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.
Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.
Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts.
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It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.
Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo
Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, whichfirst appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".
While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".
The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from, so don't take this as representative - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his belief that he'll never get into university.
If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).
Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.1 (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)
Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor. These do seem to have been his actual prescription glasses; they're very distinctive and he wears them in basically everything around this time.
In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father2 Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake Hirata's role is played by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.
(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sato in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui,which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)
Lot of graphic design choices going on here.
The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. That doesn't mean it's gone entirely unseen since its initial broadcast, though: I've been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, so there's likely been others as well. For a short time, presumably as a result of one of these recent broadcasts, the full movie was even on YouTube (unfortunately the page was not archived), which means someone out there probably has it as a DVD-r in their desk or a file on their computer.
You can also find an original song from the 1982 version called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so yours truly is probably going to do the thing at some point.
That's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky we have this much information about it - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time.
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1 That is, one of the only ones to HAVE a remake, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only others I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007.(You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)
This is a translation of the memorial doujinshi published in 1985 by Nekotei Newsletter, which includes a few words at the beginning by Ishiro Honda and then two back-to-back essays by Motohide Katayama, the first of which your author was not entirely dry-eyed while transcribing. I originally posted about this doujinshi a few years back (wow, I was terser then; I should revamp that post a bit) and was delighted to finally get a saved search hit on it recently, so I got my hands on it as soon as I could.
I'll let this thing speak for itself, but suffice to say, as we've seen here and there over the course of this blog's existence, Hirata was very much beloved by both his fans and the people around him, and his death came as a huge tragedy, if not necessarily a shock, as he'd been ill for some time. It still is a tragedy 42 years later, but this doujinshi presents some really rare insight into the state of the fandom (as it were) at the time. And not to be a cornball or anything, but reading Katayama's essays felt like... is there an expression in any language that combines both "looking into a mirror" and "shaking hands emphatically with someone"? Because it was like that.
I should note that I have excluded the filmography section from translation since that is easily available elsewhere. This post will contain only the essays. I'm also including full scans; it's 16 pages, so you'll have to scroll quite a bit, but the translation is below. This is mostly a machine TL but I have checked it over to make sure it's reasonably accurate to the best of my abilities.
Before we move on, I just want to say that I don't think I can overstate the importance of Katayama's essay on television. Katayama was writing entirely from memory and notes that he had personally taken while looking at TV guides, and he mentions several titles that - as far as I can tell - have literally no presence on the internet at all. Meaning: if it were not for Katayama having kept notes throughout the 1970s and writing them up in 1985 for this doujinshi, all record of Hirata having been in these specific titles Katayama mentions would be lost. It keeps me at night to think about how much else is out there that has been lost to time.
Anyway.
Unless I'm mistaken this portrait was based off of this photo.
Ishiro Honda's tribute.
"Thinking of Mr. H..." by Motohide Katayama, page 1
"Thinking of Mr. H..." by Motohide Katayama, page 2
"Thinking of Mr. H..." by Motohide Katayama, page 3
Katayama's TV essay, page 1
Katayama's TV essay, page 2
Katayama's TV essay, page 3
Editor's note
From Ishiro Honda
It is a great loss that we have lost Hirata; I find it deeply regrettable.
He appeared in various films of mine, ranging from Godzilla to Terror of Mechagodzilla, but his role in the original Godzilla was particularly significant. The young Hirata's sharp, intelligent appearance was perfectly suited for the role of a brilliant scientist who lived like a recluse. Acting is a human endeavor, so if an actor is averse to monster or special-effects films, you simply can't expect a good performance. While there are certain roles that demand a specific actor (and we do cast newcomers), I consistently relied on a core group that included Hirata and [Yoshio] Tsuchiya. Hirata, for his part, seemed to genuinely enjoy appearing in my films.
He was an actor with an honest, straightforward approach to performance; he would express exactly what I had in mind, making him a wonderful actor to work with. He memorized his lines quickly, and I have almost no memory of ever struggling to direct him.
Although we rarely had the chance to go out for drinks together in town, he was always the first to join in the fun whenever [we] gathered at my home. He was a serious man who was always considerate of others, so I could always rely on him when it came to organizing things.1
May [he] rest in peace.
Thinking of Mr. H...
[By Motohide Katayama]
"They told me they'd add lines and make it a more important role, so I agreed. But when it came down to it, nothing had changed at all. That Sawako Ariyoshi, she really is something else..."
It has been a little over a month since Mr. H passed away - the man who shared those words with me when I visited his dressing room during the revival of Ranbu at the Imperial Theater. Hearing the sudden news of that talented authoress [Ariyoshi]'s death recently, I found myself - however cliche it may sound - deeply contemplating the transience and fragility of human life. I also recall something else Mr. H said back then: "I'm a movie actor at heart, you see... I get bored if I have to perform the same thing for weeks on end." He also spoke of his future work: "I have two or three stage productions scheduled for the rest of the year." Yet, that production of Ranbu in February 1983 - during which some criticized Ariyoshi's unusual directorial style - turned out to be Mr. H's final stage appearance, as well as the sixth and last time I ever met him in person. He fell ill before he could play the villain in the special Fujiko Yamamoto production schedule for September; after a brief period of improvement around the New Year, he passed away on July 25th, 1984.
I almost certainly first recognized Mr. H as an actor back in my kindergarten days. For a child whose dreams were filled with monsters and war, movies - especially Toho's bright, entertaining films - were the ultimate form of amusement during that twilight era of the late 1960s and early '70s. I cannot say for sure how many films I saw on the big screen or television, but somewhere along the way, I found myself drawn to Mr. H. It wasn't Yoshio Tsuchiya, Tadao Nakamaru, [Hideyo] Amamoto, Seizaburo Kawazu, Susumu Fujita or Jun Tazaki who captured my heart. The process defies words; one simply comes to like the person. Any attempt at a rational explanation feels superficial - a distortion of something that exists in a realm beyond language. It was akin to what Motoori Norinaga called "mono no aware" [...] and there the feeling remained, fixed and constant.
The difficulty inherent in being an actor lies precisely in this realm. Moreover, only poetry can truly hold its ground here; both praise and condemnation are essentially directed at one's own fantasies, unable to spill over into the outside world. Having written this, I will sidestep the ultimate, difficult question of why I like him; suffice it to say that my deep attachment can be understood as a clear sense of "fandom".
Scouring the TV listings in Weekly TV Guide for Mr. H's name had been a habit of mine from elementary school right up until recently. Dissatisfied with this one-way connection, I eventually wrote a fan letter during the autumn of my fifth-grade year. When no reply came despite my long wait, I tried sending another - but thinking that a messy, scrawled note from a child wouldn't work, I asked my mother to add a few lines this time.
"Motohide, I hear you always watch my shows. I understand you served as a class representative. [I was] class rep during the first term [of sixth grade] and the experience of leading a class is incredibly useful when you grow up. Do your best to become class representative again in the sixth grade. To that end, try not to watch too much TV; cultivating a habit of reading books is more important. Build up your body. And always remain a fine student of L'ECOLE DE L'ETOILE DU MATIN2. Right now, I'm filming the movie Terror of Mechagodzilla, it's scheduled for release during the spring break in March. As for TV, I appear in shows like Taiyo ni Hoero!, Rise to the Heavens3, The Family Game, and Onihei Hankacho, though not every week. Please give my regards to your mother. It's cold out, so take care not to catch a cold."
That was the full text of the letter, and the joy of confirming it was in his own handwriting was a feeling I would experience only a few times in my life - far surpassing the emotion of passing a university entrance exam.
My first face-to-face meeting with him took place four months later. It was for a play newly written by Koji Toita titled Legend of the Saints, a production featuring the unusual casting of Eiko Muramatsu and Senri Sakurai as a young couple. Mr. H appeared on stage as a teacher at a girls' school. I must have been trembling as I stood at the entrance to the dressing room after the performance. I can still vividly recall the sensation of my head burning hot with the tension of crossing a line I wasn't supposed to cross. Mr. H came out when called, still wearing his stage makeup and a yukata.
"Glad you could make it. Come on in," he said, guiding me to a corner at the far end of the large dressing room shared by the male actors. The moment one comes face-to-face with the "real thing" - the person who is truly significant to you - is a time of both intense excitement and profound exhaustion. I cannot recall exactly what was said; all I remember [from the moment] is the sight of the couple Keisuke Sunagawa and Nobuyo Oyama standing near the entrance.
For the roughly ten years that followed, I maintained a nodding acquaintance with Mr. H - and to use a rather trite expression, that time felt both long and short. Our second meeting took place not long after, on July 31st, 1975, at the final performance of the Imperial Theater's summer production of The Sound of Music, starring Kaoru Yodo as Maria and Tetsuro Sagawa as Captain von Trapp, with Asao Koike and Kojiro Kusanagi in supporting roles. Mr. H, who played the Nazi admiral [von Schreiber], appeared in the audience just before the curtain rose; dressed in a sports shirt and holding a portable cassette recorder, he spotted me and strode over. I was taken aback. "My scene isn't until the very end anyway," he explained. "There are so many great songs in this show, so I thought I'd sit out here and record them right up to the last minute". As I watched his sturdy figure - after shaking my hand - disappear into a corner of the auditorium, I found myself grinning, filled with genuine delight. The Mr. H I knew was a truly good man in the best sense of the word - someone whose earnest, gentle nature was imbued with a serious intelligence. He was a man who never failed to show thoughtful consideration, even to an obscure fan like me - let alone to his regular colleagues. I wish he had taken more [time off]; it might have made things a little easier on him. When I recall the Mr. H who always treated me with such sincere warmth, the words spoken by Koji Tsuruta at [his] wake move me deeply, bringing tears to my eyes.
At 2:50 PM on July 27th, I pressed my palms together in prayer for a moment outside the gates of Honganji Wadabori Betsuin, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered; then, feeling strangely hollow, I walked toward Shimotakaido Station. I happened upon a secondhand bookstore and wandered inside. The proprietress at the counter seemed to be watching a live broadcast of the funeral; I could hear the reporter using the standard phrases reserved for such sad occasions. A greengrocer who supplied the shop arrived and struck up a conversation with her. "Looks like something's going on over there today." "It's Yoshiko Kuga's husband." "Oh, really? Remind me, what kind of man was he?" A portrait of [Hirata] appeared on the television screen. The greengrocer leaned forward intently to get a better look. "Oh, right, this guy. He was on TV a lot until recently, wasn't he?" "That's him. It's such a shame, he was still young."
Yes, he was young. I had assumed he would live forever, but I supposed that was wishful thinking. There is a strange, stark quality to the way a person simply ceases to be. Right now, I have exactly ten postcards from Mr. H beside me. Eight of them are New Year's cards; the one from 1984 bears the printed red greeting "Happy New Year," followed by a message written in his characteristically elegant handwriting: "I underwent surgery for a duodenal ulcer in September, so I'm taking some time to recuperate". It was a long convalescence - too long to take the message at face value - yet I couldn't simply dismiss it, either.
"He's been getting steadily better lately," people had been saying. That comment from So Yamamura, his senior from the University of Tokyo, formed the basis for how Mr. H was regarded in his later years. Indeed, Mr. H was the sort of actor whose depth and richness only grew with age. He was someone with a promising future ahead of him. The day when his renown as an accomplished actor would eclipse that of [Yoshiko Kuga] was truly close at hand. Yet fate is ever cruel, and that future was sealed off forever.
(Note: This piece was drafted last September and has now been revised. My grief remains unchanged.)
Motohide Katayama's TV Essay
It goes without saying that, like many other film actors, Akihiko Hirata shifted the primary focus of his career to television during the late 1960s. Here, I would like to present a record of Hirata's television appearances - to the best of my knowledge - as a reference for readers. Please not that I am currently 22 years old; while I believe I have covered the period from 1974 onwards reasonably well, there are likely significant omissions regarding the 1980s, a time for which I did not keep detailed notes. I ask for your understanding.
Everyone is likely familiar with Ultra Q and other tokusatsu shows, but his role as Mr. K was truly excellent. He appeared in Daitetsujin 17 for exactly one cour - thirteen episodes starting April 1, 1977. He appeared in episode 12 of Taiyo ni Hoero! as Toshio Kawamoto, a corrupt detective; he delivered a compelling performance in this tragic role, portraying a man who brings about his own ruin through entanglements with organized crime. Later, coinciding with the arrival of Yusaku Matsuda's character, Hirata returned to the series as Nishiyama, an inspector from the Metropolitan Police Department. He transferred to the role of the Nanamagari Precinct Chief, appearing in over forty4 episodes and becoming known for his shouting outbursts. Episode 88 in particular was essentially a showcase for [Chief Nishiyama]. There was even a storyline three or four years ago involving a bomb planted at his home.
In other police dramas, he frequently played the role of the criminal. He appeared in Shigeru Amachi's License to Kill on July 12, 1975, and February 19, 1976; playing a politician's secretary in the former and a yakuza executive in the latter. He made four appearances in Jiro Sakagami's Detective at Dawn (December 3rd, 1975; June 30 and September 15, 1976; and September 1, 1977) and played a public prosecutor in Tomorrow's Detective (November 29, 1978). In Running to the Dawn (starring Saburo Shinoda and Kenji Takaoka), he played Keiichiro Tokimura, a company president who orchestrates a staged kidnapping (February 22, 1977). He also appeared in Special Mobile Investigation Unit as a high-ranking police official.
He appeared as a semi-regular, playing the same role of a bureau chief at Haruta Bank as in the film version - the TV adaptation of The Family Game (1974, Asahi Broadcasting). Incidentally, while Yumeji Tsukioka played Daisuke Manpyo's legitimate wife in the movie, Yoshiko Kuga took over the role for the TV series.
In 1974, he appeared as a parent in the elementary school-themed drama Rise to the Heavens, starring Hitoshi Nakayama and Toshio Kurosawa (episodes aired November 2 and 9). Around the same time, he was a regular in the 30-minute daytime soap opera A Wife's Mistake, playing a husband who suspects his wife of infidelity; his character eventually dies after driving drunk and plunging off a cliff. He also played a husband in Yoko Tsukasa's daytime drama Skin of the Mountain (1981) and was a regular in Haruko Mabuchi's River of Flames.
He was an indispensable figure in period dramas as well. Early in his career he was a regular as police constable Shunzo Sasaki in Kikugoro Onoe's Young Lord Samurai's Detective Chronicles, and also appeared in Koshiro [Matsumoto]'s Onihei Hankacho. He had a long association with the Onihei series, appearing as a superior official (a junior councilor) in both the 1975 series starring Tetsuro Tamba and the more recent version starring Kinnosuke [Nakamura], (appearing in the former on May 14, May 28 and August 27). In the 1974 Kurama Tengu [TV series], he played the role of Katamono Komakine, the Kyoto deputy, in the three party Strange Tale of the Mountain Party arc (October 30, November 5 and November 12); his final scene showed him struggling after being tied to a pillar by Tengu. Masaya Takahashi played the Mountain Party leader Matsuyoshi Imamura, and Toshio Sugie served as director.
In Atsuo Nakamura's Kogarashi Monjiro, he played the yakuza boss Kanpachi, meeting a sordid and undignified end. He exuded a menacing presence as the corrupt physician Yoshioka Dogen in Toshu with Broken Umbrella Villain Hunting (Jan 27 1976) and as the corrupt constable Jinjuro Akazawa in Whirlwind of Edo II (June 24 1976, directed by Yoshiki Onoda).
In the Meiji-era drama Ronin of the Wasteland, starring Toshiro Mifune (Sept 15. 1976), he played Taketo Yamakawa, a Choshu-faction samurai shot dead by Go Wakabayashi. In the final episode of Hidden Eyes - which also featured Mifune alongside Toru Emori - he played Shuzen Hattori, a man plotting his lord's assassination with the help of a henchman played by Hideyo Amamoto. In New Zatoichi, he appeared as the yakuza boss Denbei of Shikagawa (Feb 7 1977). Other roles included appearances in Detective Stories of Denshichi (July 19, 1977), Falcons of Edo (March 28, 1978 as the Chief Censor Hara), Whirlpool of Edo (July 6, 1978) and Oedo Investigation Network (Feb 7 1979 as a Junior Councilor) - the latter being a rare merchant role, though the character was a corrupt magistrate.
He gave a fine performance as the sinister Tenmaya in Falcons of Edo IV (April 20, 1975). In Mito Komon, he played a virtuous senior retainer who is cut down almost immediately after appearing (Aug 14, 1978). In Fangs of Edo, he played the ultimate villain in the final episode; commanding a henchman played by Rinichi Yamamoto, he was spectacularly cut down by Mifune, delivering a memorable final line: "You are nothing but beasts"...
He also appeared in Teruhiko Saigo's A Tough Man, playing Yoshizumi - a department manager at a regional trading company - with a touch of earnest humor (appearing in four episodes; Oct 5, 12, 19 and 26, 1975). In another drama by writer Shigeo Hanato, Hanaborou, he played the father-in-law of Yoko Shimada's character, a man who meets an untimely death (appearing in two episodes, Jan 5 and 12, 1976). Appeared twice in Toshiba Sunday Theater. In Tobidashi (May 23 1976), his role was a doctor; the character watches over the budding romance between Keiko Sekine and Ryu Manatsu. His next appearance was in Snow Waltz, where his role wad the male lead opposite Mitsuko Kusabue. Both productions were made by regional stations.
He was a semi-regular in Matsuo Kayo's Judgement (1978), playing a judge. He also held a semi-regular role as a police chief, appearing in at least seven episodes. Hideki Takahashi appeared as a guest star in this rather melodramatic suspense series (April 1, 1977). Other credits include Ken Utsui's Rose Strait and Momoe Yamaguchi's Red Shock, in which he appeared [in four or more scenes] as the stoic JAL captain flying Momoe.
For NHK, he appeared as Kiyoshi Miyazaki, president of Mitsui & Co., in After the War: Dismantling the Zaibatsu (July 28, 1977). Subsequently, he took on roles in documentary-style productions, such as the Director of the Minister's Secretariat at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in NHK Special: The Day of Zero Imported Food (March 23, 1978) and a role in Saturday Drama: Shimoyama Incident (July 11, 1978). He also appeared in the historical drama Burning Grass, playing the Kamakura-aligned court noble Ichijo Yoshiyasu (appearing in three or four episodes). He played the role of Futaro Shiwa-Butsu in Blood Relatives (based on the novel by Hitomi Yamaguchi and starring Keiju Kobayashi).
He made guest appearances in Kumiko Oba's Comet-san and Yukio Aoshima's Mean Old Lady. He played a company president in [...] Star Dash Number 1 (starring Ikue Sakakibara and Yoshimi Iwasaki). He played the king of a certain nation in Monkey (starring Masaaki Sakai and Masako Natsume) and [appeared in the second season]. In the nighttime melodrama When a Woman Turns Around (starring Yoko Yamamoto), he was a regular, playing the ex-husband; a weak-willed man who did whatever his father (played by Yoshi Kato) told him to do (1977). In Yoshiko Mita’s Unforgettable Days (1979), he played a managing director pursuing Mita’s husband (Takao Inoue), who had vanished with company secrets and committed suicide by jumping from the office building in the final episode.
In the four-part spring 1979 series Wide Labyrinth, he played a managing director who is promoted to company president following the death of the incumbent (a fictional event). He also played a "parachuted" executive in So Kuramoto’s Shadows of Sand (where he portrayed an effeminate personnel manager) and appeared in Oryu-san, Fujiko Yamamoto’s ...Nani ga?, the role of Ishiguro (a gentleman back from France) in Mitsuko Mori’s Why? First Love South Wind, and Jinpachi Nezu’s Lovers, all in 1980.
In 1981, his roles included an advertising manager for a lingerie company in Yukiyo Toju’s Rainbow Forest, an advertising manager for a watch company in Ryoko Nakano’s Cheers to the Bad Wives of Japan!, and a pastor in Kaori Momoi’s Downtown Story. Then came the 1983 Yumie Hiraiwa drama series Lake Festival.
For some reason, nothing comes to mind regarding 1982.
At some point, he also made two or three appearances in a show called Kanasaka.
Next were the long-form dramas on commercial networks; he likely had a fair amount of work here, but since I kept no notes, I cannot be certain of the details. In 1983, he played Mashita Nagamori, one of the Five Commissioners, in TV Asahi’s New Year’s drama Sekigahara. In the Kaimaku Wide Theater slot, he played university professor Ryokichi Takigawa (showing off his mountaineering skills) in [The Mystery of the Broken Rope] (originally aired Jan 27, 1979). In Full Moon Murder Case and Don't Lay A Hand on the Bride (aired Feb 24, 1979, and June 27, 1981, respectively), he gave a powerful performance as an eccentric publishing company president with Koji Tsuruta as his chief subordinate; Aiko Morishita played his wife.
Then, in Serial Killer Torima, he played an investigation section chief; and in a police drama starring Tatsuya Mihashi and Kanako Higuchi, he played a criminal, featuring a memorable scene where he meets secretly with Kyoko Enami. In Finger of the Earth, he played an ambitious university professor, and in Wilderness of Youth (aired Jan. 2, 1978), he took on the role of a Diet member who shares a bed scene with Kiwako Taichi.
For Nippon TV’s Tuesday Suspense, a crime drama series featuring stars like Koji Tsuruta and Yuko Natori, he played an investigation section chief. In TBS’s Saturday Suspense, he appeared as a superior officer in two installments of the series starring the late Shinsuke Minami as a detective. He also appeared in TV Tokyo’s New Year’s 12-hour historical dramas, such as After That, Musashi (playing Matsudaira Izu-no-kami) and Isoroku Yamamoto. Oh yes, he also had a regular role as a vice-principal in a youth-oriented drama from the past starring Yosuke Natsuki or Raita Ryu (airing Sunday nights at 8:00 on Nippon TV). Then there was an action series - I can't recall the exact title - featuring a theme song by Dick Mine; in it, he played a Diet member who gets betrayed and eliminated by Ko Nishimura. Reiko Niwa played his only daughter.
I believe he appeared as the president of a public corporation in the first season of The Hangman, and later became a regular in New Hangman. Shingo Yamashiro, who appeared as a regular in that show, also ended his career playing a comic relief role, as everyone knows. His gaunt cheeks in his later years were a painful sight.
Moving on to non-drama appearances: first and foremost, there was Pittashi Kan-Kan. Along with the Godzilla boom, this program contributed significantly to reshaping the public image of Akihiko Hirata and garnering him renewed appreciation. He appeared on the show nearly a hundred times between 1975 and 1979, and even served as host as a substitute for Hiroshi Kume. He also displayed his brilliant answering skills on Quiz Derby (August 28, 1976) and appeared several times on Association Game. On Thanks for the Meal, he famously prepared "French toast à la Yoshiko." Then there was Tetsuko's Room, where he appeared several times with his wife. He also appeared on Let's Meet at Three, specifically the "Reunion" segment, and Guess It Right on March 10, 1979, as well as Saegusa's Roaring Laughter Salon on Saturday mornings. He also appeared on programs hosted by Fujiko Yamamoto; specifically, Fashionable and You at Three o'Clock on the same day: September 18, 1978. He even introduced Nordic cuisine from Shibuya on the show Cooking Heaven (March 20, 1976). In 1983, as part of the "Godzilla Revival Festival" campaign, he appeared on Wide Wide Fuji and even NHK’s NC9, where he expounded on the true nature of Godzilla. I also recall him appearing on Morning Jumbo Madam to promote the release of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.
There was that memorable joint appearance with Beat Takeshi and Tamori, as well as his roles on We are the Funny People and Today is the Best.
(Note) He provided the Japanese dubbing for the villain in the Columbo episode "A Friend in Deed" [How to Dial a Murder]. Akihiko Hirata was by no means an ordinary actor; rather, he possessed a personality that was perhaps too distinctive. His work surely served as a rebuke to the fools (in his family and elsewhere) who branded him as "nondescript."
Editor's Note
A year has gone by since the passing of Akihiko Hirata. During this time, there have been (at least to my knowledge) no publications or magazine articles commemorating [his achievements]; this deeply regrettable fact has surely left and indelible mark on the minds of those who truly cared for him. Of course, it may be too much to expect good sense from the stubborn and narrow-minded world of journalism; after all, they are merely the vanguard of mass manipulation. Yet, even the wisest of sages never forgets a betrayal. It is to strike a blow against this silence that I present Volume 2 of Nekotei Newsletter to the world. While it is a profound honor to compile this memorial issue for the deeply admired Hirata, I cannot help but regret that, inevitably, given my own laziness and lack of ability, the result is nothing more than a crude little booklet.5 I would be happy if it could, at the very least, quench some of the thirst felt by those who loved Hirata so dearly.
Furthermore, fully aware that it may be presumptuous, I humbly dedicate this publication to the late Akihiko Hirata. I received the cooperation of many people in compiling this issue, and I am deeply grateful to them all. I spoke with Ishiro Honda on April 21st, the day before the recording sessions for his film Ran began, he kindly made time for me despite it being such a rare day off [for him]. I am deeply apologetic for constantly making such unreasonable demands of him.
I also received immeasurable assistance from [Motohide] Katayama, a friend of Hirata's for over a decade, who contributed two articles and let me program booklets from stage productions in which Hirata had appeared; this publication would not have been possible without him. Finally, I asked Kazuhiro Hanayama to handle the design and the lettering for the section titles; I would like to make special mention of the fact that, since we could not use a photograph for the cover this time, he created original lettering for it as well. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Tatsu Mori, who handled the photomechanical processing despite his busy schedule; Nobutaka Suzuki, who assisted with some of the proofreading, and Ichiro Omata, who helped prepare the camera-ready copy.
While compiling the list of films in which Hirata appeared, I was struck by the sheer number of works I had not yet seen. For instance, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will likely never truly appreciate the full measure of Gertrude Lawrence's talent. Yet, Hirata was a magnificent screen actor; in seeking out the films I have yet to watch, it is still possible to catch glimpses of his artistry as a performer; facets of his talent that remain little known. Though [he] has ascended to the heavens, the radiance in his eyes as they appear on the silver screen will never fade. (July 15, 1985)
_____
Footnotes:
1) The specific word Honda uses here is "sewanin" which means sponsor, mediator, caretaker, that sort of thing.
2) I do not know what this means in this context. Writing a letter to a fifth-grader including a phrase in French might be singularly the most Akihiko Hirata thing I have ever heard.
3) Ten made agare [天まであがれ]. This one is weird - he himself confirms he was in the show, but I can find literally no evidence for it whatsoever.
4) My list says 33 episodes, but one of us may be wrong.
5) Editor, that "crude little booklet" currently resides in my house with candles around it.
Poor Rodan always seems to end up being the subject of some of my weirdest posts.
"What is this thing that kind of looks like a giant floppy disc?" You might ask. This is a CED, or Capacitance Electronic Disc, which I'm continually having to resist calling a "CED disc" because that's like saying "ATM machine". For a better summary of what it is and what it does, check out Techmoan's video, which includes a teardown of a CED machine (or three). For a full list of titles released to the U.S. market on CED, see here. For the U.K. market, see here. (Rodan is listed as "Uncommon", and was not released in the U.K.)
In short: it's a dead format several decades and millions of dollars in the making that turned out to be, as one YouTube commenter puts it, "a turkey". The actual video quality is not as bad as I expected - really no worse than some of the VHS tapes I've digitized - but the format has a quite unfortunate problem with stuttering and skipping, rendering a lot of movies flat-out unwatchable. More titles were issued on CED than you may think despite its short lifespan, and the list of U.S. titles includes both Godzilla 1984 and Godzilla, King of the Monsters!. My copy of Rodan is from 1983 and I got it dirt cheap; I have no idea if it's watchable, and don't have any plans to invest in a secondhand CED player to find out. It's mostly just a novelty to display in my room.
We owe Rodan's existence on CED to Vestron Video, who in 1983 put the pedal to the metal and decided to release the movie on every format simultaneously: VHS, Betamax, CED and LaserDisc. Rodan was also issued separately in 1965 on Super 8 as a black-and-white "digest" version, which you can watch here. It's most just an action cut and honestly isn't that bad if you just want to see monster stuff; it's a testament to how good Rodan was that it holds up even in such a condensed format. (Hirata's in the Super 8 version, but only a little, and for some reason looks even nerdier in black-and-white than he did in the original.)
Techmoan's video mentions CED in both the U.S. and the U.K., but having a kaiju movie on this format got me wondering if the format had any lifespan to speak of in the Japanese market. Japan is very good at keeping unusual media formats alive much longer than the rest of the world (cf. Minidisc), so I wanted to do some research to find out if any CEDs ever made it over there.
Short answer: Japan knew about CED but said nah.
Longer, more accurate answer: Japan did want it - or at least some people did - but was too busy at the time with a format war going on between VHD (Video High Density), LaserDisc, and Germany's obscure TeD (Television Electronic Disc), and although Hitachi was looking at commercializing the format for the Japanese market, it ultimately never entered domestic production, and only existed within the country as direct imports by collectors. I'm getting my information from JP Wikipedia, which unfortunately lacks a citation for this particular chapter of RCA's history, so I can't give you sources beyond what's written on the wiki. For a more personal, less objective opinion, I'll cite this blog post, whose author seems to have been entirely unfamiliar with CED. I wouldn't take one blog post as representative of the entire populace's knowledge of CED, though, and it's also worth pointing out that most people in the U.S. and U.K. - CED's actual target markets - probably have never heard of it either.
However, and more interestingly, I also turned up this article in Japanese, which is a pretty comprehensive look at what a CED was and how the format works. It's dated to 1982, so CED was still extant at the moment, although moribund; I don't know why somebody would have gone through the trouble of producing a Japanese-language guide to the format if there was not at least some interest in it within the country. This, also in Japanese, mentions CED as well, but only to make a brief note of its fleeting existence.
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.)
