大日本スリ集団 / Dai Nippon suri shūdan / The Great Japanese Pick-pocket Club (1969)

Release date: November 22, 1969

Director: Jun Fukuda

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Norihei Miki, Wakako Sakai, Noriko Takahashi, Minori Terada, Kunie Tanaka, Daigo Kusano, Hideo Sunazuka, Akihiko Hirata et al

Availability: Streaming and available on DVD from amazon.co.jp.

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Jun Fukuda is a director who really does not get enough appreciation outside of his Godzilla films (which he was notoriously hard on himself about). I was looking forward to watching this one because the cast is pretty much entirely actors who I'm a fan of - in fact, I had copy/pasted a list of cast members that I found online into this post, but once I actually started watching the movie, I had to amend the list, because it turns out there were even more actors I'm a fan of in it than what I read online.

Also, in the time between when I got this DVD in the mail this morning and when I'm writing now, late at night, I found out Minori Terada had died. So this one goes out to him. Seeing him in Ultraman Blazar was really unexpected and it was a damn good final role. RIP. Everybody go watch The Human Bullet.

No subs for this one. I shall use all of my brainpower to attempt to grok the plot.

Funakoshi (Kobayashi) and Hiradaira (Miki) are old pals who served in the army together, but one of them is now a pickpocket and the other is a detective who hates pickpockets. Hiradaira calls Funakoshi "danna" (sort of a "my lord"/"sir"-type form of address) and Funakoshi calls Hiradaira "Hira-yan" ("-yan" is, from what I understand, a familiar/informal suffix), which tells you a lot about the dynamic between the two.

Hiradaira has a pickpocketing ring that employs many goons, two of which are played by Hideo Sunazuka and Akihiko Hirata. Hirata's character is called "France" for reasons I cannot determine. The pickpocketing ring also has newer members, lower in hierarchy, who are subjected to harsh training, like dipping their fingers into boiling water to condition them into having faster reflexes. 

pictured: goons

Funakoshi, meanwhile, is working out a plan with his fellow cops to take down the pickpocketing group. We learn through a brief flashback that his grudge against pickpockets stems from childhood. Funakoshi also has a daughter, Akiko (Wakako Sakai), who seems friendly with Kunie Tanaka's character (a coworker of Funakoshi). Hiradaira has three children as well: two under 10 and an older son from a previous marriage named Heiichiro, who is played by Minori Terada.

google translate is incredibly insistent on calling him "agriculture terada"

Hiradaira's group doesn't exactly operate in the dark; France and his other fellow pickpockets hang out at his house with his wife (played by a very beautiful Noriko Takahashi), who is also in on it, and entertain Funakoshi during a get-together for war veterans. France does card tricks (and steals wallets) and Hiradaira's wife does a burlesque-type dance; very Fukuda.

actually kind of a proto-mr. k outfit going on here

At the get-together, Funakoshi asks Hiradaira to pickpocket something from Akiko as he's concerned about her. Hiradaira steals a letter out of her purse that turns out to be a marriage certificate. Akiko is involved with a man named Shiroyama who has a wife and children. I'm not clear on context - is she attempting to marry him? Attempting to break up his marriage? Funakoshi doesn't approach his daughter about this directly, which in my opinion is his first and biggest mistake. 

Funakoshi eventually tails France into a pachinko parlor and actually manages to cuff him, but he escapes. After a genuinely exciting pursuit France ends up accidentally hit by a car. Hiradaira is now down his best goon, but up one motive for revenge.

(Even France's wife never refers to him as anything but "France", which is... strange. Imagine an arty, highbrow American mafia movie where the widow of a mafioso continues referring to her dead husband as "Frenchy" even during dramatic moments. That's how this feels.)

Anyway, Hiradaira exacts revenge by telling Akiko about how her father asked him to steal the marriage papers. Akiko runs away from home because of this - we don't see it directly, but Funakoshi confronts Hiradaira with a letter Akiko wrote to say she was leaving. The two of them hash it out physically, Funakoshi angry about his daughter and Hiradaira angry about France's death. I really like the awkward length of their fight scene, and the way it's capped off with a shot of Akiko's letters drifting off in the breeze, as if to say the reason for the fight was unimportant and that at that point they were just fighting for fighting's sake.

Funakoshi ramps up the crackdown on his former friend's pickpocketing ring, and Hiradaira ramps up his pickpocketing operations, enlisting a pool of underlings to steal wallets during a parade and making off with loads of cash. Both Akiko and Heiichiro return home, but Akiko tells Funakoshi that she's not there to stay. She leaves, and writes Funakoshi another letter saying that she's going to Brazil. Funakoshi, meanwhile, has retaliated against Hiradaira by calling the boss of his son's gang and telling him Heiichiro has betrayed them. As per yakuza rule, this means Heiichiro has to cut off one of his fingers.

The film basically ends when Hiradaira storms Funakoshi's office and is in such a state of rage over his son's fate that he has a stroke. It's an abrupt ending that sounds comical on paper, but - like most things in this movie - really just doesn't register as funny. Funakoshi later catches Hiradaira on the street trying to steal somebody's wallet even in his enfeebled condition, and Hiradaira begs him to arrest him, but Funakoshi agrees to place him in a nursing home instead.

hey Tora-san fans, look who it is!

Odd movie! Odd vibes! Going in, I expected one of Jun Fukuda's typical outlandish comedies, and while the vibrant cinematography and '60s culture was still present, the humor was not. To me, the storyline just felt mean: these two men are in such a deep feud with each other that it spills over into their personal lives, and they both essentially ruin each other's families. There's also a weird undercurrent of overly controlling fatherhood here - like, "oh, yeah, you told my daughter I was sneaking around and eavesdropping on her private life, but you're the one at fault for telling her, not me for doing it." As I understand it, this was adapted from a novel and co-directed by Jo Aizawa, which may account for the watering-down of Fukuda's usual directorial style. It is good, but not what I expected, and also difficult to understand the nuances of if you're not following the dialogue 100%, which I wasn't.

So if you're watching this one I'd highly recommend not going in expecting a comedy and instead readying yourself for a complicated drama about two people who used to be friends tearing each other's lives apart. It's not bleak or anything, but there's really no humor at all. Hirata looks sharp as hell, though, and does card tricks, so, you know, worth admission.

キネマ旬報 1979年10月下旬号 / Kinema Junpo, Late October 1979 Issue

I won this on Yahoo! Auctions, although I don't think "won" is the right word to use, considering that literally no one but me bid on it. 

Anyway, if kinenote.com is to be believed, this is the only article Kinejun has run that is entirely about Akihiko Hirata, not just a movie he was in. The occasion appears to have been a re-release of many major Godzilla films and other Toho tokusatsu works that year (which was the 25th anniversary of the first Godzilla film.)

I'm not sure if this has ever been uploaded online, either as scans or just the text, so I'm including both the original in Japanese and a machine translation which I have typed up and made more readable by fixing pronouns, sentence structure, you know, the kind of stuff that gets garbled in machine translations. I've been over it a couple of times, and it's still not very good, but it's something. The photographer is credited as Koji Nishikawa, who I'm assuming also did the interviewing and wrote the article.

Visualize me cringing while trying very hard not to break the spine by putting this in my scanner...

Okay, here we go. The article seems to be formatted like an essay interspersed with interview quotes from Hirata, which I've put in quotation marks or after en-dashes. When a film title is mentioned, I've given the international title in brackets. Notes are at the bottom of the post.

It's... it's really nice.

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The film opens. The familiar music by Akira Ifukube begins to play. The Toho logo appears. The names of the staff, including producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, are listed. The names of the actors follow, and finally director Ishirō Honda appears. All the while, loud applause rings out intermittently throughout the theater. This is the scene at the Nichigeki Theater, where Toho's best special effects films were shown all at once, under the title "Godzilla Movie Collection [All August]". 

The last screening, which featured older films, was particularly lively. The audience was a diverse bunch, from elementary and middle school students to the kind of old men you might see at a film center, to young housewives with small children. They all gave generous applause to the screen. They clapped when the spaceship came out, and clapped again when the robot appeared. The children joined in, clapping. They seemed at first to be clapping without knowing what was going on, but they did know what was going on, shouting things like "Moguera will show up soon!" Kids these days study even old films as well.

I myself was moved to tears by the aerial combat scene in Battle in Outer Space, which I saw again for the first time in a long time. The excitement of seeing rocket fighter planes modeled after the experimental X155 aircraft of the time take off from the pages of boys' manga and fantasy drawings and engage in actual battles in out space on the screen is indescribable. Moreover, this is merely a dream imagined by the Japanese, which is why it is far more exciting than something like Star Wars. I could go on and on about this, so I'll stop here.

The actor who received the most applause at the "Godzilla Movie Collection" at the Nichigeki was Akihiko Hirata.

 - "That's what I heard. I got a letter from a fan saying 'Hirata was a [great actor]'. I was puzzled, thinking that was a strange thing to do. [laughs]"

Hirata appeared in 7 of the 15 Godzilla films alone. Including other works, he has appeared in about 30 Toho special effects films. [I asked] "Have you seen the overseas version of Godzilla?"

- "Yes, I have. I was surprised to hear that I speak good English [laughs]. During the peak of Godzilla movies, I received a lot of fan mail from America and Southeast Asia."

Recently, he says he has been receiving fan mail and doujinshi from all over the country. There are also countless magazines featuring Godzilla movies on racks. When I showed one to Hirata, he said, "Oh, that brings back memories, a [...]¹monster movie... the black-and-white, documentary-like feel is very powerful. I think the first Godzilla is the best. Godzilla's personality and appearance changed after it was in color." 

"When we were filming, we didn't know what we were doing, but now it feels like a classic. The filmmakers didn't know what they were doing, so they probably had three newcomers to it. The special effects scenes were done after the main story was almost finished, so it was even more confusing for us. Godzilla appeared, but when they told me to look at him, I didn't know where to look [laughs]." 

"The thing I found difficult was the stop-motion animation of the [models]. [They] shot the Godzilla [model] by moving it little by little. The doll was about 1 meter (3 feet) tall".

I had never heard that stop-motion animation² was used in Godzilla. [I ask] if a new Godzilla movie were made, would you like to appear in it again?

 - "I'd like to appear in it again. But I'd like to see one that isn't made for children."

Hirata has played many roles as genius scientists, staring with Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla. In the latest film in the series, [his character, Shinzo Mafune] even won a Nobel Prize.

  - "I'm actually not good at science," he says with a wry smile.

In war movies, he plays an officer. In Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, he wears an eyepatch like Dr. Serizawa and plays a one-eyed soldier. This kind of thing really suits him.

  - "There are a lot of them, aren't there? Is that right? I wonder. I still remember something that Yoshikata Yoda told me before. He said 'there are no actors who can play ordinary people'. I thought I could do anything, but I ended up playing a lot of serious roles."

That's because, when you hear Hirata's background, he's quite far from an ordinary person. Born in Gyeongseong, Korea³ in 1927, he returned to Japan before he even knew it. He received a strict, Spartan education and entered the Tokyo Army Cadet School.

  - "I had no intention of becoming a soldier at all. When I was a child, I admired Beethoven⁴, and I wanted to be a composer. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to go to Tokyo University and become a businessman. My older brother tried to get into military school and failed both times. Yes, it's difficult after all. Then, a distant relative was an army general, so someone had to become a soldier, and I was chosen. I applied, reluctantly, and I got in..."

His older brother is Yoshiki Onoda, a director currently active in TV after working for Shintoho. After graduating from military school, Hirata went on to the Army Academy just before the end of the war. There was a plan to move the Imperial Headquarters into the mountains of Nagano in preparation for the mainland battle, and he was training at the foot of Mt. Asama as a guard [as] he was an elite soldier.⁵ [I ask] "So, when the war ended..."

 - "Well, that was a blank period. Of course, I thought I would die before the war ended."

He returned home in a daze. After graduating from First High School and the law department of the University of Tokyo, he joined [Tokyo Boeki] (later Mitsubishi). He said that he never wanted to serve a government official again, so he joined a private company.

 - "I was pure-bred in the military, isolated from the outside world, and was only taught to die for the country and the emperor, so I didn't know anything. It's a strange story, but I didn't know anything about sex. I guess this goes on tape... I didn't even know what a wet dream was[...]⁶"

In reaction to that lifestyle, after entering the University of Tokyo, he didn't study much, but instead devoted himself to theater and dance. He made his debut at the May Festival, and was called a hammy actor.⁷ At first, he was quite calm, thinking that this was just how it was. His house was used as a dormitory for Shintoho staff and actors, so he started to associate with people in the film industry, and while he was a student, he worked part-time as an assistant director. His first film was Lynching, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, in which Yoshiko Kuga appeared alongside Ryō Ikebe. Kuga is now Hirata's wife.

 - "She's short, so when she talked to Ryō, I put her on a platform. I had to hold the platform as hard as I could, it's so ridiculous [laughs]. I remember that, but she doesn't remember it at all."

[I ask him] how they met.

 - "We worked together on Hiroshi Inagaki's Siege of Osaka Castle. We went to Gotemba for filming, and the weather was so bad it was extended by about 10 days. During that time, we played mahjongg to kill time, and we became friends, and that was it."

Hirata is a former army alumnus from Tokyo University. Kuga is the daughter of a former duke. It's a dramatic setting that reminds me of Gone With the Wind, in which Hirata played Ashley...

 - "That's not true. He was a poor duke, and since the aristocracy was abolished, his title is worthless. When we're at home, we're always wearing rags. I say "you should behave a little better, you're being disrespectful to your husband." When people come over, we get in trouble and panic. We're like a beggar couple [laughs]."

When they're at home, they just sit around doing nothing. Hirata is reading a book in silence. His wife is talking to herself. "I see, I see," Hirata nods nonchalantly.

They're happy. Their wedding anniversary is - "October 9, 1961," she answers immediately. They go outside to take a photo. Hirata's figure, with his back straight and his slow strides, would look like a scene from a movie if he were in a military uniform.

 - "I can't get rid of old habits..."

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1 The word here translates literally to "waterfall", so I'm assuming it's being used metaphorically, but I'm not sure what it means in this context.

2 In the original text this is referred to in kana as "dynamation".

3 Known as Keijo at the time, this is now in Seoul.

4 Same birthday.

5 I mean, he wasn't quite 18 when the war ended, but okay.

6 I'm not gonna be the one to translate the rest of this sentence for the first time ever. It's not weird or anything, but... yeah, no.

7 So the original word used here was "daikon", like the radish, which is kind of a colloquial term to refer to a ham actor.

ぴったしカンカン / Pittashi Kan-Kan / Perfect Kan-Kan episode #245 (1980)

"Perfect Kan-Kan" is one of those television shows where, when I research it, I find scores of people saying things like "I remember watching this! I loved this show!", but few, if any, actual full episodes are preserved. Such is the case for Akihiko Hirata's tenure on the show, which as far as I can tell would be in the dustbin of history if it were not for Hibari Misora.

Starting in 1975, Hirata appeared as a regular on this game show, the specifics of which are obtuse and not helped any by machine translation. From what I understand, the concept is that a team of four "regular people" are pitted against a team of celebrities (hosted by Konto 55's Jiro Sakagami for a while) to answer trivia questions in front of a live audience. There's a couple of episodes on YouTube (mostly from the late '80s), but none with Hirata on the team - except for one. This survives only because Hibari Misora personally owned a VHS recording of it. The studio lost the master tape, so they had to use her copy for a re-broadcast in 2009.

Here's the whole damn thing. I'd embed the video, but the uploader disabled embedding.

[The whole damn thing]

Now, I do understand a little Japanese, but Japanese game shows are on another level. I was missing 90% of this. Misora is, obviously, a guest, and most if not all of the trivia questions appear to be about her. The two I understood seemed to be something like "what did she get for a present" (Hirata answers "a letter" and then "a kiss"[!], the correct answer was "a ring") and one about her favorite food (I believe Hirata guesses sashimi, but the correct answer was ochazuke [green tea over rice]). 

I wasn't happy with not knowing what everyone says before they introduce themselves, so I tried to translate YouTube's auto-generated Japanese subtitles into English, and it's probably a dumpster fire, but take it anyway, I spent an hour of my life on it:

Jiro Sakagami: "People often say 'Jiro-san is really dark-skinned, it must be that he gets tanned while in the sea', but really I got tanned while weeding. After all, I have a 20,000 tsubo garden." [This would be approximately 66,000 square meters, or 710,418 square feet]

Akihiko Hirata: [The subtitles absolutely hate this part but I think it's something to the effect of not having time to tan because he has to read 20,000 books this summer]

Maria Asahina: "Jiro-san told me 'Maria, you've lost weight'. Of course, I lost 20,000 kilo this summer."

Shunji Fujimura: "People say that Fujimura has a strange look on his face, and that's no wonder, I was born 20,000 years ago."

Everybody is making some kind of pun around the word "ni man" (20,000) that I can't even begin to decipher. The auto-generated subs also kept thinking people were saying "nasu" [eggplant] instead of "natsu" [summer] which was causing some trouble.

The only other pictorial evidence I found of any of Hirata's appearances on the show was a Japanese Soundcloud rapper who used a still from an episode as cover art. Writing for this blog really leads me to some strange places sometimes. (The track is, admittedly, fire.)

This episode was the first time I'd ever seen him not playing a character. Of course there are interviews with him in text form that are not difficult to find, but I don't think there's exactly a huge corpus of out-of-character appearances on video out there, so this was pretty cool. Thanks, Hibari Misora, and whoever else was holding onto that tape for 29 years.

The 2nd Annual Japanese Academy Awards / 第2回 日本アカデミー賞特集 (1979)

The Academy Awards were held recently, both here in the US and in Japan, and in the US it's been a notable one, since Godzilla Minus One became the first Godzilla movie to win an Oscar. So as long as we're all currently thinking about the Academy Awards... can you guess who co-hosted the second ceremony?

The 2nd Japan Academy Awards were presented at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo on April 7, 1979, and co-hosted by Akira Takarada and Akihiko Hirata. All extant photos (as far as I know) from the ceremony can be viewed here. Somehow, incredibly frustratingly, Hirata did not end up in ANY pictures, but there's no shortage of Takarada.

telling my kids this was elvis.

The winners are as follows:

Best picture: Incident

Best director: Yoshitaro Nomura, for Incident

Best screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, for Incident

Best actor award: Ken Ogata

Best actress: Shinobu Otake

Best supporting actor: Tsunehiko Watase

Best supporting actress: Shinobu Otake

Best music: Toru Takemitsu

Best technology: Takashi Kawamata, for Incident

Best foreign film: Portrait of the Family

It was an Incident sweep that year, to say the very least. Best music and foreign film are the only categories in which Incident or someone related to it didn't win. 

I'm not already full of random trivia enough, so: Station is the only film Hirata had a role in that won a Japan Academy Award, in 1982 (not sure if he was in attendance for that or not), but Nomugi Pass was also nominated in 1980.