How to account for the extraordinary popularity of Otoko wa tsurai yo? It is the most prolific film series in the history of world cinema forty-eight films since the first movie was created in 1969, preceded by a twenty-sixepisode TV series. For much of the life of the series, individual films were attracting two million viewers per film, and it is thought that half the population of Japan has seen at least one of the films at some point. As Mark Schilling has observed, the star of the series, Atsumi Kiyoshi who played the hero, Kuruma Torajirô, nicknamed Tora-san, a short, squarefaced loser who cannot hold a steady job, did not graduate from junior high, and never once got the girl could, on any given day, beat out the likes of Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, or Michael Keaton in the Japanese market. Atsumi Kiyoshi died on August 4, 1996, from lung cancer. He was posthumously awarded the People's Honor Award (Kokumin Eiyôshô), the twelfth person to receive the honor. Despite the fact that Atsumi Kiyoshi did not wish a public funeral and the public was not informed of his death until after his cremation, well over 100,000 people have paid their final respects at Shôchiku's Ôfuna Studio near Kamakura. Those who have made this pilgrimage appear to have been representative of Japan's population as a whole men and women, children, the elderly, young couples, and the middle-aged.