お笑い三人組 / Owaraisan'ningumi / Comedy Trio (1956-1966)

Alright, I'm fully aware this is going off on a little bit of a tangent, but it is still technically part of the purpose of this blog (bringing information related to Akihiko Hirata into a more accessible format to English-speaking fans), so... y'all wanna see his younger sister?

Yoshiko Otowa (born Kazuko Onoda, later took the surname Kume when she married NHK director Shoji Kume) was a singer and actress, born July 6, 1932. I'm not certain if she's still alive; her Wikipedia page simply says that "apparently" she's retired from the entertainment industry, so if she's still out there, she's probably living a quiet life well away from the spotlight.

We're going to look at what is probably her most famous role, which was as a regular cast member on the widely-beloved, long-running live comedy show Comedy Trio [Owaraisan'ningumi], broadcast on NHK between 1956 and 1966. As the title implies, the focus of the show is a group of three comedians: rakugo performer Sanyutei Koganba (later Kokinba), storyteller Teiho Ichiryusei, and impersonator Nekohachi Edoya. Before it became a television series it was also a radio show from 1955 to 1960. The television show ran for ten years and a massive amount of episodes were produced, but I'm not sure how much of it Otowa was in, since I've seen some posters for the series that don't have her name on them. Once she did join the show, though, she was fairly central to the cast. The series was quite popular, with very high viewer ratings, and was eventually made into a manga, with menko cards of the three goofballs available as well.

She's second from the right in this cast photo.

The three comedians were close friends to begin with, and when NHK was looking to round out their comedy offerings, writer Seiro Nawa created a radio show featuring the three of them in 1955. In the following year, it was turned into a television series. The setting of the show changed from time to time, and at one point it was even a period piece taking place in the Edo era, but this became unpopular and the setting changed back shortly. Roles changed as well; the three comedians had different jobs and their three female co-stars' relationships to them shifted (sometimes sisters, sometimes wives).

Unfortunately, the series is essentially lost media. Out of hundreds of episodes that were broadcast live, only four survive; DVDs with three of the episodes can be obtained for a decent chunk of change, and the fourth - which resurfaced in 2020 - is floating around on YouTube. You can watch it below, at least for now. NHK doesn't seem to like it being there, and a separate upload of the same episode was already taken down once. Otowa's character is named Kaoru and I don't think it's terribly difficult to pick out who she is.

Before NHK zapped it, the second upload of that episode had several million views and a comment section that was full of nostalgia. It's all gone now, but here are some of the comments:

"@masaseto8507

I used to watch this video more than 50 years ago ... . It was the time when TV was exploding .... I miss those days .... It was a great fun show back then． I am very happy to see it again ...."

"@genpome4587

It was my favorite show that still stays in my heart. It was 50 years ago.

Thank you for uploading the precious footage."

Also, the lone English commenter said Otowa looks like Mary Tyler Moore. I guess I vaguely see it.

Three Comedy Trio feature films were produced, one by Nikkatsu and two by Shintoho. There are two trailers extant on YouTube, for two separate films, and they have several million views between the two of them. I think it's pretty safe to say that memories of this show run deep.

Another snippet from the show can be found on NHK's website here.

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice a familiar surname in the above trailer: two of the Comedy Trio feature films were directed (and one written) by Yoshiki Onoda, the eldest of the three Onoda siblings. Due to having been a Toho contracted actor for a long time, Hirata didn't make it into any of his brother's films save for one up until the late 1970s, at which point the five-studio agreement had collapsed, Shintoho had also collapsed, Onoda was working in television, Hirata was not contracted anymore, and everybody was free to do whatever they wanted. Otowa did not appear in anything whatsoever with Hirata.

Here Otowa is third from left in the group in the back of the poster.

Just for fun, also, here's an extremely grainy and washed-out photo of Yoshiko Otowa with a bunch of other people including Enoken. She's fourth from the right.

I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I'll be keeping an ear to the ground in case any more episodes are discovered, and I will probably get my hands on that DVD at some point, but it is very expensive for some reason. The amount of episodes that were aired compared to the four that have survived is a real shame. I greatly enjoyed the episode I did watch, even if I could barely follow the plot, and I would love to see more; it seems like a real hoot. 

In addition to this, I do happen to have a movie that Otowa had a very brief role in available on my archive.org page.

伊津子とその母 / Itsuko to sono haha / Itsuko and Her Mother (1954)

Release date: February 17, 1954

Director: Seiji Maruyama (adapted from a story by Shigeko Yuki)

Studio: Toho

Cast: Yaeko Mizutani, Ineko Arima, Rentarō Mikuni, Nobuo Kaneko, Akihiko Hirata, Kyoko Koyama et al.

Availability: No known DVD or VHS release; no internet availability; no known recent screenings. 

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We're going pre-Godzilla for our first post, looking at a film that I haven't seen and probably never will.

Itsuko and Her Mother was directed by Seiji Maruyama, who, to me, is a director synonymous with war movies. In actuality, however, it just happens that those of his works that have been subtitled and have any kind of name recognition outside of Japan are war movies; Maruyama didn't direct his first war film until 1964 with Retreat from Kiska. Prior to that, he seems to have just done whatever films were assigned to him.

The script for this film was written by prolific writer Toshirō Ide (we'll be seeing him frequently here) and adapted from a story by Shigeko Yuki called Haha no Shakaika, which translates roughly to "A Mother's Social Studies". This source material seems to be vanishingly obscure as it isn't even mentioned on Yuki's Wikipedia page. The film was produced, as most things were, by Tomoyuki Tanaka.

Although this film is so little-known that no one has even reviewed it on Kinenote, we do have a plot summary, which I'll give you the CliffsNotes version of: The main character Itsuko (Ineko Arima) lives with her mother Nobuko (Yaeko Mizutani). Both of them run a business renting out rooms and they also work at a bookstore on the side, but the bookstore is on the verge of failure and hasn't made any money in months. When Itsuko receives a marriage proposal from a young man who works at a brewing company in Nagoya, her mother picks that moment to tell Itsuko that she is not her biological daughter. While this is a huge blow to Itsuko at first, she realizes that the love they have for each other outweighs their lack of biological ties. Much of the plot revolves around Itsuko's mother trying to find a good marriage partner for her, but at least one of these potential suitors, Funahashi (Nobuo Kaneko), leaves her after finding out that Itsuko was the product of an affair. Another young man named Sugi (Rentarō Mikuni) who had been in the background for a while becomes the most appealing marriage prospect after this incident, but Itsuko is at first too torn up over the loss of Funahashi to accept his proposals, although she does care for him. The synopsis does not spoil the end of the film, but implies that Nobuko arranges her daughter's marriage to Sugi.

Ineko Arima and Rentarō Mikuni

Okay, okay. But where is Akihiko Hirata in all this. Well, we'll see later on in the post, but the only information I have about his role is that he was one of the men who rejected Itsuko. His role must have been very brief as he is not even mentioned in the synopsis.

One of the only other sources of pictorial information we have for this film is a pamphlet for its double-bill release with another film called Wakai hitomi ("Young Eyes").

(verso: Young Eyes; recto: Itsuko and Her Mother.)

Here is an advertising spread for this movie and several others. The right-hand side shows a film called Mother's Diary, and Young Eyes below it. On the left-hand side we have not just one but three movies Hirata had a role in! Farewell Rabaul at the top, and Tonight for One Night and Itsuko and Her Mother on the bottom.

Now for the entire reason why I wanted to post about this movie.

In trying to find more information, I dug up a few articles in Hawaiian newspapers from 1955. It would appear that this film screened at the Toyo Theater in Honolulu. The first article talks about the film after it's been released and issues some corrections to the previous article, which came out three days before.

From the date range of papers that ads for the film were featured in, I can deduce that it was shown in Hawaii from roughly early July to late August, 1955. Although Godzilla did have a limited theatrical run in Hawaii before it was recut into Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and released more widely, this happened in October, a few months after Itsuko and Her Mother. Additionally, the first film in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy got its U.S. release in November of 1955. So this makes Itsuko and Her Mother, as far as I can figure, the first of Hirata's films to get U.S. distribution. I'm virtually certain that the above clippings are the first time his name appeared in an English-language publication. (I went through Hawaii Times issues from the one above back to February 1953 just to be sure, which was honestly not the world's most exciting task.)

And here's something even more interesting: the film expanded to multiple theaters, not just the Toyo. I have records of it running at the Palace Theater in Hilo (a beautiful movie house that is still in operation today) through August.

Plausibly - not probably, but plausibly - there could have been people in the audience watching Godzilla for the very first time and thinking "Hey, it's that guy from the thing with Ineko Arima that we just watched."