The media has been filled with tributes to comedian Hitoshi Ueki since he died of respiratory failure March 27 at the age of 80, but compared to the intense public mourning that followed the deaths of other, equally influential Showa Era pop icons, the eulogies have been notably subdued. One explanation is the march of time. Though Ueki was never forgotten, the temporal distance that separated his death from his heyday in the 1960s is greater than it was for actor Yujiro Ishihara or singer Hibari Misora. And while he continued working in the intervening years, he never made as much of an impression on the generation of Japanese who came of age after his period of peak popularity.
But another reason for the calmer response to his passing is the nature of the man himself. Some of the tributes have pointed out the gap between Ueki's image and his real personality. Ueki was a prodigiously gifted performer, but his legacy will probably rest on his screen reputation as "Japan's most irresponsible man."
In a series of musical-comedies made during the '60s, Ueki played a salaryman who embodied simultaneously a defender of the status quo and a sloppy, selfish individualist. This character sang emphatically about how great it was to be a company employee while shamelessly brown-nosing superiors, worming his way out of work, or taking advantage of his position as a white-collar worker (still an elite job at the time) to pick up girls. Even his clothing mocked the emerging stereotype: In one film he wears outrageous bow ties and in another an array of primary-colored suits that contrasts starkly with the ubiquitous dobu-nezumi (ditch rat) look of his fellow corporate warriors.