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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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