I won this on Yahoo! Auctions, although I don't think "won" is the right word to use, considering that literally no one but me bid on it.
Anyway, if kinenote.com is to be believed, this is the only article Kinejun has run that is entirely about Akihiko Hirata, not just a movie he was in. The occasion appears to have been a re-release of many major Godzilla films and other Toho tokusatsu works that year (which was the 25th anniversary of the first Godzilla film.)
I'm not sure if this has ever been uploaded online, either as scans or just the text, so I'm including both the original in Japanese and a machine translation which I have typed up and made more readable by fixing pronouns, sentence structure, you know, the kind of stuff that gets garbled in machine translations. I've been over it a couple of times, and it's still not very good, but it's something. The photographer is credited as Koji Nishikawa, who I'm assuming also did the interviewing and wrote the article.
Visualize me cringing while trying very hard not to break the spine by putting this in my scanner...
Okay, here we go. The article seems to be formatted like an essay interspersed with interview quotes from Hirata, which I've put in quotation marks or after en-dashes. When a film title is mentioned, I've given the international title in brackets. Notes are at the bottom of the post.
It's... it's really nice.
_____
The film opens. The familiar music by Akira Ifukube begins to play. The Toho logo appears. The names of the staff, including producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, are listed. The names of the actors follow, and finally director Ishirō Honda appears. All the while, loud applause rings out intermittently throughout the theater. This is the scene at the Nichigeki Theater, where Toho's best special effects films were shown all at once, under the title "Godzilla Movie Collection [All August]".
The last screening, which featured older films, was particularly lively. The audience was a diverse bunch, from elementary and middle school students to the kind of old men you might see at a film center, to young housewives with small children. They all gave generous applause to the screen. They clapped when the spaceship came out, and clapped again when the robot appeared. The children joined in, clapping. They seemed at first to be clapping without knowing what was going on, but they did know what was going on, shouting things like "Moguera will show up soon!" Kids these days study even old films as well.
I myself was moved to tears by the aerial combat scene in Battle in Outer Space, which I saw again for the first time in a long time. The excitement of seeing rocket fighter planes modeled after the experimental X155 aircraft of the time take off from the pages of boys' manga and fantasy drawings and engage in actual battles in out space on the screen is indescribable. Moreover, this is merely a dream imagined by the Japanese, which is why it is far more exciting than something like Star Wars. I could go on and on about this, so I'll stop here.
The actor who received the most applause at the "Godzilla Movie Collection" at the Nichigeki was Akihiko Hirata.
- "That's what I heard. I got a letter from a fan saying 'Hirata was a [great actor]'. I was puzzled, thinking that was a strange thing to do. [laughs]"
Hirata appeared in 7 of the 15 Godzilla films alone. Including other works, he has appeared in about 30 Toho special effects films. [I asked] "Have you seen the overseas version of Godzilla?"
- "Yes, I have. I was surprised to hear that I speak good English [laughs]. During the peak of Godzilla movies, I received a lot of fan mail from America and Southeast Asia."
Recently, he says he has been receiving fan mail and doujinshi from all over the country. There are also countless magazines featuring Godzilla movies on racks. When I showed one to Hirata, he said, "Oh, that brings back memories, a [...]1monster movie... the black-and-white, documentary-like feel is very powerful. I think the first Godzilla is the best. Godzilla's personality and appearance changed after it was in color."
"When we were filming, we didn't know what we were doing, but now it feels like a classic. The filmmakers didn't know what they were doing, so they probably had three newcomers to it. The special effects scenes were done after the main story was almost finished, so it was even more confusing for us. Godzilla appeared, but when they told me to look at him, I didn't know where to look [laughs]."
"The thing I found difficult was the stop-motion animation of the [models]. [They] shot the Godzilla [model] by moving it little by little. The doll was about 1 meter (3 feet) tall".
I had never heard that stop-motion animation2 was used in Godzilla. [I ask] if a new Godzilla movie were made, would you like to appear in it again?
- "I'd like to appear in it again. But I'd like to see one that isn't made for children."
Hirata has played many roles as genius scientists, staring with Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla. In the latest film in the series, [his character, Shinzo Mafune] even won a Nobel Prize.
- "I'm actually not good at science," he says with a wry smile.
In war movies, he plays an officer. In Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, he wears an eyepatch like Dr. Serizawa and plays a one-eyed soldier. This kind of thing really suits him.
- "There are a lot of them, aren't there? Is that right? I wonder. I still remember something that Yoshikata Yoda told me before. He said 'there are no actors who can play ordinary people'. I thought I could do anything, but I ended up playing a lot of serious roles."
That's because, when you hear Hirata's background, he's quite far from an ordinary person. Born in Gyeongseong, Korea3 in 1927, he returned to Japan before he even knew it. He received a strict, Spartan education and entered the Tokyo Army Cadet School.
- "I had no intention of becoming a soldier at all. When I was a child, I admired Beethoven4, and I wanted to be a composer. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to go to Tokyo University and become a businessman. My older brother tried to get into military school and failed both times. Yes, it's difficult after all. Then, a distant relative was an army general, so someone had to become a soldier, and I was chosen. I applied, reluctantly, and I got in..."
His older brother is Yoshiki Onoda, a director currently active in TV after working for Shintoho. After graduating from military school, Hirata went on to the Army Academy just before the end of the war. There was a plan to move the Imperial Headquarters into the mountains of Nagano in preparation for the mainland battle, and he was training at the foot of Mt. Asama as a guard [as] he was an elite soldier.5 [I ask] "So, when the war ended..."
- "Well, that was a blank period. Of course, I thought I would die before the war ended."
He returned home in a daze. After graduating from First High School and the law department of the University of Tokyo, he joined [Tokyo Boeki] (later Mitsubishi). He said that he never wanted to serve a government official again, so he joined a private company.
- "I was pure-bred in the military, isolated from the outside world, and was only taught to die for the country and the emperor, so I didn't know anything. It's a strange story, but I didn't know anything about sex. I guess this goes on tape... I didn't even know what a wet dream was[...]6"
In reaction to that lifestyle, after entering the University of Tokyo, he didn't study much, but instead devoted himself to theater and dance. He made his debut at the May Festival, and was called a hammy actor.7 At first, he was quite calm, thinking that this was just how it was. His house was used as a dormitory for Shintoho staff and actors, so he started to associate with people in the film industry, and while he was a student, he worked part-time as an assistant director. His first film was Lynching, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, in which Yoshiko Kuga appeared alongside Ryō Ikebe. Kuga is now Hirata's wife.
- "She's short, so when she talked to Ryō, I put her on a platform. I had to hold the platform as hard as I could, it's so ridiculous [laughs]. I remember that, but she doesn't remember it at all."
[I ask him] how they met.
- "We worked together on Hiroshi Inagaki's Siege of Osaka Castle. We went to Gotemba for filming, and the weather was so bad it was extended by about 10 days. During that time, we played mahjongg to kill time, and we became friends, and that was it."
Hirata is a former army alumnus from Tokyo University. Kuga is the daughter of a former duke. It's a dramatic setting that reminds me of Gone With the Wind, in which Hirata played Ashley...
- "That's not true. He was a poor duke, and since the aristocracy was abolished, his title is worthless. When we're at home, we're always wearing rags. I say "you should behave a little better, you're being disrespectful to your husband." When people come over, we get in trouble and panic. We're like a beggar couple [laughs]."
When they're at home, they just sit around doing nothing. Hirata is reading a book in silence. His wife is talking to herself. "I see, I see," Hirata nods nonchalantly.
They're happy. Their wedding anniversary is - "October 9, 1961," she answers immediately. They go outside to take a photo. Hirata's figure, with his back straight and his slow strides, would look like a scene from a movie if he were in a military uniform.
- "I can't get rid of old habits..."
___
1 The word here translates literally to "waterfall", so I'm assuming it's being used metaphorically, but I'm not sure what it means in this context.
2 In the original text this is referred to in kana as "dynamation".
3 Known as Keijo at the time, this is now in Seoul.
4 Same birthday.
5 I mean, he wasn't quite 18 when the war ended, but okay.
6 I'm not gonna be the one to translate the rest of this sentence for the first time ever. It's not weird or anything, but... yeah, no.
7 So the original word used here was "daikon", like the radish, which is kind of a colloquial term to refer to a ham actor.
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