if the same perhaps happened in Crazy Violence as well, since his role in that is equally forgettable.

When all was said and done, Pick-Pocket Bay was released on January 3rd, 1966, on a double bill with Account of the President's Conduct [Shachō gyōjōki], the 24th entry in Toho's long-running President series. 

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor

As I've mentioned many times, the Japanese film industry as a whole was in a death spiral by the early 1970s. Within a few years of this film's release, Toho would end nearly all of their long-running series and fire most of their contracted actors. This was the environment into which Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor was born, which makes it all the more surprising that it is objectively a better movie than Pick-Pocket Bay on almost every level. Crazy Violence is the last movie to feature all seven members of Crazy Cats together; Eitaro Ishibashi left the group in 1971 and was not present for what is sometimes considered the "final" Crazy Cats film, I'll Be Deceived.

The inception of Crazy Violence supposedly came from the Cats' visit to a ryōkyoku festival (the story of Jirocho is intimately tied to oral narrative traditions like kōdan and ryōkyoku, as we'll later see), which inspired Shin Watanabe, then-president of Watanabe Pro, to make a period piece that deliberately went against the Osaka World Expo hype of the time. As with Pick-Pocket Bay, Crazy Violence was released on a double-bill with the an entry in the moribund President series, namely The ABCs of Business Management [Shachōgaku ABC]. 

The cast of characters changes a bit for the sequel - it's not necessarily that the actors change (although some do), but secondary characters play into the narrative more than in the first film, where the focus is on Hitoshi Ueki to the exclusion of most everyone else. People like Daigoro and Komasa who had only small, perfunctory roles in Pick-Pocket Bay are given much more to do in the sequel. There is also a bit of a larger guest cast, of which Yoko Naito (pictured above) is the clear stand-out. During production, Toho sent Naito over to Toei to learn yakuza basics from their top actors such as Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta since Toho themselves had less experience with yakuza films, especially female yakuza. It certainly paid off, as Naito is hugely entertaining to watch.

Akira Fuse, who was an extremely popular singer at the time, also appears in a very superfluous role. We cannot say much about his acting skills other than that he was not a professional at this point and it shows. His character is still fairly charming, though, anyway. According to Takashi Tsuboshima, he fell down a lot during filming.

International Distribution

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay reached American shores fairly quickly for a Japanese picture, having its Los Angeles premiere in August of 1966 as a double feature with Campus A-Go-Go, an entry in Yūzō Kayama's "Young Guy" series. The Pick-Pocket Bay title dates back to this premiere¹, and although it isn't a literal translation at all (that would be "Irresponsible Shimizu Harbor / Port"), it's kind of fun. Unfortunately, that seems to have been just about it for Pick-Pocket Bay's adventures outside of Japan; it doesn't look like it ever had any other U.S. theatrical screenings and I cannot find record of it ever having been distributed in any other country besides Japan and the U.S..

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, meanwhile, never made it outside of Japan at all. That's pretty much that. The title, as far as I can tell, dates to Stuart Galbraith's 2008 Toho Studios Story; it is almost but not quite a literal translation, that would be "Crazy Raid on Shimizu Harbor", which I actually prefer. In Galbraith's 1998 article for Outre magazine he renders the title as "Taking a Crazy Punch at Shimizu Harbor", which, uh, yeah.

Historical Context (or "Who are all these guys that this movie is assuming I know already?")

More or less every actor you see in these two movies is playing a specific historical or semi-historical personage from the corpus of Jirocho tales, but in most cases you wouldn’t actually know that unless you looked at a cast list, since (with the exception of a few) their names aren’t mentioned within the movies themselves. As such, we’re not going to go over every single one of Jirocho’s men in this section, but we are going to take a look at some of the more prominent figures featured in these films.

Jirocho of Shimizu

Jirocho of Shimizu was a real person (we even have his photograph), born Chōgorō Yamamoto on Valentine's Day of 1820. "Jirocho" is not a given name but a nickname, shortened from "Jirohachi's Chōgorō" (Jirohachi was the name of his maternal uncle, who adopted him). While some details about his life - that he was a yakuza-slash-entrepreneur who maintained a gang in the Shimizu area - are more or less verifiable, almost everything about him has been mythologized.

Much of what is considered Jirocho "canon" is the creation of kōdanshi Hakuzan Kanda. Starting in 1907, Kanda performed stories about Jirocho adapted from accounts published by those who knew Jirocho while he was still alive, including his adopted son. Kanda is also responsible for establishing the canonical twenty-eight men commonly depicted as Jirocho's core gang, but it is well known that at least some of those men were fictional, and the ones who weren't have had fictional characteristics incorporated into their depictions over the years. 

Some of the first films to depict Jirocho were inseparable from the initial kōdan tradition. These early films were not projects that aimed to independently depict Jirocho's life according to the director's own interpretation of it; they were direct adaptations of Kanda's work and credited him explicitly. The earliest such adaptation was directed by Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director, in 1911. 

One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda's illustration for Jirocho Sangokushi.

Jirocho's life has been depicted on screen (and in manga, print, television, stage, various storytelling arts, etc.) too many times to count. Most notably, Masahiro Makino directed an unfinished 9-part (intended to be 10) series of full-length feature films for Toho from 1952 to 1954, in which Akio Kobori played Jirocho. Makino also directed a four-part series for Toei in the early 1960s which starred Koji Tsuruta. 

In both Crazy Cats films, Jirocho is played by Hajime Hana. Just to throw out a few more names, some other on-screen Jirochos include Takashi Shimura, Hiroko Kawasaki and Shizuko Kasagi (in gender-bent versions), Denjiro Okochi, Eitaro Shindo, Kinnosuke Nakamura, Utaemon Ichikawa, and Kazuo Hasegawa.

Oiwake Sangoro (or Sangoro of Oiwake)

As with Jirocho himself, "Oiwake" refers to a place that Sangoro was associated with (his birthplace of Oiwake in Shinshu), and is not part of his given name. I'd encourage readers to think of the name "Oiwake Sangoro" as being structured like the name "Texas Pete", if that helps. Unlike Jirocho, Sangoro is solidly fictional.

I cannot overstate how much of a debt stories of Jirocho owe to traditional forms of sung narrative and formal storytelling. In particular, Sangoro's popularity would not exist without Torazo Hirozawa, pioneer of Torazo-bushi, a specific style of naniwa-bushi (sung narrative) named for him. Hirozawa was virtually synonymous with Jirocho stories and was himself an actor and radio performer. If you have the language skills (or just like to listen), you can hear Hirozawa perform Oiwake Sangoro here.

It's hard to imagine anyone more suited to playing Sangoro than Hitoshi Ueki, since the characteristics associated with Sangoro in fiction - a suave womanizer, a lone wolf, maybe a bit of a scoundrel - are basically a perfect description of the onscreen persona Ueki cultivated in his Japan's No. 1 ____ Man series and to a lesser extent his work with Crazy Cats. Nevertheless, other actors who have portrayed Sangoro include Hiroshi Nawa, Yatarou Kurokawa, Ryuji Shinagawa, and Koukichi Takada.

Ishimatsu no Mori

I'll make the same joke I always do: "Toho said it's my turn to wear the eyepatch."

Of Jirocho's henchmen, one of the most well-known is Ishimatsu no Mori (again, "Mori" is not a given name, it's where he's from), who is played in both films by Kei Tani. We actually don't know whether or not Ishimatsu was a real person; there's a lot of conflicting information coming from unreliable sources, the best of which seems to be an account from someone who met Jirocho and described that Jirocho began crying when asked about Ishimatsu. The missing eye attributed to Ishimatsu may actually have been a result of his conflation with an entirely different one-eyed henchman of the Shimizu family. (Which eye Ishimatsu was missing is not consistent in depictions.)

Other actors who had a turn playing Ishimatsu include Senkichi Omura, Jun Tazaki, Enoken, Minoru Ōki, Susumu Fujita, Hisaya Morishige, and Shintaro Katsu, just to name a few.

Ōmasa 

Omasa with Komasa as played by Yutaka Nakayama.

Omasa with Komasa as played by Senri Sakurai.

In both Crazy Cats Jirocho films, Ōmasa is played by Akihiko Hirata. Ōmasa's full name was Masagoro Yamamoto, and since he was one of two men under Jirocho by that name, he was given the nickname Ōmasa to distinguish him from the other, who was called Komasa. These nicknames mean basically "Big Masa" and "Little Masa", respectively. As the name would imply, Ōmasa was known for being an unusually tall dude (supposedly over six feet), which makes Hirata kind of a weird casting choice at five feet eight, but Ōmasa has been played by a wide variety of actors of many sizes, so it seems like more of a vibe thing than a matter of actual physical size.

Ōmasa doesn't have much to do in Pick-Pocket Bay besides being Jirocho's bulldog for a few scenes, but I gotta say, Hirata kills it in Crazy Violence. Ōmasa feels like an actual character in the second film, not just a name with a person attached, and that's all thanks to Hirata getting more lines the second time around and really stepping up his game. This is a rare comedic role for him and he plays it to the hilt, stopping just short of being hammy but still getting the intended humor across. At just shy of nine minutes into the film he delivers a rolled-R "bakayarou" that hit me in my soul. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I've had a lot of coffee.

Anyway, a few other onscreen Ōmasas include Tomisaburō Wakayama, Susumu Fujita, Yu Fujiki, Sachio Sakai, Daisuke Katō, Masao Kusakari, Jō Shishido, and Seizaburo Kawazu.

Komasa

Komasa appears in both The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor. In Pick-Pocket Bay he is played by Yutaka Nakayama, and in Crazy Violence he is played by Senri Sakurai, who, at not quite five feet tall, was really the only reasonable choice. As with all of Jirocho's men, recorded accounts of Komasa are to be treated with healthy skepticism, but according to some, he was good at iaido and known to carry around a massive sword.² Komasa has no real presence in Pick-Pocket Bay, but in Crazy Violence he has a much bigger role where he gets to interact with Omasa. And by "interact with" I do in fact mean "hug":

Komasa has gotten solo treatment in a couple of films over the years, including a few (now lost) made by Shochiku and the long-defunct Kawai Film Production Company, and in the late 1920s there was even a film titled "Omasa and Komasa" produced by Teikoku Kinema Engei. A few actors who have portrayed Komasa are Eijiro Kataoka, Kōjirō Hongō, Norihei Miki, Kei Tani, Minori Terada and Hiroyuki Watanabe. Again, these actors are a very wide range of heights (Watanabe in particular was close to 5' 10"), so playing Komasa seems to be mostly contingent on vibes.

Hangoro of Ose

A man named Tsunagoro Kanto is theorized to have later taken on the name "Hangoro of Ose", but it is also possible that the two were completely different individuals, though that theory doesn't seem to have that much traction. Hangoro does not have any distinct physical characteristics that were noted in contemporary accounts; he allegedly ran away from home at 19 and later killed a sex worker before finding his way to the Shimizu family.

In Pick-Pocket Bay, Hangoro is played by Yoshio Tsuchiya. In Crazy Violence, he is played by Kazuo Suzuki. Some other on-screen Hangoros include Kenji Mori, Ryutaro Otomo, Yutaka Nakayama, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Hiroki Matsutaka and Yoshihiko Hakamada.

Hōin ("Master") Daigoro

The term "Hōin" originally referred to a monastic rank, but by the late Meiji period when Jirocho's men were around, its meaning had changed to become sort of a catchall for anybody who was involved in any number of fields - not only monks, but also physicians, painters, scholars of Confucianism, prayer healers, mountain ascetics, and a whole host of other random monk-related vocations. As such, "Master" is just about the best translation for the term that I could think of. Unsurprisingly, Hōin Daigoro was not an actual monk; he adopted the disguise as a way to get out of trouble. Daigoro likely joined Jirocho's gang in his teens and before that was working as some kind of laborer. After the Meiji restoration Daigoro left the gang and became, by all accounts, an honest and upright family man who ran a legitimate business and was involved in his grandchildren's lives even after a stroke left him half-paralyzed.

Like Ōmasa, Daigoro was reputed to be a very large man, but as we've seen, that does not matter one whit when it comes to casting. In both Crazy Cats films, he is played by Shigeki Ishida. Some other actors who have played Daigoro include Haruo Tanaka, Tokumaro Dan, Kunio Kaga, Toshiro Chiba, Shingo Yamashiro, Mitsuru Hirata (no relation), and Takashi Sasano. Haruo Tanaka seems to have been particularly attached to the role; he played it in Toho's nine-part series but was also cast in the same role for other studios' Jirocho pictures as well.

Context, Context, Context

The thing that makes these movies so fun is that they're basically comedy skits - we're all in on the joke; nobody's pretending this is an authentic reconstruction of historical events. This allows the Cats to break the fourth wall frequently and with gusto, dropping Edo-period jokes and idioms alongside contemporary slang and pop culture references from the 1960s-'70s.

As with almost every Crazy Cats movie, both of these films are full of references to the Cats' other work outside of acting. Hitoshi Ueki's hit song "Suudara-bushi" is referenced alongside yagibushi (a traditional circle dance) in Pick-Pocket Bay, in a line that I've decided to render as "folk songs and pop songs". Unfortunately a very flat translation, but probably the easiest way to get the point across to anyone unfamiliar with these terms. And in case audiences had forgotten about Suudara-bushi by 1970 (they hadn't), Crazy Violence brought it back with a reference to the single's B-side "Koriya shakudatta", which didn't translate very well (or at all, really, but if you keep your ears out, you can still catch it). You can read a bit about Suudara-bushi in English here.

These movies also feature references to contemporary events in a broader sense than just pop culture. You'll notice early on in Crazy Violence that "Gewalt", a location mentioned throughout the film, has a decidedly non-Japanese-sounding name. This word - German for "force" or "violence" - was part of the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, as it was used frequently by student protest movements to refer to armed struggle. Within the film itself, "Gewalt" is written with kanji that are intended to be read phonetically³ with no regard to their meaning (recall that kana represent individual sounds while kanji convey words/concepts). This type of phonetic reading is called "ateji", and incidentally this is also how ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work, kind of.

Similarly, another uniquely mid-20th-century phrase that gets dropped in Crazy Violence is "ietsuki, kaatsuki, babanuki", which basically means "with a house, with a car, without a mother-in-law" and was used by newlyweds to describe their ideal living conditions. (Of course, in the film, the part about the car is omitted, since cars hadn't been invented yet.) A magazine from 1967 notes it as being sort of a hot new buzzword (buzzphrase?) so this was very "of the time" as of 1970.

Tomoe Kimura's ryōkyoku single "Showa Ishimatsu Legend: A Fool Can't Be Cured Unless He Dies"

The line "A fool can't be cured unless he dies", featured as a song in Crazy Violence, is a proverb from the Edo period that is still in use today. As we see from the single pictured above, this proverb ties these movies back to ryōkyoku Jirocho stories as it was frequently used by Torazo Hirozawa in his performances of Jirocho and Ishimatsu tales, and later by other performers doing their own versions of his work.

Speaking of that era, at one point in Crazy Violence Hitoshi Ueki insults Hideyo Amamoto SO brutally and with such specific obscure Edo-period wordplay that it took me a full hour to figure out how best to translate it. I do not know what else to tell you other than at one point some monks were apparently bored enough that they thought "Hey, you know that second-person pronoun (kimi) that sounds like the word for 'egg yolk' (kimi)? We should start calling eggs 'imperial carriages', because just like how there's kimi inside an egg, there's kimi inside a carriage!"

Anyway, to bring our present discussion back to pop culture, the one really big reference in Crazy Violence is Hajime Hana's delivery of the line "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" near the end of the film. This will take some explanation.

I would commit heinous crimes for an Odoroku Tamegoro enamel pin.

Our story begins with Wolfgang from the American sketch comedy show Laugh-In. (Do bear with me here.) Wolfgang was a German soldier who would comment on the preceding sketch by saying "Very interesting..." and then following it with something that was usually a misinterpretation of the sketch. The creators of the long-running Japanese variety show Kyosen & Maetake Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! liked Wolfgang, and they wanted to bring in a similar character who conveyed the idea of "someone who doesn't make any sense but just shows up and says something". They got Hajime Hana for the role, and decided he should be dressed as a hippie for the gag, but the problem was that they couldn't figure out what his trademark line should be. Eventually, Hana came up with a phrase based on a ryōkyoku ballad about Shimizu Jirocho that he personally liked: "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" (Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro!)

It's hard to explain why this is funny to a western audience who has absolutely no context for it, and I don't claim to understand it perfectly myself. Hana would deliver this line while dressed as a hippie and watching a brand new Sony television, so I'm fairly certain that the humor here is meant to be in the contrast between the hippie with the television (both modern conventions) and the line, which refers to Honzamura no Tamegoro (a character from a traditional Jirocho ballad) and may have been seen as somewhat antiquated, or at the very least belonging to a different category than a TV and a hippie. If I may venture a more English-friendly equivalent, this might be like an influencer looking at her phone and saying "Forsooth! Verily, this hath astounded me!"

And, I must say, when the line finally drops at the end of Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, it feels kind of amazing. The comedic timing is so pitch-perfect and Hana delivers the line so emphatically that I get the feeling a Japanese audience watching this in 1970 would have been busting a gut, even if it means nothing to us watching it today.

At any rate, Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro became a meme, and spawned not just a hit single but a five-film series. Five entire movies based off of a single joke.

Your author eight hours into one of several all-nighters that went into all this.

We're going to round out our explanation / examination of these two fine films with that, since I think I've covered just about everything I can think of. I'll end this post by plugging Toshiaki Sato, who is one of my favorite Japanese culture writers and has done a lot of work on Crazy Cats, all of which is in Japanese but can be read with a translator extension if you'd just like to get the gist of it. Crazy Movies is also a nice Japanese-language site to get basic information about all the Crazy Cats movies in one place.

Until next time, stay crazy.

^__________

1 If we want to get technical about where the title came from, it's most likely Toho Films (Toho's catalogue of movies available for international distribution), which gave official English titles to every film featured within it. However, we may never know for certain that "The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay" originates from one of these catalogues, since Heritage Auctions wants $216 for the 1966 edition of Toho Films. (Unless you want to send me $216.)

2 I don't know about you all but I am not messing with a 4' 8" guy carrying a three-foot sword.

3 So 下 for "Ge", 張 for "Baru", and 戸 for "To". "Gebaruto" is the Japanese pronunciation of "Gewalt".

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

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

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

_______

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Light family-centered sitcoms or soap operas.

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

Release date: June 1st, 1974[?]

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

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

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

____

Hell of a title, there.

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

Early draft script dating from January 1971.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer... [sighs] enhance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

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

Availability: None.

____

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

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

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

Whose wonderful girlfriend is that?

She belongs to me - a guy like a gorilla!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I thought "...unless?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussing The Film Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then came 007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have some questions about the way Italy does things.

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

"Please Excuse Us": The End

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

Screenshot taken seconds before absolutely nothing disastrous happens at all.

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

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

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

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