Obligatory introduction post.

Hello! My name's Rhys, nice to meet you. I should probably have an easy-to-access introduction post for anybody coming to this blog for the first time. 

This is (quite obviously) a fanblog dedicated to Akihiko Hirata. My point in running this blog is to provide English-language information on the more obscure parts of his filmography. I became an instant fan when I watched Godzilla '54 for the first time, and the more research I did, the more startling it was just how many of his best-known roles are obscure or entirely unknown outside of Japan. (Of course, this blog does cover stuff that is obscure even in Japan - the goal here is to be a resource for anything that doesn't have much information about it.) You can read this as a blog focusing on Showa-era film/television more generally... if you're willing to tolerate frequent digressions.

I am an amateur (very amateur... maybe “aspiring amateur”?) film historian with an interest in Showa-era film. I love to cite sources and add footnotes and fill out bibliography sections. I spend far too much money on Yahoo! Auctions. I am also fervently dedicated to film preservation, which means that all films and videos you see on this blog are backed up in several places - if a link dies, it will not be lost forever.

I will occasionally post fan translations of various materials, but I will always be up-front about my qualifications: I do understand a little Japanese and can read kana, but outside of a handful of kanji used for given names, I rely on carefully cross-checked machine translations for a lot of things. I take this stuff very seriously and if anything I post is inaccurate please feel free to let me know.

I don't know if anyone else is out there doing things like I am, but I know I can't be the only English-speaking fan. I love and welcome any and all comments, suggestions, anonymous messages asking "why are you like this", whatever. Send it my way. (I'll also do posts on request, but I can't imagine there'd be high demand for that.) This fandom has been alive and kicking since the 1950s and I hope to contribute to keeping it that way.

(what have I watched?)