Furai Ninpocho, But For Real This Time

It's always incredibly satisfying when I can follow up on a previous post about a rare movie after I have actually obtained a copy of that movie. MASSIVE thanks to wonderful human being Keith from Vintage Ninja for this one.

Since I wrote about this movie previously, there's no need for preamble, so I'll get right into it. But just a quick recap before we start: This is a comedic period piece with a trio of chuckleheads as its main characters, namely Kiyoshi Atsumi as Akugenta the womanizer, Makoto Satō as Jinkyobei who wants to take over a castle someday, and Juro Sasa as Benkei the super-strong warrior monk, all fighting against the Fuuma ninja clan, headed by Akihiko Hirata as Kotaro Fuuma. I was very excited to see this and to see Hirata play such a famous ninja.

The film opens with some sweet animated credits and an instrumental piece in the background that wouldn't be out of place in an Italian restaurant. The place-setting is during Hideyoshi Toyotomi's march towards Odawara Castle, which is held by the Hojo clan, but we're focusing on these three rascals rather than that action. 

Akugenta, Jinkyobei and Benkei are playing cho-han with some footsoldiers. Oh, sorry, I meant strip-cho-han. With loaded dice. Their aim is to steal the soldiers' clothes because the soldiers had been on a mission to help the women of Odawara Castle escape the siege. Our trio of course wants to get in on any action involving girls.

Having bamboozled the rest of the party that was escorting the women to safety, the trio, disguised as samurai, attempts to put the moves on them. Akugenta produces a rose and whispers sweet nothings to them all. This, for some reason, is wildly successful, and all the women fall in love with him immediately, and take their clothes off. (I will remind you that the author of the source material is known specifically for the erotic nature of his novels.)

Before the guys can react, they're enveloped in a strange mist. From the mist they are ambushed by your standard jidaigeki ninjas-disguised-as-monks gang - the women were an illusion. Well, all but one; one of the monks is really Princess Maya (Yuki Nakagawa), who chides Akugenta for his boorish behavior. He attempts to seduce her and falls into a big hole.

Princess Maya is the granddaughter of the lord of Oshi Castle, who is being held hostage by the Fuuma clan. She is criticized by Owari-no-kami Maeda (Jotaro Togami), currently holding Odawara, for having left the castle, although she was accompanied by bodyguards (the other fake monks). It's here that Kotaro Fuuma makes his entrance, and it's a great entrance; peeling off from the shadows, heard before he's seen. Kotaro tells Maeda that Oshi Castle will be an important base for their plans to defeat Toyotomi. We also see Ichirō Arashima's Nagoya-dialect-speaking Toyotomi, who seems a bit bored, but is excited to learn that a pretty 17-year-old girl might be in trouble. (Ew.)

I believe this is the only time he's played a ninja.

In the meantime the three stooges scam some folks. They stage a scene where Jinkyobei pretends to cut Akugenta's thumb off and then Benkei "sells" him magical medicine that regrows his thumb. They use the money from this scam to hire some prostitutes. Akugenta can't focus on the women he's hired, though, because he's thinking about Princess Maya. He and his friends sneak off to spy on her. They watch her being introduced to the husband who has been chosen for her - Samanosuke (Haruya Kato) - and call him an impolite name which I believe can be translated roughly as "wet noodle". (If I were inclined to take some further liberties I would perhaps translate this as "weaksauce".) They attempt to jump a wall and "rescue" Maya but are foiled by Fuuma ninjas.

Girl the eyeshadow.

Okay. Slay.

A ronin (we later learn he is Sukejuro Aohashi of the Iga clan) who the trio had a run-in with earlier appears and smooth-talks them into joining the Fuuma clan, explaining that if he joins them, they'd be able to be among the contingent of Maya's special guards. They are taken back to the Fuuma clan's secret cave base and meet with Kotaro, who tries to convince them to join. They're reluctant at first, but being shown the secret ninja harem seals the deal. Kotaro uses some ninjitsu to force them to reveal their names and identities, and then orders Akugenta to kill Aohashi as a test of strength, which he refuses to do. Aohashi then dies by Ninpo Spear That Sets Your Whole Body On Fire when he tries to escape anyway.

Maya travels to Oshi Castle to see her grandfather about the arranged marriage that she wants no part of, but her palanquin is ambushed by Iga ninjas. Her Fuuma bodyguards fight them off but become so carried away in their own spat (the Iga vs. Fuuma rivalry is long and storied; this is Ninjas 101) that the trio makes off with Maya. However, the palanquin that they thought was carrying her really only contained Jinkyobei, bound and gagged; the Fuuma bodyguards had taken her away. The trio still wants to get to Oshi Castle, though, so they hitchhike inside a cart full of radishes with some women.

There certainly are daikon in the cart ("daikon" can also mean "ham actor").

It was a trap, of course. The women were Fuuma ninjas in disguise. (The music that accompanies the reveal scene is almost comedically over-the-top. It doesn't feel like a big enough deal to require a musical cue.) The trio is captured but escape by convincing their Fuuma captors that the secret behind the Odawara Castle intrigue is that there's a big jewel hidden there. They promise to tell the Fuuma men where the jewel is and end up trapping them in a hut.

The trio admits to themselves that the Fuuma are a force to be reckoned with, and conclude that they need to undergo Fuuma training to be able to match their skills. They return to Kotaro and ask to be put through ninja boot camp which involves getting buried to the neck in sand and a very goofy training montage, during which they try to do the disappear-in-a-puff-of-smoke thing but fail, get chucked into boiling water (Jinkyobei loses his clothes somehow), are menaced by flaming torches, and are given gross stuff to eat. This all does nothing for their ninja skills, but it is pretty funny.

They're sucky ninjas, but it's war, so Kotaro hires them without them having completed their full course of ninja training. They are ordered to Odawara Castle to further refine their skills. Another fairly goofy sequence follows where Jinkyobei and Akugenta (Benkei isn't there because he sucks too bad) "demonstrate" their new "skills" against some of the Fuuma guys.

get a load of this guy

While this is happening, the Iga clan attacks the castle and kidnaps Maya on horseback. Kotaro and the Fuuma gang intercept them and we get the film's only really lengthy swordplay scene, with the Fuuma and our trio (mostly the trio) versus the Iga ninja. Both clans want Maya for their own purposes, but they are also bitter rivals, which seems more important than the princess. Kotaro seems to have Maya for good and is leading her by force across a rickety suspension bridge, but Akugenta swoops in on zipline and rescues her. Still pursued, Kotaro and his ninjas corner the trio in a cave and think they have them trapped.

But the trio are halfway to being Fuuma ninjas and have some skills of their own. They lure the ninjas into the cave and roll a big rock in front of the entrance (while forgetting that Benkei is also still inside). There follows a very funny moment where Jinkyobei and Akugenta are essentially Wack-a-Mole-ing Fuuma guys ("omae ja nai" - "not you") while trying to extract Benkei without letting the ninjas out. They then rescue the princess and thus ends this chapter in ninja history.

That was mildly amusing. I watch a lot of movies that feel like they either need to be juuust a little bit funnier or juuust a little bit more serious, and I can't tell if this was one of those or if the jokes just weren't landing. It doesn't help that the three guys are lecherous creeps and it's played for laughs. Hirata as Kotaro was at least fun; he does a good job being evil, as he always does, but this Kotaro is just plain evil, not the kind of "evil and loving it" that we've seen Hirata do in things like Ebirah, Horror of the Deep or Rainbowman. And it's nice that he's in the movie - I've been watching so much stuff lately where he's in one scene and then leaves. So, not the best movie ever, but still worthwhile! If I get my hands on the sequel, you will know about it.

See this movie for yourself on archive.org if you wish.

風来忍法帖 / Fūrai ninpōchō / Homeless Ninja Trick Book (and sequel) (1965/1968)

Release date: May 16, 1965 / May 8, 1968

Director: Tetsuhiro Kawasaki

Studio: Takarazuka Motion Picture Co. Ltd.; distributed by Toho

Cast: Kiyoshi Atsumi, Makoto Satō, Juro Sasa, Yuki Nakagawa, Ichirō Arashima, Akihiko Hirata, Susumu Fujita, Toshio Chiba, Kyoji Kusakawa, Makoto Kawaji, Jotaro Togami, Haruya Kato, Junji Sakai et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Semi-infrequent theater screenings and television broadcasts within Japan. Now available on archive.org.

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Note: I eventually managed to get my hands on this movie and took a look at it here. I will leave the rest of this post as I had written it before I watched the film.

We all like ninjas, right? Let's look at a movie with ninjas in it. Two movies, actually, since I'll be covering both the first film and its sequel. (Disclaimer: I wrote the majority of this post on a large dose of caffeine.)

This is a lewd gesture that basically implies having romantic liaisons with a woman.

Both of these films were based on a novel by Fūtarō Yamada. Yamada was a very prolific and popular novelist who wrote extensively within the jidaigeki genre. From the mid-50s up to as recently as last year, film studios couldn't seem to get enough of him; Toei, NTV, Kadokawa/Daiei, King Records and Takarazuka - just to name a few - have all dipped into Yamada's back catalogue. (His work was also the basis for the acclaimed Samurai Reincarnation.) Yamada was known for the elements of eroticism within his work, something that really was not emphasized until the rise of V-Cinema, when directors could get as nasty with it as they wanted. Once Yamada's novels began to be adapted to V-Cin, directors and writers would actually start inserting even more eroticism and grotesquerie into their adaptations than had been present in the original material. But the films we're talking about today came out of Takarazuka/Toho in the mid-60s, so while a lot of the humor may be on the racy side, there's no way it's going to approach, say, pinku eiga territory.

The book.

The specific work that Fūrai ninpōchō and its sequel were based off of was the ninth installment in Yamada's long-running Ninpocho series, published in 1963. This series is, in essence, Now! That's What I Call Ninjas. It features a who's-who of famous jidaigeki frequent fliers. Continuity is optional: the setting is somewhere around the Sengoku and Edo period, but characters who factually were not alive in the same era are depicted interacting with each other.

How many Ninpocho works are there, you ask? An ungodly amount. Yamada's Wikipedia article claims 28 full-length and serialized novels, but also mentions that Yamada himself stated that there were 31. There are more short stories than I can count.

Our films are set during the reign of Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Several other real, historical personages are featured in the film: Kiyoshi Atsumi plays the Heian-period military commander Minamoto no Yoshihira, who is here called Akugenta; Juro Sasa plays a warrior-monk who may or may not be based on the historical Benkei; Makoto Satō plays a character named Jinkyobei whose historical basis (if there is any) I am uncertain of. All three are generally rascals and cheaters who get themselves into various mishaps; I should mention that these are comedies, which should be apparent from Atsumi's presence as the lead.

Satō, Sasa, Atsumi and somebody's underpants

Akihiko Hirata has a distinguished role as Kotaro Fuma, leader of the legendary Fuma clan of ninjas. From what I have heard his performance as Kotaro was "good". There is no shortage of Kotaro Fumas on film given that the Fuma clan are some of the most famous ninjas; a very select few appearances include Lupin III, Ninja Captor, Sukeban Deka III, at least one CLAMP manga, and a good deal of Naruto. This isn't dusty old history - this is just Japanese pop culture. As with many historical figures, impossible legends grew up around Kotaro Fuma, such as the rumor that he was 7' 2" and had fangs. I'm presuming Hirata plays him as a normal guy, but as is usually the case with pop culture ninjas, he does have supernatural powers.

Since these movies aren't actually that obscure within their home country, I've read some impressions written by people who have watched them. One reviewer praises the miscellaneous jokes in the first film such as Ichirō Arashima speaking Nagoya dialect in his performance as Hideyoshi, but overall calls it a "bad work". Another reviewer says the color and analog filming looks nice, but the story is incoherent. On the whole, people don't seem that fond of either of these movies, but it sounds like they are at least entertaining.

The sequel, subtitled Happō yabure¹, was produced in 1966 but shelved due to poor reviews until another film starring Kiyoshi Atsumi became a runaway hit in 1968. Although the Fuma clan seems to have taken a beating in the first film, Kotaro sticks around, since Hirata is in the sequel. From a detailed plot summary, I can infer that Kotaro does die at the end of the second film, but gives a sort of "you haven't seen the last of me" speech as he does. (There would be no further films; I'm unsure if Kotaro returns in further installments of the source material.)

I've only seen this poster once, being used at a 2016 screening of the first film.

That's about all I can give you. Vintage Ninja has some screencaps of the opening credits. A DVD was available for purchase within the U.S. at some point, but I did some poking around in that regard and was unsuccessful at obtaining a copy. Who knows what the future holds, though. Maybe someday.

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1 Galbraith gives the sequel's English title as "Homeless Ninja Trick Book: Lost in All Directions", but happō yabure is a term that means "full of holes"/"vulnerable to criticism" (as an argument), so make of that what you will.