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, itdidn'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.
Today we're going to take another look at the two Crazy Cats Jirocho movies, since they've both just received brand new English subtitles, which were a collaboration between me (edits, revisions, contextual research etc) and Prince Tyler (the initial script and timing). I had a blast doing these and I hope you have a blast watching them.
I did already write posts about both of these movies a few years back, but I'm taking those down because I aim for this post to replace and improve on them. We're going to cover a lot more ground this time. These films are assuming familiarity on the viewer’s part - familiarity that many non-Japanese viewers may lack - and I hope to assist with at least some of that in my “context” section at the bottom of the post.
Okay? Okay. Let's get started.
Production History
The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay
The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay was shot in 20 days, which is unusually fast even for Toho, who were no stranger to cranking 'em out. This was due to the Crazy Cats themselves having an insanely busy schedule more so than anything Toho was doing, but it ended up being inconvenient for Toho as well: at the start of production, staff handed director Takashi Tsuboshima an unfinished script and basically told him "here, shoot this, we're already ready". According to JP Wikipedia, at the time filming began, the script only ran up until the middle of the first prison scene, which accounts for about 20 minutes of movie. After that, the script was delivered piecemeal day-by-day.
Pick-Pocket Bay was Tsuboshima's second time directing a Crazy Cats movie and his first time directing jidaigeki. I found out during my research that Tsuboshima was very fond of Enoken, which is interesting because the film's screenwriter Hideo Oguni also wrote for Enoken (along with contemporary comic Roppa Furukawa) during the late 1940s. Oguni had experience writing about Jirocho as well; for Masahiro Makino he wrote Shimizu Port pt. I and II in 1939 and 1940.
One result of Pick-Pocket Bay's rushed schedule was that Tsuboshima wasn't even 100% clear on the title of the movie during production. The movie was shot under the title "Musekinin Shimizu Minato", with the usual formula for Crazy Cats movie titles - the "Kureji no" before the rest of the title - having been forgotten until the in-house preview. Allegedly, staff also forgot to write a role for Hiroshi Inuzuka, which is why his character only shows up late in the movie for a single scene. One wonders if the same perhaps happened in Crazy Violence as well, since his role in that is equally forgettable.
When all was said and done, Pick-Pocket Bay was released on January 3rd, 1966, on a double bill with Account of the President's Conduct [Shachō gyōjōki], the 24th entry in Toho's long-running President series.
Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor
As I've mentioned many times, the Japanese film industry as a whole was in a death spiral by the early 1970s. Within a few years of this film's release, Toho would end nearly all of their long-running series and fire most of their contracted actors. This was the environment into which Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor was born, which makes it all the more surprising that it is objectively a better movie than Pick-Pocket Bay on almost every level. Crazy Violence is the last movie to feature all seven members of Crazy Cats together; Eitaro Ishibashi left the group in 1971 and was not present for what is sometimes considered the "final" Crazy Cats film, I'll Be Deceived.
The inception of Crazy Violence supposedly came from the Cats' visit to a ryōkyoku festival (the story of Jirocho is intimately tied to oral narrative traditions like kōdan and ryōkyoku, as we'll later see), which inspired Shin Watanabe, then-president of Watanabe Pro, to make a period piece that deliberately went against the Osaka World Expo hype of the time. As with Pick-Pocket Bay, Crazy Violence was released on a double-bill with the an entry in the moribund President series, namely The ABCs of Business Management [Shachōgaku ABC].
The cast of characters changes a bit for the sequel - it's not necessarily that the actors change (although some do), but secondary characters play into the narrative more than in the first film, where the focus is on Hitoshi Ueki to the exclusion of most everyone else. Peoplelike 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 doin fact mean "hug":
Komasa has gotten solo treatment in a couple of films over the years, including a few (now lost) made by Shochiku and the long-defunct Kawai Film Production Company, and in the late 1920s there was even a film titled "Omasa and Komasa" produced by Teikoku Kinema Engei. A few actors who have portrayed Komasa are Eijiro Kataoka, Kōjirō Hongō, Norihei Miki, Kei Tani, Minori Terada and Hiroyuki Watanabe. Again, these actors are a very wide range of heights (Watanabe in particular was close to 5' 10"), so playing Komasa seems to be mostly contingent on vibes.
Hangoro of Ose
A man named Tsunagoro Kanto is theorized to have later taken on the name "Hangoro of Ose", but it is also possible that the two were completely different individuals, though that theory doesn't seem to have that much traction. Hangoro does not have any distinct physical characteristics that were noted in contemporary accounts; he allegedly ran away from home at 19 and later killed a sex worker before finding his way to the Shimizu family.
In Pick-Pocket Bay, Hangoro is played by Yoshio Tsuchiya. In Crazy Violence, he is played by Kazuo Suzuki. Some other on-screen Hangoros include Kenji Mori, Ryutaro Otomo, Yutaka Nakayama, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Hiroki Matsutaka and Yoshihiko Hakamada.
Hōin ("Master") Daigoro
The term "Hōin" originally referred to a monastic rank, but by the late Meiji period when Jirocho's men were around, its meaning had changed to become sort of a catchall for anybody who was involved in any number of fields - not only monks, but also physicians, painters, scholars of Confucianism, prayer healers, mountain ascetics, and a whole host of other random monk-related vocations. As such, "Master" is just about the best translation for the term that I could think of. Unsurprisingly, Hōin Daigoro was not an actual monk; he adopted the disguise as a way to get out of trouble. Daigoro likely joined Jirocho's gang in his teens and before that was working as some kind of laborer. After the Meiji restoration Daigoro left the gang and became, by all accounts, an honest and upright family man who ran a legitimate business and was involved in his grandchildren's lives even after a stroke left him half-paralyzed.
Like Ōmasa, Daigoro was reputed to be a very large man, but as we've seen, that does not matter one whit when it comes to casting. In both Crazy Cats films, he is played by Shigeki Ishida. Some other actors who have played Daigoro include Haruo Tanaka, Tokumaro Dan, Kunio Kaga, Toshiro Chiba, Shingo Yamashiro, Mitsuru Hirata (no relation), and Takashi Sasano. Haruo Tanaka seems to have been particularly attached to the role; he played it in Toho's nine-part series but was also cast in the same role for other studios' Jirocho pictures as well.
Context, Context, Context
The thing that makes these movies so fun is that they're basically comedy skits - we're all in on the joke; nobody's pretending this is an authentic reconstruction of historical events. This allows the Cats to break the fourth wall frequently and with gusto, dropping Edo-period jokes and idioms alongside contemporary slang and pop culture references from the 1960s-'70s.
As with almost every Crazy Cats movie, both of these films are full of references to the Cats' other work outside of acting. Hitoshi Ueki's hit song "Suudara-bushi" is referenced alongside yagibushi (a traditional circle dance) in Pick-Pocket Bay, in a line that I've decided to render as "folk songs and pop songs". Unfortunately a very flat translation, but probably the easiest way to get the point across to anyone unfamiliar with these terms. And in case audiences had forgotten about Suudara-bushi by 1970 (they hadn't), Crazy Violence brought it back with a reference to the single's B-side "Koriya shakudatta", which didn't translate very well (or at all, really, but if you keep your ears out, you can still catch it). You can read a bit about Suudara-bushi in English here.
These movies also feature references to contemporary events in a broader sense than just pop culture. You'll notice early on in Crazy Violence that "Gewalt", a location mentioned throughout the film, has a decidedly non-Japanese-sounding name. This word - German for "force" or "violence" - was part of the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, as it was used frequently by student protest movements to refer to armed struggle. Within the film itself, "Gewalt" is written with kanji that are intended to be read phonetically3 with no regard to their meaning (recall that kana represent individual sounds while kanji convey words/concepts). This type of phonetic reading is called "ateji", and incidentally this is also how ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work, kind of.
Similarly, another uniquely mid-20th-century phrase that gets dropped in Crazy Violence is "ietsuki, kaatsuki, babanuki", which basically means "with a house, with a car, without a mother-in-law" and was used by newlyweds to describe their ideal living conditions. (Of course, in the film, the part about the car is omitted, since cars hadn't been invented yet.) A magazine from 1967 notes it as being sort of a hot new buzzword (buzzphrase?) so this was very "of the time" as of 1970.
Tomoe Kimura's ryōkyoku single "Showa Ishimatsu Legend: A Fool Can't Be Cured Unless He Dies"
The line "A fool can't be cured unless he dies", featured as a song in Crazy Violence, is a proverb from the Edo period that is still in use today. As we see from the single pictured above, this proverb ties these movies back to ryōkyoku Jirocho stories as it was frequently used by Torazo Hirozawa in his performances of Jirocho and Ishimatsu tales, and later by other performers doing their own versions of his work.
Speaking of that era, at one point in Crazy Violence Hitoshi Ueki insults Hideyo Amamoto SO brutally and with such specific obscure Edo-period wordplay that it took me a full hour to figure out how best to translate it. I do not know what else to tell you other than at one point some monks were apparently bored enough that they thought "Hey, you know that second-person pronoun (kimi) that sounds like the word for 'egg yolk' (kimi)? We should start calling eggs 'imperial carriages', because just like how there's kimi inside an egg, there's kimi inside a carriage!"
Anyway, to bring our present discussion back to pop culture, the one really big reference in Crazy Violence is Hajime Hana's delivery of the line "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" near the end of the film. This will take some explanation.
I would commit heinous crimes for an Odoroku Tamegoro enamel pin.
Our story begins with Wolfgang from the American sketch comedy show Laugh-In. (Do bear with me here.) Wolfgang was a German soldier who would comment on the preceding sketch by saying "Very interesting..." and then following it with something that was usually a misinterpretation of the sketch. The creators of the long-running Japanese variety show Kyosen & Maetake Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! liked Wolfgang, and they wanted to bring in a similar character who conveyed the idea of "someone who doesn't make any sense but just shows up and says something". They got Hajime Hana for the role, and decided he should be dressed as a hippie for the gag, but the problem was that they couldn't figure out what his trademark line should be. Eventually, Hana came up with a phrase based on a ryōkyoku ballad about Shimizu Jirocho that he personally liked: "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" (Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro!)
It's hard to explain why this is funny to a western audience who has absolutely no context for it, and I don't claim to understand it perfectly myself. Hana would deliver this line while dressed as a hippie and watching a brand new Sony television, so I'm fairly certain that the humor here is meant to be in the contrast between the hippie with the television (both modern conventions) and the line, which refers to Honzamura no Tamegoro (a character from a traditional Jirocho ballad) and may have been seen as somewhat antiquated, or at the very least belonging to a different category than a TV and a hippie. If I may venture a more English-friendly equivalent, this might be like an influencer looking at her phone and saying "Forsooth! Verily, this hath astounded me!"
And, I must say, when the line finally drops at the end of Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, it feels kind of amazing. The comedic timing is so pitch-perfect and Hana delivers the line so emphatically that I get the feeling a Japanese audience watching this in 1970 would have been busting a gut, even if it means nothing to us watching it today.
At any rate, Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro became a meme, and spawned not just a hit single but a five-film series. Five entire movies based off of a single joke.
Your author eight hours into one of several all-nighters that went into all this.
We're going to round out our explanation / examination of these two fine films with that, since I think I've covered just about everything I can think of. I'll end this post by plugging Toshiaki Sato, who is one of my favorite Japanese culture writers and has done a lot of work on Crazy Cats, all of which is in Japanese but can be read with a translator extension if you'd just like to get the gist of it. Crazy Movies is also a nice Japanese-language site to get basic information about all the Crazy Cats movies in one place.
Until next time, stay crazy.
__________
1 If we want to get technical about where the title came from, it's most likely Toho Films (Toho's catalogue of movies available for international distribution), which gave official English titles to every film featured within it. However, we may never know for certain that "The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay" originates from one of these catalogues, since Heritage Auctions wants $216 for the 1966 edition of Toho Films. (Unless you want to send me $216.)
2 I don't know about you all but I am not messing with a 4' 8" guy carrying a three-foot sword.
3 So 下 for "Ge", 張 for "Baru", and 戸 for "To". "Gebaruto" is the Japanese pronunciation of "Gewalt".
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 (which is nothing new; see Fantasy Paradise and Crazy Big Explosion... hey, those are both Crazy Cats movies, maybe Watanabe Pro had it out for him), 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".
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 is 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.
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 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.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that signing a contract with Toho made Akihiko Hirata's acting career. He tried out for Toho's "New Face" program in his mid-twenties1 after Yoshiko Yamaguchi suggested that he become an actor, and within just over a year and a half of making his screen debut, he ended up playing the role that would define the rest of his nearly 30-year career. And even before he joined the company as an actor, he did a little work as an assistant director for Shintoho, one of its subsidiaries.
But Toho's "Golden Age" did not last forever, and neither did the iron grip the studio kept its contracted actors under.
One of the interesting things about devoting considerable time to the study of one particularly prolific actor and their career is that you can use them to chart the trajectory of the film industry as a whole. Akihiko Hirata's film career is an interesting example of this. He began his career during the advent of the Five-Studio Agreement and continued acting beyond its demise. He stayed in the industry throughout the sudden and intense decline of domestic Japanese film production in the 1970s. By the time of his death in 1984, Japan’s film industry was completely transformed from what it had been thirty years earlier.
I've titled this essay "After Toho" because I want to restrict the scope of it to the years after Hirata had parted ways with the studio he had been with for half of his life (more than half, if you count his time at Shintoho). Placing the focus there also means exploring the changes that the Japanese film industry as a whole underwent during that time. 1958 is widely cited as the peak of the industry, with the average person going to the theater once a month, and while saying "it was all downhill from there" would be dismissing decades of cinema, in a lot of ways it was. By the mid-1970s, at any rate, the industry was barely a shadow of what it had been.
So, hopefully, if you do choose to humor me for the next several thousand words (I am not kidding, this is the longest thing I've ever written on here), you will learn at least something you didn't previously know about the landscape of the Japanese film and entertainment industry along the way.
Part I: 1971-77: The Fall of the Five-Studio Agreement and the Rise of Television
I'm beginning this essay in 1971 because that was the year that the "Five-Studio Agreement" finally collapsed, and Toho's contract system subsequently fell apart.
The "Five-Studio Agreement" was an official agreement signed by all five2 major film studios in Japan: Toho, Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Daiei, and Toei. The purpose of this agreement was to prevent studios from poaching each other's talent – something that had become a problem following the war. The document was signed in a ceremony on September 10th, 1953. Following the signing, actors and directors who were contracted with one studio were to remain with that studio and not provide work to any others, and other studios, in turn, were not to approach contracted actors and directors who did not belong to them. Studios were also no longer allowed to lend out their talent, although this was enforced less strictly and high-status directors often had some leeway in borrowing actors from other studios.
The objective of the Five-Studio Agreement shifted in the late 1950s as television began to threaten film companies. Part of the agreement was that studios were not to allow their films to be shown on television or their actors to appear on television programs. Toho, however, was the only studio that did not have any such provision, and freely provided talent to television programs produced by their subsidiaries.
By the first few years of the 1970s, the Japanese film industry was experiencing, to put it lightly, a sharp decline. Toho's near-perpetual state of financial difficulty began to come to a head once the '70s rolled around. It was a bad time for the industry as a whole, not just Toho – Daiei went bankrupt, and Nikkatsu had to reinvent itself as a purveyor of soft-core porn to survive. 1971 was also the year that Toho finally scrapped its biggest moneymaker series: the Yūzō Kayama vehicle Young Guy, Hisaya Morishige's Shachō series, and Hitoshi Ueki's Japan's No. 1 [...] Man were no more. This was a very sudden shift, brought on – in part, at least – by the growing popularity of television and imported films. Toho began distributing more anime and producing a lot of lower-budget output aimed towards children, reserving the big bucks for blockbusters they had confidence in, like Submersion of Japan.
A consequence of this industry-wide decline was that Toho's exclusive contracts no longer held the appeal or utility they once had, and so Toho made the somewhat rash decision to let go all of their actors who were not under exclusive contract. As per Stuart Galbraith:
Nearly all of Toho's contract players were let go – only Yuzo Kayama, Keiju Kobayashi, and a few others managed to hang on to regular work during the mid-1970s. Most of Toho's longtime stock talent returned to the stage or, more commonly, to the steady employment of television.
Hirata was included under that "a few others" umbrella. While he did remain with Toho, his contract was no longer exclusive, and beginning in 1971 with Epic Chushingura [Dai Chushingura] he was appearing on television series produced by companies that were not affiliated with Toho.
In Epic Chushingura he played an honorary bonus ronin (not really, but it's funny to call him that) who showed up to do some sword stuff. It was a nice role, despite only being in 3 out of 52 episodes.
Meanwhile, we can see that as soon as the 1970s begin, his appearances in film start to shift. He appeared in seven films in 1969, three in 1970, and in 1971, he appeared in just one film. In 1972 he had no theatrical film roles at all. To contextualize just how drastic a change this is: in 1957, when the industry was at its peak, he appeared in seventeenfilms.
But at the same time, he was scoring more and more guest star roles on television. A less noticeable (but more positive) change that occurred as a result of television's growing influence was that Hirata's elder brother Yoshiki Onoda was now free to cast him in whatever he wanted. Onoda had stuck with Shintoho until its collapse in the early 1960s and then went freelance, becoming an extremely prolific jidaigeki director and working up until his mid-80s – and as a consequence, Hirata became a regular feature in his brother's television episodes, since he was no longer locked into a Toho exclusive contract. Previously, the only thing the elder Onoda had managed to cast his brother in was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Shintoho's Man-eating Ama[Hitokui ama], which was pretty much only done in celebration of Onoda's debut as solo director under his new name.
(Yoshiki Onoda very much did not limit himself to casting just one single sibling – he frequently cast basically his entire family: his wife, Utako Mitsuya; his sister, Yoshiko Otowa; and, later, his son, Masayuki, who he eventually opened an acting school with. By the 1980s, all three Onoda siblings and one nephew were in the industry simultaneously; however, they never appeared in anything all at once. To complicate things even further, all three siblings and the nephew married people who were also in the film industry.)
The vast majority of these television roles were one-and-done guest star appearances or small roles in TV movies. Hirata had a few recurring television roles in the 1970s and early 1980s, but I do mean "a few" as in a vanishingly small number. That being said, we're now going to take a brief diversion to explore the biggest and most well-known of these recurring roles.
Author's Taiyo ni Hoero! collection, also featuring author's Tetsuwan namida ari poster. Author's room is a mess, please do not judge author for it.
Even though Hirata's role on the long-running cop drama Taiyo ni Hoero! coincided with his tenure at Toho – and it is technically a Toho production, since it was produced by Kokusai Broadcasting, a Toho subsidiary – I feel that it's appropriate to spend some time on it, due to it having been one of Hirata's best-known roles and due to the fact that it began its broadcast run essentially smack-dab in the middle of this extremely turbulent time for Japan's film industry.
Taiyo ni Hoero! is one of those things that was intensely popular, highly successful, and had cultural influence that continues into the present day... and virtually no one outside of Japan has ever heard of it. It was broadcast as re-runs in Hawai'i decades after the show went off the air, but most fansubbers would quail before its gargantuan 718-episode run, so it's unlikely the entire thing will ever be easily accessible to English-speaking audiences. Nevertheless, the show can be watched online if you know where to look, and as shown above, VHS tapes – mostly, as far as I know, from a home media line released around 2001 – and some very expensive DVD box sets are available to those willing to pay to import them.
I should mention that the show had fan clubs during its original run, and fan-made publications like research doujinshi were also produced since there was a general lack of official material that satisfied the need for minute detail its fans had. I do not know if any of the original clubs are still active, but I'd wager that some of their members might be on the show's Facebook fan page. Doujinshi also continued to be produced into the 2000s, of course, with information like filming locations and models of cars and guns used in the show – things that would have been difficult to find out about before the internet was what it is today.
Someone REALLY needs to remaster this show.
Hirata had one of his multitudinous one-off guest-star roles very early on in the series, in episode 12, which was a fine episode, if unremarkable. He would, however, return later in a role that made a much bigger impression. His recurring role on the show as Takayuki Nishiyama of Nanamagari Station began with episode 55 in 1973, a fun one that you can check out with subtitles here. In Nishiyama's debut episode, he's just a police inspector, but after episode 57, he is superintendent of the station. He's also a bit of a bastard. I really enjoy this role for Hirata because it allowed him to actually play a character instead of just standing around doing not much of anything, which is what a lot of his guest roles at this time ended up being.
Although Nishiyama only appeared in 33 of the show's 718 episodes, he was a memorable part of it. I own multiple publications that cite this role before they cite anything else from Hirata's filmography, even Godzilla. One is the booklet for Hirata's episode of Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series, released in 2002 (19 years after his last appearance on the show),which literally refers to him as "Akihiko Hirata, the 2nd Nanamagari Police Station Chief":
And another is the edition of DVD Magazine that includes his episode of G-Men '75, which brings up Taiyo ni Hoero! and gives a very short bio, also mentioning that he had previously starred in the two Showa Mechagodzilla films alongside the episode's other guest star, Masaaki Daimon.
Hirata would remain with Toho for all of his feature films up until 1977's Tora-san Meets His Lordship, where he is credited as belonging to Toho but is appearing in a Shochiku film. Even after leaving the studio, a lot of his feature film credits from 1977 to 1984 are still Toho films – he seems to have only shown up for the big blockbusters – and he would, of course, continue to occasionally work for them and their subsidiaries in television on a non-regular basis. (You can't exactly avoid Japan's largest film company.)
Hirata's credit in Tora-san Meets His Lordship, with "Toho" in parentheses.
I'll close this section out with Daitetsujin 17 – produced in 1977 by Toei, with no involvement from Toho at all – since I was stumping for this series long before it was even subtitled. Hirata played the formidable Captain Gomes, who unfortunately died a giant-robot-related death midway through the series. As happens often in tokusatsu, the villains of Daitetsujin 17 are more interesting than the good guys – although, on the whole, the series is more focused on giant robots than human characters, whether good or bad. Gomes was a really solid villain role for Hirata, and he plays off of the truly one-of-a-kind Ulf Otsuki – Hirata playing Gomes cold and ruthless while Otsuki plays Dr. Hassler with more ham than a supermarket's meat department close to the holidays – making the whole thing extremely entertaining. It's just a shame Gomes doesn't stick it out for the entire show.
As usual for Shōtarō Ishinomori, whose anti-fascist stance is inseparable from his work, the costume design of the villains in Daitetsujin 17 utilized unsubtle Nazi imagery.
I also really want everyone to know that somebody made a drawing of Gomes as a P.E. teacher for reasons that I am unclear on.
Credit goes to this person on pixiv. I am so so sorry for screenshotting your artwork. Hopefully I'm crediting you adequately. It is very dear to me.
Part II: 1977-1980: Pittashi Kan-kan and Other Game Shows
As we very well know, Hirata made what would be his final appearance in the Godzilla franchise in 1975 with Terror of Mechagodzilla, but in 1977 he worked with Ishirō Honda once more in The War in Space [Wakusei daisensō]. I mention War in Space because it marks another significant moment for the Japanese film industry: at this time, science fiction was enjoying unprecedented popularity, fueled by the import of films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Studios began riffing on these Western sci-fi films, which brought an entirely new flavor to Japanese sci-fi as a whole, although films such as War in Space that were intended to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars often did not produce the box office returns their studios hoped for.
I am always a sucker for a shot with interesting blocking.
We won't spend too much time on The War in Space, since that's fairly well-trodden ground, but before we move on I do want to indulge myself by covering Hirata's guest-star role in episode 21 of Red Impact [Akai shougeki]. This is one of my personal favorites because the episode is so utterly bonkers. Momoe Yamaguchi has a metal plate in her spine, from which a screw comes loose as she's on an airplane in mid-flight, so somebody has to do the whole "Is there a doctor on board?" thing and then Yamaguchi undergoes back surgery in the middle of an airplane using in-flight dining utensils that have been boiled.
You know that joke that goes "If you’re [something], and I’m [something], then who’s flying the plane?"
Alright, back to the essay at large. We're going to shift focus over to a surprisingly large part of Hirata's career: game shows. And the most significant series from that side of his career was undoubtedly Pittashi Kan-kan. Since records of the show are so scanty, I can't be certain exactly when he began to appear regularly, but I believe it was around the late 1970s.
Pittashi Kan-kan was not (from what I've seen) a serious trivia show in the vein of Jeopardy!; it seemed to cater more towards trivia about celebrities and other popular topics. The general idea of the show was that a team of experts, usually celebrities themselves (the "Pittashi" team), would compete against a team of random people (the "Kan-kan" team). It was more of a comedy show than a trivia show – the team captains were Konto '55, a comedy duo comprised of Jiro Sakagami and Kinichi Hagimoto, who headed the Pittashi and Kan-kan teams, respectively. Sometimes, when the regular host, Hiroshi Kume, was out, Hagimoto would serve as substitute host and Hirata would be acting team captain for the Kan-kan team.
Like with Taiyo ni Hoero!, Hirata played a memorable part on Pittashi Kan-kan, but not a central part, and Pittashi Kan-kan continued on after his death. That being said, though, the show basically collapsed in 1984 after Kume, Sakagami and Hagimoto all left, and the series ended in 1986, eventually to be rebooted from 2003-2021 under the title Pittanko Kan-kan. Whether Hirata not being on the show anymore had an influence on it beginning to circle the drain, I can't say.
Unfortunately, by talking about game shows, I'm starting to get into territory for which there truly is no extant visual record. Television networks restructuring over the years led to tapes being lost or destroyed unless they happened to be in the hands of a private collector. One of those private collectors was none other than Hibari Misora, who kept a personal home-taped copy of her appearance on the show on August 19th, 1980, which, lucky for us, also featured Hirata as a guest answerer.3
If one of these custom Pittashi Kan-kan yukata ever comes up for auction, that'll be the end of me having any money.
Since very few (if any) tapes of the show survive, what we have instead is anecdotes from viewers who recall Hirata's tenure on the show. Normally I would treat anecdotes with a healthy skepticism, but there is a general consensus about Hirata's appearances as a panelist, and that consensus is – pardon my French – he would say wacky shit all the time. One thing that I hear consistently from people recalling his episodes is that they were shocked that this was the same guy who played the serious, moody Dr. Serizawa. From the sound of it, he would often give a funny answer instead of trying to give a correct one – I suspect that this may have been the point of the show as a whole, since answering celebrity trivia with intense academic rigor does not make for a fun game show that lasts 10+ years.
Again, his position on Pittashi Kan-kan, although virtually unheard-of outside Japan and with very little evidence remaining of it, was something that he was publicly known for at the time. Exhibit A: a tokusatsu doujinshi published in 1981 featuring a photo of him along with the caption "Recently he has become 'the old man of Pittashi Kan-Kan', but our image of him is still the nihilistic Dr. Serizawa."
While Pittashi Kan-kan was the longest he stayed with any one game show by far, he had been making the rounds on others since the early 1970s. His first game show appearance was actually in 1969, on Association Game [Rensō gēmu] with his wife, Yoshiko Kuga. His episode aired just after his younger sister's, and that unfortunately is the closest the two of them ever got to being in anything together. He would go on to appear on Association Game twice more, in 1982 and '83. To my knowledge no footage or even stills from any of these Association Game episodes exists, and I have not found any recollections from people who watched them. (I'm really curious about whether anything was said about two Onoda siblings both appearing on Association Game in 1969 – the episodes aired very close together, and there is a pretty strong resemblance between the two of them.)
Other game shows that I'm aware Hirata appeared on are Cooking Heaven [Ryori tengoku], Quiz Derby [Kuizu dābi] (a horse race betting show), and Exactly! Let's Guess [Zubari! Atemasho], but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more; like I said, a lot of this stuff is lost to time. In addition to game shows, at this point he was also showing up on a lot of variety shows and random news programs. Like everyone else in Japan, he was interviewed on Tetsuko's Room [Tetsuko no heya], which you would think might have a better chance at surviving due to the show's longevity and popularity, but alas. I can't recall if it was Cooking Heaven or something else, but I remember hearing someone who had seen one of these variety shows say that he and Yoshiko Kuga were on it together, eating off of each other's plate.
Other variety shows include, but are not limited to, Saegusa's "I Love" Laughter Clinic [Saegusa no ai rabu bakushō kurinikku], Wide Wide Fuji [Waido waido Fuji], two consecutive episodes of the drama-variety hybrid Star Dash No. 1 [Sutã dasshu No1], and Beat Takeshi's We're the Funny People [Oretachi hyokinzoku], the latter of which I've been swearing I'll write about for decades now, if not centuries. In addition to all of this he was, of course, continuing to do a lot of random one-off guest star roles on regular scripted series.
From episode 30 of Prime Minister of Yuhigaoka [Yuhigaoka no soridaijin], 1979.
We're going to close out this section with an interview featured in the late October 1979 issue of Kinema Junpo, Japan's most influential film magazine, which you can read here. The interview was part of (I assume) a series of features titled something like Japan's Era of Individualists [Nippon koseiwa jidai].
Fun fact: I used this to get his birth date corrected on his IMDb page since they don't let you cite Wikipedia.
The brief interview has more of an op-ed feel: it opens with the interviewer recounting his own experience attending a Toho tokusatsu film festival, and then segues into the actual interview portion by mentioning that Hirata got the loudest applause of anybody during the screening. This and other points brought up during the interview are particularly interesting because it proves that Hirata definitely did have something of a fandom while he was still alive, and was even getting fan letters telling him what a great actor he was, which he seems to have regarded as a bit odd.4 He also talks about having worked with Yoshiko Kuga on the set of Lynching [Rinchi] 12 years before they met again and married – one of my favorite stories.
I really like how the interviewer fills things out so that this is more than just a question-answer-question-answer session. Kuga is there too – not being interviewed directly, but she's physically somewhere nearby while the interview is being conducted, and she does chime in to tell the interviewer what their wedding date was. You can kind of get a feel for time and place when you read this, even 46 years later.
We're going to move even deeper into television in this next section, specifically looking at TV movies, of which more and more were starting to be made at this point in time.
Part III: 1980-1983: TV Movies, TV Movies, and More TV Movies
I have neglected, up until now, to mention the absolute slew of TV movies Hirata was showing up in during this time. By the early 1980s, his output was again reaching the level it had been at during his heyday with Toho – just on the small screen instead of the big one. In 1980 alone, he had eighteen television credits. As I already mentioned, at this point we're getting into things that basically only exist as titles on a Wikipedia page or, if we're very, very lucky, a listing in a 45-year-old TV guide that some blessed soul uploaded to the internet. I always try to do my best to give as much information as I can about the most obscure parts of Hirata's filmography, but there's not much to go off of, here. Some of this stuff was re-aired in the '90s and 2000s, but less often nowadays, if at all.
Hirata in House of Evil Spirits [Akuryō no sumu ie], one of his only Saturday Wide Theater roles we have pictures of. Credit @seventy_ninety.
Something that made up a huge percentage of his screen credits at this time were various movies featured on Saturday Wide Theater [Doyou waido gekijō], also known as Saturday Night at the Mysteries. I've brought this up before, but Saturday Wide Theater was more of a timeslot than a series. Both episodic shows and one-off original movies aired in the timeslot, as well as occasional foreign imported films. No 20-minute sentaiepisode, these: the timeslot began as 90 minutes and then expanded to two hours. These were intended as – and TV Asahi was very deliberately marketing them as – movies and television for housewives. SWT was light, relatively inoffensive daytime TV for people who couldn't get out to the theater. I wrote about a few of these movies back in October of last year, if you want to get more of a feel for the kind of inconsequential suspense/mystery film that was the bread and butter of SWT.
SWT was not the only timeslot airing original made-for-TV movies at this time – far from it. There was also NTV and Yomiuri Television's Thursday Golden Drama [Mokuyō gorudendorama], TV Asahi's Monday Wide Theater [Getsuyo waido gekijō], and my personal favorite, NTV's Tuesday Suspense Theater [Kayu sasupensu gekijō]. Hirata starred in movies produced for all of these. To put into perspective how much work he was doing for television at this time, from around 1980-83 a viewer could expect to see him (and his glasses) in either a brand-new TV movie or a guest star role once or twice a month.
Only picture I can find of Hirata in A Woman in Danger [Kikiipatsu no onna], 1982, here cheating on Taiyo ni Hoero! by playing the chief of some other police station. Credit @hassy1936-gorin on livedoor.
As an aside, another thing that was happening in the early-to-mid-1980s was that the youngest Onoda sibling started getting work again. Yoshiko Otowa left the acting business in the late 1960s (although she continued to release singles as a singer into the early 1970s), but had a brief return to the spotlight in the 1980s as part of the massively popular NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen contest and in an installment of Tuesday Suspense Theater titled Underground Murder [Chitei no satsui]. You can watch the latter here; footage of her time on Kohaku Uta Gassen does not seem to be extant.
I can't be certain due to the paucity of evidence, but one or two of these daytime TV movies sound like they had Hirata dangerously close to playing a lead role, something he virtually never did. Mystery of the Broken Rope [Sōnan - kireta zairu no nazo] features him as a mountaineer who is so obsessed with his hobby that he murders his wife (named Yoshiko – I'm sure that went over well).
Behind-the-scenes photos taken at the intersection of Tayasumon Gate, Kudanminami, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, during filming of Exam Hell [Juken jigoku] in 1982. Top right still is from the film itself. Credit marikostroom.o.oo7.jp.
To move outside of TV movies in specific and back to the wider sphere of the Japanese film industry, we have to at least touch on the growing popularity of idol films. While there is disagreement over when the term "idol" began to be used in the sense that it is today – some critics consider starlets like Hideko Takamine and Hibari Misora "idols", others argue the term "idol film" can only be traced back to its first use in a 1982 issue of Scenario – most people generally seem to use the term to refer to films and media produced starting in the early 1980s (sometimes late '70s). Domestic film production was still suffering at this time, and imported films were only becoming even more popular than they already had been, but film studios – especially Toho – could usually still count on producing a home-grown megahit if they had a popular idol in front of the camera.
Hirata had roles in two things that can fairly unambiguously be called "idol films": 1981's Summer Farewell [Natsu no wakare], a vehicle for Hisako Manda; and Call Girl [Koru garu], Hirata's only theatrical credit in 1982, starring Mie from Pink Lady. I would not particularly recommend either of these, but you can watch them both online.
I really can't stress enough that we're in the Dark Ages for Hirata's filmography here. From 1980 to 1983 he had 71 television credits and a whopping 9 of those have any kind of streaming or home media availability at all. Again, within Japan, some of this stuff is being rebroadcast, but not much of it – the vast majority is, I'm very sorry to say, probably just gone, unless someone has a bootleg tape in an attic somewhere. We can take at least some solace in the fact that a surprising amount of Hirata's TV movie credits have scripts that are held in the National Diet Library.
There is much more we could get into on the topic of TV movies, but we're going to leave that behind for the moment, because a far bigger thing was happening in the 1980s. A 262-foot-tall thing, in fact.
Part IV: 1983-84: The Many Attempted Resurrections of Godzilla
Poor box office results for Terror of Mechagodzilla and the increasingly bad climate of the Japanese film industry as a whole had essentially forced the Godzilla franchise into what was starting to look like a significant hiatus, but that didn't mean people weren't trying to get more Godzilla movies made, both behind the scenes and in fan circles.
Tomoyuki Tanaka never wanted the series to go on hiatus. In 1977, just two years after Terror of Mechagodzilla, a draft titled King of Monsters: Resurrection of Godzilla, written by Ryuzo Nakanishi, was submitted to Toho. Production was actually begun on this project, with Jun Fukuda attached as director (and boy was he probably pissed off about that), but it was scrapped for unknown reasons, and Toho decided to go with The War in Space instead. The next year, a "Godzilla Revival Conference" was held, chaired by Tanaka among others, and a second draft written by Akira Murao was submitted, but not chosen.
A third draft was submitted in 1980, again titled Resurrection of Godzilla and written by Tomoyuki Tanaka and Akira Murao. It went through years of revisions until it eventually became a fully distinct fourth iteration in 1983: another Resurrection of Godzilla draft, created by Akira Murao and Hideichi Nagahara. While elements from all of these drafts were carried over into what would eventually become The Return of Godzilla, the drafts themselves were all ultimately discarded.
While Toho's staff themselves were working at making a proposal stick, the public was simultaneously pushing – and pushing hard – for a new Godzilla movie. A group of fans formally organized around this time under the name "the Godzilla Resurrection Committee", numbering in the high thousands if not tens of thousands. Their intent was to petition Toho to produce a new Godzilla movie, but they did other things as well – I'll quote from an interview with Shizuo Nakajima, a founding member of the Committee and a production assistant at Toho:5
During this time period [when] there [were] no new Godzilla productions, a group of people gathered around to make a new creation, of which I was a member. A man named Fuyuki Shinada who would make the Godzilla suits also worked with us. Shinada is the creator of Biollante and the "White Eyed Godzilla" [the GMK suit]. We did a lot of activities and made lots of petitions and we pushed Toho to create a new movie, this would result in the original movie [The Return of Godzilla].
Like any fan community worth its salt, the Resurrection Committee also produced a doujinshi, copies of which sell for decently high prices at auction.
I'd also like to point out that Toho was actually announcing these drafts to the public, not just keeping them to themselves, so it's no wonder everybody was starting to get antsy about a new film. In 1977, when the first draft was produced, Toho announced a "color remake of the original 1954 Godzilla". The next year, they announced their joint project with UPA, Godzilla vs. The Devil, which was also scrapped. 1983 saw Steve Milner and Fred Dekker's proposed Godzilla project get approval, and then never materialize. The Return of Godzilla was actually meant to be released alongside the Milner/Dekker project, with Return being intended for the domestic Japanese market and the other film for international export. History shows which of those projects ultimately won the day.
With the general public undoubtedly having been primed for a new movie by all of these announcements that never bore fruit, Godzilla fever was in full swing by the time the early 1980s rolled around. The widely-circulated pictures featuring Hirata in his Dr. Serizawa getup are from the 1983 Godzilla Revival Festival, a trailer for which can be seen below, courtesy of your verybest friend and mine, SpaceHunterM. As we can see, the trailer ends (in what must have been quite stunning fashion to an already-hyped-up public) with the cybot Godzilla roaring, meaning some of the special effects for Return of Godzilla were in production (or at least being tinkered with) at this point.
There is also surviving footage of Hirata briefly speaking about Godzilla outside of the film festival, which you can see here. (Linking directly to Twitter is for chuds.)
Hirata's old haunt Pittashi Kan-kan also got in on the Godzilla hype. On December 14th, 1983, a TV special simply titled The Godzilla Special was aired, with one of the segments being Pittashi Gojira. As I understand it, this was more of a general variety show than simply a special episode of Pittashi Kan-kan, and as such the formatting was a bit different. Tomoyuki Tanaka was there, Keiju Kobayashi was there, Haruo Nakajima was there, Akira Takarada was there, somebody asked Tanaka if whales and gorillas could have sex, people made fun of Nakajima for being bald, it was a wild time.
Out of all the Godzilla alumni who appeared on the show, Hirata was the only one actually wearing a Godzilla T-shirt (as seen in the picture at the very top of this post).
It's fairly common knowledge that Tanaka cast Hirata to play Yosuke Natsuki's role (Dr. Hayashida) and then changed plans, having Hirata in a smaller role due to his poor health at the time, before scrapping the idea of him appearing in the film entirely.
Production of The Return of Godzilla was formally announced on June 20th, 1984. Natsuki was confirmed for the Dr. Hayashida role a few days after that. Filming began on July 9th. Within a week, on July 15th, Hirata was hospitalized for respiratory failure. He died ten days later. Filming wrapped on September 27th, and the film was released to theaters on December 15th, 1984, one day before what would have been Hirata's 57th birthday.6
It's tremendously depressing. Even more so because Return of Godzilla was, in many ways, the Godzilla movie that he was hoping would be made. While Hirata was not nearly as hostile towards the idea of making Godzilla movies for children as many cast and crew (and fans) were, he explicitly said in interviews that he wanted to see – and was open to being in – a Godzilla movie that was more like the original. He seems to have held the opinion that Godzilla as a monster was fundamentally an evil thing, or at least a representation of evil, inextricable from its nuclear origins. Godzilla was supposed to be something dark and dangerous. And, finally – despite idol culture inexorably reaching its hands into it – a Godzilla movie was being made where Godzilla was scary again. When I watch Return of Godzilla, I really, sincerely hope that Hirata had at least some idea of how the movie was going to turn out, and I think, as much as a random fan 40 years later can think anything, he might have liked it.
I'm not done with the essay, though. I want to backtrack a little bit to things that Hirata was actually in. I'll bring up Sayonara Jupiter, because somebody has to.
Me.
Sayonara Jupiter had an incredibly long, tortured development and production process, and although its release in 1984 usually puts it at the end of Hirata's filmography, filming actually started all the way back in April of 1983, which means that it was very much not his final role in actual chronological terms. He was still doing TV movies throughout 1983, the last of which was a Saturday Wide Theater movie directed by his older brother. I don't think we can really read anything into that, but it's... something.
Newspaper ad for Tearful Pediatric Ward [Namida no shōni byōto], released 9/5/1983. Credit @yumeterasu on ameblo, red circle added by me.
This Saturday Wide Theater movie was Keizaburo Tsurube's Deduction! [Tsurube Keizaburō no suiri!]. There are no pictures of him from it, and I think his role was fairly small. You can read a little about it here (although be warned that that site will take about 20 minutes to load). The film aired on December 24th and was the eighteenth television appearance Hirata had made in 1983, along with three films for the big screen. So, even with the "Golden Age" of Japanese film long past, and the entertainment industry vastly different from what it had been back in 1953 when he got his start as an actor, he was still busy as all hell.
Hirata in episode 20 of New Hangman. Credit @keity_since1935 on Twitter.
I'm not sure exactly when he stopped acting, but aside from Sayonara Jupiter –which, as mentioned, was only released in 1984 because of its lengthy production process – the only credit he technically had in 1984 was New Hangman[Shin hanguman], which ran from July 1983 to February 1984, which I believe would make it his final role. I have not seen very many pictures of him from those later episodes but from what I've heard he did not look well.
He was interviewed four months before his death in conjunction with the release of a Godzilla audio drama on King Records; you can read that here.
In Conclusion: This Could Have Been Even Longer
So I guess that's where the essay has to end. I think all of Hirata's film industry contemporaries (as well as the broader tokusatsu fan community) were pretty shook up when he died. I've seen a couple of fan doujinshi memorial issues for him that were put together shortly after his death. Even decades later, when his contemporaries talk about him in interviews, they all speak about how sad it is that he died so young. Everyone around him genuinely seemed to like him – I recall someone saying that everyone at Toho was nice, but he was the nicest person there. Tomoko Ai has spoken on multiple occasions about how positive her time on set with him was during Terror of Mechagodzilla.
~350ish credits between film, stage, and television, in a career that lasted just under 30 years (not counting assistant director work) and ended severely prematurely at only 56 is nothing to sneeze at.
Like I said, though, as long as this essay was, there is much I'm leaving out. For example, one thing I have glossed over completely is Hirata's stage roles. He did some stage acting, but not very much (especially in comparison to other Toho actors), and after he left Toho, the only stage roles he had were two performances of Wild Dance [Ranbu] at the Teigeki in 1982 and '83, of which I don't believe any visual evidence survives, so I've omitted that part of his career entirely for lack of material to work with.
Another thing I've unfortunately had to omit due to total lack of information about it is a planning company that Hirata was affiliated with at some point (Yoshie Planning). I believe this was after he left Toho as he was listed as being affiliated with it in a talent directory published in 1981, but I can't do as much research into that as I'd like because the relevant documents are only available through the National Diet Library to residents of Japan.
Anyway, I hope someone reads this, but even if not, I had fun writing it.
_______
Footnotes:
1 There is some conflicting information about which class Hirata was part of but I believe it was the class of 1953. In any case, he joined the company in January of that year, when he had just turned 25.
2 The lineup was initially Toho, Shintoho, Shochiku, Daiei, and Toei, with Nikkatsu only joining later, but when Shintoho went bankrupt, it was back to five.
3 This episode used to be available on YouTube but has since been removed. Thankfully, yours truly is a hoarder, so I have it in full.
4 I don't know that he thought much of his own work. He never really talks about it in any of the interviews I've read. There is one relatively well-known quote from him where he says that he has "No representative works" – I've never known exactly what he meant by that, if he was saying that he played so many different roles that no single film represents the type of actor he was, or if he felt like he'd never been in anything good enough to represent him as an actor.
5 Full interview here. I'd like to point out that there was a lot of overlap between fans and Toho staff when it came to the Resurrection Committee. This might seem strange – employees of a film studio pushing their own studio to make a movie? – but we have to remember that a lot of the people who worked doing modeling and special effects for Toho were sometimes fairly independent from the studio itself, and even producers like Tomoyuki Tanaka were ultimately not the very highest echelon of the company. A lot of people had to agree on a lot of things and conditions had to be just right for a new Godzilla movie to happen – in fact, it was arguably the failure of Toho's idol films intended to be big hits that holiday season that led the studio to produce Return to fill that gap.
6 This was almost certainly not intentional. Godzilla movies were usually released around the middle of December starting in the Heisei era. (Which we all pretend Return of Godzilla is a part of, because time has no meaning, I guess.)
