Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari Pamphlet: Promo Images and a Lot of Text

My most recent Buyee order just came in, so I can now share high-quality scans of this pamphlet, which features some of the only images from the film that I'm aware of. Pictures first:

The "hype text" on the middle two pages reads (next to the photo of Mokuichi and the women): "Did it fall from the sky? Did it rise from the ground? [this is an idiom meaning roughly "something incredible has cropped up that has never been seen before"] A gale of laughter erupts in the tenement house! Absolutely the best, most outrageous and extravagant comedy! Laugh out loud! Everyone will laugh!" (next to the photo of Enoken and Asami Kuji) "A fire-lover, elopement, rubberneckers, Enoken giving it his all, and the greatest comedians of Japanese cinema appear in this unprecedented, extravagant comedic masterpiece!" Yowza.

Here are clearer images of the promo photos by themselves for your delectation - again, this movie is almost entirely lost, we have maybe a dozen pictures from it.

Ehehehehehe.

I'll put the synopsis under a jump cut, since it's going to run pretty long, but I want to keep one thing up here in the main post: the back of the pamphlet has a section titled kaisetsu (explanation/commentary), which is a short introduction to sell you on the film. Synopses are easy enough to find (relatively speaking), but this is unique to this pamphlet. It reads:

Kenichi Enomoto, who reigned as the king of comedy in both film and theater and was extremely popular, fell ill with a strange, rare unknown disease, and suffered a painful illness for about a year, but he has recently made a full recovery and this is his first appearance in a film. The film is written by Tsuruo Ando and the screenplay is by the sharp Toshiro Ide, who put together [several rakugo stories]. To celebrate Enoken's full recovery, this is a luxurious blockbuster that features all the comedic heroes of the Japanese film and theater world, and the director Nobuo Aoyagi has made full use of his unprecedentedly large cast in all its forms.

The story is a compilation of the rakugo stories "Nedoko", "Kaji musuko", "Dekikogoro", "Umaya kaji", "Niramugaeshi", "Shingan", and "Tarachine", all compiled into one story. The cast includes a gorgeous and diverse variety of actors such as Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Shizuko Kasagi, Tony Tani, Aiko Mimasu, Akihiko Hirata, Mayuri Mokusho, Hisaya Morishige, Yuriko Hamada, Yunosuke Ito, Atsushi Watanabe, Koreyoshi Nakamura, Kanta Kisaragi, Norihei Miki, and Asami Kuji. It was produced by Ichiro Sato and Yoshie Kishii, who worked on "Botchan" and "Onna gokoro wa hitosuji ni", and this is Toho's first luxurious comedy masterpiece of the year.

あぶない年頃 / Abunai toshigoro / A Dangerous Age (1953)

Release date: April 29, 1953

Director: Iseo Hirukawa

Studio: Produced by Shin-Ei co., released by Toho

Cast: Chiaki Tsukioka, Reiko Ishii, Kazuko Ran, Jun Mihara, Akihiko Hirata et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming, no known screenings. Possibly broadcast via Satellite Theater's on-demand service in January 2016.

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The recent release of Pu-san to DVD for the very first time got me thinking about this, so today we're going to look at a very obscure film. You can ostensibly see every film from Akihiko Hirata's first year of screen acting (although you would have to be very, very lucky to catch a screening of The Last Embrace), but the sole evidence for any screenings of this film whatsoever is one person claiming they watched it on pay-per-view TV in 2016. I do believe that, because don't know why anybody would lie about it, but I also don't have any evidence for it. (And I did try to find evidence - accessing Satellite Theater's VOD listings from early January 2016 on Wayback Machine, I don't see this film on there.)

Spicy tagline: "The pride of a virgin is about to be mercilessly assaulted!"

The film was directed by Iseo Hirukawa, who does not have a Wikipedia page. From his JMDb page, it would appear that his career lasted from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, with his first credited role having been as assistant director on Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, a Shochiku film. The script was written by leftist screenwriter Tatsuo Asano, a far more prolific figure who worked primarily as a director in the 1940s before switching to screenwriting and co-screenwriting in the 1950s, and then returning to directing in the '60s and '70s. Asano's last work was released in 1995.

Toho did not produce this movie; it was produced by Shin-Ei Co. and released by Toho. If we can speak of film studios in taxonomic terms, Shin-Ei is of the Toei clade rather than Toho, but really, the small studio retained a surprising level of independence in an era when large studios were beginning to dominate the industry. When Toyoko, Taisei, and Tokyo Film Distribution merged to form Toei in 1951, Shin-Ei branched off and formed a distribution partnership with Daiei. In 1952 the studio entered into a partnership with the Mingei Theater Company. After that - which would include the period during which A Dangerous Age was produced - records of the studio fall into obscurity. After the release of Edogawa Ranpo adaptation Spider Man in 1958, there is no further evidence of the studio's existence. 

The film was featured in Kinema Junpo twice: once to introduce the film prior to its release and once in a review after it had premiered. The synopsis can be easily found on kinenote.com, I'll paste a quick translation below. Hirata's character is named Noda. (Ahem.)

"Female medical students Megumi, Mitsuko, and Fumie roomed together in a dormitory. Megumi had feelings for her childhood friend Noda, a horticulturist, but one day Mitsuko took her to a dance party, where she met a professional photographer named Murayama, for whom she had a faint liking. When Fumie's family went bankrupt and she could no longer support her school expenses, the delinquent Mitsuko told her that it would be easier if she sold her body, but Megumi went to Murayama for Fumie and borrowed money. That night, however, Murayama got her drunk and took her virginity. Megumi began to live with Murayama and continued her nightmarish life as a model for nude photos, but when she became pregnant, he abandoned her. In despair, Megumi attempted to commit railroad suicide, but Noda saved her and she returned to her hometown. Meanwhile, Mitsuko's promiscuity had finally brought her down to a woman of the night, and Fumie was the only one left in her room at the boarding house. Megumi, who gave birth in the countryside, seems to find hope in Noda's warm hand."

As for the review - written by one Kota Shindo, apparently - the only way I could read it was if I obtained a copy of the Kinejun issue it was published in, which I was lucky enough to be able to do. (Tariffs are going to hurt me, but I will do what I must.) I feel like I mention this a lot, but Kinejun's opinion of Tetsuwan namida ari was that it was really very bad, so I was interested to know how this movie was received. As soon as I started translating the review, though, I thought to myself "oh... oh no..."

"This is one of the popular teen films these days, but it is a poor product made as a "side dish" from the beginning. It is rushed to pursue filthy sexual interest, and the producers did not seem to have any intention of making a decent film. Therefore, no matter how much we criticize it, it will be like pushing against a wall, but I would like them to stop with their lack of insight in producing, distributing, and screening such a thing.

The main characters are three female medical students. In so many words, it is a common technique to use medicine as an excuse to arouse sexual interest, but in this film, the actions of these female medical students are so random that they seem to have no intelligence at all. For example, the main character Megumi (Chiaki Tsukioka) goes to borrow a large sum of money from a suspicious nude photographer (Jun Mihara) whom she has only met once, and even drinks alcohol at his urging, then loses her virginity. Stupidity takes precedence, and not even vulgar interest can be felt.

The opening scene of a Caesarean section and the pink dance party scene clearly show the writer's lack of wisdom, which makes you feel pity. This work also stars many newcomers, including Akihiko Hirata and Kazuko Ran, but it is surprising how few of them can deliver their lines satisfactorily. I would like them to study elocution."

I wonder if all these critics were eating crow after Godzilla came out.

Anyway, the sum of visual evidence for this movie consists of some posters and a press sheet, which does at least have a picture of Hirata (under the い on the right) and a nice illustration as well, although it's kind of hard to see them. That review was pretty scathing, but it's valuable because it gives us our only description of actual specific scenes from the film. To be honest, I feel like this movie has worse odds of ever seeing the light of day - as in getting put online or at least screened in a theater or on TV - than almost anything else I've written about.

I suppose this film is of some minor note for being the first to get its own Toho Studio Mail. Unfortunately this photo is not good enough for me to capture and translate the text, but it's probably just a plot summary similar to the one above

A Dangerous Age was very short, at only 47 minutes. A 16mm print of a 30-minute section of the film is held at the Ichinomiya City Audiovisual Library. However, given that the library lists their date of acquisition of the print as sometime in 1988, I have serious doubts that their print is still watchable at all. But if the film really was broadcast on Satellite Theater, someone did digitize a print at some point. It's possible that the digitized version was this 30-minute chunk; the person who mentioned that they saw the film on Satellite Theater did not specify how long it was, and I have corroboration from other sources that Satellite Theater will sometimes not specify whether or not the film they're showing is the full version.

As an aside, I even have confirmation of one theater that the film was screened in during its debut run: the news theater Prince in Obihiro City, which was operating as the Cine Tokachi Prince as of its closing in 2012. Check out this blog post about it. Adorable little theater.

Rainbowman in Hawai'i

This post will be long.

Introduction

Note: This post was written before Rainbowman received new English subtitles in mid-2025.

On October 6th, 1972, the first episode of Warrior of Love Rainbowman premiered on NET. For almost a full year, weekly viewers were treated to one of Toho's most visibly low-budget productions, but one that nevertheless had a strange sense of energy and an at times almost psychedelic flavor to it. Extensive merchandise was produced for the show both during and after its initial broadcast, including - but not limited to - iron-on patches, notepads and sketchbooks, shoes, coloring books, a pachinko game¹, plastic tableware, menko cards, a menagerie of action figures, and whatever this is. A decade after the show ended, an anime adaptation was produced, which shifted the focus of the show from a human hero who fought using techniques inherited from his mentor, Deva Datta, to a human hero who fought with a mecha. Although it may not have had the staying power of Ultraman or Kamen Rider, cultural memory of the show remains: in 2023, Kodansha covered the show in volume 4 of their Godzilla & Toho Tokusatsu mook series. Notably, so many people involved with the show have since passed away or retired that the most relevant figure Kodansha could get for an interview was Yu Mizushima, who sang the theme song.

The star of the show was 17-year-old Kunihisa Mizutani, who gave a remarkably earnest performance as the generically-named Takeshi Yamato (not the one from Ultraman 80). He's young, but you can tell that he whole-heartedly believes in everything Takeshi is doing and going through. The rest of the cast included a few of Toho's older and more experienced actors in small roles, such as Yū Fujiki and Hiroshi Kōizumi, as well as newcomers Machiko Soga and Ulf Otsuki, who would go on to become some of the most recognized faces in tokusatsu. Playing Mr. K, the series' main villain and the mastermind behind every evil plot and scheme, was Akihiko Hirata, kitted out in an even worse wig and fake mustache than they put him in for Terror of Mechagodzilla, a pair of shades and, later in the series, a hook hand. (Mr. K in the anime was just sort of a goblin-looking thing.) Despite not appearing in every episode, Mr. K leaves a strong impression. The role suits Hirata well and he seemed to be having fun with it. As of 20 years ago, when the most recent popularity poll was conducted, Mr. K fell second only to Dr. Serizawa as Hirata's most popular role within Japan.

Rainbowman was Toho's first foray into the hero genre in a television format, and fittingly it was conceived by the creator of what is widely considered to be Japan's first hero series (Moonlight Mask): Kohan Kawauchi, a foundational figure in tokusatsu whose works are surprisingly little-known in the West.

Kawauchi is an interesting one. He had some nationalistic views (though it should be mentioned that he was anti-war), but was also the creator of several series that were very progressive for their time, such as, for example, Japan's first explicitly Muslim superhero (Messenger of Allah). Takeshi Yamato himself gains his powers through a distinctly non-Japanese mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism, traveling to India to undergo rigorous training and learn from Deva Datta. The lyrics to the series' theme song espouse global - global - unity and peace: "All humans are the same, except for differences in skin tone and language, they are all friends, but there are people who would destroy that." However, there is also the fact that Mr. K - cast as the villain at every turn, unambiguously in the wrong - is a man of unspecified nationality whose entire family was murdered by the Imperial Army, and as a result he has become bent on destroying Japan in revenge. While Mr. K's cartoonish supervillainy is obviously played up for funsies, it can be interpreted as being in pretty poor taste, and the show is not allowed to be re-ran on television today for this exact reason. As we'll see in this article, the ways in which Hawaiian audiences interpreted the series' views were nuanced even when it was first airing.

Now that we've gotten some background on what this series is, I want to leave its home country and explore the impact it had when it was broadcast outside of Japan. My aim here is to gather and present as much information related to the show's presence on Hawaiian television - and in Hawaiian life - as I can.

from Prefectural Earth Defense Force OVA

Same Bat Sister Time, Same Bat Sister Channel: When and Where Did It Air?

Tokusatsu hit Hawaiian shores in September 1973, when Tsuburaya's Emergency Directive 10-4/10-10 was broadcast with English subtitles. In February 1974, Rainbowman would begin airing. While it was popular with young people in Hawai'i, it would be overshadowed a month later by the phenomenon that was Android Kikaider's Hawaiian broadcast. The overwhelmingly positive response to Kikaider by Hawaiian fans is a large part of the reason why the show has any kind of notoriety in the U.S. today.

Rainbowman was broadcast on KIKU, which is currently on air as channel 20, broadcasting primarily Japanese and Filipino media. As of 1974, however, KIKU was on channel 13, and under different ownership. In 1966, Richard Eaton, owner of United Broadcast Company, bought KTRG-TV, hoping to convert it into a station that would broadcast Japanese-language programming. A scuffle ensued, involving FCC scrutiny, lawsuits regarding whether or not the previous owners, the Watumull family, were even able to sell the station, and doubts about Eaton's apparently poor track record with such endeavors, but ultimately the sale went through in July of 1967. In October of that year (after one more lawsuit for good measure), KTRG-TV returned to the air under the new call sign KIKU ("kiku" is the Japanese word for the chrysanthemum flower) and began airing nightly televised sumo matches. The next year, KIKU would introduce color broadcasting, and the year after, it began airing content with English subtitles. By 1975, half of its programming was subtitled.

So, when did Rainbowman air specifically? From looking through the February 1974 issues of Hawaii Times, I was able to find out that it seems like the series debuted on KIKU on Sunday, February 10th, at 7 PM.

Relevant to our interests, KIKU was also airing Dai Chushingura at around the same time.

Flipping through further issues, I could see that the show shifted days and time slots over the course of its run, starting off airing on Sundays at 7:00 but eventually switching to Saturdays at 7:30 and then Saturdays at 8:30. Its final time slot seems to have been on Wednesday at 6:30 PM, right before Kamen Rider was on. After February 4th, 1975, there is no further record of it in Hawaii Times.

So now that we have the bare bones of when the show aired and for how long, I'd like to try to find something a little more subjective. I want to look at newspaper mentions of the show that include contemporary reviews or impressions of it. And oh boy, do we have a wealth of exactly that.

Many Wonderful Things: Rainbowman in English

credit to August Ragone on Twitter

The sheer scope of newspaper coverage from when Rainbowman was on the air is staggering. Even cherry-picking some of the most interesting mentions leaves this post with probably more text than most people would want to read. If you made it this far, though, congratulations; you will be rewarded with some of the most fascinating information on tokusatsu in Hawai'i that I've ever read.

Phil Mayer writes in the September 6th edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

And now kids, the news: When all 43 episodes of "Kikaider" have been seen here, a new series "Kikaider 0-1" will replace it immediately on KIKU-TV, Channel 13. The new series will be about Kikaider's brother. The rest of this story is for parents and other old people. If they read it, maybe they won't ask so many dumb questions about "Rainbow Man" and "Kikaider," two Japanese hit shows on TV. For instance, a lot of adults think "Rainbow Man" and "Kikaider" are parts of the same show. [...] They're not. "Rainbow Man" is a lot like "Superman." And "Kikaider" is a robot who battles a different monster each week. 

[...]RAINBOW MAN is seven different good guys, one for each day of the week. He can change identities because he is also mild-mannered Yamoto Takeshi[sic], a college student who studied with a guru in India. When he must outwit the no-good "Mr. K" and his "Shine-Shine" gang, Takeshi can become Moon Man, Fire Man, Water Man, Leaf (or Tree) Man, Gold Man, Ground (or Earth) Man and Dash 7, who is also known as "Rainbow Man." Eat your heart out, Clark Kent. There are 19 more original "Kikaider" episodes and 28 more original "Rainbow Man" episodes to be shown Saturdays at 8 and 8:30 p.m. respectively. 

We also learn from Mayer's article that the first 26 episodes of Rainbowman were aired without subtitles (the switch occurred around early August of 1974), and we even have the name of the blessed soul who was assigned to subtitle the remainder: Alvin Hamada, staff member at KIKU.

So we know that the concept of Takeshi's seven "Dash" forms seems to have been translated into seven separate entities, with their own names that correspond to the powers each form has. I also find it very interesting that the article doesn't translate "Shine-Shine" as "Double-Death", "Die-Die", or any of the other ways I typically see it translated. I'm intensely curious if that means that they somehow decided to render the name of Mr. K's group as the English word "shine", or if they left the Japanese word intact in its Romaji form. Evidently, I'm not the only one who made a note of that - a letter to the editor in a subsequent edition points out that the word was not translated in the article.

Nadine Scott, in the September 14th edition, tells us... well, there's a lot to unpack here, so let me just show you the whole thing:

The Rev. Charles Crane of the Church of the Holy Nativity in Aina Haina tackles the impact of "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man," those two immensely popular Japanese TV hit shows, in his church bulletin this week. And he goes a step further in exploring the symbolism involved in the format of both shows particularly in "Rainbow Man." He sees a "deeply theological symbolism used in conjunction with the arch-villain of Rainbow Man, Mr. K", and says his henchmen are all robots who wear stocking masks and Texan hats.

"The molls are all round-eyed beauties with Western names such as [Diana and Cathy,] and their costumes are miniskirts and boots. Whenever one of the drones fails in an assignment, Mr. K, to the accompaniment of a Bach fugue, takes out a valise which controls his flips the appropriate toggle switch, makes the sign of the cross, says ["Amen"] and presses the button to disintegrate the offending knave."

Then, he writes, "it dawned on me: the enemy is us!" He points out the "bad guys are the Christians. They wear the Texas hats; their girls are made up in Western style; their leader uses a Christian liturgy to accompany his executions." And he concludes if that's the popular view of "us followers of Jesus Christ," it's no wonder missionaries are disillusioned when it is not a vacuum of innocence "into which they are received, but a pre-programmed resistance to that which is identified with all of the negative aspects of Western culture."

And what's more: there was discourse. In a subsequent edition, we have a letter to the editor responding to Rev. Crane:

SIR: As a non-haole resident of Hawaii, I was both amazed and amused with Rev. Crane's account on "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man." Rev. Crane tries to explain the "Kikaider", "Rainbow Man" phenomenon in a typical WASPish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) way. The two non-white heroes of Hawaii's youngsters are looked upon as something sinister. The same WASPish attitude has been described of "Kung Fu" by the same group.

Rev. Crane sees the makers of the fighting due as anti-white and even anti-Christian. Absurd! I am a student of psychology and have studied the reaction of Hawaii's youngsters. As Hawaii's people know, whites are part of a minority group here. However, almost all of the TV heroes have been haoles.

At long last, Hawaii's multi-racial, non-haole youngsters have someone they can identify with. "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man" are indeed "breath of fresh air in a sea of white pollution." Rev. Crane should speak up for the "Golden People of Hawaii"² if he truly believes in Christianity.

Also, check out this kid in his sweet Rainbowman tee.

This is just me. This is what the author of this blog looks like.

Presumably the above kid is the same one from this disgruntled mom's letter to the editor:

To Whom It May Concern: On Monday, Nov. 4, Troy came home from school and informed me he and his classmates had listened to an album in class which he described as being "Kikaider-Rainbow Man" music. I will state firmly at this time that if it is again necessary to play this music in class during regular school hours, I must insist that either Troy be allowed to play in the playground or sent to the office until the session is over. Neither Troy nor his brother are allowed to watch the "Kikaider-Rainbow Man" series on television as I feel this program is detrimental to their upbringing, sense of reality and overall mental stability. If they are being deprived of an essential tool in education by not being exposed to this farce, I will gladly take the consequences of my actions at a later time. While I understand and realize Enchanted Lake Elementary School is a public learning institution, I feel there is: a point at which a parent must step in. If, indeed, Troy's story is true, that point has already been reached.

While the majority of my finds in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin were simply advertisements for Rainbowman merchandise, it is very clear that the show was incredibly popular and a part of life for many Hawaiians, both children and adults. We know that people were thinking about it enough to write about their theological interpretations of Mr. K's robot harem. I've always believed that a crucial yet overlooked aspect of media preservation is the preservation of subjective, personal opinions on a film or a television series. More than just the facts of when it was made and who created it, it's also important to know how people responded to something.

Now, let's draw this exploration to a close.

Amen: Conclusions

This is mine. I embroidered it by hand. I may or may not also have a Mr. K poster on my bedroom wall.

I did not expect to cover international releases of Japanese media so frequently when I began this blog. It is perennially fascinating to me that something as massively popular as Rainbowman can today languish in unsubtitled obscurity in the West, when just 50 years ago parents cared about it enough to believe it was a danger to their children's mental health. There is so, so much out there that's just like this - for example, did you know that the first Japanese movie ever fully dubbed into English was a Toho production (with our man in a small role, of course) called 3 Dolls in College, and that it's completely out of print both within its home country and here, surviving only on a VHS tape (which I will get my hands on sooner or later)? We tend to assume that the media that survives and becomes popular achieves that status because it's the best or the most historically important, but that isn't necessarily the case. There is always more out there that you haven't seen.

Old media is worthwhile. If I successfully impress one thing upon my audience through what I write on this blog - besides my goal of proving that Akihiko Hirata was so much more than the guy who played Dr. Serizawa - I hope it is that.

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1 Incredibly important question: does this mean that, theoretically, someone could port Mr. K into Smash Brothers?

2 If you haven't heard the phrase "Golden People of Hawai'i" - I define it here because I myself had never heard of it - it refers to an advertising campaign run by Hawaii's tourism board that showed the population of Hawai'i as ethnically diverse, but did so in a way that posited the mixed-ethnicity population of Hawai'i as a colorful spectacle for the consumption of white audiences. One can imagine the writer of this letter may have been using the phrase sarcastically.

がらくた / Garakuta / Junk (aka The Rabble) (1964)

Release date: August 1, 1964

Director: Hiroshi Inagaki

Studio: Toho

Cast: Somegoro Ichikawa (fifth generation), Yuriko Hoshi, Mayumi Ozora, Ichirō Arashima, Tadao Nakamaru, Chieko Nakakita, Akihiko Hirata, Nakajiro Tomita, Yutaka Sada, Sachio Sakai, Ren Yamamoto, Haruo Tanaka, Bokuzen Hidari, Hideyo Amamoto, Jun Tazaki et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Infrequent television broadcasts and theater screenings.

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No, no, no. I didn't say this movie was bad. I said it was Junk.

Billed as Hiroshi Inagaki's 100th film, Junk was written by a three-person team that included Inagaki, Shintaro Mimura, and Masato Ide. Mimura had been working as a screenwriter since the late 1920s and was close with Inagaki (I recommend not looking at his Japanese Wikipedia page, you may not want to know how close), but this was his last credit as screenwriter; meanwhile Ide began work in the early 1950s and continued up until the early 1990s. The film was, as expected, produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, with music by Ikuma Dan.

As is typical for Inagaki, this is a jidaigeki film. From what I can gather, the story centers around Kanzaburo (Somegoro Ichikawa), a drifter who rebelled against tyrannical authority in his youth, but was betrayed by his comrades and now wanders around the country. Kanzaburo ends up as a servant to a wealthy merchant with two daughters: a vain elder sister named Makie (Mayumi Ozora) and a kind younger sister named Midori (Yuriko Hoshi). After a disaster at sea, the boat that Kanzaburo and the sisters are on, along with a group of people of mixed social classes, wrecks on a deserted island. Kanzaburo fights (physically) with the high-class officials and takes leadership of the stranded group. He and Midori begin to fall in love, but her sister becomes jealous and incites a riot against Kanzaburo. Ultimately, Kanzaburo and Midori have a "happily ever after" ending, and journey together across the sea.

@packy1954 has a two-minute clip from the film that is very fun and makes me want to see the whole thing even more.

Akihiko Hirata ended up on at least one poster. He plays a character named Miyachiyo, who is a kyogen performer. Seeing him actually do a kyogen performance would be an absolute hoot - seriously, I want to see that so much - but I have no way of knowing whether or not that actually happens at any point in the film. Miyachiyo apparently goes mad at some point between when the ship is set adrift and when it runs aground on the island, and dies after being attacked by birds (other reviews mention this scene as being unintentionally comedic because it is such an obvious ripoff of Hitchcock's The Birds).

Much of the promotional material for this movie is basically Somegoro Ichikawa beefcake

Reviews give the impression that the film is as lushly outfitted as most of Inagaki's pictures. One refers to it as "Edo-period Lord of the Flies". Overall, the whole thing sounds very typical of Inagaki; there is a lot of swordfighting but not much death or bloodshed, and an attitude of defiance against corrupt authority figures without a lot of real change to the status quo. packy1954 also says that Eiji Tsuburaya worked on the film uncredited, which is pretty easy to believe. Some stock footage from previous jidaigeki films was used.

The interesting thing about this is that it received a wider release outside of Japan. Stuart Galbraith's Toho Studios Story gives us some tantalizing information: "U.S. version [...] released by Frank Lee International. English subtitles. Possibly also released in English-dubbed format in some markets. 'International soundtrack' version produced". Let's fact-check some of that.

On a Toho Kingdom forum thread, one poster is skeptical about other films claimed by Galbraith to have been released by Frank Lee International, with the reasoning being that Frank Lee operated primarily Chinese theaters that mostly showed Shaw Bros. films. We'll shelve that connection for a moment, and come back to it later. What we do know is that the film's earliest U.S. screening was at the Toho La Brea.

callout post for me: spent $140 on yahoo! auctions this month but is too cheap to pay for a newspapers.com subscription

Junk, released as The Rabble, was playing at the Toho La Brea from roughly mid-January 1965 to mid-March of the same year. Other sources (including Galbraith) say that March was the premiere, but it seems like ads were running as early as January. The film was also included in 1965's Reminder List of Eligible Releases, which is a publication given to members of the Academy that contains a list of all films eligible for that year's Academy Awards. This does NOT mean Junk was considered for an Academy Award; it was simply eligible that year.

So about the Chinese connection. I believed at first that the film having been released by Frank Lee International was not very likely, until I ran across an issue of Pacific Citizen that mentions the film having been dubbed into Chinese.

More research into the 55th Street Playhouse reveals that it had a history, particularly around the time period that this film was released, of showing Chinese films and other films dubbed into Mandarin. And I have confirmed that the theater was owned by Frank Lee. So, indeed, Junk was initially distributed by Toho, but also distributed by Frank Lee. The showing mentioned in the clipping above took place around April of 1968. The review of this dubbed screening is... unkind.

Unfortunately, that's about as deep as the rabbit hole (or Rabble-hole... my deepest apologies) goes. This movie was circulating within the U.S. at some point several years ago, and I did some digging to try to see if I could still get my hands on a copy, but to no avail. I won't rule out the possibility of ever seeing it the way I would for some other movies, though.

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

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

Director: Tetsuhiro Kawasaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book.

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

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

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

Satō, Sasa, Atsumi and somebody's underpants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toho's "Youth School" TV dramas [東宝青春学園 / Toho Seishun Gakuen]

January 2026 edit: Many of these series are getting digitally remastered DVD releases this year, and so some of this information may now be outdated.

I don't talk about television on here as much as I talk about film, and there's a reason for that. As many Doctor Who fans will know, older television series often met an unfortunate fate as studios didn't really care to keep recordings around. This is the case in Japan as well, and it's made arguably worse by frequent television network reorganizations and elaborate copyright laws that sometimes led tapes to be deliberately destroyed, leaving us with a ton of stuff that will never see the light of day again unless some private collector has it (and from what I've heard, such collector circles keep to themselves).

So with that in our heads, let's look at Toho's Youth series of television shows! In this post, we're going to be covering What Is Youth? [Seishun to wa nanda], Go! Youth [Susume! Seishun], Flame of Youth [Honō no seishun], and Don't Cry, Youth [Nakuna seishun]. There are others in the series, but for obvious reasons we're only going to cover these four.

Read on for... baseball?

What is Youth? [青春とはなんだ] [1965-1966]

Note a very young Toyoyuki Kimura (Nambara in Ultraman Taro) in the middle.

The foundation of the series, which began with What is Youth? in 1965, was a book of the same name by Shintarō Ishihara, older brother of Yūjiro Ishihara and later governor of Tokyo. The book was adapted into a film at almost the same time as it was adapted for television; the film version stars the younger Ishihara was produced by Nikkatsu. Ishihara the elder is credited as writer only for episodes 1-26; the show was intended to end after that, but it was extended by popular demand, and since it began to diverge from the original story after the 26th episode, Ishihara's credit changed from "original work" to "original draft" starting with episode 27. The series proved to be so popular that it was made into a theatrical film titled Big Sun [Dekkai Taiyo] in 1967. You can see color footage from the film here. (Wikipedia does not mention Toyoyuki Kimura as part of the cast, but he is clearly visible in the clip, which is odd, and initially led me to believe this was colorized footage from the series.)

The first series follows Kensuke Nonomura (played by Natsuki) as he returns from the United States and takes up an English teaching position in a rural town. He becomes involved with the school's rugby club and serves as a kind of mentor to his students. Other teachers at the school have divided opinions on Kensuke's teaching methods and personal relationships with the students. 

Most people's first assumption on finding out that Akihiko Hirata was in a show like this would probably be that he played a teacher or principal or something like that. Well... sort of. This is actually one of his relatively few yakuza roles. Hirata plays Takajiro Kane, the boss of the Kanetaka group, who also happens to be the school's president and sees the school more as a business than anything else. I believe this would have been Hirata's first television role¹ as it aired slightly earlier than his episode of Ultra Q, and like Ultraman, he appears for only six episodes.

I'm so sorry but this is literally the only picture of him from this series that I can find. 

I've had a blog post bookmarked for a while that contains a directory of links to other posts where the author tracks down filming locations of the show and adds side-by-side pictures comparing the locations then and now. The level of dedication is somewhat terrifying. What is Youth? was quite well-received when it first aired and today there is still a lot of nostalgia for it among the older generation, but it has never been released on DVD.

Go! Youth [進め! 青春] [1968]

I've actually seen this one, so I can talk about it with more depth. Some wonderful person uploaded the ENTIRE THING to YouTube. It's extremely good, I really liked it.

This was the fourth installment in the Youth series, and the first to be broadcast in color. It aired for only 11 episodes before being canceled due to low ratings, which were partially because the series began airing during that year's Olympics. Kenkichi Hamahata plays the lead, a young social studies teacher named Susumu Takagi. The showrunners wanted to make Takagi a more realistic character than the "superman" teachers of the previous three series, so Takagi has a difficult time with his students at first, but eventually is goaded into becoming the president of the school's soccer team. His nickname is "Napoleon" since his catchphrase, "'Impossible' is not a word in a young person's dictionary", is adapted from a Napoleon quote. The students interpret this catchphrase with a great amount of creative license. Hamahata is very endearing as Takagi, he has charisma but he feels like a normal person too. Apparently he died in July of last year and was a prolific actor across stage and screen, as well as a prominent calligraphy hobbyist.

Hirata plays Ejima, the Vice Principal, alongside Eijiro Tonō as Principal Togawa, and he is in every episode except for #7. Neither of them particularly like Takagi or the soccer team, and frequently try to come up with schemes to disband it, but they're pretty chill about it. Ejima is something of a rival to Takagi since he's the president of the school's baseball team, and I am so incredibly pleased to report that this means in episode 3 he plays baseball himself.

one could so easily photoshop the school's emblem to say "東宝"

filing this one under "screenshots I did not expect to ever be taking"

...hang on a minute. Wait. Wait a second. I'm remembering something. Hang on.

Remember in Battle Baseball when you could have Dr. Serizawa as a pitcher? Did Banpresto know??

Let's move on now.

Flame of Youth [炎の青春] [1969]

I have seen this one as well. This was the fifth in the series, immediately following Go! Youth and broadcast for, again, only eleven episodes (all of which can be watched in the playlist I linked above). Despite the short run of Go! Youth, it was popular enough that there was demand for a follow-up. 

Keiji Higashiyama plays the lead, Gōtaro Inoki, and his assigned sport is basketball this time around. There is a bit of a change of formula in Flame of Youth in that it takes place at a former all-girls high school, so all of the students in the basketball club are girls. The bigger change, however, is that the series acknowledges the student protests. For the first time, the students in the show realize that they can advocate for themselves and organize to demand their rights, and this is treated with gravity and respect - something that I admire the show a lot for. Although the students' activism is toned down as the series progresses, they're never made the butt of a joke. One thing that really struck me while watching this immediately after watching Go! Youth is that there's hardly any basketball in it. Soccer was absolutely integral to the previous series, but here, the basketball club feels like background noise.

Flame of Youth features a woman screenwriter, Mieko Osanai. Women writers and directors are so rare in the Showa era that I make a mental note of it when I find out something I watched was written or directed by a woman. Osanai was involved in the planning stages of Ultra Q and wrote one episode, Open Up!, but didn't stick around because she didn't want to write for a series that involved monsters. In 1990 as the Gulf War was breaking out she also volunteered in refugee camps in Jordan. Osanai died last year as well, in May; she was 94 years old.

Keiji Higashiyama doesn't have a Wikipedia page. It seems that he only acted for a brief period of time before retiring. It must be said he is a tall drink of water. One wonders if they cast him in a basketball series for that alone. Some of the other cast members of Go! Youth return here (playing different roles), such as Tatsuhito Gō (acting under his previous stage name Haruo Nakazawa at this point) and Takaki Nabetani. We will also see baby Yutaka Mizutani both here and in Don't Cry, Youth. 

Hirata plays the head teacher, Takai. He is less antagonistic than the vice principal in Go! Youth, which reflects the overall more mature tone of this series, but it seems like a commonality in all of these shows that the school administration would certainly shed no tears for the disbanding of the sports club, even if they aren't actively trying to sabotage it. Unfortunately, Takai departs the show with no fanfare after the first six episodes.

As mentioned: tall drink of water

idk, I just liked this shot. Cinnamon tography.

Don't Cry, Youth [泣くな青春] [1972]

let's 👏 go 👏 UGM! 👏 U! 👏 GM!

The Youth series had been suspended after Flame of Youth in 1969, but similar series proved to be so popular that it was brought back in 1972. It was, in fact, so popular that Toho aired two of them at the same time: Don't Cry, Youth was broadcast simultaneously with Jump Out! Youth [Tobidase seishun]. This is a very odd approach that I've never heard done before (can you imagine two Ultraman series airing at the same time?) and evidently there was some overlap between the two as characters from Jump Out! Youth would appear in Don't Cry, Youth, near the end of the series. At some point, it was also adapted into young adult books. By 1972 we were firmly into the sukeban craze, so the students are much wilder than what we've seen earlier in the series.

Jin Nakayama played the lead - you may recognize that name; in a few years he would move on from captaining high school sports teams to captaining UGM in Ultraman 80. This series features the smallest of Hirata's roles in the Youth series, only appearing as a guest star in episodes 10 and 11. Since this series is obscure, I can't find any information on who he plays. 

You can watch a few episodes of this show - although not 10 or 11 - on NicoNico. (Related: There are significantly more Jin Nakayama fancams out there than I had anticipated.)

So now we've covered the extent of our man's involvement in Toho's Youth series. It is fascinating to see how the depiction of youth culture and public school in media changed so much over the course of just seven years. Although What is Youth? and Don't Cry, Youth remain inaccessible aside from reruns (of which I don't believe there have been many), the recent YouTube uploads of the middle two series are a tremendously good sign for obscure media in general. Keep digitizing those tapes!

Until next time.

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1 This may not be true - he had a very small role in an episode of Special Mobile Investigation Team that may have aired in 1964, but I can't verify that for certain, and it would be unusual since SMIT was a Toei series.