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. The seller had marked it as "dirty/damaged", which might account for the lack of interest, but honestly, I've bought "like new" books online that are nastier than this magazine. It's not dirty at all, it's just 45 years old.
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. It's still not very good, but it does make sense sometimes. 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. This will be a wall of text. Not sorry. 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.
_____
The familiar music of Akira Ifukube begins to play. The Toho logo appears. The names of the staff are listed, including producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. The names of the actors follow, and finally the director, Ishirō Honda. Meanwhile, intermittent applause echoed throughout the venue.
It was a sight to behold at Japanese theaters where all the masterpieces of Toho special effects were screened at once during the month of August under the title "The Complete Works of Godzilla Movies". The final episode, in which older films were screened daily, was particularly lively.
The audience is very diverse, ranging from elementary and junior high school students, to old men you might see at a film center, to young housewives with small children. All of them turned to the screen and gave generous applause. When the spaceship came out, they applauded. When the robot came out, they applauded again. The children also clapped. I thought they were clapping without knowing why, but then they started shouting things like "Moguera will appear soon!" so it turns out that even they know what's going on. Kids these days even study old movies. Personally, I was so moved by the aerial battle scenes in [The War in Space], which I rewatched for the first time in a while, that I was almost brought to tears. The excitement of seeing a rocket fighter modeled after the X-15, an experimental aircraft of the time, pop out of the pages of children's comics and fantasy art and engage in actual battles in outer space on the screen is indescribable. What's more, this is just a dream dreamed up by Japanese people, and that's where things like Star Wars come from. It can be much more exciting.
I don't have much time to write about this, so I'll leave it at that and write about the Godzilla movie from that day.
Akihiko Hirata was the actor who received the loudest applause during the "Complete Works" screening. "That seems to be the case. I received a letter from a fan who said there was a lot of applause when Hirata-san appeared on stage. I thought, that's strange, and shook my head [laughs]."
Hirata-san has appeared in 7 of the 15 films in the Godzilla series alone. Including other works, he has appeared in about 30 Toho special effects films.
- Have you seen the overseas version of Godzilla?
- Yes, I saw it. I was surprised at how good my English was [laughs]. During the height of the Godzilla movies, I received a lot of fan letters from America and Southeast Asia.
Recently, he has been receiving fan letters and doujinshi¹ from all over the country. There are also countless magazines on the market that feature Godzilla movies. So when I showed one of the books to Hirata-san, he said "Wow, that's so nostalgic... It's a monster movie, the fact that it's black and white and has a documentary feel makes it even more powerful. After all, I think the first Godzilla movie is the best. Godzilla's personality and appearance have changed since the movie became colored. When I was filming it, I didn't know why, but now it feels like a classic. The people who made it didn't know whether it was made from the sea or from the mountains², so I guess they had three newcomers do it. The special effects scenes take place after the main story is almost over. What are we doing here? I don't know. When Godzilla appeared, I was told to look at him, but where was he? I guess I should watch it [laughs]. What I thought was difficult was the time-lapse photography of dolls. That's right, they took the photo by moving the Godzilla doll little by little. The doll is about 1 meter tall."
This is the first time I've heard that stop-motion animation³ was used in Godzilla.
- If there were to be a new Godzilla movie, would you want to do it again?
- I'd love to appear, but I'd like to see someone who isn't a children's idol make one.
Hirata-san has played many genius scientist roles, starting with Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla 1954. The latest work in the series even won a Nobel Prize. [this didn't translate well, but it's referring to Professor Miyajima from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla]
"I'm really weak in science, but... yeah," he says with a wry smile. In [Ebirah, Horror of the Deep], he wore an eyepatch similar to Serizawa's and played the role of a one-eyed military man. He really suits the character.
"That's a lot, I wonder if he's right. I still remember what Yoshikata Yoda told me a while back, that there aren't any actors who can play ordinary people. I felt like I could do anything, but there are a lot of difficult roles."
That's no wonder. Looking at Hirata-san's background, it seems that he is quite far from an ordinary person. Born in Keijo, South Korea⁴ in 1927, before he knew it, he returned back home⁵. After receiving a strict, Spartan education, he entered the Tokyo Army Infantry School in 1945.
"I had no intention of becoming a soldier at all. When I was a child, I admired Beethoven and wanted to become a composer. When I was in elementary school, I thought I would go to the University of Tokyo and become a businessman. That's what I thought. My older brother went to kindergarten twice and failed both times. It was really difficult, after all. Also, I had a distant relative who was an army general. Someone told me that I had to become a soldier, and I was reluctant to do so. I just accepted it and went in..."
His older brother is Yoshiki Onoda, who worked for Shintoho and is currently active in television.
Just before the end of the war, Hirata entered the military academy. There was a plan to move the Imperial Headquarters into the mountains of Nagano in preparation for a decisive battle on the mainland, and the Imperial Guard was conducting exercises at the foot of Mt. Asama. He was an elite soldier.⁶
-When did the war end?
-Hmm, it's a blank now. Of course, I thought I would die before the war was over.
He was discharged from the military in a daze. After attending first high school and then the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, he joined Mitsubishi Corporation. He decided that he did not want to work for anything called the government again, so he joined a private company.
"In the military, I was isolated from [word that would not translate, possibly "culture"?] and I was taught only to die for the country and the emperor, and I don't know anything about it. It's a strange story, but I didn't know anything about sex[...]⁷
As a reaction to this lifestyle, when entering the University of Tokyo, he did not study much and focused on acting and dancing. He made his first stage appearance at the May Festival and was said to be the first Daikon actor to perform since the University of Tokyo Research Institute began. At first, he was completely unfazed, thinking it was something like this. The house was used as a dormitory for Shintoho staff and actors. He started dating filmmakers, and while he was in school, he worked part-time as an assistant director.
Yoshiko Kuga first appeared opposite Ryo Ikebe in Nobuo Nakagawa's [Lynching]. Currently, she is Hirata-san's wife.
"She's short, so it's good. When she needs to speak properly, she stands on a table. [this passage is not translating well] That's why I can do it. I'm going to take a look at that table. I'm trying so hard to hold it back, it's ridiculous. Sure [laughs] I remember that. But the other side doesn't remember it at all."
- So how did you two meet?
- Co-starring in Hiroshi Inagaki's Siege of Osaka Castle. I went to the location in Gotemba. The weather was not good so filming was extended for about 10 days. During that time, we played mahjongg to kill time and we became good friends, and that's about it.
Hirata-san is a former military officer who graduated from the University of Tokyo, and Kuga is the daughter of a former duke. The setting is dramatic, just like Gone With the Wind, in which Hirata-san played Ashley...
"That's not true. He was a poor duke. However, since the peerage system disappeared, there are no dukes or [word that is not translating]. When I'm at home, I always wear rags. You should be a little more polite. Okay, I don't know if that's rude to the host. I get in trouble when people come over, so I'm in a hurry. We look like a beggar couple [laughs]."
When the two of them are at home, they just laze around and do nothing. Hirata-san is silently reading a book. His wife is alone. "Yeah, I see," Hirata-san chimed in. It's happiness. The answer came back immediately: their wedding anniversary was October 9th, 1960.
I go outside and take photos. The way Hirata-san stands tall and takes long strides, he would look straight out of a movie if he were wearing a military uniform.
"I can't get rid of it, it's just my old habits..."
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² Not sure what this means exactly, maybe it's an idiom that isn't translating?
³ In the original text this is referred to in kana as "dynamation".
⁴ Seoul. This blog does not endorse colonialism.
⁵ AFAIK sometime between 1927 and 1932. He was the only Onoda sibling to have been born in Korea.
⁶ I'm not sure how accurate this translation is, considering he was only around 18 when the war ended, but okay.
⁷ I'm omitting a sentence here out of tact. Hirata says something about the tape after this and it seems like he might not necessarily have wanted the interviewer to put it down in writing.
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