Studio: Toho
Director: Yasuki Chiba
Cast: Daisuke Katō, Chikage Awashima, Setsoku Hara, Seizaburo Kawazu, Norihei Miki, Keiju Kobayashi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Setsuko Hara (first film), Akihiko Hirata, Yasuko Nakata, Akira Tani, Sadako Sawamura, Kyoko Aoyama (second film), Ichirō Arashima (third film), Reiko Dan, Hisaya Itō (fourth film), et al.
Availability: DVDs released November 2025 via Toho. VHS release.
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The impetus for this post is a bad pun. I thought: why not write about the Ōban series during Obon? I want to make it very clear that the two words have nothing to do with each other, but as an English-speaker inclined towards puns, I could not resist this idea once I had it in my head.
Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie's book The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, originally published in 1959 and revised in 1983, contains a brief mention of the Ōban series. This serves to illustrate a point that I've made a few times before: There are a vast number of Japanese films which were known to Western audiences around the time of their release in the mid-20th century but which are now virtually unheard of outside Japan. I will quote the section on Ōban in full:
Another outstanding comedy was Yasuki Chiba's Large Size (Oban), a 1957 film in several feature-length parts. Set in the 1920s, it was about a rather heavy (large size) man whose ambitions are equally big. He is a go-getter of the mythological American type whose constant energy in life and business is completely foreign to the traditional social ideals of the Japanese. Even in love he considers no woman beyond his ability, and here too he is generally successful for, as the picture delicately hints, he is large size all over. He is constantly losing everything—women and money both—only to gain back even more through sheer energy and determination.
Richie also speaks about the film - and gives some further elaboration about its title - in his book Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character:
Chiba's finest work was found in the tetralogy Ōban (1957-58), about a large young man whose ambitions are equally big. (Both of the English titles sometimes used, Large Size and Mr. Fortune Maker, are not precise: oban is an Osaka word, now somewhat quaint, used to designate, not the boss of a company, but the man just under him.) He is a go-getter of the mythological American (or Osakan) variety whose constant energy in life and business is completely foreign to the traditional social ideals of the Japanese. There is no plot as such; the story is a Balzac-like chronicle of the hero's various rises and falls. The richness of character and detail and the many early-1920s touches create throughout all four films an almost palpable atmosphere, one to which Daisuke Kato adds greatly in his perfect interpretation of this César Birotteau transplanted to Tokyo.
Considering that Richie appears to generally abhor all but a very select few comedies, the fact that he likes the films is a testament to their quality. I find his definition of the series as "a film in several feature-length parts" to be a bit odd - the first Ōban film alone runs for just under two hours, and the rest hit at least 100 minutes, so treating all four as one film, collectively, would create an absolute behemoth of a movie.
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| Flyer for a 2011 screening of all four films at Laputa Asagaya. |
These films were adapted from a novel by Bunroku Shishi that was originally serialized in Asahi Magazine from 1956-58. In 1962 the novel was also adapted into a 26-episode television series starring Kiyoshi Atsumi in the lead role. Also of note is that Shishi wrote Gyu-chan as using dialect specific to the Uwajima region, some of which is no longer in usage today, making this novel and these films relevant to linguistic history as well as the history of cinema. As we will see further on, the series also had a limited release in Hawai'i under its Mr. Fortune Maker title.
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| Kiyoshi Atsumi as Gyu-chan. |
The series follows a gregarious country boy named Ushinosuke Akabane (referred to as "Gyu-chan"). Gyu-chan takes the Kabutocho district of Nihonbashi by storm in the first film, is left destitute in the second after a stock market crash, returns to his hometown in the third film after incurring much debt, and finally harnesses the power of the re-opened stock market in the fourth installment. The four films cover Gyu-chan's life from the 1920s and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war to the re-opening of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949, and his various financial failures and successes along the way.
Women are of course a very large part of Gyu-chan's story, and the actresses featured in this series are some of the most enduringly popular in Showa-era cinema. Chikage Awashima, Setsuko Hara, Yasuko Nakata and Kyoko Aoyama were all Toho frequent fliers, and the other supporting cast is all names we'll readily recognize from the vast number of Toho comedies they were in: Norihei Miki is always an outsized presence in whatever he appears in, no matter how prominent his character; we also have Ichirō Arashima, Keiju Kobayashi, and our eggman Yū Fujiki in presumably a small role.
Akihiko Hirata appears in the first three installments of the series. His character is the husband of Kanako Arishima, nee Mori (Setsuko Hara), a woman who Gyu-chan had had feelings for since childhood. He is either a count or an earl1 (hokushaku; can be translated as either). Kanako is unmarried in the first film, married in the second and third, and widowed by the fourth; since the Pacific War breaks out during the course of these films, I would speculate that Count Arishima perhaps dies in circumstances related to that. Kanako dies of tuberculosis in the fourth film as well. Hirata's role doesn't seem to have been that prominent as his name is not featured on most of the posters I've seen, but regardless of how much screen time he actually has, Arishima seems to be Gyu-chan's main romantic rival.
There's not much photographic evidence for this role, either. I have seen exactly three pictures of Count Arishima (well... maybe two and a half?) and none of them are very good. This one is unambiguous:
But then there are two stills from film festival flyers that are almost too small and grainy to make out. I would bet money that I can spot Hirata in this one:
But I'm less certain about this one below. I think that's him in the uniform, but I'm not quite comfortable with what it would say about me as a person if I was capable of recognizing him from a picture this small and murky.
As mentioned, this series is not the only adaptation of the original material. In fact, the novel was so popular that it reached beyond the screen and into the real world. When the film was adapted into a movie in 1957, the mayor of Uwajima City at the time decided that Uwajima needed to have a signature confectionary, and that it should be named after the film that was set in his city. Ōban confectionaries are still manufactured today and you can order them online.
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| The graphic design is a bit eye-burning, but visit this page to see how marketing for the sweets even utilizes images from Ōban posters. Uwajima seems quite proud of these. |
These films were not unknown in English-language spheres around the time of their release, either. In March of 1958, the first film made its way into Honolulu theaters under the subtitle "Mr. Fortune Maker" - this title was used for the second and third chapters as well, which were released to theaters in July and December of 1958, respectively. I cannot seem to find any record of the fourth film having a Hawaiian release, which is a bit odd, but, you know, Hirata wasn't in the fourth one, so we care less about it.
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| At least one theater was also running The Giant Claw at the same time as the first Ōban film. It pains me on a soul-deep level to think that I will never experience going to see The Giant Claw and Ōban at the same theater on the same night. |
Although the series garnered high praise from Richie and Anderson, and continues to get positive reviews on the relatively rare occasions the films are screened in Japan, there's still no way to watch these other than to shell out for a VHS tape or be lucky enough to catch them when they're screened every few years. As I said, though, that won't be the case for long, as I am eventually going to digitize at least some of these films.
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1 He was not quite 30 at the time these films were made; I had no idea a count/earl could be that young, but I suppose there is much I do not know about Japanese peerage. Also, now he gets to be a peer like his wife’s family was, ha ha. (He and Yoshiko Kuga were not yet married at the time.)
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