青春デカメロン / Seishun Dekameron / Youth Decameron [1950]

Release date: May 9th, 1950

Studio: Shintoho

Director: Goro Kadono

Cast: Kyoko Kagawa, Akira Kishii, Saburo Boya, Kyu Sazanka, Shintaro Kido, Kasho Sanyutei, Motomi Hirose, Kingoro Yanagiya et al

Availability: No home media or streaming release. One confirmed theater screening and one confirmed television broadcast in the 1980s. Prints said to be extant.

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A while back I posted about the two films I know of that Akihiko Hirata worked on as an assistant director during his time at Shintoho before he became an actor. The earlier of the two, Lynching, I was actually able to get a hold of, but I wasn't going to go into as much depth for Youth Decameron, since it's much more obscure. However, I've decided there is in fact enough information about it to fill out a post (and consequently I'm going to take down my original post about both movies, since it's not necessary now that I've written about them separately in their own dedicated posts).

This poster is from the film's shortened re-release in 1956 under the title Crazy Uproarious Laughter (Bokusho koukyo tanoshi¹) (extremely rough translation).

Let's start with the director, Goro Kadono. Kadono was one of the founding members of Shintoho, working with the company starting in 1947 after it split off from Toho. In 1948 he began working as an assistant director under the likes of Kon Ichikawa and Yasuki Chiba, and in 1950 he made his debut as a solo director with Youth Decameron, but would continue picking up work as an assistant director even afterward, while still also directing his own features. Kadono directed 20 pictures for Shintoho, but after the studio collapsed, the last record of him is that he worked on a pink film called Peeping Private Room (Nozokareta koshitsu) for Sankyo in 1964. Nothing else is known of his whereabouts after that, and his date of death is not recorded.

The film's screenwriter, Umetsugu Inoue, is a far bigger name. Inoue had been at Keio University's Faculty of Economics when he was drafted, and after the war he continued school and graduated in 1947, subsequently beginning a career at Shintoho. He became a director after working as an assistant (and other jobs) for only five years - a relatively short period within Japan's rigid studio system. He joined Nikkatsu in the mid-'50s with some success, then went freelance in 1960 and worked for several studios before ultimately joining Shochiku Ofuna. This put him on a trajectory that would result in him being mentioned on this very blog: Inoue directed for Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series, which is one of only a few series that could boast appearances from multiple Onodas. Inoue also directed Hirata in New Hangman. Since both Ranpo and Hangman aired in the '80s, their paths had been crossing for well over 30 years at that point.

I wrote more about what an assistant director's job was at this time and what Hirata may have been doing more specifically in my post about Lynching, but in short: since he was uncredited, he could not have been either a chief assistant director or a first assistant director and was probably not even a second assistant director, which means we can narrow down the scope of his work on the film to things like setting up props, writing staging descriptions, working with extras for crowd scenes, working with any animals required on-set, miscellaneous work assisting the other assistant directors, or just holding the clapperboard. He would have been 22 at this time and working under his birth name.

Now onto the movie itself.

You can probably tell from the posters and the cast that this is a comedy. In broad strokes it seems to be of the "country bumpkins come to the city" story type. Ken Shimomura, who does data collection for Nippon Eiga's Shintoho database (a website which I very frequently use), managed to get an original pamphlet for the movie which has a little chunk of blurb on it as well as a cute portrait of Kyoko Kagawa.

A quick machine translation of the text says:

"A lineup of top entertainers, featuring art, songs, and pink excitement! A dreamlike tale of Tokyo's One Thousand and One Nights!"

"This is a striptease film with songs, and a very entertaining film. The staff is amazing. Director Goro Kadono is a rising star, and we have high hopes for his future. [Umetsugu Inoue] also showed his sharpness in the [...]"

Yes, that's right, our man worked on pink films. Keep in mind that this was de rigeur for Shintoho, and what was racy back then would hardly merit a batted eyelash today. Director Goro Kadono actually got in trouble during another production for asking Michiko Maeda to hike up her skirt.

One of my other main sources of general film information, Toshiaki Sato², relates a general outline of the plot: four friends working as shepherds on a ranch dream about moving to Tokyo and getting hired at a renowned cabaret called "Blue Fantasy". They learn where the owner of the cabaret is staying, and try to plot and scheme their way into getting him to hire them, only to find that the "owner" is an impostor. According to Sato, there were a lot of musical interludes featuring tons of performers who were popular at the time.

Kyoko Kagawa was not top billed, but she was undoubtedly who Shintoho wanted people to know was in the film before anyone else. The tagline even mentions her character Oharubo (a nickname, probably for "Haruka") by name. Without a real plot synopsis, though, I can't tell you anything else about who she plays. The rest of the main cast is mostly comedians, one stripper (Motomi Hirose), and several more prominent actors in small roles, including Kingoro Yanagiya and jazz singer Dick Mine.

Fitting for such a vanishingly obscure film, the only confirmed theater screening in the last 75 years took place at a bit of a strange location: Studio ams, a multi-purpose hall (not a movie theater) on the fifth floor of the Sangenjaya building, as part of a Kyoko Kagawa film festival. All of my information about this screening comes also from Ken Shimomura, who says he thinks the screening took place sometime in the 1990s but has no more specific details than that.

Now I did mention that the film was re-cut and re-released in 1957 under a different title, but unfortunately the extent of what I can find about the re-release version is that it exists. Given what I found out about the shortened version of my pet movie Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari, it's possible the film was recut to be played at a small film festival, or it could have just been a regular theatrical re-release by an ailing film studio desperate to bring in cash.

I think that's about all I can tell you for this one. If I can manage to find out any other films Hirata AD'd on (there has to have been more than two) I will of course write about them, but for now, I think I've pretty well covered it.

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^{1 If you Google Translate the kanji for this into Chinese it says "Hilarious sex orgy". Just thought I'd throw that out there.}

2 Toshiaki Sato please hit me up. You are my idol.

The Post Where I Talk About Yoshiki Onoda

I'm surprised I've made it so long without writing a post like this. To be honest, I've kind of been assuming that my readers probably already know who Yoshiki Onoda is, but I'm realizing that isn't necessarily the case. I have no idea if it's common knowledge that Akihiko Hirata had siblings who were also in the film industry. I don't even know if most people are aware that Hirata was not the name he was born with. (I constantly think about the xkcd comic when I'm writing for this blog.)

So let's have a Yoshiki Onoda post. The occasion is that today is or would have been his 100th birthday. I don't know if he's still alive, and I don't know if anyone else does either. I have heard that as of 2023 there were rumors that he was collecting a pension, but frankly, I would not trust my source for that statement any farther than I could throw it. In any case, there definitely are living 100-year-olds out there, so one can hope.

Poster for What Day Will You Come Back? When Will You Return?

Masahiko Onoda was born in Tokyo on July 12, 1925. He graduated from what is now Tokai University and joined Shintoho afterward, in 1947, as an assistant director. His first credit was What Day Will You Come Back? When Will You Return? [Itsu no hi-kun kaeru nan'nichi kunsairai], released in June of 1950 and starring Ken Uehara and Mieko Takamine, but since there are many different levels of assistant director within the Japanese film industry, not all of which are always credited, it is possible there may be some slightly earlier uncredited work. In 1958 he made his solo directorial debut: The Record of Lord Kusonoki's Loyalty [Nankō ni-dai seichū-roku], starring Tomisaburō Wakayama. After that film he would change his name to Yoshiki¹ and continue under that name for the rest of his career. Late in 1960 he married Utako Mitsuya, who he had worked with a an actress, and they would soon have two sons. They were married for 44 years until her death in 2004, and he must have been very fond of her, as after she died he wrote her biography.² According to his eldest son, he was very strict and serious about getting good performances out of his actors, but he treated all of his actors equally. You can find a list of films he worked on during his time at Shintoho (including as AD under his birth name) here. 

There is one picture of Onoda as a young man from his Wikipedia page that is typically used to represent him, but the blog that his son ran for the acting school the two of them operated posted many pictures of him in middle age, directing period dramas, and as an older man, teaching at the school. Here are a few of them:

I've censored the student's face because I understand that's kind of de rigeur for pictures taken of random people in Japan.

The years immediately following WWII were a time of tremendous change in the Japanese film industry. In the late 1940s, some Toho employees who were in favor of stronger labor unions and fairer working conditions split off and formed their own company, Shintoho. Shintoho, for all of its relatively short existence, was never very healthy. Still technically under the aegis of its parent company and usually at odds with it about finances and distribution, it consistently struggled to make a profit, sometimes even having to shut its facilities down. In the mid-'50s, however, it achieved its first real financial success with a trio of patriotic films about the Emperor Meiji, and subsequently the landscape of the wider Japanese film industry began to change even further when each studio realized it could solidify its place in the market by catering to one specific audience. Shintoho found its niche in making films that were often quite lurid or sexual in nature and appealed to teenagers - in an ironic twist, these sex-and-violence films that the studio had had no choice but to make due to lack of budget in its earlier days were now the kind of films that company management decided should be the studio's bread and butter. The result of the crystallization of each studio as purveyors of only one type of film was that lesser directors had little to no creative control.

This is the environment in which Yoshiki Onoda joined Shintoho. He was with the studio from its rough beginnings to its very end in 1962, and after a time he would become a freelance director, working almost exclusively in making jidaigeki for television. He also has three screenwriting credits from his time at Shintoho: Homecoming [Kisei], Cave Queens [Onna gankutsu-ō], and Beware of Suspicious People [Ayashii yatsu ni goyōshin no maki], one of the two Comedy Trio films he directed (starring Yoshiko Otowa). Interestingly, although Akihiko Hirata was a bit younger than him, he actually joined Shintoho before his older brother, also as an assistant director. I'm not sure what the policy was about family members working at the same company at the same time, but I will note that the Onoda brothers' individual stints at Shintoho do not seem to overlap.

Yoshiki Onoda seemed to enjoy casting his family in stuff. After marrying Utako Mitsuya, he continued to work with her, and both of his younger siblings show up pretty often in his films (and especially his later jidaigeki television work, in Hirata's case). He also frequently directed his son Masayuki Onoda during his acting career, which lasted from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. As I've said before, the Onoda Venn Diagram is surprisingly complicated, and the addition of a son makes it even more so: the eldest Onoda directed both of his younger siblings and his son, but never both siblings at the same time, and never either sibling at the same time as his son. I do wish we had at least gotten one full three-sibling team-up at some point.³

Otowa is on the right in the purple sweater and apron.

Onoda was very prolific, but few of his films have received English subtitles. His most famous work outside of Japan is Female Slave Ship, something of an extremely minor proto-exploitation cult classic, undoubtedly better known for starring a ridiculously young Bunta Sugawara than for its direction. As of the time of writing, including that film, there are currently six of Onoda's films that you can go on the internet and watch (or buy) right now. The others are Stray Wolf (1982), The Flower Flute Murders (1983), Araki Mataemon: Duel at Kagiya Corners (1993), Onihei Hankacho: Heizo the Demon (1995), and Samurai Justice: Mother and Daughter. Heizo the Demon, like much of his Onihei Hankacho work, also stars his son. Cave Queens was shown at the Far East Film Festival in 2010 and critics evidently liked it.

Poster for I Am a Mountain Man in the City, also featuring Yoshiko Otowa (left-most column, holding... ladles, maybe?)

Although his last work as a director was in 2008, he was interviewed in 2010 for a documentary⁴ about fellow Shintoho director Teruo Ishii. The full documentary unfortunately never received a home media release after its initial premiere, but a trailer is on YouTube, which contains literally about two seconds of footage of Onoda speaking. (We do live off scraps over here.) He is 85 in the documentary, and he resembles his younger brother enough that seeing him at that age gives me a very strange feeling.

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1 Machine translators don't know how to handle his name. You will sometimes see Yoshimiki, Yoshimi, or Yoshimoto, but it is pronounced "Yoshiki".

2 This was The Cherry Blossoms Bloomed Twice [Sakura wa ni-do saita], released in 2006. I don't have a solid source for this either, but I have heard that Mitsuya recounted falling in love with him on the set of Man-Eating Ama, when she was hesitant to do a nude scene and he told her she could just wear a towel instead.

3 Something I like to do because I'm a huge nerd is keep track of actors who have worked with all three siblings, which there are less of than you may imagine. Currently, I'm aware of Masayo Banri, Toyoko Takechi and Tōru Yuri.

4 Tokusatsu fans take note: Shiro Sano and Yuriko Hishimi also appear in this documentary.

私刑 リンチ / Rinchi / Lynching (1949)

Release date: December 20, 1949

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa

Studio: Shintoho

Cast: Kanjūrō Arashi, Ranko Hanai, Yoshiko Kuga, Ryō Ikebe, Eitarō Shindō, Eijirō Tōno, Makoto Kobori, Tamae Kiyokawa

Availability: DVD release. Also available on archive.org.

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December 2025 edit: I'm tremendously happy to announce that a year after making this post, this film is now available on DVD through Shintoho Cinema Nostalgia. The Internet Archive link will remain up until or unless it gets copyright-struck. The back of the box makes no mention of Hirata, but you and I know, don't we?

HUGE thanks to Pinball Novice for this one.

Before Akihiko Hirata became an actor, he worked part-time for Shintoho as an assistant director. This was something I knew about since I started this blog, but I was never able to find out which movies he worked on until I unexpectedly stumbled upon two Shintoho films that he supposedly worked on. Both are incredibly obscure, but one had been digitized at some point. This is the film we're going to look at today. I'll first get into a little background on the film itself. 

Lynching was the first collaboration between Nobuo Nakagawa and Kanjūrō Arashi, one of Japan's early film stars, and was the fourth postwar work produced by Nakagawa. According to Ryō Ikebe, this film was the template for the yakuza films that Arashi would become prolific in later in his career. As of 1949, Shintoho's films were still being distributed through Toho, the company they had broken off from after the bitter labor dispute of the mid-1940s, but despite this, Shintoho attempted to release Lynching independently. Toho responded in classic Toho fashion and filed a provisional injunction, claiming they had financed production costs of Lynching and eight other films in advance; this injunction was granted, and Lynching was ultimately released by Toho. The film was based on a novel by Sunao Otsubo published the same year as its release.

Toho: "Nice movie you got there. Would be a shame if it didn't get released because it was tied up in a distribution rights dispute."

So what does an assistant director do?¹ 

In the past, an assistant director position was essentially an apprenticeship. It was not common at all for someone to become a full-time film director without having worked through the ranks (chief, second, third, fourth, etc) of assistant director positions beforehand. The relationship between ranks was complicated and each position came with its own responsibilities: second and third were generally much busier than chief, with duties that involved costume, makeup, and art/props; fourth was essentially an assistant position to third and was also usually the person in charge of the clapperboard as well as any animal handling necessary for the film. There are degrees even below fourth as well, but their duties seem to have been more nebulous. When film staff were largely contracted employees of a specific film company, rather than freelancers, only the chief and sometimes up to the second assistant director would receive credits on film.

Now, I don't have all the details on exactly what rank Hirata was when he was working as an assistant director at Shintoho.² I don't know exactly what he was doing on set of Lynching, but from an interview where he speaks about the film, he does talk about working with Yoshiko Kuga, so he could potentially have been second assistant director, although I'm not sure if a part-timer would have that position. With no direct confirmation, though, he could have had a wide range of duties, such as handling props and writing staging descriptions, working with extras for crowd scenes, directing still photographs, or just assisting other ADs and holding the clapperboard. During production of Lynching he would have been not quite 22 and working under his real name (Onoda).

Good god I feel like I'm putting myself and everybody reading this through film school. Let's get on with it.

As assistant director one of the things Hirata may have been responsible for is setting up props in scenes like this one, and directing the extras to their places.

The film is set at the beginning of the Showa era (so after 1925). It is a yakuza movie centered around the Sugawara family (yes, Sugawara as in Bunta). The family takes care of an annual festival at Kongōji Temple, but Seikichi (Kanjūrō Arashi), a young member of the group, was given short shrift during preparations for this festival due to the jealousy of his older peers. The whole suburb - of which the Sugawara gang is a large component - is busy with the festival, doing things like making dolls, hauling heavy stuff around, etc. There's a horse.

If he were fourth AD it is entirely possible he also dealt with this horse.

Seikichi is also in love with a waitress named Okayo (Ranko Hanai). She wants him to leave the yakuza and run away with her, but he hesitates. Umewaka (Eijirō Tonō), an older member of the gang, offers Seikichi a deal: if he steals a golden Buddha statue that is important for the festival, he will be allowed to leave the gang with Okayo. Perhaps vulnerable to bribes and deals due to being in love and disillusioned with his fellow gang members, Seikichi takes it - but it's not what it seems. Umewaka (and another member, Hiō, played by Eitaro Shindo) just want him gone.

Ranko Hanai played the lead in the 1938 film Falling Blossoms, and would unfortunately die at the age of 42.

To cap off the tension created in the scene where Seikichi takes the deal, we see him chopping wood with an axe immediately afterward. This is one of a few one-off shots that feel very satisfying because the pure symbolism provides a quick break from the action in front of us. I also noted a shot of ripples in a pond while Seikichi is on the run later in the film. Nakagawa is an excellent director even in his non-kaidan works.

This foreshadows the following events: Seikichi knife-fights Umewaka in a well-choreographed scene on a bridge, soundtracked by rushing wind. The title of the film comes from the scene after this, where Seikichi is lynched by the rest of the Sugawara family who weren't in on the Buddha statue heist, trying to get information out of him about its whereabouts.

Seikichi is ultimately arrested for stealing the statue. He leaves behind Okayo, who at this point is pregnant with their child. Shogoro Sugawara (Makoto Komori), the boss of the gang, has a young son who has been hanging around - he will become important later.

Seikichi escapes prison, but it doesn't take long before his old family tries to kidnap him. He manages to escape and there's a struggle with a gun afterward in which Umewaka is killed and Seikichi is wounded, all while the police are in hot pursuit. Seikichi makes it just close enough to where Okayo is staying with their daughter to be able to hear her crying before he is again arrested, despite pleading with the cops.

Let me tell you, I was looking reeeeeeal close at the extras in this movie.

War has broken out by the time of his third escape attempt. He is imprisoned once more and put to work at a sewing machine, with fifteen years added to his sentence.

It is now 1945, and Nobuo Sugawara - the boy from before - is grown. This is Ryō Ikebe's role in the film. Ikebe is one of those people who is much older than he looks; in this film he is 31 playing a ~24-year-old. 

Seikichi's daughter Kuwako, also grown up now, is played by Yoshiko Kuga, all of 17 and already with three years' acting experience, singing her heart out solo. Nobuo looks after Okayo and Kuwako while Seikichi serves the last years of his sentence. 

Kuwako is a bit of a firebrand and sings in the black market in association with Sakurai Bussan, the gang formed after the dissolution of the Sugawara family. Nobuo, a demobbed soldier, is now a shoemaker. They have a budding romance, but the Sakurai Bussan dudes don't care for it. There's an excellent scene where Nobuo brawls with the gang while Kuwako plays with a pop gun in an arcade, unbothered. I'm gonna level with y'all: Kuga is the centerpiece of this film. She's fantastic. 

Seikichi, meanwhile, is released from prison. He is fraught with the anxiety of having been away from his wife and child for 18 years. He hasn't escaped the yakuza life, however: the boss of Sakurai Bussan is Hiō, the old boss of the Sugawara gang, and they know to wait for him as soon as he gets out of prison. They get him good and drunk to try to make him reveal the location of the golden Buddha. But Nobuo witnessed him being hustled into a car by the Sakurai gang, so he lets Okayo know what happened. Seikichi is too smart to get fooled again this time, though, and absconds in the middle of the night.

So. I remembered something about this movie. Or rather, I remembered something, but I didn't know that it was about this movie until now. 

In the Kinejun interview I translated, Hirata brings up holding a platform steady for Yoshiko Kuga to stand on, but since I hadn't seen this movie (and had previously only read that interview as a garbled translation), I didn't realize what he was talking about. So that means that in this scene right here...

Just out of frame is a 21-year-old Akihiko Onoda holding a wooden platform steady while the woman he would marry 12 years later stands on it to kiss her co-star.

And, I mean, not to be weird about it or anything, but oh my fucking god.

So anyway. The end of the film.

Seikichi escapes and runs into the shoe shop where Nobuo works and where Kuwako is staying. He doesn't recognize her and just begs her to be quiet and hide him while the gang is after him. After the coast is clear he reveals who he is to Kuwako, who runs to Okayo and tells her, the two of them both in disbelief. Nobuo asks Seikichi why he's on the run and he confesses the story of the stolen statue. This is all very emotional: 18 years in prison for basically not much; getting tricked into stealing a statue and killing someone in a situation that was hardly his fault where his own life was in danger. Nobuo gives Seikichi a dressing-down and convinces him to reveal the whereabouts of the statue to the police.

Hiō captures Seikichi and tries to lynch him again. Nobuo, meanwhile, goes to the police. A situation ensues which is essentially an inverted car chase: Seikichi seizes the wheel from one of the Sakura gang members while they're driving him off to who-knows-where, and now the gang members are all effectively at his mercy. But one of them has a little pistol and shoots Seikichi. Despite this, he yet lives, and leads the police to the location of the hidden statue. All charges are dropped and the film ends with him in a legitimate job and his family living a happy, normal life.

Headline about Sakurai Bussan's boss' unmasking and the end of the gang

I love movies so much.

This was good. A very solid piece of Japanese cinematic history. Techniques which would have been new at the time like dolly shots, cross-screen fades, and double exposures are all utilized here to great effect. Arashi is a charismatic lead who has some je n'ai sais quoi about him that makes him stand out from other silent-era actors, but Yoshiko Kuga steals the show. She's irrepressible in this. What a blessing to have this film, to be able to see movies like this one. I will burn it to a DVD and I already have multiple copies in various places, so I am now another link in the chain of people who are keeping this one preserved. Though, I do wish we had Youth Decameron, too - maybe someday.

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1 I'm sourcing my information from Japanese Wikipedia to try to get a better picture of what the position entailed in the Japanese film industry specifically.

2 The assistant director who was credited on this film is Akira Hagiwara, who had been working since the 1930s across multiple film studios and eventually became a full-time director.

人喰海女 / Hitokui Ama / Man-eating Ama (1958)

Release date: July 27, 1958

Director: Yoshiki Onoda

Studio: Shintoho

Cast: Ken Utsui, Yōko Mihara, Utako Mitsuya, Masayo Banri¹, Kyôko Yashiro, Namiji Namiura, Akihiko Hirata, Tetsurō Tamba et al

Availability: No online streaming, no known recent screenings. At least one television broadcast, possibly in 2017-18. A DVD can be purchased on amazon.co.jp if it is not out of stock. (If it is out of stock, you might try getting in touch with the folks at Shintoho Cinema Nostalgia, who put out the DVD.)

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I had plans to write about this film at some point, but I didn't think I would be writing about it after having actually seen it. I assumed that, with no physical media release, I had no chance. Even its Wikipedia page says “the film has never been released on home video, but is not lost as some sources claim.²" But then I found out that it did get a physical release - in the form of (almost) the entire movie included as a bonus feature on a DVD of another ama film. I say "almost" the entire movie because apparently the DVD release contains only 71 out of the film's total runtime of 74 minutes. I of course bought a copy immediately. I'm not sure if the missing footage was the reason why this wasn't given its own solo release or if it was something else, but I wouldn't imagine I'm the only person who would pay good money for a DVD with just Hitokui Ama alone.

Believe me when I say this is the most excited I've been about a movie in a very, very long time.

I've done as much research into this film as I could, but I still don't know anything about its production history, which is something I'm really curious about. If anybody has issues of Kinema Jumpo from August or October of 1958, hit me up, they might contain more information about this. It also had some kind of theatrical release in Belgium, which is... very weird.

This film is notable because Akihiko Hirata managed to be in it at a time when he was still under contract with Toho. A promotional flyer for the film mentions that Hirata appeared in this film specifically to celebrate his brother's debut as solo director (he had worked as assistant director for a long time beforehand), which is very nice. (Onoda's first solo debut was actually a different film released a few months before this one, but still.)

Unlike some of the other DVDs I've obtained, this one did not have subtitles of any kind, so I'm relying entirely on my own garbage Japanese skills and online plot summaries.³

Let's gooooooo.

We start the film off with a catfight between two women on the beach, because Shintoho. The fight is stopped in its tracks when one of the women notices a dead body washing onto the shore. There's a short scene at a police station afterwards, and it's revealed that the decedent had a vial of some kind of drug in his pocket. The cops rule it a suicide, but a single detective, Maruyama, believes otherwise.

Hirata's in this movie so briefly it's like he's trying to get out of there before Toho realizes he's gone.

The two main leads in the film are women divers named Sada and Kazue. They might be biological sisters; I can't really tell for sure, you know how it is. Sada had a checkered past in Tokyo that she lied about when she came back to become a diver, and while she wasn't directly responsible for the murder, she did hire an old boyfriend, Yoshizaki, to do it for her. Yoshizaki promised he'd leave after the murder, but he becomes an alcoholic and starts following Sada around, threatening her secret. Sada's new boyfriend Goro (played by Starman himself, Ken Utsui) doesn't know anything about her past, and he wants her to stop diving out of fear for her safety after the murder. We also get a fight scene between Yoshizaki and Goro that perfectly mirrors the catfight from the beginning, which I thought was interesting. This does have nice cinematography.

There's some fun underwater filming here that's surprisingly good for its time, if a bit stiff and the picture a bit cloudy. Also, Tetsurō Tamba is here. He plays a character named Miyata, who wants Goro's fishing grounds. He initially doesn't know about Sada, but Yoshizaki eventually tells him, and he becomes another party who is manipulating Sada by using her secret as leverage.

We get yet another addition to the cast when Kazue saves a man named Kimizuka, a visiting reporter from Tokyo, from cliff-diving in a dangerous spot. He and Maruyama go to a bar in Tokyo to question the proprietress about the dead man's identity.

Kazue is played by Utako Mitsuya, Yoshiki Onoda's future wife. She would later say she fell in love with him while filming this movie, when she didn't want to do a nude scene and he told her she could wear a swimsuit and strategically-placed towel instead.

Sada eventually ends up killing Yoshizaki out of self-defense. She stashes the body in the same rough patch of ocean Kazue stopped Kimizuka from diving into, but Kazue eventually finds it. There's a brief moment when we think Kazue is going to tell on Sada to Kimizuka... aaaand then we have a "Miss Ama" beauty pageant, because Shintoho. The pageant scene is actually surprisingly tense, with a group of women being looked over by a crowd of men and nearly atonal music building up to the moment when Sada comes out onstage, visibly distraught, not knowing who in the audience knows her secret.

Sada finally gives up and goes back to Miyata to let him do to her what he will. Goro knows about her secrets at this point, and was going to leave her to the cops and reporters, but Kazue convinces him to follow her to the island where she and Miyata are. We get another scuffle between Utsui and Tamba at the end, and there's a great moment where Tamba loses the fishing spear he'd been holding, pulls out another knife, then throws that knife away and grabs the fishing spear again, like, dude, just pick a knife. This seemed silly until it became apparent that he had to throw aside the second knife so Sada could conveniently find it and escape her ties.

Sada stabs Miyata, but dies from... something? Exhaustion? It's not very clear what actually happened to her. I was a bit disappointed by this because it felt like the narrative chose to take the easy way out by killing her instead of allowing her character any further growth.

Depending on how you look at it, this movie is either a murder mystery interrupted by a bunch of lengthy scenes of attractive people swimming, or a bunch of lengthy scenes of attractive people swimming interrupted by a murder mystery. I expected there to be, y'know, some cop stuff, the usual kind of thing you get in a murder mystery, but there's really not. And I kind of love it! It has this vibe like a darker, more grown-up version of a teenage beach movie, like something you'd sneak into with some friends who are not old enough to get into the theater legitimately. It's never super explicit, but there's definitely some stuff I can't post on here. It's not the best movie, but it's a relic of the past; I can't judge it by today's standards. This kind of thing made Shintoho money and gave people jobs, so I respect that.

As for the print, it's... certainly what you would expect from a film whose existence was uncertain for much of the last 65 years. The sound is pretty good, and it's visually crisp (i.e. not blurry or pixelated at all), but it's so dim at times that I couldn't tell if they were doing day-for-night shots or if it was the film itself. No frame is without grain and vertical lines running through it, although it's not enough to be distracting. As I said at the beginning, there's three minutes missing, and you can definitely tell that there's points where a scene cuts off prematurely or skips oddly. All in all it's a very old, very rare movie that we're extremely lucky has survived and is now (kind of) back in print.

If nothing else, I highly recommend this if you've got it bad for Tetsurō Tamba.

_____

¹ Banri, Toru Yuri and Toyoko Takechi are currently the only three people I'm aware of who worked with all three Onoda siblings.

² The source referred to here is Jasper Sharp's 2008 book Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema. Sharp dedicates pages 33-43 to a very astute survey of the phenomenon of ama films, and of Hitokui Ama, he says: "Shintoho would find a suitably buxom replacement for [Michiko] Maeda in the form of Yôko Mihara, first appearing in Yoshiki Onoda's intriguingly-titled Cannibal Ama in 1958, a movie which unfortunately appears to be no longer with us."

³ I'm very thankful to this person's blog post for providing me with a lot of information about the plot, as well as the knowledge that this was broadcast on television at some point in the past.

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.