"What does your URL mean?"

It's not like this blog is getting thousands of visitors a day (I'm not getting any, AFAIK), but in the event that somebody is curious about it, it might be a good thing to have an easily available post explaining my URL. I admit I could have chosen something more obvious, but I get a kick out of this one, and here's why.

Enban Sensō Bankid [Flying Saucer War Bankid] was a 1976 tokusatsu television series produced by Toho. It was Toho's attempt to cash in on the brand-new (at the time) Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, which would become the foundation of the super sentai series. Bankid follows a team of children and teens who, led by their tutor, use their secret identities and fleet of aircraft and vehicles to fight against invading aliens (the Bukimi Seijin, literally "Bukimi Planet People" or I guess "Bukimians"). The Bukimi are led by an unseen commander (shirei) named Guzare, who ends most episodes by chastising and then summarily exploding whatever poor Bukimi had failed to invade the Earth that week.

For 25 episodes, Guzare exists as a disembodied voice (played by Kiyoshi Kobayashi), until episode 26, the series finale, when he finally gets fed up with how ineffective his underlings have been and comes down to Earth himself to have a little chat with Bankid. This is the first and only time in the series that we actually see him. Guzare's human form is played by Akihiko Hirata, and the getup Toho put him in is... well, it's a lot:

i really think toho loved putting him in shitty wigs more than any of their other actors

God, I haven't watched this episode in so long, but it still gets me. The show is good, actually, but incredibly cheap; the face actors double as the suit actors and there's two yellow "rangers" because I guess that's just what their suit budget allowed for.

So yeah, that's... that's why I have this URL. I really do recommend watching Bankid, it's never been subtitled but it's a ton of fun. The episode formula is consistent and entertaining every time: there's always a person who turns out to be a Bukimi in disguise, and every episode usually has a nice satisfying moment where one of Bankid "unmasks" them. The Bukimi were designed by Tohl Narita of Ultraman fame, so they look cool (no, really), and the opening theme is an absolute ripper. And to cap it all off there's whatever is going on in the final episode. Maybe this is where Gerard Way got that jacket from.

Edit: Since I originally wrote this post, I came across something that serves as an explanation for a lot of... that.

So, uh.

It would appear that Guzare was originally intended to be a woman.

anonymous toho exec ca. 1976: "sure. fine. cast whoever you want. but we're keeping the wig and the bodysuit."

DOUJINSHI.

In the Kinema Junpo article/interview I posted recently, I was extremely intrigued by the passing mention of doujinshi focusing on Akihiko Hirata. (For those just joining us, doujinshi are basically fanzines that the government gets kind of mad about sometimes. Japanese copyright law is very strict.) So I've been poking around online to see what I can find... which is not that much. I'll update this if and when I find new things.

強引愚我道堂本舗 猫目銀四郎 呆然一発! [Daitetsujin 17 doujin, year unknown]

god look at it

As is typical for Mandarake, this listing had only one image, and I can't find parallels anywhere else on the internet. It's weird that the photo is so crisp; it appears to be a scan or screenshot, whereas most other doujin listings are just photographs of the item. I have absolutely no idea what this is; Googling the title turns up nothing and every translator I chuck it into gives me something different. But oh man.

As long as we're talking about Daitetsujin 17, I have to show you the, uh, this.

猫亭通信 #1 [Nekotei Newsletter issue #2, August 1985?]

This is an issue of a tokusatsu doujin and it appears to have been a memorial issue for Hirata published the year after he died. If I'm understanding things correctly, Ishirō Honda himself actually contributed something to this. Again, Mandarake only gives me one picture, so I know nothing about the content of the doujin. (I do know the exact photo that drawing is based off of, but I don't have it to hand right now.)

ゴジラ復活委員会 [Godzilla Resurrection/Revival Committee, various, 1980s]

photo shows issues 1-3 of the doujin and issue #15 of the newsletter (far right)

I could probably make an entire post about the Godzilla Resurrection Committee. They published a doujin that was, according to some, pretty high-quality for the time. It's actually fairly difficult to find information about the committee in general, which is surprising given how important they were, and even harder to find scans of their doujin. 

参考資料 鋼鉄王 1 特集 [The King of Steel, issue 1[?], 1984]

This is... an Iron King doujinshi that has a memorial for him for some reason? He was never in Iron King but I guess that's how big an impact his death had on the wider tokusatsu fan community. Can't find pictures of the actual article, unfortunately.

轟天号 第4号特集 [Gotengo, issue #4, 1981?]

A nice tokusatsu doujin. Got a kick out of this one because of the "candid picture somebody took of their high school teacher" vibe. The text says "Recently he has become 'the old man of Pittashi Kan-Kan', but our image of him is still the nihilistic Dr. Serizawa." The picture is from an amateur special effects tournament. (More on that later.)

バンキッド ハラッパでひみつきち [Harappa Himitsukichi, vol. 4, 2003?]

observe the chonk factor

That's my guy! Commander Guzare! Namesake of the blog! This is an absolute unit of a doujin covering Enban Sensō Bankid, and from the sheer size of it I cannot imagine this one page shown on the Yahoo! Auctions listing is the only time Guzare is mentioned. There are other volumes covering other shows as well, like Seiun Kamen Machineman, and I'd love to get my hands on this one (or any of them), but they are pretty expensive and hard to come by.

ウルトラ感想文 [Ultra Impressions, vol. ?, year unknown]

What am I looking at.

I have no idea what this is because I can't find any other pictures or information, but who cares, all we need to see is pretty manga Iwamoto with sparkles. From the one other picture on the auction listing, it looks like this doujin was going for the "trying to cheat on an exam by writing all the answers down on a 1''x1'' square of paper and hiding it in your sleeve" school of graphic design. I really am dying to see what the rest of this thing looks like; if anybody out there happens to own a copy, please hit me up.

Also, yes that is fanart of that one specific scene in episode 39 where the door to the room Fuji's in opens and bodysnatched Iwamoto is just standing there in this really weird pose:

And frankly I think that level of specificity is absolutely delightful.

火曜サスペンス劇場 - 地底の殺意 / Kayō Sasupen'sugekijō - Chitei no satsui / Tuesday Suspense Theater: Underground Murderous Intent (1983)

Release date: July 5, 1983

Director: Yoichi Maeda

Studio: NTV with cooperation from Shochiku Eizo

Cast: Masakazu Tamura, Kyoko Kobayashi, Hiroko Shino, Keiko Orihara, Ryusuke Oki, Akiko Sodeki, Yoshiko Otowa et al

Availability: Home media release of this specific film is unknown and unlikely. The film in its entirety is on archive.org.

____

Today we're going to be looking at the only feature-length film I've managed to dredge up that includes Yoshiko Otowa in the cast. And I really did dredge it up: I used Wayback Machine to resurrect a deleted YouTube video (which was actually the second of two links that I found, the first was gone for good) and watched the entire thing that way. I know this is kind of a "don't you have anything better to do?" post, but I do have something better to do - sleep, it is 12:45 AM - and I'm choosing to do this instead. And you know what? I'm super excited about it.

(And anyway, I've put it on archive.org so now you don't have to do all that.)

For those of you just tuning in, Otowa is Hirata's younger sister. I talk about her and what is probably her most well-known credit here. Her work is obscure and sparse; in the late '50s and '60s she was frequently in films directed by their older brother, Yoshiki Onoda, but she never appeared in anything alongside Hirata. (The Onoda Venn diagram is surprisingly complicated.) After that she did a few things in the '80s and then mostly fell off the map.

Some background: "Tuesday Suspense Theater" was not a "television series" in the usual episodic sense of that term, but a series of made-for-TV films directed by and starring many, many top names of the time. A longer explanation of the series would just take up space since it's been running for so long and includes so many titles, a lot of which are pretty much lost media. (Although I will say you should watch Obayashi's Lovely Devils, it's an underrated gem of his.) This particular film also stars Masakazu Tamura of Nemuri Kyoshiro fame. This will be my first time seeing him out of a chonmage.

The link I posted includes commercials, which is always fun. I think we all love retro Japanese TV ads. I assume, because of the ads, that the video was ripped from a VHS recording somebody made during the original airing (as far as I know this was never rebroadcast). It's in atrocious quality, but what do you expect from a YouTube link that was literally brought back from the dead.

The film begins with a couple, Tomoyuki Katsuhara and his wife Katsumi (played by Tamura and Shino, respectively), returning to their apartment after an extended trip to Spain. The atmosphere is immediately off, and Katsumi finds a trap door under their kitchen floor that hadn't previously been there, leading to a small hole with a ladder. There are rumors that the guy renting their apartment in the interim, Nogawa, was a bit... odd, to say the least (we get a fantasy montage of him doing stuff like tying his girlfriend to a balcony and killing kittens). The film seems to set us up to think he had something to do with the trap door.

Otowa's character is one of the perennial nosey housewives who often congregate outside apartment buildings in older Japanese films. Her character is the one responsible for the nasty rumors about Nogawa. It took me a minute to figure out who she was even though I'd seen her in Comedy Trio because she's a bit older in this, but as soon as I saw her in profile I was like oh yep. 

imoto

Katsumi tries to tell her husband about the hole, and about Nogawa, but she gets a firm "baka" response, of course. But Katsuhara does go down into the hole with a flashlight and discovers something written on the wall: the name "Tatsuo Sasamoto" scrawled over with Xs. Both this and Nogawa's general weirdness turn out to be red herrings.

pictured: hole dispute

Nogawa comes over while Katsumi is alone and is generally a creep to her. I didn't catch much of what he said, but he seemed to know something about the hole under the kitchen floor. When Katsuhara comes home, his wife again attempts to talk to him about the hole, but he continues to be dismissive; this is when the jackhammers come out. Katsumi has men over to dig up the floor, but they don't find anything immediately. When she's down there alone, though, she finds a wristwatch and then a necklace buried in the dirt. She recognizes the necklace as belonging to a woman her husband used to date, and as she tries to pull the necklace up, she unearths... a skeleton!

this film is now 💀CERTIFIED SPOOKY💀

Katsuhara returns home and Katsumi confronts him, and he admits that the skeleton is who she thinks it is: a woman, Akiko - actually a coworker of Katsumi's - who he'd been seeing. We get a lengthy flashback that ends with Katsuhara and Akiko arguing and him strangling her in maybe the least dramatic murder scene I've ever watched. He picks up the phone, presumably thinking about turning himself in, but then decides instead to be reasonable and carve a hole under his kitchen floor to hide her body in. As one does. Back in the present, he confesses everything to his wife.

future skeleton on the left

They then decide to both commit suicide with red wine and opiates. Buuuut first we get a long Spain montage. There's flamenco dancing, that's nice, I always like to see flamenco dancing. There's also bullfighting, which is... markedly less nice.

Katsuhara wakes up from the suicide attempt, but Katsumi doesn't. He, of course, drags her body down to the hole under the kitchen. Katsumi eventually does wake up too, after she's been thrown into the hole with no way of escaping. Her husband can hear her calls for help, but he piles furniture over the trap door and ignores her. After a while she figures out she can make a good deal of noise banging on a pipe, and the whole building hears it - while Katsuhara is out feeling sorry for himself due to murdering two women, Katsumi is managing to summon the authorities despite being locked in a hole. The film ends with Katsumi in an ambulance and Katsuhara in the back seat of a police cruiser, tailing her.

big surprise for this Ultraman stan: that's Kitajima [Shūsuke Tsumura] from Taro on the left, behind Tamura

I gotta admit this is not the best movie ever. It has a few fun scenes, but on the whole, it's "get home from work and fall asleep in front of the TV" cinema. It could just be because I thoroughly read every scrap of plot summary I could find beforehand to prepare myself for watching something I would only half understand, but none of the twists and turns feel very surprising. From the moment that Katsumi finds that hole, you know she is going to end up in it eventually. Everything in between is just a lot of stuff. Nobody reacts to anything in a reasonable way. It's all TV-land dramatics and filler.

But I still had fun. If nothing else, this was definitely the oddest way I've ever found and watched a movie. I'm scheduling this to post on a Tuesday for authenticity's sake.

抱擁 / Hōyō / The Last Embrace (1953)

Release date: March 11, 1953

Director: Masahiro Makino

Studio: Toho

Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Yoshiko [Shirley] Yamaguchi, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hiroshi Koizumi, Sachio Sakai, Ren Yamamoto, Toyoko Takegawa et al

Availability: No home media or internet streaming release. No known screenings within the past 15 years.

----

I should have made this post last month for the film's 71st anniversary, but better late than never, I guess.

As of the time of writing, I have not seen this movie and am fervently searching for it. I've gone down many avenues, including contacting several individuals and institutions about it, but with no luck. I am certain, however, that the film is not lost, as screenings have taken place since the film's initial release¹. Toho also produced an English-subtitled version², but I'm unaware for what purpose. I will readily admit that there isn't anything particularly special about this movie in and of itself, apart from it having been Akihiko Hirata's very first film role, but that alone is enough to make me want to see it. (If you have a copy... you know where to find me.)

So I can't watch this thing, at least not currently, but what I can do is dump everything I know about it into, as far as I know, the only extensive English-language post about it on the internet. If I ever do get lucky enough to watch it, I will, of course, make a new post about it. There's also a Kinema Junpo issue with an article about the film from when it first came out, and if I lose my fool head and buy that issue, I'll make a new post about it as well. (Edit: Whoops.)

I have seen exactly two pictures of Hirata from the film and both of them are extremely rare:

Masahiro Makino may not be a name with the same kind of Western recognition as Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu or someone like that, but he was an extremely prolific director, and before that, in the 1910s and '20s, he was also an extremely prolific actor as well. This means Makino was involved in Japan's film industry pretty much from its very beginnings - which makes sense, since his father was Shozo Makino, Japan's first professional film director. The Last Embrace was produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, as many Toho films were, and the script came from an original idea by Tanaka and Toshio Yasumi, who was also a frequent scriptwriter for Toho.

extremely crusty poster

As for the cast, it's all your usual Toho guys (and some gals), but fairly early in their careers for a lot of them except Mifune (for whom this was his 30th film) and Shimura. Yoshiko Yamaguchi has a bit of a cult following, from what I understand, and it's her presence in this along with big star Mifune that gives me any hope at all that somebody still cares about this movie enough to upload it to the internet someday.

Yamaguchi's character seems to be the protagonist of the film. According to the plot summaries I've found, Yamaguchi plays a woman who lived in the mountains and was set to be married before her fiancé was killed in a sudden avalanche. She then moves to Tokyo, where she frequents a bar along with a group of poets, and meets a yakuza who looks like her dead fiancé (Mifune plays both roles). I am assuming Hirata has a very small role in this - he's probably one of the poets from the bar Yamaguchi hangs out in. His character's name is given as "alias Sandaime", which would imply some yakuza association, but I think that it is likely just a nickname as the group of poets seem to all have aliases. 

Note the following poster: under Hirata's name it says "New Face".

While the film itself is frustratingly elusive, its main theme, sung by Yamaguchi, is on YouTube for your delectation. There's a nice slideshow of images from the film and pictures of Yamaguchi that plays during the song, along with lyrics in Japanese.

shoutout to the person who reblogged this on tumblr and just tagged it "#men"

Some odds and ends to finish this off: Here is a post (in Japanese) from someone who has actually seen the movie. I believe this person saw either of the 2008 screenings mentioned in my footnotes. Mifune's website has a bunch of pictures of him from the film here. In the process of researching this post I found a blog dedicated to Yoshiko Yamaguchi, which I have a deep appreciation for.

That's it! That's everything I know! I know for a fact that people other than me are looking for this, so I remain hopeful that I'll watch it someday.

______

¹ A 2008 screening at the Shin-Bungeiza theater in Tokyo is confirmed from a user on Kinenote, as well as a screening in the same year at the 6th annual Kyoto Film Festival; this blogger, writing in 2021, claims a screening about ten years ago. I have confirmation of a screening at the almighty Laputa Asagaya theater in 2005 as well. (What hasn't been screened at Laputa, honestly.) So that's a total of three and a half known screenings.

² Galbraith, Stuart. The Toho Studios Story. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Columbo post.

Columbo post?

Columbo post.

As many people reading this blog are probably aware, the American detective series Columbo became a smash hit in Japan very soon after its original broadcast. The series began airing on NHK in 1972, and was broadcast regularly until 1981 and then sporadically throughout the 1980s and later, remaining popular today. Columbo was voiced by Asao Koike until his death in 1985, at which time the role was taken over by Taro Ishida.

So I've got other things to say, but first let's talk about Columbo. The episode we're looking at here is season 7, episode 4, "How to Dial a Murder", broadcast in Japan as 攻撃命令 [Attack Order]. This is one of the rare cases in which everything I'm talking about is readily accessible: for Americans, the episode is streaming on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and [opens my trench coat to offer you an archive.org link] here if you hate streaming services. In Japan, if you have a Hulu account, you can access the episode there. Unfortunately, Hulu Japan is region-locked, and the only other place to watch it is as a 22-minute clip on NicoNico, which I guess is better than nothing. Here you go. I watched the original episode and then the clip of the dub, which was really fun. Hirata dubs the killer, and it reminded me a little of his guest role in episode 20 of Operation: Mystery. (Edit: I wonder if anybody has subtitled that.)

The Japanese dub of Columbo is one of Hirata's two dubbing gigs. The other was a 1968 French/Italian/Mexican production called Le Rapace (known in English as Birds of Prey, released in Japan as ベラクルスの男 [Man of Vera Cruz]). Hirata dubs the lead role, originally played by Lino Ventura. The dub was made for the "Wednesday Roadshow" timeslot on NTV and was aired on December 13th, 1972. I actually watched the film for research purposes (in its original French and Spanish, with English subtitles) and it was quite good. Ventura's character is a French hitman who arrives in Mexico to carry out a political assassination, and as he doesn't speak Spanish, he has no lines for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's not the kind of thing I typically watch, but it was interesting. I do wonder why he dubbed this film specifically. Given that it was his only other dubbing role outside of Columbo, I would hazard a guess that personal interest in the film was involved in some capacity.

It's surprising to me that these two things were Hirata's only voice acting roles. In my opinion he had a very recognizable, distinctive voice and manner of speaking, but I admit some bias there due to the amount of his films that I've seen. It is worth mentioning that he would have had ample experience dubbing his own roles, since audio was often not recorded on-set in movies of this era and was dubbed in in post, but these are the only examples where he dubs somebody else.

I'm creating a new tag for voice acting/dubbing in the hopes that I might turn up that dub of Le Rapace (or anything else) in the future.

大日本スリ集団 / Dai Nippon suri shūdan / The Great Japanese Pick-pocket Club (1969)

Release date: November 22, 1969

Director: Jun Fukuda

Studio: Toho

Cast: Keiju Kobayashi, Norihei Miki, Wakako Sakai, Noriko Takahashi, Minori Terada, Kunie Tanaka, Daigo Kusano, Hideo Sunazuka, Akihiko Hirata et al

Availability: Streaming and available on DVD from amazon.co.jp.

____

Jun Fukuda is a director who really does not get enough appreciation outside of his Godzilla films (which he was notoriously hard on himself about). I was looking forward to watching this one because the cast is pretty much entirely actors who I'm a fan of - in fact, I had copy/pasted a list of cast members that I found online into this post, but once I actually started watching the movie, I had to amend the list, because it turns out there were even more actors I'm a fan of in it than what I read online.

Also, in the time between when I got this DVD in the mail this morning and when I'm writing now, late at night, I found out Minori Terada had died. So this one goes out to him. Seeing him in Ultraman Blazar was really unexpected and it was a damn good final role. RIP. Everybody go watch The Human Bullet.

No subs for this one. I shall use all of my brainpower to attempt to grok the plot.

Funakoshi (Kobayashi) and Hiradaira (Miki) are old pals who served in the army together, but one of them is now a pickpocket and the other is a detective who hates pickpockets. Hiradaira calls Funakoshi "danna" (sort of a "my lord"/"sir"-type form of address) and Funakoshi calls Hiradaira "Hira-yan" ("-yan" is, from what I understand, a familiar/informal suffix), which tells you a lot about the dynamic between the two.

Hiradaira has a pickpocketing ring that employs many goons, two of which are played by Hideo Sunazuka and Akihiko Hirata. Hirata's character is called "France" for reasons I cannot determine. The pickpocketing ring also has newer members, lower in hierarchy, who are subjected to harsh training, like dipping their fingers into boiling water to condition them into having faster reflexes. 

pictured: goons

Funakoshi, meanwhile, is working out a plan with his fellow cops to take down the pickpocketing group. We learn through a brief flashback that his grudge against pickpockets stems from childhood. Funakoshi also has a daughter, Akiko (Wakako Sakai), who seems friendly with Kunie Tanaka's character (a coworker of Funakoshi). Hiradaira has three children as well: two under 10 and an older son from a previous marriage named Heiichiro, who is played by Minori Terada.

google translate is incredibly insistent on calling him "agriculture terada"

Hiradaira's group doesn't exactly operate in the dark; France and his other fellow pickpockets hang out at his house with his wife (played by a very beautiful Noriko Takahashi), who is also in on it, and entertain Funakoshi during a get-together for war veterans. France does card tricks (and steals wallets) and Hiradaira's wife does a burlesque-type dance; very Fukuda.

actually kind of a proto-mr. k outfit going on here

At the get-together, Funakoshi asks Hiradaira to pickpocket something from Akiko as he's concerned about her. Hiradaira steals a letter out of her purse that turns out to be a marriage certificate. Akiko is involved with a man named Shiroyama who has a wife and children. I'm not clear on context - is she attempting to marry him? Attempting to break up his marriage? Funakoshi doesn't approach his daughter about this directly, which in my opinion is his first and biggest mistake. 

Funakoshi eventually tails France into a pachinko parlor and actually manages to cuff him, but he escapes. After a genuinely exciting pursuit France ends up accidentally hit by a car. Hiradaira is now down his best goon, but up one motive for revenge.

(Even France's wife never refers to him as anything but "France", which is... strange. Imagine an arty, highbrow American mafia movie where the widow of a mafioso continues referring to her dead husband as "Frenchy" even during dramatic moments. That's how this feels.)

Anyway, Hiradaira exacts revenge by telling Akiko about how her father asked him to steal the marriage papers. Akiko runs away from home because of this - we don't see it directly, but Funakoshi confronts Hiradaira with a letter Akiko wrote to say she was leaving. The two of them hash it out physically, Funakoshi angry about his daughter and Hiradaira angry about France's death. I really like the awkward length of their fight scene, and the way it's capped off with a shot of Akiko's letters drifting off in the breeze, as if to say the reason for the fight was unimportant and that at that point they were just fighting for fighting's sake.

Funakoshi ramps up the crackdown on his former friend's pickpocketing ring, and Hiradaira ramps up his pickpocketing operations, enlisting a pool of underlings to steal wallets during a parade and making off with loads of cash. Both Akiko and Heiichiro return home, but Akiko tells Funakoshi that she's not there to stay. She leaves, and writes Funakoshi another letter saying that she's going to Brazil. Funakoshi, meanwhile, has retaliated against Hiradaira by calling the boss of his son's gang and telling him Heiichiro has betrayed them. As per yakuza rule, this means Heiichiro has to cut off one of his fingers.

The film basically ends when Hiradaira storms Funakoshi's office and is in such a state of rage over his son's fate that he has a stroke. It's an abrupt ending that sounds comical on paper, but - like most things in this movie - really just doesn't register as funny. Funakoshi later catches Hiradaira on the street trying to steal somebody's wallet even in his enfeebled condition, and Hiradaira begs him to arrest him, but Funakoshi agrees to place him in a nursing home instead.

hey Tora-san fans, look who it is!

Odd movie! Odd vibes! Going in, I expected one of Jun Fukuda's typical outlandish comedies, and while the vibrant cinematography and '60s culture was still present, the humor was not. To me, the storyline just felt mean: these two men are in such a deep feud with each other that it spills over into their personal lives, and they both essentially ruin each other's families. There's also a weird undercurrent of overly controlling fatherhood here - like, "oh, yeah, you told my daughter I was sneaking around and eavesdropping on her private life, but you're the one at fault for telling her, not me for doing it." As I understand it, this was adapted from a novel and co-directed by Jo Aizawa, which may account for the watering-down of Fukuda's usual directorial style. It is good, but not what I expected, and also difficult to understand the nuances of if you're not following the dialogue 100%, which I wasn't.

So if you're watching this one I'd highly recommend not going in expecting a comedy and instead readying yourself for a complicated drama about two people who used to be friends tearing each other's lives apart. It's not bleak or anything, but there's really no humor at all. Hirata looks sharp as hell, though, and does card tricks, so, you know, worth admission.

キネマ旬報 1979年10月下旬号 / Kinema Junpo, Late October 1979 Issue

I won this on Yahoo! Auctions, although I don't think "won" is the right word to use, considering that literally no one but me bid on it. 

Anyway, if kinenote.com is to be believed, this is the only article Kinejun has run that is entirely about Akihiko Hirata, not just a movie he was in. The occasion appears to have been a re-release of many major Godzilla films and other Toho tokusatsu works that year (which was the 25th anniversary of the first Godzilla film.) I'm not sure if this has ever been uploaded online, either as scans or just the text, so I'm including both the original in Japanese and a machine translation which I have typed up and made more readable by fixing pronouns, sentence structure, etc.; the kind of stuff that gets garbled in machine translations. I've been over it a couple of times, and it's still not very good, but it's something. The photographer is credited as Koji Nishikawa, who I'm assuming also did the interviewing and wrote the article.

Visualize me cringing while trying very hard not to break the spine by putting this in my scanner...

_____________

The film opens. The familiar music by Akira Ifukube begins to play. The Toho logo appears. The names of the staff, including producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, are listed. The names of the actors follow, and finally director Ishirō Honda appears. All the while, loud applause rings out intermittently throughout the theater. This is the scene at the Nichigeki Theater, where Toho's best special effects films were shown all at once, under the title "Godzilla Movie Collection [All August]". 

The last screening, which featured older films, was particularly lively. The audience was a diverse bunch, from elementary and middle school students to the kind of old men you might see at a film center, to young housewives with small children. They all gave generous applause to the screen. They clapped when the spaceship came out, and clapped again when the robot appeared. The children joined in, clapping. They seemed at first to be clapping without knowing what was going on, but they did know what was going on, shouting things like "Moguera will show up soon!" Kids these days study even old films as well.

I myself was moved to tears by the aerial combat scene in Battle in Outer Space, which I saw again for the first time in a long time. The excitement of seeing rocket fighter planes modeled after the experimental X155 aircraft of the time take off from the pages of boys' manga and fantasy drawings and engage in actual battles in out space on the screen is indescribable. Moreover, this is merely a dream imagined by the Japanese, which is why it is far more exciting than something like Star Wars. I could go on and on about this, so I'll stop here.

The actor who received the most applause at the "Godzilla Movie Collection" at the Nichigeki was Akihiko Hirata.

 - "That's what I heard. I got a letter from a fan saying 'Hirata was a [great actor]'. I was puzzled, thinking that was a strange thing to do. [laughs]"

Hirata appeared in 7 of the 15 Godzilla films alone. Including other works, he has appeared in about 30 Toho special effects films. [I asked] "Have you seen the overseas version of Godzilla?"

- "Yes, I have. I was surprised to hear that I speak good English [laughs]. During the peak of Godzilla movies, I received a lot of fan mail from America and Southeast Asia."

Recently, he says he has been receiving fan mail and doujinshi from all over the country. There are also countless magazines featuring Godzilla movies on racks. When I showed one to Hirata, he said, "Oh, that brings back memories, a [...]¹monster movie... the black-and-white, documentary-like feel is very powerful. I think the first Godzilla is the best. Godzilla's personality and appearance changed after it was in color." 

"When we were filming, we didn't know what we were doing, but now it feels like a classic. The filmmakers didn't know what they were doing, so they probably had three newcomers to it. The special effects scenes were done after the main story was almost finished, so it was even more confusing for us. Godzilla appeared, but when they told me to look at him, I didn't know where to look [laughs]." 

"The thing I found difficult was the stop-motion animation of the [models]. [They] shot the Godzilla [model] by moving it little by little. The doll was about 1 meter (3 feet) tall".

I had never heard that stop-motion animation² was used in Godzilla. [I ask] if a new Godzilla movie were made, would you like to appear in it again?

 - "I'd like to appear in it again. But I'd like to see one that isn't made for children."

Hirata has played many roles as genius scientists, staring with Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla. In the latest film in the series, [his character, Shinzo Mafune] even won a Nobel Prize.

  - "I'm actually not good at science," he says with a wry smile.

In war movies, he plays an officer. In Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, he wears an eyepatch like Dr. Serizawa and plays a one-eyed soldier. This kind of thing really suits him.

  - "There are a lot of them, aren't there? Is that right? I wonder. I still remember something that Yoshikata Yoda told me before. He said 'there are no actors who can play ordinary people'. I thought I could do anything, but I ended up playing a lot of serious roles."

That's because, when you hear Hirata's background, he's quite far from an ordinary person. Born in Gyeongseong, Korea³ in 1927, he returned to Japan before he even knew it. He received a strict, Spartan education and entered the Tokyo Army Cadet School.

  - "I had no intention of becoming a soldier at all. When I was a child, I admired Beethoven⁴, and I wanted to be a composer. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to go to Tokyo University and become a businessman. My older brother tried to get into military school and failed both times. Yes, it's difficult after all. Then, a distant relative was an army general, so someone had to become a soldier, and I was chosen. I applied, reluctantly, and I got in..."

His older brother is Yoshiki Onoda, a director currently active in TV after working for Shintoho. After graduating from military school, Hirata went on to the Army Academy just before the end of the war. There was a plan to move the Imperial Headquarters into the mountains of Nagano in preparation for the mainland battle, and he was training at the foot of Mt. Asama as a guard [as] he was an elite soldier.⁵ [I ask] "So, when the war ended..."

 - "Well, that was a blank period. Of course, I thought I would die before the war ended."

He returned home in a daze. After graduating from First High School and the law department of the University of Tokyo, he joined [Tokyo Boeki] (later Mitsubishi). He said that he never wanted to serve a government official again, so he joined a private company.

 - "I was pure-bred in the military, isolated from the outside world, and was only taught to die for the country and the emperor, so I didn't know anything. It's a strange story, but I didn't know anything about sex. I guess this goes on tape... I didn't even know what a wet dream was[...]⁶"

In reaction to that lifestyle, after entering the University of Tokyo, he didn't study much, but instead devoted himself to theater and dance. He made his debut at the May Festival, and was called a hammy actor.⁷ At first, he was quite calm, thinking that this was just how it was. His house was used as a dormitory for Shintoho staff and actors, so he started to associate with people in the film industry, and while he was a student, he worked part-time as an assistant director. His first film was Lynching, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, in which Yoshiko Kuga appeared alongside Ryō Ikebe. Kuga is now Hirata's wife.

 - "She's short, so when she talked to Ryō, I put her on a platform. I had to hold the platform as hard as I could, it's so ridiculous [laughs]. I remember that, but she doesn't remember it at all."

[I ask him] how they met.

 - "We worked together on Hiroshi Inagaki's Siege of Osaka Castle. We went to Gotemba for filming, and the weather was so bad it was extended by about 10 days. During that time, we played mahjongg to kill time, and we became friends, and that was it."

Hirata is a former army alumnus from Tokyo University. Kuga is the daughter of a former duke. It's a dramatic setting that reminds me of Gone With the Wind, in which Hirata played Ashley...

 - "That's not true. He was a poor duke, and since the aristocracy was abolished, his title is worthless. When we're at home, we're always wearing rags. I say "you should behave a little better, you're being disrespectful to your husband." When people come over, we get in trouble and panic. We're like a beggar couple [laughs]."

When they're at home, they just sit around doing nothing. Hirata is reading a book in silence. His wife is talking to herself. "I see, I see," Hirata nods nonchalantly.

They're happy. Their wedding anniversary is - "October 9, 1961," she answers immediately. They go outside to take a photo. Hirata's figure, with his back straight and his slow strides, would look like a scene from a movie if he were in a military uniform.

 - "I can't get rid of old habits..."

___

1 The word here translates literally to "waterfall", so I'm assuming it's being used metaphorically, but I'm not sure what it means in this context.

2 In the original text this is referred to in kana as "dynamation".

3 Known as Keijo at the time, this is now in Seoul.

4 Same birthday.

5 I mean, he wasn't quite 18 when the war ended, but okay.

6 I'm not gonna be the one to translate the rest of this sentence for the first time ever. It's not weird or anything, but... yeah, no.

7 The original word used here was "daikon", like the radish, which is kind of a colloquial term to refer to a ham actor.