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Above: an alternate poster for a movie we talked about last year—Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. It premiered today in 1972. This is its standard promo, and it differs from the rare tateken we already showed you only slightly, but could we pass up another chance to share art of this type? Certainly not.
This rare tateken size poster was made for the roman porno movie Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, which premiered today in 1972 and is known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. Plotwise, Kazuko Shirakawa plays a beautiful bar worker who’s carrying on an affair with elderly Taiji Tonoyama. He lives in a mid-city highrise and uses binoculars to spy on his many neighbors, which he needs to do to become sexually aroused. Kazuko is more or less fine with this little kink, mainly because she wants to use him to improve her circumstances. She convinces Taiji to move to a higher, larger apartment and buy a telescope so he can get his rocks off even more efficiently.
So basically what you have here is a roman porno take on Rear Window with all restraint removed. It makes sense, right? Admit it—when you watched Jimmy Stewart getting an eyeful of Georgine Darcy you made the same jokes we did about how in real life he’d be getting handsy with himself. Nikkatsu Studios brought those thoughts into the open. We respect it. We do the same with Pulp Intl., which is why it has a sharper focus on sex compared to other vintage book and movie sites. As we’ve said before, many of those novels and noirs are catalyzed by sex, but it couldn’t be described or shown. Nikkatsu took the next logical step. As we do.
Inevitably, peeper and peeped upon meet. Kazuko bumps into Junko Miyashita, then Junko calls on Kazuko later and shares a confidence with her. When Kazuko’s other, younger lover needs a million yen, a desperate Kazuko resorts to blackmail. Think that’s going to work out okay? Then you don’t know roman porno. This one, with its focus on crime rather than sexual domination, is superior for the genre. Since only about 20% of roman pornos are good, we should probably quit while we’re ahead. But we won’t because we love sharing the posters. And speaking of, if you watch Hirusagari no joji: Uramado see if you can spot the Christina Lindberg posters in one scene.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.
In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.
In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.
Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.
In the United States, after standing idly by during years of communist witch hunts in Hollywood and beyond, the U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for conduct bringing the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The vote ruined McCarthy’s career.
In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.
