ABSTRACT
What is the longest film series ever made? The answer, according to The Guinness Book of Records, is the Otoko wa Tsurai Yo (It's Tough Being a Man) or Tora-san (as it is commonly known) series, which started in August 1969 and ended with the death of series star Kiyoshi Atsumi in August 1996. I
The Guinness entry is a bit misleading: Other series have been around longer than Tora-san's twenty-seven year~odzilla since 1954 and James Bond since 1962-but no other series has put more movies into the theaters: forty-eight installments about the misadventures ofTorajiro Kuruma, the lovelorn wandering peddler from Shibamata, Katsushika Ward. Before the films, in 1968, there was a Tora-san TV drama series that ran for twenty-six episodes.
