帰って来た若旦那 / Kaettekita wakadanna / The Young Master Comes Back [1955]

Release date: November 1st, 1955

Studio: Toho

Director: Nobuo Aoyagi

Cast: Koji Tsuruta, Yoko Tsukasa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Machiko Kitagawa, Murasaki Fujima, Minoru Chiaki, Shoichi Hirose, Akihiko Hirata et al.

Availability: Infrequent theater screenings and at least one television broadcast, otherwise unavailable for viewing.

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get a load of this guy

Koji Tsuruta is the star of the show here, and from what I can tell this movie seems to be one in a loosely-connected series of other films he had starred in that all shared the word "Wakadanna" in their title. All of them are equally obscure and I can't say much about them for certain, but Tsuruta appears to play a different character in each film, so they're probably not a "series" in terms of narrative continuity.

I'm interested in this one because of how obscure it is and because Hirata's role in it seems to be best described as "nefarious bakery financier". The plot: the head of Nanban-do, a candy shop that has been in operation since the Edo period, hopes that his son Shuichi (Tsuruta) will continue the business, but Shuichi is abroad, studying art in the US. Sakurako (Nijiko Kiyokawa), the owner of Sakura Bakery, wants to take over Nanban-do in his absence. Her financier Mochizuki (Hirata), who wants to marry her daughter Kyoko (Yoko Tsukasa), uses a spurious IOU belonging to Nanban-do as grounds to claim ownership of the candy shop. Mochizuki also intends to embezzle from both Sakura Bakery and Nanban-do. Shuichi, meanwhile, returns from America and is told that the date of his arranged marriage to Harue (Machiko Kitagawa), a woman he doesn't actually want to marry, is approaching. Harue has another lover as well, a man named Igarashi (Minoru Chiaki), and Shuichi manages to get Harue's father to agree to let her marry Igarashi instead. After Kyoko rejects Mochizuki, her and Shuichi end up together.

This comes to us from Nobuo Aoyagi, who directed my pet movie Rakugo Nagaya wa hana zakari. It shares some of the cast with that film as well. Aoyagi is more famous for the Sazae-san series, which we may be looking into at some point in the future. The film was based on an idea by Seiji Kaede, who I can't really find any information about, and adapted by Tokuhei Wakao, a fairly prolific screenwriter and banker. Among other things, Wakao co-wrote the script for Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple with Hiroshi Inagaki and adapted Structure of Hate to the screen. The soundtrack was done by Masaru Satō which means it was probably very good.

Aside from the poster above, we have two stills of Hirata's no-good two-timing bakery financier, and things aren't looking so great for him.

This is such an odd angle on him and my artist brain loves it. Drawing this would make an excellent study in perspective/foreshortening/lighting.

That first, clearer still comes courtesy of the Japanese Movie Channel (more stills here), who aired the film as part of an ongoing celebration of Koji Tsuruta's work in November of 2019. As I've said before: if it was aired on television, that means a digitized print exists, and that means this could be released on DVD at any time, but it hasn't been. That still was apparently so good they colorized it and used it on another poster as well:

The funniest thing about this movie is that all of the reviews I've read say the same thing: "It's called 'Young Master Comes Back' but he doesn't come back until the middle of the film." (Some append that by saying "and he isn't even young", as Tsuruta was about 30 at the time, but as somebody rapidly entering their late 20s, I'm not sure I approve of that one.) Aside from reviews around the time of the 2019 broadcast, there are reviews from 2010 and 2011, so there must have been more screenings, but I can't determine where or exactly when. 

Apparently, there is a competition among theaters in Japan that show classic movies called the "Kanpe Grand Prix" ("Kanpe" is short for "cunning paper", a term which basically means something like "cheat sheet"), where people can vote on their favorites out of several categories (best director, best actor, best actress, etc) as pertains to all the old movies shown at those theaters that year. In 2017 Murasaki Fujima received one vote for the Best Actress category from someone called "Ando-san". So there was a screening at some point around 2016-17 as well. (Shoutout to Ando-san.)

That's about all I can give you for this one. A last interesting thing to note is that this does have an official English title ("Tactics of Love") but no apparent distribution to English-speaking markets. 

落語長屋は花ざかり / Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari / A Long, Comic Story of Houses In Their Prime (1954)

Release date: March 17, 1954

Director: Nobuo Aoyagi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Aiko Mimasu, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Yūnosuke Itō et al

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Four confirmed theater screenings of the shortened re-release version between 2000 and 2016; the full film is most probably lost.

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[Note: In the time since writing this post, I've obtained and translated an early draft script of this film. You can see the script and my translation here. I've edited this post to include the new information I've gathered from reading the script.]

So this post turned out to be longer and more involved than I initially planned for it to be. It's one of many things I've written about on here that I've done so much research into, I almost feel like I've seen it, even though I haven't. I won't be covering the plot, but if you're looking for that sort of thing, there is a page where someone has written it out in detail, although they're referencing a shortened re-release of the film and not the 91-minute original.

This is the first in a trilogy of films which adapted classic rakugo stories and fleshed them out into one semi-connected narrative. As rakugo is performed by a single storyteller acting out various parts, the idea here was to adapt those stories into scenarios where each part was played by a separate actor, instead of having one person act them all out. Other changes were made to the stories, but as I understand, some variation is natural in rakugo, especially depending on the geographic location where the performance is taking place.

The rakugo stories included in Nagaya wa Hana Zakari (or, at least, the early draft script for it) are:

• Nedoko ("Bed"/"Bedroom")
• Kaji musuko ("Fire son")
• Dekikogoro ("Impulse"/"On a whim")
• Umaya kaji ("Stable fire")
• Niramugaeshi ("Glaring back")
• Shingan ("Mind's eye)
• Tarachine ("Mother", "Father", or "Parent" in general)

While you can't watch the film itself, you can check out "Rakugo Mambo" and "Chinchirorin" on YouTube. They are both absolute bops. I like to listen to them while I'm working night shift.

I don't know that audiences would have been going to see this because they were interested in it as a film - they would see it for Enoken, Roppa Furukawa, and the soundtrack composed by Toriro Miki. None of these names are that well-known outside of Japan unless you're interested in a very specific time period of Japanese pop culture history, so I'll give some brief context.

Kenichi "Enoken" Enomoto was a comedian who got his start as an assistant in Asakusa Opera plays during the late 1910s and eventually moved from stage comedy to film with PCL, the precursor to Toho. I find the late 1940s and early 1950s to be a fascinating era in Japanese cinema because it is filled with actors like Enoken, who had been acting since before Japan had a motion picture industry to speak of, alongside a generation or two of younger actors for whom film was the only way they had ever experienced acting. (Even so, it was common for actors at this time to perform in small-time stage plays - such as Toho New Face festivals and the like - before they made their debut in front of the camera.) You went to see movies for Enoken: a good deal of his films have "エノケンの" ("Enoken's") preceding the title.

Yes this is the picture of Enoken we're going with. (Enoken doing the kissing, promoter and yakuza Kazuo Taoka being kissed)

Enoken was massively famous throughout much of his life but suffered the loss of a son and some health problems that left him despondent and hospitalized. However, Harold Lloyd would visit him and encourage him to work with some of his disabilities - including a prosthetic leg - and he would return to acting, mostly in television, incorporating his prosthetic leg into his comedy routine. He ultimately died of liver failure at age 70.

Furukawa, also an editor and essayist, came from former nobility, and seemed to be headed towards a career in writing until a turn to stage acting in his early 30s. He started a production company that mostly put out acharaka ("nonsense" comedy plays) which were apparently not that great. Furukawa joined Takarazuka within a few years of its founding and then joined PCL. With PCL he had a comedy troupe that attained a high degree of popularity and put on a multitude of variety plays and musicals with large attendance. He was at the height of his fame just before the war, and while he was patriotic, he also seemed to find certain nationalistic wartime trends ridiculous - he was asked to change his name so that it would be written in kanji (he spelled "Roppa" in katakana) and was quite angry about it. After the war his fame waned; although there was a brief revival in the mid-1950s (and he would dub a small role in the Japanese version of Dumbo), his health issues, including diabetes and tuberculosis, led to him dying early at 57.

ca. 1935, from left: manzai comedian Entatsu Yokoyama, manzai writer Minoru Akita, and Roppa

Toriro Miki was multi-talented: he wrote lyrics, composed music, directed for the stage, and wrote for television and film. Here he is being given a whole roasted chicken by a fan.

That's about how I'd look if somebody gave me a whole roasted chicken. That's also about how I'd look if I gave somebody a whole roasted chicken.

Miki was a scholar at first and then, after being drafted, began composing music while in the military. After the war he decided to pursue music full-time. Miki was associated with jōdan ongaku, which directly translates to "joke music". As I understand it, this is jazzy music that is performed with a light, joking attitude; Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats as well as Frankie Sakai and City Slickers are two very popular bands who performed in this style. Miki worked extensively in commercial jingles and TV themes, and is the only one of these three who seems to have lived a long and possibly not depressing life. He died at age 80 while his four-part memoir was being published.

So, where does A Long, Comic Story fit in the timeline of these three entertainers? After having explored their respective back catalogues, this movie is barely a blip in the shadow of their much more famous works. Enoken and Miki were doing pretty well at this point, and Furukawa was on the decline, but, more importantly for our purposes, the cast also includes a young up-and-comer who had only been acting for about a year and was, before the end of 1954, going to play a pivotal role in arguably the most famous movie to ever come out of Japan.

sixth from far right on the row of portraits and also the still on the far left

This isn't Akihiko Hirata's best-known movie (it's not really anybody's best-known movie), but I think everything he was in before Godzilla is interesting just by virtue of it being before Godzilla. A Long, Comic Story was released about a month after his very strong performance in Farewell Rabaul, which got him noticed by Ishirō Honda and eventually cast in Godzilla, and he had also had his first (and only) leading role in film the year before - in a film that at least one critic basically described as a dumpster fire. (I disagree, but what do I know.)

From what I can gather, the full movie may actually not exist anymore. In 2010 a film and culture writer reached out to Toho directly about screening the film at Jimbocho Theater as part of a festival, and was given the 38-minute re-release version. Helpfully, the person who obtained the 38-minute version wrote a blog post about it which specifies that Hirata's role was cut entirely from the shortened version. Given that the only screenings I can confirm - which go as far back as the year 2000 - also use the shortened version, I think it's pretty safe to say that's all that remains of this movie, which would make the posters and the pamphlet the only pictorial evidence we have of Hirata's role. I think you can probably understand why getting the script felt so special.

In the film, Hirata plays Sonosuke, the firebug son of a landlord/gidayu enthusiast who eventually gets disowned and kicked out for skipping out on his father's gidayu performance to go watch a big fire with his girlfriend (eventually wife). Reading the script made me sorely upset that the parts of the film that include him were cut - if the final film resembled the script in any way, this was a rare comedic role for him. Sonosuke almost seems like he was written to be a teenager rather than an adult, but the script as well as the source material it was adapted from do specify that he is an adult.

I guess I'll just end this post by encouraging you to please read the script. Again, this movie is a footnote, but it's precisely because it's so obscure that I was able to do something like this; deteriorating Kurosawa scripts that are selling for upwards of $500 are just not in my wheelhouse. And, honestly, it's a really good and funny movie. If you're familiar with the actors, it is very easy to recreate a version of the film in your head, even if none of us will ever see it for real.