黒帯三国志 / Kuro-obi sangokushi / Rainy Night Duel (1956)

Release date: January 29, 1956
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Shin Saburi, Akio Kobori, Kyōko Kagawa, Mariko Okada, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Hideo Saeki, Yū Fujiki, Haruo Tanaka, Shōsaku Sugiyama et al.
Availability: No availability on home media. Infrequent screenings and television broadcasts.

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This is a film that has multiple English titles (and no English release). I've decided to go with the title that the film is listed under on Letterboxd, but it's not a literal translation - not even close, actually. A literal translation would be Black Belt Sangokushi, which is sometimes elaborated into Black Belt Romance of the Three Kingdoms, since that's what "sangokushi" means. ("Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is a historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong which is set during the end of the Han dynasty and the beginning of China's Three Kingdoms period.)

Got all that? Okay.

A promo still from this movie has been the header image on my blog since I created it, but you may have noticed that said image has changed from a small, low-resolution photo to a large, high-quality scan. This is because I now own this promo still. It currently sits in a frame on my desk. Unfortunately I haven't seen the film, but maybe someday I'll get that lucky.

fun fact: it took me 11 months to notice Toshirō Mifune was in this photo

I have to continue talking about the title for a moment longer, because now that we know the historical context that it implies, I must disabuse you of the notion that this movie takes place in ye olde ancient times. It takes place at the end of the Meiji period (early 1910s). The movie is in fact bookended by shots of trains. I have read that the "Three Kingdoms" in the title is an allusion to Kyūshū, Honshū, and Hokkaido, but I'm not sure about that, due to not having seen the film.

On the surface, this may look like a samurai movie due to the way everyone is dressed, but it's actually about judo and karate. The story was written by Akira Shimomura and serialized in Novels and Readings magazine; I can't find out much about the story or the author, but it seems like Shimomura may have written other works about judo. The film was directed by Senkichi "No Way In Hell Am I Directing Godzilla" Taniguchi, and the music was done by our favorite, Akira Ifukube. You can actually find his score for the film on CD here and there, but the movie itself remains elusive. Kihachi Okamoto also served as assistant director. It would be a few years before he would make his solo directorial debut.

I don't own this, unfortunately

eiga.com and a translator will give you a decent summary of the film. Be sure to check out reviews on kinenote as well for much more plot detail. Toshirō Mifune plays what sounds like a righteous dojo member who is excommunicated from his former dojo and repeatedly pitted against human traffickers, people from rival dojo, and other opponents, while attempting to romantically pursue a woman who isn't allowed to be with him. 

I didn't start this blog to talk about Toshirō Mifune, though. Hirata's character is one of two sons of the head of a rival dojo who, as I understand it, does get some one-on-one fight scenes with Mifune. I must also mention that, yes, that is him with long hair in those photos up there. I don't know what to make of it either. Hirata seems to have the primary antagonist role here, which is interesting, and I'm hearing a lot of people express surprise to see him playing a karateka - get good and watch you some Tetsuwan Namida Ari!

extremely crusty poster

There are some more stills here, but whatever print this person was watching is so bad it looks like something made by the Lumiere brothers. There's been a handful of reviews from people who have seen it in theaters or on pay-per-view television over the years, so, as with many things, this could easily be released to home media, but it just isn't. Now is the time to be digitizing and releasing movies such as this one - the further the print degrades, the less use there’ll be in producing a home media edition.

It would appear that this was adapted into a manga twice in the same year that it was released. From what I can tell the serialized story came first, then the film and the manga concurrently, as a promotional campaign. (I managed to find some pictures of the actual manga itself and I do find it very amusing that the mangaka has chosen to make Hirata’s character bald.)

I'll end this post with a few miscellaneous impressions I've gleaned from reviews:

• The judo choreography is not good but the karate is alright.
• Some of the tertiary dojo guys use weapons like brass knuckles and chains, which is unusual.
• People don't really know for sure what the "Three Kingdoms" in the title refers to, what I mentioned above is just speculation.
• There's shakuhachi.
• General consensus is Mifune was too old for this role (he was 36 at the time).
• Hirata may have been playing his role comedically or it just came off that way unintentionally.

This is a really interesting movie that remains essentially unknown outside of its home country, and inaccessible even within it aside from the odd theater screening and TV broadcast. But people are seeing it somehow - the last review on Filmarks was from October 2023. Even though I haven't seen it, there are enough reviews of the film that I feel like I know a lot about it. And now you do too!

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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[Note: In the time since writing this post, I've obtained and translated an early draft script of this film. You can see the script and my translation here. I've edited this post to include the new information I've gathered from reading the script.]

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 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.

This is the first in a trilogy of films which adapted classic rakugo stories and fleshed them out into one semi-connected narrative. As rakugo is performed by a single storyteller acting out various parts, the idea here was to adapt those stories into scenarios where each part was played by a separate actor, instead of having one person act them all out. Other changes were made to the stories, but as I understand, some variation is natural in rakugo, especially depending on the geographic location where the performance is taking place.

The rakugo stories included in Nagaya ha Hana Zakari (or, at least, the early draft script for it) are:

• Nedoko ("Bed"/"Bedroom")
• Kaji musuko ("Fire son")
• Dekikogoro ("Impulse"/"On a whim")
• Umaya kaji ("Stable fire")
• Niramugaeshi ("Glaring back")
• Shingan ("Mind's eye)
• Tarachine ("Mother", "Father", or "Parent" in general)

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 in film 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. In 2010 a film and culture writer reached out to Toho directly about screening the film at Jimbocho Theater as part of a festival, and was given the 38-minute re-release version. Helpfully, the person who obtained the 38-minute version wrote a blog post about it which specifies that Hirata's role was 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. I think you can probably understand why getting the script felt so special.

In the film, Hirata plays Sonosuke, the firebug son of a landlord/gidayu enthusiast who eventually gets disowned and kicked out for skipping out on his father's gidayu performance to go watch a big fire with his girlfriend (eventually wife). Reading the script made me sorely upset that the parts of the film that include him were cut - if the final film resembled the script in any way, this was a rare comedic role for him. Sonosuke almost seems like he was written to be a teenager rather than an adult, but the script as well as the source material it was adapted from do specify that he is an adult.

I guess I'll just end this post by encouraging you to please read the script. Again, this movie is a footnote, but it's precisely because it's so obscure that I was able to do something like this; deteriorating Kurosawa scripts that are selling for upwards of $500 are just not in my wheelhouse. And, honestly, it's a really good and funny movie. If you're familiar with the actors, it is very easy to recreate a version of the film in your head, even if none of us will ever see it for real.

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.}