TONKATSU or TANUKI (E only)

[Michael Raine]

At 01:59 PM 1/23/99 +0000, you wrote:
>Sorry for this seemingly endless stream of posts to the list.  Months
>without a word, then suddenly this loquacity.  You see, I am chained to my
>desk finishing a translation project, and except for nutrition in the form
>of TONKATSU, this is the only diversion I allow.  Still, I wanted to
>recommend HATSUHARU TANUKI GOTEN (dir. Kimura Keigo, '59/Daiei) which I
>briefly mentioned before on this list.  This is a thoroughly dazzling
>(thanks to a brilliant use of technicolor) musical, that is well worth a
>look.  I believe that IZUMO Maroh will discuss it in her upcoming book. 
>Anyway, the whole TANUKI series including UTAU TANUKI GOTEN ('39) probably
>deserves a look, if one could somehow get that look.  But do catch
>HATSUHARU TANUKI GOTEN on videotape ... it helps if you love the frivolity
>and camp of musicals, especially one with lime-green girls as kappa and
>naughty tanuki (of both sexes) who are embarrassed when one sports a tail

Hope this topic isn't already dead, cos it's something I'm really
interested in. There's also Shichiren hana tanuki goten from Shochiku in
1954 and Oatari tanuki goten from Toho in 1958, both starring the
incomparable Misora Hibari. I assumed they were children's films but I
wondered after reading a zadankai from the mid-50s about film export. One
of the discussants said there were two kinds of export: art films for
Europe and the USA, and simple tales of magic for the South East Asian
market -- does anyone know if Japanese studios seriously tried to export
films like this? Has anyone seen the 1949 Tanuki goten film starring famous
"onna producer" Mizunoe Takiko and Kyo Machiko? Must have been quite a
wrench to go from that to Rashomon! Mizunoe's presence raises a question:
if each studio had it's own "kagekidan" or the equivalent, and if
Takarazuka was making films, why have there been so few Japanese musicals
-- or have there? 

What is a musical? Rick Altman claims there's a "basic sexual duality" in
the "dual focus narrative" of the American Musical. I wonder how well that
fits the alternately triple and single focus of the "sannin musume" series
with Misora Hibari, Yukimura Izumi and Eri Chiemi. There's an explicitly
heterosexual cover story in Janken musume and Romansu musume, but it seems
to me that the films have a more homosocial orientation, made most explicit
in Janken musume through Eri Chiemi's character and the squabbling over who
gets to sleep with Izumi-chan when she comes to stay. This figures into the
song structure which, rather than narrate the conflict and eventual union
of the romantic leads, celebrates the girls as friends (the roller coaster
song at the end of Janken musume) or performers (an hilarious sequence when
the three girls go to the Toho theatre to see live performances by ...
themselves!). Boys in the films are like the overt product placements
(Meiji chocolate everywhere!), pieced together from pictures in Heibon (the
"eiga to goraku zasshi" -- another product placement). Even the
Eastmancolor film seems adjusted to mimic the glossy pastel covers of
contemporary magazines such as Heibon.  

The more I think about it, the more drenched with music Japanese film seems
to be. Sato Tadao even claims that the Meiji government introduced western
music into schools to train the Japanese to become good soldiers! There
were title songs for silent films and by the mid-30s films such as Haro
Tokyo and Tokyo Rapusodii had already coded styles of music into their
various ideological significances (degenerate jazz and French chansons vs
healthy German accordion music, for example!). Of course, the musical must
be more than singing -- but there are "back stage" musicals like Dansei tai
josei even before the war. I suppose the key is whether the songs are
merely accompaniment or whether they provide and alternate narrative
structure. In that sense, perhaps Inoue Umetsugu exhibits the strongest
postwar "will to musical". Even action films such as Shorisha get a ballet
sequence! And Subarashiki dansei seems to me an attempt to emulate the
classic US backstage musical, all its improbabilities coming together in a
final, choral, moral lesson: there are wonderful guys all around you! 

Michael 
>.... 
>
>Also, you could consider later musicals such as star vehicles for Sawada
>Kenji (HONOO NO SHOZO, '74, dir. Fujita Toshiya) which I just saw at Cinema
>Shimokitazawa (---not quite as chained as I claimed, eh.) And aren't there
>a number of other star vehicles such as Yu Gatta Chansu (for singer Kikkawa
>Koji, '84??) and CHECKERS in TAN TAN TANUKI (for the Checkers, '85).  But
>then again, I can't quite remember how much of musicals these latter two
>are.  Surely, there must be vehicles for the girl stars too, but I've never
>claimed impartiality.
>
>Jonathan
>