"Tora-san Summit" in Memory of a Legendary Movie Hero

Those of you Japanese movie fans may be familiar with Tora-san in a series of 48 movies made of him and his family back home in Shibamata. This legendary movie character is so popular that an idea cropped up a while back to commemorate the passing of Tora-san in some sort of festa, tentatively named Tora-san Summit.

The festa, the "1st Tora-san Summit" took place in Tora-san's hometown of Katsushika Shibamata on November 7. Some 14,000 Tora-san fans flocked to the grounds of Taishakuten Temple and along the approach to the temple.

Tora-san's "It's Tough to be Born a Man" series ran 48 stories each of which involving certain local towns and villages Tora-san visited to peddle. The ceremony was loaded with a variety of such local products brought in from respective location points.

The summit was attended by the representatives of 11 local municipalities including the City of Vienna where the films were taken. Yoji Yamada, 84, director of the film series who wrote or co-wrote all the screenplays, was present at the opening ceremony at Taishakuten Temple. In his greetings, Yamada commented:

"I'm so happy to be here today in memory of Tora-san and hope this event will be repeated farther into the future."

The summit adopted a joint communique to preserve nature and         indelible scenes of location points.

Make-believe Tora-sans were all over the ceremony site, one of whom, Kyosuke Horiguchi, 69, from Kumamoto portrayed Tora-san in Amakura so well that amateur photographers flocked around him.

The eating and drinking joints along the approach to Taishakuten Temple sold unique products from the localities where Tora-san films were shot, including Onion Miso Dumplings from Komoro, Nagano, Shark-fin Buns from Kesennuma, Miyagi, Grilled Jidori Chicken from Nichinan, Miyazaki. All these places Tora-san traveled and peddled his way along.