Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajiro kokoro no tabiji (1989) User Reviews

If you liked the other 46 Tora-san movies, you'll like this one too

[chris-1028 · 16 July 2002]

Contains Spoiler Tora-san befriends a suicidal salary man who is so greatful that he insists that Tora-san accompany him on a trip to Vienna. Torajiro has never even been on an airplane but reluctantly goes. Torajiro is miserable while his companion drags him through museums and famous sites. While there he falls for a pretty young Japanese tour guide, but like all his other romances, this one fizzles out. Upon returning to his home, he utters his trademark "it was just a dream".

If you enjoy the Tora-san formula, this one won't dissapoint you. If you have never seen one of these movies, you might catch this one subtitled in English on a flight to Japan. It is worth watching but the translation skims over alot of things. Basically Tora-san is a wanderer, a hopeless romantic, a looser. The series is about his journies around Japan and his many failures at romance. Somehow this really appeals to a certain generation of Japanese.

The only Tora-san film set outside Japan

[ButaNiShinju · 20 April 2008]

The film is notable in the series for being the only one in which Tora-san goes outside Japan. (But, parenthetically, why Vienna? It's a curious choice, being much less on the radar scope of Japanese travelers, especially in 1989, than, say, London, New York, Paris, or Rome --- possibly the Austrian Tourist Board provided some support for the film...).

The film includes some nice scenes of Vienna and its environs --- Schonbrunn Palace, Durnstein in the Wachau Valley, etc. But predictably, it's all lost on Tora-san, who spends much of his time in the hotel room, or getting mixed in with an organized tour of Japanese tourists.