Above, an alternate promo for Yoru no saizensen: Tôkyô onna chizu, aka Secret Zone of Tokyo. This one is nice, but the previous version is one of the coolest Japanese posters we’ve seen.

Above, a Midnight from today 1966 with cover star Nobu McCarthy, wild, wicked and willing. Or so Midnight claims. Born Nobu Atsumi in Canada of Japanese extraction, McCarthy won the 1955 Miss Tokyo pageant, and later parlayed a chance Los Angeles encounter with a talent agent into a television and theater career dotted with film roles. As far as Midnight’s suggestion of availability goes, McCarthy was already married with children by 1966, and probably already too well-known to have to stoop to cheap publicity techniques on the covers of second rate tabloids. Which means we’re putting this quote entirely on the editors. After many years on screen and stage, McCarthy died of an aortal aneurysm while filming Gaijin—Ama-me Como Sou in 2002. Below is a still of her from her first credited film role in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy The Geisha Boy.

 

Above is a January 1978 cover for Australia’s Adam, a magazine you know well by now if you frequent this site. The art here illustrates Terry P. Duval’s story “The Final Run,” in which a hapless truck driver picks up what he thinks is a damsel in distress, but who soon shows she’s a pure femme fatale. Adam began in 1946, and this is the magazine near the end—it folded, looks like, in May 1978. Inside this issue you get the usual literary, artistic and photographic treats, including five pages of Patti Clifton shots, plus skiing Nazis, and a profile of the notorious but misunderstood Tokyo Rose, who we wrote about last year.

Readers also get to visit a Dakhma, aka Tower of Silence, a Zoroastrian structure where dead bodies—considered in the religion to be unclean—are left to be sun baked and picked apart by scavenging birds, thus preventing putrefaction which would pollute the earth. Mmm. Fun! The author visits a tower near Yazd, Iran, and must have gotten there just before the government shut all such structures down permanently. Today, the only towers still used for ritual exposure are in India. So put those on your travel itinerary. And lastly, on the rear page, you get Paul Hogan in another ad for Winfield cigarettes. Forty-seven scans appear below.

Above is a poster for the Japanese sexploitation movie Tôkyô neon chitai: Josei jishin de go shidô itashimasu, aka Tokyo Neon Zone: Lesson to You, which is pretty much in the same vein as this movie for which we showed you a poster a few weeks ago. Tôkyô neon chitai starred Rina Nagisa, Mami Sakura and Ami Takashima, and was directed by Shoichi Ikeda. Nagisa made several other pinku flicks, all of which seem to be fairly obscure today. That is to say, we haven't been able to track down a copy of any of them. However we do have another Nagisa poster we’ll show you later. Tôkyô neon chitai: Josei jishin de go shidô itashimasu premiered in Japan today in 1977.

Last week we watched Meiko Kaji’s Kaidan nobori ryu, aka Blind Woman’s Curse, and were too busy being cute with our summary of the film to mention that the blind woman was played by Hiroko (Hoki) Tokuda, who is better known to many people as author Henry Miller’s last wife. When they met she was working as a lounge pianist in L.A. and Miller, who had established himself as one of the most important American writers ever, was living in Pacific Palisades.

Tokuda told the New York Times in 2011: “Henry started asking every week to meet me. I realized he just wanted a Japanese woman to add to his collection, and I would always ask myself, ‘Why me?’ Soon after we met, he started telling people he was going to marry me.” And marry her he did in September 1967. She was twenty-nine and Miller, who had been born in 1891, was on the verge of turning seventy-six.

By early 1970 Tokuda had left Miller and was back in Japan, where that year she filmed Blind Woman’s Curse. Miller died in 1980, and Tokuda is in Japan today, running a piano bar called Tropic of Cancer, after her ex-husband’s most famous book. She says her marriage with Miller was never consummated, which may or may not be true—Miller isn’t around to contradict her. She also says she only married him for a green card,and has even joked about him being a bad kisser. "Terrible," she describes it. "Wet."

We love this. It’s a poster for Nikkatsu’s 1969 sexploitation flick Yoru no saizensen: Tôkyô onna chizu, which starred Satoko Sato and her interesting leather outfit, and was released internationally as Secret Zone of Tokyo. But that isn’t a literal translation of the Japanese title. If you glance at the bottom of the poster, the first two figures, if you’re looking left to right, say “Tokyo.” The red shape with the heart in the middle is a nifty mash-up of the two figures that make up the word “women.” And the last two figures say “map” or possibly “atlas.” So it says, “Tokyo Women Map.” Which is something we really could have used at times in the past. Yoru no saizensen: Tôkyô onna chizu premiered in Japan today in 1969.

Above, two mugshots from today 1946 of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was one of many women who broadcast English-language radio from Tokyo during World War II. These broadcasts were aimed at Allied personnel in the Pacific, and the soldiers referred to all the women collectively as Tokyo Rose, despite whatever they actually called themselves on air. D’Aquino called herself Orphan Ann, and her radio stints were limited to twenty-minute segments on Radio Tokyo. It wasn’t much time, but her low, raspy voice made an impression on listeners. What did she say? History.net answers that question by providing an example of a typical D’Aquino intro:

Hello there, Enemies! How's tricks? This is Ann of Radio Tokyo, and we're just going to begin our regular program of music, news and the Zero Hour for our friends—I mean, our enemies!—in Australia and the South Pacific. So be on your guard, and mind the children don't hear! All set? OK. Here's the first blow at your morale—the Boston Pops playing ‘Strike Up the Band!’

When the war ended D’Aquino, who was an American citizen, was taken into custody and shipped back to the U.S., where she was tried and convicted of treason. There was no actual proof that she had done anything traitorous—in fact her humor-tinged broadcasts had often undermined her Japanese employers’ intentions—but she neverthelesslanguished in prison for six years. D’Aquino’s legal troubles only ended in 1977, when U.S. president Gerald R. Ford pardoned her after evidence emerged that witnesses had lied at her trial. Cleared of wrongdoing, and the constant threat of deportation lifted, D’Aquino lived the rest of her days quietly and died in 2006 at age 90.

We couldn’t resist posting this. It’s part of a calendar originally published by the Japanese men’s magazine Heibon Punch. We’ve seen the image in several places, but we suspect it originated at the website bullesdejapon. Riding without any protective gear whatsoever is Me-ju Ayako, aka Ayako Meki, who appeared in the Nikkatsu flicks Red Assault and Eros Nights in Tokyo. This shot is from 1980. 

Above, Marilyn Monroe on the cover of the Japanese cinema magazine Eiga No Tomo, aka Friend of Movies, which published between 1947 and 1957. This issue, with its candy-like striped motif, is from March 1954, promoting her film How To Marry a Millionaire, which would open in Tokyo on March 17.