The two Crazy Cats Shimizu Jirocho movies: The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor [1966 / 1970]

Today we're going to take another look at the two Crazy Cats Jirocho movies, since they've both just received brand new English subtitles, which were a collaboration between me (edits, revisions, contextual research etc) and Prince Tyler (the initial script and timing). I had a blast doing these and I hope you have a blast watching them.

I did already write posts about both of these movies a few years back, but I'm taking those down because I aim for this post to replace and improve on them. We're going to cover a lot more ground this time. These films are assuming familiarity on the viewer’s part - familiarity that many non-Japanese viewers may lack - and I hope to assist with at least some of that in my “context” section at the bottom of the post.

Okay? Okay. Let's get started.

Production History

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay was shot in 20 days, which is unusually fast even for Toho, who were no stranger to cranking 'em out. This was due to the Crazy Cats themselves having an insanely busy schedule more so than anything Toho was doing, but it ended up being inconvenient for Toho as well: at the start of production, staff handed director Takashi Tsuboshima an unfinished script and basically told him "here, shoot this, we're already ready". According to JP Wikipedia, at the time filming began, the script only ran up until the middle of the first prison scene, which accounts for about 20 minutes of movie. After that, the script was delivered piecemeal day-by-day.

Pick-Pocket Bay was Tsuboshima's second time directing a Crazy Cats movie and his first time directing jidaigeki. I found out during my research that Tsuboshima was very fond of Enoken, which is interesting because the film's screenwriter Hideo Oguni also wrote for Enoken (along with contemporary comic Roppa Furukawa) during the late 1940s. Oguni had experience writing about Jirocho as well; for Masahiro Makino he wrote Shimizu Port pt. I and II in 1939 and 1940.

One result of Pick-Pocket Bay's rushed schedule was that Tsuboshima wasn't even 100% clear on the title of the movie during production. The movie was shot under the title "Musekinin Shimizu Minato", with the usual formula for Crazy Cats movie titles - the "Kureji no" before the rest of the title - having been forgotten until the in-house preview. Allegedly, staff also forgot to write a role for Hiroshi Inuzuka, which is why his character only shows up late in the movie for a single scene. One wonders if the same perhaps happened in Crazy Violence as well, since his role in that is equally forgettable.

When all was said and done, Pick-Pocket Bay was released on January 3rd, 1966, on a double bill with Account of the President's Conduct [Shachō gyōjōki], the 24th entry in Toho's long-running President series. 

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor

As I've mentioned many times, the Japanese film industry as a whole was in a death spiral by the early 1970s. Within a few years of this film's release, Toho would end nearly all of their long-running series and fire most of their contracted actors. This was the environment into which Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor was born, which makes it all the more surprising that it is objectively a better movie than Pick-Pocket Bay on almost every level. Crazy Violence is the last movie to feature all seven members of Crazy Cats together; Eitaro Ishibashi left the group in 1971 and was not present for what is sometimes considered the "final" Crazy Cats film, I'll Be Deceived.

The inception of Crazy Violence supposedly came from the Cats' visit to a ryōkyoku festival (the story of Jirocho is intimately tied to oral narrative traditions like kōdan and ryōkyoku, as we'll later see), which inspired Shin Watanabe, then-president of Watanabe Pro, to make a period piece that deliberately went against the Osaka World Expo hype of the time. As with Pick-Pocket Bay, Crazy Violence was released on a double-bill with the an entry in the moribund President series, namely The ABCs of Business Management [Shachōgaku ABC]. 

The cast of characters changes a bit for the sequel - it's not necessarily that the actors change (although some do), but secondary characters play into the narrative more than in the first film, where the focus is on Hitoshi Ueki to the exclusion of most everyone else. People like Daigoro and Komasa who had only small, perfunctory roles in Pick-Pocket Bay are given much more to do in the sequel. There is also a bit of a larger guest cast, of which Yoko Naito (pictured above) is the clear stand-out. During production, Toho sent Naito over to Toei to learn yakuza basics from their top actors such as Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta since Toho themselves had less experience with yakuza films, especially female yakuza. It certainly paid off, as Naito is hugely entertaining to watch.

Akira Fuse, who was an extremely popular singer at the time, also appears in a very superfluous role. We cannot say much about his acting skills other than that he was not a professional at this point and it shows. His character is still fairly charming, though, anyway. According to Takashi Tsuboshima, he fell down a lot during filming.

International Distribution

The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay reached American shores fairly quickly for a Japanese picture, having its Los Angeles premiere in August of 1966 as a double feature with Campus A-Go-Go, an entry in Yūzō Kayama's "Young Guy" series. The Pick-Pocket Bay title dates back to this premiere¹, and although it isn't a literal translation at all (that would be "Irresponsible Shimizu Harbor / Port"), it's kind of fun. Unfortunately, that seems to have been just about it for Pick-Pocket Bay's adventures outside of Japan; it doesn't look like it ever had any other U.S. theatrical screenings and I cannot find record of it ever having been distributed in any other country besides Japan and the U.S..

Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, meanwhile, never made it outside of Japan at all. That's pretty much that. The title, as far as I can tell, dates to Stuart Galbraith's 2008 Toho Studios Story; it is almost but not quite a literal translation, that would be "Crazy Raid on Shimizu Harbor", which I actually prefer. In Galbraith's 1998 article for Outré magazine he renders the title as "Taking a Crazy Punch at Shimizu Harbor", which, uh, yeah.

Historical Context (or "Who are all these guys that this movie is assuming I know already?")

More or less every actor you see in these two movies is playing a specific historical or semi-historical personage from the corpus of Jirocho tales, but in most cases you wouldn’t actually know that unless you looked at a cast list, since (with the exception of a few) their names aren’t mentioned within the movies themselves. As such, we’re not going to go over every single one of Jirocho’s men in this section, but we are going to take a look at some of the more prominent figures featured in these films.

Jirocho of Shimizu

Jirocho of Shimizu was a real person (we even have his photograph), born Chōgorō Yamamoto on Valentine's Day of 1820. "Jirocho" is not a given name but a nickname, shortened from "Jirohachi's Chōgorō" (Jirohachi was the name of his maternal uncle, who adopted him). While some details about his life - that he was a yakuza-slash-entrepreneur who maintained a gang in the Shimizu area - are more or less verifiable, almost everything about him has been mythologized.

Much of what is considered Jirocho "canon" is the creation of kōdanshi Hakuzan Kanda. Starting in 1907, Kanda performed stories about Jirocho adapted from accounts published by those who knew Jirocho while he was still alive, including his adopted son. Kanda is also responsible for establishing the canonical twenty-eight men commonly depicted as Jirocho's core gang, but it is well known that at least some of those men were fictional, and the ones who weren't have had fictional characteristics incorporated into their depictions over the years. 

Some of the first films to depict Jirocho were inseparable from the initial kōdan tradition. These early films were not projects that aimed to independently depict Jirocho's life according to the director's own interpretation of it; they were direct adaptations of Kanda's work and credited him explicitly. The earliest such adaptation was directed by Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director, in 1911. 

One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda's illustration for Jirocho Sangokushi.

Jirocho's life has been depicted on screen (and in manga, print, television, stage, various storytelling arts, etc.) too many times to count. Most notably, Masahiro Makino directed an unfinished 9-part (intended to be 10) series of full-length feature films for Toho from 1952 to 1954, in which Akio Kobori played Jirocho. Makino also directed a four-part series for Toei in the early 1960s which starred Koji Tsuruta. 

In both Crazy Cats films, Jirocho is played by Hajime Hana. Just to throw out a few more names, some other on-screen Jirochos include Takashi Shimura, Hiroko Kawasaki and Shizuko Kasagi (in gender-bent versions), Denjiro Okochi, Eitaro Shindo, Kinnosuke Nakamura, Utaemon Ichikawa, and Kazuo Hasegawa.

Oiwake Sangoro (or Sangoro of Oiwake)

As with Jirocho himself, "Oiwake" refers to a place that Sangoro was associated with (his birthplace of Oiwake in Shinshu), and is not part of his given name. I'd encourage readers to think of the name "Oiwake Sangoro" as being structured like the name "Texas Pete", if that helps. Unlike Jirocho, Sangoro is solidly fictional.

I cannot overstate how much of a debt stories of Jirocho owe to traditional forms of sung narrative and formal storytelling. In particular, Sangoro's popularity would not exist without Torazo Hirozawa, pioneer of Torazo-bushi, a specific style of naniwa-bushi (sung narrative) named for him. Hirozawa was virtually synonymous with Jirocho stories and was himself an actor and radio performer. If you have the language skills (or just like to listen), you can hear Hirozawa perform Oiwake Sangoro here.

It's hard to imagine anyone more suited to playing Sangoro than Hitoshi Ueki, since the characteristics associated with Sangoro in fiction - a suave womanizer, a lone wolf, maybe a bit of a scoundrel - are basically a perfect description of the onscreen persona Ueki cultivated in his Japan's No. 1 ____ Man series and to a lesser extent his work with Crazy Cats. Nevertheless, other actors who have portrayed Sangoro include Hiroshi Nawa, Yatarou Kurokawa, Ryuji Shinagawa, and Koukichi Takada.

Ishimatsu no Mori

I'll make the same joke I always do: "Toho said it's my turn to wear the eyepatch."

Of Jirocho's henchmen, one of the most well-known is Ishimatsu no Mori (again, "Mori" is not a given name, it's where he's from), who is played in both films by Kei Tani. We actually don't know whether or not Ishimatsu was a real person; there's a lot of conflicting information coming from unreliable sources, the best of which seems to be an account from someone who met Jirocho and described that Jirocho began crying when asked about Ishimatsu. The missing eye attributed to Ishimatsu may actually have been a result of his conflation with an entirely different one-eyed henchman of the Shimizu family. (Which eye Ishimatsu was missing is not consistent in depictions.)

Other actors who had a turn playing Ishimatsu include Senkichi Omura, Jun Tazaki, Enoken, Minoru Ōki, Susumu Fujita, Hisaya Morishige, and Shintaro Katsu, just to name a few.

Ōmasa 

Omasa with Komasa as played by Yutaka Nakayama.

Omasa with Komasa as played by Senri Sakurai.

In both Crazy Cats Jirocho films, Ōmasa is played by Akihiko Hirata. Ōmasa's full name was Masagoro Yamamoto, and since he was one of two men under Jirocho by that name, he was given the nickname Ōmasa to distinguish him from the other, who was called Komasa. These nicknames mean basically "Big Masa" and "Little Masa", respectively. As the name would imply, Ōmasa was known for being an unusually tall dude (supposedly over six feet), which makes Hirata kind of a weird casting choice at five feet eight, but Ōmasa has been played by a wide variety of actors of many sizes, so it seems like more of a vibe thing than a matter of actual physical size.

Ōmasa doesn't have much to do in Pick-Pocket Bay besides being Jirocho's bulldog for a few scenes, but I gotta say, Hirata kills it in Crazy Violence. Ōmasa feels like an actual character in the second film, not just a name with a person attached, and that's all thanks to Hirata getting more lines the second time around and really stepping up his game. This is a rare comedic role for him and he plays it to the hilt, stopping just short of being hammy but still getting the intended humor across. At just shy of nine minutes into the film he delivers a rolled-R "bakayarou" that hit me in my soul. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I've had a lot of coffee.

Anyway, a few other onscreen Ōmasas include Tomisaburō Wakayama, Susumu Fujita, Yu Fujiki, Sachio Sakai, Daisuke Katō, Masao Kusakari, Jō Shishido, and Seizaburo Kawazu.

Komasa

Komasa appears in both The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay and Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor. In Pick-Pocket Bay he is played by Yutaka Nakayama, and in Crazy Violence he is played by Senri Sakurai, who, at not quite five feet tall, was really the only reasonable choice. As with all of Jirocho's men, recorded accounts of Komasa are to be treated with healthy skepticism, but according to some, he was good at iaido and known to carry around a massive sword.² Komasa has no real presence in Pick-Pocket Bay, but in Crazy Violence he has a much bigger role where he gets to interact with Omasa. And by "interact with" I do in fact mean "hug":

Komasa has gotten solo treatment in a couple of films over the years, including a few (now lost) made by Shochiku and the long-defunct Kawai Film Production Company, and in the late 1920s there was even a film titled "Omasa and Komasa" produced by Teikoku Kinema Engei. A few actors who have portrayed Komasa are Eijiro Kataoka, Kōjirō Hongō, Norihei Miki, Kei Tani, Minori Terada and Hiroyuki Watanabe. Again, these actors are a very wide range of heights (Watanabe in particular was close to 5' 10"), so playing Komasa seems to be mostly contingent on vibes.

Hangoro of Ose

A man named Tsunagoro Kanto is theorized to have later taken on the name "Hangoro of Ose", but it is also possible that the two were completely different individuals, though that theory doesn't seem to have that much traction. Hangoro does not have any distinct physical characteristics that were noted in contemporary accounts; he allegedly ran away from home at 19 and later killed a sex worker before finding his way to the Shimizu family.

In Pick-Pocket Bay, Hangoro is played by Yoshio Tsuchiya. In Crazy Violence, he is played by Kazuo Suzuki. Some other on-screen Hangoros include Kenji Mori, Ryutaro Otomo, Yutaka Nakayama, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Hiroki Matsutaka and Yoshihiko Hakamada.

Hōin ("Master") Daigoro

The term "Hōin" originally referred to a monastic rank, but by the late Meiji period when Jirocho's men were around, its meaning had changed to become sort of a catchall for anybody who was involved in any number of fields - not only monks, but also physicians, painters, scholars of Confucianism, prayer healers, mountain ascetics, and a whole host of other random monk-related vocations. As such, "Master" is just about the best translation for the term that I could think of. Unsurprisingly, Hōin Daigoro was not an actual monk; he adopted the disguise as a way to get out of trouble. Daigoro likely joined Jirocho's gang in his teens and before that was working as some kind of laborer. After the Meiji restoration Daigoro left the gang and became, by all accounts, an honest and upright family man who ran a legitimate business and was involved in his grandchildren's lives even after a stroke left him half-paralyzed.

Like Ōmasa, Daigoro was reputed to be a very large man, but as we've seen, that does not matter one whit when it comes to casting. In both Crazy Cats films, he is played by Shigeki Ishida. Some other actors who have played Daigoro include Haruo Tanaka, Tokumaro Dan, Kunio Kaga, Toshiro Chiba, Shingo Yamashiro, Mitsuru Hirata (no relation), and Takashi Sasano. Haruo Tanaka seems to have been particularly attached to the role; he played it in Toho's nine-part series but was also cast in the same role for other studios' Jirocho pictures as well.

Context, Context, Context

The thing that makes these movies so fun is that they're basically comedy skits - we're all in on the joke; nobody's pretending this is an authentic reconstruction of historical events. This allows the Cats to break the fourth wall frequently and with gusto, dropping Edo-period jokes and idioms alongside contemporary slang and pop culture references from the 1960s-'70s.

As with almost every Crazy Cats movie, both of these films are full of references to the Cats' other work outside of acting. Hitoshi Ueki's hit song "Suudara-bushi" is referenced alongside yagibushi (a traditional circle dance) in Pick-Pocket Bay, in a line that I've decided to render as "folk songs and pop songs". Unfortunately a very flat translation, but probably the easiest way to get the point across to anyone unfamiliar with these terms. And in case audiences had forgotten about Suudara-bushi by 1970 (they hadn't), Crazy Violence brought it back with a reference to the single's B-side "Koriya shakudatta", which didn't translate very well (or at all, really, but if you keep your ears out, you can still catch it). You can read a bit about Suudara-bushi in English here.

These movies also feature references to contemporary events in a broader sense than just pop culture. You'll notice early on in Crazy Violence that "Gewalt", a location mentioned throughout the film, has a decidedly non-Japanese-sounding name. This word - German for "force" or "violence" - was part of the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, as it was used frequently by student protest movements to refer to armed struggle. Within the film itself, "Gewalt" is written with kanji that are intended to be read phonetically³ with no regard to their meaning (recall that kana represent individual sounds while kanji convey words/concepts). This type of phonetic reading is called "ateji", and incidentally this is also how ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work, kind of.

Similarly, another uniquely mid-20th-century phrase that gets dropped in Crazy Violence is "ietsuki, kaatsuki, babanuki", which basically means "with a house, with a car, without a mother-in-law" and was used by newlyweds to describe their ideal living conditions. (Of course, in the film, the part about the car is omitted, since cars hadn't been invented yet.) A magazine from 1967 notes it as being sort of a hot new buzzword (buzzphrase?) so this was very "of the time" as of 1970.

Tomoe Kimura's ryōkyoku single "Showa Ishimatsu Legend: A Fool Can't Be Cured Unless He Dies"

The line "A fool can't be cured unless he dies", featured as a song in Crazy Violence, is a proverb from the Edo period that is still in use today. As we see from the single pictured above, this proverb ties these movies back to ryōkyoku Jirocho stories as it was frequently used by Torazo Hirozawa in his performances of Jirocho and Ishimatsu tales, and later by other performers doing their own versions of his work.

Speaking of that era, at one point in Crazy Violence Hitoshi Ueki insults Hideyo Amamoto SO brutally and with such specific obscure Edo-period wordplay that it took me a full hour to figure out how best to translate it. I do not know what else to tell you other than at one point some monks were apparently bored enough that they thought "Hey, you know that second-person pronoun (kimi) that sounds like the word for 'egg yolk' (kimi)? We should start calling eggs 'imperial carriages', because just like how there's kimi inside an egg, there's kimi inside a carriage!"

Anyway, to bring our present discussion back to pop culture, the one really big reference in Crazy Violence is Hajime Hana's delivery of the line "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" near the end of the film. This will take some explanation.

I would commit heinous crimes for an Odoroku Tamegoro enamel pin.

Our story begins with Wolfgang from the American sketch comedy show Laugh-In. (Do bear with me here.) Wolfgang was a German soldier who would comment on the preceding sketch by saying "Very interesting..." and then following it with something that was usually a misinterpretation of the sketch. The creators of the long-running Japanese variety show Kyosen & Maetake Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! liked Wolfgang, and they wanted to bring in a similar character who conveyed the idea of "someone who doesn't make any sense but just shows up and says something". They got Hajime Hana for the role, and decided he should be dressed as a hippie for the gag, but the problem was that they couldn't figure out what his trademark line should be. Eventually, Hana came up with a phrase based on a ryōkyoku ballad about Shimizu Jirocho that he personally liked: "Ah! Tamegoro is surprised!" (Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro!)

It's hard to explain why this is funny to a western audience who has absolutely no context for it, and I don't claim to understand it perfectly myself. Hana would deliver this line while dressed as a hippie and watching a brand new Sony television, so I'm fairly certain that the humor here is meant to be in the contrast between the hippie with the television (both modern conventions) and the line, which refers to Honzamura no Tamegoro (a character from a traditional Jirocho ballad) and may have been seen as somewhat antiquated, or at the very least belonging to a different category than a TV and a hippie. If I may venture a more English-friendly equivalent, this might be like an influencer looking at her phone and saying "Forsooth! Verily, this hath astounded me!"

And, I must say, when the line finally drops at the end of Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor, it feels kind of amazing. The comedic timing is so pitch-perfect and Hana delivers the line so emphatically that I get the feeling a Japanese audience watching this in 1970 would have been busting a gut, even if it means nothing to us watching it today.

At any rate, Atto! Odoroku Tamegoro became a meme, and spawned not just a hit single but a five-film series. Five entire movies based off of a single joke.

Your author eight hours into one of several all-nighters that went into all this.

We're going to round out our explanation / examination of these two fine films with that, since I think I've covered just about everything I can think of. I'll end this post by plugging Toshiaki Sato, who is one of my favorite Japanese culture writers and has done a lot of work on Crazy Cats, all of which is in Japanese but can be read with a translator extension if you'd just like to get the gist of it. Crazy Movies is also a nice Japanese-language site to get basic information about all the Crazy Cats movies in one place.

Until next time, stay crazy.

^__________

1 If we want to get technical about where the title came from, it's most likely Toho Films (Toho's catalogue of movies available for international distribution), which gave official English titles to every film featured within it. However, we may never know for certain that "The Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay" originates from one of these catalogues, since Heritage Auctions wants $216 for the 1966 edition of Toho Films. (Unless you want to send me $216.)

2 I don't know about you all but I am not messing with a 4' 8" guy carrying a three-foot sword.

3 So 下 for "Ge", 張 for "Baru", and 戸 for "To". "Gebaruto" is the Japanese pronunciation of "Gewalt".

Koto no Tsume, Revisited (or: Koto no Two-me)

This is just a quick post to make mention of something I'm extraordinarily excited about. Recently, I was contacted by someone who had read my post about Koto no Tsume (which we're henceforth going to call Last Days of the Samurai) and asked me if I was interested in subtitling the movie, since they actually had a copy of it. That's the kind of thing you don't have to ask me twice!

You can now, for the first time in close to 70 years, watch this movie with English subtitles here. Massive thanks to kagetsuhisoka for proofreading and re-timing the entire thing after Aegisub let me down.

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I can say more about it. Last Days of the Samurai is a very emotionally fraught film, but in terms of its visuals, it's quite the bare-bones affair: there are maybe two or three sets (which could very well have been re-used from another production), the whole thing takes place over the span of about two days, and it has a relatively small cast, out of which surprisingly few people have speaking parts. Hirata's character Ushioda only has a couple of lines; his role is basically to be salty about the whole affair and then eventually die off-screen, and yes, as seen above, when we first see him he is shaving Yu Fujiki's face, which is, uh, interesting? Again, not as fun as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, but I do always enjoy these roles where he gets to be angsty as I think he plays that particular emotion very well.

I find it kind of unusual that Ushioda isn't referred to by name in the film - as in, there's no point where anybody directly addresses him using his name (his name is mentioned, but only when he's off-screen). The same goes for most of the miscellaneous ronin. Looking at the Toho News sheet I included in my last post, it seems like the actors did have their characters' names written under their pictures in promotional materials, but aside from that, you wouldn't be able to tell who the less-prominently-featured members of the cast were meant to be playing.

As for the rest of the cast, this film feels mostly like a vehicle for its three leads (Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi and Koshiro Matsumoto), and they really hit it out of the park. There's not much of a script to work with, here, and the storyline is well-trodden territory, but Ogi and Nakamura as the star-crossed lovers especially give a very evocative performance, and Matsumoto pulls off his role with exactly the strong sense of dignity that was no doubt intended. (We may recall Senjaku Nakamura getting all his teeth pulled out in Yagyu Secret Scrolls.) 

Takanori Ushioda's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Anyway, if all of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can now judge the film for yourself. It's a pleasure to know that this is out there in a format more accessible to English-speakers, so I hope you'll give it a look-see. The link, again, is here, the movie is available as both an mp4 with burned-in subtitles and as a higher-quality mkv.

2 Years of guzareshirei...

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

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

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

It's been an expensive two years. 

A very, very expensive two years.

Brand New English Subtitles for Young Season [Wakai kisetsu / 若い季節] !

I am, as ever, utterly delighted to bring you brand new English subtitles for a movie featuring Akihiko Hirata that had not previously been available with subtitles. As with many things I talk about on here, there's really no reason why this shouldn't have been subbed a long time ago - it's a funny, charming, well-made film that I think will appeal to a wide audience. In this post I'm not going to spend much (if any) time on the plot, I just want to provide some supplemental information about the film itself.

Watch it for yourself here. I'll be linking back to this page on archive.org as well, so if you're coming from there: hi, hello, yes I am like this all the time.

The first thing to note about Young Season is that it features every member of the band Crazy Cats but is not itself technically A Crazy Cats Movie. At this point, the band was still kind of getting the hang of doing movies as an ensemble, so you'll notice that compared to much grander features like Mexican Free-For-All, the bandmembers are all just kind of... there. They are not in particularly important roles, they just happen to be part of the cast. Kengo Furusawa directs; he would later become prolific within the Crazy Cats series, but did a lot of other features for Toho as well.

The film version of Young Season we're looking at today was based on a popular NHK television drama by the same name, which ran from 1961 to 1964. It was a musical workplace comedy, one of those wonderful genre hybrids that either no one bothers to make anymore or, if they do, they suck. The cast is largely the same as in the film, although Kiyoshi Atsumi had a role in the TV drama but was absent from the film. The crew is much the same as well, with Isamu Onoda having an "original work" credit as well as a co-screenwriting credit. (We have talked about this Onoda on here before; he is of no relation to one Akihiko Onoda.) Hirata did not appear in the TV version, which I believe was due to his exclusive contract at the time. There was also a sequel film produced two years later.

The theme song (which is sung by a chorus in the film version) was originally sung by The Peanuts; listen to it here.

Some of the cast of the Young Season TV series.

According to the film's Wikipedia page, it was obscure for a long time after its initial release until it was aired on television in 1986 and subsequently released on laserdisc. It was then issued on DVD twice in 2008 and 2014; I own the 2014 edition, which is where I sourced the file that I subtitled from. Young Season was released simultaneously with Yamaneko sakusen (English title "Operation Enemy Fort"), another film in which Hirata had a very small role (and a bad fake beard).

As for its stateside release, Hawaiian theaters got the first movie with English subtitles in November of 1964 (surprisingly late, considering how popular Kyu Sakamoto was; I'm betting there was an earlier release I'm not aware of). The first film had another theater run in January of 1965, and its sequel ran a few months later in July. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser describes the first film as "a musical comedy with Kyu Sakamoto, Hitoshi Ueki and Reiko Dan heading an all-star cast of funsters." (Interestingly, different theaters seemed to flip-flop on advertising the film as starring Kyu Sakamoto and Hitoshi Ueki or Kyu Sakamoto and Hajime Hana.) I have not been able to find English-language reviews of the film from its original run.

More of the cast from the TV drama who also appear in the films.

Something that I can also do in this post is talk about translation specifics that I couldn't convey within the subtitles. Since I'm not a fluent speaker, a lot of my fansubbing work just comes down to doing a whole hell of a lot of research. One fun ("fun") thing I discovered was that a line I was having a ridiculous amount of trouble with was not difficult because I wasn't hearing it right - I was hearing it fine, it was just actual, literal made-up nonsense words; kind of a Showa-era meme. (My translation of these lines had to be very indirect in order to convey the meaning of the dialogue.) There are a few other "localizations" that I had to do as well, most of which is too insignificant to really warrant mention¹ - for example, Japanese has the phrase "sly as a monkey" whereas we have "sly as a fox", but I went with "sly as a fox" because I felt like it sounded more familiar to an English-speaking audience.

I also had no real way to convey that a lot of the character names in this movie play off of their actors' real names. For example, Ichiro Arashima plays a character named "Arima"; Shinchou Kokontei III plays a character named Chota Shindo, nicknamed "Shinchou"; and Jerry Fujio plays a character named, uh, Fujio Fujio². Usually with these Crazy Cats movies, the bandmembers' characters get names that relate to their real ones (so Hitoshi Ueki can play "Ueda", Kei Tani can play "Tanida", etc), but here, the writers didn't bother. They're just Ueki, Hana, Inuzuka, and so on.

This leads us into talking about Hirata's character Minamikawa, who is actually an exception to the name wordplay; "Minamikawa" has nothing to do with his real name either phonetically or with the kanji used to write it. If I had to guess, I’d say that roles for the “guest stars” (Shinchou, Fujio, etc) were probably written with those specific actors in mind, and the rest of the roles were just filled out with Toho’s usual cast of players.

Minamikawa fits exactly the kind of smug, arrogant so-and-so archetype that Hirata was so good at playing. It's implied that Minamikawa is taking care of the financial aspect of the scam Tres Bien is trying to pull, but otherwise he doesn't have that much of a role in the proceedings. He doesn't really do anything solo, he's usually part of a group of people scheming and plotting in a room together. We do, at one point, get to see Jerry Fujio go undercover on an intel-gathering operation targeting Minamikawa and the other saboteurs which for some reason involves Fujio giving him a massage and lighting his cigarettes for him. (IMHO, Fujio Fujio deserved everything he got for that godawful "Indian Twist" song.)

He smokes A LOT in this movie, even for him. Also I guess Minamikawa is married.

Yeah okay I just liked these shots

The last we see of Minamikawa, he and a Tres Bien executive he was colluding with are getting the hell out of Dodge under threat of physical violence from Kenji Sahara. Minamikawa does not appear in the sequel.

I've never worked an office job, is this typical?

I'll wrap up by saying that I really had a lot of fun subtitling this one, and I'm very heartened to see so many Crazy Cats and Crazy Cats-adjacent movies getting subtitled these past few years. There is, of course, also the sequel to Young Season, which does not currently have subtitles; I may not be the person for that job, but I do hope it gets done someday. In the meantime I'm sure I'll pick up other projects along the way but for now I need to get some sleep. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

translation: "[squirming]"

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Footnotes:

1 One that I do want to explain is the "Liquistick"/"ick" pun. In the original Japanese, the proposed name is "Ekibeni", which sounds like "Ekiben", a boxed lunch you can buy at train stations. ("Ekiben" is also slang for having sex standing up, but I don't believe the term was in usage in that capacity ca. 1962.) Other puns I considered include "Liquistick"/"Bisquick" to retain the sense that the pun was referring to a food item, but I was not sure everybody watching the movie would know what Bisquick is.

2 Written 藤尾富士男. I assume nobody has this name in real life, but if they do, my condolences.

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

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

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

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

Here's episode 3 of Star Wolf.

Here's episode 33 of Comet-san.

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

青島要塞爆撃命令 / Chintao yōsai bakugeki meirei / Siege of Fort Bismarck [1963]: Another Very Special Post

Release date: May 29th, 1963
Studio: Toho
Director: Kengo Furusawa
Cast: Ryō Ikebe, Jun Tazaki, Yosuke Natsuki, Makoto Sato, Tōru Ibuki, Yūzō Kayama, Akihiko Hirata, Mie Hama, Susumu Fujita, Bokuzen Hidari, Yasuhisa Tsutsumi et al.
Availability: Unsubtitled Japanese DVD available via Toho. English dub available online. English-subtitled Blu-Ray also available.

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I come to you once again with another movie that I subtitled (check out the last one too). 

I first watched this unsubtitled several years ago, and although my Japanese skills were worse then than they are now, I still enjoyed it for its many explosions. In fact, the film's remarkable tokusatsu was something that I remembered very clearly even years later. The effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya, who had previously created miniatures for propaganda films that were so realistic they fooled the U.S. government into thinking they were real, and other recognizable names populate the effects department too: Sadamasa Arikawa was in charge of photography, and a young Teruyoshi Nakano served as assistant director of special effects, uncredited.

This is a plane nerd movie. The film takes place in the second year of WWI, when naval aviation in Japan was still in its infancy and airplanes were starting to be used in battle worldwide for what was essentially the first time. It is set in the time leading up to and during what is known in the West as the "Siege of Tsingtao", a joint Japanese-British operation against the German port of Qingdao within the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory, a section of China that Germany had acquired following political tensions at the turn of the century. Japanese troops massively outnumbered the Germans (24,500 to 3,750) and also took far greater losses. While the film is much more character-driven and doesn't focus too much on historical background apart from the opening narration, it is accurate that the Japanese Navy at this time did indeed have exactly two airplanes, one of which was destroyed. Read more about the event in its Wikipedia article here. Notably, British presence in the operation is entirely absent from Siege of Fort Bismarck.

There are incredibly detailed miniature replicas of planes...

...and there are extremely impressive full-scale models of planes.

That’s a real human on top of it, not a model.

The two types of plane featured in the film are the French-imported Farman MF.11 Shorthorn (whose engine was produced domestically in Japan under the "Re-type" name, and the aircraft itself produced under the name "Mo-type") and the Rumpler Taube, the latter of which is just a gorgeous machine, although it doesn't have as much screentime. Even the smaller model planes in Fort Bismarck had a wingspan of over one meter (3.2 feet), and the full-scale models were suspended from a helicopter for filming. (The full-scale models had functional rotors, but presumably could not actually get airborne.)

I also have to emphasize that, again, the explosions in this movie are unparalleled. The final ten minutes of this movie features a chain-reaction explosion sequence that is more intense than pretty much any other Toho movie of this era - that includes Godzilla films.

We're now going to move outside of Japan to talk about the movie's English dub. It was dubbed in Hong Kong by Axis International in the same year as its Japanese release and available for TV syndication through Westhampton Film Corporation. The dub is fully extant and you can grab the audio online here; for some reason, it's also available as an optional track on the Italian DVD release of the film. It's... certainly a '60s Hong Kong dub, that's about all I can say. Our patron saint of obscure Toho MSpaceHunter has the dub credits on YouTube, so you can watch them below.

As with most Japanese releases from this era, Hawai'i got the movie first. The film played throughout May and June of 1965. Unfortunately I can give no further information on the Hawaiian run other than that it happened; after June the movie disappears from the papers.

Moving on to Los Angeles, the film has more of a presence.

According to TV guides from the Los Angeles area, the film began airing on television in the middle of August 1966. This is a bit unusual because it actually precedes the Los Angeles theatrical release of the film by two years. In March 1968, the film opened at the Toho La Brea. Here's the full review, cobbled together from an OCR'd newspaper page:

'Fort Bismarck' Opens at the Toho La Brea 

BY KEVIN THOMAS Times Staff Writer 

Just before the outbreak of World War I, the Germans built a fortress on the Chinese peninsula of Liaotung. Siding with the Allies, Japan sent out military and naval forces to put down the Huns. She also provided two fragile-looking planes, a pair of Farmans imported from France. "Siege of Fort Bismarck," an old-fashioned action-packed war picture (at the Toho La Brea) focuses on the exploits of the four men who piloted the Farmans. It's the perfect entertainment for small boys. In fact, with its episodic plot and strong doses of service comedy, it resembles nothing so much as a condensation of an old serial, complete with cliffhangers.

The novelty, of course, is that the Japanese are fighting the Germans this time instead of us fighting them both. Most adults, however, are likely to consider this picture the way they consider such World War I airborne adventures as "Hell's Angels" [...] great in the sky, silly on the ground. (Believe it or not, our four heroes even run afoul of a Chinese Mata Hari.) "Siege at[sic] Fort Bismarck," nonetheless, is strong in production values and special effects. Its director, Kengo Furusawa, supplies plenty of verve.

That "great in the sky, silly on the ground" thing is a point I noticed while I was subtitling the film as well: I didn't catch any of the comedy the first time around, but after having to translate every single line, I realized that it is very goofy. The pilots are mostly a bunch of chuckleheads who sometimes end up having to be towed across the Chinese peninsula by oxen, although in their defense nobody really knew how to fly an airplane yet.

We will now take a deep dive to look at the film outside of both the U.S. and Japan. We'll start off with the film's Thai release and its corresponding poster. Mie Hama-sploitation aside, this is a surprisingly well-made poster; a real human artist had to spend a lot of time on those portraits and they do look pretty nice. (The tagline says "See battles from World War I like you've never seen them before!")

She was wearing much more clothing in the scene this was based off of.

Italy put in less effort, and was also slow to acquire the film, releasing it in 1972. The poster art they used looks like it was recycled from a pulp magazine for boys. This also reflects the troubling Italian tradition of putting a big picture of a white guy and a bunch of random Western-sounding names on a poster for reasons that I can only assume have to do with wanting to avoid making it too obvious that the movie is Japanese.

I can't lay the blame solely on Italy for that artwork, though, because Greece's earlier release of the film seems to be the source of it. Or at least I think that's the case; I can't determine whether Greece got the film in 1963 or whether the website I found this poster on was just listing the original Japanese release date. Aesthetically, though, this flyer does look older than 1972. The art itself looks like it could date back to the 1940s (or even '30s, honestly.)

Mia Xama!

Mexico was just a little bit behind, receiving the film in 1978. This is the sole record I have of a Spanish-language release, and I don't know whether the film was shown subtitled or dubbed. At least viewers knew it was in Eastmancolor! (It wasn't, it was in Tohoscope, which has basically the same specs, but it still bothers me when people call them the same.)

credit @grajallywood on insta

The film was apparently shown in Brazil in 1964 at Cine Jóia, a Japanese theater in Sao Pãolo that was later turned into a concert hall. Or at least I assume it was; the paper only says that a trailer for it was shown, but that would lead me to believe that the full film did come some time later.

The main feature was Kigeki ekimae chagama ("Station Front Comedy: Teakettle"), starring Frankie Sakai.

Totally off-topic, but man, check out this picture of Cine Jóia with a huge marquee of Akira Takarada on it.

I hope you've enjoyed our little excursion around the world, but now we're going back to Japan to talk about the star of the show. Akihiko Hirata plays Navy Captain Yoshikawa. He is in full dress uniform for the entirety of his screentime (which isn't much) and boy does he have a mustache. He does quite a lot of shouting in the last act of the film, but that aside, it's always nice to subtitle him because he usually enunciates very clearly, unlike SOME people I know (Tatsuya Mihashi).

"Maybe I will grow a mustache." -Lieutenant Nakazawa (Submarine E-57 Will Not Surrender)

That's a 2.5mb png, baby!

The thing that I remembered most from the first time I watched this movie is that there's a scene where Yoshikawa jumps into the ocean with all his clothes on. Which is disgusting, because this was probably filmed on Toho's Big Pool set and that thing was a cesspit.

The last thing I'll say about this one is that it happens to be the one and only time that Hirata and Masahiko Naruse appeared in the same film together - this is significant because Naruse voiced Dr. Serizawa in the 1954 radio play version of Godzilla, making Siege of Fort Bismarck the only movie that has a cast of not just one but two Serizawas. I have mentioned this before because I think it is neato. (Naruse plays the Chinese spy who attempts to blow up the Japanese ship using a junk boat set on fire.)

I gotta say I enjoyed this one more the second time around. It's a fun movie. I can see why it was exported for the U.S. market. More importantly, I hope YOU enjoy it when you see it with subtitles.

10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas / The Mad Atlantic [怒涛一万浬]: A Very, Very, Very, Very Special Post

Release date: July 13, 1966
Director: Jun Fukuda
Studio: Mifune Productions, released by Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Mihashi, Makoto Satō, Mie Hama, Sachio Sakai, Ryo Tamura, Akihiko Hirata, Tadao Nakamaru, Ikio Sawamura, Akira Hitomi, Yasuzo Ogawa, Kazuo Suzuki, Ben Hiura, Akiyoshi Kasuga, Shintaro Nakaoka et al.
Availability: A Japanese DVD release from Toho and an English-subtitled Blu-Ray are available. English-subtitled print also held in BAMFA film library.

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Today I'm going to talk about something that I'm extremely excited about because I actually had a hand in ushering it into existence. For the first time, this long-out-of-print movie is available to buy with English subtitles, and I helped with those subtitles.¹ Unfortunately I'm going to have to be a bit reticent with details on exactly how you can obtain the disc (you know how such things go when Toho is involved), but if you do know what I'm talking about, I highly encourage you to buy the Blu-Ray, as it includes not only the film but a host of extras such as news clips, interviews with Palmense film buffs, and more. 

The first thing to note about 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas is that it was shot partially on location in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This made headlines at the time, since Toshirō Mifune was and is one of the most (if not the most) internationally-recognized Japanese actors, and as producer of the film, he brought with him an entourage of cast and crew, including director Jun Fukuda. Prince Tyler has archived full-page scans of some Spanish-language newspapers detailing the production of the film and Mifune's arrival in Las Palmas over here. Believe it or not, this movie also has Godzilla connections: Yoshimitsu Banno served as chief assistant director, and in one brief scene Sachio Sakai (himself a Godzilla series veteran) hits the "shie" pose, originally from Osomatsu-kun but known to us Western fans as Godzilla's victory dance in Destroy All Monsters.

Despite having been filmed there, 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas never received a screening in the Canary Islands or in Spain more broadly until its screening at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival last year. Some of the extras on the Blu-Ray go into detail about the process of getting that screening off the ground, which was of course hindered by Toho being Toho. Film nerds in and with connections to Las Palmas had been searching for the film after discovering its ties to the islands, and from what the organizer of the film festival describes, he was basically sent a file of it by an anonymous benefactor who had ripped it from an HD TV broadcast. Ultimately, though, the source of the version shown at the festival was a scan of the print held at BAMFA. More about the film through the Las Palmas lens can be read here with some mildly distracting random bolding, provided you read Spanish or have a translator extension on your browser.

Unfortunately, outside of a few witty one-liners on the film's Letterboxd page, I haven't found as many Palmense reviews of the film from after the festival as I'd like. I do, however, have evidence of what the Americans thought, and what the Americans thought was what Americans thought in the '60s about basically every Japanese movie not directed by Akira Kurosawa: "this kind of sucks". When the movie premiered at Toho's La Brea theater in November of 1967, LA Times critics were not enthused:

"None of the pictures Japan's top star Mifune has made for his own company has been very good- to put it mildly.

The latest, The Mad Atlantic (at the Toho La Brea), is no exception. But at least its extravagant melodramatics and unrestrained sentimentality make it lots more fun than its predecessors. Because its trawler off the west coast of Africa has had a bad year, a Japanese tuna company sends out Mifune to take charge. Stuck behind a desk for two years, he's eager determined[sic] for the challenge and in no time at all after arriving in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands he finds the odds piling up against him. A 20-hour ordeal with the nets brings in a nice catch but not without a top hand being harpooned.

Then, an accidental tangling of lines with some Spaniards leads to Mifune squaring off on the docks with their captain. To top it off, that injured man has been found to be permanently handicapped, and Mifune's young intern has hit the bottle in remorse. (He'd really rather slug Mifune.) Back at sea Mifune begins to bring in big hauls. Just as it looks like he's going to make that quota after all a hurricane strikes naturally and he gets an SOS from a yacht. Will Mifune answer the call or sacrifice his nets? Will it work out that he's able to do both? Will his injured man face up to his handicap? Will that intern shape up? (It seems safe to say that no Toshiro Mifune fan will even have to see the movie to answer these questions.)"

Everyone is allowed their opinion, of course, but - and perhaps this is just because I have a personal investment in it - I think this movie is fantastic. The fishing scenes are unbelievably realistic (do not watch this if you have an aversion to seeing a lot of dead fish) and look like they must have been a nightmare to film, especially during the film's impressive climax, a risky rescue mission involving sailing directly into a storm, and especially since this was a wintertime shoot. I have to say I think I ultimately enjoyed the fishing scenes more than the rest of it because I appreciated the hard work that must have gone into them, but the location filming does give the movie a more expansive scale than it otherwise would have had. I really can't overstate the "realism" element when it comes to the fishing scenes; Toho made their boys fish for real. You WILL believe Sachio Sakai has been on the sea all his life.

Anyhow, Autumn and winter of 1967 was rife with Mifune features at Toho La Brea; in quick succession, they showed Masaaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, one half of Yagyu Secret Scrolls, and 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas under its English-language title The Mad Atlantic. Hawaiians got the film much earlier; it was kicking around from January of 1967 to August of that same year.

Our man has his requisite small role, but he manages to pack a lot of being a jerk into his limited screentime. Hirata plays Nozaki, the branch manager of the fishing company who Mifune and Mihashi's characters work for. His greatest hits include firing a guy and then telling him not to get so emotional about it, and essentially saying "sorry, but we gotta put the numbers before the people" after one of the fishermen is permanently disabled by a fishhook to the arm.

Boo, hiss, we're calling OSHA on him.

I promise the subtitles are far, far less crusty on the Blu-Ray. This is just me chucking my files into VLC to take some quick screenshots.

Since I had to watch every millisecond of this movie a thousand times in the process of subbing it, I have special secret knowledge: Nozaki has a given name and it's Koichi. You can see it written above the door to his office in a few scenes, and it's literally the only place his given name is mentioned.² In all media related to this film, he's just credited as "Nozaki".

Riveting, I know.

What actually is kind of riveting is that Hirata does seem to have been among the actors shipped out to Las Palmas for filming. This is all but confirmed by one of the Spanish newspaper articles, which specifies that the scenes at the airport were filmed on location - not just for B-roll but, to quote, "exterior scenes in which the Japanese actors took part". Since Hirata was in those scenes, he must have actually been there. Mifune states in an interview that along with the film crew "five actors and one actress"³ were brought over - that could possibly be Mie Hama, Mifune himself, Makoto Satō, Tatsuya Mihashi, and perhaps Ryo Tamura and Akihiko Hirata. Toho sent him to Guam for Son of Godzilla around this time as well; I guess he was down to go to Las Palmas too.

[Edit May 2026: As per Brett Homenick's 2023 interview with Ryo Tamura, it is confirmed that he was one of the actors brought to Las Palmas:

There was a movie called The Mad Atlantic (1966), with Mr. Mifune as the chief fisherman and us as the crew. It was shot in the Canary Islands.

That was my first trip abroad, and I was very happy about that. We were staying at the same hotel. Around midnight or 1:00 a.m., I heard his drunk voice downstairs. He was yelling, “Come out, you idiots! Are you refusing to drink with me?” Everyone escaped to their rooms. (laughs) I think he felt more confident when he drank.

End of edit.]

Now that I've shown screenshots, I can bring up the weird thing about this movie, which is that it's shot in black-and-white. I have nothing against black-and-white filming on principle, but for this specific movie, which includes such beautiful outdoor shots of Las Palmas, it would stand to reason that you'd want the film to be as colorful and vibrant as possible. And what's even stranger is that the original Toho DVD is formatted oddly for no apparent reason. It's in an unusual frame rate: 29.97 whereas, as per my contact who I worked for, "Most of the time the films from Toho will be frame-rate 23.976 'progressive' (AKA 24fps)." The 29.97 frame rate is "usually reserved for TV shows, or the made for TV movies and so on when it goes into the DVD, not actual films..." The likely conclusion we can draw from this is that the movie was in obscurity by the time Toho decided to release it on DVD in 2023, and they had to just kind of work with whatever they could get because an ideal-quality print was not available.

As for the black-and-white, since this was produced by Mifune Productions, I'm going to blame him for that. Mifune appears to double down on this decision in one of the Spanish interviews:

"Who is the movie being made here for?" We asked him.  

"For Taiyo Fishery," he said, "and it will be distributed by Toho worldwide."

"In color?" 

"No, black and white." 

The black-and-white works quite well for the scenes on the fishing boat, especially the dramatic rescue scene, but something about depicting Las Palmas without color just feels downright wrong. Well, Mifune had a vision, I suppose, and who are we to dispute it?

So, now you can watch this movie with English subtitles and you don't even have to go reserve a space in the viewing carrel with my good buddies at BAMFA (they do not know they are my good buddies, but a member of faculty did me a kindness once and I love them for it) or attend a film festival to see it.

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1 I say "helped" because I handled the Japanese-to-English translation while Prince Tyler took care of the Spanish-to-English parts. I was also working off of a transcript, but said transcript was incredibly rough, so the majority of this was done by me, a dictionary, kotobank.jp, and the Japanese Wikipedia page for "Long-line fishing", all working together as one big happy family at 2 in the morning while I was sick with something that might have been covid.

2 To be as unbiased as possible (this is sarcasm, I will always be biased), I should also mention that Tsuda, the young intern mentioned in the American review, also has a given name - Kohji -  that you would not know unless you watched the film and caught the split-second scene where Mihashi's character shows Tsuda's ID around while he's searching for him in Las Palmas.

3 I actually doubt this, because it seems like there's a hell of a lot more than five Japanese actors in scenes that look likely to have been shot on location.