風来忍法帖 / Fūrai ninpōchō / Homeless Ninja Trick Book (and sequel) (1965/1968)

Release date: May 16, 1965 / May 8, 1968

Director: Tetsuhiro Kawasaki

Studio: Takarazuka Motion Picture Co. Ltd.; distributed by Toho

Cast: Kiyoshi Atsumi, Makoto Satō, Juro Sasa, Yuki Nakagawa, Ichirō Arashima, Akihiko Hirata, Susumu Fujita, Toshio Chiba, Kyoji Kusakawa, Makoto Kawaji, Jotaro Togami, Haruya Kato, Junji Sakai et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Semi-infrequent theater screenings and television broadcasts within Japan.

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We all like ninjas, right? Let's look at a movie with ninjas in it. Two movies, actually, since I'll be covering both the first film and its sequel. (Disclaimer: I wrote the majority of this post on a large dose of caffeine.)

This is a lewd gesture that basically implies having romantic liaisons with a woman.

Both of these films were based on a novel by Fūtarō Yamada. Yamada was a very prolific and popular novelist who wrote extensively within the jidaigeki genre. From the mid-50s up to as recently as last year, film studios couldn't seem to get enough of him; Toei, NTV, Kadokawa/Daiei, King Records and Takarazuka - just to name a few - have all dipped into Yamada's back catalogue. (His work was also the basis for the acclaimed Samurai Reincarnation.) Yamada was known for the elements of eroticism within his work, something that really was not emphasized until the rise of V-Cinema, when directors could get as nasty with it as they wanted. Once Yamada's novels began to be adapted to V-Cin, directors and writers would actually start inserting even more eroticism and grotesquerie into their adaptations than had been present in the original material. But the films we're talking about today came out of Takarazuka/Toho in the mid-60s, so while a lot of the humor may be on the racy side, there's no way it's going to approach, say, pinku eiga territory.

The book.

The specific work that Fūrai ninpōchō and its sequel were based off of was the ninth installment in Yamada's long-running Ninpocho series, published in 1963. This series is, in essence, Now! That's What I Call Ninjas. It features a who's-who of famous jidaigeki frequent fliers. Continuity is optional: the setting is somewhere around the Sengoku and Edo period, but characters who factually were not alive in the same era are depicted interacting with each other.

How many Ninpocho works are there, you ask? An ungodly amount. Yamada's Wikipedia article claims 28 full-length and serialized novels, but also mentions that Yamada himself stated that there were 31. There are more short stories than I can count.

Our films are set during the reign of Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Several other real, historical personages are featured in the film: Kiyoshi Atsumi plays the Heian-period military commander Minamoto no Yoshihira, who is here called Akugenta; Juro Sasa plays a warrior-monk who may or may not be based on the historical Benkei; Makoto Satō plays a character named Jinkyobei whose historical basis (if there is any) I am uncertain of. All three are generally rascals and cheaters who get themselves into various mishaps; I should mention that these are comedies, which should be apparent from Atsumi's presence as the lead.

Satō, Sasa, Atsumi and somebody's underpants

Akihiko Hirata has a distinguished role as Kotaro Fuma, leader of the legendary Fuma clan of ninjas. From what I have heard his performance as Kotaro was "good". There is no shortage of Kotaro Fumas on film given that the Fuma clan are some of the most famous ninjas; a very select few appearances include Lupin III, Ninja Captor, Sukeban Deka III, at least one CLAMP manga, and a good deal of Naruto. This isn't dusty old history - this is just Japanese pop culture. As with many historical figures, impossible legends grew up around Kotaro Fuma, such as the rumor that he was 7' 2" and had fangs. I'm presuming Hirata plays him as a normal guy, but as is usually the case with pop culture ninjas, he does have supernatural powers.

Since these movies aren't actually that obscure within their home country, I've read some impressions written by people who have watched them. One reviewer praises the miscellaneous jokes in the first film such as Ichirō Arashima speaking Nagoya dialect in his performance as Hideyoshi, but overall calls it a "bad work". Another reviewer says the color and analog filming looks nice, but the story is incoherent. On the whole, people don't seem that fond of either of these movies, but it sounds like they are at least entertaining.

The sequel, subtitled Happō yabure¹, was produced in 1966 but shelved due to poor reviews until another film starring Kiyoshi Atsumi became a runaway hit in 1968. Although the Fuma clan seems to have taken a beating in the first film, Kotaro sticks around, since Hirata is in the sequel. From a detailed plot summary, I can infer that Kotaro does die at the end of the second film, but gives a sort of "you haven't seen the last of me" speech as he does. (There would be no further films; I'm unsure if Kotaro returns in further installments of the source material.)

I've only seen this poster once, being used at a 2016 screening of the first film.

That's about all I can give you. Vintage Ninja has some screencaps of the opening credits. A DVD was available for purchase within the U.S. at some point, but I did some poking around in that regard and was unsuccessful at obtaining a copy. Who knows what the future holds, though. Maybe someday.

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1 Galbraith gives the sequel's English title as "Homeless Ninja Trick Book: Lost in All Directions", but happō yabure is a term that means "full of holes"/"vulnerable to criticism" (as an argument), so make of that what you will.

Toho's "Youth School" TV dramas [東宝青春学園 / Toho Seishun Gakuen]

I don't talk about television on here as much as I talk about film, and there's a reason for that. As many Doctor Who fans will know, older television series often met an unfortunate fate as studios didn't really care to keep recordings around. This is the case in Japan as well, and it's made arguably worse by frequent television network reorganizations and elaborate copyright laws that sometimes led tapes to be deliberately destroyed, leaving us with a ton of stuff that will never see the light of day again unless some private collector has it (and from what I've heard, such collector circles keep to themselves).

So with that in our heads, let's look at Toho's Youth series of television shows! In this post, we're going to be covering What Is Youth? [Seishun to wa nanda], Go! Youth [Susume! Seishun], Flame of Youth [Honō no seishun], and Don't Cry, Youth [Nakuna seishun]. There are others in the series, but for obvious reasons we're only going to cover these four.

Read on for... baseball?

What is Youth? [青春とはなんだ] [1965-1966]

Note a very young Toyoyuki Kimura (Nambara in Ultraman Taro) in the middle.

The foundation of the series, which began with What is Youth? in 1965, was a book of the same name by Shintarō Ishihara, older brother of Yūjiro Ishihara and later governor of Tokyo. The book was adapted into a film at almost the same time as it was adapted for television; the film version stars the younger Ishihara was produced by Nikkatsu. Ishihara the elder is credited as writer only for episodes 1-26; the show was intended to end after that, but it was extended by popular demand, and since it began to diverge from the original story after the 26th episode, Ishihara's credit changed from "original work" to "original draft" starting with episode 27. The series proved to be so popular that it was made into a theatrical film titled Big Sun [Dekkai Taiyo] in 1967. You can see color footage from the film here. (Wikipedia does not mention Toyoyuki Kimura as part of the cast, but he is clearly visible in the clip, which is odd, and initially led me to believe this was colorized footage from the series.)

The first series follows Kensuke Nonomura (played by Natsuki) as he returns from the United States and takes up an English teaching position in a rural town. He becomes involved with the school's rugby club and serves as a kind of mentor to his students. Other teachers at the school have divided opinions on Kensuke's teaching methods and personal relationships with the students. 

Most people's first assumption on finding out that Akihiko Hirata was in a show like this would probably be that he played a teacher or principal or something like that. Well... sort of. This is actually one of his few yakuza roles. Hirata plays Takajiro Kane, the boss of the Kanetaka group, who also happens to be the school's president and sees the school more as a business than anything else. Since the series is essentially lost media, I'm not sure about this, but it seems like Hirata may have only appeared in the episodes that are based directly off of Ishihara's book, since from what I understand the main thrust of the story is about conflict between Kensuke and Takajiro. I believe this would have been Hirata's first television role¹ as it aired slightly earlier than his episode of Ultra Q.

I'm so sorry but this is literally the only picture of him from this series that I can find. 

I've had a blog post bookmarked for a while that contains a directory of links to other posts where the author tracks down filming locations of the show and adds side-by-side pictures comparing the locations then and now. The level of dedication is somewhat terrifying. What is Youth? was quite well-received when it first aired and today there is still a lot of nostalgia for it among the older generation, but it has never been released on DVD.

Go! Youth [進め! 青春] [1968]

I've actually seen this one, so I can talk about it with more depth. Some wonderful person uploaded the ENTIRE THING to YouTube. It's extremely good, I really liked it.

This was the fourth installment in the Youth series, and the first to be broadcast in color. It aired for only 11 episodes before being canceled due to low ratings, which were partially because the series began airing during that year's Olympics. Kenkichi Hamahata plays the lead, a young social studies teacher named Susumu Takagi. The showrunners wanted to make Takagi a more realistic character than the "superman" teachers of the previous three series, so Takagi has a difficult time with his students at first, but eventually is goaded into becoming the president of the school's soccer team. His nickname is "Napoleon" since he's always talking about Napoleon, and he has a catchphrase that goes something like "'Impossible' is not a word in a young person's dictionary", which the students interpret with a great amount of creative license. Hamahata is very endearing as Takagi, he has charisma but he feels like a normal person too. Apparently he died in July of last year and was a prolific actor across stage and screen, as well as a prominent calligraphy hobbyist.

Hirata plays Ejima, the Vice Principal, alongside Eijiro Tonō as Principal Togawa, and he is in every episode except for #7. Neither of them particularly like Takagi or the soccer team, and frequently try to come up with schemes to disband it, but they're pretty chill about it. Ejima is something of a rival to Takagi since he's the president of the school's baseball team, and I am so incredibly pleased to report that this means in episode 3 he plays baseball himself.

one could so easily photoshop the school's emblem to say "東宝"

filing this one under "screenshots I did not expect to ever be taking"

...hang on a minute. Wait. Wait a second. I'm remembering something. Hang on.

Remember in Battle Baseball when you could have Dr. Serizawa as a pitcher? Did Banpresto know??

Let's move on now.

Flame of Youth [炎の青春] [1969]

I have seen this one as well. This was the fifth in the series, immediately following Go! Youth and broadcast for, again, only eleven episodes (all of which can be watched in the playlist I linked above). Despite the short run of Go! Youth, it was popular enough that there was demand for a follow-up. 

Keiji Higashiyama plays the lead, Gōtaro Inoki, and his assigned sport is basketball this time around. There is a bit of a change of formula in Flame of Youth in that it takes place at a former all-girls high school, so all of the students in the basketball club are girls. The bigger change, however, is that the series acknowledges the student protests. For the first time, the students in the show realize that they can advocate for themselves and organize to demand their rights, and this is treated with gravity and respect - something that I admire the show a lot for. Although the students' activism is toned down as the series progresses, they're never made the butt of a joke. One thing that really struck me while watching this immediately after watching Go! Youth is that there's hardly any basketball in it. Soccer was absolutely integral to the previous series, but here, the basketball club feels like background noise.

Flame of Youth features a woman screenwriter, Mieko Osanai. Women writers and directors are so rare in the Showa era that I make a mental note of it when I find out something I watched was written or directed by a woman. Osanai was involved in the planning stages of Ultra Q and wrote one episode, Open Up!, but didn't stick around because she didn't want to write for a series that involved monsters. In 1990 as the Gulf War was breaking out she also volunteered in refugee camps in Jordan. Osanai died last year as well, in May; she was 94 years old.

Keiji Higashiyama doesn't have a Wikipedia page. It seems that he only acted for a brief period of time before retiring. It must be said he is a tall drink of water. One wonders if they cast him in a basketball series for that alone. Some of the other cast members of Go! Youth return here (playing different roles), such as Tatsuhito Gō (acting under his previous stage name Haruo Nakazawa at this point) and Takaki Nabetani. We will also see baby Yutaka Mizutani both here and in Don't Cry, Youth. 

Hirata plays the head teacher, Takai. He is less antagonistic than the vice principal in Go! Youth, which reflects the overall more mature tone of this series, but it seems like a commonality in all of these shows that the school administration would certainly shed no tears for the disbanding of the sports club, even if they aren't actively trying to sabotage it. Unfortunately, Takai departs the show with no fanfare after the first six episodes.

As mentioned: tall drink of water

idk, I just liked this shot. Cinnamon tography.

Don't Cry, Youth [泣くな青春] [1972]

let's 👏 go 👏 UGM! 👏 U! 👏 GM!

The Youth series had been suspended after Flame of Youth in 1969, but similar series proved to be so popular that it was brought back in 1972. It was, in fact, so popular that Toho aired two of them at the same time: Don't Cry, Youth was broadcast simultaneously with Jump Out! Youth [Tobidase seishun]. This is a very odd approach that I've never heard done before (can you imagine two Ultraman series airing at the same time?) and evidently there was some overlap between the two as characters from Jump Out! Youth would appear in Don't Cry, Youth, near the end of the series. At some point, it was also adapted into young adult books. By 1972 we were firmly into the sukeban craze, so the students are much wilder than what we've seen earlier in the series.

Jin Nakayama played the lead - you may recognize that name; in a few years he would move on from captaining high school sports teams to captaining UGM in Ultraman 80. This series features the smallest of Hirata's roles in the Youth series, only appearing as a guest star in episodes 10 and 11. Since this series is obscure, I can't find any information on who he plays. 

You can watch a few episodes of this show - although not 10 or 11 - on NicoNico. (Related: There are significantly more Jin Nakayama fancams out there than I had anticipated.)

So now we've covered the extent of our man's involvement in Toho's Youth series. It is fascinating to see how the depiction of youth culture and public school in media changed so much over the course of just seven years. Although What is Youth? and Don't Cry, Youth remain inaccessible aside from reruns (of which I don't believe there have been many), the recent YouTube uploads of the middle two series are a tremendously good sign for obscure media in general. Keep digitizing those tapes!

Until next time.

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1 This may not be true - he had a very small role in an episode of Special Mobile Investigation Team that may have aired in 1964, but I can't verify that for certain, and it would be unusual since SMIT was a Toei series.

The Oddity That Is (or Oddities That Are) "Ankokugai" Export Dubs (and More!)

I was initially going to make this post solely about The Last Gunfight, but according to Stuart Galbraith's comprehensive Toho Studios Story, The Big Boss and Big Shots Die at Dawn received English dubs as well, so we're going to look at all three. Galbraith doesn't provide specifics on when the films were released stateside or how widely, so let's see what else we can find out about the English-dubbed versions of each of these three films and how they were released in the U.S., if at all. (There are, of course, more films in the Ankokugai series, but we're only going to be talking about these for [gestures to blog] obvious reasons.)

The Last Gunfight (1960)

It would appear that the U.S. release of The Last Gunfight was limited strictly to television. Introducing Mifune's character with a shot of him socking Hideyo Amamoto in the face can almost make us forget that the trailer omits Hirata entirely. In addition to the above trailer, there's also a far less flashy one where their approach to dubbing seems to be "just don't include clips of anyone speaking".

Distribution was handled by National Telefilm Associates, who had launched their own network four years prior and would shortly become the largest independent television distributor in the nation, and the much less successful Commonwealth United. The dub was produced in Tokyo. Judging from the fact that the dub was first featured in Toho's catalogue of 1962 international releases, it seems that it was available for TV syndication by that point, although whether or not it was actually ever aired on TV is unknown to me. Despite ultimately being relegated to television, the dubbed version was intended for theatrical release; this is evident from the way the closing credits are cropped. Why a theatrical release was aborted is unknown. Who currently holds the full dub, if it is extant, is unknown. Interestingly, though, I've found a list of inventory once held by NYC's Movielab, a defunct film post-processing facility, that includes the film.

The trailer was featured on Vol. 5 of Something Weird Video's Dusk to Dawn Drive-in Trash-O-Rama Show trailer compilation VHS tape series.

Big Shots Die at Dawn (1961)

While we don't have a trailer for this one, I was able to find the film featured in the same catalogue of 1962 international releases mentioned above:

I also came across potentially the most unexpected thing I've ever found in the course of doing research for this blog: there is a no wave album called Ninja Star Danger Rock by Henry Kaiser, Charles K. Noyes and Weasel Walter where every track is titled after a Kihachi Okamoto film. Big Shots Die at Dawn is included, as is The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman and At This Late Date the Charleston. I bought it, I listened to it, and... it's just no wave. It doesn't have anything to do with Kihachi Okamoto. Fortunately, I do like no wave, so I enjoyed it. (And I thought the Pittashi Kan-Kan Soundcloud rap was weird.)

The Big Boss (1959)

A dub of this may exist, but it doesn't seem to have been included in the same deal as Big Shots and Gunfight, and was probably promoted, dubbed, and distributed by different companies. It's almost impossible to Google this movie due to the existence of a Bruce Lee film with the same name. Even more confusing is that our beloved patron saint of weird Toho stuff SpaceHunterM has contributed to the preservation of the English dub of the Bruce Lee film. I'm not sure if the fact that I can't find anything out about an English dub of our Big Boss is because there genuinely wasn't one, or if the proliferation of similarly-titled films is obfuscating the English dub beyond my reach.

However.

In the "really didn't see that one coming" category of archaeological finds I've unearthed, we have the Cuban theatrical release of this film. The newspapers that advertise the film are from mid-October to early November 1959, so it was dubbed/subbed (not sure which) and distributed incredibly quickly. I can find three ads that ran in Diario de la Marina and one from Prensa Libre, which shut down the next year due to being occupied by the Cuban government:

The text under the ad says "We protest the closure of the Universal Cinema due to an illegal strike" and was under every cinema ad on the page.

This one says "The wildest gunfighters filmed".

This one says "Luxurious and violent like no other movie ever made - don't miss it!"

I think "El Submarino Heroico" MIGHT be Submarine E-57 Will Not Surrender.

Five years later, in 1964, the film was released in Mexico. I'm really having to grub around for any evidence of this Spanish-language release at all, so I have no idea if the same dub/sub was used for both the Cuban and Mexican markets. I do know one thing: we have lobby cards! Somebody in Japan even cared enough to import one at some point, since there's one for sale on Yahoo! Auctions.

The tagline reads "Who took care of you when the crime syndicate took over Tokyo?" Also, is that supposed to be Mifune? It looks like Joe Pesci in Home Alone.

 

That's all for now. While I've always respected dubbing and the efforts to preserve international versions of Toho movies, I've never been that personally interested in the hunt for lost dubs; however, that may be changing, as lately whenever I sit down to write about the international release of a film, I end up going down a huge rabbit hole.