丼池 / Dobuike [1963 & 1968]

drawing by Kisaku Ito for the 1963 set plans

Background

Today we're going to look at three separate performances (and one film adaptation) of the same play. As I mention nearly every time I write about a stage play, it's difficult to research plays because there's usually not a wealth of visual evidence for them, and my area of interest is, of course, confined to a time before everybody had a camera in their pocket. But I'm pleasantly surprised that I was able to find a decent amount of information and images this time, so this post will run a bit longer than my other stage play posts.

What does "Dobuike" mean? I'll copy/paste Kotobank's definition, because it is as clear and concise as you're going to get: "A pond located in Minamisenba, Chuo Ward, Osaka City. It was filled in 1874. Before World War II, furniture wholesalers and textile wholesalers were crowded along Dobuike-suji, which faced the pond. Formerly known as Ashiike". 

The plays we're looking at today were written specifically for the stage; they are not adaptations of older literary works or traditional theater. The author/director of Dobuike was Kazuo Kikuta, who is so prolific and esteemed within his home country that to give a brief overview of his career in English feels almost insulting. Kikuta began as a playwright in the mid-1920s, working closely with Roppa Furukawa and his troupe, and then joined Toho in 1936. He left Roppa's troupe due to creative differences in 1943 and eventually became one of Toho's foremost stage directors in the 1950s. Kikuta was an enormously significant figure in the world of post-war Japanese stage musicals, and among many other achievements, he acquired the rights to My Fair Lady and became the first Japanese person to stage a Broadway musical. Many of his works focused on Osaka, including Dobuike.

I would encourage you to research Kikuta yourself if this sounds interesting to you - his career is far more expansive than I can cover here. Somehow, despite his domestic fame, he doesn't have an English Wikipedia page, but maybe some of you read French?

The Play (and the Movie)

The play is set in a back alley off of Dobuike-suji, where textile wholesalers do business. Masa Kanazawa, a woman with ten years of experience as a shop clerk who's just been cheated out of her life's savings, seeks a loan from Katsumi Muroi, the president of Muroi Trading, so that she might start fresh at a co-op trading center. To this end she meets with Sadahiko Kanemitsu, head clerk of the Sonoda firm. Katsumi is not in the business of giving out loans freely, and insists on carefully investigating the circumstances of her borrowers beforehand. To quote the synopsis from the booklet accompanying the Umeda Koma Stadium performance: "When we lend, we look like the Salvation Army; when the payment comes due, we look like vampires".

Chūhei Sonoda, president of the Sonoda firm, approaches Katsumi to arrange for a loan to a business in Minami-Kyūhōji. Initially Katsumi refuses, but then "Old Lady Matsuko", the firm's primary financier, steps in and asks Katsumi personally to provide the loan. This is not out of kindness, however; to quote the synopsis again, Matsuko says "You don’t necessarily have to drive them into bankruptcy; just strip them of their rights, transfer the business to someone else, and pocket the difference."

Then, a woman named Umeko Murata appears, asking for a financial consultation with Matsuko. Matsuko refuses, able to see through Umeko and recognize that she herself intends to bleed the local merchants dry, but Umeko forces the matter. Umeko is denied a loan from Katsumi, and through desperation, she winds up exploiting the weakness of Masunaga, a section chief at Iiyama Manufacturing, for women.

Katsumi, meanwhile, seeks to get out from under Matsuko's auspices by any means necessary. Finally, she comes up with an idea: Muroi Trading is to begin offering "Treasure Investment" certificates in the form of promissory notes, a scheme wherein the firm takes their customers' money and invests it in high-yield ventures that promise good returns. This would otherwise be illegal if it were not set up in the form of a "loan relationship": the customer gives money and receives a promissory note in return. The Treasure Investment concept proves enormously lucrative. Katsumi is able to break free of Matsuko, and even leaves her fiancé to focus solely on moneylending.

Although, to me, that sounds very serious and complicated, Kikuta ends his introduction in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet by wishing his audience "an enjoyable day filled with laughter", so it's possible the actual play is more light-hearted than the synopsis makes it out to be.

In September of 1963, Toho released a film adaptation of Dobuike, which was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, written by Giichi Fujimoto, and based off of Kikuta's original story. The main four actresses again reprised their roles, with a few new additions (notably Kenji Sahara). What's surprising to me about this movie is that, despite how detailed and colorful the sets appear to have been, the movie itself is in black-and-white.

Since we don't have any video from any of the plays, watching the movie would be our only chance to see Kikuta's original story performed with a live cast. Unfortunately, the movie is as obscure as the plays: it's been broadcast on television a few times, but never released to streaming or physical home media.

As for the main cast, it's a bit difficult to break it all down thanks to Dobuike having been staged so many times, but here's my best shot:

• Mitsuko Mori plays Masa Kanazawa in both 1963 plays and the 1963 film; Yuko Hamaki plays Masa in the 1968 Imperial Theater performance.
• Isuzu Yamada plays Umeko Murata in all three plays; Michiyo Aratama plays Umeko in the film.
• Aiko Mimasu plays Matsuko Taira in every version.
• Yoko Tsukasa plays Katsumi Muroi in every version.
• Akihiko Hirata plays Sadahiko Kanemitsu in all three plays; Keiji Sada¹ plays Sadahiko in the film.
• Kenzo Tabu plays Chūhei Sonoda in the Umeda Koma Stadium performance, and Ganjiro Nakamura II plays Chūhei in the film; the casting for this role in the other two plays is unknown to me.

I gather that Dobuike is Women's Business™. In Kikuta's aforementioned introduction, he highlights the main four actresses first, and then just kind of says "oh yeah and I guess the guys are pretty good too". Hirata himself is not mentioned at all in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet aside from once, in a review, and it's a similar "and he is also there" statement. (Reviewers also were not shy about blatant spoilers, and as such I know that the story does not end well for Katsumi.)

Anyway, we'll move on now to the plays themselves. 

The Performances

1963 / Geijutsu-za [Arts Theater]

The first stage adaptation of Dobuike opened on New Year's Day, 1963, and ran into February; exact dates elude me. I'd imagine there's a booklet for this performance floating around somewhere, but I haven't seen any copies, if so.

The Geijutsu-za was a relatively small theater (to us, anyway) with a seating capacity of 750, located on the 4th floor of Toho's headquarters in Yurakucho, Chiyoda ward, Tokyo. It was directly managed by Toho - another thing foreign to us, since in America production companies cannot own theaters due to anti-trust laws. As of 1963 the theater was only 5 years old. Mitsuko Mori, one of the stars of Dobuike, appeared frequently in plays staged at the Geijutsu-za: she made her debut at the theater in 1958, and when it closed in 2005, she starred in its final performance.

The art director for this version of the play was Kisaku Ito, whose beautiful drawings for the set design you can see here. I really would recommend taking a look at them, they are absolutely gorgeous. Kikuta both wrote and directed this performance, which was staged by Toho. Ito died just five years after staging this play; his Wikipedia page doesn't note a cause, but he was only 67.

1963 / Umeda Koma Stadium

This second performance was staged at the Umeda Koma Stadium (now the Umeda Arts Theater) in Osaka, with involvement from Toho, and ran from June 1st to June 26th. I got my hands on a pamphlet for this performance and uploaded the entire thing to Internet Archive. As usual for my scans, they're not very good, but you should still be able to read the text, if that's what you desire.

Kazuo Kikuta again directed the play, and Kisaku Ito again handled the art direction, though we have no pictures of the set design apart from what's in the booklet. 

There actually are a lot of pictures of Hirata's character Sadahiko in this booklet, which I was not expecting. I'd been assuming his role was relatively minor, but he seems to have had a lot of scenes. Considering this, it's not surprising that Hirata didn't appear in the movie adaptation; after performing the same role twice a day (there was a matinee and evening show for this run) every day for a month, twice within one year, he was probably sick of it. (His friend Motohide Katayama recalls him mentioning that he preferred to act on film rather than the stage, because he found playing the same role over and over fairly boring.)

I will now direct your attention to his funky sweater:

1968 / Imperial Theater [Teikoku Gekijō]

We have some inside information about this run of the play courtesy of Makoto Kobayashi, a Toho stage actor who I have mentioned here before and who is still active online in his 90s. (In the above picture, Kobayashi is the guy standing around looking intimidating.)

I'm sorry, I just need to reiterate that. Makoto Kobayashi is blogging. He's 92 and he's blogging. He's a Showa-era Toho-contracted stage actor who is 92 years old and he is blogging about his career with perfect clarity. Toho fans, you all should be paying attention to this guy.

Anyway, this second run of the play ran from December 2nd to December 27th with largely the same cast. Kobayashi notes that during one performance one of the actors (Kinzo Takahashi) accidentally bumped into a piece of stage equipment during the show and made a hole in it, which made Isuzu Yamada and Aiko Mimasu laugh so hard that the play came to a stop for a few moments. Kobayashi also mentions that he fell asleep on stage while performing his role as a detective hiding out in some bushes. (He says that he did get scolded, but admits sleeping on stage feels really nice.) Kobayashi also has a pamphlet from this run of the play that I've never seen for sale or auction before.

Kazuo Kikuta was still credited for the original work, but for this run of the play Junji Tsumura directed.  I can't find much out about Tsumura; he may have been under Toho's employ, as the only other credits of his that I can dig up are other plays staged at Toho-owned venues, but I don't know anything for sure.

Conclusion

At some point I am going to have to figure out how to write a proper segue into an ending.

______

1 Toho casting department: "Okay, for our character Sadahiko we need somebody with either 'Sada' or 'Hiko' in his name, no exceptions."

火曜サスペンス劇場「受験地獄」/ Kayō sasupensu gekijo: Juken jikogu / Exam Hell [1982]

Release date: Aired on January 12th, 1982

Director: Masaharu Segawa

Studio: Produced by Kokusei Broadcasting and NTV

Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.

Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts.

____

It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.

Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo

Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, which first appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".

While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".

The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from, so don't take this as representative - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his belief that he'll never get into university.

If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).

Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.¹ (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)

Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor. These do seem to have been his actual prescription glasses; they're very distinctive and he wears them in basically everything around this time.

In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father² Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake Hirata's role is played by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.

(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sato in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui, which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)

Lot of graphic design choices going on here.

The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. That doesn't mean it's gone entirely unseen since its initial broadcast, though: I've been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, so there's likely been others as well. For a short time, presumably as a result of one of these recent broadcasts, the full movie was even on YouTube (unfortunately the page was not archived), which means someone out there probably has it as a DVD-r in their desk or a file on their computer.

You can also find an original song from the 1982 version called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so yours truly is probably going to do the thing at some point.

That's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky we have this much information about it - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time.

_____

1 That is, one of the only ones to HAVE a remake, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only others I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007. (You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)

2 Which is ironic considering that in real life he was Masahiko's brother.

はりきり社長 / Harikiri Shachō / Fighting President (1956)

Release date: July 13, 1956

Director: Kunio Watanabe

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Yoko Tsukasa, Yasuko Nakata, Norihei Miki, Akihiko Hirata, George Luiker et al

Availability: Available on DVD from Amazon JP and streaming on Prime Video (Japan-only).

____

[This is a revised and expanded version of a post that was originally published on April 1st, 2024.]

Today we're going to take a look at the third entry in Toho's long-running "Shachō" ("company president"; henceforth President) series, which is comprised of 33 films released across 14 years, plus 6 that are considered supplemental/tie-in works. The President series may not have garnered as much international recognition as Toho's tokusatsu films, but salaryman comedies like this and prolific, long-running series such as the Ekimae ("front of [train] station") series were the studio's bread and butter during the 1950s, although the concept began to fizzle out in the 1960s and finally collapsed in 1970s along with the studio system.

The President series starred Hisaya Morishige as the president of a company - a different company each time - and Keiju Kobayashi as his secretary, with Kobayashi playing straight-man to Morishige's goofy president. One thing I find interesting about the series is that the names of Morishige and Kobayashi's characters change between films. I'll be honest here and admit that this is the only entry in the series I have actually seen (many such cases), so I can't tell whether the actors play different characters in each separate film, or if they're the same people, just with new names. Norihei Miki, Daisuke Kato, Frankie Sakai, Asami Kuji and Yoko Tsukasa were also staples of the series.

Considering that there were well over 30 of these films made, it's somewhat surprising that Fighting President is the only time Hirata found his way into the President series, and even more surprising that his role in this movie amounts to basically a walk-on. He appears in two scenes, and that's if we're being very generous and counting two people looking at a photograph of his character ("chotto handsome, dessho?") as "a scene". George Luiker, an actor of Armenian and Estonian parentage, also guest stars in Fighting President for the first of what would be four appearances in the President series. Luiker of course later went on to star alongside Hirata in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

As I said, this is the third entry, so we're still pretty early into the series, and things are just now starting to take shape that would influence the rest of the films. For example, this is the first time Asami Kuji appeared as the president's wife, and it is also the only time Kunio Watanabe was in the director's chair; most - but not quite all - of the following films were directed by either Shue Matsubayashi, Toshio Sugie, or Yasuki Chiba. Within Japan, this movie was released on a double-bill with Madame White Snake, which most definitely had more staying power in the Western film canon than Fighting President did. 

Kunio Watanabe (left) with Hisaya Morishige. Credit to @tnmiyako38.

I want to stay on the subject of Watanabe for a minute, because his Wikipedia page makes him out to be something of an interesting character. Born in 1899, he became a left-wing activist in college, got fired from his first job for spurious reasons, and then met the then-head of Nikkatsu, who hired him on as an actor even though he wanted to direct. Watanabe finally did become a director throughout the 1920s and joined Toho in 1936, at which point his politics had evidently changed; when Toho had a wee spot of union trouble Watanabe led an anti-communist right-wing movement and was vocally anti-union. Following that he joined Shintoho in 1947 and directed their first picture. His Wiki page states that he had a habit of throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it, which I didn't think was a thing anybody actually did outside of cartoons from the 1920s. He also had twelve siblings.

Ryōzō Kasahara, Fighting President's screenwriter, has a far terser Wikipedia page in terms of personal detail but a filmography that speaks for itself: not only did he pen most of the entries in the President series but also Toho's Sazae-san series, Eizō Sugawa's stellar You Can Succeed, Too, a few of the more famous Crazy Cats/Hitoshi Ueki films and a couple of Wakadaisho movies.

English title translation issues have always plagued the President series. When these movies were released (or even just mentioned) in English-speaking markets, they were usually assigned titles that were some variation upon "Three Gents" or sometimes "Five Gents": Aloha Three Gents, Five Gents Prefer Geisha, Three Gents Go West, Hail the Three Gents, etc. Oddly enough, newspaper reviews and publicity from the time when these movies were being exported (early to mid-1960s, mostly) use the English and Japanese titles interchangeably, and a few President movies seem to actually have been shown under their Japanese title with no translation provided at all.

Within a two-week period in mid-December 1958, Honolulu's Kapahulu theater brought out three Toho hits (or semi-hits): Fighting President, 1956's Hesokuri Shachō under the title "The Frugal President", and - unrelated to the President series, but relevant to our interests - Zoku-Zoku Oban under the title "Mr. Fortune Maker". The English title of the movie we're looking at today comes from that Hawaiian theatrical run. I originally published this post using the title Stuart Galbrath gives it in his magisterial Toho Studios Story, "Company President in High Spirits", but since Fighting President seems to have been handed down by Toho themselves, I've decided to use that one from now on instead. ("Harikiri" is a word that means "enthusiastic", "go-get-'em", "hyped", etc. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ritual suicide.)

France also got involved - the only country I'm aware of aside from Japan and the United States where this film has been released - and re-christened the film "La Vie trépidante des décideurs: l'ardeur au travail", which literally translates to "The Fast-Paced Lives of Decision-Makers: Zeal for Work". Fighting President was screened in France a few times, in fact: once in 2008, once in 2012, and just recently, in February of 2026.

But wait, the title confusion gets worse... You will not find this movie on IMDb under either Fighting President or Company President in High Spirits, but instead "Three Generations of Company Presidents". I have not been able to determine where this title came from. I honestly think, unless I'm missing some international release where it ran under that title, that this could very well be the result of a translation mix-up, since this was the third entry in the President series.

But wait, it gets even worse... 1959's Zoku Shachō Taiheki is on IMDb as "Three Generations of Company Presidents Part II". Not only is Zoku Shachō Taiheki very much NOT a sequel to Fighting President, it's actually a sequel to the first Shachō Taiheki, which is a completely different movie.

You see why I said English titles are a problem with this series?

We'll wrap things up there before it gets any more convoluted, but I'm also going to retain my live commentary from the original version of this post (under a jump cut; slightly revised as well) for posterity's sake.