Word: yasujiro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...They are as different as water and fire," says a family friend. Seiji and Yoshiaki are the sons of the late Yasujiro Tsutsumi, a cantankerous millionaire who became speaker of the lower house of the Diet after making a fortune in railroads, hotels and department stores. Nicknamed "Pistol" for his buccaneering business methods, Yasujiro bought out impoverished aristocrats who could not pay inheritance taxes during the late '40s and early '50s, put up hotels on the newly acquired land and cockily called the hotel chain Prince. The 484-room Tokyo Prince, for example, is set on the former cemetery...
When the elder Tsutsumi died in 1964, the two brothers inherited dramatically different amounts and parts of their father's empire, parts that fit their sharply divergent personalities and amounts that apparently reflected the feelings between father and sons. The cultured and mild-mannered Seiji, the son of Yasujiro's wife Misao, has established himself as a novelist and an award-winning poet whose early literary work sometimes suggested filial embarrassment and even enmity...
Yoshiaki's life took a less refined path. His mother was one of Yasujiro's mistresses. This illegitimate son was the favorite, and he still praises his father as "the greatest entrepreneur I've ever met." While Seiji was merely given control of a money-losing department store, Yoshiaki inherited not only the railway and real estate portions of the empire but also his father's political clout: he is close to Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, for example, and backed him in his fight for the leadership in 1987. A rugged sportsman who owns the national-champion baseball team...
...three of them meet up in Cleveland, then drive to Florida for two improbable plot twists. There are only 67 shots, each separated from the next by a few seconds of blackness, and three funny bits. Artfully done, with offhand references to directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted...
...1950s Japan could boast not only a robust film industry but also a vibrant national cinema, with three directors-Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa-who could be counted among the handful of film-making giants. Mizoguchi died in 1956, Ozu in 1963, and no younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965-all outside the studio system-and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed...