"Zero Pilot" Goes West

Today we're going to take a look at this somewhat odd VHS release of Toho's 1976 Zero Pilot, originally titled Ozora no Samurai ("Samurai of the Sky"). The reason why I say that this is odd is because the English-dubbed tape pictured above is the only physical release of this movie in the United States. You can get a Japanese DVD for relatively cheap, but if you don't speak any Japanese and want to watch it, your only option is to endure the dub.

So the main thing to know about this movie is that it's based off of the life of former flying ace Saburo Sakai. That this film was (at least at one time) readily available to an English-speaking audience is somewhat apropos, considering that Sakai's life and wartime activities were brought to such an audience in 1957 via Samurai!, an autobiography ghostwritten by Martin Caidin. The reliability of Samurai! has been called into question, and Sakai himself states that the 64 kills Caidin ascribes to him in the book - a number also given on the back of the VHS box - is not an accurate reflection of his actual record. I should emphasize, however, that Zero Pilot isn't based on any specific work by Sakai, but rather a kind of general overview of his life. 

Although we're mostly looking at the overseas release of this movie and not its production history, I would be remiss not to mention that the film was financed by Taikan Productions. Taikan was ostensibly a production company, but really it was a religious organization formed as an offshoot of Tenka Ikka no Kai ("One Family Under Heaven"), a company founded by a dude named Kenichi Uchimura that was absolutely, 100% a pyramid scheme. This kind of thing was getting to be such an issue in Japan in the late 1970s that new laws against pyramid schemes were enacted, resulting in the dissolution of Tenka Ikka no Kai and the jailing of its founder for three years.

Moving swiftly on... despite its incredibly shady financing, the people who worked on the actual movie did their absolute best, and the result is definitely up to Toho's reputation for remarkable special effects. Godzilla fans will recognize the name of Zero Fighter's SFX director, Koichi Kawakita, for whom this was his first time in a directorial role. Toho was really going through it in the 1970s, but even so, no footage or miniatures were reused, and Kawakita's attention to detail is what saves this from being a totally forgettable film. It's also kind of fun to see old Toho regulars like Ren Yamamoto and Yoshio Katsube still sticking it out even while the studio was faltering.

One area where Zero Pilot is unfortunately pretty forgettable, though, is within Akihiko Hirata's filmography. This is one of his "show up, look authoritative, explain some stuff, and then leave" roles, and his cumulative screen time amounts to around three minutes (I did count). His English dubber's vocal style is best described as "drunk and belligerent". The only really notable thing about this role is that it's the only time Hirata and Hiroshi Fujioka - best known by far as Takeshi Hongo AKA Kamen Rider Ichigo - ever crossed paths.

Hirata and Fujioka do share the screen directly in several scenes, which I find more amusing than I probably should. Here is an annotated screenshot that you can use to annoy your friends who don't watch tokusatsu.

Moving even more swiftly on, let me now begin talking about what I actually made this post to talk about: the tape.

So I guess the most pressing issue on my mind here is who exactly is responsible for that dub. Well, ultimately, the answer to that is Toho themselves, considering they exported an English-dubbed version of it in 1984 (trailer here). But in terms of who actually executed the dub, that would be the Matthew Oram/Barry Haigh group, a Hong Kong-based outfit who should be very familiar to Godzilla and Shaw Brothers fans. Among many other roles, Matthew Oram himself dubbed Dr. Mafune in the English version of Terror of Mechagodzilla. In Zero Pilot Oram dubs Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but for whatever reason the export trailers feature Barry Haigh voicing Sakai instead.

What is very, very strange about this English dub is that it actually features alternate footage. Two entirely separate versions of the film's bookending scenes were shot, with the export version featuring Hiroshi Fujioka sporting a mustache and the Japanese cut having him 'stacheless. This kind of sounds like something I just made up, but you can see it for yourself here.

(...did that say "OBAN International Finance Group"?)

Although the dub itself was commissioned and produced closer to the film's 1976 release, Zero Pilot didn't make its way onto VHS until ten years later, in 1986. It is what the kids refer to as a "big chungus" (Godzilla, King of the Monsters! for scale):

The 1986 Combat Video VHS release was not, however, the first time the dub was heard on American shores. The film ran throughout March of 1984 and into April at Los Angeles' Kokusai/Crenshaw theater. During this theatrical run it was shown on a double-bill with Nomugi Pass, which also features Hirata in a very small and somewhat silly role (all his character really does is get grossed out by how badly silk-spinning mills smell). I don't technically know for certain that Zero Pilot was shown dubbed, but considering Toho were responsible for exporting it and they'd already had a dubbed version sitting around since the '70s, it seems pretty likely to me that they would have given the dub to American distributors.

Most everything I've talked about so far is not terribly obscure information, but Combat Video itself is a bit harder to get a bead on. "Combat Video" is in fact not the name of a specific label, but an offshoot/series/arm/??? of a larger outfit called Video City Productions, an Oakland-based distributor active throughout the 1980s (specific dates elude me). Video City was no stranger to Japanese war films, also releasing Toei's Port Arthur (featuring our man as well) and The Imperial Japanese Empire in 1985. Other illustrious titles distributed by the company include Crazy Fat Ethel 2, SS Hell Camp, White Cannibal Queen and The Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

You know... I'm kind of just... starting to wonder if this tape might not actually have been officially licensed by Toho.

What in the who?

In the interest of brevity, and because I originally intended to restrict the scope of this post to just the Combat Video VHS, I'm not going to go over the film's release in other countries, but it actually did make it quite far. Just to give a quick summary: West Germany was the first to receive Zero Pilot a remarkable matter of weeks after its Japanese release, followed by Sweden and Finland the next year, Denmark in 1978, Portugal in 1979, Spain in 1980 and finally Hungary in 1991. I think it's fairly safe to say that despite being a Japanese product, this movie was at least in some way intended to be palatable to an international audience. We can tell that Toho was considering how it would be received overseas by the fact that they catered Hiroshi Fujioka's facial hair to their intended viewers' perceived taste.

On that note, I'll leave you, but before I do, let's just take a nice long look at the German DVD release of Zero Pilot, which for some unknown reason decided to give Akihiko Hirata top billing despite, as mentioned, only having three minutes of screen time.

I won't disclose whether or not I searched this up on eBay and bought a copy.

兄とその妹 / Ani to sono imoto / A Brother and His Sister [1956]

Release date: September 19th, 1956

Director: Shue Matsubayashi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Ryo Ikebe, Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Keiju Kobayashi, Eijiro Yanagi, Akihiko Hirata, Daisuke Kato et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Infrequent theater screenings; most recently in 2015.

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Recently we had a look at Summer in Eclipse, so now let’s see about the film it played on a double-bill with (in some theaters, at least). With its all-star cast - Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa and Ryo Ikebe all playing off each other, whew - it’s surprising that there’s so little coverage of this movie out there. Unfortunately that means the amount of information I can give you about this one will be pretty limited, but let's see what's up anyway.

A Theater SS News pamphlet showing A Brother and His Sister playing alongside Summer in Eclipse.

Our director, Shue Matsubayashi, does not need much of an introduction; he was a bit of a Toho workhorse, producing some big hits for them such as The Last War, Storm over the Pacific, and The Imperial Navy. For a long time I made the mistake of associating Matsubayashi specifically with war dramas, since those are his most well-known films, but he did also make light comedies and romances as well: he directed quite a few entries in Toho's Shachō [President] series, and some one-offs with goofy titles such as Oddball Nippon and Dimple of Tokyo. A Brother and His Sister was the first film Matsubayashi directed under his contract with Toho.

A Brother and His Sister is a remake of Yasujiro Shimazu's 1939 film for Shochiku of the same name, which is usually referred to in English under the slightly different title A Brother and His Younger Sister. This film is, from what I've seen, generally regarded as a classic within the wider canon of Japanese cinema; see this for better context than I could give it. Since the earlier film is readily available, I've watched it in the process of writing this post. Obviously this was very useful for familiarizing me with the plot of the earlier film, but because I don't have the later film to compare it to, I can't say how similar or different they are.

I will say that the earlier film is so much a product of 1939 and is so modern for its time in ways that would not have had the same impact as they would in 1956 - men and women talk about issues of marriage and gender roles freely, and the lead character, Mamiya (Shin Saburi in the original), is utterly respectful of his younger sister Fumiko (Michiko Kuwano) and her ability to make her own decisions and live an independent life - that, unless the entire purpose of the remake was to examine the way gender roles and society had changed in the 17 years since the original's release, I'm not really sure what the point of remaking it was. The original film also ends on a fairly imperialist note, with the protagonist being hired on at a firm that is in the process of expanding into Manchuria and further into mainland Asia; this was, as I understand, removed in the remake.

(The original also has a funky organ soundtrack that I doubt the remake could replicate.)

Tsukasa, Ikebe and Hara.

Ikebe may be the star of this movie, but we are not, sorry to say, a Ryo Ikebe fanblog. Akihiko Hirata plays Michio, the role that Ken Uehara filled in the 1939 film, and having watched the original I can say that Michio is an inveterate flirt, or at least as much of an inveterate flirt as one could be on film in 1939. I had no trouble whatsoever imagining Hirata in this role. Ostensibly, Michio also speaks English; in the 1939 film this is only referenced in conversation as an important plot point (Fumiko speaks English as part of her job as a typist, and overhears Michio talking about her in English when he thinks she can't understand him, which leads to an essentially one-sided romance and a marriage proposal) and not shown on screen. Having not seen the remake, I'm not sure if it's still the case that characters are established as speaking English without us actually hearing them speak English.

Regardless, I see a lot of people assume that Hirata could not speak English or had to learn his lines phonetically due to his heavily-accented English performance in Latitude Zero, but personally I think there are way too many movies where he speaks English and sounds fine for him to have been doing all of that phonetically. He actually does seem to confirm that he knew some English - but perhaps didn’t have a very high opinion of his skills - in an interview where he's asked if he's seen the American version of Godzilla '54 and he answers "Yes, I was surprised at how good my English was."

Getting down off my soapbox, I have to admit that signs do point towards no one in the remake speaking English either, as no reviews I've found mention Hirata's English performance in this film. I also haven't been able to drag up any pictures of him as Michio, despite it sounding like he has a fairly prominent role.

Laputa Asagaya - Showa film nerd holy land - played the film thrice: once in 2003 as part of a Yoko Tsukasa film festival, once in 2007 as part of a Shue Matsubayashi film festival, and once in 2015 as part of a Setsuko Hara film festival. (Where is the Akihiko Hirata film festival?) It also played at the Shin Bungeiza in 2015 alongside A Good-Natured Couple, another 1956 Toho film starring Ikebe.

It's too bad that this one hasn't had more attention given it, because Matsubayashi is a very good director and I would think it would be interesting from a film-historical standpoint to look at a post-war remake of an esteemed pre-war film. For some reason, English-language sources seem to have decided that the 1956 film is called "Ani to sono musume" instead of "Ani to sono imoto", which is... not correct... like, at all... but that is the title it is listed under on IMDb as well as what turns up the most results in a Google search. It doesn't seem to have ever had an English-subtitled release anywhere outside of Japan, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had a small run in Hawai'i in the 1950s; it seems like the kind of thing that might have been shown over there.

Well, now you and I know about it, at least.

丼池 / Dobuike [1963 & 1968]

drawing by Kisaku Ito for the 1963 set plans

Background

Today we're going to look at three separate performances (and one film adaptation) of the same play. As I mention nearly every time I write about a stage play, it's difficult to research plays because there's usually not a wealth of visual evidence for them, and my area of interest is, of course, confined to a time before everybody had a camera in their pocket. But I'm pleasantly surprised that I was able to find a decent amount of information and images this time, so this post will run a bit longer than my other stage play posts.

What does "Dobuike" mean? I'll copy/paste Kotobank's definition, because it is as clear and concise as you're going to get: "A pond located in Minamisenba, Chuo Ward, Osaka City. It was filled in 1874. Before World War II, furniture wholesalers and textile wholesalers were crowded along Dobuike-suji, which faced the pond. Formerly known as Ashiike". 

The plays we're looking at today were written specifically for the stage; they are not adaptations of older literary works or traditional theater. The author/director of Dobuike was Kazuo Kikuta, who is so prolific and esteemed within his home country that to give a brief overview of his career in English feels almost insulting. Kikuta began as a playwright in the mid-1920s, working closely with Roppa Furukawa and his troupe, and then joined Toho in 1936. He left Roppa's troupe due to creative differences in 1943 and eventually became one of Toho's foremost stage directors in the 1950s. Kikuta was an enormously significant figure in the world of post-war Japanese stage musicals, and among many other achievements, he acquired the rights to My Fair Lady and became the first Japanese person to stage a Broadway musical. Many of his works focused on Osaka, including Dobuike.

I would encourage you to research Kikuta yourself if this sounds interesting to you - his career is far more expansive than I can cover here. Somehow, despite his domestic fame, he doesn't have an English Wikipedia page, but maybe some of you read French?

The Play (and the Movie)

The play is set in a back alley off of Dobuike-suji, where textile wholesalers do business. Masa Kanazawa, a woman with ten years of experience as a shop clerk who's just been cheated out of her life's savings, seeks a loan from Katsumi Muroi, the president of Muroi Trading, so that she might start fresh at a co-op trading center. To this end she meets with Sadahiko Kanemitsu, head clerk of the Sonoda firm. Katsumi is not in the business of giving out loans freely, and insists on carefully investigating the circumstances of her borrowers beforehand. To quote the synopsis from the booklet accompanying the Umeda Koma Stadium performance: "When we lend, we look like the Salvation Army; when the payment comes due, we look like vampires".

Chūhei Sonoda, president of the Sonoda firm, approaches Katsumi to arrange for a loan to a business in Minami-Kyūhōji. Initially Katsumi refuses, but then "Old Lady Matsuko", the firm's primary financier, steps in and asks Katsumi personally to provide the loan. This is not out of kindness, however; to quote the synopsis again, Matsuko says "You don’t necessarily have to drive them into bankruptcy; just strip them of their rights, transfer the business to someone else, and pocket the difference."

Then, a woman named Umeko Murata appears, asking for a financial consultation with Matsuko. Matsuko refuses, able to see through Umeko and recognize that she herself intends to bleed the local merchants dry, but Umeko forces the matter. Umeko is denied a loan from Katsumi, and through desperation, she winds up exploiting the weakness of Masunaga, a section chief at Iiyama Manufacturing, for women.

Katsumi, meanwhile, seeks to get out from under Matsuko's auspices by any means necessary. Finally, she comes up with an idea: Muroi Trading is to begin offering "Treasure Investment" certificates in the form of promissory notes, a scheme wherein the firm takes their customers' money and invests it in high-yield ventures that promise good returns. This would otherwise be illegal if it were not set up in the form of a "loan relationship": the customer gives money and receives a promissory note in return. The Treasure Investment concept proves enormously lucrative. Katsumi is able to break free of Matsuko, and even leaves her fiancé to focus solely on moneylending.

Although, to me, that sounds very serious and complicated, Kikuta ends his introduction in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet by wishing his audience "an enjoyable day filled with laughter", so it's possible the actual play is more light-hearted than the synopsis makes it out to be.

In September of 1963, Toho released a film adaptation of Dobuike, which was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, written by Giichi Fujimoto, and based off of Kikuta's original story. The main four actresses again reprised their roles, with a few new additions (notably Kenji Sahara). What's surprising to me about this movie is that, despite how detailed and colorful the sets appear to have been, the movie itself is in black-and-white.

Since we don't have any video from any of the plays, watching the movie would be our only chance to see Kikuta's original story performed with a live cast. Unfortunately, the movie is as obscure as the plays: it's been broadcast on television a few times, but never released to streaming or physical home media.

As for the main cast, it's a bit difficult to break it all down thanks to Dobuike having been staged so many times, but here's my best shot:

• Mitsuko Mori plays Masa Kanazawa in both 1963 plays and the 1963 film; Yuko Hamaki plays Masa in the 1968 Imperial Theater performance.
• Isuzu Yamada plays Umeko Murata in all three plays; Michiyo Aratama plays Umeko in the film.
• Aiko Mimasu plays Matsuko Taira in every version.
• Yoko Tsukasa plays Katsumi Muroi in every version.
• Akihiko Hirata plays Sadahiko Kanemitsu in all three plays; Keiji Sada¹ plays Sadahiko in the film.
• Kenzo Tabu plays Chūhei Sonoda in the Umeda Koma Stadium performance, and Ganjiro Nakamura II plays Chūhei in the film; the casting for this role in the other two plays is unknown to me.

I gather that Dobuike is Women's Business™. In Kikuta's aforementioned introduction, he highlights the main four actresses first, and then just kind of says "oh yeah and I guess the guys are pretty good too". Hirata himself is not mentioned at all in the Umeda Koma Stadium booklet aside from once, in a review, and it's a similar "and he is also there" statement. (Reviewers also were not shy about blatant spoilers, and as such I know that the story does not end well for Katsumi.)

Anyway, we'll move on now to the plays themselves. 

The Performances

1963 / Geijutsu-za [Arts Theater]

The first stage adaptation of Dobuike opened on New Year's Day, 1963, and ran into February; exact dates elude me. I'd imagine there's a booklet for this performance floating around somewhere, but I haven't seen any copies, if so.

The Geijutsu-za was a relatively small theater (to us, anyway) with a seating capacity of 750, located on the 4th floor of Toho's headquarters in Yurakucho, Chiyoda ward, Tokyo. It was directly managed by Toho - another thing foreign to us, since in America production companies cannot own theaters due to anti-trust laws. As of 1963 the theater was only 5 years old. Mitsuko Mori, one of the stars of Dobuike, appeared frequently in plays staged at the Geijutsu-za: she made her debut at the theater in 1958, and when it closed in 2005, she starred in its final performance.

The art director for this version of the play was Kisaku Ito, whose beautiful drawings for the set design you can see here. I really would recommend taking a look at them, they are absolutely gorgeous. Kikuta both wrote and directed this performance, which was staged by Toho. Ito died just five years after staging this play; his Wikipedia page doesn't note a cause, but he was only 67.

1963 / Umeda Koma Stadium

This second performance was staged at the Umeda Koma Stadium (now the Umeda Arts Theater) in Osaka, with involvement from Toho, and ran from June 1st to June 26th. I got my hands on a pamphlet for this performance and uploaded the entire thing to Internet Archive. As usual for my scans, they're not very good, but you should still be able to read the text, if that's what you desire.

Kazuo Kikuta again directed the play, and Kisaku Ito again handled the art direction, though we have no pictures of the set design apart from what's in the booklet. 

There actually are a lot of pictures of Hirata's character Sadahiko in this booklet, which I was not expecting. I'd been assuming his role was relatively minor, but he seems to have had a lot of scenes. Considering this, it's not surprising that Hirata didn't appear in the movie adaptation; after performing the same role twice a day (there was a matinee and evening show for this run) every day for a month, twice within one year, he was probably sick of it. (His friend Motohide Katayama recalls him mentioning that he preferred to act on film rather than the stage, because he found playing the same role over and over fairly boring.)

I will now direct your attention to his funky sweater:

1968 / Imperial Theater [Teikoku Gekijō]

We have some inside information about this run of the play courtesy of Makoto Kobayashi, a Toho stage actor who I have mentioned here before and who is still active online in his 90s. (In the above picture, Kobayashi is the guy standing around looking intimidating.)

I'm sorry, I just need to reiterate that. Makoto Kobayashi is blogging. He's 92 and he's blogging. He's a Showa-era Toho-contracted stage actor who is 92 years old and he is blogging about his career with perfect clarity. Toho fans, you all should be paying attention to this guy.

Anyway, this second run of the play ran from December 2nd to December 27th with largely the same cast. Kobayashi notes that during one performance one of the actors (Kinzo Takahashi) accidentally bumped into a piece of stage equipment during the show and made a hole in it, which made Isuzu Yamada and Aiko Mimasu laugh so hard that the play came to a stop for a few moments. Kobayashi also mentions that he fell asleep on stage while performing his role as a detective hiding out in some bushes. (He says that he did get scolded, but admits sleeping on stage feels really nice.) Kobayashi also has a pamphlet from this run of the play that I've never seen for sale or auction before.

Kazuo Kikuta was still credited for the original work, but for this run of the play Junji Tsumura directed.  I can't find much out about Tsumura; he may have been under Toho's employ, as the only other credits of his that I can dig up are other plays staged at Toho-owned venues, but I don't know anything for sure.

Conclusion

At some point I am going to have to figure out how to write a proper segue into an ending.

______

1 Toho casting department: "Okay, for our character Sadahiko we need somebody with either 'Sada' or 'Hiko' in his name, no exceptions."

はりきり社長 / Harikiri Shachō / Fighting President (1956)

Release date: July 13, 1956

Director: Kunio Watanabe

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Yoko Tsukasa, Yasuko Nakata, Norihei Miki, Akihiko Hirata, George Luiker et al

Availability: Available on DVD from Amazon JP and streaming on Prime Video (Japan-only).

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[This is a revised and expanded version of a post that was originally published on April 1st, 2024.]

Today we're going to take a look at the third entry in Toho's long-running "Shachō" ("company president"; henceforth President) series, which is comprised of 33 films released across 14 years, plus 6 that are considered supplemental/tie-in works. The President series may not have garnered as much international recognition as Toho's tokusatsu films, but salaryman comedies like this and prolific, long-running series such as the Ekimae ("front of [train] station") series were the studio's bread and butter during the 1950s, although the concept began to fizzle out in the 1960s and finally collapsed in 1970s along with the studio system.

The President series starred Hisaya Morishige as the president of a company - a different company each time - and Keiju Kobayashi as his secretary, with Kobayashi playing straight-man to Morishige's goofy president. One thing I find interesting about the series is that the names of Morishige and Kobayashi's characters change between films. I'll be honest here and admit that this is the only entry in the series I have actually seen (many such cases), so I can't tell whether the actors play different characters in each separate film, or if they're the same people, just with new names. Norihei Miki, Daisuke Kato, Frankie Sakai, Asami Kuji and Yoko Tsukasa were also staples of the series.

Considering that there were well over 30 of these films made, it's somewhat surprising that Fighting President is the only time Hirata found his way into the President series, and even more surprising that his role in this movie amounts to basically a walk-on. He appears in two scenes, and that's if we're being very generous and counting two people looking at a photograph of his character ("chotto handsome, dessho?") as "a scene". George Luiker, an actor of Armenian and Estonian parentage, also guest stars in Fighting President for the first of what would be four appearances in the President series. Luiker of course later went on to star alongside Hirata in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

As I said, this is the third entry, so we're still pretty early into the series, and things are just now starting to take shape that would influence the rest of the films. For example, this is the first time Asami Kuji appeared as the president's wife, and it is also the only time Kunio Watanabe was in the director's chair; most - but not quite all - of the following films were directed by either Shue Matsubayashi, Toshio Sugie, or Yasuki Chiba. Within Japan, this movie was released on a double-bill with Madame White Snake, which most definitely had more staying power in the Western film canon than Fighting President did. 

Kunio Watanabe (left) with Hisaya Morishige. Credit to @tnmiyako38.

I want to stay on the subject of Watanabe for a minute, because his Wikipedia page makes him out to be something of an interesting character. Born in 1899, he became a left-wing activist in college, got fired from his first job for spurious reasons, and then met the then-head of Nikkatsu, who hired him on as an actor even though he wanted to direct. Watanabe finally did become a director throughout the 1920s and joined Toho in 1936, at which point his politics had evidently changed; when Toho had a wee spot of union trouble Watanabe led an anti-communist right-wing movement and was vocally anti-union. Following that he joined Shintoho in 1947 and directed their first picture. His Wiki page states that he had a habit of throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it, which I didn't think was a thing anybody actually did outside of cartoons. He also had twelve siblings.

Ryōzō Kasahara, Fighting President's screenwriter, has a far terser Wikipedia page in terms of personal detail but a filmography that speaks for itself: not only did he pen most of the entries in the President series but also Toho's Sazae-san series, Eizō Sugawa's stellar You Can Succeed, Too, a few of the more famous Crazy Cats/Hitoshi Ueki films and a couple of Wakadaisho movies.

English title translation issues have always plagued the President series. When these movies were released (or even just mentioned) in English-speaking markets, they were usually assigned titles that were some variation upon "Three Gents" or sometimes "Five Gents": Aloha Three Gents, Five Gents Prefer Geisha, Three Gents Go West, Hail the Three Gents, etc. Oddly enough, newspaper reviews and publicity from the time when these movies were being exported (early to mid-1960s, mostly) use the English and Japanese titles interchangeably, and a few President movies seem to actually have been shown under their Japanese title with no translation provided at all.

Within a two-week period in mid-December 1958, Honolulu's Kapahulu theater brought out three Toho hits (or semi-hits): Fighting President, 1956's Hesokuri Shachō under the title "The Frugal President", and - unrelated to the President series, but relevant to our interests - Zoku-Zoku Oban under the title "Mr. Fortune Maker". The English title of the movie we're looking at today comes from that Hawaiian theatrical run. I originally published this post using the title Stuart Galbrath gives it in his magisterial Toho Studios Story, "Company President in High Spirits", but since Fighting President seems to have been handed down by Toho themselves, I've decided to use that one from now on instead. ("Harikiri" is a word that means "enthusiastic", "go-get-'em", "hyped", etc. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ritual suicide.)

France also got involved - the only country I'm aware of aside from Japan and the United States where this film has been released - and re-christened the film "La Vie trépidante des décideurs: l'ardeur au travail", which literally translates to "The Fast-Paced Lives of Decision-Makers: Zeal for Work". Fighting President was screened in France a few times, in fact: once in 2008, once in 2012, and just recently, in February of 2026.

But wait, the title confusion gets worse... You will not find this movie on IMDb under either Fighting President or Company President in High Spirits, but instead "Three Generations of Company Presidents". I have not been able to determine where this title came from. I honestly think, unless I'm missing some international release where it ran under that title, that this could very well be the result of a translation mix-up, since this was the third entry in the President series.

But wait, it gets even worse... 1959's Zoku Shachō Taiheki is on IMDb as "Three Generations of Company Presidents Part II". Not only is Zoku Shachō Taiheki very much NOT a sequel to Fighting President, it's actually a sequel to the first Shachō Taiheki, which is a completely different movie.

You see why I said English titles are a problem with this series?

We'll wrap things up there before it gets any more convoluted, but I'm also going to retain my live commentary from the original version of this post (under a jump cut; slightly revised as well) for posterity's sake.

Legend of the Irresponsible Hero II: 2 Irresponsible 2 Heroic

I greet you again today with news of new subtitles! I was not planning on making another post for Legend of the Irresponsible Hero (I already wrote one with less detail a few years back), but once I started subtitling the movie I found that there was, in fact, still enough to talk about to justify a new post.

We'll start with a little production history.

A Little Production History

Production on this one was touch-and-go. The film was originally slated for a March release, but during filming, in January of 1964, Hitoshi Ueki was hospitalized for about a month due to overwork. (Unsurprising; I'm not sure how all seven of these guys were not constantly either overworked or ending up with broken ankles from all their stunts). The film was eventually released in the middle of July on a double bill with Hiromichi Horikawa's Brand of Evil. 

According to Keiko Awaji's audio commentary, the Hong Kong location shooting was done at the same time as the shooting for the previous film Crazy Cats Go To Hong Kong. There is something kind of weird going on with some of the location footage, specifically the external location shots done in Macau; the bottom of the frame is occasionally blurry in some shots, and the film stock seems different. I'm wondering if post-production was especially rushed, because that's not the only film oddity here; a good number of the cuts in this movie are noticeably very messy and have visible artifacting along the bottom of the screen.

Example of blurry frame...

 

...and messy cut. And these are both from the HD remaster, which if anything makes the sloppy cut job even more obvious.

This was director Toshio Sugie's last time with the Cats, which is too bad; his entries in the series are some of the most outlandish and spectacular. Sugie had worked for Toho since its PCL days and was very versatile, contributing entries to many of Toho's big series: the President series, the Young Guy series, their lesser-known Rakugo Guy films, and the Crazy series, of course.

Music is a huge part of these Crazy Cats movies, obviously. The two people responsible for creating the film's soundtrack were Hiroaki Hagiwara (music) and Shigeru Tsukada (lyrics). Hagiwara was involved with Crazy Cats in some way or another even before the band was in its final form: he was initially a member of the band's predecessor Hajime Hana and the Cuban Cats, but left to focus on composing music. He continued to write for the band up to his death, including writing Hitoshi Ueki's big hit Suudara-bushi. In addition to that, though, he also wrote for other singers, one of whom just so happened to be Yoshiko Otowa, Akihiko Hirata's younger sister. Listen to Ramen Girl in Love here.¹

I think you should also know this about him:

In the waiting room at Hakodate Port, Hagiwara was reading the newspaper. Soon [Hitoshi] Ueki noticed a strange smell and took a closer look, seeing that Hagiwara's coat was touching the stove, and a faint wisp of smoke was rising from it. "[Y]ou should move a little further away," Ueki warned, but Hagiwara only gave a half-hearted reply and continued reading the newspaper. Soon the coat began to burn, so Ueki said, "Your coat is on fire," but Hagiwara replied, "I know," and continued reading the newspaper.

Fly Pan Am: International Distribution

Legend of the Irresponsible Hero opened at the Toho La Brea on September 23rd, 1966 under the title It's a Bet, and was shown as a double feature with Dark the Mountain Snow, a now-mostly-forgotten Hideko Takamine picture directed by Zenzō Matsuyama. Just a few weeks prior, the Toho La Brea had also shown Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay on a double-bill with Campus A-Go-Go. The movie continued to kick around until October and was then never shown theatrically again, as far as I can determine. I have not found any indication that the movie had any theatrical screenings outside of Japan and the United States.

Crazy Cats were not unknown outside of Japan at this time, but were certainly not a household name; places like Hawai'i and Los Angeles that had a large nisei and sansei population and theaters that showed Japanese films would have been familiar with them. In fact, 1966 could probably be considered the height of the Cats' international stardom, as they actually made a visit to Toho's Honolulu theater in July of that year.

Although this section is for international distribution, I do want to at least mention briefly that when the film was aired on television in Japan in 2019, previews introduced Hirata's character with the subtitle "The Man Who Killed Godzilla and Zetton".

...Zetton? Really? Zetton? I mean... technically, I guess?

Image credit @kortoku on Twitter

Don't Have A Macau, Man: Geographic Context and Gambling

As of 1964, Macau was still a Portuguese territory. Japan (surprisingly) did not occupy the island during the second World War aside from installing "government advisors", and it was actually the United States who were responsible for really the only direct military action that occurred during the war, when they bombed the island after learning that the colonial government had plans to sell fuel to Japan. Portugal relinquished control over Macau to China in 1974 as a "Portuguese territory under Chinese administration" and finally agreed to hand over the colony entirely by 1999.

(You will notice in the opening credits that the Hong Kong actors have "Cathay Organization" written in parentheses next to their names. That is these folks. I do not know if Cathay had any stake in the actual production of the film or if their involvement was limited strictly to providing actors.)

Now is the part of the post where I talk about gambling, which had been legal in Macau since the 1850s. This is skippable, since I don't think there's any part of the movie that will be completely ruined if you don't have context for the game that's being played, but I had to learn this, so dammit, now you do, too. Here's a quick run-down of all the games played in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero.

Sic Bo

Also known as "big and small", this is an uneven game of chance that essentially involves betting on the outcome of a dice roll. It's commonly played in casinos across Asia but has spread internationally. You can read more about it on its English Wikipedia page here. As one would expect, we only see Ueki's character win at sic bo, specifically with a triple match, which according to Wikipedia has a 215-to-1 chance of happening, and he does it twice.

Oicho-kabu

Ueda and Hanaki play a quick round of oicho-kabu in Hanaki's apartment in loving memory of Hanaki's mustache. You can read about oicho-kabu on Wikipedia here; it is from this game that we get the word "yakuza", but oddly enough the name of the game itself is derived from the Portuguese for "eight end" (oito cabo). Oicho-kabu can also be played with a hanafuda deck, which is mentioned in the film's theme song ("cherry blossom and moon over the mountain, plum and pine" are all hanafuda cards).

Mahjongg

You already know what mahjongg is.

In the cold open of Legend of the Irresponsible Hero, Ueda wins with a "Big Three Dragons" hand, which jisho.org defines as a "winning hand consisting of pungs or kongs of each of the three types of dragon tiles​". This means that Ueda held three-of-a-kinds (or four-of-a-kinds) of each of the three dragon "suits". To tell you the truth, I am never more miserable while subtitling a movie than I am when people are playing mahjongg. Fortunately, it doesn't show up in the movie any more after the opening.

Chō-han

You most likely also know what chō-han is if you've seen even one yakuza film, ever, at any point in your life. Incredibly simple: two dice go into a cup, the cup is shaken, players bet on whether the dice will be even (cho) or odd (han). And yet, the amount of onscreen bloodshed that has resulted from such a rudimentary game...

Ueda and Zhang play three rounds of cho-han against each other at the end of the film, although Zhang cheats... kind of? I don't think there's really any way to cheat at cho-han unless you play with loaded dice, since it's pure chance, but he does take advantage of his opponent's weakness. Read about chō-han on Wikipedia's very short and sweet page for it here.

Rōkyoku LARPing: Historical Background

A memorial stone erected by Torazo Hirozawa, originator of "Torazo-bushi" whom we met in our Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay / Crazy Violence at Shimizu Harbor post.

It is a relatively major recurring joke in Irresponsible Hero that Hanaki and Ueda think their situation is just like the famed "Brawl at Koujinyama", and they invoke the story as motivation and justification for their adventures in Macau (much to the chagrin of their long-suffering significant others). This is obviously familiar ground for Japanese viewers, but it is as obscure or even more so than much of the Shimizu Jirocho lore we discussed in our post about the same would be to non-Japanese viewers. (Actually, this IS Shimizu Jirocho lore, just a kind of side-story. The Shimizu Jirocho Cinematic Universe, if you will.)

The "Brawl at Koujinyama" refers to a turf war that took place on April 6th and 8th, 1866, at what is now the site of Koujinyama Kannon-ji temple in Suzuka City. It began as a dispute between two gamblers, Nagakichi of Kanbe and Annotoku (the nickname of Tokujiro Anou), the latter of whom was a local yakuza boss who had seized territory - including a gambling den, hence the relevance in Irresponsible Hero - as his own. The conflict escalated when Jirocho of Shimizu himself got involved after hearing of the death of his sworn brother Nikichi Kira. Jirocho supposedly raised 480 men against Annotoku's side; the battle ended in an apology and an eventual peace agreement, which was finalized in 1869. Among the combatants and serving as something of a mediator was Jirocho's man Omasa, played by Hirata in both Crazy Cats Shimizu films.

Nikichi Kira, who both Hanaki and Ueda seem to want to be, became sort of a folk hero after his death by gunshot wound(!) at the age of 28 during the battle at Koujinyama. Nagakichi of Kanbe, Chen Shumei's counterpart according to Hanaki, was an underling of Annotoku until his adopted son got into a fight and his house was set on fire by Annotoku's men. Nagakichi survived the conflict.

This battle, while historical, has been embellished over the years (as has Jirocho) through its telling by kōdan and rōkyoku performers. This kind of thing was experiencing a resurgence in the mid-1960s, which may explain both its inclusion in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero and the impetus behind the two Shimizu films.

"Have You Spotted Any Suckers?": Translation Notes

I actually do not have much else to say in the way of translation notes; much of the context I feel is necessary to fully understand the film's historical references has already been explained above. The only thing I really want to mention is that the long musical number in the middle of the film is sung in the format of a specific type of traditional counting song where the opening verse of each stanza begins with a number ("one", "two", etc; or in Japanese "hitotsu", "futatsu", etc) and then the verse that follows begins with the same kana as the initial number. I found that there was no way to make this work in English without compromising the translation itself, so I had to settle for using the same letter to begin the first two verses.

I guess I should also mention that I did not translate the Chinese dialogue directly at all; I translated it from the on-screen Japanese subtitles, which from experience are not always quite accurate, but, also from experience, it is an absolute fool's errand for a non-Chinese speaker (myself) to attempt to translate Chinese phonetically. (I did transcribe the English dialogue by ear as opposed to using the Japanese subtitles, because allegedly I do speak English.)

Without much else to say that I haven't already covered, we're going to wrap this one up right about here. If at one point this concluding section was longer and filled out with an embarrassing nerd rant that I thought was a great idea to post on the internet at 2 in the morning, then that's for me to know and you never to find out. Otherwise I'll say ciao for now, and I'll also say that I think we have some cause to celebrate, because with this, every Crazy Cats movie Hirata guest-starred in is now subtitled save for Fantasy Heaven and that one is not far behind, trust me.

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1 Me hearing Kei Tani say "Don't cry, little sister" in Legend of the Irresponsible Hero: "OMG, is he referencing Yoshiko Otowa's 1953 King Records A-side duet with Toshiro Oumi, 'Don't Cry, Little Sister'?!"

日蝕の夏 / Nisshoku no natsu / Summer in Eclipse [1956]

Release date: September 26th, 1956

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Shintaro Ishihara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mieko Takamine, Setsuko Wakayama, So Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake, Akihiko Hirata, Makoto Sato, Nadao Kirino, Noriko Sengoku et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings of a print that is noticeably degraded.

____

It's finally summer! Not right now, because I’m writing this way back in spring and putting it in the queue, but that's not important - let's celebrate the solstice with a summery-titled movie.¹

This movie brought to you by... canned peaches, I guess?

This film was adapted from an original work by its star, writer/actor/sucky politician Shintaro Ishihara, who we met briefly in our post about Toho's Youth School TV series. Ishihara is the brother of Yujiro Ishihara, himself quite a prolific actor who has shown up on the blog a few times, most notably in his mainstay role on the long-running detective drama Taiyo ni Hoero!. Shintaro Ishihara was enjoying quite a bit of success in 1956, with Eclipse being the fourth film released that year in which he had a leading role.

Adaptations of Ishihara's literary works were instrumental in the development of what are referred to as "Sun Tribe" films, which portray a kind of rebellious, youthful subculture closely associated with similar American movements such as rockabilly. (Eclipse is the only Sun Tribe movie in Hirata's vast filmography, due mostly to the fact that Toho was generally not putting these kinds of films out; it was usually Nikkatsu.) In addition to writing the original material, Ishihara also co-authored the screenplay with Toshiro Ide, who we've seen here a few times before as well.

Ishihara plays Naoki Mishima, who from plot synopses sounds like a generally disaffected youth, spending much of his time riding motorcycles and motorboating. He has an elder brother named Masaki (played by Hirata) who recently broke off an engagement to a woman named Taeko (Setsuko Wakayama). We later learn that the reason why the engagement was nullified was because Taeko was having an affair with Masaki's father Kozo (So Yamamura). This is only one of what sounds like quite a few joyless and ultimately futile romantic endeavors had by numerous characters, including the protagonist: starting off the film with a girl his age named Kyouko (Yoko Tsukasa), Naoki eventually begins a relationship with another woman, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), who is several years his senior.

While Ishihara was at the height of his popularity around this time, it doesn't seem like Eclipse is one of his more well-regarded films. Even the director, Hiromichi Horikawa, a purveyor of otherwise very solid films for Toho, regards this one as "a flop" (shippaisaku). Funnily enough, I also encountered an interview with Nobuyoshi Ishihara, Shintaro's fourth son, in which the interviewer brings up a poster for Eclipse hanging in Nobuyoshi's studio; his response was to say, basically, "Yeah that movie was fine but did you hear about the one he did with Francois Truffaut?"

This is a tie-in poster promoting Suzuki's "Colleda" motorcycle model, which featured heavily in the film. (Reminiscent of the Godzilla posters that want to make sure you remember Ogata rides a Cabton.)

Try as I might (and buddy I am trying) I cannot turn up any pictures of Hirata from the film. Reviews that I've read describe his character as "calculating/scheming" which would seem to imply he does have some kind of role in the overall plot, but evidently it was not a big enough role to get him featured on any posters nor even have a little portrait of him in press sheets, the way Toho often did. Here are some weirdly high-quality stills from the film; none feature our man, but I want access to whatever OP's source was for these. I am very curious about this role because I cannot imagine how a character could be described as "scheming" while also having his fiancée end up leaving him for his dad. What exactly is Masaki scheming? A way to win his fiancée back from his dad?

Screenings of the film seem incredibly sparse and reviewers have noted that the print does not look good. This person writes a travelogue featuring a poster for the movie displayed in the city of Ome, which seems to be a smallish place known as a nice respite for those looking to get away from the general Tokyo-ness of Tokyo. Laputa Asagaya has, of course, shown the film at least once.

Thanks to the attention given to the Sun Tribe movement by film scholars studying Japanese cinema, Eclipse has been cited in multiple research papers. None that I've seen, however, go in-depth on the film's actual content; it is simply mentioned as part of a list of Sun Tribe films produced around this period that demonstrate the same kind of boundary-pushing sensibilities as all of their ilk. The majority of these papers have been in English (I assume there are some in Japanese as well, but have not found any) save for one in Italian and one in French.

Outside of Japan, the film made its way to Hawaiian theaters in late 1957 under the unusual but poetic title The Summer the Sun Was Lost. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin advertised the film as "a tense drama of modern Japan". Thanks to the Hawaii Hochi, we have - blessedly, gloriously - an actual English-language review of the film, written by your friend and mine Max Morinaga. I will quote it here in its entirety.

A film which I saw recently and which I found to be oddly entertaining was titled "The Summer The Sun Was Lost".

Shintaro Ishihara, one of present-day Japan's most popular authors, was the star of the film. As an actor, he ain't much. But as I understand it, his novels about juvenile delinquents and teenage sinners are sold by the hundreds of thousands!

"The Summer The Sun Was Lost" didn't do so well at the box office of the Kapahulu, where it was shown last week, but it did a terrific big business in Japan.

One of the high spots of this picture was the scene showing sweet-faced Yoko Tsukasa indulging in some mighty passionate kissing with Shintaro in the semi-darkness of a private garage.

Shintaro is mighty disillusioned when he discovers that his sweet-faced girl has had numerous affairs with numerous boys, and he is also disgusted with his parents when he learns that his father has a mistress and his gentle and gracious mother has a lover!

Shintaro himself indulges in an affair with a middle-aged woman (Mieko Takamine) who still looks mighty good in a bathing suit!

On that note, I think I've given about all the information about this surprisingly obscure film that I can. Considering that its Sun Tribe contemporaries are much better preserved, it's disappointing that this one only seems to live on in dingy prints and no home media release. One can always hope it'll get some kind of digitization before the print degrades past watchability, if it hasn't done so already.

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1 I am not allowed to write about Summer Farewell [Natsu no Wakare].

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.

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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".