The Post Where I Talk About Yoshiki Onoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranking Every Manga Iwamoto (That I Could Find) For Ultraman Day

1) Yuzo Takada's Ultraman The First

This is probably my favorite Ultraman '66 manga. Yuzo Takada's art style is so precise and impressive on a technical level, and although he doesn't try to be realistic, he doesn't go full caricature either. I also really like that he draws all the characters' height accurately.

For the most part, the three volumes in this manga stick closely to selected episodes from the original series, but there's enough original content to make it fun. Some of the episodes are combined into one chapter ("My Home is Earth", "The Monster Graveyard", "Farewell Ultraman", and one or two others are all kinda smashed together as the finale, for example) and as a result Dr. Iwamoto ends up in story arcs that he wasn't actually a part of, which I will never complain about. Takada also establishes that Fuji is a gamer, and although it isn't canon, it is canon in my heart. There's another much-needed new female character in the mix as well: a tomboy mechanic named Hinata (who uses the "ore" pronoun); if I recall correctly, she's the only original character in the manga, and she's very cool.

At the end, Fuji is the one who gets bodysnatched by Baltans, instead of Iwamoto getting bodysnatched by Alien Zetton, which is an interesting choice. I highly recommend this manga and I wish it was translated.

Also this panel goes unbelievably hard:

Text says "I won't forgive you, Baltan!"

2) Eiichi Shimizu & Tomohiro Shimoguchi's ULTRAMAN

It's debatable whether or not Edo actually deserves to be here. His whole look is an obvious nod to bodysnatched Iwamoto from the final episode of Ultraman, but whether or not Edo is actually that specific Zetton is never explicitly confirmed. We do see Edo watching what appears to be a recording of Ultraman's fight with Zetton in a (possibly non-canon) bonus comic at the end of one volume, but for the most part Edo's relation to the 1966 Zetton is left up to the imagination.

This one bothers me a little bit though. These mangaka CAN draw likenesses (Shiro Maki from Operation: Mystery is also in the manga... for... some reason, and he looks recognizably like Shin Kishida) but Edo's human form is fully just Some Guy.

In any event, Edo gets the #2 spot because he inspired an AO3 fic that is deeply funny to me:

3) Kyōta Kawasaki's Ultraman: The Science Patrol's Battle Chronicles: Operation Giant

I found pictures of this on a closed auction listing and I was so intrigued that I tracked a copy down and bought it. I thought at first that it was just somebody's random doujin, but it's actually officially licensed. It is [takes breath] a manga adaptation of Toshihiro Iijima's novelization of his own unproduced pilot script for Ultraman. I believe this was published around 1994. 

I have read the whole thing and it's great fun. The art style is very rudimentary, but Kawasaki is really good at drawing action scenes, and it's like watching an episode of Ultraman that never got made. The story is about a little scrap-metal robot who is commandeered by an unknown force in order to announce the arrival of "G", which turns out to be an enormous - bigger than Ultraman - and extremely powerful black robot that looks like a suit of armor. The Baltans appear as well, and there are a lot of characters who are original to the manga. Iwamoto only shows up once in the second-to-last panel on the last page. 

Possibly the rarest thing on this list, but maybe not for long. If this ever shows up translated, yours truly may or may not have had a hand in it.

4) Kazuo Umezu's Ultraman

Man, something about Generic Shounen Manga Iwamoto just gets me.

I do want to award extra points to this manga because Umezu at least gives Iwamoto more of a dynamic role than he ever had in the series. He volunteers to take Mummy Man to his house since he has the requisite facilities to keep its body from decomposing(!) but the truck he's driving (with Mummy Man in the back) ends up getting scooped up in Dodongo's jaws and he has to be rescued by Ultraman. This entire manga somehow survived the MangaDex purge, and it would be just absolutely horrible if you were to read it there for free instead of paying for an officially-licensed translation (which doesn't exist).

(Edit: Well, would you look at that.)

By the way, the reason why so many artists draw him with that weird Clark Kent-style single lock of hair out of place seems to be because of one scene from Cry of the Mummy. He doesn't look like that at any point in any of his other episodes. I guess that scene made an impression on people.

4) Gendai Comics (Hideoki Inoue)

sorry about the poor image quality but the lighting situation in the original auction listing photos seemed to be "haunted basement"

If I couldn't read his name in kanji, I would have no idea this was Iwamoto. Points on for being funny, I guess. Gendai Comics' Ultraman is one of those series that has incredibly good cover art and then the actual manga itself is just eh.

5) Gendai Comics (Osamu Kishimoto)

Does he have glasses? Okay, sure. Really good Ide, though. That's what I look like after I've been doing subtitles for eleven hours straight.

Non-Manga Honorable Mention: Elisabetta Stoinich's RRParksCards Sketch Card

Sneak peek inside guzareshirei HQ. That is indeed the one and only Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari script in its shadowbox in the background.

I had to special-order this as soon as I knew it existed and a series of events then unfolded that led to what was ultimately a nine-month wait time (largely my fault for mistaking a years-old Kickstarter for an active project), but we got there in the end. Nobody ever does fanart of Dr. Iwamoto. If you're a fanartist and you're reading this, consider it your sign to do fanart of Dr. Iwamoto. I compel you. Show it to me. (Here's some.)

I hope you enjoyed this goofy post. I did. One of these days I'm going to make a "Fictional Characters I Have Heard People Say Look Like Akihiko Hirata" post and it's gonna be the craziest thing any of you have ever seen.

Masayuki Onoda, Akihiko Hirata’s Nephew

I’m writing this off-the-cuff because it’s information that I have just found out today, so excuse me if it’s not up to quality standards.

Masayuki Mitsuya, born Onoda, is the eldest son of Utako Mitsuya and Yoshiki Onoda. He is not mentioned by name on Onoda's Wikipedia page, nor Mitsuya's. As far as I can tell, his only acting roles under his birth name seem to be in one episode of The Mysterious Detective Yutaro Hatori and the Fledgling Female Detective and a fairly decent recurring role in five episodes of Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series, which his uncle also appeared in. To my knowledge he and Hirata were never in anything together, but in addition to Beauty Series, both of them also guest-starred in separate episodes of Kumiko Oba's Comet-san in 1978.

Masayuki Onoda acted under different names (Masahiro Tsuji, Masayuki Mitsuya) much more extensively: for one, he frequently appeared in Kichiemon Nakamura's Onihei Hankacho series, which his father directed many installments of. I'll refer to him with the name Mitsuya as that seems to be what he goes by now. He is, or at least was at some point, married to actress Yuki Nohira.

Here he is in the opening credits of Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series.

For reference here's Hirata on the poster for Tetsuwan namida ari in 1953, maybe three-ish years older than his nephew in the above screenshot:

Not only was Mitsuya an actor: Later in his life he became the director of Mitsuya Production Co., which at one point ran Onihei Juku, a tutoring school that taught young actors an extensive course on jidaigeki (including swordfighting instruction, hair and makeup, dialogue, language, and history). Yoshiki Onoda also taught at the school. As of 2009, Mitsuya had a blog for the school where he posts occasional pictures of his father (which are actually extremely hard to come by). I will also draw your attention to the fact that his birthday is July 24th. I already thought it was pretty remarkable that the Onoda family had two birthdays and one death all within the month of July, but now I know that they actually have three birthdays in July.

After finding out about him, I rewatched episode 46 of Kagaku Sentai Dynaman, which he has a fairly prominent guest role in. Sayoko Hagiwara, who played Rei Tachibana/DynaPink, met up with him again in 2018, which is the most recent mention of him I'm aware of.

I might have cried watching Dynaman today, which is not something I thought I'd ever be saying.

I also want to mention that Yoshiki Onoda and Utako Mitsuya had one other, younger son, who I cannot find any information about. Presumably this other son was not in the acting industry as most of his family was, or else I would imagine I'd be able to find him some way or another.

I did not know Hirata had any living relatives. And they’re not even old. I've never heard that Yoshiko Otowa had any children (and her husband died at just 56 or 57 as well), so these two sons and whatever children they might have could be his only living relatives, if his siblings aren't still alive; nobody seems to know whether or not they are.

NHK特集 想定ドキュメント 輸入食料ゼロの日 / NHK tokushū: sōtei dokyumento: yunyū shokuryō zero no hi / NHK Special: Hypothetical Documentary: Day of Zero Imported Food [1978]

No images from this docudrama exist, but I don't like to make posts without images, so here's an entirely unrelated book about the same subject.

Intro

A while ago, I spent a very long time assembling what I believe is the most comprehensive list of every single one of Hirata's film, television and stage credits, which ended up amounting to somewhere around 350 titles (the actual list is slightly less, but I usually say "around 350" to account for anything I might have missed due to obscurity). People generally like stories about the strange and unusual, so let's ask the question: out of that number, what is the weirdest thing he was in?

Well, that depends on what we consider "weird". First off, I want to absolutely avoid the pitfall of calling something weird just because it's from Japan. His The Sound of Music or Gone With the Wind aren't "weird" just because they're Japanese productions of English-language works. None of the game shows or variety shows Hirata was on¹ in the late '70s and early '80s qualify as "weird" just because we've never heard of them. Okage wa Waga kokoro ni ari - a docudrama about the founder of a specific Shintō sect - is a bit surprising, but I'm not going to call something "weird" because it involves a religion that I don't subscribe to. And I'm not talking about movies that are "weird" in a narrative or conceptual sense. The H-Man is objectively pretty weird, but it's science fiction, so that's to be expected.

So with all of those qualifiers, I think the one thing I can say for certain is actually pretty weird is the TV docudrama about what would happen if Japan suddenly stopped importing food. Maybe "weird" is not the most precisely accurate term here, but it's the sort of thing that's just a bit unusual to see in an actor's filmography - and it would be for any actor. You could imagine your favorite British soap opera star in something like this and it would still be weird. In any event, here is everything I can tell you about Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi.

Who made this thing

Despite not having a Wikipedia article, the director of the docudrama, Sakae Okazaki, has been a part of NHK's history (and the history of television as a whole) since 1953, which is essentially when television broadcasting began within Japan. Okazaki's main interest when he began working for NHK was producing media related to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki's home had been burned down by an American air raid, and when he was stationed at the Hiroshima branch of NHK, he created radio dramas on the subject of the atomic bomb. Okazaki was initially very reluctant to move from radio to television, but he found success in the mid-1960s when he produced what is considered to be Japan's first docudrama, Sōnan ["Disaster"], about the search for thirteen students from a mountaineering club who were lost on Mount Yakushi. After that, he also produced Japan's first color taiga drama, Ten to chi to. In the late 1970s Okazaki was in charge of "NHK Special", the series that Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi belongs to more broadly. Okazaki is still alive at 95 years old and was interviewed by Yahoo! News about his long career in March of this year.

I can find virtually no information about the docudrama's main screenwriter, Mamoru Tanabe. His name appears as a credit on a plethora of NHK programs dating back to, as far as I can tell, the mid-1950s. I'm not sure where he is now or when he stopped working, if he has.

As for the rest of the cast: Momoko Kōchi's in it, I just want to say that before I get to anybody else. There are a few other fairly well-known actors in the cast as well, including Gin Maeda, Toshiaki Nishizawa, Toei "hey it's that guy" Fumio Watanabe, and prolific voice actor Akira Kume. I have no idea what Hirata's role in this was, but I think "miscellaneous scientist" is a fairly safe bet. It usually is.

What is this thing

The general idea of the docudrama is summed up in its title. At least as of 1978, Japan was importing 60-70% of all its food product, and the docudrama takes place in the year "19XX", after Japan's government, acting on top-secret information regarding the upcoming sudden stoppage of all imports, begins to assess the country's capacity for food production, an endeavor mainly undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture. The production capacity of rural agricultural areas is analyzed by computer and the answer given is apparently not reassuring: with its current production capacity, one-third of the population would starve within the year if food imports were to cease. The docudrama - which took more than a year to produce and involved real-world experiments in food production using underutilized land such as golf courses - features actual staff of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and reporting by Ryōjū Katsube, a real-life NHK reporter who was, among other things, in charge of local reports for the world's first television broadcast from Japan's Showa base in Antarctica.

Please see Hiroshi Makita's thread on the docudrama. I am clowning on it a little, but this scenario is an important thing to consider; it's very concerning knowing your country may not be able to adequately feed its own population in a time of crisis, and from what Makita says, this problem has not been fully solved even today.

This was not the only speculative docudrama that NHK produced. Within the "Hypothetical Document" series, two other scenarios were explored: an earthquake warning and a large-scale blackout in Tokyo. There is a little footage and some stills from the other two docudramas, but as far as I know not a single image from the one we're looking at today is available online.

Can we watch it

No.

Well, not unless you're affiliated with a university in Japan and/or can get special permission to view it for educational purposes. (I don't know about you, but I think my purposes are pretty educational.)

There are more NHK TV specials that are lost to time and to Japan's draconian copyright laws forcing tapes to be destroyed following television stations restructuring than there are grains of sand on a beach. Fortunately, this is not one of them: it is held in Yokohama's Broadcast Library, which is the only facility in Japan that collects and archives television programs, radio programs, commercials, and related material and provides free-of-charge viewing. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that if I am ever in Yokohama, I will find a way to watch it there. I will tell you all about it.

That's not the only place where the docudrama is held, though. As it was released to VHS in 1990, numerous universities now have a copy: CiNii, Japan's equivalent of WorldCat, a website that allows you to search for any book in any library anywhere, lists 29 universities that have a tape. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the tape seems to be unavailable for general consumption: academic institutions are the only places that got a copy, as far as I know, and I'm not even sure what the tape looks like. If I do ever find a copy, you will know about it.

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1 Okay, the Beat Takeshi thing was probably weird. I will eventually write something about that.

断崖の決闘 / Dangai no ketto / Duel at the Precipice (aka Kill the Killer!) [1961]

Release date: June 27th, 1961

Director: Kozo Saeki
Studio: Takarazuka Motion Picture Co., distributed by Toho
Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Tadao Nakamaru, Kumi Mizuno, Tatsuya Mihashi, Keiko Awaji, Akihiko Hirata, Michiyo Tamaki, Tetsuro Tamba et al.
Availability: No home media or streaming release.

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The film we're looking at today was included in the 1962 edition of Toho Films, Toho's catalogue of releases that were available for licensing and distribution to international markets. Something interesting to point out is that while international cuts of Japanese films often shave down the run time, whatever Toho did to the English version of this film actually extended it - the original was 77 minutes, the version distributed by Toho International was 85. Added B-roll, perhaps? Unfortunately, we probably won't ever know.

The production crew of this film is largely unknown to us Toho fans, since this was produced by Takarazuka (even though the catalogue says "Produced by Toho Co., Ltd"... hmmm). Director Kozo Saeki helmed a lot of the very popular Ekimae films that ran alongside the President series for a number of years throughout the 1960s, but he actually got his start as a director during the silent film era, and was never exclusive to Toho, working for many different studios throughout his ultimately quite short life (he died in 1972 at the age of 60). In fact, the Ekimae series were not technically Toho productions: they were produced by Tokyo Eiga, a subsidiary of Toho. They certainly earned Toho a good deal of cash, though.

If we're familiar with anybody on the production side of this film, it would probably be Riichirō Manabe, a prolific composer who did the soundtrack for - among other things, but most notable to us - Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. Megalon.

Now, let's look at how Toho sold the film to English-speaking markets.

Hirata's character is named Otaki but the copy-writer for the catalogue seems to have mis-transliterated it as "Otake". Otaki is the boss of a drug ring and sounds like a generally nefarious person according to other synopses, but was not the main villain and eventually had a change of heart, handing over a list of the drug dealers he worked with to one of the good guys just before dying.

long poster is long

Now, just because a movie was included in that Toho Films catalogue doesn't necessarily mean that it was picked up for distribution. In fact, I can't find any record of Kill the Killer! playing in U.S. theaters, nor any stateside mention of the film under any other name. (I did find out during my research that Dobunezumi Sakusen got a U.S. release, which is kind of insane.)

So, unfortunately I don't have any English-language newspaper blurbs to show. Japanese reviewers imply that Saeki, who worked primarily in comedies, may not have been the ideal director for the film - adding in comical touches that didn't fit the storyline - and that perhaps Senkichi Taniguchi would have been better (give the man a break, though, he was already directing about a bazillion movies for Toho per year). Read a more extensive review from my friend (not really my friend, but I like their reviews and they always put "-sama" after Hirata's name) over here.

As for screenings within Japan, the film played in theaters in 2019 and was broadcast on television in 2021. So not terribly obscure, but definitely not available for anybody to watch any time they want. It's a shame that this never got picked up for stateside distribution, because a lot of Toho's early '60s crime films did manage to stick around after being exported and are readily obtainable today - The Last Gunfight, Merciless Trap, Big Shots Die at Dawn, et cetera. This could have been one of them if only a few theater owners had been interested enough to license it.

The Human Condition [人間の条件] (1958 Stage Play)

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, because it's something I consider to be a pretty big deal, but I've been slow to obtain materials I feel like I need to flesh out the post. When I talk about Hirata's filmography I tend to say that he had "two and a half" lead roles: one is Tetsuwan namida ari, the "half" is when he dubbed the lead role in Man from Vera Cruz, and the third is this, the lead role in a 1958 stage adaptation of The Human Condition, which ran from roughly September to November or possibly December. Not only did he play the lead role, this was also his first time acting for the stage in this capacity.¹

from my personal collection

I'm not really going to be talking about The Human Condition in general here, because the much more famous film adaptation starring Tatsuya Nakadai is widely acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema, so enough has been said about that and probably about the novel that it's based on as well. I'm focusing solely on this particular stage adaptation. Like most of the plays I've written about, there doesn't seem to be any pictures taken while the play was being performed, so most if not all of the visual evidence related to The Human Condition comes from promotional pamphlets for it.

The play was co-directed by two people. One was Kazuo Kikuta, a very respected playwright of the post-war era. He worked for Toho to produce, among other things, Japanese adaptations of English-language plays such as My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof. Kikuta was even well-known enough outside of Japan to have received an obituary in the New York Times after his death in 1973. The other director was Shozaburo Kubo, who I unfortunately cannot find much information about. He seems to have perhaps been involved in the artistic side of the production. The script was written by Kinji Obata, a playwright of some note who was not terribly prolific but was sometimes said to be "a successor" to Kazuo Kikuta.

I own a pamphlet from this performance. Inside is a brief blurb intended to sell potential viewers on it. Roughly translated, it reads:

Highly praised by all critics!

"A powerful work that makes the most of the original" (Asahi Shimbun)

This four-hour epic dramatizes the first and second parts of the original, said to be the biggest postwar bestseller.

The anguish of Kaji, a man of conscience and humanism, is depicted with a raw, breathtaking sense of tension.

It's worth a look.

"Pursues the stupidity of war" (Tokyo Shimbun)

For Geijutsu-za, which has mostly run mid-season plays up until now, this is a rare work that is almost a fully new drama. It is not just a digest of the original work, it is interesting, and there are many thought-provoking issues. This dramatization of four acts, thirteen scenes, and four hours is a success.

"A popular structure" (Sankei Shinkai)

In addition to being a timely project, the script (by Kinji Obata) and direction (by Kazuo Kikuta), overflow with humanism within a popular structure, making it a perfect performance for Geijutsu-za. [Akihiko] Hirata's excellent performance is also noteworthy.  

From the home to the workplace, The Human Condition receives wide-ranging recommendations: National Workers' Cultural Association, Mother & Housewife Association, Tokyo Regional Women's Organizations Federation, Manchu Association, Repatriates' Organizations Federation, Tetsudo Manchuria-Mongolia Compatriots Support Association, Tokyo Teachers' Union, Kaimenkai, National Film and Theater Workers' Union.

Before we move on, I just want to point something out about that pamphlet. See this?

They misspelled his name. That says "Teruhiko".

I have some further information on the process of adapting the original work to the stage. All of the writers and producers had some familiarity with each other prior to the play being staged: Obata was commissioned by the company that Kubo worked for to adapt the book, and Obata had also met the author of The Human Condition, Junpei Gomikawa. Obata was paid ¥10,000 for the script (about $70 in today's USD). This happened early in Obata's career, and because of the success of this endeavor, he went on to become a writer and director for Toho.

not from my personal collection, but maybe someday it will be. top: Yoko Tsukasa, bottom: Aiko Mimasu

The Human Condition was performed at the Geijutsu-za, a theater operated directly by Toho. How directly? Well, it was literally inside what was their headquarters building at the time. By modern standards this theater was fairly small, seating only 750 people. The Geijutsu-za has now closed, but it is still a theater, just under a different name (Theater Creation) and new ownership. Photos from the inside of the Geijutsu-za while it was operating under that name are surprisingly scarce, but we can get a general idea of the space from photos of Theater Creation:

While I was doing research into this play, I ran across something that I don't see often. Shortly after Yoshiko Kuga passed away last year, Makoto Kobayashi, a former Toho actor who is currently 90 years old and still blogging, wrote a post about her, Hirata, and this play. Kobayashi says that he did not work with Kuga often but did work with Hirata on many occasions as part of the drama club, and that he was a very nice person with a "strict and slightly serious" personality who was a good fit to be Kuga's husband.

Although I can only experience it through machine translation, I cannot overstate how valuable Kobayashi's blog is to anyone like myself who has a fascination with Toho's "golden age". Although he worked mostly for stage, not screen, Kobayashi acted alongside many of the actors who I frequently mention on this blog and he is still very much alive and writing about his recollections of his experiences. Here he is as an extra in an NHK drama. He states that this photo was taken where the famous Godzilla statue in Shinjuku is today.

I wish there was more I could give you, because to me it's really unexpected that Hirata would even be in something like this. I think it speaks to a lot of confidence to be able to act the lead role in a four-hour play that ran for over three months - and not just any play but an adaptation of The Human Condition, of all things. I'm going to try to dig up contemporary reviews or mentions, because there has to have been some in film periodicals from the time, but I'm not sure how much luck I'll have on that front. In any case, there may be updates to this post or further, separate posts on the topic in the future.

^_____

1 I have a vague notion that he may have done some stage acting at a May Day festival at some point around the late 1940s or early 1950s, but I haven't looked deep enough into that to be able to say for certain. The Human Condition was, in any case, probably his first "real" stage acting gig.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I've finished up my subtitles for two of the surviving three episodes of Comedy Trio. This is the first time any of Yoshiko Otowa's work has gotten English subtitles. Please check the episodes out here. I also timed everything completely by hand.

As always, I want to make it very clear that I don't know enough Japanese to just bang this out by ear, so this translation was assisted by dictionaries and carefully cross-referenced machine translation. This particular job was especially difficult because the style of dialogue in a live comedy show is much different from a normal scripted drama. People talk over each other, talk during audience noise, don't enunciate, speak too quietly or too far away from the mic, and so on. These subtitles are not perfect, but I really hope they're more good than bad. (I’m gonna be honest, I doubt I'll be subtitling live television again any time soon.)

If anyone out there wants to mess with these, I'm more than happy to provide the raws and my .txt files.

Some TL notes under the cut: