In Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp, also known as It’s Tough Being a Man, itinerant salesman Kuruma Torajiro (Atsumi Kiyoshi) returns home to Shibamata in northern Tokyo for the first time in 20 years. He foolishly meddles in his younger sister’s love life and upsets his aunt and uncle before leaving for Nara, where he falls in love with a woman who is already engaged to someone else. Tora is, it turns out, something of a boorish idiot. His comical misadventures sustain not only this 1969 comedy, but a staggering 47 sequels between then and 1995 (and Atsumi Kiyoshi’s death).

I have been to Tora’s home town of Shibamata. There is a Tora-San museum across the road from a separate museum about the series’ director Yamada Yoji. What is more, a bronze statue of Atsumi Kiyoshi stands immediately outside the local train station. How iconic and popular must a movie franchise be to receive these things?

To watch a Tora-San movie is to engage in full-bore Japanese cinema. When this first film was released on American DVD for the first time, it came with both subtitles and surtitles, each colour-coded to both capture the rapid-fire dialogue and provide sufficient cultural background to understand the subtext. Truth be told there is plenty at which one can laugh without an intimate knowledge of Japanese customs and society, but the full experience is a deliberately dense and frantic one. Part of the appeal of the film is how it brightly represents late-1960s Japan, vivid in colour and brimming with a sort of breezy optimism.

Atsumi Kiyoshi is not the sole central figure of Tora-San. From the outset we are also introduced to his younger sister Sakura (Baisho Chieko) and his aunt and uncle (Misaki Chieko and Shimojo Masami). All four actors deliver their roles with a wonderful sense of appeal, and within a few films seeing them again is like visiting old friends. It is ultimately Atsumi’s show, however, and he walks an impressive tightrope throughout – balancing with elan Tora’s frightful behaviours and ultimately decent nature. His adventures may not have ventured too far beyond Japan, but he remains – like Godzilla, Astroboy, and Mifune Toshiro in a top-knot – an integral part of Japanese screen culture.

Almost all of the Tora-San films were directed by Yamada Yoji. He used to be Kurosawa’s assistant before stretching out into his own works. In the 1990s he helmed some of Japan’s finest jidaigeki samurai pictures, including The Twilight Samurai (2002) and Love and Honor (2006). He is still directing features today, most recently Tokyo Taxi in 2025 which was released when he was 93. He has a clean, unfussy style that is evident all the way back in Our Lovable Tramp. He artfully keeps his own work out of the way, working only to serve the story, the characters, and the comedy. It is a delicate balancing act that he makes look so easy.

Any fan of Japanese cinema owes it to themselves to sample at least one Tora film, and it may as well be the first one. To abuse a well-known saying: to know Tora is to know Japan.