復讐浄瑠璃坂 / Fukushu jorurizaka / Revenge at Joruri Slope pt. I + II [1955]

Release date: December 11th and December 21st, 1955

Director: Kyotaro Namiki & Buntaro Futagawa

Studio: Produced by Takarazuka, released by Toho

Cast: Kanjuro Arashi, Denjiro Okochi, Senjaku Nakamura, Ryotaro Oki, Chikage Ogi, Tamao Nakamura, Akihiko Hirata et al.

Availability: VHS releases. Infrequent theater screenings. No other home media or streaming availability.

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Today in the "I wish these were more accessible" department, let's look at a duology of films with a cast full of jidaigeki heavy-hitters that have somehow not had a decent home media release in the past 70 years. The first film was subtitled "Ambush at Onibushi Pass" [Onibushi-toge shougeki], the second was subtitled "Bloody Battle at Dawn" [Akatsuki no kessen].

These films are based on an actual historical event, which I'll only give the broad strokes of here since I'm not terribly familiar with it. An argument broke out during a memorial service for Tadamasa Okudaira, former lord of the Utsunomiya domain, on March 2nd, 1668, between members of separate branches of the Okudaira clan, supposedly in response to one of them being late to the service. One man was killed, and in response not only his killer but also his killer's family were punished, stripped of their stipends, and some sent into exile, including a 12-year-old boy. The boy, Genpachi, drew popular support, and some members of the Okudaira clan abandoned their posts and became ronin in service of revenge against the murderer. Ultimately, a group of 42 ronin raided the mansion where the murderer, Hayato Okudaira, was hiding. This occurred 30 years before the more famous Ako Roshi incident, popularized across the world as Chushingura or some variation on the title "47 Ronin".

The story was disseminated widely throughout the country (which is why it should probably be taken with a grain of salt) in various contemporary publications, and was also adapted into plays and other forms of storytelling, including, eventually, this set of two films by Toho that we're going to look at today.

Jorurizaka in 2017. Credit to Tokuzo Edomura.

Kyotaro Namiki also directed Kurama Tengu Goyo-to ihen, a favorite of mine which we looked at quite a while ago (it's the one with Dr. Serizawa in it). Aside from that, his career doesn't seem to have produced much in the way of hits; he worked with Kanjūrō Arashi's production company on many occasions as well as Shōzō Makino's, and was active from 1929 to 1960. The two Joruri Slope movies were actually co-directed by him and Buntaro Futakawa, brother of Eisuke Takizawa, who did another dear favorite of mine, Tetsuwan namida ari. Futakawa was 56 at the time, and retired after directing these two films, dying only nine years later. Namiki, on the other hand, lived to be 99, and wrote a little bit after retiring from filmmaking.

A few other names from the staff: the original work was written by Sanjugo Naoki, a man of many pen names who also knew Masahiro Makino, and it was adapted to the screen by Ryo Takei and Rokuhei Susukita, two people who do not have Wikipedia pages. Takei has writing credits for many things we're familiar with here, such as the two Tea-Picker's Song of Goodbye films and Wharf with the Weeping Girl. Susukita worked for over 50 years and wrote a whole hell of a lot of things, but these movies are the only ones he wrote for that are relevant to our interests.

Speaking of writing, there was also a manga adaptation of these films which I unfortunately can't find any pictures of besides a Mandarake listing.

Hirata's character on the left-hand side, third from top

Hirata plays a character named Kyubei Okudaira. He is on Hayato's side, and is one of Chikage Ogi's character Kikuno's three brothers. He gets killed in the second film. That is about all I can tell you. Our sum total of visual evidence for this role amounts to three images: the press sheet featured above, the following press sheet...

We love grainy photos here. Hirata's character is fourth from left in the row of portraits, recognizable by his chonmage and because Toho's in-house portrait artist/s was (were?) pretty consistent in the way they drew him.

...and get ready, because it can and will get even grainer than that:

I swear that at some point I saw a larger version of this image and could make out that Hirata is on the very bottom right.

As for screenings, both of these films have played, like every other Japanese movie ever made, at Laputa Asagaya. They have also been aired on pay-per-view TV at least once in 2021. I don't have a lot to go off of in terms of critical reception, but one reviewer felt very strongly that bad character writing made the second part take a sharp downturn and essentially ruined the rest of the film. Another reviewer calls the films "fairly entertaining".

That, unfortunately, is kind of it. It's surprising there isn't more out there about these, considering that they do have a physical release. The tapes seem to be quite rare, but rest assured that if they ever do come up for auction, no matter how expensive, I'll be getting my hands on them.

Brand New English Subtitles for Young Season [Wakai kisetsu / 若い季節] !

I am, as ever, utterly delighted to bring you brand new English subtitles for a movie featuring Akihiko Hirata that had not previously been available with subtitles. As with many things I talk about on here, there's really no reason why this shouldn't have been subbed a long time ago - it's a funny, charming, well-made film that I think will appeal to a wide audience. In this post I'm not going to spend much (if any) time on the plot, I just want to provide some supplemental information about the film itself.

Watch it for yourself here. I'll be linking back to this page on archive.org as well, so if you're coming from there: hi, hello, yes I am like this all the time.

The first thing to note about Young Season is that it features every member of the band Crazy Cats but is not itself technically A Crazy Cats Movie. At this point, the band was still kind of getting the hang of doing movies as an ensemble, so you'll notice that compared to much grander features like Mexican Free-For-All, the bandmembers are all just kind of... there. They are not in particularly important roles, they just happen to be part of the cast. Kengo Furusawa directs; he would later become prolific within the Crazy Cats series, but did a lot of other features for Toho as well.

The film version of Young Season we're looking at today was based on a popular NHK television drama by the same name, which ran from 1961 to 1964. It was a musical workplace comedy, one of those wonderful genre hybrids that either no one bothers to make anymore or, if they do, they suck. The cast is largely the same as in the film, although Kiyoshi Atsumi had a role in the TV drama but was absent from the film. The crew is much the same as well, with Isamu Onoda having an "original work" credit as well as a co-screenwriting credit. (We have talked about this Onoda on here before; he is of no relation to one Akihiko Onoda.) Hirata did not appear in the TV version, which I believe was due to his exclusive contract at the time. There was also a sequel film produced two years later.

The theme song (which is sung by a chorus in the film version) was originally sung by The Peanuts; listen to it here.

Some of the cast of the Young Season TV series.

According to the film's Wikipedia page, it was obscure for a long time after its initial release until it was aired on television in 1986 and subsequently released on laserdisc. It was then issued on DVD twice in 2008 and 2014; I own the 2014 edition, which is where I sourced the file that I subtitled from. Young Season was released simultaneously with Yamaneko sakusen (English title "Operation Enemy Fort"), another film in which Hirata had a very small role (and a bad fake beard).

As for its stateside release, Hawaiian theaters got the first movie with English subtitles in November of 1964 (surprisingly late, considering how popular Kyu Sakamoto was; I'm betting there was an earlier release I'm not aware of). The first film had another theater run in January of 1965, and its sequel ran a few months later in July. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser describes the first film as "a musical comedy with Kyu Sakamoto, Hitoshi Ueki and Reiko Dan heading an all-star cast of funsters." (Interestingly, different theaters seemed to flip-flop on advertising the film as starring Kyu Sakamoto and Hitoshi Ueki or Kyu Sakamoto and Hajime Hana.) I have not been able to find English-language reviews of the film from its original run.

More of the cast from the TV drama who also appear in the films.

Something that I can also do in this post is talk about translation specifics that I couldn't convey within the subtitles. Since I'm not a fluent speaker, a lot of my fansubbing work just comes down to doing a whole hell of a lot of research. One fun ("fun") thing I discovered was that a line I was having a ridiculous amount of trouble with was not difficult because I wasn't hearing it right - I was hearing it fine, it was just actual, literal made-up nonsense words; kind of a Showa-era meme. (My translation of these lines had to be very indirect in order to convey the meaning of the dialogue.) There are a few other "localizations" that I had to do as well, most of which is too insignificant to really warrant mention¹ - for example, Japanese has the phrase "sly as a monkey" whereas we have "sly as a fox", but I went with "sly as a fox" because I felt like it sounded more familiar to an English-speaking audience.

I also had no real way to convey that a lot of the character names in this movie play off of their actors' real names. For example, Ichiro Arashima plays a character named "Arima"; Shinchou Kokontei III plays a character named Chota Shindo, nicknamed "Shinchou"; and Jerry Fujio plays a character named, uh, Fujio Fujio². Usually with these Crazy Cats movies, the bandmembers' characters get names that relate to their real ones (so Hitoshi Ueki can play "Ueda", Kei Tani can play "Tanida", etc), but here, the writers didn't bother. They're just Ueki, Hana, Inuzuka, and so on.

This leads us into talking about Hirata's character Minamikawa, who is actually an exception to the name wordplay; "Minamikawa" has nothing to do with his real name either phonetically or with the kanji used to write it. If I had to guess, I’d say that roles for the “guest stars” (Shinchou, Fujio, etc) were probably written with those specific actors in mind, and the rest of the roles were just filled out with Toho’s usual cast of players.

Minamikawa fits exactly the kind of smug, arrogant so-and-so archetype that Hirata was so good at playing. It's implied that Minamikawa is taking care of the financial aspect of the scam Tres Bien is trying to pull, but otherwise he doesn't have that much of a role in the proceedings. He doesn't really do anything solo, he's usually part of a group of people scheming and plotting in a room together. We do, at one point, get to see Jerry Fujio go undercover on an intel-gathering operation targeting Minamikawa and the other saboteurs which for some reason involves Fujio giving him a massage and lighting his cigarettes for him. (IMHO, Fujio Fujio deserved everything he got for that godawful "Indian Twist" song.)

He smokes A LOT in this movie, even for him. Also I guess Minamikawa is married.

Yeah okay I just liked these shots

The last we see of Minamikawa, he and a Tres Bien executive he was colluding with are getting the hell out of Dodge under threat of physical violence from Kenji Sahara. Minamikawa does not appear in the sequel.

I've never worked an office job, is this typical?

I'll wrap up by saying that I really had a lot of fun subtitling this one, and I'm very heartened to see so many Crazy Cats and Crazy Cats-adjacent movies getting subtitled these past few years. There is, of course, also the sequel to Young Season, which does not currently have subtitles; I may not be the person for that job, but I do hope it gets done someday. In the meantime I'm sure I'll pick up other projects along the way but for now I need to get some sleep. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

translation: "[squirming]"

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Footnotes:

1 One that I do want to explain is the "Liquistick"/"ick" pun. In the original Japanese, the proposed name is "Ekibeni", which sounds like "Ekiben", a boxed lunch you can buy at train stations. ("Ekiben" is also slang for having sex standing up, but I don't believe the term was in usage in that capacity ca. 1962.) Other puns I considered include "Liquistick"/"Bisquick" to retain the sense that the pun was referring to a food item, but I was not sure everybody watching the movie would know what Bisquick is.

2 Written 藤尾富士男. I assume nobody has this name in real life, but if they do, my condolences.

あの娘が泣いてる波止場 / Anoko ga naiteiru hatoba / Wharf with the Weeping Girl (1956)

Release date: May 17, 1956

Director: Shigeaki Hidaka

Studio: Toho

Cast: Akira Takarada, Michiya Mihashi, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, Machiko Kitagawa, Shoko Masa, Tetsu Nakamura(?)

Availability: No known home media release or online streaming. No known screenings.

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This is a movie that was adapted from a song! In 1955 Michiya Mihashi recorded Anoko ga naiteiru hatoba, written by Kimio Takano and Tōru Funamura, as a B-side on a King Records single. The song became incredibly popular with fishing boat crews in the port of Kamaishi and sold 1.8 million copies, which made it one of Mihashi's biggest hits. The next year, the song was adapted into a film, featuring Mihashi himself in his debut screen role. The song is just three minutes long and the lyrics seem relatively sparse, so it's fascinating that it ended up being adapted into an entire film. (To be fair, though, the film itself only runs just about an hour.)

Aw come on guys, I thought you hashed this out already like 2 years ago.

Director Shigeaki Hidaka co-wrote the script with Hirosuke Takenaka. Hidaka was active for a relatively brief period of time and didn't produce much of any note, save for a co-screenwriting credit alongside Takeo Murata on a blatant cash-grab sequel to some movie about a giant irradiated lizard. Hidaka is obscure enough that the date of his death is unknown. Takenaka is even worse; he has no Wikipedia page, but evidently he was the screenwriter for both Tea-Picker's Song of Farewell movies, which we have covered here previously. The cinematographer for the film was Jun Yasumoto, who is a bit more prolific; he worked on several Ozu features as well as some good Toho stuff like The Vampire Moth and Samurai I and II.

This is a pretty obscure movie. No reviews on Kinenote or Filmarks; 2 people on Kinenote have logged it as "watched", 2 logged it on eiga.com and 1 logged it on Filmarks (but maybe those are all the same people using different websites). While researching the film, I found a website that I could only access through Wayback Machine where someone wrote about a memory they had of the song. I want to include it for some cultural context.

To my classmates who graduated together in March 1957:

I graduated from a small junior high school in a mountain village famous for the amount of snow in the prefecture. There were 23 of us in my class, and 21 of us, except for two who went on to high school, have now jumped out into the real world. At the time, [...] "The Wharf with the Weeping Girl" was very popular in the school, and the boys often sang it with a parody version. "Goodbye, goodbye, everyone in the class, money is calling me, so I'm off..." It was a pretty intense parody version, but after that, everyone lived an honest and modest life. Every time I attend a class reunion, I think to myself, "Oh, I'm so glad I was in the same class as these people." The classmates who I studied with at the same desk in the classroom are my lifelong friends. Hayaboshi, Funaka-cho, Fushiki-gun, Toyama Prefecture.

From this ad we can infer that this film was the second picture on a double bill with Nobuo Nakagawa's Koi sugata kitsune goten at some point.

The film seems to have played at Cine Tokachi during its original run, but I cannot verify any screenings in recent (or even not-so-recent) memory, which probably means bad things for the chances of a print of this film currently being extant. The song is far more famous than the film. I wish I could give you more on this, it's very intriguing to me since it features a Godzilla cast reunion (and, apparently, Serizawa vs. Ogata, round 2).