Obscure Japanese Film #225
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| Jiro Tamiya | 
This oddity is an independent Japanese-British co-production from a company called Akari, which seems to have been formed by star Jiro Tamiya and director Terence Donovan especially for this movie. Tamiya plays Kimura, a secret service man who goes to London on a covert mission. A Professor Bewsley (John Welsh) has found a way to produce synthetic fuel from hydrogen (or sommat) and Kimura must prevent it from falling into the wrong hands – but of course that’s all just a Hitchcock-like MacGuffin to set the plot in motion. Along the way, Kimura forms an uneasy alliance with British secret service man Alexander (Robert Hardy) and is seduced by the mysterious Della (Carolyn Seymour).
Unfortunately, the plot is convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility at times. The screenplay is by Shinobu Hashimoto, justly famous for his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa among others, but who sometimes seemed to go off the rails when not working from a literary source and left to his own devices (see also Lake of Illusions). Here, Hashimoto has based his story on the fact that Japan had no specific law against espionage at the time, making it a so-called ‘paradise for spies’ (Japan’s State Secrecy Law finally went into force in 2014). It’s perhaps worth noting that, preceding Hashimoto’s screenplay credit, the opening credits state (in this order) ‘New Dialogue by John Bird / Original Translation from the Japanese by Professor Alan Turney / From an Idea by Terence Donovan.’ John Bird (1936-2022) was a very well-known figure in the UK, famous for his satirical writing and comic acting, mainly on television, and was no doubt responsible for making the dialogue more colloquial. In any case, a bizarre climax involving Tamiya rubbing rice balls all over himself and an actual yellow dog (which has been died that colour) is something only the eccentric Hashimoto could have cooked up.
Of course, the title is also partly a racial epithet – another strange scene features Kimura pretending to be hopeless at judo before his opponent calls him a ‘yellow Jap’, at which point he snarls, ‘I don’t mind the “Jap” so much, but don’t ever call me “yellow”!’ He then loses it and proceeds to fuck up his opponent by dislocating both his arm and his jaw for him (incidentally, Tamiya was a black belt in karate, so why the filmmakers failed to make use of this real-life skill instead of featuring a judo match is anyone’s guess). Helpfully, Kimura later explains the second word in the title more fully, saying, ‘In Japan, detectives and informers are called dogs – they’re always sniffing around. Not a very polite expression,’ while another canine quirk of this film is that Kimura has a phobia of dogs. However, perhaps a further motivation for the use of ‘dog’ in the title is that Tamiya had starred in the series of nine Inu (‘dog’) films made by Daiei between 1964 and 1967.
God knows how Tamiya hooked up with fashion photographer Terence Donovan and chose him as director. Donovan had never made a film before and never would again, with the exception of a number of music videos such as the one for Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’. On this evidence, it’s not hard to see why Donovan made no further features. Almost everything falls flat here and, considering Donovan’s background, one might expect the film to look good at least, but most of it’s indifferently photographed and looks like cheap TV. A tragic footnote to this film is the fact that both Tamiya and Donovan suffered from depression and would die by suicide – Donovan not until 1996, but Tamiya in 1978, the year after this film was finally released in Japan (by Shochiku) and flopped both with the critics and at the box office. While Yellow Dog was certainly not the reason for his suicide, it may have been one of many contributing factors.
Tamiya does surprisingly well in terms of his English pronunciation, though his intonation is rather strange and I suspect that he learned his lines phonetically. This must have been quite a challenge, and you can only admire him for taking it on, especially considering that he’s surrounded by such experienced and confident British actors as Robert Hardy and co. Cross-cultural collaborations of this sort rarely turn out well, and this one certainly didn’t, but it’s not entirely without entertainment value as we watch Tamiya as a fish out of water slurping his soup, pretending incompetence and bemusing the Brits, who (I’m ashamed to say) mostly come across as a cold and chauvinistic bunch of entitled snobs.

Robert Hardy and Angela Thorne 
 




 
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