Roppa

[Aaron Gerow]

>*  Roppa (or is it Ropa?) Furukawa
>       (I noticed there's a new book out on Norihei Miki, and in it 
>there's a photo by Furukawa, but I can't make out whether there's one "p" 
>or two!)

Furukawa Roppa (Roppa is correct) is one of the more fascinating 
individuals in Japanese film/entertainment history, if only because he 
was born as the sixth son of Baron Kato Terumao, a former physician to 
the emperor and member of the House of Peers.  He was adopted into the 
Furukawa family and went to Waseda, where he started hanging out with 
film and literary intellectuals.  His first "profession" was in fact film 
journalism, and you see his name (without the katakana) in many of the 
movie magazines of the 1920s, not only as a writer, but also as an editor 
(_Kamata_, _Eiga jidai_, among others).  You could say he was one of the 
first aristocrats to enter the film world, something significant given 
the low social status of actors and entertainers (if not film itself) at 
the time.  Due to his connections with the benshi of the time and 
entertainment entrepreneurs like Hankyu's Kobayashi Ichizo (of 
Takurazuka, Toho fame), he began organizing and appearing in 
musical-comedy stage reviews like "Warai no tengoku" with benshi and 
vaudevillians in the early 1930s.  He appeared in early sound films like 
_Horoyoi jinsei_ (1933) and many Toho films later on, becoming one of the 
top screen and stage comedians of the era.  His Showa diary is one of the 
classics of modern diary literature.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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