じゃじゃ馬ならし / Jajauma narashi / Taming an Unruly Girl (1966)

Release date: June 22nd, 1966

Studio: Toho

Director: Toshio Sugie

Cast: Tadao Takashima, Junko Ikeuchi, Mie Hama, Mitsuko Kusabue, Ichirō Arashima, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Akihiko Hirata et al

Availability: No known theater screenings. No home media release, but digitized copies of the film possibly exist.

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"Akihiko Hirata only ever got typecast in very serious scientist-type roles."

Choosing what to write about on here is more or less arbitrary, with some exceptions: I try to avoid very popular subjects unless I have something interesting to say about them (I was originally going to have a "no Godzilla" rule, look how that turned out) and I try not to write about war movies because I don't want to get canceled. But for this, the decision to write about it was very simple and arose from circumstances outside of my control: 

I had a dream about it.

My subconscious mind picked a bit of a tough one. There's not too much information about this movie out there, and the difficulty of looking it up on the internet is compounded by the fact that "Jajauma narashi" also happens to be the Japanese title of The Taming of the Shrew, so a simple Google search brings you all information related to any time The Taming of the Shrew has ever been mentioned in a  Japanese-language context. ("Jajauma" is an expression that literally means "restless horse" and is used figuratively to refer to a person who's restless or unmanageable, especially a woman.)

That being said, though... in the process of doing research on this one, I began to draw the conclusion that it was solidly within the "prints of this probably do not exist anymore" category. But then I found something incredible: footage. Someone out there is hanging onto a copy of this movie. Whether it'll ever see the light of day or not remains up to the person who has it, but we can hope. (That Twitter handle sounds very familiar to me, I think we've seen them on the blog before - they may be somebody like @packy1954 who somehow has access to every Toho movie ever made.)

But even an obscure movie needs marketing: lobby cards and posters were produced to advertise the film, many of which still exist and are or have been up for auction. All of the lobby cards share one thing in common; they're very colorful, very mod, very 1960s. That gives us an idea of what the film itself looked like, even if the actual full movie is at present nowhere to be found on home media or streaming.

This one isn’t up for auction anymore because I bought it and now it’s in my house.

The film was adapted from a literary work, although not The Taming of the Shrew; Maruo Shioda's Ijiwaru nyobo sojuho ("A Cruel Wife's Management Ways") provided the source material. Going off of the Kinema Junpo synopsis, it sounds like this is a salaryman comedy about hard-working husbands who are very annoyed by their wives asking for those pesky things women always want (basic attention and stability). At only 66 minutes in runtime, and considering that between its release and today it has fallen into essentially total obscurity, I'm going to hazard a guess that Toho didn't really intend for this to be one of 1966's big blockbusters.

Hirata seems to have played a coworker of Tadao Takashima's character, who was passed over for a promotion in favor of Takashima (or perhaps Takashima just happened to be promoted first, the synopsis isn't very clear). At some point in the film he ends up in a traffic accident (oh no, not Get 'em All again) although the details of that are also not spelled out in the synopsis. He has to have been important enough to end up on one of the lobby cards shown above, but I'm not sure what all he does in the film as he isn't one of the central characters.

I genuinely think maybe 2 people have seen this thing in the past 60 years. There are no reviews on Kinenote or Filmarks and one person has logged it as "seen" on eiga.com. It doesn't look like it's ever been screened in a theater past its initial release. Upon its debut, it played on a double-bill with a Keiju Kobayashi vehicle called The Stranger Within a Woman (Onna no nakani iru tan'nin). Basically, it just kind of seems like Toho needed a second movie for a double bill and immediately forgot it existed after it had done its duty.

That's it for today, thank you for reading if you've gotten this far.

A Little Look-See at the February 1955 Issue of Eiga Fan [映画ファン]

You ever pay decent money to import a magazine from another country because of one single picture you saw in an auction listing? Because I did. (Pre-tariffs. This post has been queued for a while.)

left page: top row (L-R): Ren Yamamoto, Yū Fujiki, Momoko Kōchi, Kenji Sahara (credited here under his birth name Tadashi Ishihara), bottom row: Akira Takarada, Machiko Kitagawa.
right page: top row: Akihiko Hirata, Chizuru Murasaki, bottom row: Keiko Mori, Masako Nijo.

Above is a spread showing off some of Toho's brightest young stars. The two sidebars read (on right) "The Toho gang that will carry the future! We look forward to your great achievements!" (on left) "The role of a daughter, a handsome guy, a gangster, a vanguard - a colorful flower blooms." The bottom text has each actor's name and a few words about them; Hirata's says that he joined the company on the recommendation of Yoshiko Yamaguchi. ("Recommendation" as in she suggested to him that he should become an actor, not that she recommended him to Toho - as far as I understand.)

You want to see some other Toho guys? There's not many in here since Eiga Fan covered films from all studios, not just Toho. But here we have Akira Kubo barely looking old enough to drive.

Next, we're going to doxx Yoshio Tsuchiya.

Born May 18, 1927 in Kamiozu, Shioyama City, Yamanishi Prefecture. Real name: Yoshio Tsuchiya. Graduated from Megawa Junior High School, Yamanishi Medical College, and Haiyuza Institute. Member of Haiyuza Theater Company. Joined Toho on May 1st, 1954. Appeared in Mitsuyusen [Smuggler's Ship] after the premiere of Seven Samurai. Family: Living in the countryside with only a mother. Hobbies: Mountaineering, guns, swimming, violin, fairy tales. Height: 5' 7". Weight: 141 pounds. Current residence: Ohara-cho 1060 Koyama-kata, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. 

"I feel lonely because everything around me is so conventional. I want to be a more simple person, lively in love, and courageous. I would like to encounter a fun and interesting work in that sense. To lighten up the around around us, who are poor, even just a little. I continue to hope."

That's about it for this post. Yes, I did try to find Yoshio Tsuchiya's house on Google Maps. No, I was not successful. Also please note that his weight is approximate because Eiga Fan used an obsolete unit of measurement and I had to do some interesting calculations (which made me feel like a weird person).

にっぽん実話時代 / Nippon sukyandaru jidai / The Age of Japanese Scandals [aka Sensation Seekers] (1963)

Release date: February 16, 1963

Director: Jun Fukuda

Studio: Toho

Cast: Tadao Takashima, Junko Ikeuchi, Mie Hama, Jun Tazaki, Akiko Wakabayashi, Yū Fujiki, Akihiko Hirata, Ichirō Arashima, Kunie Tanaka, Mickey Curtis, Ikio Sawamura et al

Availability: No home media release. Some television broadcasts and theater screenings.

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This is one of those "sounds like fun, too bad I'll probably never see it" movies. Jun Fukuda was one of Toho's best comedy directors in the 1960s, but for every Secret of the Telegian or Ironfinger or Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, it seems like he's got five more movies that just didn't have the same staying power for whatever reason. 

The film follows a failing economic magazine that struggles to keep up with the times until a mysterious new editor-in-chief (Tadao Takashima, playing against type) is brought in. The publishing company is renamed and the magazine is revamped as a gossip rag that is aimed at an audience eager for scandals - hence the title. The staff of the magazine quickly turn to questionable means of spinning hot stories for their new magazine, such as bribes, wiretapping, honey traps, secret tape recordings, and fabricated affairs, the latter of which drives at least one woman to attempt suicide. When the staff jumps on an investigation of a large conglomerate, the magazine company's president (Akihiko Hirata) suddenly pushes back - it turns out the conglomerate has been the source of the magazine company's capital. Eventually, Takashima's editor-in-chief, despite being the one who started the company down this path, sees the error of his ways in the end and seeks to put right the damage his gossip rag has done.

Akiko Wakabayashi and a rare non-sideburned Kunie Tanaka

Reviews of the film on Kinenote talk a lot about how surprising it is to see Takashima playing the bad guy (one reviewer describes him as gidogido no kuso yarou, basically "a greasy bastard"), and say that with its all-star cast of Toho actors, this feels like it could be a kaiju movie. People seem to like the film quite a lot, but almost everyone mentions that the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. In any case, we are all in agreement that it's a shame this hasn't been released to DVD.

Despite playing the president of the company where most of the characters work, Hirata's role seems to have been pretty small. I haven't seen him on any posters, and none of the reviews I've read mention him beyond the fact that he is in the movie and plays a corrupt/shady businessman, which is always fun.

As mentioned, Jun Fukuda was the director. The script was written by Hiroshi Matsuki, who got his start in theater (even forming his own company) before shifting to television in the late 1950s and frequently wrote for the Crazy Cats series. The score was done by prolific neoclassical composer Toshiro Mayuzuri, protege of Akira Ifukube. Mayuzuri provided music for many Toho features, the most familiar of which to my non-Japanese readers would probably be Pigs and Battleships, Carmen Comes Home, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, Good Morning, and Black Lizard.

This next image I'm going to show is interesting - this is an ad for the movie's original theatrical run that was done in the style of gossip magazines of the time, but with the (fictional) names of the characters and events in the film instead of real information. It's pretty clever.

As for screenings and broadcasts: it was, like almost every movie ever made, screened at Laputa Asagaya, in 2012. Throughout 2019 the film was available on the Japanese Specialized Film Channel (Nihon-eiga Senmon Channel, a channel that mostly broadcasts Toho and Kadokawa dramas) as a pay-per-view option. According to one blogger, in 2019 the film was also available on YouTube, but it has since been taken down. (I've seen this pattern frequently: movie gets broadcast on TV, movie gets put on YouTube shortly after, movie immediately gets yoinked off YouTube by copyright gods.) The bulk of reviews seem to be from 2019, so I'm guessing the JSFC broadcast is how most people have seen this film; that being said, the most recent review on Filmarks is from January 2025.

Mie Hama in the film - credit to Misako Otani on Pinterest

This movie did get a theatrical release in the U.S. with English subtitles. It was retitled as Sensation Seekers, which removes some of the nuance of the original Japanese title (it contains the word jitsuwa, "true story", but the kanji for it are read as "scandal"). I did some newspaper archive scouring in an attempt to determine where the film was screened, but the results were inconclusive. Newspapers from areas where Toho had theaters operating between the time of the film's release and 1970 (I used a wide range in my search, since the exact release date is unknown) do not mention it. I also searched available issues of Boxoffice and Variety; no dice. I would consider it possible to probable that the film was featured in Vol. 8 of Toho’s catalogue of international releases, but I don’t have access to that. Overall, I did hardcore internet archaeology for this one, but I just can't confirm anything about its U.S. run.

While I couldn't find information about U.S. screenings, I did find that the film was referenced in a book called "Japan Beyond Its Borders: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media". The book was a collaboration between two authors, one of whom is Japanese, and was published in Japan, so I'm going to tentatively conclude that it was the Japanese author who had seen the film and was providing the reference (unless there is some newer theatrical run that has completely eluded me). I think this conclusion is further supported by the fact that the citation doesn't use the film's export title.

As if I didn't already want to see this movie enough, here is the entire citation:

On that note, that's about all I can give you for The Age of Japanese Scandals. You can read probably the most detailed synopsis you're going to get here if you have a translator (or can just read Japanese), I've given the CliffsNotes version above. Again: sounds really fun, too bad I can't see it.

10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas / The Mad Atlantic [怒涛一万浬]: A Very, Very, Very, Very Special Post

Release date: July 13, 1966
Director: Jun Fukuda
Studio: Mifune Productions, released by Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Mihashi, Makoto Satō, Mie Hama, Sachio Sakai, Ryo Tamura, Akihiko Hirata, Tadao Nakamaru, Ikio Sawamura, Akira Hitomi, Yasuzo Ogawa, Kazuo Suzuki, Ben Hiura, Akiyoshi Kasuga, Shintaro Nakaoka et al.
Availability: A Japanese DVD release from Toho and an English-subtitled Blu-Ray are available. English-subtitled print also held in BAMFA film library.

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Today I'm going to talk about something that I'm extremely excited about because I actually had a hand in ushering it into existence. For the first time, this long-out-of-print movie is available to buy with English subtitles, and I helped with those subtitles.¹ Unfortunately I'm going to have to be a bit reticent with details on exactly how you can obtain the disc (you know how such things go when Toho is involved), but if you do know what I'm talking about, I highly encourage you to buy the Blu-Ray, as it includes not only the film but a host of extras such as news clips, interviews with Palmense film buffs, and more. 

The first thing to note about 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas is that it was shot partially on location in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This made headlines at the time, since Toshirō Mifune was and is one of the most (if not the most) internationally-recognized Japanese actors, and as producer of the film, he brought with him an entourage of cast and crew, including director Jun Fukuda. Prince Tyler has archived full-page scans of some Spanish-language newspapers detailing the production of the film and Mifune's arrival in Las Palmas over here. Believe it or not, this movie also has Godzilla connections: Yoshimitsu Banno served as chief assistant director, and in one brief scene Sachio Sakai (himself a Godzilla series veteran) hits the "shie" pose, originally from Osomatsu-kun but known to us Western fans as Godzilla's victory dance in Destroy All Monsters.

Despite having been filmed there, 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas never received a screening in the Canary Islands or in Spain more broadly until its screening at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival last year. Some of the extras on the Blu-Ray go into detail about the process of getting that screening off the ground, which was of course hindered by Toho being Toho. Film nerds in and with connections to Las Palmas had been searching for the film after discovering its ties to the islands, and from what the organizer of the film festival describes, he was basically sent a file of it by an anonymous benefactor who had ripped it from an HD TV broadcast. Ultimately, though, the source of the version shown at the festival was a scan of the print held at BAMFA. More about the film through the Las Palmas lens can be read here with some mildly distracting random bolding, provided you read Spanish or have a translator extension on your browser.

Unfortunately, outside of a few witty one-liners on the film's Letterboxd page, I haven't found as many Palmense reviews of the film from after the festival as I'd like. I do, however, have evidence of what the Americans thought, and what the Americans thought was what Americans thought in the '60s about basically every Japanese movie not directed by Akira Kurosawa: "this kind of sucks". When the movie premiered at Toho's La Brea theater in November of 1967, LA Times critics were not enthused:

"None of the pictures Japan's top star Mifune has made for his own company has been very good- to put it mildly.

The latest, The Mad Atlantic (at the Toho La Brea), is no exception. But at least its extravagant melodramatics and unrestrained sentimentality make it lots more fun than its predecessors. Because its trawler off the west coast of Africa has had a bad year, a Japanese tuna company sends out Mifune to take charge. Stuck behind a desk for two years, he's eager determined[sic] for the challenge and in no time at all after arriving in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands he finds the odds piling up against him. A 20-hour ordeal with the nets brings in a nice catch but not without a top hand being harpooned.

Then, an accidental tangling of lines with some Spaniards leads to Mifune squaring off on the docks with their captain. To top it off, that injured man has been found to be permanently handicapped, and Mifune's young intern has hit the bottle in remorse. (He'd really rather slug Mifune.) Back at sea Mifune begins to bring in big hauls. Just as it looks like he's going to make that quota after all a hurricane strikes naturally and he gets an SOS from a yacht. Will Mifune answer the call or sacrifice his nets? Will it work out that he's able to do both? Will his injured man face up to his handicap? Will that intern shape up? (It seems safe to say that no Toshiro Mifune fan will even have to see the movie to answer these questions.)"

Everyone is allowed their opinion, of course, but - and perhaps this is just because I have a personal investment in it - I think this movie is fantastic. The fishing scenes are unbelievably realistic (do not watch this if you have an aversion to seeing a lot of dead fish) and look like they must have been a nightmare to film, especially during the film's impressive climax, a risky rescue mission involving sailing directly into a storm, and especially since this was a wintertime shoot. I have to say I think I ultimately enjoyed the fishing scenes more than the rest of it because I appreciated the hard work that must have gone into them, but the location filming does give the movie a more expansive scale than it otherwise would have had. I really can't overstate the "realism" element when it comes to the fishing scenes; Toho made their boys fish for real. You WILL believe Sachio Sakai has been on the sea all his life.

Anyhow, Autumn and winter of 1967 was rife with Mifune features at Toho La Brea; in quick succession, they showed Masaaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, one half of Yagyu Secret Scrolls, and 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas under its English-language title The Mad Atlantic. Hawaiians got the film much earlier; it was kicking around from January of 1967 to August of that same year.

Our man has his requisite small role, but he manages to pack a lot of being a jerk into his limited screentime. Hirata plays Nozaki, the branch manager of the fishing company who Mifune and Mihashi's characters work for. His greatest hits include firing a guy and then telling him not to get so emotional about it, and essentially saying "sorry, but we gotta put the numbers before the people" after one of the fishermen is permanently disabled by a fishhook to the arm.

Boo, hiss, we're calling OSHA on him.

I promise the subtitles are far, far less crusty on the Blu-Ray. This is just me chucking my files into VLC to take some quick screenshots.

Since I had to watch every millisecond of this movie a thousand times in the process of subbing it, I have special secret knowledge: Nozaki has a given name and it's Koichi. You can see it written above the door to his office in a few scenes, and it's literally the only place his given name is mentioned.² In all media related to this film, he's just credited as "Nozaki".

Riveting, I know.

What actually is kind of riveting is that Hirata does seem to have been among the actors shipped out to Las Palmas for filming. This is all but confirmed by one of the Spanish newspaper articles, which specifies that the scenes at the airport were filmed on location - not just for B-roll but, to quote, "exterior scenes in which the Japanese actors took part". Since Hirata was in those scenes, he must have actually been there. Mifune states in an interview that along with the film crew "five actors and one actress"³ were brought over - that could possibly be Mie Hama, Mifune himself, Makoto Satō, Tatsuya Mihashi, and perhaps Ryo Tamura and Akihiko Hirata. Toho sent him to Guam for Son of Godzilla around this time as well; I guess he was down to go to Las Palmas too.

Now that I've shown screenshots, I can bring up the weird thing about this movie, which is that it's shot in black-and-white. I have nothing against black-and-white filming on principle, but for this specific movie, which includes such beautiful outdoor shots of Las Palmas, it would stand to reason that you'd want the film to be as colorful and vibrant as possible. And what's even stranger is that the original Toho DVD is formatted oddly for no apparent reason. It's in an unusual frame rate: 29.97 whereas, as per my contact who I worked for, "Most of the time the films from Toho will be frame-rate 23.976 'progressive' (AKA 24fps)." The 29.97 frame rate is "usually reserved for TV shows, or the made for TV movies and so on when it goes into the DVD, not actual films..." The likely conclusion we can draw from this is that the movie was in obscurity by the time Toho decided to release it on DVD in 2023, and they had to just kind of work with whatever they could get because an ideal-quality print was not available.

As for the black-and-white, since this was produced by Mifune Productions, I'm going to blame him for that. Mifune appears to double down on this decision in one of the Spanish interviews:

"Who is the movie being made here for?" We asked him.  

"For Taiyo Fishery," he said, "and it will be distributed by Toho worldwide."

"In color?" 

"No, black and white." 

The black-and-white works quite well for the scenes on the fishing boat, especially the dramatic rescue scene, but something about depicting Las Palmas without color just feels downright wrong. Well, Mifune had a vision, I suppose, and who are we to dispute it?

So, now you can watch this movie with English subtitles and you don't even have to go reserve a space in the viewing carrel with my good buddies at BAMFA (they do not know they are my good buddies, but a member of faculty did me a kindness once and I love them for it) or attend a film festival to see it.

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1 I say "helped" because I handled the Japanese-to-English translation while Prince Tyler took care of the Spanish-to-English parts. I was also working off of a transcript, but said transcript was incredibly rough, so the majority of this was done by me, a dictionary, kotobank.jp, and the Japanese Wikipedia page for "Long-line fishing", all working together as one big happy family at 2 in the morning while I was sick with something that might have been covid.

2 To be as unbiased as possible (this is sarcasm, I will always be biased), I should also mention that Tsuda, the young intern mentioned in the American review, also has a given name - Kohji -  that you would not know unless you watched the film and caught the split-second scene where Mihashi's character shows Tsuda's ID around while he's searching for him in Las Palmas.

3 I actually doubt this, because it seems like there's a hell of a lot more than five Japanese actors in scenes that look likely to have been shot on location.