Zero Pilot Gaiden: The German Dub

Guten tag!

As it happens, I did in fact acquire a German DVD of Zero Pilot as mentioned at the end of my post about it, and I’ve uploaded the entire German dub to Internet Archive here. This DVD was such a nightmare to get a hold of that I wanted to make it worth my while by turning it into a whole post, so let's find out more about the German release of this movie together.

(This German dub isn't particularly rare - it's available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV in Germany, but you can't watch those if you don't have a German account.)

As I've said, Zero Pilot's German release came startlingly quick on the heels of its Japanese premiere: while Japanese audiences first saw it on October 2nd of 1976, Germans got it just weeks later on October 26th, under the title Sturzflug in die Hölle (literally "Nosedive/Free Fall Into Hell"). Oddly enough I can't really find any information about this initial German run, because I haven't been able to turn up any German newspaper articles or other media relating to the film. I even ran through some old issues of Der Spiegel looking for mentions of it, which was... fun? I think? I don't really know what it was.

Very interestingly, I've also found evidence that Germany MIGHT have had the earliest home media release of the film in addition to the earliest theatrical run: an issue of Weltluftfahrt seems to indicate that the movie was available as of 1982 - one year earlier than its Dutch VHS release - from ITT Schaub-Lorenz in Pforzheim. I'm not amending this to my previous post about the film, because I'm not entirely sure if I'm interpreting my sources right - from everything I can find out about ITT Schaub-Lorenz, they manufactured radios and televisions and whatnot, and I don't see any indication that they distributed films. If they were selling Zero Pilot, though, they had an entirely different cut from any of the others featured on German home media, because the publication gives its length as 92 minutes, which, as we'll see, is much longer than the DVD releases.

You can see some of the original German lobby cards for the film here (scroll down a bit). Most of the lobby cards have pictures of airplanes or Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but our man did make it onto one, albeit from the back:

On right, in foreground. (Look, just trust me on this.)

In addition to its theatrical run in Germany itself, the film was also shown a few times in Liechtenstein, first in January and February of 1978 and then again in October of that year. During the latter run, the same publications that were advertising Zero Pilot were also advertising some weird movie I've never heard of called Star Wars. Too bad that one didn't make any lasting impression!

As far as I can tell, Zero Pilot was first released to DVD in 2008 under its Sturzflug in die Hölle title, followed by another DVD release in 2009 as Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf ("Skull-and-Crossbones Bomber Wing") and one as Samurai Kamikaze in 2015. It also seems to frequently be packaged with other war movies in cheap 3-film DVD sets, some of which have shoved it alongside Umberto Lenzi's The Biggest Battle, Giuseppe Vari's A Place in Hell, Bitto Albertini's The War Devils and a movie I can't find anything out about called Operation Barbarossa. While the DVD I have says "Samurai Kamikaze" on the cover, as you'll see, the title card in the actual video file reads "Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf".

Multiple different severely truncated versions of the movie have been featured on these various DVD releases, with the 2008 one being the worst, at 78 minutes, and our 2015 version only barely better at 82. This seems to be the version used by Amazon and Apple Video, since they both give a running time of 81 minutes. You can find a list of the German voice cast here.

White guys on the cover of your Japanese movie about a Japanese pilot in the Japanese army is certainly a choice.

Now, for the thing about all of this that is really funny to me: for whatever reason, the 2015 DVD release (this is the one I've gotten my hands on) associates the movie very strongly with Akihiko Hirata, despite - I will stress this again - his being in the movie for under three minutes. It's not even like his name is first in the cast alphabetically or anything.

Poland does this too, on possibly the ugliest poster ever featured on this blog:

At first I thought "Well, maybe he was popular in Germany?" but finding that Polish poster has made me lean more towards believing that the reasoning behind this is because people don't know what he looks like (or at least can't put a name to a face). Maybe, once one distributor slapped his name first in the cast for whatever reason, everybody else went "yeah, his name is first, that means he must be the guy who plays the dude" and just rolled with it.

Anyway, I've gotten off the rails and did not even really intend to make a full post about this in the first place, so I'll leave things there. It's unfortunate to see how this movie has been treated in Germany (packaged with random war movies and sold for incredibly cheap), because even though it's not a particularly memorable picture, Koichi Kawakita's work on it deserves more respect than it's getting. Hiroshi Fujioka wore that fake mustache for you, Western audience! You could at least appreciate the film!

"Zero Pilot" Goes West

Today we're going to take a look at this somewhat odd VHS release of Toho's 1976 Zero Pilot, originally titled Ozora no Samurai ("Samurai of the Sky"). The reason why I say that this is odd is because the English-dubbed tape pictured above is the only physical release of this movie in the United States. You can get a Japanese DVD for relatively cheap, but if you don't speak any Japanese and want to watch it, your only option is to endure the dub.

So the main thing to know about this movie is that it's based off of the life of former flying ace Saburo Sakai. That this film was (at least at one time) readily available to an English-speaking audience is somewhat apropos, considering that Sakai's life and wartime activities were brought to such an audience in 1957 via Samurai!, an autobiography ghostwritten by Martin Caidin. The reliability of Samurai! has been called into question, and Sakai himself states that the 64 kills Caidin ascribes to him in the book - a number also given on the back of the VHS box - is not an accurate reflection of his actual record. I should emphasize, however, that Zero Pilot isn't based on any specific work by Sakai, but rather a kind of general overview of his life. 

Although we're mostly looking at the overseas release of this movie and not its production history, I would be remiss not to mention that the film was financed by Taikan Productions. Taikan was ostensibly a production company, but really it was a religious organization formed as an offshoot of Tenka Ikka no Kai ("One Family Under Heaven"), a company founded by a dude named Kenichi Uchimura that was absolutely, 100% a pyramid scheme. This kind of thing was getting to be such an issue in Japan in the late 1970s that new laws against pyramid schemes were enacted, resulting in the dissolution of Tenka Ikka no Kai and the jailing of its founder for three years.

Moving swiftly on... despite its incredibly shady financing, the people who worked on the actual movie did their absolute best, and the result is definitely up to Toho's reputation for remarkable special effects. Godzilla fans will recognize the name of Zero Fighter's SFX director, Koichi Kawakita, for whom this was his first time in a directorial role. Toho was really going through it in the 1970s, but even so, no footage or miniatures were reused, and Kawakita's attention to detail is what saves this from being a totally forgettable film. It's also kind of fun to see old Toho regulars like Ren Yamamoto and Yoshio Katsube still sticking it out even while the studio was faltering.

One area where Zero Pilot is unfortunately pretty forgettable, though, is within Akihiko Hirata's filmography. This is one of his "show up, look authoritative, explain some stuff, and then leave" roles, and his cumulative screen time amounts to around three minutes (I did count). His English dubber's vocal style is best described as "drunk and belligerent". The only really notable thing about this role is that it's the only time Hirata and Hiroshi Fujioka - best known by far as Takeshi Hongo AKA Kamen Rider Ichigo - ever crossed paths.

Hirata and Fujioka do share the screen directly in several scenes, which I find more amusing than I probably should. Here is an annotated screenshot that you can use to annoy your friends who don't watch tokusatsu.

Moving even more swiftly on, let me now begin talking about what I actually made this post to talk about: the tape.

So I guess the most pressing issue on my mind here is who exactly is responsible for that dub. Well, ultimately, the answer to that is Toho themselves, considering they exported an English-dubbed version of it in 1984 (trailer here). But in terms of who actually executed the dub, that would be the Matthew Oram/Barry Haigh group, a Hong Kong-based outfit who should be very familiar to Godzilla and Shaw Brothers fans. Among many other roles, Matthew Oram himself dubbed Dr. Mafune in the English version of Terror of Mechagodzilla. In Zero Pilot Oram dubs Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but for whatever reason the export trailers feature Barry Haigh voicing Sakai instead.

What is very, very strange about this English dub is that it actually features alternate footage. Two entirely separate versions of the film's bookending scenes were shot, with the export version featuring Hiroshi Fujioka sporting a mustache and the Japanese cut having him 'stacheless. This kind of sounds like something I just made up, but you can see it for yourself here.

(...did that say "OBAN International Finance Group"?)

Although the dub itself was commissioned and produced closer to the film's 1976 release, it didn't make its way onto VHS until ten years later, in 1986. (Zero Pilot itself was first released to home media in 1983 with subtitles for the Dutch market.) The Combat Video VHS is what the kids refer to as a "big chungus" (Godzilla, King of the Monsters! for scale):

The 1986 Combat Video VHS release was not, however, the first time the dub was heard on American shores. The film ran throughout March of 1984 and into April at Los Angeles' Kokusai/Crenshaw theater. During this theatrical run it was shown on a double-bill with Nomugi Pass, which also features Hirata in a very small and somewhat silly role (all his character really does is get grossed out by how badly silk-spinning mills smell). I don't technically know for certain that Zero Pilot was shown dubbed, but considering Toho were responsible for exporting it and they'd already had a dubbed version sitting around since the '70s, it seems pretty likely to me that they would have given the dub to American distributors.

Most everything I've talked about so far is not terribly obscure information, but Combat Video itself is a bit harder to get a bead on. "Combat Video" is in fact not the name of a specific label, but an offshoot/series/arm/??? of a larger outfit called Video City Productions, an Oakland-based distributor active throughout the 1980s (specific dates elude me). Video City was no stranger to Japanese war films, also releasing Toei's Port Arthur (featuring our man as well) and The Imperial Japanese Empire in 1985. Other illustrious titles distributed by the company include Crazy Fat Ethel 2, SS Hell Camp, White Cannibal Queen and The Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

You know... I'm kind of just... starting to wonder if this tape might not actually have been officially licensed by Toho.

What in the who?

In the interest of brevity, and because I originally intended to restrict the scope of this post to just the Combat Video VHS, I'm not going to go over the film's release in other countries, but it actually did make it quite far. Just to give a quick summary: West Germany was the first to receive Zero Pilot a remarkable matter of weeks after its Japanese release, followed by Sweden and Finland the next year, Denmark in 1978, Portugal in 1979, Spain in 1980 and finally Hungary in 1991. I think it's fairly safe to say that despite being a Japanese product, this movie was at least in some way intended to be palatable to an international audience. We can tell that Toho was considering how it would be received overseas by the fact that they catered Hiroshi Fujioka's facial hair to their intended viewers' perceived taste.

On that note, I'll leave you, but before I do, let's just take a nice long look at the German DVD release of Zero Pilot, which for some unknown reason decided to give Akihiko Hirata top billing despite, as mentioned, only having three minutes of screen time.

I won't disclose whether or not I searched this up on eBay and bought a copy.

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 more to the Crazy Cats themselves having an insanely busy schedule 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 pts. 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 [Damasareta].

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 Outré 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 21st-century-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".

女房を早死にさせる方法 / Nyobo o hayajine ni saseru houhou / How To Make Your Wife Die Early [1974]

Release date: June 1st, 1974[?]

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Miyoko Akaza, Shigeru Oya, Yukiko Kobayashi, Akihiko Hirata, Michiko Tsukasa, Kenzo Tabu, Hisao Toake, Chiharu Kuri, Naoko Yusa, Chikako Natsumi, Koji Wada et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings.

____

Hell of a title, there.

This is a follow-up to our look at Susumu Kodama's unreleased The Woman I Chose, and, like that film, How To Make Your Wife Die Early also went unreleased following its completion. Unlike The Woman I Chose, though, this one eventually did get shown in theaters; it seems like it began production around January of 1971 and was finished a few months later, but it took three more years before audiences would get to see it.

Early draft script dating from January 1971.

I'll copy-paste Kinema Junpo's synopsis from its early May 1971 issue here wholesale, since it's the only plot description we're going to get:

Shunichi and Yumiko Kudo [Natsuki & Akaza, respectively] are about to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. Shunichi is an architectural designer, and Yumiko was a fashion model in the past, but lately their relationship has started to [sour]. Moreover, Shunichi is devastated to learn that his mentor, Dr. Ishimatsu [Toake], has married a woman younger than Yumiko. At this time, Shunichi meets Yoko [Tsukasa], the daughter of the owner of the drive-in "Route 70," and his ["seven-year itch"] resurfaces.

Yokoyama [Hirata], Shunichi's colleague and a globe-trotting architect, scoffs at Shunichi. Yokoyama, a self-proclaimed playboy and bachelor, whispers devilishly that Shunichi's freedom allows him to have a love affair with Yoko, and teaches Shunichi various ways to commit the perfect crime of slowly killing his wife. 

Meanwhile, Yumiko reunites with her friends from her modeling days: Maki [Yusa], Nana [Kuri], and Kyoko [Natsumi]. Maki had just recently lost her husband, who was twenty years older than her, but her expression is surprisingly cheerful. Are they after the inheritance?

Maki may have killed her husband through some clever means. If Maki demanded sex every night, it would have been very effective on her husband, who had a weak heart. Nana and Kyoko smiled devilishly at the prospect of reuniting with Yumiko. They were jealous of Yumiko, who had been the most popular girl in her prime and seemed happy even after marriage, and plotted to destroy her family life. They taught Yumiko how to get rid of her husband and introduced her to the playboy Michio Kihara [Wada]. However, the murderous intent that had been instilled in her by others naturally faded with time. And before long, their peaceful married life resumed.

A peculiarity that I've noticed while reading reviews on sites like Kinenote and Filmarks is that sometimes users will randomly decide to review a movie that they watched not recently or even semi-recently but just at any given point during their life, even if "any given point" means "thirty years ago". Thanks to Kinenote user 銀夢来夢, who saw the movie in 1974 and reviewed it in 2013, we can learn about what Toho was doing with this movie when they finally got around to releasing it:

I watched this on June 23, 1974, at the Toho theater in Kochi. It was distributed by Toho. At the time, it was often shown as part of a double feature in regional theaters. The film shown alongside it was "Three Old Women" [Sanbaba], also distributed by Toho.

So, from the sound of it, this movie's release was a matter of "somebody go tell the intern to dig around in storage, we need another movie for our double bill". Three Old Women wasn't the only movie it double-billed with, either; in 1974 it also played alongside another Yosuke Natsuki feature called Awesome Guys [Sugoii yatsura]. I've found some indication that the Awesome Guys double-bill may have actually taken place in March which would push the official release date back a few months, but I'm not certain about any of that (which is why I've put a load-bearing question mark next to the release date).

Yoshio Shirasaka adapted the film to the screen from two works written by Junji Ishigaki titled Ten Ways to Make Your Wife Die Early and Ten Ways to Make Your Husband Die Early, serialized in Weekly Asahi. Ishigaki seems to have primarily been a medical writer, and his other works have titles such as Introduction to Sexual Medicine, The Ethics of Nursing, 365 Days of Health, and - most relevant to our current examination - How to Make Your Husband Last a Long Time and How to Make Your Husband Strong and Long-Lasting. The overwhelming majority of Ishigaki's work is concerned with subjects like healthy diet, raising children, sexual hygiene, and family planning, so given that context, I'm not sure what to make of this movie. Possibly he published his Weekly Asahi articles as a joke?

In any case, we do have a picture of Hirata's character, Yokoyama, and, uh, well.

Computer... [sighs] enhance.

A slightly different version of the same poster with a less cropped picture of Yokoyama is out there as well:

This poster has been folded in half but we don't care about the other half.

And we've also got another picture of him from a lobby card that looks slightly better, although I have to say I think this is his worst on-screen facial hair so far:

Bad fake beard aside, it's very interesting to see how in the 1970s, as the film industry was imploding and Toho's system of exclusive contracts was falling apart, Hirata started to be cast in comedic roles, something that would never have happened 10-15 years earlier in his career. It's nice to see him get away from being typecast as scientists/villains, although those kinds of roles would still continue to be associated with him for the rest of his life and beyond.

There are a few other lobby cards for sale online as well as some stills which are catalogued as being held in the Toei Eigamura Library. I sent in an inquiry asking if these could be viewed digitally but they cannot. In any case it's possible these stills are just the same lobby cards that are already available online.

Despite being shelved initially and then relegated to the second half of a double-bill three years later, somebody evidently kept prints around, because I've found reports of a few theatrical screenings: One in 2006, an unconfirmed one in 2010 (can't confirm locations of these two), and in the early 2000s Laputa Asagaya showed it as part of a festival celebrating the work of Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote the film. Laputa must have really been digging around for the deep cuts, because compared to some of Shirasaka's other work - Giants and Toys, The Beast Must Die, Blind Beast, Kon Ichikawa's Olympics movie, etc - this is the smallest of small potatoes. A Filmarks reviewer writing in January of 2025 says they saw the film at Toho Cinemas Shibuya, but I'm not sure if that means it screened in 2025 or if, as mentioned above, the reviewer saw it some other time and just decided to write about it in 2025. If it did screen last year, that would be lovely as it would confirm that prints are extant and good enough to be viewed.

This still showing the film's production crew confirms that shooting was wrapped in spring of 1971 (we can just barely make out "1971" on the sign being held up by the guy with the glasses who kind of looks like Shin Kishida.)

Mentions of the film on social media, more than anything else, proved to be instrumental in getting a feel for how people remember this movie today and learning about its screening history. Despite its obscurity, it seems like a lot of people were engaging with the movie specifically when Laputa showed it as part of their Shirasaka festival. Twitter user @kasamatu_kun says "[...]I, too, am a devotee who rushed to see 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early' at Laputa Asagaya Late two decades ago, lured by the appearance of Miyoko Akaza." @rikako_ki, on the other hand, describes it as "an incredibly boring movie[...]the epitome of a B-movie," but a movie doesn't necessarily have to be good for us to want to see it.

The weirdest reference I've managed to find online is from a Filmarks review that namedrops it in reference to an American beach party movie from the 1960s called Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. User KyoSiroの感想・評価 says: "Susan Hart is absolutely adorable and full of playful mischief in her role as the ghost watching over the proceedings. Her entrance scene utilizes a composite visual effect - superimposing blue-tinted film footage - reminiscent of Director Susumu Kodama's 'How to Make Your Wife Die Early'." Considering how obscure and little-known this movie is, that's a pretty random comparison to throw out there. Also, I really can't imagine why a movie like this would use composite filming.

Well, anyway, I hope this post was informative, because now I'm probably on a watchlist for Googling "how to make your wife die early".

俺の選んだ女 / Ore no eranda onna / The Woman I Chose [1976]

Release date: Unreleased; some sources claim a release date of December 11, 1976

Director: Susumu Kodama

Studio: Toho

Cast: Raita Ryu, Chieko Matsubara, Chieko Naniwa, Daisuke Katō, Keiji Yanoma, Kunihisa Mizutani, Kon Ōmura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Bontaro Miake, Masao Shimizu, Sadako Sawamura, Akihiko Hirata, Chikako Natsumi et al.

Availability: None.

____

I've been writing about films from the '50s and '60s a lot lately, so for our this and our next post, we're going to take a look at some from the 1970s. I know most of what I talk about here is obscure, but this one takes the cake: It was never released at all!

By 1976, Toho's system of exclusive contracts for actors and staff had been dead for about five years. That doesn't mean, however, that The Woman I Chose is full of B-listers; obviously, we can see that there are some decently famous names in the cast: Hirata's Taiyo ni Hoero! co-star Raita Ryu and the very prolific former Nikkatsu actress Chieko Matsubara - who is still working at 81 years old - headline, with a few other distinguished folks like Seiji Miyaguchi (Seven Samurai) and Daisuke Katō (Yojimbo) backing them up. It's also worth noting that this film represents one of Kunihisa Mizutani's few roles before he retired from acting to take care of his family's camera business. (Mizutani of course played foil to Hirata's Mr. K in Warrior of Love Rainbowman.)

Ryu was already a regular on Taiyo ni Hoero! at this point, and audiences for this film (had they ever existed) would have been familiar with him from the show. In fact, the tagline on the above poster pretty unambiguously makes reference to Ryu's character on Taiyo ni Hoero!, whose nickname is "Gori" (gorilla):

Whose wonderful girlfriend is that?

She belongs to me - a guy like a gorilla!

A human-hearted comedy that paints a picture of tearful love through laughter! 

Toho had planned to release - and, from what I understand, made the film for the sole purpose of releasing - The Woman I Chose on a double bill with Mother of the Cliff, but the then-popular Inugami Family was chosen instead, which seems to have sentenced our movie to obscurity forevermore. Another point that makes this film's relegation to the dustbin all the more regrettable is that Kyu Sakamoto, though not being credited, makes a special appearance. This movie is included in his filmography on his official website, and some promo stills of him do exist, but even his fame couldn't get this movie out there - perhaps another indication of just how bad the film industry was circa 1976.

Susumu Kodama, the director of this film, was much more prolific in television, having worked on the very popular What is Youth? back in the 1960s, which kicked off Toho's series of Youth [Seishun] school dramas. We can see some more of the influence television had been having on the film industry in the fact that The Woman I Chose is officially listed by Toho as having been produced by their television department despite having been planned as a theatrical release, with sales handled by the film department. This is the second of two theatrical films Kodama directed that were unreleased, and next time, we'll be taking a look at the second one, which, despite being shelved, did eventually make it to theaters.

Hirata is credited as playing a character named "Kuroda", but since this character is not mentioned in the film's synopsis (published in Kinema Junpo's late February 1977 edition), we can know nothing about him whatsoever. His role is likely quite small, as he doesn't appear on any posters, and although there are a fair number of promotional stills out there, none of those feature him, either. Since Ryu's character works in advertising and the plot does seem to heavily involve some miscellaneous business drama, I'm going to guess he plays somebody's boss, but that's pure speculation. 

Does Toho still have this movie? That's what I'd like to know. After 50 years, if it's never been digitized or taken out of storage, I highly doubt the print is in decent condition, and considering the ups and downs Toho has been through, it's very probable that nobody currently working at the company knows where the movie physically is. Even I'm having trouble drumming up any optimism about this one ever resurfacing. But hopefully, my writing about this film in English for the first time can bring it out of total obscurity by at least some small degree.

2 Years of guzareshirei...

I have been writing this blog for 2 years now. I don't think anybody reads it, but writing it makes me happy, so I'm going to continue to do so. To celebrate my anniversary, in addition to revamping the blog's theme - I feel like can never quite get it to look good, I have to settle for "halfway decent" - I've done fansubs for episode 55 of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which introduces Hirata's character Chief Nishiyama, one of his more well-known roles within Japan despite its near-total obscurity overseas. Apart from its broadcast on Hawaiian TV decades ago, this is the first time this episode has had English subtitles.

Check it out here. It'll be on archive.org until and unless people with say-so (or their lawyers) decide it shouldn't be. Also note that Toyoko Takechi, who has a guest role in this episode, is what I (somewhat embarrassingly) like to call a "triple crown" actress: she worked with Hirata and both of his siblings at various times.

As always, there will be more posts; I have plans for the coming year. And if anyone is reading this, thank you, sincerely. 

It's been an expensive two years. 

A very, very expensive two years.

Brand New English Subtitles for Star Wolf and Comet-san!

It's still his birthday. It ain't midnight yet where I live. I've got one more post in me.

In real life, I am fortunate enough to host monthly screenings of tokusatsu films and television that, for some reason, people have actually been showing up to for a year and a half. I manage to be (...mostly) normal for the rest of the year, but when December rolls around, all bets are off. (Personally, I took the day off work so I could stay home and watch The Killing Bottle and Ironfinger back-to-back, which turned out to be a really good idea because somebody drove a car through the store where I work today.)

This year I had the privilege of holding my most special screening in an actual art gallery. This is something I spend a lot of time preparing for every year, so having such a great venue to host it was a blast. For this year's screening, I subtitled two episodes that Hirata guest-starred in which previously did not have subtitles. I've now uploaded them to Internet Archive where they will remain until and unless anybody decides to call down the copyright gods, or if somebody else fansubs them and makes mine look bad in comparison.

Here's episode 3 of Star Wolf.

Here's episode 33 of Comet-san.

Our man sounds like he had a really bad cold when they were filming Comet-san.