Dr. Iwamoto Appreciation Post (Ultraman Day Special)

Last year, we ranked Dr. Iwamoto's appearances across various Ultraman '66 manga for Ultraman Day. This year I wanted to write something a bit broader in scope, just a bit of a general low-down on the man himself. If you're here, it's likely that you already have some familiarity with the Ultra series, but I'm going to try to write this post with the assumption that my audience knows absolutely nothing about the character I'm talking about - while still trying to make it interesting for those who do. 

So, please, if that sounds even slightly appealing to you, read on for lore, trivia, behind-the-scenes history, extra-canonical appearances, and... choose-your-own adventure books, I guess?

I. Okay, Who Is He? (The Part You Can Skip If You Already Know)

Dr. Iwamoto was a semi-regular character on the 1966 tokusatsu television series Ultraman, played by Akihiko Hirata. Dr. Iwamoto appeared in a total of six non-consecutive episodes that aired between August 14th, 1966 and April 9th, 1967. His very first appearance was in episode 5, Secret of the Miroganda, in which he analyzed some snot. (This did include the sniff test.) Dr. Iwamoto's role within the show was as a kind of science consultant for the SSSP (Special Science Search Party/Patrol), who would offer analysis and advice on strange phenomena the team encountered and assist in developing weapons, vehicles, and other technology for them as well. Dr. Iwamoto was the inventor of most of the Japan branch's weapons and vehicles, including the Jet VTOL, the SSSP's main all-purpose aircraft, which still remains an iconic, recognizable fixture of the original series.

In the original United Artists English dub of the series, Dr. Iwamoto is voiced by William Kiehl, a notably deep-voiced American actor who had previously voiced Hercules as well as two characters played by Christopher Lee. This dub is available in full here, although not in the best quality. More recently, in 2025, Okratron5000 produced a new English dub for Tsuburaya's compilation project Ultraman 4K Discovery; as some of the episodes selected for the compilation do feature Dr. Iwamoto, I assume he was dubbed into English as well, but unfortunately I haven't seen 4K Discovery and cannot find a credit for his English voice actor.

While Dr. Iwamoto was never really the subject of an individual storyline, the closest he got to a "focus episode" is probably episode 16, where he is involved in a contest with another scientist to develop a new rocket. Iwamoto is presented as an example of a good, diligent scientist who is willing to take extra time to ensure that his work is viable - even though it loses him the contest - in contrast to the other scientist, Dr. Mori, who rushes to complete his rocket at the expense of safety.

I really have always wondered what the stage direction was here. I imagine it was something like "Pose like you're possessed by an alien" with no further elaboration.

Dr. Iwamoto is also featured quite prominently in the series finale (episode 39). He is the victim of an Alien Zetton plot to kill Ultraman, wherein he is knocked out, has his appearance stolen, and is used as a disguise to incapacitate Agent Fuji and infiltrate the SSSP base. Alien Zetton wearing Dr. Iwamoto's black business suit has also become somewhat of an iconic image from the series, and it is directly referenced in the 2019 ULTRAMAN manga by Edo, an Alien Zetton whose default outfit is a black suit and tie. (Whether or not this is the same Alien Zetton from the finale is never confirmed or denied.)

II. Extremely Cogent and Articulate Analysis (Trust Me)

The thing about Dr. Iwamoto is that he is an absolute nothingburger of a character. He has very few traits besides being a good scientist. I personally laugh every time I watch Science Patrol Into Space, because his "Impressive. I lost." line (more or less a direct translation) is more or less the only time in the entire series that he shows any personality.

But. But! The fans love him.

The proof that the fans love him is that, in the early 2000s, when a BBS for Akihiko Hirata fans ran a poll where visitors could vote for their favorite of his many roles, Dr. Iwamoto ranked within the top 5. There is also a small but respectable amount of fanart of Dr. Iwamoto out there (cute example). I'm going to go ahead and argue that Dr. Iwamoto is a fan favorite not because people like Dr. Iwamoto himself, but because people like Hirata. It was a great casting choice on Tsuburaya's part: almost every episode of the original Ultraman has a guest star who viewers would know from some tokusatsu movie or other, but having one of the Godzilla franchise's most recognizable actors stick it out throughout the entire series instead of just showing up for one guest appearance and never returning is, to put it plainly, fun. We love to see it. We've loved to see it for 60 years now.

III. Into The Weeds (And Also Into The Gotenyama Science Center)

Now, as I just said, within the main series, Dr. Iwamoto has no characterization whatsoever. We don't get to see anything at all of his life outside of Doin' Science. We don't even know his given name. The most personal detail about him that any Ultraman-related media has ever offered is that he is 40 years old. (To be fair, basically all of the characters from the original 1966 series have little to no backstory as well.) In this section, and what follows, I'm going to sum up what we do know about him based on canonical and extra-canonical sources, starting with his place of employment.

Dr. Iwamoto is the director of the fictional Gotenyama Science Center, staffed by many other scientists and their assistants, seen sporadically throughout the series. Gotenyama, for my readers unfamiliar with Japanese geography (I myself am also deeply unfamiliar with Japanese geography, so don't feel bad), is a hill located in Tokyo's Shinagawa ward. I'm gonna take a vague and extremely uninformed guess and say that the decision to place the Science Center in Gotenyama specifically might have had something to do with it being Sony's headquarters for many years beginning in 1947 - it could be that the area had an association with technology, development, etc due to Sony's presence. But, again, this is an uninformed guess.

You're damn right I'm using a Hokusai painting in my article about Dr. Iwamoto from the 1966 tokusatsu television series Ultraman.

The filming location for the fictional Gotenyama Science Center was the real-life Nagasawa Water Purification Plant, which you can see more pictures of here. Below is a picture of the site as it appeared in 2015. The plant served as a filming location for not just Ultraman '66 but many other tokusatsu shows as well, both within the Ultra series and without.

Dr. Iwamoto's status as director of the Science Center actually makes him the only human character who directly links Ultraman to its predecessor series Ultra Q, although the connection is, like much of our information about him, never stated within the original series. In the game Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol, Dr. Iwamoto is established as having taken over Dr. Ichinotani from Ultra Q's job after the latter retired due to injury.

While there is some post-series media that has looked at what happened after the events of Farewell Ultraman, to my knowledge, nothing has ever confirmed with any reasonable degree of canonicity (or even an unreasonable degree) what Dr. Iwamoto did after the end of the series. My personal headcanon is that he continued to be director of the Science Center until Hoshino came of age and then handed over the post to him. It's entirely made up, but I think Hoshino fanboying for Iwamoto's rocket in Science Patrol Into Space would make it fit nicely into series continuity.

IV. What Could Have Been

If you've watched the entirety of the original 1966 series, you'll notice that several episodes feature random scientists who show up for a scene or two, explain something, and are never seen again. Behind the scenes, every single one of these characters was actually written to be Dr. Iwamoto. This is one positive that arises from Iwamoto being such a paper-thin character: giving him a distinct personality would have made it impossible to sub in other actors last-minute. (But imagine if we'd had him in eleven episodes instead of six!)

I can think of no other way to illustrate this point than with a home-cooked meme. I apologize in advance for it.

From looking at changes made between early script drafts and finalized episodes, we can get a better idea of how Dr. Iwamoto developed into a character who was specifically associated with Hirata; I.E. it seems (operative word "seems", this is a theory) that if they couldn't get him in the studio that day, they just wrote in some other scientist instead, and if they did get him, they changed the role to be Dr. Iwamoto. Case in point: in Cry of the Mummy, there was originally a different guest scientist named "Dr. Shibata" who had what ended up being Dr. Iwamoto's role in the final version.

Even within the episodes that Dr. Iwamoto did appear in, there were changes made from the early scripts. For example, in Cry of the Mummy he initially had a more involved role in defeating Mummy Man, and it was going to be him instead of Arashi who uses the Spider Shot. We do in fact have a still from a deleted scene where Iwamoto and the team try to catch Mummy Man:

Dr. Iwamoto was also initially going to be a botanist, as per the script for Secret of the Miroganda; one assumes this was scrapped because a botanist would not be of as much use to the SSSP on a regular basis as just a generic scientist. It's worth mentioning as well that there is a whole host of unproduced scripts for episodes of the '66 series that never ended up being shot, any of which could, I guess, hypothetically have featured Iwamoto.

In terms of production background, and not just Dr. Iwamoto specifically, Hirata was slated to be involved in the series as far back as before it was even decided that Ultraman was going to be Ultraman (some early ideas for the series had the main protagonist imagined as a friendly, birdlike alien named Bemular who assisted the SSSP). Around this time Hirata was also considered for what ultimately ended up being Kenji Sahara's role on Ultra Q. I think we can draw a conclusion here that, as a young company making its foray into tokusatsu TV, Tsuburaya seems to have wanted Hirata in their series from a very early stage.

V. Appearances Outside of the Main Series

While Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol establishes pretty much the only backstory we ever get for Dr. Iwamoto, he does show up in a few other adaptations, spin-offs and other extraneous materials as well. I'm skipping over manga, having already covered it last year, but I'm still going to show you Yuzo Takada's Dr. Iwamoto again because, really, truly, if anything lives rent-free in my brain it is this.

Now, we've got some other video game adaptations to look at. As mentioned above, Dr. Iwamoto appears in Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol with some added lore, consulting on the process of defeating a kaiju that is original to the game...

...and he also appears in Super Tokusatsu Taisen 2001, a great big sprawling confusion of a game featuring many characters from across several different tokusatsu franchises. Interestingly, the game involves characters from Daitetsujin 17, including Hirata's Captain Gomes, which makes this probably the only time he's ever appeared in a video game twice. And yes there is crossover fanart (scroll to fourth panel.)

Iwamoto also appears very briefly in the PS2 Ultraman game via archival stills taken directly from the series. It seems like the whole storyline about Iwamoto being used to infiltrate the base is deleted from this part of the game; he shows up only to deliver the Pencil Bomb to the SSSP.

As a segue out of video games and into books, I'd like to take a moment to bring up Pat Cadigan's inclusion of Dr. Iwamoto in her novelization of the original series, because while I do of course appreciate that she wrote him into the book at all, she seems to be describing an entirely different guy. Throughout the book Dr. Iwamoto is written as being old - as in old old. This is a direct novelization of the original series, so there is no time-skip at play here; there's no reason why Dr. Iwamoto would not be the age he is in the series. One could almost get the feeling the author was talking about Dr. Ichinotani if he was not also described as being noticeably taller than Ide. It's weird, it really is. I don't know what's up with it.

Anyway, moving on to other novelizations, Dr. Iwamoto also appears in Tetsuo Kinjo's 1967 novelization of the series. Unfortunately, this novelization has somehow escaped English translation for going on 60 years now, so I know nothing about what his role within the novel is or if he gets any extra backstory besides what's given in the series. There's surprisingly little information about this book out there, and secondhand copies tend to be hard-to-find and expensive. (Maybe if we try hard enough, we can summon Dr. Jeffrey Angles with the power of our minds to help with the situation.)

Another category of Ultraman '66 tie-in media that has gotten surprisingly little English-language coverage is "choose your own adventure" books (referred to in Japanese as "game books"), of which there are two that I know about. Dr. Iwamoto is featured in both. In Shoot the Mysterious Meteorite Swarm!, published in 1986 (seen below), there are a whole bunch of scenarios that involve Iwamoto, including one where he (and several other people) get possessed by Alien Baltan. This game book also introduces a few original characters, such as Dr. Iwamoto's colleague Dr. Togawa and an agent named Natasha from the SSSP's Moscow branch.

I think it's nice that they gave him a friend :)

The second game book... okay, can you bear with me for a second?

The second Ultraman game book, 1987's Tokyo Rescue Mission, is set in the 1980s, and features all of the same characters as the 1966 series, including Dr. Iwamoto. The problem here is that the 1966 series actually does not take place in 1966; as implied by Jamila's gravestone seen in My Home Is Earth, the series is set in 1993. This would mean that Tokyo Rescue Mission actually takes place before the events of the 1966 series, and if we go by the assumption that Iwamoto is 40 as of 1993, it would also mean that he'd been working as a scientist for the SSSP since his late twenties.

Or - and this is more likely scenario - it implies that the people who wrote Tokyo Rescue Mission forgot or didn't know or didn't care that the series was supposed to be set in 1993. I prefer this explanation, because if we assume the original series all took place in the '60s and the game book takes place in the '80s, then that means Dr. Iwamoto had a nice long career with the SSSP, and provides some insight into what he was doing after Farewell Ultraman.

In any case, I also own a copy of Tokyo Rescue Mission, and I can tell you that Dr. Iwamoto does not have much to do in it at all. Unfortunately, this second game book does not have any fun illustrations like the first one, just a lot of blurry black-and-white stills like any good publication from the early days of home media.

VI. In Conclusion

There's no conclusion! Now we all go and watch Science Patrol Into Space for the 500th time! And we enjoy the fact that such talented, creative people came together to produce a show whose beautiful practical effects and message of hope and collaboration are ever-green!

Yoshiko Otowa's Full Discography

Rejoice!

No longer must you think to yourself "Damn, I really wish I knew who sang the B-side to Hana no inochi wa mijikai mono yo"! No more will you lament your ignorance as to who wrote the lyrics to Yoru no Akuma! You can, at any time you wish, find out the catalogue number for Igawa Ondo / Igawa Kouta!

Alright, maybe not so many people are curious about those things, but I'm quite happy to announce that I've compiled (what I believe to be) the first full* discography for Yoshiko Otowa, and it'll be a permanent fixture in the tabs bar at the top of my blog from now on. This is, as far as I know, the only list of its kind; no one website has a complete catalogue of every release she sang on. I've linked to YouTube recordings of all the songs that I could find, but some of these songs have never been uploaded to the internet. I own many of her records - and will buy more in the future - so I am actively working on uploading those missing tracks. 

Her singing career lasted from the early 1950s to the mid-late 1970s (it's a little foggy when exactly she stopped recording music), so if you've got any interest in Japanese pop music from any point within that period, it might be worth checking some of this stuff out.

*This is still somewhat of a work in progress; her work is so obscure that I will be continually updating this list if/when I find more.

portrait by author

Legend of the Irresponsible Hero II: 2 Irresponsible 2 Heroic

I greet you again today with news of new subtitles! I was not planning on making another post for Legend of the Irresponsible Hero (I already wrote one with less detail a few years back), but once I started subtitling the movie I found that there was, in fact, still enough to talk about to justify a new post.

We'll start with a little production history.

A Little Production History

Production on this one was touch-and-go. The film was originally slated for a March release, but during filming, in January of 1964, Hitoshi Ueki was hospitalized for about a month due to overwork. (Unsurprising; I'm not sure how all seven of these guys were not constantly either overworked or ending up with broken ankles from all their stunts). The film was eventually released in the middle of July on a double bill with Hiromichi Horikawa's Brand of Evil. 

According to Keiko Awaji's audio commentary, the Hong Kong location shooting was done at the same time as the shooting for the previous film Crazy Cats Go To Hong Kong. There is something kind of weird going on with some of the location footage, specifically the external location shots done in Macau; the bottom of the frame is occasionally blurry in some shots, and the film stock seems different. I'm wondering if post-production was especially rushed, because that's not the only film oddity here; a good number of the cuts in this movie are noticeably very messy and have visible artifacting along the bottom of the screen.

Example of blurry frame...

 

...and messy cut. And these are both from the HD remaster, which if anything makes the sloppy cut job even more obvious.

This was director Toshio Sugie's last time with the Cats, which is too bad; his entries in the series are some of the most outlandish and spectacular. Sugie had worked for Toho since its PCL days and was very versatile, contributing entries to many of Toho's big series: the President series, the Young Guy series, their lesser-known Rakugo Guy films, and the Crazy series, of course.

Music is a huge part of these Crazy Cats movies, obviously. The two people responsible for creating the film's soundtrack were Hiroaki Hagiwara (music) and Shigeru Tsukada (lyrics). Hagiwara was involved with Crazy Cats in some way or another even before the band was in its final form: he was initially a member of the band's predecessor Hajime Hana and the Cuban Cats, but left to focus on composing music. He continued to write for the band up to his death, including writing Hitoshi Ueki's big hit Suudara-bushi. In addition to that, though, he also wrote for other singers, one of whom just so happened to be Yoshiko Otowa, Akihiko Hirata's younger sister. Listen to Ramen Girl in Love here.¹

I think you should also know this about him:

In the waiting room at Hakodate Port, Hagiwara was reading the newspaper. Soon [Hitoshi] Ueki noticed a strange smell and took a closer look, seeing that Hagiwara's coat was touching the stove, and a faint wisp of smoke was rising from it. "[Y]ou should move a little further away," Ueki warned, but Hagiwara only gave a half-hearted reply and continued reading the newspaper. Soon the coat began to burn, so Ueki said, "Your coat is on fire," but Hagiwara replied, "I know," and continued reading the newspaper.

Fly Pan Am: International Distribution

Legend of the Irresponsible Hero opened at the Toho La Brea on September 23rd, 1966 under the title It's a Bet, and was shown as a double feature with Dark the Mountain Snow, a now-mostly-forgotten Hideko Takamine picture directed by Zenzō Matsuyama. Just a few weeks prior, the Toho La Brea had also shown Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay on a double-bill with Campus A-Go-Go. The movie continued to kick around until October and was then never shown theatrically again, as far as I can determine. I have not found any indication that the movie had any theatrical screenings outside of Japan and the United States.

Crazy Cats were not unknown outside of Japan at this time, but were certainly not a household name; places like Hawai'i and Los Angeles that had a large nisei and sansei population and theaters that showed Japanese films would have been familiar with them. In fact, 1966 could probably be considered the height of the Cats' international stardom, as they actually made a visit to Toho's Honolulu theater in July of that year.

Although this section is for international distribution, I do want to at least mention briefly that when the film was aired on television in Japan in 2019, previews introduced Hirata's character with the subtitle "The Man Who Killed Godzilla and Zetton".

...Zetton? Really? Zetton? I mean... technically, I guess?

Image credit @kortoku on Twitter

Don't Have A Macau, Man: Geographic Context and Gambling

As of 1964, Macau was still a Portuguese territory. Japan (surprisingly) did not occupy the island during the second World War aside from installing "government advisors", and it was actually the United States who were responsible for really the only direct military action that occurred during the war, when they bombed the island after learning that the colonial government had plans to sell fuel to Japan. Portugal relinquished control over Macau to China in 1974 as a "Portuguese territory under Chinese administration" and finally agreed to hand over the colony entirely by 1999.

(You will notice in the opening credits that the Hong Kong actors have "Cathay Organization" written in parentheses next to their names. That is these folks. I do not know if Cathay had any stake in the actual production of the film or if their involvement was limited strictly to providing actors.)

Now is the part of the post where I talk about gambling, which had been legal in Macau since the 1850s. This is skippable, since I don't think there's any part of the movie that will be completely ruined if you don't have context for the game that's being played, but I had to learn this, so dammit, now you do, too. Here's a quick run-down of all the games played in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

Sic Bo

Also known as "big and small", this is an uneven game of chance that essentially involves betting on the outcome of a dice roll. It's commonly played in casinos across Asia but has spread internationally. You can read more about it on its English Wikipedia page here. As one would expect, we only see Ueki's character win at sic bo, specifically with a triple match, which according to Wikipedia has a 215-to-1 chance of happening, and he does it twice.

Oicho-kabu

Ueda and Hanaki play a quick round of oicho-kabu in Hanaki's apartment in loving memory of Hanaki's mustache. You can read about oicho-kabu on Wikipedia here; it is from this game that we get the word "yakuza", but oddly enough the name of the game itself is derived from the Portuguese for "eight end" (oito cabo). Oicho-kabu can also be played with a hanafuda deck, which is mentioned in the film's theme song ("cherry blossom and moon over the mountain, plum and pine" are all hanafuda cards).

Mahjongg

You already know what mahjongg is.

In the cold open of Legend of the Irresponsible Hero, Ueda wins with a "Big Three Dragons" hand, which jisho.org defines as a "winning hand consisting of pungs or kongs of each of the three types of dragon tiles​". This means that Ueda held three-of-a-kinds (or four-of-a-kinds) of each of the three dragon "suits". To tell you the truth, I am never more miserable while subtitling a movie than I am when people are playing mahjongg. Fortunately, it doesn't show up in the movie any more after the opening.

Chō-han

You most likely also know what chō-han is if you've seen even one yakuza film, ever, at any point in your life. Incredibly simple: two dice go into a cup, the cup is shaken, players bet on whether the dice will be even (cho) or odd (han). And yet, the amount of onscreen bloodshed that has resulted from such a rudimentary game...

Ueda and Zhang play three rounds of cho-han against each other at the end of the film, although Zhang cheats... kind of? I don't think there's really any way to cheat at cho-han unless you play with loaded dice, since it's pure chance, but he does take advantage of his opponent's weakness. Read about chō-han on Wikipedia's very short and sweet page for it here.

Rōkyoku LARPing: Historical Background

A memorial stone erected by Torazo Hirozawa, originator of "Torazo-bushi" whom we met in our Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay / Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor post.

It is a relatively major recurring joke in Irresponsible Hero that Hanaki and Ueda think their situation is just like the famed "Brawl at Koujinyama", and they invoke the story as motivation and justification for their adventures in Macau (much to the chagrin of their long-suffering significant others). This is obviously familiar ground for Japanese viewers, but it is as obscure or even more so than much of the Shimizu Jirocho lore we discussed in our post about the same would be to non-Japanese viewers. (Actually, this IS Shimizu Jirocho lore, just a kind of side-story. The Shimizu Jirocho Cinematic Universe, if you will.)

The "Brawl at Koujinyama" refers to a turf war that took place on April 6th and 8th, 1866, at what is now the site of Koujinyama Kannon-ji temple in Suzuka City. It began as a dispute between two gamblers, Nagakichi of Kanbe and Annotoku (the nickname of Tokujiro Anou), the latter of whom was a local yakuza boss who had seized territory - including a gambling den, hence the relevance in Irresponsible Hero - as his own. The conflict escalated when Jirocho of Shimizu himself got involved after hearing of the death of his sworn brother Nikichi Kira. Jirocho supposedly raised 480 men against Annotoku's side; the battle ended in an apology and an eventual peace agreement, which was finalized in 1869. Among the combatants and serving as something of a mediator was Jirocho's man Omasa, played by Hirata in both Crazy Cats Shimizu films.

Nikichi Kira, who both Hanaki and Ueda seem to want to be, became sort of a folk hero after his death by gunshot wound(!) at the age of 28 during the battle at Koujinyama. Nagakichi of Kanbe, Chen Shumei's counterpart according to Hanaki, was an underling of Annotoku until his adopted son got into a fight and his house was set on fire by Annotoku's men. Nagakichi survived the conflict.

This battle, while historical, has been embellished over the years (as has Jirocho) through its telling by kōdan and rōkyoku performers. This kind of thing was experiencing a resurgence in the mid-1960s, which may explain both its inclusion in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero and the impetus behind the two Shimizu films.

"Have You Spotted Any Suckers?": Translation Notes

I actually do not have much else to say in the way of translation notes; much of the context I feel is necessary to fully understand the film's historical references has already been explained above. The only thing I really want to mention is that the long musical number in the middle of the film is sung in the format of a specific type of traditional counting song where the opening verse of each stanza begins with a number ("one", "two", etc; or in Japanese "hitotsu", "futatsu", etc) and then the verse that follows begins with the same kana as the initial number. I found that there was no way to make this work in English without compromising the translation itself, so I had to settle for using the same letter to begin the first two verses.

I guess I should also mention that I did not translate the Chinese dialogue directly at all; I translated it from the on-screen Japanese subtitles, which from experience are not always quite accurate, but, also from experience, it is an absolute fool's errand for a non-Chinese speaker (myself) to attempt to translate Chinese phonetically. (I did transcribe the English dialogue by ear as opposed to using the Japanese subtitles, because allegedly I do speak English.)

Now, in conclusion, I'm going to get a little weird for the ensuing several paragraphs. Bear with me here. I was a linguistics nerd before I was anything else.

Suzaku Gate / Suzakumon / 朱雀門 [1967]

Researching stage plays is always fascinating to me, but also frequently very frustrating because I'm never able to turn up as much visual evidence as I'd like to. If I'm lucky, I can find promotional pictures of the cast in costume, but pictures from the actual performance are pretty much nonexistent for most of the stuff we look at here. That is unfortunately the case with Suzakumon as well, but I was able to get my hands on a booklet which has a lot of really beautiful high-quality pictures; I've scanned the entire thing and you can take a look at it for yourself here.

So, I suppose an appropriate place to start would be asking the question "what is a 'suzakumon', exactly?"

The Suzaku Gate was, historically, the southernmost gate of the Imperial Palace in the three former Japanese capitals of Fujiwara-kyō, Heijo-kyō and Heian-kyō. The gate takes its name from the Vermillion Bird (suzaku), the Guardian of the South according to traditional Chinese astronomy. No historical suzakumon remain extant, but reconstructions have been built. That all suzakumon which presently exist today are modern reconstructions of ancient structures feels like a nice segue into our play, which is itself a reconstruction: a kabuki adaptation of a story written by a British man.

Suzakumon was based off of the play Kismet, written by American-born British playwright Edward Knoblock and first performed in 1911. After several hundred performances in England, the play was eventually brought to Broadway in 1953. Kismet has been adapted to film several times; four were based directly on the Knoblock play and one, released in 1955, was based off of the 1953 Broadway musical.

Only picture I've found of Hirata during an actual performance.

Obviously, Kismet enjoyed some popularity in Japan in the middle of the 20th century, but I am not sure that this popularity still remains today. Currently neither Knoblock nor his play nor any of the subsequent adaptations of it have Japanese Wikipedia pages. A search for the author and his work in Japanese does not even bring up any subjective results (I.E. reviews that indicate everyday people in Japan are reading and enjoying him with any regular frequency), just one or two DVDs for sale and film databases. To be fair, though, I'm not even sure Kismet is that popular with English-speaking audiences anymore, either.

However, this 1967 performance was not the first time Kismet had been staged in Japan. The Takarazuka Flower Troupe performed the play in August of 1955 as directed by Shirai Tetsuzou, and this was a direct adaptation; the play's original setting was preserved. According to the Takarazuka Revue's official website, this performance was notable for being the first use of wireless microphones in Japan.

Poster for the 1955 Takarazuka performance of Kismet, subtitled "unmei" ("fate")

In the section of my Teigeki pamphlet written by author Shinichiro Nakamura, he describes why he believes that the original Arabian Nights-ish setting of Kismet is so well-suited to adaptation into a Heian-period kabuki play, and draws comparisons between the two settings, even referring to Nara as "another Baghdad" and saying that the protagonist of Kismet could "step directly into the role of the protagonist of Suzakumon without creating any sense of unnaturalness[...]".

Another interesting detail about this play that we'll never be able to hear firsthand is its score, which, if it followed the example set by other kabuki plays being staged at the Teigeki in the 1960s, was Western-style. Suzakumon is considered "Shin Kabuki", which is a form of kabuki that incorporates Western ideas and dispenses with certain conventions of more traditional kabuki while still retaining its stylistic structure.

It would appear that the impetus for Toho's decision to adapt Kismet into a kabuki play in 1967 was due to the efforts of a single person; namely Toho's producer Iwao Mori, who was personally interested enough in the play to translate it into Japanese. But, while Toho describes nearly everything about the play as its own idea, its production was not solely domestic - Suzakumon was produced in cooperation with American Play Company.

According to the New York Public Library's archival page on company records in their collection:

The American Play Company was a New York theatrical agency which represented authors and rights-holders and assisted in the negotiation of theatrical and film licensing. The company originated in the 1880s, when Elisabeth Marbury became the protégée of Daniel Frohman and began representing authors and managing their various productions on Broadway, the national tour circuit, and regional amateur productions. She became the representative of Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Bernard Shaw, Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P.G. Wodehouse. She was also the sole representative of the French Society of Authors.

In 1914, Marbury merged with Selwyn and Company to form the American Play Company. By 1930, the company had also absorbed the De Mille company and the John Rumsey Company. The company continued producing and managing properties until the early 1960s, when it was purchased by Sheldon Abend.

Although the NYPL's holdings only go up to 1966, American Play Company continued to exist until last year (2025), when it was acquired by International Literary Properties. As of that time, it was owned by actor Michael Douglas, who had acquired the company in 1999.

I cannot determine how involved the American Play Company was with the production of Kismet and with Toho in general. It seems like Toho did the bulk of the work out of their own desire to stage the play, rather than APC approaching them with intent to collaborate, but then again 100% of my sources are Japanese; I would really like to be able to find a news story from an American source that mentions the play being staged in Japan, but no such thing seems to exist or be accessible to me. I would guess, from what I've read, that APC simply held the rights to the play and that Toho had to go through them to be able to stage it.

Nara's reconstructed suzakumon.

Suzakumon was produced in participation with the 22nd Agency of Cultural Affairs Arts Festival, which, as per the Agency of Cultural Affairs' website, is "an art festival held every fall with the aim of providing the general public with the opportunity to appreciate excellent works of art at home and abroad, and contributing to the improvement and promotion of our culture". Performances sponsored by the Agency of Cultural Affairs include kabuki, noh, bunraku, ballet, contemporary theater, and other forms of traditional Japanese song and dance, but awards are given also to things like television dramas, documentaries, and radio plays, so this is not exclusively a festival for traditional arts, although that does seem to have been a focus. The festival is held annually ("in principle", not sure what they mean by that) from October 1st to November 30th and is still going strong in its 80th year.

I will say that it is very difficult to find out anything about this specific play because most search results are either about actual, historical suzakumon or the 1957 Daiei film starring Raizō Ichikawa by the same name (which is just straight jidaigeki as far as I'm aware; no relation to this play).

Hirata plays Karimaro no Mononobe. He is a bad guy. I can say nothing else about Karimaro because the plot synopsis does not mention him other than to compare him to his "close associate", Muromaro no Yuge (Chusha Ishikawa), who the synopsis unkindly describes as "conflat[ing] public office with private gain and engag[ing] in rampant misrule". The lack of further information is disappointing, since the costume photo of him is so interesting (if jidaigeki is to be believed, the Heian period was notable for its cool hats):

The rest of the cast is a fairly even mixture of kabuki actors and contemporary stage actors. Likely the biggest name within the cast in terms of kabuki is the 8th Koshiro Matsumoto (also sometimes known as Hakuo Matsumoto I), but we also see people who we'd recognize from well outside of the kabuki world, like Mariko Miyagi, Mitsuko Kusabue and Mie Hama, the latter of which had not previously been in a stage play with a long continuous run-time such as Suzakumon. That Hama was a first-timer in this kind of performance makes it all the more disappointing that I can find no reviews of the play from the time.

The only real external reference to Suzakumon that I've found - outside of the pamphlet and a database of plays performed at the Teigeki - is a single mention of it by name in the November 1967 issue of Toho Films magazine, within a one-paragraph bio of Hirata (the magazine was doing these for a lot of their contracted actors around this time). It is literally a mention by name; I'm sure it was cited only because it was the most recent stage play he'd appeared in. (It's cited alongside Sangokushi, the other play he was in in 1967; mayhap we'll take a look at that eventually.)

The part I've blacked out is literally just his entire home address. I don't care if he's dead, I'm not doxxing him. (He lived in Setagaya, though.)

This specific play is a perfect example of why doing research into lesser-known Showa-era stage plays is both fulfilling and frustrating; it's fulfilling because I get to learn about things I've never heard of and I come away with it with a bunch of new questions, but it's frustrating because there's virtually no material directly related to the actual play I'm researching. The booklet is 100% my sole source of information, here. (Not that it's a bad source, but I want more pictures, more reviews.)

In any case, I hope this is interesting to you as a bit of an oddity if nothing else; perhaps you didn't know there was a kabuki adaptation of Kismet. I certainly didn't, but then I also did not even know what Kismet was when I started writing this post.

日蝕の夏 / Nisshoku no natsu / Summer in Eclipse [1956]

Release date: September 26th, 1956

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Shintaro Ishihara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mieko Takamine, Setsuko Wakayama, So Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake, Akihiko Hirata, Makoto Sato, Nadao Kirino, Noriko Sengoku et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings of a print that is noticeably degraded.

____

It's finally summer! Not right now, because I’m writing this way back in spring and putting it in the queue, but that's not important - let's celebrate the solstice with a summery-titled movie.¹

This movie brought to you by... canned peaches, I guess?

This film was adapted from an original work by its star, writer/actor/sucky politician Shintaro Ishihara, who we met briefly in our post about Toho's Youth School TV series. Ishihara is the brother of Yujiro Ishihara, himself quite a prolific actor who has shown up on the blog a few times, most notably in his mainstay role on the long-running detective drama Taiyo ni Hoero!. Shintaro Ishihara was enjoying quite a bit of success in 1956, with Eclipse being the fourth film released that year in which he had a leading role.

Adaptations of Ishihara's literary works were instrumental in the development of what are referred to as "Sun Tribe" films, which portray a kind of rebellious, youthful subculture closely associated with similar American movements such as rockabilly. (Eclipse is the only Sun Tribe movie in Hirata's vast filmography, due mostly to the fact that Toho was generally not putting these kinds of films out; it was usually Nikkatsu.) In addition to writing the original material, Ishihara also co-authored the screenplay with Toshiro Ide, who we've seen here a few times before as well.

Ishihara plays Naoki Mishima, who from plot synopses sounds like a generally disaffected youth, spending much of his time riding motorcycles and motorboating. He has an elder brother named Masaki (played by Hirata) who recently broke off an engagement to a woman named Taeko (Setsuko Wakayama). We later learn that the reason why the engagement was nullified was because Taeko was having an affair with Masaki's father Kozo (So Yamamura). This is only one of what sounds like quite a few joyless and ultimately futile romantic endeavors had by numerous characters, including the protagonist: starting off the film with a girl his age named Kyouko (Yoko Tsukasa), Naoki eventually begins a relationship with another woman, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), who is several years his senior.

While Ishihara was at the height of his popularity around this time, it doesn't seem like Eclipse is one of his more well-regarded films. Even the director, Hiromichi Horikawa, a purveyor of otherwise very solid films for Toho, regards this one as "a flop" (shippaisaku). Funnily enough, I also encountered an interview with Nobuyoshi Ishihara, Shintaro's fourth son, in which the interviewer brings up a poster for Eclipse hanging in Nobuyoshi's studio; his response was to say, basically, "Yeah that movie was fine but did you hear about the one he did with Francois Truffaut?"

This is a tie-in poster promoting Suzuki's "Colleda" motorcycle model, which featured heavily in the film. (Reminiscent of the Godzilla posters that want to make sure you remember Ogata rides a Cabton.)

Try as I might (and buddy I am trying) I cannot turn up any pictures of Hirata from the film. Reviews that I've read describe his character as "calculating/scheming" which would seem to imply he does have some kind of role in the overall plot, but evidently it was not a big enough role to get him featured on any posters nor even have a little portrait of him in press sheets, the way Toho often did. Here are some weirdly high-quality stills from the film; none feature our man, but I want access to whatever OP's source was for these. I am very curious about this role because I cannot imagine how a character could be described as "scheming" while also having his fiancée end up leaving him for his dad. What exactly is Masaki scheming? A way to win his fiancée back from his dad?

Screenings of the film seem incredibly sparse and reviewers have noted that the print does not look good. This person writes a travelogue featuring a poster for the movie displayed in the city of Ome, which seems to be a smallish place known as a nice respite for those looking to get away from the general Tokyo-ness of Tokyo. Laputa Asagaya has, of course, shown the film at least once.

Thanks to the attention given to the Sun Tribe movement by film scholars studying Japanese cinema, Eclipse has been cited in multiple research papers. None that I've seen, however, go in-depth on the film's actual content; it is simply mentioned as part of a list of Sun Tribe films produced around this period that demonstrate the same kind of boundary-pushing sensibilities as all of their ilk. The majority of these papers have been in English (I assume there are some in Japanese as well, but have not found any) save for one in Italian and one in French.

Outside of Japan, the film made its way to Hawaiian theaters in late 1957 under the unusual but poetic title The Summer the Sun Was Lost. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin advertised the film as "a tense drama of modern Japan". Thanks to the Hawaii Hochi, we have - blessedly, gloriously - an actual English-language review of the film, written by your friend and mine Max Morinaga. I will quote it here in its entirety.

A film which I saw recently and which I found to be oddly entertaining was titled "The Summer The Sun Was Lost".

Shintaro Ishihara, one of present-day Japan's most popular authors, was the star of the film. As an actor, he ain't much. But as I understand it, his novels about juvenile delinquents and teenage sinners are sold by the hundreds of thousands!

"The Summer The Sun Was Lost" didn't do so well at the box office of the Kapahulu, where it was shown last week, but it did a terrific big business in Japan.

One of the high spots of this picture was the scene showing sweet-faced Yoko Tsukasa indulging in some mighty passionate kissing with Shintaro in the semi-darkness of a private garage.

Shintaro is mighty disillusioned when he discovers that his sweet-faced girl has had numerous affairs with numerous boys, and he is also disgusted with his parents when he learns that his father has a mistress and his gentle and gracious mother has a lover!

Shintaro himself indulges in an affair with a middle-aged woman (Mieko Takamine) who still looks mighty good in a bathing suit!

On that note, I think I've given about all the information about this surprisingly obscure film that I can. Considering that its Sun Tribe contemporaries are much better preserved, it's disappointing that this one only seems to live on in dingy prints and no home media release. One can always hope it'll get some kind of digitization before the print degrades past watchability, if it hasn't done so already.

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1 I am not allowed to write about Summer Farewell [Natsu no Wakare].

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 Outré 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.

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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".