Peering Through the TokyoScope: A Night With Japanese Superheroes

As many of you know, the word otaku isn't only a reference to anime and manga nuts on either side of the Pacific and, in fact, there are a whole galaxy of otaku types. From military vehicles to trains, medical procedures to hot springs, otaku fill every cultural niche in Japan. Among American fanciers of Japanese pop culture, however, few varieties are rarer than the tokusatsu otaku: the purveyors of all that is men and women in rubber or spandex suits beating the living snot out of each other on film. This is the realm of the Japanese superhero, and it's a lot more involved than just Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. 
 
Keeping track of it all for American audiences are two experts in the field, Patrick Macias, editor of Otaku USA magazine, and August Ragone, author of Eiji Tsubaraya: Master of Monsters. This past Friday, July 9, the super-knowledgable duo presented a brief history of Japanese superheros in the modern age at the state-of-the-art VIZ Theater in San Francisco Japantown's New People Building, which I was fortunate enough to swing a last-minute attendance. 
 
Shocking as it may sound, if one judges simply by the abundance of media, the Japanese may be more into superheroes than Americans can ever hope to match. Since the mid-1950s that small island nation has pumped out thousands of individual television series, movies, comics and, yes, even live-action stage performances on the subject of superpowered do-gooders. 
 
Macias and Ragone's talk focused mainly on live-action television and film depictions of Japanese superheroes. The tale really begins in the mid-1950s, when Japanese studio heads witnessed the sensational reaction the public had to both Eiji Tsubaraya's original Godzilla film and George Reeves' TV serial The Adventures of Superman. Combining the two, studio Shintōhō created the hero Super Giant, a literal man of steel (and a crotch stuffed with cotton) who fought evil at what would later become the traditional stomping grounds for Japanese superhero shows, the nondescript urban or suburban industrial site. Followed a year later by Moonlight Mask, a vigilante who fought crimes wrapped in linen sheets clutching twin .38 Special revolvers, the two shows set off a wave of tokusatsu ("special effects") TV programs and movies that hasn't abated to this day even a little bit.

There are four basic eras/categories of Japanese superhero media: masked heroes, riders, henshin metal hero and super sentai. Most drawing influence from American comics were the masked heroes, such as the above two examples that took cues from Superman and Batman, respectively, but also including the venerable Ultraman, whose franchise is seen as the pinnacle of that sub-genre. Prominent shows from the riders category include Kamen Rider and Kikaider, the latter of which enjoyed huge popularity in Hawaii (youth of the '70s in that state are referred to as "Generation Kikaider"). Perhaps least known in the West among these categories is the henshin ("transforming") metal hero era of the '80s that includes Space Sherrif Gavan and Juuko B-Fighter (a.k.a. Big Bad Beetleborgs). Last, but certainly not least, was the surge in the '90s of super sentai ("military unit") team shows. One needn't look any further than Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers for a fine example of this group.
 
Tokusatsu shows continue to this day, but the high water mark for viewership came in the '70s when studios were raking in cash hand over fist. Even Marvel wanted to get into this market and ended up licensing a tokusatsu production of Spider-Man to studio giant Toei that premiered in 1978 and ran for forty-one episodes. This show had pretty much nothing to do with the original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko character and saw motorcycle racer-cum-Spider-Man Takuya Yamashiro battling minions of Professor Monster's Iron Cross Army in a giant robot called the Leopardon. Regardless of how faithful it was to its source material, the show popularized the Spider-Man character in Japan and paved the way for human-piloted giant robots in future super sentai shows. 
 
Interestingly enough, many of the most successful shows in the early years whose legacies are still being felt to this day can be traced to just one man: Shotaro Ishinomori. As the protege of manga great Osamu Tezuka, Ishinomori latched onto the humanoid cyborg theme put forth in Astroboy and created the grittier Cyborg 009 manga in 1963. After the success of this and the 8 Man TV series Ishinomori later went on to create Kamen Rider, Inazuman, Goranger and more, almost single-handedly launching the super sentai and henshin sub-genres.

As the talk proceeded I couldn't help but feel a little sad for the progression of the tokusatsu genre as a whole. Whereas the fan demographic for American superheroes has gradually trended upwards over the past several decades, their Japanese counterparts have slid from all-ages viewerships in the '60s and '70s to mainly lowest common denominator childrens fare in recent times. The emphasis, of course, is to push as much tie-in merchandising as possible and if the story buckles under the weight of bi-weekly new characters and powers then so be it--there's always a new show just around the corner. 
 
This dispensable quality of Japanese superheroes is perhaps one of the biggest differences between their larger-than-life defenders of justice and ours and a major part of the story in each of their respective universes. This is their take on the notion that no amount of evil can ever triumph because for every hero knocked down another, probably stronger one, will just rise up in their place--and that's a concept that translates well no matter which language it's expressed in. 
 
Macias' TokyoScope talks are a monthly event at New People in San Francisco, so if you're a local or plan to be in town next time one takes place I highly encourage you to check it out.