Legend of the Irresponsible Hero II: 2 Irresponsible 2 Heroic

I greet you again today with news of new subtitles! I was not planning on making another post for Legend of the Irresponsible Hero (I already wrote one with less detail a few years back), but once I started subtitling the movie I found that there was, in fact, still enough to talk about to justify a new post.

We'll start with a little production history.

A Little Production History

Production on this one was touch-and-go. The film was originally slated for a March release, but during filming, in January of 1964, Hitoshi Ueki was hospitalized for about a month due to overwork. (Unsurprising; I'm not sure how all seven of these guys were not constantly either overworked or ending up with broken ankles from all their stunts). The film was eventually released in the middle of July on a double bill with Hiromichi Horikawa's Brand of Evil. 

According to Keiko Awaji's audio commentary, the Hong Kong location shooting was done at the same time as the shooting for the previous film Crazy Cats Go To Hong Kong. There is something kind of weird going on with some of the location footage, specifically the external location shots done in Macau; the bottom of the frame is occasionally blurry in some shots, and the film stock seems different. I'm wondering if post-production was especially rushed, because that's not the only film oddity here; a good number of the cuts in this movie are noticeably very messy and have visible artifacting along the bottom of the screen.

Example of blurry frame...

 

...and messy cut. And these are both from the HD remaster, which if anything makes the sloppy cut job even more obvious.

This was director Toshio Sugie's last time with the Cats, which is too bad; his entries in the series are some of the most outlandish and spectacular. Sugie had worked for Toho since its PCL days and was very versatile, contributing entries to many of Toho's big series: the President series, the Young Guy series, their lesser-known Rakugo Guy films, and the Crazy series, of course.

Music is a huge part of these Crazy Cats movies, obviously. The two people responsible for creating the film's soundtrack were Hiroaki Hagiwara (music) and Shigeru Tsukada (lyrics). Hagiwara was involved with Crazy Cats in some way or another even before the band was in its final form: he was initially a member of the band's predecessor Hajime Hana and the Cuban Cats, but left to focus on composing music. He continued to write for the band up to his death, including writing Hitoshi Ueki's big hit Suudara-bushi. In addition to that, though, he also wrote for other singers, one of whom just so happened to be Yoshiko Otowa, Akihiko Hirata's younger sister. Listen to Ramen Girl in Love here.¹

I think you should also know this about him:

In the waiting room at Hakodate Port, Hagiwara was reading the newspaper. Soon [Hitoshi] Ueki noticed a strange smell and took a closer look, seeing that Hagiwara's coat was touching the stove, and a faint wisp of smoke was rising from it. "[Y]ou should move a little further away," Ueki warned, but Hagiwara only gave a half-hearted reply and continued reading the newspaper. Soon the coat began to burn, so Ueki said, "Your coat is on fire," but Hagiwara replied, "I know," and continued reading the newspaper.

Fly Pan Am: International Distribution

Legend of the Irresponsible Hero opened at the Toho La Brea on September 23rd, 1966 under the title It's a Bet, and was shown as a double feature with Dark the Mountain Snow, a now-mostly-forgotten Hideko Takamine picture directed by Zenzō Matsuyama. Just a few weeks prior, the Toho La Brea had also shown Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay on a double-bill with Campus A-Go-Go. The movie continued to kick around until October and was then never shown theatrically again, as far as I can determine. I have not found any indication that the movie had any theatrical screenings outside of Japan and the United States.

Crazy Cats were not unknown outside of Japan at this time, but were certainly not a household name; places like Hawai'i and Los Angeles that had a large nisei and sansei population and theaters that showed Japanese films would have been familiar with them. In fact, 1966 could probably be considered the height of the Cats' international stardom, as they actually made a visit to Toho's Honolulu theater in July of that year.

Although this section is for international distribution, I do want to at least mention briefly that when the film was aired on television in Japan in 2019, previews introduced Hirata's character with the subtitle "The Man Who Killed Godzilla and Zetton".

...Zetton? Really? Zetton? I mean... technically, I guess?

Image credit @kortoku on Twitter

Don't Have A Macau, Man: Geographic Context and Gambling

As of 1964, Macau was still a Portuguese territory. Japan (surprisingly) did not occupy the island during the second World War aside from installing "government advisors", and it was actually the United States who were responsible for really the only direct military action that occurred during the war, when they bombed the island after learning that the colonial government had plans to sell fuel to Japan. Portugal relinquished control over Macau to China in 1974 as a "Portuguese territory under Chinese administration" and finally agreed to hand over the colony entirely by 1999.

(You will notice in the opening credits that the Hong Kong actors have "Cathay Organization" written in parentheses next to their names. That is these folks. I do not know if Cathay had any stake in the actual production of the film or if their involvement was limited strictly to providing actors.)

Now is the part of the post where I talk about gambling, which had been legal in Macau since the 1850s. This is skippable, since I don't think there's any part of the movie that will be completely ruined if you don't have context for the game that's being played, but I had to learn this, so dammit, now you do, too. Here's a quick run-down of all the games played in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

Sic Bo

Also known as "big and small", this is an uneven game of chance that essentially involves betting on the outcome of a dice roll. It's commonly played in casinos across Asia but has spread internationally. You can read more about it on its English Wikipedia page here. As one would expect, we only see Ueki's character win at sic bo, specifically with a triple match, which according to Wikipedia has a 215-to-1 chance of happening, and he does it twice.

Oicho-kabu

Ueda and Hanaki play a quick round of oicho-kabu in Hanaki's apartment in loving memory of Hanaki's mustache. You can read about oicho-kabu on Wikipedia here; it is from this game that we get the word "yakuza", but oddly enough the name of the game itself is derived from the Portuguese for "eight end" (oito cabo). Oicho-kabu can also be played with a hanafuda deck, which is mentioned in the film's theme song ("cherry blossom and moon over the mountain, plum and pine" are all hanafuda cards).

Mahjongg

You already know what mahjongg is.

In the cold open of Legend of the Irresponsible Hero, Ueda wins with a "Big Three Dragons" hand, which jisho.org defines as a "winning hand consisting of pungs or kongs of each of the three types of dragon tiles​". This means that Ueda held three-of-a-kinds (or four-of-a-kinds) of each of the three dragon "suits". To tell you the truth, I am never more miserable while subtitling a movie than I am when people are playing mahjongg. Fortunately, it doesn't show up in the movie any more after the opening.

Chō-han

You most likely also know what chō-han is if you've seen even one yakuza film, ever, at any point in your life. Incredibly simple: two dice go into a cup, the cup is shaken, players bet on whether the dice will be even (cho) or odd (han). And yet, the amount of onscreen bloodshed that has resulted from such a rudimentary game...

Ueda and Zhang play three rounds of cho-han against each other at the end of the film, although Zhang cheats... kind of? I don't think there's really any way to cheat at cho-han unless you play with loaded dice, since it's pure chance, but he does take advantage of his opponent's weakness. Read about chō-han on Wikipedia's very short and sweet page for it here.

Rōkyoku LARPing: Historical Background

A memorial stone erected by Torazo Hirozawa, originator of "Torazo-bushi" whom we met in our Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay / Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor post.

It is a relatively major recurring joke in Irresponsible Hero that Hanaki and Ueda think their situation is just like the famed "Brawl at Koujinyama", and they invoke the story as motivation and justification for their adventures in Macau (much to the chagrin of their long-suffering significant others). This is obviously familiar ground for Japanese viewers, but it is as obscure or even more so than much of the Shimizu Jirocho lore we discussed in our post about the same would be to non-Japanese viewers. (Actually, this IS Shimizu Jirocho lore, just a kind of side-story. The Shimizu Jirocho Cinematic Universe, if you will.)

The "Brawl at Koujinyama" refers to a turf war that took place on April 6th and 8th, 1866, at what is now the site of Koujinyama Kannon-ji temple in Suzuka City. It began as a dispute between two gamblers, Nagakichi of Kanbe and Annotoku (the nickname of Tokujiro Anou), the latter of whom was a local yakuza boss who had seized territory - including a gambling den, hence the relevance in Irresponsible Hero - as his own. The conflict escalated when Jirocho of Shimizu himself got involved after hearing of the death of his sworn brother Nikichi Kira. Jirocho supposedly raised 480 men against Annotoku's side; the battle ended in an apology and an eventual peace agreement, which was finalized in 1869. Among the combatants and serving as something of a mediator was Jirocho's man Omasa, played by Hirata in both Crazy Cats Shimizu films.

Nikichi Kira, who both Hanaki and Ueda seem to want to be, became sort of a folk hero after his death by gunshot wound(!) at the age of 28 during the battle at Koujinyama. Nagakichi of Kanbe, Chen Shumei's counterpart according to Hanaki, was an underling of Annotoku until his adopted son got into a fight and his house was set on fire by Annotoku's men. Nagakichi survived the conflict.

This battle, while historical, has been embellished over the years (as has Jirocho) through its telling by kōdan and rōkyoku performers. This kind of thing was experiencing a resurgence in the mid-1960s, which may explain both its inclusion in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero and the impetus behind the two Shimizu films.

"Have You Spotted Any Suckers?": Translation Notes

I actually do not have much else to say in the way of translation notes; much of the context I feel is necessary to fully understand the film's historical references has already been explained above. The only thing I really want to mention is that the long musical number in the middle of the film is sung in the format of a specific type of traditional counting song where the opening verse of each stanza begins with a number ("one", "two", etc; or in Japanese "hitotsu", "futatsu", etc) and then the verse that follows begins with the same kana as the initial number. I found that there was no way to make this work in English without compromising the translation itself, so I had to settle for using the same letter to begin the first two verses.

I guess I should also mention that I did not translate the Chinese dialogue directly at all; I translated it from the on-screen Japanese subtitles, which from experience are not always quite accurate, but, also from experience, it is an absolute fool's errand for a non-Chinese speaker (myself) to attempt to translate Chinese phonetically. (I did transcribe the English dialogue by ear as opposed to using the Japanese subtitles, because allegedly I do speak English.)

Now, in conclusion, I'm going to get a little weird for the ensuing several paragraphs. Bear with me here. I was a linguistics nerd before I was anything else.

Suzaku Gate / Suzakumon / 朱雀門 [1967]

Researching stage plays is always fascinating to me, but also frequently very frustrating because I'm never able to turn up as much visual evidence as I'd like to. If I'm lucky, I can find promotional pictures of the cast in costume, but pictures from the actual performance are pretty much nonexistent for most of the stuff we look at here. That is unfortunately the case with Suzakumon as well, but I was able to get my hands on a booklet which has a lot of really beautiful high-quality pictures; I've scanned the entire thing and you can take a look at it for yourself here.

So, I suppose an appropriate place to start would be asking the question "what is a 'suzakumon', exactly?"

The Suzaku Gate was, historically, the southernmost gate of the Imperial Palace in the three former Japanese capitals of Fujiwara-kyō, Heijo-kyō and Heian-kyō. The gate takes its name from the Vermillion Bird (suzaku), the Guardian of the South according to traditional Chinese astronomy. No historical suzakumon remain extant, but reconstructions have been built. That all suzakumon which presently exist today are modern reconstructions of ancient structures feels like a nice segue into our play, which is itself a reconstruction: a kabuki adaptation of a story written by a British man.

Suzakumon was based off of the play Kismet, written by American-born British playwright Edward Knoblock and first performed in 1911. After several hundred performances in England, the play was eventually brought to Broadway in 1953. Kismet has been adapted to film several times; four were based directly on the Knoblock play and one, released in 1955, was based off of the 1953 Broadway musical.

Only picture I've found of Hirata during an actual performance.

Obviously, Kismet enjoyed some popularity in Japan in the middle of the 20th century, but I am not sure that this popularity still remains today. Currently neither Knoblock nor his play nor any of the subsequent adaptations of it have Japanese Wikipedia pages. A search for the author and his work in Japanese does not even bring up any subjective results (I.E. reviews that indicate everyday people in Japan are reading and enjoying him with any regular frequency), just one or two DVDs for sale and film databases. To be fair, though, I'm not even sure Kismet is that popular with English-speaking audiences anymore, either.

However, this 1967 performance was not the first time Kismet had been staged in Japan. The Takarazuka Flower Troupe performed the play in August of 1955 as directed by Shirai Tetsuzou, and this was a direct adaptation; the play's original setting was preserved. According to the Takarazuka Revue's official website, this performance was notable for being the first use of wireless microphones in Japan.

Poster for the 1955 Takarazuka performance of Kismet, subtitled "unmei" ("fate")

In the section of my Teigeki pamphlet written by author Shinichiro Nakamura, he describes why he believes that the original Arabian Nights-ish setting of Kismet is so well-suited to adaptation into a Heian-period kabuki play, and draws comparisons between the two settings, even referring to Nara as "another Baghdad" and saying that the protagonist of Kismet could "step directly into the role of the protagonist of Suzakumon without creating any sense of unnaturalness[...]".

Another interesting detail about this play that we'll never be able to hear firsthand is its score, which, if it followed the example set by other kabuki plays being staged at the Teigeki in the 1960s, was Western-style. Suzakumon is considered "Shin Kabuki", which is a form of kabuki that incorporates Western ideas and dispenses with certain conventions of more traditional kabuki while still retaining its stylistic structure.

It would appear that the impetus for Toho's decision to adapt Kismet into a kabuki play in 1967 was due to the efforts of a single person; namely Toho's producer Iwao Mori, who was personally interested enough in the play to translate it into Japanese. But, while Toho describes nearly everything about the play as its own idea, its production was not solely domestic - Suzakumon was produced in cooperation with American Play Company.

According to the New York Public Library's archival page on company records in their collection:

The American Play Company was a New York theatrical agency which represented authors and rights-holders and assisted in the negotiation of theatrical and film licensing. The company originated in the 1880s, when Elisabeth Marbury became the protégée of Daniel Frohman and began representing authors and managing their various productions on Broadway, the national tour circuit, and regional amateur productions. She became the representative of Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Bernard Shaw, Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P.G. Wodehouse. She was also the sole representative of the French Society of Authors.

In 1914, Marbury merged with Selwyn and Company to form the American Play Company. By 1930, the company had also absorbed the De Mille company and the John Rumsey Company. The company continued producing and managing properties until the early 1960s, when it was purchased by Sheldon Abend.

Although the NYPL's holdings only go up to 1966, American Play Company continued to exist until last year (2025), when it was acquired by International Literary Properties. As of that time, it was owned by actor Michael Douglas, who had acquired the company in 1999.

I cannot determine how involved the American Play Company was with the production of Kismet and with Toho in general. It seems like Toho did the bulk of the work out of their own desire to stage the play, rather than APC approaching them with intent to collaborate, but then again 100% of my sources are Japanese; I would really like to be able to find a news story from an American source that mentions the play being staged in Japan, but no such thing seems to exist or be accessible to me. I would guess, from what I've read, that APC simply held the rights to the play and that Toho had to go through them to be able to stage it.

Nara's reconstructed suzakumon.

Suzakumon was produced in participation with the 22nd Agency of Cultural Affairs Arts Festival, which, as per the Agency of Cultural Affairs' website, is "an art festival held every fall with the aim of providing the general public with the opportunity to appreciate excellent works of art at home and abroad, and contributing to the improvement and promotion of our culture". Performances sponsored by the Agency of Cultural Affairs include kabuki, noh, bunraku, ballet, contemporary theater, and other forms of traditional Japanese song and dance, but awards are given also to things like television dramas, documentaries, and radio plays, so this is not exclusively a festival for traditional arts, although that does seem to have been a focus. The festival is held annually ("in principle", not sure what they mean by that) from October 1st to November 30th and is still going strong in its 80th year.

I will say that it is very difficult to find out anything about this specific play because most search results are either about actual, historical suzakumon or the 1957 Daiei film starring Raizō Ichikawa by the same name (which is just straight jidaigeki as far as I'm aware; no relation to this play).

Hirata plays Karimaro no Mononobe. He is a bad guy. I can say nothing else about Karimaro because the plot synopsis does not mention him other than to compare him to his "close associate", Muromaro no Yuge (Chusha Ishikawa), who the synopsis unkindly describes as "conflat[ing] public office with private gain and engag[ing] in rampant misrule". The lack of further information is disappointing, since the costume photo of him is so interesting (if jidaigeki is to be believed, the Heian period was notable for its cool hats):

The rest of the cast is a fairly even mixture of kabuki actors and contemporary stage actors. Likely the biggest name within the cast in terms of kabuki is the 8th Koshiro Matsumoto (also sometimes known as Hakuo Matsumoto I), but we also see people who we'd recognize from well outside of the kabuki world, like Mariko Miyagi, Mitsuko Kusabue and Mie Hama, the latter of which had not previously been in a stage play with a long continuous run-time such as Suzakumon. That Hama was a first-timer in this kind of performance makes it all the more disappointing that I can find no reviews of the play from the time.

The only real external reference to Suzakumon that I've found - outside of the pamphlet and a database of plays performed at the Teigeki - is a single mention of it by name in the November 1967 issue of Toho Films magazine, within a one-paragraph bio of Hirata (the magazine was doing these for a lot of their contracted actors around this time). It is literally a mention by name; I'm sure it was cited only because it was the most recent stage play he'd appeared in. (It's cited alongside Sangokushi, the other play he was in in 1967; mayhap we'll take a look at that eventually.)

The part I've blacked out is literally just his entire home address. I don't care if he's dead, I'm not doxxing him. (He lived in Setagaya, though.)

This specific play is a perfect example of why doing research into lesser-known Showa-era stage plays is both fulfilling and frustrating; it's fulfilling because I get to learn about things I've never heard of and I come away with it with a bunch of new questions, but it's frustrating because there's virtually no material directly related to the actual play I'm researching. The booklet is 100% my sole source of information, here. (Not that it's a bad source, but I want more pictures, more reviews.)

In any case, I hope this is interesting to you as a bit of an oddity if nothing else; perhaps you didn't know there was a kabuki adaptation of Kismet. I certainly didn't, but then I also did not even know what Kismet was when I started writing this post.

日蝕の夏 / Nisshoku no natsu / Summer in Eclipse [1956]

Release date: September 26th, 1956

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Shintaro Ishihara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mieko Takamine, Setsuko Wakayama, So Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake, Akihiko Hirata, Makoto Sato, Nadao Kirino, Noriko Sengoku et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings of a print that is noticeably degraded.

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It's finally summer! Not right now, because I’m writing this way back in spring and putting it in the queue, but that's not important - let's celebrate the solstice with a summery-titled movie.¹

This movie brought to you by... canned peaches, I guess?

This film was adapted from an original work by its star, writer/actor/sucky politician Shintaro Ishihara, who we met briefly in our post about Toho's Youth School TV series. Ishihara is the brother of Yujiro Ishihara, himself quite a prolific actor who has shown up on the blog a few times, most notably in his mainstay role on the long-running detective drama Taiyo ni Hoero!. Shintaro Ishihara was enjoying quite a bit of success in 1956, with Eclipse being the fourth film released that year in which he had a leading role.

Adaptations of Ishihara's literary works were instrumental in the development of what are referred to as "Sun Tribe" films, which portray a kind of rebellious, youthful subculture closely associated with similar American movements such as rockabilly. (Eclipse is the only Sun Tribe movie in Hirata's vast filmography, due mostly to the fact that Toho was generally not putting these kinds of films out; it was usually Nikkatsu.) In addition to writing the original material, Ishihara also co-authored the screenplay with Toshiro Ide, who we've seen here a few times before as well.

Ishihara plays Naoki Mishima, who from plot synopses sounds like a generally disaffected youth, spending much of his time riding motorcycles and motorboating. He has an elder brother named Masaki (played by Hirata) who recently broke off an engagement to a woman named Taeko (Setsuko Wakayama). We later learn that the reason why the engagement was nullified was because Taeko was having an affair with Masaki's father Kozo (So Yamamura). This is only one of what sounds like quite a few joyless and ultimately futile romantic endeavors had by numerous characters, including the protagonist: starting off the film with a girl his age named Kyouko (Yoko Tsukasa), Naoki eventually begins a relationship with another woman, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), who is several years his senior.

While Ishihara was at the height of his popularity around this time, it doesn't seem like Eclipse is one of his more well-regarded films. Even the director, Hiromichi Horikawa, a purveyor of otherwise very solid films for Toho, regards this one as "a flop" (shippaisaku). Funnily enough, I also encountered an interview with Nobuyoshi Ishihara, Shintaro's fourth son, in which the interviewer brings up a poster for Eclipse hanging in Nobuyoshi's studio; his response was to say, basically, "Yeah that movie was fine but did you hear about the one he did with Francois Truffaut?"

This is a tie-in poster promoting Suzuki's "Colleda" motorcycle model, which featured heavily in the film. (Reminiscent of the Godzilla posters that want to make sure you remember Ogata rides a Cabton.)

Try as I might (and buddy I am trying) I cannot turn up any pictures of Hirata from the film. Reviews that I've read describe his character as "calculating/scheming" which would seem to imply he does have some kind of role in the overall plot, but evidently it was not a big enough role to get him featured on any posters nor even have a little portrait of him in press sheets, the way Toho often did. Here are some weirdly high-quality stills from the film; none feature our man, but I want access to whatever OP's source was for these. I am very curious about this role because I cannot imagine how a character could be described as "scheming" while also having his fiancée end up leaving him for his dad. What exactly is Masaki scheming? A way to win his fiancée back from his dad?

Screenings of the film seem incredibly sparse and reviewers have noted that the print does not look good. This person writes a travelogue featuring a poster for the movie displayed in the city of Ome, which seems to be a smallish place known as a nice respite for those looking to get away from the general Tokyo-ness of Tokyo. Laputa Asagaya has, of course, shown the film at least once.

Thanks to the attention given to the Sun Tribe movement by film scholars studying Japanese cinema, Eclipse has been cited in multiple research papers. None that I've seen, however, go in-depth on the film's actual content; it is simply mentioned as part of a list of Sun Tribe films produced around this period that demonstrate the same kind of boundary-pushing sensibilities as all of their ilk. The majority of these papers have been in English (I assume there are some in Japanese as well, but have not found any) save for one in Italian and one in French.

Outside of Japan, the film made its way to Hawaiian theaters in late 1957 under the unusual but poetic title The Summer the Sun Was Lost. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin advertised the film as "a tense drama of modern Japan". Thanks to the Hawaii Hochi, we have - blessedly, gloriously - an actual English-language review of the film, written by your friend and mine Max Morinaga. I will quote it here in its entirety.

A film which I saw recently and which I found to be oddly entertaining was titled "The Summer The Sun Was Lost".

Shintaro Ishihara, one of present-day Japan's most popular authors, was the star of the film. As an actor, he ain't much. But as I understand it, his novels about juvenile delinquents and teenage sinners are sold by the hundreds of thousands!

"The Summer The Sun Was Lost" didn't do so well at the box office of the Kapahulu, where it was shown last week, but it did a terrific big business in Japan.

One of the high spots of this picture was the scene showing sweet-faced Yoko Tsukasa indulging in some mighty passionate kissing with Shintaro in the semi-darkness of a private garage.

Shintaro is mighty disillusioned when he discovers that his sweet-faced girl has had numerous affairs with numerous boys, and he is also disgusted with his parents when he learns that his father has a mistress and his gentle and gracious mother has a lover!

Shintaro himself indulges in an affair with a middle-aged woman (Mieko Takamine) who still looks mighty good in a bathing suit!

On that note, I think I've given about all the information about this surprisingly obscure film that I can. Considering that its Sun Tribe contemporaries are much better preserved, it's disappointing that this one only seems to live on in dingy prints and no home media release. One can always hope it'll get some kind of digitization before the print degrades past watchability, if it hasn't done so already.

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1 I am not allowed to write about Summer Farewell [Natsu no Wakare].