Tokyo ondo is another characteristic example of the form of saundo-ban in which popular song takes centre stage. Like Shima no musume (The Island Girl, 1933), screened at Pordenone in 2017, it was directed by Hotei Nomura (1880-1934), a veteran who played a key role in developing the tradition of female-centred melodramas at Shochiku, and featured a hit song recorded by the most popular female singer of the 1930s, Katsutaro Kouta (1904-1974). Katsutaro came from the pleasure quarters of Yoshicho, Tokyo, where she worked as a geisha, performing in traditional vocal genres with shamisen accompaniment, before her discovery and signing by a Victor executive led to her first recording on that label in 1931.
With Tokyo ondo, Shochiku managed to secure an exclusive contract with Victor, and this tie-in all-star cast film, featuring Nobuko Fushimi as Nobuko Yajima and Joji Oka as her fiancé Susumu Saito in the leading roles, became the second collaboration between director Nomura and musical director Haruyo Shimada, after Shima no musume. The film’s melodramatic plot centres on two lovers struggling to overcome the hurdles their parents put in the way of their union, which may be read as a tacit critique of class difference and parental aspirations.
The title song, “Tokyo ondo”, was the biggest musical hit of the summer of 1933, promoted on radio and records as well as on film. Scholar Shuhei Hosokawa comments that “The lyrics celebrate Tokyo as a capital, the Imperial Palace in its centre, and consequently Japan as a nation at the centre of the world,” and the song arguably chimed with the increasingly nationalistic mood of Japan in the wake of its annexation of Manchuria the previous year.
Hosokawa argues that the film makes a more sophisticated use of its song than did Shima no musume, in which the song was tied to the content of specific scenes; here, he writes, “it is not the lyric that matters to the plot but the festive mood,” and, indeed, the song is sometimes heard in instrumental variations. In addition, the climax “seems to go beyond silent routines by using different music sources depending on the filmic space”, forging experimental sonic contrasts between different melodies and silence. Acknowledging the way in which the music, plus occasional synchronized sound effects, moved beyond the norms of silent film accompaniment, Kinema Junpo critic Fuyuhiko Kitagawa hailed this saundo-ban with the words, “This is certainly sound film.”
A year later, “Tokyo ondo” was followed by another song, “Sakura ondo”, which inspired five separate film versions, as almost all of Japan’s major film studios competed to capitalize on its success. Sadly, all the saundo-ban versions of Sakura ondo are considered lost, though a full sound version is extant.

Alexander Jacoby, Johan Nordström