落語長屋は花ざかり / Rakugo nagaya ha hana zakari / A Long, Comic Story of Houses In Their Prime (1954)

Release date: March 17, 1954

Director: Nobuo Aoyagi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Aiko Mimasu, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Yūnosuke Itō et al

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Four confirmed theater screenings of the shortened re-release version between 2000 and 2016; the full film is most probably lost.

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So this post turned out to be longer and more involved than I initially planned for it to be. It's one of many things I've written about on here that I've done so much research into, I almost feel like I've seen it, even though I haven't. I think I ended up writing so much about this film because, despite his extensive and diverse filmography, Hirata wasn't in anything else with Enoken (although it's plausible they could have met when Hirata was working as AD at Shintoho), let alone any movies having to do with rakugo in general. I won't be covering the plot, but if you're looking for that sort of thing, there is a page where someone has written it out in detail, although they're referencing a shortened re-release of the film and not the 91-minute original. Also, this film was part of a trilogy - I'm not sure if any of the others survive either.

While you can't watch the film itself, you can check out "Rakugo Mambo" and "Chinchirorin" on YouTube. They are both absolute bops. I like to listen to them while I'm working night shift.

I don't know that audiences would have been going to see this because they were interested in it as a film - they would see it for Enoken, Roppa Furukawa, and the soundtrack composed by Toriro Miki. None of these names are that well-known outside of Japan unless you're interested in a very specific time period of Japanese pop culture history, so I'll give some brief context.

Kenichi "Enoken" Enomoto was a comedian who got his start as an assistant in Asakusa Opera plays during the late 1910s and eventually moved from stage comedy to film with PCL, the precursor to Toho. I find the late 1940s and early 1950s to be a fascinating era in Japanese cinema because it is filled with actors like Enoken, who had been acting since before Japan had a motion picture industry to speak of, alongside a generation or two of younger actors for whom film was the only way they had ever experienced acting. (Even so, it was common for actors at this time to perform in small-time stage plays - such as Toho New Face festivals and the like - before they made their debut in front of the camera.) You went to see movies for Enoken: a good deal of his films have "エノケンの" ("Enoken's") preceding the title.

Yes this is the picture of Enoken we're going with. (Enoken doing the kissing, promoter and yakuza Kazuo Taoka being kissed)

Enoken was massively famous throughout much of his life but suffered the loss of a son and some health problems that left him despondent and hospitalized. However, Harold Lloyd would visit him and encourage him to work with some of his disabilities - including a prosthetic leg - and he would return to acting, mostly in television, incorporating his prosthetic leg into his comedy routine. He ultimately died of liver failure at age 70.

Furukawa, also an editor and essayist, came from former nobility, and seemed to be headed towards a career in writing until a turn to stage acting in his early 30s. He started a production company that mostly put out acharaka ("nonsense" comedy plays) which were apparently not that great. Furukawa joined Takarazuka within a few years of its founding and then joined PCL. With PCL he had a comedy troupe that attained a high degree of popularity and put on a multitude of variety plays and musicals with large attendance. He was at the height of his fame just before the war, and while he was patriotic, he also seemed to find certain nationalistic wartime trends ridiculous - he was asked to change his name so that it would be written in kanji (he spelled "Roppa" in katakana) and was quite angry about it. After the war his fame waned; although there was a brief revival in the mid-1950s (and he would dub a small role in the Japanese version of Dumbo), his health issues, including diabetes and tuberculosis, led to him dying early at 57.

ca. 1935, from left: manzai comedian Entatsu Yokoyama, manzai writer Minoru Akita, and Roppa

Toriro Miki was multi-talented: he wrote lyrics, composed music, directed for the stage, and wrote for television and film. Here he is being given a whole roasted chicken by a fan.

That's about how I'd look if somebody gave me a whole roasted chicken. That's also about how I'd look if I gave somebody a whole roasted chicken.

Miki was a scholar at first and then, after being drafted, began composing music while in the military. After the war he decided to pursue music full-time. Miki was associated with jōdan ongaku, which directly translates to "joke music". As I understand it, this is jazzy music that is performed with a light, joking attitude; Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats as well as Frankie Sakai and City Slickers are two very popular bands who performed in this style. Miki worked extensively in commercial jingles and TV themes, and is the only one of these three who seems to have lived a long and possibly not depressing life. He died at age 80 while his four-part memoir was being published.

So, where does A Long, Comic Story fit in the timeline of these three entertainers? After having explored their respective back catalogues, this movie is barely a blip in the shadow of their much more famous works. Enoken and Miki were doing pretty well at this point, and Furukawa was on the decline, but, more importantly for our purposes, the cast also includes a young up-and-comer who had only been acting for about a year and was, before the end of 1954, going to play a pivotal role in arguably the most famous movie to ever come out of Japan.

sixth from far right on the row of portraits and also the still on the far left

This isn't Akihiko Hirata's best-known movie (it's not really anybody's best-known movie), but I think everything he was in before Godzilla is interesting just by virtue of it being before Godzilla. A Long, Comic Story was released about a month after his very strong performance in Farewell Rabaul, which got him noticed by Ishirō Honda and eventually cast in Godzilla, and he had also had his first (and only) leading role the year before - in a film that at least one critic basically described as a dumpster fire. (I disagree, but what do I know.)

From what I can gather, the full movie may actually not exist anymore - I'm reading a blog post from somebody who said they contacted Toho about getting a print to screen as part of a comedy festival at the Jimbocho Theater and they were only given the 38-minute re-release version mentioned above. Helpfully, the post also specifies that Hirata's role is cut entirely from the shortened version. Given that the only screenings I can confirm - which go as far back as the year 2000 - also use the shortened version, I think it's pretty safe to say that's all that remains of this movie, which would make the posters and the pamphlet the only pictorial evidence we have of Hirata's role.

Ah, that's depressing.

Rodan, Il Mostro Alato

I've had this Rodan poster saved to my computer for a while now and it always makes me laugh. I wasn't even going to post about it because it might be one of those things that's funny to me only. But things kind of got weird. We'll see.

Like, what? Neat poster, but who's Richard?

I know it's fairly common for people the world over to adopt Western-sounding names or nicknames for any number of reasons (remember when Hiroyuki Sanada was called "Duke"?) but I'm 99.9999% certain that is not what's going on here. I can't rule it out completely, of course, but I feel like with all the research I've done for this blog, I would have encountered at least one mention of it somewhere other than an Italian movie poster from 1968. As best I could tell, this seemed like a case of the Italians just deciding they didn't like the name "Akihiko" and assigning him a new one.

But I wondered if this rabbit hole went any deeper. It seems like the only promotional materials that contain this... error? Are the ones from the film's re-release in 1968. The original release in 1958¹ doesn't do it (although they still couldn't quite grok Kenji Sahara's surname). And I do say promotional materials, plural, because there are also lobby cards. All of them are like this.

You can distinguish between the two theatrical runs by the distributor name on the poster. Here I will go into the international history of Rodan to provide some context. A lot of international releases of the film stem from a cut produced by King Brothers. The original 1958 Italian release uses this cut and was distributed by RKO (and hence will have "RKO" on the poster somewhere). The film was re-released in 1968 by Ardin Cinematografica using a different, incredibly sloppy, cobbled-together cut of the film. This re-release seems to be where it all went wrong. 

And it's only this movie, and only this re-release. I've done a lot of research while writing this post and it looks like for every other Toho film imported to Italy where Hirata had a big enough role to appear on the poster, the Italians did spell his name right.

There's tons and tons of these posters and lobby cards. All from the 1968 release. All "Richard Hirata". This one's really good. Dig that random white lady.

"oh heavens me!"

It's also worth noting that I also have no earthly idea who William Scotty or John Garry are. At first I assumed they were part of a dubbing crew, but I've never heard of a dubbed film listing its voice cast on the poster, so I can't explain why those names are there. I'm leaning towards them being made up, honestly. (The English cut of Rodan isn't a King of the Monsters! deal where white actors were inserted into the actual plot, so that wouldn't explain it.)

So who is Ardin Cinematografica? What other movie crimes have they committed, if any? (Completely leaving Sonny Chiba's name off of their poster for Terror Beneath the Sea, for one.)

It would appear that they were a distribution company who handled both domestic Italian films and foreign imports throughout the late 1960s and 70s. I cannot find out much information about them, but one source of unknown reliability claims a connection to a multitude of other Japanese films: Prophecies of Nostradamus, Matango, Battle of the Japan Sea, Bullet Wound, et cetera. I started this post for fun, but I'm gonna be honest, it got a little depressing seeing just how hard they're trying to make these movies look like they have white people in them.

poster for Bullet Wound, starring Yūzō Kayama and Kiwako Taichi, and definitely not either of those people on the poster

At this point, I was about to end this post. I thought I had done all the research I could, and I had become disillusioned with European distribution companies in the process. I'd gotten to the bottom of it: It's Ardin Cinematografica's fault. But then the plot thickened.

I found out Germany was in on it too.

Rodan does not take place in Osaka.

I had so many browser tabs open at this point. You have no idea.

The 1968 German distributor (R.C.S. Filmverleih) seems like the same deal as Ardin; just an importer who handled foreign film releases. King Brothers can't be the source of the error, since they produced earlier cuts that were released with promotional materials that didn't have it.

Spain at least tried. We won't even get into "Inoshiro Honda". That's a whole other can of worms.² (Or perhaps I should say "a whole other can of Meganula".)

So what do we know? In 1968, when Rodan was re-released in Italy and Germany, somebody put "Richard Hirata" on the promo materials. Upon further research, I found that the original posters were drawn by a prolific Italian artist named Mario Piovano, so it appears that Italy released the film first, and Germany copied their lobby cards and posters from them. But who, ultimately, is responsible?

Well.

I'm going to say this tentatively, because I don't want to lay blame on the artist. But Piovano was associated with a studio called Studio Paradiso, who provided posters for both domestic Italian releases and imports - tons of movies, basically. I cannot assign Studio Paradiso sole responsibility, since I don't know if they did typesetting as well or if they just handed the art over to film studios and let their graphic design department handle the typesetting, but the closest thing I can give as an answer to "who did this?" is that it was probably some combination of Studio Paradiso and Ardin Cinematografica's graphic design department (if they had one).

But... why?

Like I said, I started this post for laughs, but going down the rabbit hole of weird-ass foreign posters for Toho movies made me realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is literally just racism. I still find this whole situation funny in a pathetic way, but there's something really mean about it. Like, "Sure, we'll take your movies, but we'll scrape you and your names off of the posters first." The United States was no better than Europe about this - do you want to see the least effort anybody has ever put into making a movie poster?

You can tell when someone is trying but is unfamiliar with the Japanese language. That's how we get so many things that say "Akihito Hirata"³. And of course I don't have a problem with people transliterating names into their own language. Not every language has the same phonemes, sometimes substitutions are made. That's just how language works. But this isn't any of that. This sucks.

Let's end on a nicer note. Poland put a cool dinosaur on their Rodan poster for no reason.

______ 

¹ Interesting plot twist here - I've also found an Italian eBay listing for one of the 1958 lobby cards where the cast on the card itself is all correct but the seller's description uses "Richard Hirata". I don't know what this indicates, but I find it quite odd.

^{2 "Inoshiro" is an alternate reading of the kanji used to spell his given name, but it is incorrect - his wife Kimi stated in an interview after his death that he did pronounce it "Ishirō".}

^{3 LIFE Magazine, this is directed at you, specifically. If you need someone to fact-check the fifth reissue of your Godzilla special, you know where to find me.}