A Word from Yoshiki Onoda on Television ("Mimizu no Kawagoto")

Today I'm going to test your attention span with a post that is almost entirely text, because I've got an issue of TV Drama from June of 1962 that features a short piece authored by Yoshiki Onoda. I think it’s appropriate to describe what we’ve got here as basically an op-ed. (The title is an idiom, it literally means "Earthworm's Ramblings".) I’ve got no way of knowing if writing like this was a regular thing that Onoda did, since I’ve never seen any other issues of this magazine, but considering how prolific a television director he was, I would assume that he did contribute to more publications than just this. What I'm giving you here is a quick machine translation, so don't take it as gospel, but from what I can tell it seems alright.

This is basically Yoshiki Onoda saying that he wants television networks (and those financially invested in them) to actually give a damn about producing art that matters to people instead of basing every decision on what drives ratings up and makes the most money. It's very interesting to read input from someone within the industry during a time when television was causing a massive shift in Japan's media landscape, and if you've ever seen any of Onoda's work, this gives some nice insight into his creative philosophy. Given that he'd just recently left Shintoho after its collapse, at this point in time he was in a bit of a better position to produce the kind of work he wanted to make, rather than be a studio-contracted director with little creative freedom.

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While theatrical cinema is currently trending toward larger scales and evolving into a form of spectacle, television films, by contrast, interact with viewers exclusively through the cathode-ray tubes found within the home.

Consequently, the limitations inherent in these smaller-scale films that are brought directly into the intimate circle of family life are accompanied by an even greater set of constraints. Unlike live dramas, film should offer the potential to expand the scope of dramatic expression with greater freedom and richness. The depiction of character environments, psychological nuances, and visually lyrical compositions should, in theory, powerfully instill in viewers both an aesthetic sensibility and a profound sense of reality.

Therefore, it stands to reason that television films should surpass live dramas in quality; yet, what accounts for the continued stagnation of the medium?

As television stations expanded their programming lineups, they could no longer rely solely on live broadcasts. This naturally led to a recognition of the necessity for filmed content - a need initially met by a flood of imported foreign television series. Over time, however, this influx paved the way for the rise of domestic television production. Today, driven in part by foreign currency considerations, the volume of imported content is gradually declining, resulting in the mass production of domestic television films. Given that round-the-clock broadcasting is said to be just around the corner, it is an entirely natual progression that the volume of domestic television films will continue to rise in the future.

As practitioners involved in the creation of television films, we earnestly home that broadcasters will move beyond their current mindset: one in which they produce telvision films merely out of unavoidable necessity. Rather than simply relying on film as an easy default option, we urge them to cultivate a strong, affirmative awareness: the realization that precisely because the medium is film, it offers unique capabilities and creative possibilities that are otherwise unattainable.

One of the primary reasons for the aforementioned stagnation, simply put, is that the production companies themselves have fallen into a state of merely fulfilling a "necessity". One aspect of this situation stems from the fact that, since television is typically watched in the living room - a space that is always brightly lit and fosters a sense of close intimacy between the screen and the viewer - there is a prevailing expectation for works that the entire family can enjoy together. However, if this expectation remains the sole standard, television cinema stands no chance of ever truly evolving. It would serve only to contribute to the "dumbing down" of the masses. While some argue that this constitutes the fundamental difference between theatrical cinema and television cinema, I do not share that view.

Indeed, the more intimate the connection between the visual medium and the viewer, the less difficult it should be to penetrate the viewer's inner world. Consequently, the fundamental natural of dramatic storytelling itself should, by rights, remain essentially the same regardless of the medium. Is it not the true mission of television cinema - which has found its way into the very heart of the home - to inspire viewers to contemplate life with earnestness, to feel a boundless moral indignation toward social ills, and to discover the joy of living life with a forward-looking spirit? Relying solely on home dramas¹ cannot possibly fulfill this mission. To dismiss the possibility of such depth on the grounds that "viewers lack the intellectual capacity" is an overly conservative mindset that serves merely to perpetuate the status quo.

Every television station should realize that it bears an obligation to elevate the cultural and intellectual standards of its viewers. I can only hope that, by taking a step forward beyond rigid constraints and embracing the imperative to fulfill this duty, the future will bring forth a continuous stream of truly exceptional television productions. Finally, television possesses a trump card which is held as an absolute, sacrosanct dogma: viewer ratings. Based on these results, programs are often reshuffled or canceled with alarming ease. From the perspective of nurturing and fostering the growth of television cinema, I earnestly implore all television stations and their respective sponsors to refrain, as much as possible, from wielding [viewer ratings as a] formidable and often destructive weapon.

1 Light family-centered sitcoms or soap operas.

The Post Where I Talk About Yoshiki Onoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Release date: July 27, 1958

Director: Yoshiki Onoda

Studio: Shintoho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's gooooooo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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