The Post Where I Talk About Yoshiki Onoda

I'm surprised I've made it so long without writing a post like this. To be honest, I've kind of been assuming that my readers probably already know who Yoshiki Onoda is, but I'm realizing that isn't necessarily the case. I have no idea if it's common knowledge that Akihiko Hirata had siblings who were also in the film industry. I don't even know if most people are aware that Hirata was not the name he was born with. (I constantly think about the xkcd comic when I'm writing for this blog.)

So let's have a Yoshiki Onoda post. The occasion is that today is or would have been his 100th birthday. I don't know if he's still alive, and I don't know if anyone else does either. I have heard that as of 2023 there were rumors that he was collecting a pension, but frankly, I would not trust my source for that statement any farther than I could throw it. In any case, there definitely are living 100-year-olds out there, so one can hope.

Poster for What Day Will You Come Back? When Will You Return?

Masahiko Onoda was born in Tokyo on July 12, 1925. He graduated from what is now Tokai University and joined Shintoho afterward as an assistant director. His first credit was What Day Will You Come Back? When Will You Return? [Itsu no hi-kun kaeru nan'nichi kunsairai], released in June of 1950 and starring Ken Uehara and Mieko Takamine, but since there are many different levels of assistant director within the Japanese film industry, not all of which are always credited, it is possible there may be some slightly earlier uncredited work. In 1958 he made his solo directorial debut: The Record of Lord Kusonoki's Loyalty [Nankō ni-dai seichū-roku], starring Tomisaburō Wakayama. After that film he would change his name to Yoshiki¹ and continue under that name for the rest of his career. Late in 1960 he married Utako Mitsuya, who he had worked with a an actress, and they would soon have two sons. They were married for 44 years until her death in 2004, and he must have been very fond of her, as after she died he wrote her biography.² According to his eldest son, he was very strict and serious about getting good performances out of his actors, but he treated all of his actors equally. You can find a list of films he worked on during his time at Shintoho (including as AD under his birth name) here. 

There is one picture of Onoda as a young man from his Wikipedia page that is typically used to represent him, but the blog that his son ran for the acting school the two of them operated posted many pictures of him in middle age, directing period dramas, and as an older man, teaching at the school. Here are a few of them:

I've censored the student's face because I understand that's kind of de rigeur for pictures taken of random people in Japan.

The years immediately following WWII were a time of tremendous change in the Japanese film industry. In the late 1940s, some Toho employees who were in favor of stronger labor unions and fairer working conditions split off and formed their own company, Shintoho. Shintoho, for all of its relatively short existence, was never very healthy. Still technically under the aegis of its parent company and usually at odds with it about finances and distribution, it consistently struggled to make a profit, sometimes even having to shut its facilities down. In the mid-'50s, however, it achieved its first real financial success with a trio of patriotic films about the Emperor Meiji, and subsequently the landscape of the wider Japanese film industry began to change even further when each studio realized it could solidify its place in the market by catering to one specific audience. Shintoho found its niche in making films that were often quite lurid or sexual in nature and appealed to teenagers - in an ironic twist, these sex-and-violence films that the studio had had no choice but to make due to lack of budget in its earlier days were now the kind of films that company management decided should be the studio's bread and butter. The result of the crystallization of each studio as purveyors of only one type of film was that lesser directors had little to no creative control.

This is the environment in which Yoshiki Onoda joined Shintoho. He was with the studio from its rough beginnings to its very end in 1962, and after a time he would become a freelance director, working almost exclusively in making jidaigeki for television. He also has three screenwriting credits from his time at Shintoho: Homecoming [Kisei], Cave Queens [Onna gankutsu-ō], and Beware of Suspicious People [Ayashii yatsu ni goyōshin no maki], one of the two Comedy Trio films he directed (starring Yoshiko Otowa). Interestingly, although Akihiko Hirata was a bit younger than him, he actually joined Shintoho before his older brother, also as an assistant director. I'm not sure what the policy was about family members working at the same company at the same time, but I will note that the Onoda brothers' individual stints at Shintoho do not seem to overlap.

Yoshiki Onoda seemed to enjoy casting his family in stuff. After marrying Utako Mitsuya, he continued to work with her, and both of his younger siblings show up pretty often in his films (and especially his later jidaigeki television work, in Hirata's case). He also frequently directed his son Masayuki Onoda during his acting career, which lasted from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. As I've said before, the Onoda Venn Diagram is surprisingly complicated, and the addition of a son makes it even more so: the eldest Onoda directed both of his younger siblings and his son, but never both siblings at the same time, and never either sibling at the same time as his son. I do wish we had at least gotten one full three-sibling team-up at some point.³

Otowa is on the right in the purple sweater and apron.

Onoda was very prolific, but few of his films have received English subtitles. His most famous work outside of Japan is Female Slave Ship, something of an extremely minor proto-exploitation cult classic, undoubtedly better known for starring a ridiculously young Bunta Sugawara than for its direction. As of the time of writing, including that film, there are currently six of Onoda's films that you can go on the internet and watch (or buy) right now. The others are Stray Wolf (1982), The Flower Flute Murders (1983), Araki Mataemon: Duel at Kagiya Corners (1993), Onihei Hankacho: Heizo the Demon (1995), and Samurai Justice: Mother and Daughter. Heizo the Demon, like much of his Onihei Hankacho work, also stars his son. Cave Queens was shown at the Far East Film Festival in 2010 and critics evidently liked it.

Poster for I Am a Mountain Man in the City, also featuring Yoshiko Otowa (left-most column, holding... ladles, maybe?)

Although his last work as a director was in 2008, he was interviewed in 2010 for a documentary⁴ about fellow Shintoho director Teruo Ishii. The full documentary unfortunately never received a home media release after its initial premiere, but a trailer is on YouTube, which contains literally about two seconds of footage of Onoda speaking. (We do live off scraps over here.) He is 85 in the documentary, and he resembles his younger brother enough that seeing him at that age gives me a very strange feeling.

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1 Machine translators don't know how to handle his name. You will sometimes see Yoshimiki, Yoshimi, or Yoshimoto, but it is pronounced "Yoshiki".

2 This was The Cherry Blossoms Bloomed Twice [Sakura wa ni-do saita], released in 2006. I don't have a solid source for this either, but I have heard that Mitsuya recounted falling in love with him on the set of Man-Eating Ama, when she was hesitant to do a nude scene and he told her she could just wear a towel instead.

3 Something I like to do because I'm a huge nerd is keep track of actors who have worked with all three siblings, which there are less of than you may imagine. Currently, I'm aware of Masayo Banri, Toyoko Takechi and Tōru Yuri.

4 Tokusatsu fans take note: Shiro Sano and Yuriko Hishimi also appear in this documentary.