NHK特集 想定ドキュメント 輸入食料ゼロの日 / NHK tokushū: sōtei dokyumento: yunyū shokuryō zero no hi / NHK Special: Hypothetical Documentary: Day of Zero Imported Food [1978]

No images from this docudrama exist, but I don't like to make posts without images, so here's an entirely unrelated book about the same subject.

Intro

A while ago, I spent a very long time assembling what I believe is the most comprehensive list of every single one of Hirata's film, television and stage credits, which ended up amounting to somewhere around 350 titles (the actual list is slightly less, but I usually say "around 350" to account for anything I might have missed due to obscurity). People generally like stories about the strange and unusual, so let's ask the question: out of that number, what is the weirdest thing he was in?

Well, that depends on what we consider "weird". First off, I want to absolutely avoid the pitfall of calling something weird just because it's from Japan. His The Sound of Music or Gone With the Wind aren't "weird" just because they're Japanese productions of English-language works. None of the game shows or variety shows Hirata was on¹ in the late '70s and early '80s qualify as "weird" just because we've never heard of them. Okage wa Waga kokoro ni ari - a docudrama about the founder of a specific Shintō sect - is a bit surprising, but I'm not going to call something "weird" because it involves a religion that I don't subscribe to. And I'm not talking about movies that are "weird" in a narrative or conceptual sense. The H-Man is objectively pretty weird, but it's science fiction, so that's to be expected.

So with all of those qualifiers, I think the one thing I can say for certain is actually pretty weird is the TV docudrama about what would happen if Japan suddenly stopped importing food. Maybe "weird" is not the most precisely accurate term here, but it's the sort of thing that's just a bit unusual to see in an actor's filmography - and it would be for any actor. You could imagine your favorite British soap opera star in something like this and it would still be weird. In any event, here is everything I can tell you about Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi.

Who made this thing

Despite not having a Wikipedia article, the director of the docudrama, Sakae Okazaki, has been a part of NHK's history (and the history of television as a whole) since 1953, which is essentially when television broadcasting began within Japan. Okazaki's main interest when he began working for NHK was producing media related to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki's home had been burned down by an American air raid, and when he was stationed at the Hiroshima branch of NHK, he created radio dramas on the subject of the atomic bomb. Okazaki was initially very reluctant to move from radio to television, but he found success in the mid-1960s when he produced what is considered to be Japan's first docudrama, Sōnan ["Disaster"], about the search for thirteen students from a mountaineering club who were lost on Mount Yakushi. After that, he also produced Japan's first color taiga drama, Ten to chi to. In the late 1970s Okazaki was in charge of "NHK Special", the series that Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi belongs to more broadly. Okazaki is still alive at 95 years old and was interviewed by Yahoo! News about his long career in March of this year.

I can find virtually no information about the docudrama's main screenwriter, Mamoru Tanabe. His name appears as a credit on a plethora of NHK programs dating back to, as far as I can tell, the mid-1950s. I'm not sure where he is now or when he stopped working, if he has.

As for the rest of the cast: Momoko Kōchi's in it, I just want to say that before I get to anybody else. There are a few other fairly well-known actors in the cast as well, including Gin Maeda, Toshiaki Nishizawa, Toei "hey it's that guy" Fumio Watanabe, and prolific voice actor Akira Kume. I have no idea what Hirata's role in this was, but I think "miscellaneous scientist" is a fairly safe bet. It usually is.

What is this thing

The general idea of the docudrama is summed up in its title. At least as of 1978, Japan was importing 60-70% of all its food product, and the docudrama takes place in the year "19XX", after Japan's government, acting on top-secret information regarding the upcoming sudden stoppage of all imports, begins to assess the country's capacity for food production, an endeavor mainly undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture. The production capacity of rural agricultural areas is analyzed by computer and the answer given is apparently not reassuring: with its current production capacity, one-third of the population would starve within the year if food imports were to cease. The docudrama - which took more than a year to produce and involved real-world experiments in food production using underutilized land such as golf courses - features actual staff of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and reporting by Ryōjū Katsube, a real-life NHK reporter who was, among other things, in charge of local reports for the world's first television broadcast from Japan's Showa base in Antarctica.

Please see Hiroshi Makita's thread on the docudrama. I am clowning on it a little, but this scenario is an important thing to consider; it's very concerning knowing your country may not be able to adequately feed its own population in a time of crisis, and from what Makita says, this problem has not been fully solved even today.

This was not the only speculative docudrama that NHK produced. Within the "Hypothetical Document" series, two other scenarios were explored: an earthquake warning and a large-scale blackout in Tokyo. There is a little footage and some stills from the other two docudramas, but as far as I know not a single image from the one we're looking at today is available online.

Can we watch it

No.

Well, not unless you're affiliated with a university in Japan and/or can get special permission to view it for educational purposes. (I don't know about you, but I think my purposes are pretty educational.)

There are more NHK TV specials that are lost to time and to Japan's draconian copyright laws forcing tapes to be destroyed following television stations restructuring than there are grains of sand on a beach. Fortunately, this is not one of them: it is held in Yokohama's Broadcast Library, which is the only facility in Japan that collects and archives television programs, radio programs, commercials, and related material and provides free-of-charge viewing. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that if I am ever in Yokohama, I will find a way to watch it there. I will tell you all about it.

That's not the only place where the docudrama is held, though. As it was released to VHS in 1990, numerous universities now have a copy: CiNii, Japan's equivalent of WorldCat, a website that allows you to search for any book in any library anywhere, lists 29 universities that have a tape. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the tape seems to be unavailable for general consumption: academic institutions are the only places that got a copy, as far as I know, and I'm not even sure what the tape looks like. If I do ever find a copy, you will know about it.

_____

1 Okay, the Beat Takeshi thing was probably weird. I will eventually write something about that.

お笑い三人組 / Owarai san'ningumi / Comedy Trio (1956-1966)

Alright, I'm fully aware this is going off on a little bit of a tangent, but it is still technically part of the purpose of this blog (bringing information related to Akihiko Hirata into a more accessible format to English-speaking fans), so... y'all wanna see his younger sister?

Cover of Oshiawase bushi / Koi no ramen musume

Yoshiko Otowa (birth name Kazuko Onoda) was born on July 6th, 1932. I'm not certain if she's still alive; her Wikipedia page simply says that "apparently" she's retired from the entertainment industry, so if she's still out there, she's probably living a quiet life well away from the spotlight. She was a singer as well as an actress, and married NHK director Shoji Kume, who she worked with. Kume passed away in 1985. We'll be looking at her acting career today, but she had a much longer career as a singer (early 1950s-early 1970s); I'm sure that will eventually come up here and there on the blog as well

Farthest right in the photo on the left (in striped shirt).

Arguably Otowa's most famous credit was her regular role as Kaoru on the widely-beloved, long-running live comedy show Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi], broadcast on NHK between 1956 and 1966. As the title implies, the focus of the show is a group of three comedians: rakugo performer Kinō Sanyutei, storyteller Teiho Ichiryusai, and impersonator Nekohachi Edogoya. Their female counterparts are played by Toshie Kusunoki, Yoshiko Otowa and Kyōmi Sakura.

The series was quite popular, with very high viewer ratings, and was eventually made into a manga, with menko cards of the three goofballs available as well. Otowa was not always part of the central cast, and since most of the episodes are lost, I'm not certain exactly when she joined, but it was sometime in the early 1960s.

Sanyutei, Ichiryusai and Edogoya were all close friends to begin with, and when NHK was looking to round out their comedy offerings in the mid-1950s, writer Seiro Nawa created a radio show featuring the three of them that debuted in 1955. The following year, it was turned into a television series. The setting of the show changed from time to time, and at one point it was even a period piece taking place in the Edo era, but this became unpopular and the setting changed back shortly. Roles changed as well; the three comedians had different jobs and their three female co-stars' relationships to them shifted (sometimes sisters, sometimes wives).

A still from when the show was jidaigeki.

Unfortunately, the series is essentially lost media. Hundreds of episodes were produced and broadcast, but only three have resurfaced, periodically being uploaded to YouTube and then zapped by NHK. YouTube comments from the brief times when episodes have been available make it very, very clear that there is a lot of nostalgia for this series:

"@masaseto8507

I used to watch this video more than 50 years ago ... . It was the time when TV was exploding .... I miss those days .... It was a great fun show back then． I am very happy to see it again ...."

"@genpome4587

It was my favorite show that still stays in my heart. It was 50 years ago.

Thank you for uploading the precious footage."

Here Otowa is third from left in the group in the back of the poster.

Three Comedy Trio feature films were produced, one by Nikkatsu and two by Shintoho. There are two trailers extant on YouTube, for two separate films, and they have several million views between the two of them. Another snippet from the show can be found on NHK's website here.

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice a familiar surname in the above trailer: two of the Comedy Trio feature films were directed (and one written) by Yoshiki Onoda, the eldest of the three Onoda siblings. Due to having been a Toho contracted actor for a long time, Hirata didn't make it into any of his brother's films save for one up until the late 1970s, at which point the five-studio agreement had collapsed, Shintoho had also collapsed, Onoda was working in television, Hirata was not contracted anymore, and everybody was free to do whatever they wanted. (Otowa did not appear in anything with Hirata at any point, however.)

That's about it for this post, but we'll be seeing Otowa on the blog again in future. If I've done anything here to shed light on the career of a talented performer who is otherwise virtually unknown outside of her home country, then I consider that mission accomplished. Hope this was as interesting to you all as it is to me.