The Oddity That Is (or Oddities That Are) "Ankokugai" Export Dubs (and More!)

I was initially going to make this post solely about The Last Gunfight, but according to Stuart Galbraith's comprehensive Toho Studios Story, The Big Boss and Big Shots Die at Dawn received English dubs as well, so we're going to look at all three. Galbraith doesn't provide specifics on when the films were released stateside or how widely, so let's see what else we can find out about the English-dubbed versions of each of these three films and how they were released in the U.S., if at all. (There are, of course, more films in the Ankokugai series, but we're only going to be talking about these for [gestures to blog] obvious reasons.)

The Last Gunfight (1960)

It would appear that The Last Gunfight had a(n attempted) television run as well as a theatrical run. Introducing Mifune's character with a shot of him socking Hideyo Amamoto in the face can almost make us forget that the trailer omits Hirata entirely. In addition to the above trailer, there's also a far less flashy one where their approach to dubbing seems to be "just don't include clips of anyone speaking".

Distribution was handled by National Telefilm Associates, who had launched their own network four years prior and would shortly become the largest independent television distributor in the nation, and the much less successful Commonwealth United. The dub was produced in Tokyo. Judging from the fact that the dub was first featured in Toho's catalogue of 1962 international releases, it seems that it was available for TV syndication by that point, although whether or not it was actually ever aired on TV is unknown to me. Despite ultimately being relegated to television, the dubbed version was intended for theatrical release; this is evident from the way the closing credits are cropped. I've also found a list of inventory once held by NYC's Movielab, a defunct film post-processing facility, that includes the film.

I thought for a long time that the whereabouts of the full dub were wholly unknown, but apparently somebody out there just had a full 16mm print of it that they only gave out to their Patreon supporters. It was since taken down until recently, when someone else asked directly if they could have it, and as a result the dub is now available as an optional track on Showa Video's release of the film. Neat!

On the theater side, the film was shown at the Nippon theater in Honolulu starting on March 30th, 1962. As far as I'm aware, this was a subtitled version that was entirely different from the dub, and was its earliest release outside of Japan.

The trailer was featured on Vol. 5 of Something Weird Video's Dusk to Dawn Drive-in Trash-O-Rama Show trailer compilation VHS tape series.

Big Shots Die at Dawn (1961)

While we don't have a trailer for this one, I was able to find the film featured in the same catalogue of 1962 international releases mentioned above:

I also came across potentially the most unexpected thing I've ever found in the course of doing research for this blog: there is a no wave album called Ninja Star Danger Rock by Henry Kaiser, Charles K. Noyes and Weasel Walter where every track is titled after a Kihachi Okamoto film. Big Shots Die at Dawn is included, as is The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman and At This Late Date the Charleston. I bought it, I listened to it, and... it's just no wave. It doesn't have anything to do with Kihachi Okamoto. Fortunately, I do like no wave, so I enjoyed it. (And I thought the Pittashi Kan-Kan Soundcloud rap was weird.)

The Big Boss (1959)

A dub of this may exist, but it doesn't seem to have been included in the same deal as Big Shots and Gunfight, and was probably promoted, dubbed, and distributed by different companies. It's almost impossible to Google this movie due to the existence of a Bruce Lee film with the same name. Even more confusing is that our beloved patron saint of weird Toho stuff SpaceHunterM has contributed to the preservation of the English dub of the Bruce Lee film. I'm not sure if the fact that I can't find anything out about an English dub of our Big Boss is because there genuinely wasn't one, or if the proliferation of similarly-titled films is obfuscating the English dub beyond my reach.

However.

In the "really didn't see that one coming" category of archaeological finds I've unearthed, we have the Cuban theatrical release of this film. The newspapers that advertise the film are from mid-October to early November 1959, so it was dubbed/subbed (not sure which) and distributed incredibly quickly. I can find three ads that ran in Diario de la Marina and one from Prensa Libre, which shut down the next year due to being occupied by the Cuban government:

The text under the ad says "We protest the closure of the Universal Cinema due to an illegal strike" and was under every cinema ad on the page.

This one says "The wildest gunfighters filmed".

This one says "Luxurious and violent like no other movie ever made - don't miss it!"

I think "El Submarino Heroico" MIGHT be Submarine E-57 Will Not Surrender.

Five years later, in 1964, the film was released in Mexico. I'm really having to grub around for any evidence of this Spanish-language release at all, so I have no idea if the same dub/sub was used for both the Cuban and Mexican markets. I do know one thing: we have lobby cards! Somebody in Japan even cared enough to import one at some point, since there's one for sale on Yahoo! Auctions.

The tagline reads "Who took care of you when the crime syndicate took over Tokyo?" Also, is that supposed to be Mifune? It looks like Joe Pesci in Home Alone.

 

That's all for now. While I've always respected dubbing and the efforts to preserve international versions of Toho movies, I've never been that personally interested in the hunt for lost dubs; however, that may be changing, as lately whenever I sit down to write about the international release of a film, I end up going down a huge rabbit hole.

Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari Addendum: Ōwarai Daifukucho Edition [大笑い大福帳]

Translating that script left me wanting to do further research on the shortened re-release version of the film. I'm not that curious about why they cut Akihiko Hirata's role (they cut a lot of people's roles, not just him), but I wanted to know more about the shortened version and what of the original film did survive the editing process. Here's what I was able to find out.

When the film was re-released, the title was changed to Ōwarai Daifukucho, or Big Laughs Daifukucho. (A daifukucho was a type of account book used in the Edo period, when the film is set.) With only four confirmed screenings in the past ~25 years, it's barely less obscure than the film proper, but it does at least exist.

Thankfully, people who have seen this edited version of the film shared their thoughts about it on the internet. Through this, we can glean that the 38-minute version is comprised of two skits from the full film: "Mind's Eye", the skit featuring Hisaya Morishige as Mokuichi the anma, and "Tarachine", the skit where Kenichi Enomoto's character is set up with Asami Kuji's character through a matchmaking arrangement. Intriguingly, even though it isn't seen, events from the segment that featured Hirata's character are mentioned in the shortened film.

When I originally wrote up this post, I had a very difficult time figuring out one glaring piece of information: why this movie was recut and when. However, in the course of my research into something entirely unrelated, I may have finally come to the bottom of both of those questions. According to the official blog for the town of Musashi-Kosugi, flyers for a 1958 Tanabata festival were recovered that included a list of films being shown at the Yurakuza theater, one of which was Ōwarai Daifukucho. However, I also came across an auction listing for an Ōwarai Daifukucho poster where the release date was listed as 1956. So unless the listing is incorrect, I'd say 1956 is most likely when this recut version was created.

Let's take a look at those more recent screenings.

Laputa Asagaya

Occurring in June 2016, this appears to be the most recent screening. It was held as part of a showcase of screenwriter Toshiro Ide's work, focusing mostly on women's films. The showcase ran from June through to August and a great deal of films were shown. Owarai Daifukucho was screened from June 26th to July 2nd.

Satellite Theater

Satellite Theater (Eisei Gekijo, or Eigeki) is a Japan-only digital television channel that broadcasts kabuki and other stage plays, Korean dramas and K-pop, Chinese dramas, music, older films, and other such things. The channel apparently broadcast Ōwarai Daifukucho in May of 2016, and I found a blog post where someone complains about the way Satellite Theater presented the film as if it were the full version when it wasn't.

Jimbocho Theater

On June 12, 2010, as part of the "Comedy Movie Paradise" film festival, Ōwarai Daifukucho was shown at the Jimbocho Theater. The theme of the day was rakugo movies, and the slate of films was even titled after our movie: "Rakugo Movies in Full Bloom". Since the edited version is so short, it was screened alongside another, unrelated film. This particular screening is interesting because the person who was responsible for getting Ōwarai Daifukucho was film writer and music producer Toshiaki Satō, who asked Toho directly if they had a print of Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari. They apparently did not, so he was given the short version instead, and his excitement about seeing the film is palpable in the blog post he wrote. He also mentions having a script in that post. I can’t help but wonder: is that script my script? I have no way of knowing, but for some reason I have a feeling that it very well might be.

The post says that Satō watched the film together with someone else, and it was then screened digitally at the Jimbocho. I don't know who currently holds the print (presumably Toho) or who has the digitized version, but it's good that there is a digitized version, given that the print is most likely severely degraded by now.

Unknown 2000 screening

I'm gonna be honest here. I said in my original post that I found a screening that took place in 2000. I remember it, I remember looking at a webpage with information about it, I confirmed that it happened in 2000. What I did not do was save this page in any capacity and now I have no idea where the hell it is. I don't want to edit that part out of the post because I'm sure I did see it, but also, with no way to verify it, I feel bad leaving it in. Great job, me.

With that I think I've covered everything I can about the state that Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari currently exists (or doesn't exist) in. Yippee, a whole four(?) screenings.

Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari [落語長屋は花ざかり]: Original Script

That's right. I said "original script".

I translated the whole thing. If you'd like, you can also look at it for yourself; I've put it on archive.org here. Sorry for the bad photos, but putting this in a scanner would have destroyed it. I'm going to go ahead and create a specific tag for this film as well since I'll be writing about it so much.

So.

While I was doing research for my post about this movie, I found a kosho.org listing simply titled "Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari script". The description said "stains, tears, scratches". There were no photos. No further details. No page count or dimensions were given. The price it was listed for was suspiciously cheap.

"Count me in," I said.

After reading the script, I think I can infer a few things about it. The first is that this is an early draft. That's fairly obvious just from looking at the pages where the cast is listed - there are actors written there who weren't in the final film, roles that didn't make it, and blank spaces where there should be names. There's also a blank page where the rest of the crew's names should be. I haven't (and probably won't) see the finished film, so I can't say this with full confidence, but I'm inclined to think that this may even be the first draft. We can be certain, though, that whoever owned this definitely knew Akihiko Hirata was going to be in the film at the point when they were writing stuff in it, since his name is written with the rest of the cast.

There is absolutely no way to tell who this belonged to. I'm almost certain it was someone on the production crew rather than the cast, since the notes made in the script seem to pertain to cutting/editing scenes. However, I don't know how many people in the crew would or could have the authority to do things like cross out entire scenes and change the layout of the set. That blank page where there should have been more crew listed is interesting in this regard. It could mean absolutely nothing, but it could also mean that the rest of the crew hadn't been assembled yet, so the script would have been owned by one of the few crew members whose names were written in the script: Ichiro Sato, Yoshie Kishii, Tsuruo Ando, Toshiro Ide, or Nobuo Aoyagi. You can find a fuller list of the credited production crew here, although as always be aware of mistranslated names if you're using an auto-translator.

Utter guesswork there, though. Anybody could have had it. It could have been someone in the cast as well, but I’m trying not to think too hard about that.

Just... honestly, my god. Holding this in my hands. This was bouncing around Toho even if it wasn't on set during filming. I just want to emphasize that the experience of reading this script and "watching" a film that doesn't seem to exist anymore in its full extent was, honestly, very affecting. You want to see something incredible?

Like, incredible incredible?

To talk about the actual process of translating it: I put several weeks of my life into this project and I don't think I fully knew what I was getting into. As you can see in the photo above, the handwriting was extremely difficult for me to decipher as someone who doesn't natively write kanji. Further complications arose the further I went into it: it became evident that the entire film assumes familiarity on the viewer's part with a plethora of specific aspects of Japanese culture and history from the Edo period, including plays, people, places, customs, and language. The script is also so old that it frequently uses obsolete kanji.

That all being said, on the whole I am fairly confident about this translation, because the bulk of it was done literally word-by-word, copy-pasting kanji into online dictionaries and using websites like HiNative and Kotobank to gain context for phrases and idioms I was uncertain of. I did lean on machine translation, but I don't want to say that that's all this is, because the percentage of it that I figured out through looking up individual words in a dictionary (or being able to read it myself, although that accounts for very little) far outweighs what I got from DeepL and the like. I've tried to be honest in places where I just can't figure something out, and I've added a frankly somewhat frightening amount of footnotes to make it easier to understand, so hopefully reading it is not as hard on you as translating it was on me.

If you read this far, thanks! I included a chart mapping out all of the relationships between the characters in the PDF of my translation, but I'll post it here too just for funsies. Note that this only applies to the script - many of these characters aren't present in the final film.

Here are my links once more for good measure: translation here, full script here.

嵐の中の男 / Arashi no naka no otoko / A Man in the Storm (1957)

Release date: February 5, 1957
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Akio Kobori, Akemi Negishi, Jun Tazaki, Midori Isomura, Akihiko Hirata, Yoshio Kosugi, Ikio Sawamura, Makoto Satō, Yoshifumi Tajima
Availability: No DVD or streaming release. Occasional theater screenings and broadcasts on SkyPerfect and possibly other television networks as recently as last year.

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Consider this a sequel to my post about Rainy Night Duel - another entry in the "Toshirō Mifune Does Judo" Cinematic Universe, if you will. The two films are unrelated but highly similar and were both directed by Senkichi Taniguchi with Kihachi Okamoto as AD, so I will skip the production background, for the most part. Several years ago I was searching for this movie and became very excited when I thought I found it, but I had in fact found the Nikkatsu film Man Who Brings a Storm (Arashi wo yobu otoko)... and I watched it anyway, it was really good.

Much of my information and stills come from this person's blog post. They seem to have mistaken someone else for Yasuhiko Saijō in one photo. Saijō was acting in 1957 (just barely) but I don't believe he was in this film.

And here's something very interesting: a (closed) auction listing for an album of behind-the-scenes photos from the time of the film's production. I'm not sure what the story behind this is. I suppose it must have belonged to someone who worked on the film.

This film isn't that obscure - it's still being seen in Japan, with theater screenings in 2023 and television broadcasts in 2024. However, at least one reviewer has mentioned that the print being shown at Cinema Vera in 2023 was degraded, which is very concerning. At least there is a digitized version.

As for further crew: prolific screenwriter Kenrō Matsuura (who also went by Takeo) co-wrote the script with Taniguchi and Tomoyuki Tanaka produced the film. Urato Watanabe, a classical composer who didn't work too much in the film industry but did a lot of school songs, handled the score. The cinematographer was Kazuo Yamada who I note here because he was apparently the person who hired Toshirō Mifune on at Toho - not as an actor, initially, but as a strapping young lad to carry photography equipment. This would then lead to Mifune entering Toho's New Face program.

I can't see how Mifune's role here is much different from his role in Rainy Night Duel. However, the film is set during the Russo-Japanese war, so it has some political turmoil going on in the background. Akihiko Hirata doesn't play a rival judoka like he did in Rainy Night Duel but is instead the leader of a group called Sekishinsha. This group did actually exist in the Meiji era; they were Christian colonists aiming to settle in the north of Japan in the 1880s. Hirata also doesn't have long hair in this one like in the previous film, but he does have a mustache. (Jun Tazaki gets to wear the bad wig this time, and according to reviewers he was not good at judo.)

That print really is looking yucky.

As early as 1959, the film had been dubbed into English and was being promoted for international release by Toho (a subbed version was produced at some point as well). The film was also included in Toho's 1962 catalogue of international releases. The earliest screening I can confirm is a short run at the Nippon Theater in Honolulu in 1963.

The film would also be released in Mexico in 1962 and Argentina in 1963. To me this seems like a bit of an odd choice for an export, considering the political backdrop of the film. I would think Rainy Night Duel would be less complicated to translate. The American release was handled by Toho International and doesn't seem to have been edited for export, since the running time is the same as the original.

I did some Google scouring and I came across one of those things that I feel like I might be the only person to have looked at in many years. A 700-page, Spanish-language volume - fully scanned, and god bless the people who did it - on every film exhibited in Mexico from 1960 to 1969.

So we know that it played on February 22nd, and we know where. Here is the Polanco Theater and... maybe the Coliseo, I can't figure out if the theater in the picture is the specific Coliseo referred to in the book.

As for the 1969 U.S.American run, I had a hunch it probably played at Toho La Brea, given that none of Toho's other U.S. theaters were operational at that point, and it turns out that it did. I'm not paying through the nose for a newspapers.com subscription to see the full issue, but, I mean, I don't really need to. It's right there.

The Toho La Brea was opened in 1926 as Chotiner's La Brea and then renamed to Fox La Brea; no photos seem to exist from the specific time period during which it was operated by Toho. It is currently a church, but as it was a theater, in some way, it was always a church.

The film also had a little tiny run during late September 1969 at the Toyo theater in Honolulu, retitled as "Story of Judo" - or possibly that is not a title but just a tagline type of thing.

I had quite a difficult time finding information about the Argentinian run of the film, and was about to give up, but after some more scouring, I found out that it played at the Cine Hindu in Buenos Aires, which has been demolished and is now department stores. The film was still playing on September 25th, but I don't believe that was the opening date. While the Mexican market titled the film either "El Hombre de la Tormenta" or "El Judoka", I believe Argentina used "El Judoka/Yudoka" exclusively.

violence, suspense and action - oh boy!

credit to @buenosairesperdida on insta

So that's that. I can't go back in time, but I have the internet, which is, like, the same thing. 

I don't know if this is interesting to anybody else, but it is to me. I don't know how to explain why it feels important to remember that there was an era where the only way you could see a movie was to physically go to a theater. All of the theaters I mention in this post are beautiful buildings, and none of them now exist in the form they did when people were sitting down to watch A Man in the Storm. I was not able to do the same deep dive into international releases for Rainy Night Duel since it doesn't appear to have been exported, although according to Stuart Galbraith it did receive an English subtitled version. 

黒帯三国志 / Kuro-obi sangokushi / Rainy Night Duel (1956)

Release date: January 29, 1956
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Shin Saburi, Akio Kobori, Kyōko Kagawa, Mariko Okada, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Hideo Saeki, Yū Fujiki, Haruo Tanaka, Shōsaku Sugiyama et al.
Availability: No availability on home media. Infrequent screenings and television broadcasts.

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This is a film that has multiple English titles (and no English release). I've decided to go with the title that the film is listed under on Letterboxd, but it's not a literal translation - not even close, actually. A literal translation would be Black Belt Sangokushi, which is sometimes elaborated into Black Belt Romance of the Three Kingdoms, since that's what "sangokushi" means. ("Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is a historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong which is set during the end of the Han dynasty and the beginning of China's Three Kingdoms period.)

Got all that? Okay. Let's move on.

This promo still was the blog's header image for a good long time. I also own it physically, and it lives in a frame on my desk.

I have to continue talking about the title for a moment longer, because now that we know the historical context that it implies, I must disabuse you of the notion that this movie takes place in ye olde ancient times. It takes place at the end of the Meiji period (early 1910s). The movie is in fact bookended by shots of trains. I have read that the "Three Kingdoms" in the title is an allusion to Kyūshū, Honshū, and Hokkaido, but I'm not sure about that, due to not having seen the film.

On the surface, this may look like a samurai movie due to the way everyone is dressed, but it's actually about judo and karate. The story was written by Akira Shimomura and serialized in Novels and Readings magazine; I can't find out much about the story or the author, but it seems like Shimomura may have written other works about judo. The film was directed by Senkichi "No Way In Hell Am I Directing Godzilla" Taniguchi, and the music was done by our favorite, Akira Ifukube. You can actually find his score for the film on CD here and there, but the movie itself remains elusive. Kihachi Okamoto also served as assistant director. It would be a few years before he would make his solo directorial debut.

I don't own this, unfortunately

eiga.com and a translator will give you a decent summary of the film. Be sure to check out reviews on kinenote as well for much more plot detail. Toshirō Mifune plays what sounds like a righteous dojo member who is excommunicated from his former dojo and repeatedly pitted against human traffickers, people from rival dojo, and other opponents, while attempting to romantically pursue a woman who isn't allowed to be with him. 

I didn't start this blog to talk about Toshirō Mifune, though. Hirata's character is one of two sons of the head of a rival dojo who, as I understand it, does get some one-on-one fight scenes with Mifune. I must also mention that, yes, that is him with long hair in those photos up there. I don't know what to make of it either. Hirata seems to have the primary antagonist role here, which is interesting, and I'm hearing a lot of people express surprise to see him playing a karateka - get good and watch you some Tetsuwan Namida Ari!

I previously didn't have any pictures of Hirata from this movie aside from really small and grainy portraits on press sheets, but I've recently found a Twitter account that keeps giving me treasure, so clap your eyes on this one:

There are some more stills here, but whatever print this person was watching is so bad it looks like something made by the Lumiere brothers. There's been a handful of reviews from people who have seen it in theaters or on pay-per-view television over the years, so, as with many things, this could easily be released to home media, but it just isn't. Now is the time to be digitizing and releasing movies such as this one - the further the print degrades, the less use there’ll be in producing a home media edition.

It would appear that this was adapted into a manga twice in the same year that it was released. From what I can tell the serialized story came first, then the film and the manga concurrently, as a promotional campaign. (I managed to find some pictures of the actual manga itself and I do find it very amusing that the mangaka has chosen to make Hirata’s character bald.)

I'll end this post with a few miscellaneous impressions I've gleaned from reviews:

• The judo choreography is not good but the karate is alright.
• Some of the tertiary dojo guys use weapons like brass knuckles and chains, which is unusual.
• People don't really know for sure what the "Three Kingdoms" in the title refers to, what I mentioned above is just speculation.
• There's shakuhachi.
• General consensus is Mifune was too old for this role (he was 36 at the time).
• Hirata may have been playing his role comedically or it just came off that way unintentionally.

This is a really interesting movie that remains essentially unknown outside of its home country, and inaccessible even within it aside from the odd theater screening and TV broadcast. But people are seeing it somehow - the last review on Filmarks was from October 2023. Even though I haven't seen it, there are enough reviews of the film that I feel like I know a lot about it. And now you do too!

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

Release date: March 17, 1954

Director: Nobuo Aoyagi

Studio: Toho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rodan, Il Mostro Alato

I've had a jpeg of this Rodan poster saved to my computer for a while now and it always makes me laugh. I wasn't even going to post about it because it might be one of those things that's only funny to me. But things got... kind of weird. We'll see.

Like, what? Neat poster, but who's Richard?

I know it's fairly common for people the world over to adopt Western-sounding names or nicknames for any number of reasons (remember when Hiroyuki Sanada was called "Duke"?) but I'm 99.9999% certain that is not what's going on here. I can't rule it out completely, of course, but I feel like with all the research I've done for this blog, I would have encountered at least one mention of it somewhere other than an Italian movie poster from 1968. As best I could tell, this seemed like a case of the Italians just deciding they didn't like the name "Akihiko" and assigning him a new one.

But I wondered if this rabbit hole went any deeper. It seems like the only promotional materials that contain this... error? Are the ones from the film's re-release in 1968. The original release in 1958¹ doesn't do it (although they still couldn't quite grok Kenji Sahara's surname). And I do say promotional materials, plural, because there are also lobby cards. All of them are like this.

You can distinguish between the two theatrical runs by the distributor's name on the poster. Here I will go into the international history of Rodan to provide some context. A lot of international releases of the film stem from a cut produced by King Brothers. The original 1958 Italian release uses this cut and was distributed by RKO (and hence will have "RKO" on the poster somewhere). The film was then re-released in Italy by Ardin Cinematografica in 1968, using a different, incredibly sloppy, cobbled-together cut of the film. This re-release seems to be where it all went wrong. 

And it's only this movie, and only this re-release. I've done a lot of research while writing this post and it looks like for every other Toho film imported to Italy where Hirata had a big enough role to appear on the poster, the Italians did spell his name right.

There's tons and tons of these posters and lobby cards. All from the 1968 release. All "Richard Hirata". This one's really good. Dig that random white lady.

"oh heavens me!"

It's also worth noting that I also have no earthly idea who William Scotty or John Garry are. At first I assumed they were part of a dubbing crew, but I've never heard of a dubbed film listing its voice cast on the poster, so I can't explain why those names are there. I'm leaning towards them being made up, honestly. (The English cut of Rodan isn't a King of the Monsters! deal where white actors were inserted into the actual plot, so that wouldn't explain it.)

So who is Ardin Cinematografica? What other movie crimes have they committed, if any? (Completely leaving Sonny Chiba's name off of their poster for Terror Beneath the Sea, for one.)

It would appear that they were a distribution company who handled both domestic Italian films and foreign imports throughout the late 1960s and 70s. I cannot find out much information about them, but one source of unknown reliability claims a connection to a multitude of other Japanese films: Prophecies of Nostradamus, Matango, Battle of the Japan Sea, Bullet Wound, et cetera. I started this post for fun, but I'm gonna be honest, it got a little depressing seeing just how hard they're trying to make these movies look like they have white people in them.

poster for Bullet Wound, starring Yūzō Kayama and Kiwako Taichi, and definitely not either of those people on the poster

At this point, I was about to end this post. I thought I had done all the research I could, and I had become disillusioned with European distribution companies in the process. I'd gotten to the bottom of it: it's all Ardin Cinematografica's fault. But then the plot thickened.

I found out Germany was in on it too.

Rodan does not take place in Osaka.

I had so many browser tabs open at this point. You have no idea.

The 1968 German distributor (R.C.S. Filmverleih) seems like the same deal as Ardin; just an importer who handled foreign film releases. King Brothers can't be the source of the error, since they produced earlier cuts that were released with promotional materials that didn't have it.

Spain at least tried. We won't even get into "Inoshiro Honda". That's a whole other can of worms.² (Or perhaps I should say "a whole other can of Meganula".)

So what do we know? In 1968, when Rodan was re-released in Italy and Germany, somebody put "Richard Hirata" on the promo materials. Upon further research, I found that the original posters were drawn by a prolific Italian artist named Mario Piovano, so it appears that Italy released the film first, and Germany copied their lobby cards and posters from them. But who, ultimately, is responsible?

Well.

I'm going to say this tentatively, because I don't want to lay blame on the artist. But Piovano was associated with a studio called Studio Paradiso, who provided posters for both domestic Italian releases and imports - tons of movies, basically. I cannot assign Studio Paradiso sole responsibility, since I don't know if they did typesetting as well or if they just handed the art over to a distributor and let their graphic design department handle the typesetting, but the closest thing I can give as an answer to "who did this?" is that it was probably some combination of Studio Paradiso and Ardin Cinematografica's graphic design department (if they had one).

But... why?

Like I said, I started this post for laughs, but going down the rabbit hole of weird-ass foreign posters for Toho movies made me realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is literally just racism. I still find this whole situation funny in a pathetic way, but there's something really mean about it. Like, "Sure, we'll take your movies, but we'll scrape you and your names off of the posters first." The United States was no better than Europe about this - do you want to see the least effort anybody has ever put into making a movie poster?

You can tell when someone is trying but is unfamiliar with the Japanese language. That's how we get so many things that say "Akihito Hirata"³. And of course I don't have a problem with people transliterating names into their own language. Not every language has the same phonemes, sometimes substitutions are made. That's just how language works. But this isn't any of that. This sucks.

Let's end on a nicer note. Poland put a cool dinosaur on their Rodan poster for no reason.

______ 

¹ Interesting plot twist here - I've also found an Italian eBay listing for one of the 1958 lobby cards where the cast on the card itself is all correct but the seller's description uses "Richard Hirata". I don't know what this indicates, but I find it quite odd.

^{2 "Inoshiro" is an alternate reading of the kanji used to spell his given name, but it is incorrect - his wife Kimi stated in an interview after his death that he did pronounce it "Ishirō".}

^{3 LIFE Magazine, this is directed at you, specifically. If you need someone to fact-check the fifth reissue of your Godzilla special, you know where to find me.}