The two Crazy Cats Shimizu Jirocho movies: The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor [1966 / 1970]

Today we're going to take another look at the two Crazy Cats Jirocho movies, since they've both just received brand new English subtitles, which were a collaboration between me (edits, revisions, contextual research etc) and Prince Tyler (the initial script and timing). I had a blast doing these and I hope you have a blast watching them.

I did already write posts about both of these movies a few years back, but I'm taking those down because I aim for this post to replace and improve on them. We're going to cover a lot more ground this time. These films are assuming familiarity on the viewer’s part - familiarity that many non-Japanese viewers may lack - and I hope to assist with at least some of that in my “context” section at the bottom of the post.

Okay? Okay. Let's get started.

Production History

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay was shot in 20 days, which is unusually fast even for Toho, who were no stranger to cranking 'em out. This was due to the Crazy Cats themselves having an insanely busy schedule more so than anything Toho was doing, but it ended up being inconvenient for Toho as well: at the start of production, staff handed director Takashi Tsuboshima an unfinished script and basically told him "here, shoot this, we're already ready". According to JP Wikipedia, at the time filming began, the script only ran up until the middle of the first prison scene, which accounts for about 20 minutes of movie. After that, the script was delivered piecemeal day-by-day.

Pick-Pocket Bay was Tsuboshima's second time directing a Crazy Cats movie and his first time directing jidaigeki. I found out during my research that Tsuboshima was very fond of Enoken, which is interesting because the film's screenwriter Hideo Oguni also wrote for Enoken (along with contemporary comic Roppa Furukawa) during the late 1940s. Oguni had experience writing about Jirocho as well; for Masahiro Makino he wrote Shimizu Port pt. I and II in 1939 and 1940.

One result of Pick-Pocket Bay's rushed schedule was that Tsuboshima wasn't even 100% clear on the title of the movie during production. The movie was shot under the title "Musekinin Shimizu Minato", with the usual formula for Crazy Cats movie titles - the "Kureji no" before the rest of the title - having been forgotten until the in-house preview. Allegedly, staff also forgot to write a role for Hiroshi Inuzuka, which is why his character only shows up late in the movie for a single scene. One wonders if the same perhaps happened in Crazy Violence as well, since his role in that is equally forgettable.

When all was said and done, Pick-Pocket Bay was released on January 3rd, 1966, on a double bill with Account of the President's Conduct [Shachō gyōjōki], the 24th entry in Toho's long-running President series. 

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor

As I've mentioned many times, the Japanese film industry as a whole was in a death spiral by the early 1970s. Within a few years of this film's release, Toho would end nearly all of their long-running series and fire most of their contracted actors. This was the environment into which Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor was born, which makes it all the more surprising that it is objectively a better movie than Pick-Pocket Bay on almost every level. Crazy Violence is the last movie to feature all seven members of Crazy Cats together; Eitaro Ishibashi left the group in 1971 and was not present for what is sometimes considered the "final" Crazy Cats film, I'll Be Deceived.

The inception of Crazy Violence supposedly came from the Cats' visit to a ryōkyoku festival (the story of Jirocho is intimately tied to oral narrative traditions like kōdan and ryōkyoku, as we'll later see), which inspired Shin Watanabe, then-president of Watanabe Pro, to make a period piece that deliberately went against the Osaka World Expo hype of the time. As with Pick-Pocket Bay, Crazy Violence was released on a double-bill with the an entry in the moribund President series, namely The ABCs of Business Management [Shachōgaku ABC]. 

The cast of characters changes a bit for the sequel - it's not necessarily that the actors change (although some do), but secondary characters play into the narrative more than in the first film, where the focus is on Hitoshi Ueki to the exclusion of most everyone else. People like Daigoro and Komasa who had only small, perfunctory roles in Pick-Pocket Bay are given much more to do in the sequel. There is also a bit of a larger guest cast, of which Yoko Naito (pictured above) is the clear stand-out. During production, Toho sent Naito over to Toei to learn yakuza basics from their top actors such as Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta since Toho themselves had less experience with yakuza films, especially female yakuza. It certainly paid off, as Naito is hugely entertaining to watch.

Akira Fuse, who was an extremely popular singer at the time, also appears in a very superfluous role. We cannot say much about his acting skills other than that he was not a professional at this point and it shows. His character is still fairly charming, though, anyway. According to Takashi Tsuboshima, he fell down a lot during filming.

International Distribution

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay reached American shores fairly quickly for a Japanese picture, having its Los Angeles premiere in August of 1966 as a double feature with Campus A-Go-Go, an entry in Yūzō Kayama's "Young Guy" series. The Pick-Pocket Bay title dates back to this premiere¹, and although it isn't a literal translation at all (that would be "Irresponsible Shimizu Harbor / Port"), it's kind of fun. Unfortunately, that seems to have been just about it for Pick-Pocket Bay's adventures outside of Japan; it doesn't look like it ever had any other U.S. theatrical screenings and I cannot find record of it ever having been distributed in any other country besides Japan and the U.S..

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, meanwhile, never made it outside of Japan at all. That's pretty much that. The title, as far as I can tell, dates to Stuart Galbraith's 2008 Toho Studios Story; it is almost but not quite a literal translation, that would be "Crazy Raid on Shimizu Harbor", which I actually prefer. In Galbraith's 1998 article for Outre magazine he renders the title as "Taking a Crazy Punch at Shimizu Harbor", which, uh, yeah.

Historical Context (or "Who are all these guys that this movie is assuming I know already?")

More or less every actor you see in these two movies is playing a specific historical or semi-historical personage from the corpus of Jirocho tales, but in most cases you wouldn’t actually know that unless you looked at a cast list, since (with the exception of a few) their names aren’t mentioned within the movies themselves. As such, we’re not going to go over every single one of Jirocho’s men in this section, but we are going to take a look at some of the more prominent figures featured in these films.

Jirocho of Shimizu

Jirocho of Shimizu was a real person (we even have his photograph), born Chōgorō Yamamoto on Valentine's Day of 1820. "Jirocho" is not a given name but a nickname, shortened from "Jirohachi's Chōgorō" (Jirohachi was the name of his maternal uncle, who adopted him). While some details about his life - that he was a yakuza-slash-entrepreneur who maintained a gang in the Shimizu area - are more or less verifiable, almost everything about him has been mythologized.

Much of what is considered Jirocho "canon" is the creation of kōdanshi Hakuzan Kanda. Starting in 1907, Kanda performed stories about Jirocho adapted from accounts published by those who knew Jirocho while he was still alive, including his adopted son. Kanda is also responsible for establishing the canonical twenty-eight men commonly depicted as Jirocho's core gang, but it is well known that at least some of those men were fictional, and the ones who weren't have had fictional characteristics incorporated into their depictions over the years. 

Some of the first films to depict Jirocho were inseparable from the initial kōdan tradition. These early films were not projects that aimed to independently depict Jirocho's life according to the director's own interpretation of it; they were direct adaptations of Kanda's work and credited him explicitly. The earliest such adaptation was directed by Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director, in 1911. 

One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda's illustration for Jirocho Sangokushi.

Jirocho's life has been depicted on screen (and in manga, print, television, stage, various storytelling arts, etc.) too many times to count. Most notably, Masahiro Makino directed an unfinished 9-part (intended to be 10) series of full-length feature films for Toho from 1952 to 1954, in which Akio Kobori played Jirocho. Makino also directed a four-part series for Toei in the early 1960s which starred Koji Tsuruta. 

In both Crazy Cats films, Jirocho is played by Hajime Hana. Just to throw out a few more names, some other on-screen Jirochos include Takashi Shimura, Hiroko Kawasaki and Shizuko Kasagi (in gender-bent versions), Denjiro Okochi, Eitaro Shindo, Kinnosuke Nakamura, Utaemon Ichikawa, and Kazuo Hasegawa.

Oiwake Sangoro (or Sangoro of Oiwake)

As with Jirocho himself, "Oiwake" refers to a place that Sangoro was associated with (his birthplace of Oiwake in Shinshu), and is not part of his given name. I'd encourage readers to think of the name "Oiwake Sangoro" as being structured like the name "Texas Pete", if that helps. Unlike Jirocho, Sangoro is solidly fictional.

I cannot overstate how much of a debt stories of Jirocho owe to traditional forms of sung narrative and formal storytelling. In particular, Sangoro's popularity would not exist without Torazo Hirozawa, pioneer of Torazo-bushi, a specific style of naniwa-bushi (sung narrative) named for him. Hirozawa was virtually synonymous with Jirocho stories and was himself an actor and radio performer. If you have the language skills (or just like to listen), you can hear Hirozawa perform Oiwake Sangoro here.

It's hard to imagine anyone more suited to playing Sangoro than Hitoshi Ueki, since the characteristics associated with Sangoro in fiction - a suave womanizer, a lone wolf, maybe a bit of a scoundrel - are basically a perfect description of the onscreen persona Ueki cultivated in his Japan's No. 1 ____ Man series and to a lesser extent his work with Crazy Cats. Nevertheless, other actors who have portrayed Sangoro include Hiroshi Nawa, Yatarou Kurokawa, Ryuji Shinagawa, and Koukichi Takada.

Ishimatsu no Mori

I'll make the same joke I always do: "Toho said it's my turn to wear the eyepatch."

Of Jirocho's henchmen, one of the most well-known is Ishimatsu no Mori (again, "Mori" is not a given name, it's where he's from), who is played in both films by Kei Tani. We actually don't know whether or not Ishimatsu was a real person; there's a lot of conflicting information coming from unreliable sources, the best of which seems to be an account from someone who met Jirocho and described that Jirocho began crying when asked about Ishimatsu. The missing eye attributed to Ishimatsu may actually have been a result of his conflation with an entirely different one-eyed henchman of the Shimizu family. (Which eye Ishimatsu was missing is not consistent in depictions.)

Other actors who had a turn playing Ishimatsu include Senkichi Omura, Jun Tazaki, Enoken, Minoru Ōki, Susumu Fujita, Hisaya Morishige, and Shintaro Katsu, just to name a few.

Ōmasa 

Omasa with Komasa as played by Yutaka Nakayama.

Omasa with Komasa as played by Senri Sakurai.

In both Crazy Cats Jirocho films, Ōmasa is played by Akihiko Hirata. Ōmasa's full name was Masagoro Yamamoto, and since he was one of two men under Jirocho by that name, he was given the nickname Ōmasa to distinguish him from the other, who was called Komasa. These nicknames mean basically "Big Masa" and "Little Masa", respectively. As the name would imply, Ōmasa was known for being an unusually tall dude (supposedly over six feet), which makes Hirata kind of a weird casting choice at five feet eight, but Ōmasa has been played by a wide variety of actors of many sizes, so it seems like more of a vibe thing than a matter of actual physical size.

Ōmasa doesn't have much to do in Pick-Pocket Bay besides being Jirocho's bulldog for a few scenes, but I gotta say, Hirata kills it in Crazy Violence. Ōmasa feels like an actual character in the second film, not just a name with a person attached, and that's all thanks to Hirata getting more lines the second time around and really stepping up his game. This is a rare comedic role for him and he plays it to the hilt, stopping just short of being hammy but still getting the intended humor across. At just shy of nine minutes into the film he delivers a rolled-R "bakayarou" that hit me in my soul. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I've had a lot of coffee.

Anyway, a few other onscreen Ōmasas include Tomisaburō Wakayama, Susumu Fujita, Yu Fujiki, Sachio Sakai, Daisuke Katō, Masao Kusakari, Jō Shishido, and Seizaburo Kawazu.

Komasa

Komasa appears in both The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor. In Pick-Pocket Bay he is played by Yutaka Nakayama, and in Crazy Violence he is played by Senri Sakurai, who, at not quite five feet tall, was really the only reasonable choice. As with all of Jirocho's men, recorded accounts of Komasa are to be treated with healthy skepticism, but according to some, he was good at iaido and known to carry around a massive sword.² Komasa has no real presence in Pick-Pocket Bay, but in Crazy Violence he has a much bigger role where he gets to interact with Omasa. And by "interact with" I do in fact mean "hug":

Komasa has gotten solo treatment in a couple of films over the years, including a few (now lost) made by Shochiku and the long-defunct Kawai Film Production Company, and in the late 1920s there was even a film titled "Omasa and Komasa" produced by Teikoku Kinema Engei. A few actors who have portrayed Komasa are Eijiro Kataoka, Kōjirō Hongō, Norihei Miki, Kei Tani, Minori Terada and Hiroyuki Watanabe. Again, these actors are a very wide range of heights (Watanabe in particular was close to 5' 10"), so playing Komasa seems to be mostly contingent on vibes.

Hangoro of Ose

A man named Tsunagoro Kanto is theorized to have later taken on the name "Hangoro of Ose", but it is also possible that the two were completely different individuals, though that theory doesn't seem to have that much traction. Hangoro does not have any distinct physical characteristics that were noted in contemporary accounts; he allegedly ran away from home at 19 and later killed a sex worker before finding his way to the Shimizu family.

In Pick-Pocket Bay, Hangoro is played by Yoshio Tsuchiya. In Crazy Violence, he is played by Kazuo Suzuki. Some other on-screen Hangoros include Kenji Mori, Ryutaro Otomo, Yutaka Nakayama, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Hiroki Matsutaka and Yoshihiko Hakamada.

Hōin ("Master") Daigoro

The term "Hōin" originally referred to a monastic rank, but by the late Meiji period when Jirocho's men were around, its meaning had changed to become sort of a catchall for anybody who was involved in any number of fields - not only monks, but also physicians, painters, scholars of Confucianism, prayer healers, mountain ascetics, and a whole host of other random monk-related vocations. As such, "Master" is just about the best translation for the term that I could think of. Unsurprisingly, Hōin Daigoro was not an actual monk; he adopted the disguise as a way to get out of trouble. Daigoro likely joined Jirocho's gang in his teens and before that was working as some kind of laborer. After the Meiji restoration Daigoro left the gang and became, by all accounts, an honest and upright family man who ran a legitimate business and was involved in his grandchildren's lives even after a stroke left him half-paralyzed.

Like Ōmasa, Daigoro was reputed to be a very large man, but as we've seen, that does not matter one whit when it comes to casting. In both Crazy Cats films, he is played by Shigeki Ishida. Some other actors who have played Daigoro include Haruo Tanaka, Tokumaro Dan, Kunio Kaga, Toshiro Chiba, Shingo Yamashiro, Mitsuru Hirata (no relation), and Takashi Sasano. Haruo Tanaka seems to have been particularly attached to the role; he played it in Toho's nine-part series but was also cast in the same role for other studios' Jirocho pictures as well.

Context, Context, Context

The thing that makes these movies so fun is that they're basically comedy skits - we're all in on the joke; nobody's pretending this is an authentic reconstruction of historical events. This allows the Cats to break the fourth wall frequently and with gusto, dropping Edo-period jokes and idioms alongside contemporary slang and pop culture references from the 1960s-'70s.

As with almost every Crazy Cats movie, both of these films are full of references to the Cats' other work outside of acting. Hitoshi Ueki's hit song "Suudara-bushi" is referenced alongside yagibushi (a traditional circle dance) in Pick-Pocket Bay, in a line that I've decided to render as "folk songs and pop songs". Unfortunately a very flat translation, but probably the easiest way to get the point across to anyone unfamiliar with these terms. And in case audiences had forgotten about Suudara-bushi by 1970 (they hadn't), Crazy Violence brought it back with a reference to the single's B-side "Koriya shakudatta", which didn't translate very well (or at all, really, but if you keep your ears out, you can still catch it). You can read a bit about Suudara-bushi in English here.

These movies also feature references to contemporary events in a broader sense than just pop culture. You'll notice early on in Crazy Violence that "Gewalt", a location mentioned throughout the film, has a decidedly non-Japanese-sounding name. This word - German for "force" or "violence" - was part of the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, as it was used frequently by student protest movements to refer to armed struggle. Within the film itself, "Gewalt" is written with kanji that are intended to be read phonetically³ with no regard to their meaning (recall that kana represent individual sounds while kanji convey words/concepts). This type of phonetic reading is called "ateji", and incidentally this is also how ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work, kind of.

Similarly, another uniquely mid-20th-century phrase that gets dropped in Crazy Violence is "ietsuki, kaatsuki, babanuki", which basically means "with a house, with a car, without a mother-in-law" and was used by newlyweds to describe their ideal living conditions. (Of course, in the film, the part about the car is omitted, since cars hadn't been invented yet.) A magazine from 1967 notes it as being sort of a hot new buzzword (buzzphrase?) so this was very "of the time" as of 1970.

Tomoe Kimura's ryōkyoku single "Showa Ishimatsu Legend: A Fool Can't Be Cured Unless He Dies"

The line "A fool can't be cured unless he dies", featured as a song in Crazy Violence, is a proverb from the Edo period that is still in use today. As we see from the single pictured above, this proverb ties these movies back to ryōkyoku Jirocho stories as it was frequently used by Torazo Hirozawa in his performances of Jirocho and Ishimatsu tales, and later by other performers doing their own versions of his work.

Speaking of that era, at one point in Crazy Violence Hitoshi Ueki insults Hideyo Amamoto SO brutally and with such specific obscure Edo-period wordplay that it took me a full hour to figure out how best to translate it. I do not know what else to tell you other than at one point some monks were apparently bored enough that they thought "Hey, you know that second-person pronoun (kimi) that sounds like the word for 'egg yolk' (kimi)? We should start calling eggs 'imperial carriages', because just like how there's kimi inside an egg, there's kimi inside a carriage!"

Anyway, to bring our present discussion back to pop culture, the one really big reference in Crazy Violence is Hajime Hana's delivery of the line "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" near the end of the film. This will take some explanation.

I would commit heinous crimes for an Odoroku Tamegoro enamel pin.

Our story begins with Wolfgang from the American sketch comedy show Laugh-In. (Do bear with me here.) Wolfgang was a German soldier who would comment on the preceding sketch by saying "Very interesting..." and then following it with something that was usually a misinterpretation of the sketch. The creators of the long-running Japanese variety show Kyosen & Maetake Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! liked Wolfgang, and they wanted to bring in a similar character who conveyed the idea of "someone who doesn't make any sense but just shows up and says something". They got Hajime Hana for the role, and decided he should be dressed as a hippie for the gag, but the problem was that they couldn't figure out what his trademark line should be. Eventually, Hana came up with a phrase based on a ryōkyoku ballad about Shimizu Jirocho that he personally liked: "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" (Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro!)

It's hard to explain why this is funny to a western audience who has absolutely no context for it, and I don't claim to understand it perfectly myself. Hana would deliver this line while dressed as a hippie and watching a brand new Sony television, so I'm fairly certain that the humor here is meant to be in the contrast between the hippie with the television (both modern conventions) and the line, which refers to Honzamura no Tamegoro (a character from a traditional Jirocho ballad) and may have been seen as somewhat antiquated, or at the very least belonging to a different category than a TV and a hippie. If I may venture a more English-friendly equivalent, this might be like an influencer looking at her phone and saying "Forsooth! Verily, this hath astounded me!"

And, I must say, when the line finally drops at the end of Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, it feels kind of amazing. The comedic timing is so pitch-perfect and Hana delivers the line so emphatically that I get the feeling a Japanese audience watching this in 1970 would have been busting a gut, even if it means nothing to us watching it today.

At any rate, Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro became a meme, and spawned not just a hit single but a five-film series. Five entire movies based off of a single joke.

Your author eight hours into one of several all-nighters that went into all this.

We're going to round out our explanation / examination of these two fine films with that, since I think I've covered just about everything I can think of. I'll end this post by plugging Toshiaki Sato, who is one of my favorite Japanese culture writers and has done a lot of work on Crazy Cats, all of which is in Japanese but can be read with a translator extension if you'd just like to get the gist of it. Crazy Movies is also a nice Japanese-language site to get basic information about all the Crazy Cats movies in one place.

Until next time, stay crazy.

^__________

1 If we want to get technical about where the title came from, it's most likely Toho Films (Toho's catalogue of movies available for international distribution), which gave official English titles to every film featured within it. However, we may never know for certain that "The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay" originates from one of these catalogues, since Heritage Auctions wants $216 for the 1966 edition of Toho Films. (Unless you want to send me $216.)

2 I don't know about you all but I am not messing with a 4' 8" guy carrying a three-foot sword.

3 So 下 for "Ge", 張 for "Baru", and 戸 for "To". "Gebaruto" is the Japanese pronunciation of "Gewalt".