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 for other English-speaking fans like me, so you don't have to go to like ten different websites and translate Google search results), so... y'all wanna see his younger sister?
Yoshiko Otowa (born 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 just 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. Information about her is fairly scanty, but it seems that she made regular appearances on a widely-beloved comedy show called Owaraisan'ningumi. I just found out about it this morning, so I don't know much, but it was a live, 30-minute comedy series broadcast on NHK between 1956 and 1966. A massive amount of episodes were produced, and as the title implies, the main cast is a group of three comedians: rakugo performer Sanyutei Koganba, storyteller Teiho Ichiryusai, and impersonator Nekohachi Edoya. Before it became a television series it was also a radio broadcast from 1955 to 1960.
It seems that this is all but lost media. Only a small handful of episodes survive. A DVD with three of them was released in the 1990s, and in 2020, a fourth episode was discovered.
Here is one of them. This appears to be the only full episode on YouTube. Otowa plays a character named Kaoru. It isn't difficult at all to figure out which one she is, but I was surprised at how tall she was when I watched this for the first time!
This video has 1.7 million views, and here's just a sampling of the nostalgia-filled 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."
I also really appreciate the lone English commenter who says Yoshiko Otowa looks like Mary Tyler Moore. I guess I vaguely see it.
Here, also, is a trailer for one of several (I think) Owaraisan'ningumi movies. 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.
Older Japanese comedy seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of jokes about part-time jobs.
Another snippet from the show can be found on NHK's website here.
I wasn't going to include the trailer, since it's just a trailer, but then I noticed who directed (and wrote) it: Yoshiki Onoda! All film adaptations of the series appear to have been produced by Shintoho, the studio Onoda was working for at the time. It's too bad Hirata could not have been in any of them since Toho had him in their clutches. He would, however, make it into Shintoho's Hitokui Ama in 1958, which I may make a post about at some point, as well as one episode of the 1972 Kogarashi Monjiro TV series that Onoda directed - an episode which happened to air on his birthday. (We are big on random trivia here.)
I have seen three of Yoshiki Onoda's films (Female Slave Ship, The Flower Flute Murders, and Samurai Justice 2: Mother and Daughter) and they're perfectly serviceable.
I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I'm a die-hard lost media lover, and now that I'm aware of Owaraisan'ningumi, I'll be keeping an ear to the ground in case any more episodes are discovered. 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.
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