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.

____

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.