DOUJINSHI.

In the Kinema Junpo article/interview I posted recently, I was extremely intrigued by the passing mention of doujinshi focusing on Akihiko Hirata. (Doujinshi are basically fanzines that the government gets kind of mad about sometimes. Japanese copyright law is very strict.) So I've been poking around online to see what I can find... which is not that much. We're talking about self-published, generally middling-quality zines, many of which are at minimum 40 years old, so there's not going to be a ton out there on the internet, but that just makes the images I do come across more fun to look at. I'll update this if and when I find new things.

強引愚我道堂本舗 猫目銀四郎 呆然一発! [Daitetsujin 17 doujin, year unknown]

god look at it

As is typical for Mandarake, this listing had only one image, and I can't find parallels anywhere else on the internet. It's weird that the photo is so crisp; it appears to be a scan or screenshot, whereas most other doujin listings are just photographs of the item. I have absolutely no idea what this is; Googling the title turns up nothing and every translator I chuck it into gives me something different. But oh man.

Hey speaking of Daitetsujin 17...

誌ウソコミケットカタログ78 [Un Comicate Catalogue '78, 1996]

This is a dubious addition since that could be Gomes or it could be any of the other Brain dudes, but I like the art, so I'm putting it here.

猫亭通信 #1 [Nekotai Tsushin issue #2, August 1985?]

This is an issue of a tokusatsu doujin and it appears to have been a memorial issue for Hirata published the year after he died. If I'm understanding things correctly, Ishirō Honda himself actually contributed something to this. Again, Mandarake only gives me one picture, so I know nothing about the content of the doujin. (I do know the exact photo that drawing is based off of, but I don't have it to hand right now.)

ゴジラ復活委員会 [Godzilla Resurrection/Revival Committee, various, 1980s]

photo shows issues 1-3 of the doujin and issue #15 of the newsletter (far right)

I could probably make an entire post about the Godzilla Resurrection Committee. They published a doujin that was, according to some, pretty high-quality for the time. It's actually fairly difficult to find information about the committee in general, which is surprising given how important they were, and even harder to find scans of their doujin. I'm including this because I reckon Hirata was involved with the committee at some point, since I believe they were the folks responsible for those pictures of him (✌️) dressed as Serizawa again to promote a re-release of the first Godzilla movie in the early '80s that just kind of make me sad.

参考資料 鋼鉄王 1 特集 [The King of Steel, issue 1[?], 1984]

This is... an Iron King doujinshi that has a memorial for him for some reason? He was never in Iron King but I guess that's how big an impact his death had on the wider tokusatsu fan community. Can't find pictures of the actual article, unfortunately.

轟天号 第4号特集 [Gotengo, issue #4, 1981?]

A nice tokusatsu doujin. Got a kick out of this one because of the "candid picture somebody took of their high school teacher" vibe. The text says "Recently he has become 'the old man of Pittashi Kan-Kan', but our image of him is still the nihilistic Dr. Serizawa." The picture is from an amateur special effects tournament. (More on that later.)

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image sources:

1. https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1131593345&ref=list&keyword=%E5%A4%A7%E9%89%84%E4%BA%BA%EF%BC%91%EF%BC%97&lang=en

2. https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1053359150&ref=list&dispCount=240&categoryCode=030503&lang=en

3. https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/k154243529/

4. https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/o1131200178?conversionType=yac_item_bottom_recommend_list

5. https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/c1079371651/

火曜サスペンス劇場 - 地底の殺意 / Kayō Sasupen'sugekijō - Chitei no satsui / Tuesday Suspense Theater: Underground Murderous Intent (1983)

Release date: July 5, 1983

Director: Yoichi Maeda

Studio: NTV with cooperation from Shochiku Eizo

Cast: Masakazu Tamura, Kyoko Kobayashi, Hiroko Shino, Keiko Orihara, Ryusuke Oki, Akiko Sodeki, Yoshiko Otowa et al

Availability: Home media release of this specific film is unknown and unlikely. The film in its entirety is on archive.org.

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Today we're going to be looking at the only feature-length film I've managed to dredge up that includes Yoshiko Otowa in the cast. And I really did dredge it up: I used Wayback Machine to resurrect a deleted YouTube video (which was actually the second of two links that I found, the first was gone for good) and watched the entire thing that way. I know this is kind of a "don't you have anything better to do?" post, but I do have something better to do - sleep, it is 12:45 AM - and I'm choosing to do this instead. And you know what? I'm super excited about it.

(And anyway, I've put it on archive.org so now you don't have to do all that.)

For those of you just tuning in, Otowa is Hirata's younger sister. I talk about her and what is probably her most well-known credit here. Her work is obscure and sparse; in the late '50s and '60s she was frequently in films directed by their older brother, Yoshiki Onoda, but she never appeared in anything alongside Hirata. (The Onoda Venn diagram is surprisingly complicated.) After that she did a few things in the '80s and then mostly fell off the map.

Some background: "Tuesday Suspense Theater" was not a "television series" in the usual episodic sense of that term, but a series of made-for-TV films directed by and starring many, many top names of the time. A longer explanation of the series would just take up space since it's been running for so long and includes so many titles, a lot of which are pretty much lost media. (Although I will say you should watch Obayashi's Lovely Devils, it's an underrated gem of his.) This particular film also stars Masakazu Tamura of Nemuri Kyoshiro fame. This will be my first time seeing him out of a chonmage.

The link I posted includes commercials, which is always fun. I think we all love retro Japanese TV ads. I assume, because of the ads, that the video was ripped from a VHS recording somebody made during the original airing (as far as I know this was never rebroadcast). It's in atrocious quality, but what do you expect from a YouTube link that was literally brought back from the dead.

The film begins with a couple, Tomoyuki Katsuhara and his wife Katsumi (played by Tamura and Shino, respectively), returning to their apartment after an extended trip to Spain. The atmosphere is immediately off, and Katsumi finds a trap door under their kitchen floor that hadn't previously been there, leading to a small hole with a ladder. There are rumors that the guy renting their apartment in the interim, Nogawa, was a bit... odd, to say the least (we get a fantasy montage of him doing stuff like tying his girlfriend to a balcony and killing kittens). The film seems to set us up to think he had something to do with the trap door.

Otowa's character is one of the perennial nosey housewives who often congregate outside apartment buildings in older Japanese films. Her character is the one responsible for the nasty rumors about Nogawa. It took me a minute to figure out who she was even though I'd seen her in Comedy Trio because she's a bit older in this, but as soon as I saw her in profile I was like oh yep. 

imoto

Katsumi tries to tell her husband about the hole, and about Nogawa, but she gets a firm "baka" response, of course. But Katsuhara does go down into the hole with a flashlight and discovers something written on the wall: the name "Tatsuo Sasamoto" scrawled over with Xs. Both this and Nogawa's general weirdness turn out to be red herrings.

pictured: hole dispute

Nogawa comes over while Katsumi is alone and is generally a creep to her. I didn't catch much of what he said, but he seemed to know something about the hole under the kitchen floor. When Katsuhara comes home, his wife again attempts to talk to him about the hole, but he continues to be dismissive; this is when the jackhammers come out. Katsumi has men over to dig up the floor, but they don't find anything immediately. When she's down there alone, though, she finds a wristwatch and then a necklace buried in the dirt. She recognizes the necklace as belonging to a woman her husband used to date, and as she tries to pull the necklace up, she unearths... a skeleton!

this film is now 💀CERTIFIED SPOOKY💀

Katsuhara returns home and Katsumi confronts him, and he admits that the skeleton is who she thinks it is: a woman, Akiko - actually a coworker of Katsumi's - who he'd been seeing. We get a lengthy flashback that ends with Katsuhara and Akiko arguing and him strangling her in maybe the least dramatic murder scene I've ever watched. He picks up the phone, presumably thinking about turning himself in, but then decides instead to be reasonable and carve a hole under his kitchen floor to hide her body in. As one does. Back in the present, he confesses everything to his wife.

future skeleton on the left

They then decide to both commit suicide with red wine and opiates. Buuuut first we get a long Spain montage. There's flamenco dancing, that's nice, I always like to see flamenco dancing. There's also bullfighting, which is... markedly less nice.

Katsuhara wakes up from the suicide attempt, but Katsumi doesn't. He, of course, drags her body down to the hole under the kitchen. Katsumi eventually does wake up too, after she's been thrown into the hole with no way of escaping. Her husband can hear her calls for help, but he piles furniture over the trap door and ignores her. After a while she figures out she can make a good deal of noise banging on a pipe, and the whole building hears it - while Katsuhara is out feeling sorry for himself due to murdering two women, Katsumi is managing to summon the authorities despite being locked in a hole. The film ends with Katsumi in an ambulance and Katsuhara in the back seat of a police cruiser, tailing her.

big surprise for this Ultraman stan: that's Kitajima [Shūsuke Tsumura] from Taro on the left, behind Tamura

I gotta admit this is not the best movie ever. It has a few fun scenes, but on the whole, it's "get home from work and fall asleep in front of the TV" cinema. It could just be because I thoroughly read every scrap of plot summary I could find beforehand to prepare myself for watching something I would only half understand, but none of the twists and turns feel very surprising. From the moment that Katsumi finds that hole, you know she is going to end up in it eventually. Everything in between is just a lot of stuff. Nobody reacts to anything in a reasonable way. It's all TV-land dramatics and filler.

But I still had fun. If nothing else, this was definitely the oddest way I've ever found and watched a movie. I'm scheduling this to post on a Tuesday for authenticity's sake.

抱擁 / Hōyō / The Last Embrace (1953)

Release date: March 11, 1953

Director: Masahiro Makino

Studio: Toho

Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Yoshiko [Shirley] Yamaguchi, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hiroshi Koizumi, Sachio Sakai, Ren Yamamoto, Toyoko Takegawa et al

Availability: No home media or internet streaming release. No known screenings within the past 15 years.

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I should have made this post last month for the film's 71st anniversary, but better late than never, I guess.

As of the time of writing, I have not seen this movie and am fervently searching for it. I've gone down many avenues, including contacting several individuals and institutions about it, but with no luck. I am certain, however, that the film is not lost, as screenings have taken place since the film's initial release¹. Toho also produced an English-subtitled version², but I'm unaware for what purpose. I will readily admit that there isn't anything particularly special about this movie in and of itself, apart from it having been Akihiko Hirata's very first film role, but that alone is enough to make me want to see it. (If you have a copy... you know where to find me.)

So I can't watch this thing, at least not currently, but what I can do is dump everything I know about it into, as far as I know, the only extensive English-language post about it on the internet. If I ever do get lucky enough to watch it, I will, of course, make a new post about it. There's also a Kinema Junpo issue with an article about the film from when it first came out, and if I lose my fool head and buy that issue, I'll make a new post about it as well. (Edit: Whoops.)

When I originally wrote this post, I said that I had never seen any pictures of Hirata from this film, which was true at the time, but I have since acquired volume 3 of Toho's Tokusatsu Eiga book series, and it contains the only picture I have ever found of Hirata's role in The Last Embrace. Hours and hours spent scouring the internet and this is the first time I've seen this picture.

Masahiro Makino may not be a name with the same kind of Western recognition as Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu or someone like that, but he was an extremely prolific director, and before that, in the 1910s and '20s, he was also an extremely prolific actor as well. This means Makino was involved in Japan's film industry pretty much from its very beginnings - which makes sense, since his father was Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director. The Last Embrace was produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, as many Toho films were, and the script came from an original idea by Tanaka and Toshio Yasumi, who was also a frequent scriptwriter for Toho.

extremely crusty poster

As for the cast, it's all your usual Toho guys (and some gals), but fairly early in their careers³ for a lot of them except Mifune (for whom this was his 30th film) and Shimura. Yoshiko Yamaguchi has a bit of a cult following, from what I understand, and it's her presence in this along with big star Mifune that gives me any hope at all that somebody still cares about this movie enough to upload it to the internet someday.

Yamaguchi's character seems to be the protagonist of the film. According to the plot summaries I've found, Yamaguchi plays a woman who lived in the mountains and was set to be married before her fiancé was killed in a sudden avalanche. She then moves to Tokyo, where she frequents a bar along with a group of poets, and meets a yakuza who looks like her dead fiancé (Mifune plays both roles). I am assuming Hirata has a very small role in this - he's probably one of the poets from the bar Yamaguchi hangs out in. His character's name is given as "alias Sandaime", which would imply some yakuza association, but I think that it is likely just a nickname as the group of poets seem to all have aliases. 

Note the following poster: under Hirata's name it says "New Face".

While the film itself is frustratingly elusive, its main theme, sung by Yamaguchi, is on YouTube for your delectation. There's a nice slideshow of images from the film and pictures of Yamaguchi that plays during the song, along with lyrics in Japanese.

shoutout to the person who reblogged this on tumblr and just tagged it "#men"

Some odds and ends to finish this off: Here is a post (in Japanese) from someone who has actually seen the movie. I believe this person saw the 2008 screening mentioned in my footnotes. Mifune's website has a bunch of pictures of him from the film here. In the process of researching this post I found a blog dedicated to Yoshiko Yamaguchi, which I have a deep appreciation for.

That's it! That's everything I know! I know for a fact that people other than me are looking for this, so I remain hopeful that I'll watch it someday.

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¹ A 2008 screening at the Shin-Bungeiza theater in Tokyo is confirmed from a user on Kinenote, and this blogger, writing in 2021, claims a screening about ten years ago. I have confirmation of a screening at the almighty Laputa Asagaya theater in 2005 as well. (What hasn't been screened at Laputa, honestly.)

² Galbraith, Stuart. The Toho Studios Story. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

³ I've heard conflicting information about whether Hirata was part of the fifth Toho New Face group (in 1950) or the eighth (in 1953). 1953 would make more sense considering his film debut was that year, but I don't know either way. As far as I know, ca. 1950 he was part-timing as an assistant director and doing theater club stuff after having graduated from law school.

Columbo post.

Columbo post?

Columbo post.

As many people reading this blog are probably aware, the American detective series Columbo became a smash hit in Japan very soon after its original broadcast. The series began airing on NHK in 1972, and was broadcast regularly until 1981 and then sporadically throughout the 1980s and later, remaining popular today. Columbo was voiced by Asao Koike until his death in 1985, at which time the role was taken over by Taro Ishida.

So I've got other things to say, but first let's talk about Columbo. The episode we're looking at here is season 7, episode 4, "How to Dial a Murder", broadcast in Japan as 攻撃命令 [Attack Order]. This is one of the rare cases in which everything I'm talking about is readily accessible: for Americans, the episode is streaming on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and [opens my trench coat to offer you an archive.org link] here if you hate streaming services. In Japan, if you have a Hulu account, you can access the episode there. Unfortunately, Hulu Japan is region-locked, and the only other place to watch it is as a 22-minute clip on NicoNico, which I guess is better than nothing. Here you go. I watched the original episode and then the clip of the dub, which was really fun. Hirata dubs the killer, and it reminded me a little of his guest role in episode 20 of Operation: Mystery.

The Japanese dub of Columbo is one of Hirata's two voice acting roles. The other was a 1968 French/Italian/Mexican production called Le Rapace (known in English as Birds of Prey, released in Japan as ベラクルスの男 [Man of Vera Cruz]). Hirata dubs the lead role, originally played by Lino Ventura. The dub was made for the "Wednesday Roadshow" timeslot on NTV and was aired on December 13th, 1972. I actually watched the film for research purposes (in the original French and Spanish, with English subtitles) and it was surprisingly good. Ventura's character is a French hitman who arrives in Mexico to carry out a political assassination, and as he doesn't speak Spanish, he has no lines for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's not the kind of thing I typically watch, but it was interesting.

It's surprising to me that these two things were Hirata's only voice acting roles. In my opinion he had a very recognizable, distinctive voice and manner of speaking, but I admit some bias there due to having seen nearly 100 of his films at this point. 

I'm creating a new tag for voice acting/dubbing in the hopes that I might turn up that dub of Le Rapace (or anything else) in the future.

はりきり社長 / Harikiri Shachō / President Harikiri (1956)

Release date: July 13. 1956

Director: Kunio Watanabe

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Yoko Tsukasa, Yasuko Nakata, Norihei Miki, Akihiko Hirata, George Luiker et al

Availability: Available on DVD from amazon.co.jp.

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This is the third entry in the long-running "Shachō" (company president) series, none of which, as far as I know, are subtitled or even really known about in the West. The series is comprised of 33 films released across 14 years, and there are also six films considered supplemental/tie-in works. Harikiri Shachō is the only Shachō film Hirata had a role in, so it's the only one I've seen. Morishige plays Heitaro Okanda, the president of a bicycle manufacturing company, and Kobayashi is his secretary, Kazuo Suyama. The dynamic between the two is what makes a lot of the humor in Harikiri Shachō and, I would assume, the rest of the series. Morishige thinks he's the straight man, but he's really the comedy relief, and Kobayashi is the more relatable everyman.

And that's harikiri, not hara-kiri; nobody disembowels themselves in this film. "Harikiri" means something like "with all one's might", at least according to Papago.

Who's ready for ✨business✨? No subtitles here so I gotta put my thinking cap on. There is actually a little bit of English in this! But not much.

Okanda is newly married to a former chanson singer named Chieko (Asami Kuji) at the beginning of the film. His company, Taiyo Bicycle, also brings in a young woman named Harue (Yoko Tsukasa) for her English skills, so that she can work in the export department and speak with overseas buyers. Suyama is quite taken with her.

Dropping in on this series as an outside observer is really interesting. Even without being familiar with the context, I can tell Morishige is putting everything into his performance as the president. He might come off comedic sometimes, but when he gets up on a platform and starts giving a speech about selling bicycles - even though his secretary has to jump in and correct things here and there - he sounds like the president of a country, not just a company.

unrestrained summer fun

Taiyo Bicycle has to keep expanding, and Okanda goes to Sengoku, the president of one of the company's shareholders, to ask for a loan. Sengoku brings Okanda to his home for a traditional dinner and a night of entertainment, but Okanda has trouble fitting in as he doesn't smoke or drink excessively due to some kind of heart problem. It is a pretty bogus time.

pictured: pretty bogus time

Okanda escapes, but Suyama, who stays behind, finds out that Harue, the new hire who caught his eye, is the daughter of the host's landlady. While the bad vibes continue in the other room, Suyama and Harue sit down in the kitchen to drink coffee (with straws?) and Harue tells Suyama that Sengoku also has a son named Takao:

actual quote from the movie: "chotto handsome, dessho?" [roughly: "kinda handsome, huh?"]

Then there's a beauty pageant, because there's always a beauty pageant. A lot of pretty girls ride around on bicycles and have their measurements taken by Okanda and his staff; the effort gives Okanda a nosebleed. They also have a parade with all the contestants.

they really are not selling bicycles like they used to anymore

The winner, a girl named Momoko (Yasuko Nakata), gets to hang out in the president's office, sit behind the desk, smoke cigarettes, stuff like that. Unfortunately this was scheduled pretty poorly, and George Marner, the representative of an American company looking to contract with Taiyo Bicycle, comes in as Momoko is putting on her bodice with assistance from the president. He's immediately a mega creep to Momoko before getting down to business, with Harue translating. His fascination with Momoko will continue until he exits the film.

White boy George suggests a cycling trip with Okanda and all of the other Miss Cycle contestants to test out their products. There's some mambo music, everybody shakes a leg, much better vibes than the super awkward dinner with Sengoku earlier.

guest star: this cow

(I looked up George Luiker, the actor who plays George, and apparently he is the child of Estonian and Armenian parents and had grown up in the Soviet Union before becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen and taking the name Joji Ruikawa. This was his first role. He is fluent in Japanese, which his character hides from Okanda for some reason, but when it comes time to try to impress Momoko, all bets are off.)

Hirata's character, Takao, finally enters the picture while Okanda and everyone are on their cycling mini-vacation. I'm really not sure what the point of this character was; both him and Suyama are photographers, so it seems like there's a setup for a love triangle, but Takao is in one scene for about 30 seconds and doesn't get brought up again, so... alright.

Okanda's wife, meanwhile, discovers photos of her husband at the Miss Cycle pageant, measuring some other girl's thighs. Later she also catches him getting into a car with Momoko. At the same time, Suyama attempts to confess his love to Harue, and she's SUPER not into it. He gives a rousing speech, from what of it I could understand, and at the end asks her to marry him, but she wants absolutely none of that. Or... does she? You know the movie is from the '50s when it takes the girl slapping the guy and telling him to get lost a few times for her to realize she actually does like him after all.

Eventually Chieko ends up at the same nightclub as Okanda and Momoko. There's more mambo music. Okanda mistakes some random white guy for George Marner. On the dance floor Okanda gets too into it and loses his shoe while mambo-ing with Momoko, and it's Chieko who finds it for him. They go home and she confronts him with the pictures. He tries to explain (and calls her "o-baka-san" in the process - I did not realize there was basically a polite way of calling somebody an idiot) but she throws him out of their bedroom.

Okanda goes back to Sengoku, who won't listen to him anymore, and Marner leaves for America. All seems lost and Okanda goes up to the roof where Suyama catches him and thinks he's about to commit suicide - he's not, but Suyama delivers a pep talk anyway and it puts the wind back in Okanda's sails. He makes up with Chieko, too, and soon he gets a telegram from Marner, agreeing to the contract. The film ends with Harue and Okanda leaving for America to meet with him.

This was a good time. Odd pacing, though, with everything taking a sudden downturn and then getting wrapped up all within the last fifteen minutes. There's a surprising amount of fanservice for its time, and it gets kind of gross, with Momoko calling Okanda "papa" and him being overly friendly with her, and then having to explain it to his wife, even though none of it was romantic. It's a really dated movie. 

Still, fun! Older comedies are sometimes a lot easier for me to watch as a non-Japanese speaker because the exaggerated physical humor makes the plot easier to follow. Seeing Keiju Kobayashi that young was also funny, since I'm used to him playing very serious, mature characters. I don't know if I'd watch 33 of these movies, but it would be very interesting to see the evolution of the series, especially toward the late '60s, because this one seemed so solidly a product of its time that any kind of societal change would render its premise untenable.

Hirata's in this for literally one scene (if you don't count the photo of him Harue shows Suyama), but we're used to that around here.