Big in Japan

The forecast calls for... shenanigans: Tora-san (Kiyoshi Atsumi) and night club singer Lily (Ruriko Asaoka) in Tora-san Meets The Songstress (Again). Courtesy Montreal World Film Festival.

A film critic once said that in Japan, his face was more recognizable than the emperor’s; fans call him “the bum from Shibamata.” He is Tora-san, the sake-loving, itinerant salesman who starred in the longest-running film series in history. To honour Kiyoshi Atsumi, the actor who played this Japanese pop-culture icon for 27 years, the Montreal World Film Festival is screening four of the 48 Tora-san films, which have rarely been seen outside Japan.

Tora-san is an unlikely hero: he’s lazy and poorly educated, with the social status of a circus carny. He’s single but no heartthrob; he usually wears a grubby beige suit and spends more time sleeping and drinking than peddling the cheap trinkets he’s supposed to offload. Yet keeping track of Tora-san’s adventures was a Japanese obsession for nearly three decades. Each picture in the series — which began in 1969 and ran until Atsumi died in the mid-’90s — drew an estimated 1.7 million viewers.

Why the collective interest in this rather homely vagabond? In a country renowned for being work-obsessed, Tora-san’s bohemian life provided appealing escapism, says Japanese film expert Catherine Russell, a professor at Concordia University’s Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema. “He represented something that’s not available to the corporate salary man in Japan. He’s not part of the system. Yet he can go home. It confirms a very romantic idea,” says Russell, author of The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, to be released next spring.

Tora-san travels around aimlessly, but doesn’t pay the emotional price for his wanderlust. No matter what happens in the outside world, he always returns to the back of the humble sweet shop his uncle, aunt and sister run in Shibamata, the village-like suburb of Tokyo where he was born. In Shibamata, neighbours are like extended family and everyone is connected. So while the films are set in contemporary Japan, the hard-working, honest country people who are Tora-san’s friends and family appear to have been ferried in from a simpler period. “Tora-san always comes home. But home is a fantasy home of a village in the city. It’s a Japan of 30 years ago,” says Russell.

The Tora-san movies are part of a genre known as shomin-geki (common-people’s drama), which was created by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu in the 1920s for the Shochiku Company studio. But unlike Ozu’s so-called home dramas, which are lauded for their depth and social realism, the Tora-san movies are cheery and predictable. Although their intricate storylines and folksy characters are strangely compelling, director Yamada Yoji (The Twilight Samurai) was hardly stretching the limits of his craft. Which isn’t surprising, as he himself was a company man. He joined Shochiku in 1954 and made almost all of the 48 Tora-san movies for the studio. And why not? With Tora-san, he had discovered a winning formula.

On the road of life: Tora-san meets a passionate geisha (Kiwako Taichi) while travelling on business in Tora-san's Sunrise and Sunset. Courtesy Montreal World Film Festival.

Much of the drama in Tora-san movies is domestic and takes place around the kitchen table. The action usually involves encounters between Tora-san’s family and the strangers he picks up in his travels. In Tora-san Meets the Songstress (Again), Tora-san befriends a corporate executive, Papa, whom he finds standing on a train platform in a daze. Papa is unhappy with his rigid, bourgeois life and decides to travel with Tora-san for a while. The carefree trekkers have picnics, sleep in railway stations and hang out by the sea. We don’t just meet Papa; we also encounter his anxious wife and a woman he once loved. In the same film, we are also introduced to Lily the Songstress, who comes and lives with Tora-san’s family for a while after her divorce. In Tora-san’s Sunrise and Sunset, it’s a rich old man whom the family welcomes into their home. In both films, Tora-san and his relations are troubled by the apparent loneliness of their well-heeled guests. But their melancholy is fleeting; like Tora-san himself, life moves on.

I went to these films expecting to experience something completely foreign, yet I was struck by how familiar they were. Tora-san movies have the pacing and tone of early American sitcoms. While the films are funny and lighthearted, they are also moralistic; Tora-san’s family is like a cross between the too-good-to-be-true Waltons and the slapstick Honeymooners.

When he conceived of the series, Yamada’s intention may have been to imitate television. Although Japanese cinema experienced a Golden Age right after the war — when directors like Akira Kurosawa made some of their best films — by the 1960s, most Japanese were television addicts, and the country’s major film studios were struggling to survive. According to Russell, the Tora-san movies got the Shochiku Company through this bleak period.

“In 1968, most studios were making porn or these radical, avant-garde movies. There wasn’t much in between. If you wanted to see a Japanese film that didn’t offend you, it was Tora-san, ” says Russell. In fact, before Kiyoshi Atsumi brought Tora-san to the big screen, he played the character in a television drama.

Yamada always maintained that his series was a hit because Tora-san changed along with Japanese society. It’s more likely the opposite. Despite the highly industrialized, complex nature of postwar Japan, Tora-san and his family always remained comfortingly intact. Unlike The Waltons’ John-Boy, Tora-san leaves home, but always comes back.

The Montreal World Film Festival is screening four Tora-San movies between Aug. 26 and Sept. 4.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.

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