In Yoji Yamada's 40th episode in the Tora san series, Tora-san's Salad-Day Memorial (1987) Tora (Kiyoshi Atsumi) finds himself in Komoro, Nagano where he meets a kindly old lady who puts him up for the night. Through this incident we learn that the kindly lady is sick and needs to go to the hospital for treatment by her equally kind doctor Machiko (Yoshiko Mita)-Tora offers to go with her because she wants to die at home. It turns out Machiko has a young daughter, Yuki (Hiroko Mita) attending Waseda in Tokyo. When Tora returns to Tokyo he goes to visit the campus for Mitsuo, his nephew who doesn't really want to go to college. Later when granny is on her death bed she requests to see Tora, so Yuki brings him to Komoro again only to find that she has died. Later Machiko and Tora spend a tender moment but Tora moves on as usual. In the final sequence which mirrors the first, a thin man with a Hitler mustache steals goods from Tora and another peddler friend at a festival in another castle town-Shimbara in Kyushu.
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