Mizunoe Takiko

[Aaron Gerow]

The morning papers are reporting the death of Mizunoe Takiko. She died  
of old age on November 16th at the age of 94. Most people remember  
Tākī, as she was fondly called, as a star of the Shochiku Shojo  
Kagekidan (Shochiku's rival to Takarazuka), where she in the 1930s she  
stunned fans as "the beauty in men's clothes." She joined it in 1928  
at the age of 13 and left in 1939 to start her own troupe. She was  
also famous after the war as a host of Kohaku utagassen (the Red and  
White Song Competition) when it was still on radio and then on TV, and  
as one of the team leaders on NHK's long-running TV game show, Gesture.

But we should remember her as a dynamic film producer in an age when  
almost all the producers were male. She produced Taiyo no kisetsu  
(Season of the Sun) at Nikkatsu and is widely credited for building  
Ishihara Yujiro into a star (I wonder if the Kitahara Mie character in  
Arashi o yobu otoko is not based on her). She produced his first  
starring film, Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit) as well as many other of  
Yujiro's films. The JMDB lists her as producer on 76 films, all at  
Nikkatsu.

She also appeared as an actress in a number of films, the last being  
Obayashi Nobuhiko's Onna-zakari in 1994. A flamboyant figure who never  
married, she held her own funeral in 1993, hosted by Morishige Hisaya  
(who died last week), because "I want to see all your faces while I am  
still alive."

There are a couple of books on or by Tākī:

Mizunoe Takiko : Himawari batchama / [chosha Mizunoe Takiko].
Taakii : Mizunoe Takiko den / Nakayama Chinatsu.

Mizunoe takiko : iroiro arimashita.

Tākī hōdan waratta naita

Minna yūchan ga sukidatta : tākī to yūjirō to kantokutachi.

Someone should really do some research on this fascinating figure.  
I've posted one of her songs on my blog.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
site: www.aarongerow.com



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20091121/683eca7b/attachment.html