TROUBLE TELESCOPE

They'd have been fine if they'd used it to look at the stars.

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.

Japan, Nikkatsu, Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, Afternoon Affair: Rear Window, Kazuko Shirakawa, Junko Miyashita, Taiji Tonoyama, poster art, roman porno, pinku, sexploitation, cinema, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.