Miyata Gyaos' Empire Raids Again

Today I'm going to take you on a tour of an ancient internet relic. I'm going to show you Miyata Gyaos'¹ Akihiko Hirata fansite.

This is, as of now, all available to view for yourself, but with the recent ruling in Hachette's favor in their case against the Internet Archive - which houses Wayback Machine, perhaps the single most important apparatus for preserving websites - I want there to be a memory of it out there, just in case. I also want to warn you that Google Translate breaks the site - you must either copy/paste chunks of text into Google Translate piecemeal or have a browser extension such as DeepL that allows you to highlight and translate text.

Part 1: The website

On December 1st, 2000, Miyata started a GeoCities website for one of his favorite actors, Akihiko Hirata. Before this, as far back as 1997, Miyata had a personal website (he refers to this as his "Millennium Empire") where he would write about Hirata among other people: Shin Kishida, Takayuki Miyauchi, Tatsumi Yano, and Kaneto Shiozawa. (In later incarnations, Miyata's webpage would become a site for Japanese fans of the band a-ha, which is... interesting.) We're only going to cover one of these, but I will also mention that the Kishida fansite is accessible through Wayback Machine as well, and its BBS was quite a bit livelier than the one I'll be talking about here.

Unfortunately, GeoCities is with us no longer. Like many things (I and my bank account can attest to the fact that Yahoo! Auctions is still very much operational) it survived far longer in Japan, shutting its doors only in 2019, but the last actual capture of the live website preserved by Wayback Machine is from 2008. This leaves us with only 10 captures of a website that appeared to have been updated semi-regularly for several years.

Miyata was an artist as well. I believe he drew this portrait. Later there was another image added, but Wayback Machine doesn't archive it, whatever it was.

The homepage hosted links to several subpages. At the top was, at first, a list of upcoming reruns of shows and films that Hirata had been in, then later Miyata would add links to newly-released DVDs. (¥12,000 [$83 USD in today's money] for a couple episodes of Rainbowman... jeepers.) Miyata also hosted a page with external links to unrelated websites run by his friends. We've got five of those: a film review website, Ogikubo Toho (which I have talked about before), a Rainbowman fansite, a Yoshio Tsuchiya fansite, and Mifune Productions' official website.

The subpages were: A short biography (nothing you can't find on Wikipedia), a filmography, Miyata's own film and television reviews, a list of publications of interest, and - one of my favorite things ever - a user poll where visitors to the site could vote for their favorite among Hirata's many roles. (Not ALL of them. But a lot of them.)

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Serizawa was voted #1

Huge shoutout to the person who voted for his 2-second appearance in Prophecies of Nostradamus. I respect that. Also surprised to see France from Great Japan Pickpocket Club up there with a respectable amount of votes. At the same time, though, seven people voted for the corrupt city councilman in At This Late Date, the Charleston? Seven whole people? Man.

Miyata's opinions

As for the "publications of interest" page, this seems to be things that Miyata owned personally, since it's far from a comprehensive list of every magazine/article featuring Hirata or his works:

• Toho SF Tokusatsu Eiga Series vol. 3 [my link here]
• The late October 1979 issue of Kinema Junpo [my link here]
• Two Taiyo ni Hoero! commemorative books (I don't own either, but you can get you one for really cheap, if I don't get to it first)
• A pamphlet from Donburi Pond - this is from the 1967 Teigeki performance, not the 1963 Geijutsu-za one, so I've never actually seen it

Now, I want to talk about that filmography for a minute, because it's really fascinating to me. You might be saying "it's a fansite for an actor, of course it has a filmography", but it's deeper than that. 

This is the most extensive record of titles that Hirata appeared in that I've seen, ever. Nothing on the modern internet can match it. I based my own filmography spreadsheet on Miyata's list because it has things that I have never seen anybody else mention - particularly stage plays. While I was trying to do research for that section of my spreadsheet, I found that there were several things on Miyata's list that I not only couldn't confirm Hirata had been in - I couldn't confirm that they ever happened at all. I don't doubt that these plays did happen, but they are so obscure that no record of them survives on the internet today.

I'm insanely curious about how Miyata managed to compile something this extensive 25 years ago. There are idiosyncrasies to Miyata's list that make it clear it was not copy-pasted from somewhere else: some films are categorized under the wrong year, and while checking titles for the spreadsheet I would occasionally have Google correct a kanji to something else, which seems to imply that either Miyata made a typo or there's some alternate spelling of the title that is less commonly used. Where in the world was he getting his information from? Especially about the stage plays?

In any case, I'm going to move on now to talking about the BBS, which I felt was significant enough to warrant spitting this post into two parts.

Part 2: The BBS

We have even fewer captures of this than of the webpage itself, which is a real shame because the BBS was updated far more frequently. Nevertheless, it is incredibly cool to look at the small snippet of community that has been preserved. Honestly, I wish the world was still like this: video rental stores, people recording stuff to tape off the TV and trading it, email lists where you can talk about movies with people. It just sounds funner than endless subscription services and digital copies of movies that you can never technically "own".

I highly recommend taking the time to translate the whole deal yourself, but here is a list of some of my favorite posts:

• Somebody linked to a set of playing cards with portraits of Toho actors on them (heavily considered making this my header photo for a while)
• One or two people apologizing for accidentally sending junk chain emails (the response from the board is essentially “let’s all watch more movies to move on”)
• At least one person who, as of 2002, said they had already been a fan of Hirata's for 25 years. I'm telling you, this fandom is small, but it is eternal
• Somebody who'd seen The Last Embrace, somehow
• An eighth-grader?
• Some spicy hot takes about how it was actually Dr. Iwamoto's fault that Ultraman got killed by Zetton
• Someone playing through Pokemon who named their Laplace "Akihiko"
• Someone talking about planning to go see Godzilla Final Wars in the theater on Hirata's birthday

I didn't really learn anything from the BBS that I didn't already know, but the fun of it is the fact that all of these people 20+ years ago were doing what I'm still doing in 2024. I started up a monthly tokusatsu film screening series earlier this year (If you know me in real life, hi! Also: sorry!) and my first film was The Mysterians. I can tell you I absolutely thought about the people on the BBS while I was screening it. 

Addendum: Where is Miyata Gyaos now?

Short answer: I don't know. It would feel weird to stalk somebody across the internet over 20+ years. I think Miyata would be in his 50s now, and I have no earthly idea what he's doing with himself. I do know that he contributed to a Shin Kishida doujin at one point.

If he is out there, though, and he sees this (which will almost certainly never happen), I just want to say thank you. Thanks for the BBS. I wish there was still something like it today. Thanks for the crazy comprehensive filmography with stuff that doesn't exist on the internet anymore. I have preserved those titles for the future. I hope someday somebody reads my own blog and finds it as wonderful as I find Miyata's.

As a last note I also want to mention that the owner of the Yoshio Tsuchiya fansite I briefly mentioned passed away from leukemia in 2001. He was part of Miyata's circle of internet friends and everyone was aware that he had gotten sick. Reading their posts about him really shows how much more like a real-life friend group the internet was at this point in time. His name was Saigawa. His website is also no longer extant, but you can view it on Wayback Machine as well here.

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1 I'm not sure if this name is written using traditional Japanese name order, with "Miyata" as the surname and "Gyaos" as the given name, but I'm going to be referring to him as "Miyata". I'm also gonna take a wild guess and say Gyaos is not his real name.