You Can Succeed, Too

Series Opening Film + Party

Introduction by Michael Raine, series curator. 

Join us for the post-screening party featuring food, drinks and karaoke! Jazz vocalist and instrumentalist Yasuno Katsuki will set the mood by singing hit Japanese songs from the 1950-60s and then open the floor for audience participation. Come prepared to sing your favorite tunes in English or Japanese! Emceed by Brian Walters.

The closest Japanese cinema ever came to the full-blown Broadway style musical, with singing and dancing on the streets of Tokyo, music by avant-garde composer and jazzman Toshiro Mayuzumi, lyrics by renowned poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, and direction by one of Toho’s most prominent "new wave" directors, Eizo Sugawa. Popular jazz drummer and actor Frankie Sakai stars in this comic version of the "industrial competition" genre: two tourism companies compete for foreign clients in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highlighting the coming internationalization of Japan, the film dramatizes the felt tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures of the "economic animal" lifestyle, and the energy of high economic growth.

1964, 100 min., 35mm, color. In Japanese with live English subtitles. Directed by Eizo Sugawa. With Frankie Sakai, Mie Hama, Jerry Ito, Yoshitomi Masuda, Mie Nakao.

Print courtesy of National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Tickets: $15/$12 Japan Society members, seniors & students


Part of the 2016 Globus Film Series Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.

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