March 6, 2016

Day By Day: 1936

Friday, March 6th: The Chaplin party arrives in Yokohama, Japan.


Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, her mother, Alta, and Chaplin's valet Frank Yonemori, arrived from Honolulu aboard the SS President Coolidge. The group immediately took a train to Tokyo where they are shown engaging in three of Chaplin's favorite activities from his previous trip to Japan (with brother Sydney) in 1932: eating tempura (deep fried prawns),* attending a kabuki theater performance, and watching the sumo wrestling matches.

The Chaplin party will return to Japan once more at the end of May before heading home to California.




Above: The group eating tempura in a Tokyo restaurant (the date on the video is wrong).

Below: At the Kabuki theater & wrestling matches. These are pages from a photo album in the Chaplin Archives. I believe the handwriting is Paulette's (see enlarged versions here and here):



The Chaplin entourage will sail for Shanghai the next day, arriving on the 9th.  More on that coming up in "Day By Day: 1936".

*During his 1932 visit, it was rumored that Chaplin ate 30-50 prawns in one sitting. Read more about Chaplin's previous visit to Japan from my "World Tour Revisited" series here and here

1 comment:

  1. I've never seen the actual film of them in the restaurant - it's fun to see them moving, instead of just in pictures.

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