力道山・男の魂 / Rikidozan: Otoko no tamashii / Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit

Release date: August 29, 1956
Director: Seiichiro Uchikawa
Studio: Distributed by Toho, produced jointly by Wakatsuki Pro, Takimura Pro, and Rikidozan Pro.
Cast: Rikidozan, Keiko Kishi, Ichirō Arashima, Hisaya Morishige, Mike Mazurki, Mariko Miyagi, Yasuko Nakata, Helen Higgins, Akihiko Hirata, Chiemi Eri et al.
Availability: VHS release, no other home media. Now available on archive.org.
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I am so, so utterly delighted to bring you this post today.

Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit is a docudrama about Rikidozan, the "Father of Puroresu", who was quite famous in the Showa era and did a lot to popularize pro wrestling in Japan after the war, but died very young after a street fight. (You'll have to forgive me because I don't know much more about him than that.) More importantly for our purposes, Akihiko Hirata is in it. This is in fact one of the most obscure titles in his filmography that has a home media release.

That home media release comes in the form of a run of VHS tapes that Toho Video put out in the late 1980s. This film has never been released to DVD or streaming, and I've heard that as of a 2014 theater screening, the original film stock had degraded so badly that it was almost entirely pink. So, this movie runs the risk of being lost to time as the materials it's stored on continue to degrade, unless somebody were to obtain one of those (fairly rare) VHS tapes and digitize it.

So I did that.

It was, all things considered, a pretty risky endeavor. I had no guarantee that the tape would play or, if it played, that the image and sound quality wouldn't be abysmal. But it was worth the risk. After waiting a solid two months, I had a 40-year-old ex-rental VHS tape on my hands that had survived both Japan's typhoon season and the tropical storm that hit my area on the day it was delivered. And did the risk pay off?

It sure did. And I have the archive.org link to prove it.

Let's take a look at it with screenshots. This person wrote a much nicer and more detailed summary that Google translates pretty decently; read it for more plot information.

The film opens with a bunch of kids doing chanbara stuff on a beach when one of them notices a pair of sandals that turn out to belong to Rikidozan. We get some cute scenes of him flipping the kids around, letting them bury him in the sand, general antics. It's nice, I like it. I don't know that there's much of a plot to this thing, honestly. It's mostly just a movie made for people who want to see Rikidozan. (And me.)

big dude isn't he

Ichirō Arashima's here too. He plays Riki's manager. He gets fired after a noodle dispute, gets drunk at a bar, tries to weaponize his manager status for clout, and they threaten to call the police on him.

Bartender played by Hisaya Morishige, of Shachō fame

me watching this movie

A driving point of conflict throughout the film is that a teacher named Shirai thinks Rikidozan is a bad influence on children because he's too violent. After a lot of wrestling and a lot of miscellaneous scenes of huge sweaty men in the shower and the gym and whatnot, Shirai comes directly to Rikidozan's office. She lets him know that a kid injured his classmate bad enough to put him in the hospital by using one of Riki's signature karate chops. Her and Riki visit the injured party and the fact that a child was hurt in a way that had anything to do with him does seem to upset him.

Rikidozan's main rival in this is an American wrestler named Max, played by Mike Mazurki, another person I don't know anything about, and... is... is that the big guy with the hammer from Yojimbo?

Max promises Rikidozan a match - framed as a kind of "East vs. West" thing - as they're both some of the top wrestlers from their respective countries. Max apparently killed somebody (maybe) during a match, and this earned him a reputation, as well as the nickname "Murderer". 

Max responds to questions about his opponent's death with "I guess he was a bit unlucky." [cracks knuckles ominously for a solid 15 seconds] "But that RARELY happens."

Riki and his fanmail

At this point in the plot some shady characters enter the picture who are trying to secure a deal with the yakuza(?) whereby they would gain rights to a bunch of properties in Tokyo if their side wins at gambling. Various ideas are floated until the idea comes up that they could bet on pro wrestlers... the Rikidozan vs. Max match, specifically. The thing is: Max is apparently going blind.

Thiiiiiiis is where Hirata's character finally comes into play. He plays Max's doctor and the only person who knows anything about what's wrong with him. The side who wants Rikidozan to lose kidnaps him and tortures him for information on anything that could be used to blackmail Max (who has been told he'll be fine for long enough to have the match). After they learn his secret, they go to Max and use it as leverage, along with a huge amount of cash, gold, and jewelry, to try to convince him to kill Riki, promising they'll take care of him after he goes blind if he can win the match for them. We don't see Hirata's character (named Fujimura, same as in Varan) again after this; he was really just a plot device.

I guess the point of this is to contrast people who fight dirty against Rikidozan who supposedly does not; he stays cool even in the face of Max swearing he'll kill him the next day. We get a scene where he tells a bunch of kids not to get too violent because that's not what pro wrestling is about. He tells them he won't use karate chops anymore now either.

I won't post screenshots of the final fight. You can go watch it for yourself now if that kind of thing interests you, I really don't care one way or another about wrestling so I don't even know what parts I should be screenshotting or not. Hisaya Morishige gets in the ring, though, absolutely ready to throw down.

Riki wins his fight fair and square, but that means Max is useless now, so the goons in the audience, who have smuggled in a gun, shoot him. He survives long enough to give some final words to his wife and to reconcile with Riki, thanking him for giving him an honorable final match.

So. I can now add "wrestling propaganda movie" to my list of things I've sat through for Akihiko Hirata. Okay, maybe "propaganda" is a little harsh. But this is a movie about how good and noble puroresu is supposed to be, and it props up Rikidozan as an exemplar of that, and it will not hear any contrary opinions. It is, as I said, a movie for people who want to see Rikidozan. I can imagine a lot of young boys probably watched this and thought it was cool. I have no problem with that. It's just a little silly. And I liked it. I hope this was as fun for you as it was for me, because for me it was very, very fun.

My apologies that the title card is cut off in the recording, by the way; I didn't realize I had to press "start".

江戸川乱歩の美女シリーズ: 湖底の美女 / Edogawa ranpo no bijo shirīzu: Kotei no bijo (1982) / Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series: Beauty at the Bottom of the Lake

Release date: October 23, 1982

Director: Umetsugu Inoue

Studio: Shochiku/TV Asahi

Cast: Yumiko Nogawa, Chiaki Matsubara, Akihiko Hirata, Kojiro Kusanagi, Emiko Yamauchi, Tatsuhiro Itō, Yoshio Inaba, Masaya Takahashi et al.

Availability: Full series available on DVD; it also has been aired on Shochiku Tokyu every Sunday since April of this year as part of a celebration of Edogawa Ranpo's birth. Available on U-Next (Japan-only).

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Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series was a series of TV movies that ran for a remarkable 17 years (from 1977 to 1994) as part of TV Asahi's Saturday Wide Theater timeslot. As the title implies, the series adapted works by the author Edogawa Ranpo (the more famous pseudonym of Tarō Hirai). This one in particular is based on "The Lakeside Pavilion Incident". For a TV movie, it's surprising that this is relatively accessible; Hirata worked extensively in television after he left Toho in the late '70s, but the vast (and I do mean vast) majority of TV movies from that time are virtually lost media. Apparently the series takes a dip in quality after this film, which was the last one directed by Umetsugu Inoue. The soundtrack was done by acclaimed and prolific composer Hajime Kaburagi.

This will contain full spoilers, so beware. As I always say, all images are copyright Shochiku, and I claim no ownership - I'm just the weirdo with the DVD. Here are some scans of the booklet. This is the 2002 King Records release.

I always find it really interesting to hear what movie/series people use when they say "Akihiko Hirata from[...]" since he was in SO much stuff. In this case, the booklet chooses to mention his recurring role on Taiyo ni Hoero!, which is virtually unknown in the West.

Detective Akechi (Shigeru Amachi's character throughout the series) finally gets a vacation at a picturesque hotel on Lake Shirakaba with two characters who I assume are from earlier episodes. At the station, he meets up with Hirata's character, a finance lawyer named Kamimura, who he apparently is familiar with. They greet each other and then part ways.

At the center of the plot is a painter named Yosui and his family problems. This seemed like it was on track to becoming an inheritance drama, but it gets a little wacky - you'll see.

All the players end up - in classic murder mystery style - staying in the same hotel: Akechi, his friends Fumiyo and Kobayashi, Kamimura, Yosui's model Yukari, and Yosui himself, as well as another painter, Kaga, and his model, Maki. Very abruptly, Yosui walks in on Shinobu in bed with her younger lover, Nozaki, also a pupil of Yosui's. We learn that Yosui contrived this as a setup, convincing Nozaki to sleep with her so that he could get a speedy divorce. Nozaki's condition for doing this was that he would be allowed to marry Yosui's daughter Yoko, but she eventually dumps him.

There's a lot of girls in swimsuits in this.

After a rapid-fire argument that I honestly didn't catch a lot of, Yoko discovers a kokeshi doll with a skull carved into it in her bed. The booklet says that this "foreshadows a murder"; I'm not sure if that means the kokeshi doll is a recurring motif throughout the Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series films or just this one. Yoko runs to Yukari and the two remember that they conveniently know a detective staying in the same hotel - no vacation for Akechi after all. 

Just after the girls ask Akechi about the doll, things get even more complicated: while sitting down to watch a televised live performance by the Marine Girls (an underwater dance troupe also responsible for some of the diving scenes in the film), Akechi and friends witness a corpse at the bottom of an aquarium. It's Yosui's daughter Yoko, and the news finally sends Yosui - who had a weak heart - over the edge. It doesn't kill him, but he's incapacitated.

Other detectives interview the security guard/aquarium maintenance guy who was overseeing the monitors - he had taken sleeping pills on the job and wasn't watching. By the time he got back to his post, the body was already there. A second hotel worker attests to this. Akechi also talks to Yukari about the doll, but pretty much just tells her to take it to the police. (He's playing it cool, but you can tell gears are turning in his head.)

🤨

The detectives also question Shinobu (with Kamimura assuming lawyer duties), and as soon as she namedrops Akechi, the whole mood in the room changes - oh, Japan's #1 detective is in the area? We gotta get him on this! 🎶Zubatto sanjo, zubatto kaiketsu!🎶 (Sorry, I hear somebody say "kaiketsu" and that's all I think of.)

love seeing him play lawyers. putting that law degree to good use.

Akechi gets everybody in a room and looks into their alibis. Shinobu is coy about it in a way that screams "I have something to do with this", Kamimura is offended to even be asked, and I didn't entirely catch what Nozaki says but I think he claims he was alone. Akechi shows the kokeshi around and nobody says they've seen it. We move into a montage of other interviewees describing what they saw of Yoko prior to her death.

Amachi is wearing this sweet jacket for most of the film

As abruptly as we're shown Shinobu and Nozaki together, we're VERY suddenly and completely out of nowhere shown Shinobu and Kamimura in bed together as well. Oh, alright then. 

And then - oh.

Oh, okay?

Well, now Maki's dead.

Fumiyo and Akechi have another chat with the aquarium guy about Maki's murder, and they watch Yukari on the monitors as they talk - oh. Oh no.

Yukari survives her skullman encounter and we load up the funky Hajime Kaburagi score as Akechi pursues the killer(?). This of course goes nowhere. Too early in the movie for a big reveal like that.

Akechi has been, in the background, nonchalantly questioning people about this print of one of Yosui's paintings that the aquarium guy has in his office. With his expert detective skills, he intuits that it has to be relevant to the case. He enlists Fumiyo and Kobayashi to find as much information about the mountain as they possibly can, and they learn that Yosui himself is somehow involved with events that transpired there in 1961. Akechi goes so far as to travel to the mountain... but so does the killer!

Akechi goes missing after an attempted murder by rockslide, and we transition back to the hotel, where we see an unknown figure deposit another skull doll on Yosui's bed and then turn off his oxygen while his attending nurse naps. Unfortunately for his would-be murderer, he still doesn't die from this. The other detective, in Akechi's absence, grills a room full of murder suspects quite dramatically.

Yosui, still recuperating, is wheeled into the room and tells his story in front of everyone. 20 years prior, on the mountain from the painting, Yosui took shelter in a hut occupied by a woman and her daughter during a bad storm. Yosui raped the woman, whose daughter turns out to be Yukari. So Shinobu was not Yoko's biological mother.

So, no matter how suspicious Shinobu and Kamimura looked, no matter who was sleeping with whom, it was all a bunch of good old red herrings. Yukari had the motive. It looks like it's her. But here is where it all takes a hard left turn. Now Sanzo, who I've been referring to as "aquarium guy", points to Yosui and says "that man isn't Yosui"! "Yosui" reveals that Sanzo is Yukari's father! "Yosui" takes off his fake facial hair and wig! And begins to peel off the mask he'd been wearing!

I had been a little bored at the beginning of this film but I will admit this moment made me go "oh NOOOO!" out loud.

Akechi Columboes his way through an exposition dump: Yukari's mother killed herself following Yosui's assault, leaving Yukari alone, and Sanzo had to witness it all. Now Sanzo is the one with the motive, and we see it all revealed: he killed Yoko, pretended to be sleeping, dumped the body in the aquarium, and then killed Maki because she saw him do it. He also pretended to attack Yukari in the skull mask to throw Akechi off. But in a final dramatic moment, Sanzo shoots himself through the heart rather than be arrested for his crimes, and Yukari kills herself in the same lake her mother did, unable to live with herself.

So that was a wild ride. I can't compare it to other episodes of the series since I haven't seen any, but I can believe that this was considered the peak of it.

I tend to associate Hirata and Amachi with each other, since they were both of the same generation and both died very young within about a year of each other, but they really didn't work together very often at all. I like Shigeru Amachi as well, his cool-guy persona really works for this role, but I'm not sure how I felt about his younger assistants - they seemed like they were just there for audience relatability, or something. I would also imagine the plot was changed drastically from the source material, since so much of it relies on things like television monitors that would not have been around in the 1920s.

I had a lot of fun with this overall; it was a little cheesy but in all the right ways that make a murder drama a good time.

Miyata Gyaos' Empire Raids Again

Today I'm going to take you on a tour of an ancient internet relic. I'm going to show you Miyata Gyaos'¹ Akihiko Hirata fansite.

This is, as of now, all available to view for yourself, but with the recent ruling in Hachette's favor in their case against the Internet Archive - which houses Wayback Machine, perhaps the single most important apparatus for preserving websites - I want there to be a memory of it out there, just in case. I also want to warn you that Google Translate breaks the site - you must either copy/paste chunks of text into Google Translate piecemeal or have a browser extension such as DeepL that allows you to highlight and translate text.

Part 1: The website

On December 1st, 2000, Miyata started a GeoCities website for one of his favorite actors, Akihiko Hirata. Before this, as far back as 1997, Miyata had a personal website (he refers to this as his "Millennium Empire") where he would write about Hirata among other people: Shin Kishida, Takayuki Miyauchi, Tatsumi Yano, and Kaneto Shiozawa. (In later incarnations, Miyata's webpage would become a site for Japanese fans of the band a-ha, which is... interesting.) We're only going to cover one of these, but I will also mention that the Kishida fansite is accessible through Wayback Machine as well, and its BBS was quite a bit livelier than the one I'll be talking about here.

Unfortunately, GeoCities is with us no longer. Like many things (I and my bank account can attest to the fact that Yahoo! Auctions is still very much operational) it survived far longer in Japan, shutting its doors only in 2019, but the last actual capture of the live website preserved by Wayback Machine is from 2008. This leaves us with only 10 captures of a website that appeared to have been updated semi-regularly for several years.

Miyata was an artist as well. I believe he drew this portrait. Later there was another image added, but Wayback Machine doesn't archive it, whatever it was.

The homepage hosted links to several subpages. At the top was, at first, a list of upcoming reruns of shows and films that Hirata had been in, then later Miyata would add links to newly-released DVDs. (¥12,000 [$83 USD in today's money] for a couple episodes of Rainbowman... jeepers.) Miyata also hosted a page with external links to unrelated websites run by his friends. We've got five of those: a film review website, Ogikubo Toho (which I have talked about before), a Rainbowman fansite, a Yoshio Tsuchiya fansite, and Mifune Productions' official website.

The subpages were: A short biography (nothing you can't find on Wikipedia), a filmography, Miyata's own film and television reviews, a list of publications of interest, and - one of my favorite things ever - a user poll where visitors to the site could vote for their favorite among Hirata's many roles. (Not ALL of them. But a lot of them.)

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Serizawa was voted #1

Huge shoutout to the person who voted for his 2-second appearance in Prophecies of Nostradamus. I respect that. Also surprised to see France from Great Japan Pickpocket Club up there with a respectable amount of votes. At the same time, though, seven people voted for the corrupt city councilman in At This Late Date, the Charleston? Seven whole people? Man.

Miyata's opinions

As for the "publications of interest" page, this seems to be things that Miyata owned personally, since it's far from a comprehensive list of every magazine/article featuring Hirata or his works:

• Toho SF Tokusatsu Eiga Series vol. 3 [my link here]
• The late October 1979 issue of Kinema Junpo [my link here]
• Two Taiyo ni Hoero! commemorative books (I don't own either, but you can get you one for really cheap, if I don't get to it first)
• A pamphlet from Donburi Pond - this is from the 1967 Teigeki performance, not the 1963 Geijutsu-za one, so I've never actually seen it

Now, I want to talk about that filmography for a minute, because it's really fascinating to me. You might be saying "it's a fansite for an actor, of course it has a filmography", but it's deeper than that. 

This is the most extensive record of titles that Hirata appeared in that I've seen, ever. Nothing on the modern internet can match it. I based my own filmography spreadsheet on Miyata's list because it has things that I have never seen anybody else mention - particularly stage plays. While I was trying to do research for that section of my spreadsheet, I found that there were several things on Miyata's list that I not only couldn't confirm Hirata had been in - I couldn't confirm that they ever happened at all. I don't doubt that these plays did happen, but they are so obscure that no record of them survives on the internet today.

I'm insanely curious about how Miyata managed to compile something this extensive 25 years ago. There are idiosyncrasies to Miyata's list that make it clear it was not copy-pasted from somewhere else: some films are categorized under the wrong year, and while checking titles for the spreadsheet I would occasionally have Google correct a kanji to something else, which seems to imply that either Miyata made a typo or there's some alternate spelling of the title that is less commonly used. Where in the world was he getting his information from? Especially about the stage plays?

In any case, I'm going to move on now to talking about the BBS, which I felt was significant enough to warrant spitting this post into two parts.

Part 2: The BBS

We have even fewer captures of this than of the webpage itself, which is a real shame because the BBS was updated far more frequently. Nevertheless, it is incredibly cool to look at the small snippet of community that has been preserved. Honestly, I wish the world was still like this: video rental stores, people recording stuff to tape off the TV and trading it, email lists where you can talk about movies with people. It just sounds funner than endless subscription services and digital copies of movies that you can never technically "own".

I highly recommend taking the time to translate the whole deal yourself, but here is a list of some of my favorite posts:

• Somebody linked to a set of playing cards with portraits of Toho actors on them (heavily considered making this my header photo for a while)
• One or two people apologizing for accidentally sending junk chain emails (the response from the board is essentially “let’s all watch more movies to move on”)
• At least one person who, as of 2002, said they had already been a fan of Hirata's for 25 years. I'm telling you, this fandom is small, but it is eternal
• Somebody who'd seen The Last Embrace, somehow
• An eighth-grader?
• Some spicy hot takes about how it was actually Dr. Iwamoto's fault that Ultraman got killed by Zetton
• Someone playing through Pokemon who named their Laplace "Akihiko"
• Someone talking about planning to go see Godzilla Final Wars in the theater on Hirata's birthday

I didn't really learn anything from the BBS that I didn't already know, but the fun of it is the fact that all of these people 20+ years ago were doing what I'm still doing in 2024. I started up a monthly tokusatsu film screening series earlier this year (If you know me in real life, hi! Also: sorry!) and my first film was The Mysterians. I can tell you I absolutely thought about the people on the BBS while I was screening it. 

Addendum: Where is Miyata Gyaos now?

Short answer: I don't know. It would feel weird to stalk somebody across the internet over 20+ years. I think Miyata would be in his 50s now, and I have no earthly idea what he's doing with himself. I do know that he contributed to a Shin Kishida doujin at one point.

If he is out there, though, and he sees this (which will almost certainly never happen), I just want to say thank you. Thanks for the BBS. I wish there was still something like it today. Thanks for the crazy comprehensive filmography with stuff that doesn't exist on the internet anymore. I have preserved those titles for the future. I hope someday somebody reads my own blog and finds it as wonderful as I find Miyata's.

As a last note I also want to mention that the owner of the Yoshio Tsuchiya fansite I briefly mentioned passed away from leukemia in 2001. He was part of Miyata's circle of internet friends and everyone was aware that he had gotten sick. Reading their posts about him really shows how much more like a real-life friend group the internet was at this point in time. His name was Saigawa. His website is also no longer extant, but you can view it on Wayback Machine as well here.

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1 I'm not sure if this name is written using traditional Japanese name order, with "Miyata" as the surname and "Gyaos" as the given name, but I'm going to be referring to him as "Miyata". I'm also gonna take a wild guess and say Gyaos is not his real name.