After Toho

Introduction

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that signing a contract with Toho made Akihiko Hirata's acting career. He tried out for Toho's "New Face" program in his mid-twenties¹ after Yoshiko Yamaguchi suggested that he become an actor, and within just over a year and a half of making his screen debut, he ended up playing the role that would define the rest of his nearly 30-year career. And even before he joined the company as an actor, he did a little work as an assistant director for Shintoho, one of its subsidiaries.

But Toho's "Golden Age" did not last forever, and neither did the iron grip the studio kept its contracted actors under.

One of the interesting things about devoting considerable time to the study of one particularly prolific actor and their career is that you can use them to chart the trajectory of the film industry as a whole. Akihiko Hirata's film career is an interesting example of this. He began his career during the advent of the Five-Studio Agreement and continued acting beyond its demise. He stayed in the industry throughout the sudden and intense decline of domestic Japanese film production in the 1970s. By the time of his death in 1984, Japan’s film industry was completely transformed from what it had been thirty years earlier.

I've titled this essay "After Toho" because I want to restrict the scope of it to the years after Hirata had parted ways with the studio he had been with for half of his life (more than half, if you count his time at Shintoho). Placing the focus there also means exploring the changes that the Japanese film industry as a whole underwent during that time. 1958 is widely cited as the peak of the industry, with the average person going to the theater once a month, and while saying "it was all downhill from there" would be dismissing decades of cinema, in a lot of ways it was. By the mid-1970s, at any rate, the industry was barely a shadow of what it had been.

So, hopefully, if you do choose to humor me for the next several thousand words (I am not kidding, this is the longest thing I've ever written on here), you will learn at least something you didn't previously know about the landscape of the Japanese film and entertainment industry along the way.

Part I: 1971-77: The Fall of the Five-Studio Agreement and the Rise of Television

I'm beginning this essay in 1971 because that was the year that the "Five-Studio Agreement" finally collapsed, and Toho's contract system subsequently fell apart. 

The "Five-Studio Agreement" was an official agreement signed by all five² major film studios in Japan: Toho, Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Daiei, and Toei. The purpose of this agreement was to prevent studios from poaching each other's talent – something that had become a problem following the war. The document was signed in a ceremony on September 10th, 1953. Following the signing, actors and directors who were contracted with one studio were to remain with that studio and not provide work to any others, and other studios, in turn, were not to approach contracted actors and directors who did not belong to them. Studios were also no longer allowed to lend out their talent, although this was enforced less strictly and high-status directors often had some leeway in borrowing actors from other studios.

The objective of the Five-Studio Agreement shifted in the late 1950s as television began to threaten film companies. Part of the agreement was that studios were not to allow their films to be shown on television or their actors to appear on television programs. Toho, however, was the only studio that did not have any such provision, and freely provided talent to television programs produced by their subsidiaries.

By the first few years of the 1970s, the Japanese film industry was experiencing, to put it lightly, a sharp decline. Toho's near-perpetual state of financial difficulty began to come to a head once the '70s rolled around. It was a bad time for the industry as a whole, not just Toho – Daiei went bankrupt, and Nikkatsu had to reinvent itself as a purveyor of soft-core porn to survive. 1971 was also the year that Toho finally scrapped its biggest moneymaker series: the Yūzō Kayama vehicle Young Guy, Hisaya Morishige's Shachō series, and Hitoshi Ueki's Japan's No. 1 [...] Man were no more. This was a very sudden shift, brought on by the growing popularity of television and imported films. Toho began distributing more anime and producing a lot of lower-budget output aimed towards children, reserving the big bucks for blockbusters they had confidence in, like Submersion of Japan.

A consequence of this industry-wide decline was that Toho's exclusive contracts no longer held the appeal or utility they once had, and so Toho made the somewhat rash decision to let go all of their actors who were not under exclusive contract. As per Stuart Galbraith:

Nearly all of Toho's contract players were let go – only Yuzo Kayama, Keiju Kobayashi, and a few others managed to hang on to regular work during the mid-1970s. Most of Toho's longtime stock talent returned to the stage or, more commonly, to the steady employment of television. 

Hirata was included under that "a few others" umbrella. While he did remain with Toho, his contract was no longer exclusive, and beginning in 1971 with Epic Chushingura [Dai Chushingura] he was appearing on television series produced by companies that were not affiliated with Toho.

In Epic Chushingura he played an honorary bonus ronin (not really, but it's funny to call him that) who showed up to do some sword stuff. It was a nice role, despite only being in 3 out of 52 episodes.

Meanwhile, we can see that as soon as the 1970s begin, his appearances in film start to shift. He appeared in seven films in 1969, three in 1970, and in 1971, he appeared in just one film. In 1972 he had no theatrical film roles at all. To contextualize just how drastic a change this is: in 1957, when the industry was at its peak, he appeared in seventeen films.

But at the same time, he was scoring more and more guest star roles on television. A less noticeable, but (probably) more positive, change that occurred as a result of television's growing influence was that Hirata's elder brother Yoshiki Onoda had a steady career again – he had stuck with Shintoho until its collapse in the early 1960s and then went freelance, becoming an extremely prolific jidaigeki director and working up until his mid-80s – and as a consequence, Hirata became a regular feature in his brother's television episodes. Previously, the only thing the elder Onoda had managed to cast his brother in was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Shintoho's Man-eating Ama [Hitokui ama], which was pretty much only done in celebration of Onoda's debut as solo director under his new name.

(Yoshiki Onoda very much did not limit himself to casting just one single sibling – he frequently cast basically his entire family: his wife, Utako Mitsuya; his sister, Yoshiko Otowa; and, later, his son, Masayuki, who he eventually opened an acting school with. By the 1980s, all three Onoda siblings and one nephew were in the industry simultaneously; however, they never appeared in anything all at once. To complicate things even further, all three siblings and the nephew married people who were also in the film industry.)

The vast majority of these television roles were one-and-done guest star appearances or small roles in TV movies. Hirata had a few recurring television roles in the 1970s and early 1980s, but I do mean "a few" as in a vanishingly small number. That being said, we're now going to take a brief diversion to explore the biggest and most well-known of these recurring roles.

Author's Taiyo ni Hoero! collection, also featuring author's Tetsuwan namida ari poster.

Even though Hirata's role on the long-running cop drama Taiyo ni Hoero! coincided with his tenure at Toho – and it is technically a Toho production, since it was produced by Kokusai Broadcasting, a Toho subsidiary – I feel that it's appropriate to spend some time on it, due to it having been one of Hirata's best-known roles and due to the fact that it began its broadcast run essentially smack-dab in the middle of this extremely turbulent time for Japan's film industry.

Taiyo ni Hoero! is one of those things that was intensely popular, highly successful, and had cultural influence that continues into the present day... and virtually no one outside of Japan has ever heard of it. It was broadcast as re-runs in Hawai'i decades after the show went off the air, but most fansubbers would quail before its gargantuan 718-episode run, so it's unlikely the entire thing will ever be easily accessible to English-speaking audiences. Nevertheless, the show can be watched online if you know where to look, and as shown above, VHS tapes – mostly, as far as I know, from a home media line released around 2001 – and some very expensive DVD box sets are available to those willing to pay to import them.

I should mention that the show had fan clubs during its original run, and fan-made publications like research doujinshi were also produced since there was a general lack of official material that satisfied the need for minute detail its fans had. I do not know if any of the original clubs are still active, but I'd wager that some of their members might be on the show's Facebook fan page. Doujinshi also continued to be produced into the 2000s, of course, with information like filming locations and models of cars and guns used in the show – things that would have been difficult to find out about before the internet was what it is today.

Someone REALLY needs to remaster this show.

Hirata had one of his multitudinous one-off guest-star roles very early on in the series, in episode 12, which was a fine episode, if unremarkable. He would, however, return later in a role that made a much bigger impression. His recurring role on the show as Takayuki Nishiyama of Nanamagari Station began with episode 55 in 1973, a fun one that you can check out here. In Nishiyama's debut episode, he's just a police inspector, but after episode 57, he is superintendent of the station. He's also a bit of a bastard. I really enjoy this role for Hirata because it allowed him to actually play a character instead of just standing by doing not much of anything. 

Although Nishiyama only appeared in 33 of the show's 718 episodes, he was a memorable part of it. I own multiple publications that cite this role before they cite anything else from Hirata's filmography, even Godzilla. One is the booklet for Hirata's episode of Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series, released in 2002 (19 years after his last appearance on the show), which literally refers to him as "Akihiko Hirata, the 2nd Nanamagari Police Station Chief":

And another is the edition of DVD Magazine that includes his episode of G-Men '75, which brings up Taiyo ni Hoero! and gives a very short bio, also mentioning that he had previously starred in the two Showa Mechagodzilla films alongside the episode's other guest star, Masaaki Daimon.

Hirata would remain with Toho for all of his feature films up until 1977's Tora-san Meets His Lordship, where he is credited as belonging to Toho but is appearing in a Shochiku film. Even after leaving the studio, a lot of his feature film credits from 1977 to 1984 are still Toho films – he seems to have only shown up for the big blockbusters – and he would, of course, continue to occasionally work for them and their subsidiaries in television on a non-regular basis. (You can't exactly avoid Japan's largest film company.)

Hirata's credit in Tora-san Meets His Lordship, with "Toho" in parentheses.

I'll close this section out with Daitetsujin 17 – produced in 1977 by Toei, with no involvement from Toho at all – since I was stumping for this series long before it was even subtitled. Hirata played the formidable Captain Gomes, who unfortunately died a giant-robot-related death midway through the series. As happens often in tokusatsu, the villains of Daitetsujin 17 are more interesting than the good guys – although, on the whole, the series is more focused on giant robots than human characters, whether good or bad. Gomes was a really solid villain role for Hirata, and he plays off of the truly one-of-a-kind Ulf Otsuki – Hirata playing Gomes cold and ruthless while Otsuki plays Dr. Hassler with more ham than a supermarket's meat department close to the holidays – making the whole thing extremely entertaining. It's just a shame Gomes doesn't stick it out for the entire show.

As usual for Shōtarō Ishinomori, whose anti-fascist stance is inseparable from his work, the costume design of the villains in Daitetsujin 17 utilized unsubtle Nazi imagery.

I also really want everyone to know that somebody made a drawing of Gomes as a P.E. teacher for reasons that I am unclear on.

Credit goes to this person on pixiv. I am so so sorry for screenshotting your artwork. Hopefully I'm crediting you adequately. It is very dear to me.

Part II: 1977-1980: Pittashi Kan-kan and Other Game Shows

As we very well know, Hirata made what would be his final appearance in the Godzilla franchise in 1975 with Terror of Mechagodzilla, but in 1977 he worked with Ishirō Honda once more in The War in Space [Wakusei daisensō]. I mention War in Space because it marks another significant moment for the Japanese film industry: at this time, science fiction was enjoying unprecedented popularity, fueled by the import of films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Studios began riffing on these Western sci-fi films, which brought an entirely new flavor to Japanese sci-fi as a whole, although films such as War in Space that were intended to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars often did not produce the box office returns their studios hoped for.

I am always a sucker for a shot with interesting blocking.

We won't spend too much time on The War in Space, since that's fairly well-trodden ground, but before we move on I do want to indulge myself by covering Hirata's guest-star role in episode 21 of Red Impact [Akai shougeki]. This is one of my personal favorites because the episode is so utterly bonkers. Momoe Yamaguchi has a metal plate in her spine, from which a screw comes loose as she's on an airplane in mid-flight, so somebody has to do the whole "Is there a doctor on board?" thing and then Yamaguchi undergoes back surgery in the middle of an airplane using in-flight dining utensils that have been boiled.

You know that joke that goes "If you’re [something], and I’m [something], then who’s flying the plane?"

Alright, back to the essay at large. We're going to shift focus over to a surprisingly large part of Hirata's career: game shows. And the most significant series from that side of his career was undoubtedly Pittashi Kan-kan. Since records of the show are so scanty, I can't be certain exactly when he began to appear regularly, but I believe it was around the late 1970s.

Pittashi Kan-kan was not (from what I've seen) a serious trivia show in the vein of Jeopardy!; it seemed to cater more towards trivia about celebrities and other popular topics. The general idea of the show was that a team of experts, usually celebrities themselves (the "Pittashi" team), would compete against a team of random people (the "Kan-kan" team). It was more of a comedy show than a trivia show – the team captains were Konto '55, a comedy duo comprised of Jiro Sakagami and Kinichi Hagimoto, who headed the Pittashi and Kan-kan teams, respectively. Sometimes, when the regular host, Hiroshi Kume, was out, Hagimoto would serve as substitute host and Hirata would be acting team captain for the Kan-kan team.

Like with Taiyo ni Hoero!, Hirata played a memorable part on Pittashi Kan-kan, but not a central part, and Pittashi Kan-kan continued on after his death. That being said, though, the show basically collapsed in 1984 after Kume, Sakagami and Hagimoto all left, and the series ended in 1986, eventually to be rebooted from 2003-2021 under the title Pittanko Kan-kan. Whether Hirata not being on the show anymore had an influence on it beginning to circle the drain, I can't say.

Unfortunately, by talking about game shows, I'm starting to get into territory for which there truly is no extant visual record. Television networks restructuring over the years led to tapes being lost or destroyed unless they happened to be in the hands of a private collector. One of those private collectors was none other than Hibari Misora, who kept a personal home-taped copy of her appearance on the show on August 19th, 1980, which, lucky for us, also featured Hirata as a guest answerer.³

If one of these custom Pittashi Kan-kan yukata ever comes up for auction, that'll be the end of me having any money.

Since very few (if any) tapes of the show survive, what we have instead is anecdotes from viewers who recall Hirata's tenure on the show. Normally I would treat anecdotes with a healthy skepticism, but there is a general consensus about Hirata's appearances as a panelist, and that consensus is that – pardon my French – he would say wacky shit all the time. One thing that I hear continually from people recalling his episodes is that they were shocked that this was the same guy who played the serious, moody Dr. Serizawa. From the sound of it, he would often give a funny answer instead of trying to give a correct one – I suspect that this may have been the point of the show as a whole, since answering celebrity trivia with intense academic rigor does not make for a fun game show that lasts 10+ years.

Again, his position on Pittashi Kan-kan, although virtually unheard of outside of Japan and with very little evidence remaining of it, was something that he was publicly known for at the time. Exhibit A: a tokusatsu doujinshi published in 1981 featuring a photo of him along with the caption "Recently he has become 'the old man of Pittashi Kan-Kan', but our image of him is still the nihilistic Dr. Serizawa."

While Pittashi Kan-kan was the longest he stayed with any one game show by far, he had been making the rounds on others since the early 1970s. His first game show appearance was actually in 1969, on Association Game [Rensō gēmu] with his wife, Yoshiko Kuga. His episode aired just after his younger sister's, and that unfortunately is the closest the two of them ever got to being in anything together. He would go on to appear on Association Game twice more, in 1982 and '83. To my knowledge no footage or even stills from any of these Association Game episodes exists, and I have not found any recollections from people who watched them. (I'm really curious about whether anything was said about two Onoda siblings both appearing on Association Game in 1969 – the episodes aired very close together, and there is a pretty strong resemblance between the two of them.)

Other game shows that I'm aware Hirata appeared on are Cooking Heaven [Ryori tengoku], Quiz Derby [Kuizu dābi] (a horse race betting show), and Exactly! Let's Guess [Zubari! Atemasho], but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more; like I said, a lot of this stuff is lost to time. In addition to game shows, at this point he was also showing up on a lot of variety shows and random news programs. Like everyone else in Japan, he was interviewed on Tetsuko's Room [Tetsuko no heya], which you would think might have a better chance at surviving due to the show's longevity and popularity, but alas. I can't recall if it was Cooking Heaven or something else, but I remember hearing someone who had seen one of these variety shows say that he and Yoshiko Kuga were on it together, eating off of each other's plate.

Other variety shows include, but are not limited to, Saegusa's "I Love" Laughter Clinic [Saegusa no ai rabu bakushō kurinikku], Wide Wide Fuji [Waido waido Fuji], two consecutive episodes of the drama-variety hybrid Star Dash No. 1 [Sutã dasshu No1], and Beat Takeshi's We're the Funny People [Oretachi hyokinzoku], the latter of which I've been swearing I'll write about for decades now, if not centuries. In addition to all of this he was, of course, continuing to do a lot of random one-off guest star roles on regular scripted series.

From episode 30 of Prime Minister of Yuhigaoka [Yuhigaoka no soridaijin], 1979.

We're going to close out this section with an interview featured in the late October 1979 issue of Kinema Junpo, Japan's most influential film magazine, which you can read here. The interview was part of (I assume) a series of features titled something like Japan's Era of Individualists [Nippon koseiwa jidai].

Fun fact: I used this to get his birth date corrected on his IMDb page since they don't let you cite Wikipedia. I also got his place of birth corrected without submitting any proof, which is against IMDb's site rules, but they may have just kind of assumed I knew what I was talking about since I was able to provide scans from a 46-year-old Japanese magazine that I personally own. 

The brief interview has more of an op-ed feel: it opens with the interviewer recounting his own experience attending a Toho tokusatsu film festival, and then segues into the actual interview portion by mentioning that Hirata got the loudest applause of anybody during the screening. This and other points brought up during the interview are particularly interesting because it proves that Hirata definitely did have something of a fandom while he was still alive, and was even getting fan letters telling him what a great actor he was, which he seems to have regarded as a bit odd.⁴  He also talks about having worked with Yoshiko Kuga on the set of Lynching [Rinchi] 12 years before they met again and married – one of my favorite stories.

I really like how the interviewer fills things out so that this is more than just a question-answer-question-answer session. Kuga is there too – not being interviewed directly, but she's physically somewhere nearby while the interview is being conducted, and she does chime in to tell the interviewer what their wedding date was. You can kind of get a feel for time and place when you read this, even 46 years later.

We're going to move even deeper into television in this next section, specifically looking at TV movies, of which more and more were starting to be made at this point in time.

Part III: 1980-1983: TV Movies, TV Movies, and More TV Movies

I have neglected, up until now, to mention the absolute slew of TV movies Hirata was showing up in during this time. By the early 1980s, his output was again reaching the level it had been at during his heyday with Toho – just on the small screen instead of the big one. In 1980 alone, he had eighteen television credits. As I already mentioned, at this point we're getting into things that basically only exist as titles on a Wikipedia page or, if we're very, very lucky, a listing in a 45-year-old TV guide that some blessed soul uploaded to the internet. I always try to do my best to give as much information as I can about the most obscure parts of Hirata's filmography, but there's not much to go off of, here. Some of this stuff was re-aired in the '90s and 2000s, but less often nowadays, if at all.

Hirata in House of Evil Spirits [Akuryō no sumu ie], one of his only Saturday Wide Theater roles we have pictures of. Credit @seventy_ninety.

Something that made up a huge percentage of his screen credits at this time were various movies featured on Saturday Wide Theater [Doyou waido gekijō], also known as Saturday Night at the Mysteries. I've brought this up before, but Saturday Wide Theater was more of a timeslot than a series. Both episodic shows and one-off original movies aired in the timeslot, as well as occasional foreign imported films. No 20-minute sentai episode, these: the timeslot began as 90 minutes and then expanded to two hours. These were intended as – and TV Asahi was very deliberately marketing them as – movies and television for housewives. SWT was light, relatively inoffensive daytime TV for people who couldn't get out to the theater. I wrote about a few of these movies back in October of last year, if you want to get more of a feel for the kind of inconsequential suspense/mystery film that was the bread and butter of SWT.

SWT was not the only timeslot airing original made-for-TV movies at this time – far from it. There was also NTV and Yomiuri Television's Thursday Golden Drama [Mokuyō gorudendorama], TV Asahi's Monday Wide Theater [Getsuyo waido gekijō], and my personal favorite, NTV's Tuesday Suspense Theater [Kayu sasupensu gekijō]. Hirata starred in movies produced for all of these. To put into perspective how much work he was doing for television at this time, from around 1980-83 a viewer could expect to see him (and his glasses) in either a brand-new TV movie or a guest star role once or twice a month.

Only picture I can find of Hirata in A Woman in Danger [Kikiipatsu no onna], 1982, here cheating on Taiyo ni Hoero! by playing the chief of some other police station. Credit @hassy1936-gorin on livedoor.

As an aside, another thing that was happening in the early-to-mid-1980s was that the youngest Onoda sibling started getting work again. Yoshiko Otowa left the acting business in the late 1960s, possibly to start a family as she had married her Comedy Trio producer Shoji Kume. (This is speculation; I do not currently know if she had any children, but women across history have left their careers to start families, so it wouldn't be surprising.) By "getting work" I do mean "one role", but hey, at least it was something. You can watch her installment of Tuesday Suspense Theater, Underground Murder [Chitei no satsui], here.

I can't be certain due to the paucity of evidence, but one or two of these daytime TV movies sound like they had Hirata dangerously close to playing a lead role, something he virtually never did. Mystery of the Broken Rope [Sōnan - kireta zairu no nazo] features him as a mountaineer who is so obsessed with his hobby that he murders his wife (named Yoshiko – I'm sure that went over well).

Behind-the-scenes photos taken at the intersection of Tayasumon Gate, Kudanminami, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, during filming of Exam Hell [Juken jigoku] in 1982. Top right still is from the film itself. Credit marikostroom.o.oo7.jp.

 
To move outside of TV movies in specific and back to the wider sphere of the Japanese film industry, we have to at least touch on the growing popularity of idol films. While there is disagreement over when the term "idol" began to be used in the sense that it is today – some critics consider starlets like Hideko Takamine and Hibari Misora "idols", others argue the term "idol film" can only be traced back to its first use in a 1982 issue of Scenario – most people generally seem to use the term to refer to films and media produced starting in the early 1980s (sometimes late '70s). Domestic film production was still suffering a bit at this time, and imported films were only becoming even more popular than they already had been, but film studios – especially Toho – could usually still count on producing a home-grown megahit if they had a popular idol in front of the camera.

Hirata had roles in two things that can fairly unambiguously be called "idol films": 1981's Summer Farewell [Natsu no wakare], a vehicle for Hisako Manda, and Call Girl [Koru garu], Hirata's only theatrical credit in 1982, starring Mie from Pink Lady. I would not particularly recommend either of these, but you can watch them both online.

I really can't stress enough that we're in the Dark Ages for Hirata's filmography here. From 1980 to 1983 he had 68 television credits and a whopping 9 of those have any kind of streaming or home media availability at all. Again, within Japan, some of this stuff is being rebroadcast, but not much of it – the vast majority is, I'm very sorry to say, probably just gone, unless someone has a bootleg tape in an attic somewhere. We can take at least some solace in the fact that a surprising amount of Hirata's TV movie credits have scripts that are held in the National Diet Library.

There is much more we could get into on the topic of TV movies, but we're going to leave that behind for the moment, because a far bigger thing was happening in the 1980s. A 262-foot-tall thing, in fact.

Part IV: 1983-84: The Many Attempted Resurrections of Godzilla

Poor box office results for Terror of Mechagodzilla and the increasingly bad climate of the Japanese film industry as a whole had essentially forced the Godzilla franchise into what was starting to look like a significant hiatus, but that didn't mean people weren't trying to get more Godzilla movies made, both behind the scenes and in fan circles.

Tomoyuki Tanaka never wanted the series to go on hiatus. In 1977, just two years after Terror of Mechagodzilla, a draft titled King of Monsters: Resurrection of Godzilla, written by Ryuzo Nakanishi, was submitted to Toho. Production was actually begun on this project, with Jun Fukuda attached as director (and boy was he probably pissed off about that), but it was scrapped for unknown reasons, and Toho decided to go with The War in Space instead. The next year, a "Godzilla Revival Conference" was held, chaired by Tanaka among others, and a second draft written by Akira Murao was submitted, but not chosen.

A third draft was submitted in 1980, again titled Resurrection of Godzilla and written by Tomoyuki Tanaka and Akira Murao. It went through years of revisions until it eventually became a fully distinct fourth iteration in 1983: another Resurrection of Godzilla draft, created by Akira Murao and Hideichi Nagahara. While elements from all of these drafts were carried over into what would eventually become The Return of Godzilla, the drafts themselves were all ultimately discarded.

While Toho's staff themselves were working at making a proposal stick, the public was simultaneously pushing – and pushing hard – for a new Godzilla movie. A group of fans formally organized around this time under the name "the Godzilla Resurrection Committee", numbering in the high thousands if not tens of thousands. Their intent was to petition Toho to produce a new Godzilla movie, but they did other things as well – I'll quote from an interview with Shizuo Nakajima, a founding member of the Committee and a production assistant at Toho:⁵

During this time period [when] there [were] no new Godzilla productions, a group of people gathered around to make a new creation, of which I was a member. A man named Fuyuki Shinada who would make the Godzilla suits also worked with us. Shinada is the creator of Biollante and the "White Eyed Godzilla" [the GMK suit]. We did a lot of activities and made lots of petitions and we pushed Toho to create a new movie, this would result in the original movie [The Return of Godzilla].

Like any fan community worth its salt, the Resurrection Committee also produced a doujinshi, copies of which sell for decently high prices at auction.

I'd also like to point out that Toho was actually announcing these drafts to the public, not just keeping them to themselves, so it's no wonder everybody was starting to get antsy about a new film. In 1977, when the first draft was produced, Toho announced a "color remake of the original 1954 Godzilla". The next year, they announced their joint project with UPA, Godzilla vs. The Devil, which was also scrapped. 1983 saw Steve Milner and Fred Dekker's proposed Godzilla project get approval, and then never materialize. The Return of Godzilla was actually meant to be released alongside the Milner/Dekker project, with Return being intended for the domestic Japanese market and the other film for international export. History shows which of those projects ultimately won the day.

With the general public undoubtedly having been primed for a new movie by all of these announcements that never bore fruit, Godzilla fever was in full swing by the time the early 1980s rolled around. The widely-circulated pictures featuring Hirata in his Dr. Serizawa getup are from the 1983 Godzilla Revival Festival, a trailer for which can be seen below, courtesy of your very best friend and mine, SpaceHunterM. As we can see, the trailer ends (in what must have been quite stunning fashion to an already-hyped-up public) with the cybot Godzilla roaring, meaning some of the special effects for Return of Godzilla were in production (or at least being tinkered with) at this point.

There is also surviving footage of Hirata briefly speaking about Godzilla outside of the film festival, which you can see here. (Linking directly to Twitter is for chuds.)

Hirata's old haunt Pittashi Kan-kan also got in on the Godzilla hype. On December 14th, 1983, a TV special simply titled The Godzilla Special was aired, with one of the segments being Pittashi Gojira. As I understand it, this was more of a general variety show than simply a special episode of Pittashi Kan-kan, and as such the formatting was a bit different. Tomoyuki Tanaka was there, Keiju Kobayashi was there, Haruo Nakajima was there, Akira Takarada was there, somebody asked Tanaka if whales and gorillas could have sex, people made fun of Nakajima for being bald, it was a wild time.

Out of all the Godzilla alumni who appeared on the show, Hirata was the only one actually wearing a Godzilla T-shirt (as seen in the picture at the very top of this post).

It's fairly common knowledge that Tanaka cast Hirata to play Yosuke Natsuki's role (Dr. Hayashida) and then changed plans, having Hirata in a smaller role due to his poor health at the time, before scrapping the idea of him appearing in the film entirely.

Production of The Return of Godzilla was formally announced on June 20th, 1984. Natsuki was confirmed for the Dr. Hayashida role a few days after that. Filming began on July 9th. Within a week, on July 15th, Hirata was hospitalized for respiratory failure. He died ten days later. Filming wrapped on September 27th, and the film was released to theaters on December 15th, 1984, one day before what would have been Hirata's 57th birthday.⁶ I don't want to include any more unsourced anecdotes than I absolutely have to, and I don't remember at all where I heard this, so take it with a few grains of salt, but I swear I've read that he left the hospital at some point to watch filming.

It's tremendously depressing. Even more so because Return of Godzilla was, in many ways, the Godzilla movie that he was hoping would be made. While Hirata was not nearly as hostile towards the idea of making Godzilla movies for children as many cast and crew (and fans) were, he explicitly said in interviews that he wanted to see – and was open to being in – a Godzilla movie that was more like the original. He seems to have held the opinion that Godzilla as a monster was fundamentally an evil thing, or at least a representation of evil, inextricable from its nuclear origins. Godzilla was supposed to be something dark and dangerous. And, finally – despite idol culture inexorably reaching its hands into it – a Godzilla movie was being made where Godzilla was scary again. When I watch Return of Godzilla, I really, sincerely hope that Hirata had at least some idea of how the movie was going to turn out, and I think, as much as a random fan 40 years later can think anything, he might have liked it.

I'm not done with the essay, though. I want to backtrack a little bit to things that Hirata was actually in. I'll bring up Sayonara Jupiter, because somebody has to.

Me.

Sayonara Jupiter had an incredibly long, tortured development and production process, and although its release in 1984 usually puts it at the end of Hirata's filmography, filming actually started all the way back in April of 1983, which means that it was very much not his final role in actual chronological terms. He was still doing TV movies throughout 1983, the last of which was a Saturday Wide Theater movie directed by his older brother. I don't think we can really read anything into that, but it's... something.

Newspaper ad for Tearful Pediatric Ward [Namida no shōni byōto], released 9/5/1983. Credit @yumeterasu on ameblo, red circle added by me.

This Saturday Wide Theater movie was Keizaburo Tsurube's Deduction! [Tsurube Keizaburō no suiri!]. There are no pictures of him from it, and I think his role was fairly small. You can read a little about it here (although be warned that that site will take about 20 minutes to load). The film aired on December 24th and was the eighteenth television appearance Hirata had made in 1983, along with three films for the big screen. So, even with the "Golden Age" of Japanese film long past, and the entertainment industry vastly different from what it had been back in 1953 when he got his start as an actor, he was still busy as all hell. 

Hirata in episode 20 of New Hangman. Credit @keity_since1935 on Twitter.

I'm not sure exactly when he stopped acting, but aside from Sayonara Jupiter – which, as mentioned, was only released in 1984 because of its lengthy production process – the only credit he technically had in 1984 was New Hangman [Shin hanguman], which ran from July 1983 to February 1984. However, I'd imagine that Pittashi Gojira was almost definitely shot after Keizaburo Tsurube was, which would probably make it his final "role" (it's not a role, but you get my drift).

He was interviewed four months before his death in conjunction with the release of a Godzilla audio drama on King Records; you can read that here.

In Conclusion: This Could Have Been Even Longer

So I guess that's where the essay has to end. I think all of Hirata's film industry contemporaries (as well as the broader tokusatsu fan community) were pretty shook up when he died. I've seen a couple of fan doujinshi memorial issues for him that were put together shortly after his death. Even decades later, when his contemporaries talk about him in interviews, they all speak about how sad it is that he died so young. Everyone around him genuinely seemed to like him – I recall someone saying that everyone at Toho was nice, but he was the nicest person there. Tomoko Ai has spoken on multiple occasions about how positive her time on set with him was during Terror of Mechagodzilla.

~350ish credits between film, stage, and television, in a career that lasted just under 30 years (not counting assistant director work) and ended severely prematurely at only 56 is nothing to sneeze at. 

Like I said, though, as long as this essay was, there is much I'm leaving out. For example, one thing I have glossed over completely is Hirata's stage roles. He did some stage acting, but not very much (especially in comparison to other Toho actors), and after he left Toho, the only stage roles he had were two performances of Wild Dance [Ranbu] at the Teigeki in 1982 and '83, of which I don't believe any visual evidence survives, so I've omitted that part of his career entirely for lack of material to work with.

Another thing I've unfortunately had to omit due to total lack of information about it is a planning company that Hirata was affiliated with at some point (Yoshie Planning). I believe this was after he left Toho as he was listed as being affiliated with it in a talent directory published in 1981, but I can't do as much research into that as I'd like because the relevant documents are only available through the National Diet Library to residents of Japan.

Anyway, I hope someone reads this, but even if not, I had fun writing it.

_______

Footnotes:

1 There is some conflicting information about which class Hirata was part of but I believe it was the class of 1953. In any case, he joined the company in January of that year, when he had just turned 25.

2 The lineup was initially Toho, Shintoho, Shochiku, Daiei, and Toei, with Nikkatsu only joining later, but when Shintoho went bankrupt, it was back to five.

3 This episode used to be available on YouTube but has since been removed. Thankfully, yours truly is a hoarder, so I have it in full.

4 I don't know that he thought much of his own work. He never really talks about it in any of the interviews I've read. There is one relatively well-known quote from him where he says that he has "No representative works" – I've never known exactly what he meant by that, if he was saying that he played so many different roles that no single film represents the type of actor he was, or if he felt like he'd never been in anything good enough to represent him as an actor.

5 Full interview here. I'd like to point out that there was a lot of overlap between fans and Toho staff when it came to the Resurrection Committee. This might seem strange – employees of a film studio pushing their own studio to make a movie? – but we have to remember that a lot of the people who worked doing modeling and special effects for Toho were sometimes fairly independent from the studio itself, and even producers like Tomoyuki Tanaka were ultimately not the very highest echelon of the company. A lot of people had to agree on a lot of things and conditions had to be just right for a new Godzilla movie to happen – in fact, it was arguably the failure of Toho's idol films intended to be big hits that holiday season that led the studio to produce Return to fill that gap.

6 This was almost certainly not intentional. Godzilla movies were usually released around the middle of December starting in the Heisei era. (Which we all pretend Return of Godzilla is a part of, because time has no meaning, I guess.)