In short: It’s Hard to be a Man (1969)

aka Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo

Twenty years after he left his family following a fight with this father, street peddler Torajiro Kuruma (Kiyoshi Atsumi), usually called Tora, returns to what’s left of it – his uncle and aunt and his half-sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). After some moments of happiness, Tora begins to cause all kinds of chaos in the lives of the family, ruining a marriage meeting for Sakura by getting boorishly drunk, and typically showing all the emotional maturity of a child that loves to pretend a dignified grown-up; though, as his saving grace, also a lot of natural kindness and a lack of actual meanness. While he’s ruining Sakura’s love life, he’s also falling in love himself, unhappily and slightly ridiculously.

Having watched a movie right out of the middle of the series, I thought why not start of the beginning of Yoji Yamada’s long-running and much beloved Japanese comedy series and have a look at how its beginning played out. As it turns out, most of what I’ve said about the later movie fits this one as well, for the characters and their relations to one another are pretty much fully realized right from the start, details and elements of the background apparently shifting and growing over time in slow and organic ways. There’s a clear appeal in that, particularly when it is combined with Yamada’s gift for creating a sense of place and time (even if it is an idealized place and time), which also helps emphasize how much everyone here is part of a community, seen and unseen.

Many of the elements here will apparently repeat throughout the whole of the series, which might become a bit tiresome over time. Or not at all by virtue of the simple universality of some of these elements, like Tora’s inability to feel fully at home when he is at home but his sentimental longing for that very same home when he is away, the way side characters have fully developed life of quiet tragedy or happiness we only get glimpses into, and so on.

The humour here is generally gentle. The film pokes fun at Tora’s mix of foolishness and braggadocio, but clearly likes him and everyone else on screen as well. This is a film that smiles at foolishness and quietly shakes its head at it rather than shaking its fist, which feels absolutely right for what this tries to be. So I’m not at all surprised at the amount of love the series got in its time.