Igano Kabamaru (1983)

 

Today's release is another collaboration with Kineko Video—this time, it is Toei's Igano Kabamaru from 1983. Adapted from the manga of the same name, this tells the story of a young ninja living in Iga who trains daily with his strict grandfather, Saizou. When Saizou suddenly passes away one afternoon, Igano moves from Iga to Tokyo to stay with Ran Ookubo, one of Saizou's acquiantances who fell in love with him long ago. The rest of the movie focuses on Igano adjusting to modern life and his attempts to win the feelings of Ran's granddaughter, Mai; as the movie progresses, Igano eventually gets involved in a rivalry between two private schools and finds himself competing against another boy who formerly trained with Igano in the mountains alongside Saizou.

I wish I could give enough details about how I stumbled across this movie, but honestly, I genuinely don't remember anymore. All I do vaguely remember is that I downloaded the movie from AsianDVDClub, back when that still existed... although, perhaps I watched it because I was going through Kentaro Haneda's scoring history and him scoring this movie caught my interest? That seems more likely. In any case, I admit that I didn't like this that much on my first watch; back when I posted my fansub of Be-Bop Highschool from 1985, I wrote that the movie felt like it was just a compilation of multiple manga chapters. I don't have any such issues with movies like that nowadays, but back then that idea was foreign to me and Igano Kabamaru—which happens to be another movie made in the same way—was a title I ultimately quickly forgot about after I watched it back in the day.

For the release I downloaded when I watched this long ago, I'm not sure where it was sourced from. I don't feel like downloading it again to double-check, but in any case, this movie has only had a LD/Betamax/VHS release so far. It seems to have gotten broadcasted on Toei's "toei.ch" service at some point, though in SD only. A 16mm copy of the movie popped up for sale in 2022, so I wanted to take advantage of it and purchased it since to this day there is still no official HD remaster of the movie currently. It took a while to get it scanned due to stalling on my end (plus other projects I was focusing on throughout the years that followed), but the folks at Kineko finally managed to help scan it for me recently.

Quality-wise, how is it?

It's not perfect, though that isn't to say that it's in shit condition, because it isn't. The movie was clearly shot on 35mm, but as a result of converting this from 35mm to 16mm, the framing looks a little unusual on the corners and the letterboxing bars aren't consistent as they're always changing positions in each shot. Additionally, this copy wasn't faded, but surprisingly this movie somehow had that classic™ green tint that's associated a lot with old Toei titles, so some CC'ing was applied on this scan to reduce that a little bit. As far as scratches/marks go, this copy is noticeably showing its age, but IMO it's not so bad to the point where it distracts the viewer from being able to watch it.

The audio, on the other hand, is unfortunately a little flawed on this release, as it cuts off for less than a second during several spots in the movie where reel changes had to be performed. Some of these spots were able to be patched, others weren't. I wanted to pursue this film either on VHS or LD so I could borrow the audio from those copies and use that to patch the audio in for the missing sections, but the movie is stupid rare to find unless you're seeking it out on Betamax. (Yes, a Betamax copy was acquired for this project, but it wasn't used since the audio was abysmal. Nothing to do with the condition of the tape, that's just how the audio was mastered)

The subs were taken from that old release I mentioned earlier. I tried asking around to see if anybody knew where the subs were sourced from, but sadly it doesn't seem like anyone knows. In any case, the subs weren't the worst thing out there, but being a JP live-action movie and all, it was far from perfection—so time was taken to get this fixed up & re-timed to my liking. They were carefully QC'ed afterwards to help give it the finishing touches.

That's about it. I'd like to go and put out a v2 of this release once I can get the VHS or LD but realistically speaking it'll probably be a while before any of that happens. Although, the v2 release would probably be a good opportunity for me to include in goodies that I couldn't otherwise include in this initial release...

This can be downloaded at the usual spot. 

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 25

 
During her search for Memole, Marielle crosses paths with Jimmy, a little boy who ran away from home for fun and is being chased down by the police. Upon discovering Memole's tiny parasol inside of his bag, she agrees to hide Jimmy temporarily since she believes that he could hold the key towards finding Memole once and for all. Memole, on the other hand, continues to search for Marielle with no luck...

Semi-trivia(?):
After this show finished airing, a short theatrical movie based off this show was released as part of some yearly film festival that Toei would hold. That movie was mainly a re-cap of this very episode, with bits from episode 24 thrown in. I actually happened to sub said special years ago, before this show's fansub got started... oh, how time flies.

Inka's write-up:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2026/10/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no-memoru-25/

 

An Update on Tantei Monogatari

TL;DR — The show is going on an infinite hiatus. No, I do not know when I'll come back to resume working on it.

The long version:
Those of you who had been following both my blog and my previous Twitter account will likely already know about this—well, some of it, maybe. This is mostly meant for the people who do not browse Twitter and just strictly follow this blog only.

I've been enjoying whatever I've finished so far of Tantei Monogatari, but truthfully speaking, tackling this show for subbing was way overwhelming than I would have ever imagined. The longer episode run-times, the shitty optical audio, the dialogue, there being no JP subtitles to work off of... consequently, this was a project that I quite frequently stalled on and also took a long time to work on since I wanted everything to be perfect. This isn't something I really mention often but I really did struggle trying to get the first few episodes out.

A couple episodes later into the project, I got in touch with some translators who said that they were interested in translating the rest of the show for free—OLDB1BA and rudluff, respectively. Considering 99% of my solo projects consist purely of commissioned translations, I didn't want to let this opportunity slip, so I happily accepted them into the project. With their help, plus with the help of a native JP user, I was convinced that the rest of the project would go smoothly.

I think this occurred, what, last year? Somewhere around there. Fast forward sometime later into the future...

rudluff started becoming offline more frequently due to IRL priorities. (I don't blame him for this.) I could no longer rely on the native JP user for TLC'ing the harder lines in this show for reasons I would rather not disclose here since mentioning them publicly on this blog won't fix or change anything. This left just OLDB1BA, who went on to do the rest of the show by himself, surprisingly enough.

I'm not sure if this had happened after he finished the show, but AvistaZ had begun offering a large bounty for anyone who could submit an upload of the entire show, subbed. OLDB1BA & I had talked about this and the conversation can be summed down to exactly this:

He felt it was unfair that I was taking such a long time to release each episode, considering he had gone and done the whole show for free. Additionally, he wanted to be the one to fulfill that site's bounty request for the show, but he wasn't sure if that would have been possible due to how frequently I was putting out these episodes. Ultimately, we compromised—since he did do the whole show for free, I agreed to let him release the rest of the episodes that I hadn't yet put out under the "LonelyChaser" label.

Now, here's the thing... OLDB1BA wrote on the description for that upload (on AvistaZ) that the subs for these "unreleased episodes" (we'll call them "beta" subs, since that's how they're referred to on there) were to remain exclusive on there and couldn't be uploaded anywhere else. Some torrent sites out there do actually have rules regarding exclusivity and all, so I genuinely thought those subs really were exclusive to the site.

Well, as it turns out, some user on Twitter decided to download these beta subs and release them publicly on a now-deleted tweet that got a shit ton of reposts, all in the name of "preservation". It gets better—when I discussed this incident with some other users, they explained to me that AvistaZ does not, and never had, any such "exclusivity" rules on their site, so the "Do not share elsewhere" warning that's on that upload really doesn't mean jackshit.

All things considered, this greatly upset me. Not only was I pissed that the beta subs made their way into the public this way, but I also got frustrated over the so-called "exclusivity" of those subs. I don't know, it just irked me that I was assured that they couldn't be re-posted elsewhere when that was totally moot from the start. All of this happened a few months ago, but after that entire fiasco, whatever motivation I had left to continue working on the show just kept shrinking day by day until it got to where we currently are now.  

So, what happens next?

Despite everything, I'm not dropping the show. I do want to resume this at some point and see it through the end. I'm happy that OLDB1BA was able to finish it on his own, but contrary to what the torrent page's comments for those beta subs says, the project could still benefit from extra QC'ing and it absolutely still needs lots of TLC'ing IMHO. Nevertheless, considering what recently happened (and the fact that I'm juggling way too many projects right now), I just simply have no interest in working on it at this moment. Maybe I'll resume once I have less stuff to work on or once JP subs for this show pop up, if the latter ever happens.

Note to self: if a translator offers to translate an entire show for you, do not accept it. 

I apologize to anybody who had been keeping up with this project from the start and was looking forward to any future releases.

Studio Bebow Documentary (v2)

 
Tomonori Kogawa's Cool Cool Bye OVA originally came included with a short little extra—a small documentary centered around his animation studio, Studio Bebow (also the same studio that animated the OVA). Within this documentary are short interviews from various staff members, as well as a short introduction from Kogawa himself at the beginning.

I had subbed this myself many years ago, but it was in need of a huge update. Aside from the fact that it could have benefited from a better video source, the translation was handled by someone whom I stopped working with ages ago for two reasons. One, their translation work was awful (which I didn't realize until later), and two, this person in general was just not very professional to work with.

(Fun fact: after a long time had passed since we both last spoke to each other, he randomly DM'ed me out of the blue asking me for money so that he could purchase a new cell phone with it. WTF?)

I had been wanting to revise this documentary as a result, but I just never got around to it due to a boatload of reasons. That changed when Collectr from Orphan Fansubs expressed interest in wanting to release a new version of the documentary several years ago. Once again, this sort of stalled for a bit since I couldn't find a suitable translator for it, but I was able to get the ball rolling on this re-translation project after I was introduced to user "justj22". He helped translate the documentary while Collectr edited/typeset it afterwards, and it was finished off with extra QC'ing from imatu and myself.

A final note:
This documentary can be found at the usual spot, but it is not a standalone release. This was actually bundled alongside a new version of Orphan's Cool Cool Bye fansubbed release. I can't post a direct link to it but you'll easily find it on that site under the "Orphan" tag.

Click here to be re-directed to Collectr's blog post on this release.

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 24

Marielle begins her first day at school in Saint-Loine, but things go awry for her when she discovers that Grace is in the same class as her and will stop at nothing to ensure that Marielle's time spent at school is nothing short of a living hell. Memole, unable to cope with the fact that she won't be seeing Marielle for a while (and plagued with nightmares of Marielle being bullied relentlessly at school), does the unthinkable and goes on a journey to Saint-Loine if it means being able to see her once again.

Inka's write-up:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2026/09/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no-memoru-24/