Roppa

[Peter B. High]

Thank you Aaron for the run-down on Roppa--a favorite of mine!

For those of you who don't know him, he was a rolly-polly stand-up-type 
comedian whose screen presence combined the physical ungainliness of Oliver 
Hardy with a whiff of intellectuality a-la Charles Laughton. I'm not sure we 
capture the ineffable essence of this performer by dwelling on his aristocratic 
heritage. His screen personna was far from ..."baronial." He was ever the 
hapless, usually citified, common citizen. Rather than Achako or Entatsu--who 
had fairly standardized comic personnas--Roppa moved freely between  
semi-slapstick to serio-whimsical roles. Actually, he is usually contrasted 
with his contemporary, "Enoken," the pixyish, nimble-bodied reigning king of 
slapstick. Whereas Enoken's humor was largely physical--and he was a charming 
comic singer as well--Roppa's was the product of his intellect. The best 
summation of him I've come across so far is in Nakahara Yumihiko's *Teibon 
Nihon no Kigekijin*: "From the neck up, Roppa with his glib mouth and big moon 
face was hilarious. From the neck down it was another matter.He never fully 
mastered the art of hand-gestures or body-language. His legs and feet were 
never brought into play; in fact, they seemed never to really belong to him."

And I couldn't agree more with Aaaron's characterization of Roppa's massive 
two-volume diary as "one of the classics of modern diary literature." As an 
inveterate voyeur of other people's lives, I love to read diaries (often I have 
a couple piled next to the bed--my own usually sits buried in a slag heap of 
half-read paperbacks and unanswered correspondence in the corner). Actually, 
I've read Roppa's diary at least twice--once for historical instruction and 
once for the sheer pleasure of it. For the wartime period, its even better than
Yamada Futaro's gruelling depiction of the 1945 dog days in his *Senchu-ha 
Fusen Nikki* Far more that Futaro's, Roppa's give us  a living, breathing 
individual whose utterly human frailties unfold like a low-keyed drama before 
our eyes--his chronic exhaustion (interrupted by exhillerating high's brought 
on by an injection of "hiropon" aphedimins), his arguments with his mother, his 
chronically bad teeth. Ah, the drama of Roppa's poor teeth! They got really bad 
just as the bombing began. We watch him anxiously confront the ordeal of 
multiple extractions ("I've got to do something about this...but not this week. 
Too busy.") Then comes the day when he finally appears in Dr. Inoue's chair 
("The news is worse than I'd feared."). He worries about how he's going to 
sound on his twice-a-week radio show with his front teeth gone. Then, before 
the ordeal is finished, the doctor's supply of local anaesthetic runs out. Then 
the office itself disappears in a bombing firestorm. Roppa's record of those 
last terrible months, when the bombing begame a numbing routine for the 
citizens of Tokyo, will remain etched forever in my mind: "3/21: An hour or two 
before dawn, the sirens start up again. 'Pooo! Pooo!' I get up. put on my robe 
and go down into the shelter." It wasn't long before he had become inured to 
the wail of the siren: "3/28: "About one a.m., 'pooo!' I wake up but since it 
didn't sound like the neighborhood, I roll over and go back to sleep."

Actually, the Japanese cinema world has consistently produced a lot of 
top-flight writing--Oshima Nagisa's essays, for example. At the risk of raising 
a tempest among his fans on the list, I have to admit that I often prefer his 
essays to many of his films. Itami Mansaku, too, was a magnificent essayist, 
producing some of the best examples of this genre in the 1930s and 40s Japanese 
literary world. Kishi Keiko, meanwhile, has been turning out really fine books 
of reportage recently.Some of my all-time  favorites among Japanese cinema 
literature are the autobiographies of Makino Masahiro (*Eiga Tosei,* etc), 
Yamamoto Kajiro (*Eiga Suikoden,* etc.) and Ushihara Kiyohiko (*Kiyohiko 
Eiga-fu 50-nen*) . As the son of Makino Shozo ("the Father of Japanese 
Cinema"), Masahiro as a child had a unique vantage point on the very earlky 
days of Japanese filmmaking. His descriptions of Onoue Matsunosuke (Japan's 
first real movie star), Bando Tsumasaburo and a host of others are invariably 
linked to some memorable (and strongly visual vignette).  Parts of the second 
volume of his two-volume autobiography, however, get overwhelmed by his 
virulent hatred of his mother. Yamamoto Kajiro's lengthy description of making 
*The Sea War From Hawaii to Malaya* (1942) is equally "cinematic." But when it 
comes to strongly visual, highly dramatic story-telling, nobody beats Ushihara 
Kiyohiko. As a director, he was certainly competent, if somewhat hum-drum. As a 
memoire writer, he is rivetting. Although I once spent several months pouring 
through every first-hand reportage work on the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) I 
could get my hands on, nothing compared for vividness with Ushihara's 
description of the Quake at the Shochiku Kamata studios and his perilous trek 
through a devastated industrial wasteland back to Yokohama, where he found his 
wife trapped under their house. A week or so later, they were among a group of 
refugees making their way to the Kansai region onboard a steamer. They run into 
a terrific typhoon while at sea and the ship almost founders. The description 
of the panic of the passengers would do Joseph Conrad justice!

Anyway, if you read Japanese all of these works--along with Iwasaki Akira's 
harrowing description of his arrest by the Thought Police in 1940 and his 
subsequent incarceration in the "pig box" (prison)-- are richly rewarding 
must-reads. (Actually, I've done translations of some of this material into 
English already...)

Peter B. High
Nagoya University