暗黒街全滅作戦 / Ankokugai zenmetsu sakusen / Mission to Annihilate the Underworld [1965]

Release date: February 14th, 1965

Director: Jun Fukuda

Studio: Toho

Cast: Tatsuya Mihashi, Makoto Sato, Akihiko Hirata, Mie Hama, Akemi Kita, Toru Ibuki, Somesho Matsumoto, Yoshifumi Tajima, Junichiro Mukai, Shoji Nakayama, Nadao Kirino, Wataru Omae et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release; occasional theatrical screenings.

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Toho's "Ankokugai" (Underworld) series was an unconnected group of seven crime movies released between 1956 and 1965. Three of them have English subtitles and one even has an extant English dub, but - despite the fact that those of the series that have been subtitled are top-notch films - the other half remains unsubtitled and unavailable on home media anywhere. At a glance, the Ankokugai movies that haven't received English subtitles are:

• The Underworld (1956, Kajiro Yamamoto)
• The Witness Killed (1961, Jun Fukuda)
• The Weed of Crime (1962, Jun Fukuda)
• Mission to Annihilate the Underworld (1965, Jun Fukuda)

Relevant to our interests, all but two of these seven movies plus the series' "companion piece" Big Shots Die at Dawn feature Akihiko Hirata in usually a fairly decent role. Since The Weed of Crime was at some point floating around online long enough for me to have watched it (one of my biggest regrets is not keeping the file), that makes Mission to Annihilate the Underworld Hirata's only Ankokugai movie that is fully unavailable through any channel. Let's take a look at it.

Check out a trailer courtesy of @makoto_ookubo. (I'm embedding the video directly so I don't have to link you to Twitter).

Mission to Annihilate the Underworld was both directed and co-written by reluctant Godzilla auteur Jun Fukuda, with Yoshihiro Ishimatsu and Ei Ogawa also collaborating on the screenplay. Of the two co-writers, Ogawa was the more prolific, and he was attached to Taiyo ni Hoero! for much of the series' lifespan. I mistakenly believed that Mission had been produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka (a fair assumption, given that he produced almost everything Toho put out for decades), but its producer was actually Kenichiro Tsunoda, DP for Toho's affiliate studio Tokyo Eiga.

Mission was the seventh and final film in the Ankokugai series. Why it ended here is not currently known to me - whether it had just run its course, or if perhaps declining ticket sales forced the series to cease. I do find it a bit curious that Mission was only featured once in Kinema Junpo, Japan's largest and most influential film magazine, and never reviewed by it.

I unfortunately have not been able to drag up much information about Akihiko Hirata's character Shimada, a second-generation yakuza boss who seems to have been fairly important to the plot but evidently not important enough to be shown on any Japanese posters. He's billed pretty high within the cast: in the poster above, the two names on the far right that you see in orange are Tatsuya Mihashi and Makoto Sato, who play the leads, then it's Mie Hama, Akemi Kita and Akihiko Hirata. (Remember the cast is intended to be read from right to left.)

Notice that I said "any Japanese posters". We do have a poster from the Thai release of this film (retitled something like "Two Fierce Tigers") that includes Shimada:

Exhibit A in my "sometimes I see a picture of Makoto Sato and for a second I think I'm looking at Bunta Sugawara" catalogue. 

Something I found very interesting about this movie is that it's set in Tokai City, Aichi Prefecture, which is of course a perfectly normal city today, but as of the time of movie's production, it did not actually exist. Tokai City was formed by a merger of the Chita District towns Yokosuka and Ueno in 1969. Yokosuka and Ueno had been considering merging since the mid-1950s, but evidently reception of the idea was not so good locally. In the following decade, though, the population of both towns began to grow to the extent that boundary disputes arose, and in 1967 the governor of Aichi Prefecture suggested a merger.

It's a small thing, but these are the kind of details that get lost in translation so easily. I do not know what the name "Tokai City" would have meant to a Japanese audience circa 1965. Would it have invoked a sense of overcrowding and possibly crime? Would the audience as a whole have been aware of Yokosuka and Ueno's encroachment upon each other? Would anyone have cared? Did Toho just pull the name out of a hat?

Tokai City's Great Buddha of Shirakuen. Incidentally, this Buddha was consecrated in 1927, the same year Hirata was born.

In any event, Toho released Mission to Annihilate the Underworld on a double-bill with Ryo Kinoshita's adaptation of Mishima's School of the Flesh. Toho also promoted the film alongside the Frank Sinatra picture None but the Brave, which shares several cast members with Mission, but I'm not sure if this was a double-bill or if only flyers were produced. 

Since Kinejun never bothered with the movie, I can't say what critical reception was like at the time. Modern reviews are okay, with nobody seeming like they really love the film but nobody hating it either. Everyone seems to agree that Mie Hama is great, which goes without saying. Apparently Makoto Sato wears a red jacket in the film, which is not particularly remarkable to me, but two separate Filmarks reviewers and Sato's own son Tosuke evidently found it memorable enough to make mention of it, so I feel that I should as well. (Maybe it's the same jacket Sachio Sakai wears in Ironfinger; Toho did reuse costumes.)

Though it has escaped both official physical release and illicit internet distribution (as far as I know?), Mission has evidently been digitized: check out a short scene featuring Shoji Nakayama here. The film has also been broadcast on television for what does appear to be quite some time, since I found a random Twitter user claiming that they had seen the movie on TV "as a child".

Sato and Hama. Sato plays the lead bad guy (as one can imagine) while Tatsuya Mihashi plays the good guy.

Theater screenings within Japan... have happened; not very often, but they have. As with most things it has played at Laputa Asagaya more than once, and in 2019 it played as part of a Makoto Sato film festival, advertised as a "new print" - not exactly sure if that means a restoration or a recently-unearthed print or something else, but it's good to know.

As far as I can tell - and this is backed up by Stuart Galbraith's Toho Studios Story, though Galbraith has been wrong - Mission to Annihilate the Underworld never received a theatrical release in the United States. (Google's AI summary claims that it did, but it also thinks Ironfinger is part of the International Secret Police series, which is just stupid.)

Continuing on the theme of things being wrong, the film is on IMDb under the title "Ankokugai gekitotsu sakusen". I genuinely have no clue where it acquired that title. I can find no primary Japanese sources indicating that that name was ever associated with it.

It appears that this movie was also marketed to a Portuguese-speaking audience at some point, because it has a Portuguese title ("Sob o Comando do Crime") that is not a literal translation. It is a bit difficult to find anything else out about this release since the title is shared by another film from 1995.

That dearth of information on international releases leads us now to the conclusion of what was (to me) something of an overall disappointing post. Considering how (relatively) well-known the other Ankokugai movies are, it's even more frustrating how little information I'm able to give about this one. The last thing I'll mention is that the movie's funky surf-rock soundtrack is available to listen to online - check out timestamps 10:31 and 12:29 in this compilation video.

Godzilla Day Bonus: Let's Go To France

Long story short: what I have for you today is LE CHOC DES PLANÈTES, the rare-ish (and previously unavailable online) French cut/dub of 1962's Gorath, which you can watch in full on Internet Archive here.

Why? I don't know.

Long story longer: I initially wanted to include this in an article I was working on about the various international export versions of Gorath, but that article didn't pan out. I've decided instead to make it an addition to my Godzilla Day festivities since, due to being busy behind the scenes, I had to settle for writing a shorter, less elaborate Godzilla Day post this year. This counts as Godzilla-related because Gorath appeared in Godzilla Final Wars, and furthermore because I said so.

(Long story even longer: I actually had to mail this off to somebody who had a PAL-compatible tape deck for digitization, and it was not cheap or easy to get the French tape in the first place, so, all told, the entire process of bringing you Le Choc des Planètes set me back $135.)

Like, you can't tell me this doesn't rule.

Gorath hit the French home video market in the 1980s, and from everything I can find, it was the film's first entry into France, apparently never having had a theatrical release. It seems to have also been its last entry into the country, as it doesn't seem to have a DVD or streaming release either - at least not specifically a French-dubbed version; I'm sure French people can stream other versions wherever anybody watches anything. The tape I have was released by Fil à Film, who put it out with several different covers, all of which are actually pretty cool by themselves but have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie.

As you'll see, the French cut is mostly just the Brenco American cut dubbed into French (they didn't even bother to take Brenco's name off of the closing credits), which unfortunately means our beloved Maguma is reduced to strange noises and an indistinguishable corpse shrouded in fog. To get more technical, this is actually the Heritage Enterprises cut, which is a re-cut of the Brenco cut that removes the pre-title sequence present in the Japanese version. (You can learn more about differences between the American and Japanese versions here.)

According to a website I found, at least four separate VHS editions of this film exist, and the space-helmet painting on the cover of mine seems to have been ripped off by Fil à Film from an edition originally distributed by Ciné Video in 1986. Given that the tape includes previews for other films being released to VHS in 1989, I'd guess my tape comes from sometime around then.

I've done quite a bit of scouring and actually cannot turn up much of anything about an earlier French release of this film, which is quite odd. Imagine it's the 1980s and you're a French sci-fi fan who pays attention to what films certain labels are putting out on VHS. You pick up the newest release from Broadway or from Fil à Film, entranced by the inexplicable, hallucinatory cover art, you stick it in your VHS player, and... it's a severely edited Japanese movie from 1962 that has never been released in your country until now?

So, yeah, apologies that my Godzilla Day posts were not (to me) quite up to snuff this year, but there is a lot happening behind the scenes. I suggest that you check out the previous year's two posts, which I thought were pretty alright.

Godzilla Day Special: Let's Go To Guam

For this year's Godzilla Day post, I wanted to take a break from writing about Dr. Serizawa and look at a different Godzilla movie that Hirata had a part in (of which there were, of course, quite a few). We're going to talk about the filming of Son of Godzilla, part of which was conducted on location in Guam.

Son of Godzilla is relatively unique within Hirata's filmography, since as far as I know Toho was not really in the habit of sending him overseas to film. In fact, the only other instance of this that I can recall offhand would be 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas, in which he was (probably? I discuss it further in the post) among a handful of cast and crew sent to film in Las Palmas. If he ever traveled abroad outside of his career as an actor, I've never heard him talk about it.

Guam has been an American territory since the late 1800s, with a brief interruption when it was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army for a godawful 31 months during the Pacific War. Over 20 years had passed between then and when filming began for Son of Godzilla, though, and whatever feelings may have still been harbored locally, tourism and the film industry are both incredibly lucrative, so Toho was able to partner with Pan American to bring their cast and crew to the island for filming.

Son of Godzilla was released on December 16th(!) of 1967, and I believe filming more generally was conducted from summer to autumn of 1967, which is a fairly long production period for Toho. I'm not sure how much of that time was spent on Guam, but one guesses purely from the fact that all the actors are tan as hell that it was shot during high summer. The film's JP Wikipedia page notes that Yoshio Tsuchiya heard from locals that there were Imperial Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle on the island, and jokingly called to them to come out, not knowing that Shoichi Yokoi was actually in hiding on Guam at the time for real.

I've always really loved the artwork from this Asahi Sonorama record. See more images on this Mandarake listing.

Perhaps the most extensive quote about shooting on Guam comes from Jun Fukuda, and was published in Stuart Galbrath's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!:

[We shot Son of Godzilla] in Guam. We really had fun. It was very hard for Japanese people to travel overseas back then, and also at the time there was only one hotel on Guam. The wife of the Chief Immigration Officer was Japanese, and her Japanese Wives organization really helped us be able to shoot there. The government backed them up, and so the Guam officials provided us cars, anything we needed during our stay for free. They were very helpful, as they were in America. In Japan they don’t understand shooting films very much. Whenever I go outside of Japan, I get jealous about how film-conscious the rest of the world is. I had the experience of shooting a film in Spain, in the Canary Islands. The police stopped traffic for half a day — that would never happen in Japan.

Kenji Sahara doesn't have much to say about it in a 2009 interview:

We could enjoy the fresh air and beautiful scenery in Guam. However, for an actor, there is no difference between working on location and in studios. We do the same thing either on location or in studios.

One person who evidently did not have fun was Tadao Takashima - because he didn't even go. Takashima had such a severe fear of flying that even when Toho offered to buy his wife a plane ticket so she could accompany him, he still refused. A locally-hired double was used for some scenes instead, and everything where Takashima himself had to appear was shot in Japan.

It is likely that there will never be any way to verify exactly who that double was, but there's something kind of interesting there - if he was hired locally, could he have been Chamorro? Would that make Son of Godzilla the first and only Japanese Godzilla movie to feature an Indigenous actor?

Anyhow, many sources (mostly Toho mooks) claim that setting the film on an island was a move intended to reduce the number of characters and therefore the budget. The Godzilla franchise was beginning to show diminishing returns at this point, so it makes sense that the studio would have been concerned, but remote filming does seem like kind of a genius move on their part - they get to save money on paying actors and reap the benefits of "exotic" location shooting. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to save the film, and ticket sales fell from the previous Godzilla entry; the Godzilla suit was also deemed to be pretty ugly (fair assessment) and not reused for the following film. When Son of Godzilla was exported to America it was shunted right to television without a theatrical release.

Thanks to the blessing(?) that is the internet, although there are significant holes in our knowledge of exactly where filming was conducted, we have a few anecdotes from people who live in Guam that may give some suggestions. These include:

• "[...]somewhere down at the southern end of the island. You won't find places like that towards the northern end." - /u/roastedpig_671
• Mount Lamlam - /u/Agreeable_Menu_6142

As an aside, three years after Son of Godzilla, the first film considered to be fully a product of Guam was made: Terry Bourke's Noon Sunday, which heavily fictionalizes some real events from WWII. By all accounts it's an awful film, but it is at least historically interesting. (This is information I learned from an article by Michael Lujan Bevacqua for Pacific Daily News. Great headline; pulls no punches.)

It's surprising to me how little information there is about the Guam shoot out there, considering it was the first Godzilla movie to have been shot overseas. The series itself was beginning to slip a bit at this point, which might have contributed to the location shoot not making as big of a splash as it could have, say, five or ten years earlier.

To conclude, I have to say I was really sincerely hoping that I would be able to turn up some other behind-the-scenes pictures from Son of Godzilla, but no, it does indeed appear that whatever is going on here is all we have.

Could be worse, I suppose.

Halloween Special: You Are Not Ready For The H-Man Bus

So, you've probably heard about the truck with a giant Godzilla head on it that drove around Japan to promote Godzilla Minus One. But did you know that, as promotion for The H-Man, Columbia deployed an entire mobile haunted house on wheels to wend its way across America?

As per the June 15th, 1959 issue of Boxoffice:

HORROR TRAILER TO SELL COLUMBIA'S H-MAN

A colorful Columbia "H-Man" horror car trailer will visit 36 cities in eight states to exploit "The H-Man," color science-fiction release. It has already begun an initial 27-day tour with the itinerary including Columbus, Ohio, and stop-offs in Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island before winding up in Bridgeport, Conn., June 20. The film has been set for saturation bookings in those states during the last week in June.

The public will pass through "the home of the H-man" in a 32-foot van with special effects including bubbling atomic pools, dripping phosphorescent water, ultra-violet lighting and eerie sound effects as well as a three-dimensional, animated "H-man." The display was created by the Tracy Parade and Display Co. of North Bergen, N.J., which made the float for Columbia's "7th Voyage of Sinbad."

Columbia has prepared an inexpensive 4-page tabloid herald with news and pictures for promotion of the local level. There is also a 17-page showmanship kit available through exchanges.

And from the June 17, 1959 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor, we have further description, along with a mention of some freebies:

Columbia is sending an "H-Man" horror trailer to 36 cities in eight states as part of its exploitation campaign on the science-fiction thriller. The trailer, literally a horror show on wheels, it is expected, will be used in connection also with subsequent engagements of the film. Designed to permit the public to enter and pass through "The Home of The H-Man", the 32-foot van features a variety of scientific shock displays based on scenes in the film. In addition to a three-dimensional, animated "H-Man", the special effects in the cavern-like interior include bubbling atomic pools, dripping phosphorescent water, ultra-violet lighting and eerie sound effects. Miniature "H-Men" of die-cut sponge are being used as giveaways in connection with this picture.

According to another issue of Boxoffice which I am unfortunately not able to view in full, 500,000 of these die-cut miniature H-Men were produced. I would bet that if any of those managed to survive the almost 70 years down to today, some freaks out there would pay absolutely mind-boggling money for one. (I'm "some freaks", it's me.) I haven't managed to dig up any pictures of these things, but it was no secret that they were being given away: newspaper ads for the film also advertised that a certain number of visitors would receive their very own tiny H-Man.

Now, speaking of pictures, you're probably wondering: "Are there any photos of this whole H-Man bus / van / trailer / portal straight to the dank dripping sewers of death affair?"

Oh, yes, dear reader, there are indeed. Although... I'm gonna be honest, they're a bit disappointing, and it's difficult to really even tell what's going on in the second one.

Sorry to say that does indeed appear to be all we have in terms of photographic evidence.

I did some digging into "Tracy Parade and Display Co." and found a website, quite lovingly curated, dedicated to its founder, Bill Tracy. Tracy was evidently a prominent designer of dark rides and haunted houses, so although the pictures above might not do it justice, one does not doubt that the interior of the H-Man trailer was suitably fun and spooky.

What may be even more exciting than the trailer itself, though, is what individual theaters were getting up to in their promotion for the film. As per an issue of Exhibitors' Herald and Moving Picture World that, again, I do not have full access to, the Broadway-Capitol theater in Detroit actually had a guy running around in costume, who the theater announced beforehand would be at large downtown. A specific slogan was broadcast on the radio prior to this fiend's appearance on the streets of Detroit, and anybody who was willing to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and give the slogan would receive a free movie ticket to The H-Man. The trailer was also parked outside the Broadway-Capitol for a time.

Exhibitors' Herald etc. also informs us that the H-Man trailer doesn't seem to have stuck to its initial schedule: unless the publication was misinformed, the trailer ended up visiting not just 36 but over 100 cities across the continental United States.

Considering that the trailer ranged far and wide, there's got to be more than a few people out there with first- or second-hand accounts of it. So, I'd like to ask my readers... were your parents in this trailer? Your grandparents, maybe? Were YOU? Tell me about it, I have a public email address now, anysuckers@gmail.com. I'll make you famous. [Citation needed.]

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

Part I: The Men Behind The H-Man

The staff of The H-Man.

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

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

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

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

And, of course, you've got Eiji Tsuburaya in charge of the special effects - another figure who needs no introduction. We're going to give The H-Man's effects further examination in the next section, so we'll skim over him for now.

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

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

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

You KNOW whoever drew this was having a great time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a contemporary review from Motion Picture Exhibitor, written in June of 1959. MPE was a periodical geared towards theater owners, rather than theatergoers, so their reviews tend to take a slightly different tack.

The H-Man –––– MELODRAMA, 79m

Columbia

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

Estimate: Good horror entry.

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

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

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

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

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

The H-Man

(WIDESCREEN–COLOR)

Good story well made. Pic is exploitable.

Hollywood, June 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the peepers on that H-Man!

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

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

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

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

SHOWING OF AMERICAN FILM FURSTRATED[sic]

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

I mean... okay.

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

____

Sources: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Pilot Gaiden: The German Dub

Guten tag!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Release date: December 3rd, 1980

Director: Shintaro Sobue

Studio: NTV

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book version of Pediatric Ward featuring Kaori Momoi.

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

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

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

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

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

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