火曜サスペンス劇場「受験地獄」/ Kayō sasupensu gekijo: Juken jikogu / Exam Hell [1982]

Release date: Aired on January 12th, 1982

Director: Masaharu Segawa

Studio: Produced by Kokusei Broadcasting and NTV

Cast: Yōsuke Tagawa, Miki Jinbo, Akihiko Hirata, Mariko Tsubota, Masuo Iwamoto, Takeo Namai, Ryūsuke Ōbayashi, Kiyoshi Hitomi et al.

Availability: No home media release; extremely infrequent re-broadcasts. Available in full on Internet Archive.

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It's back-to-school season! Let's look at a very apropos TV movie.

Image credit kenta2005 on ameblo

Although the author went uncredited (at least in the 1982 version; the 2014 remake does seem to credit him), Exam Hell was based off of a short story by Kyutaro Nishimura, which first appeared in the March 30th edition of Shukan shōsetsu ("Weekly Novel"). Nishimura was a mystery author, best known for his Inspector Totsugawa series, and in writing Exam Hell he turned to the evergreen subject of Japan's grueling university entrance exams. Contemporary criticism describes the story as "[...]a high-quality social mystery that satirizes the strange social phenomenon of 'Exam Hell' and leads to a surprising ending".

While entrance exams are pretty hellish everywhere, the title of Exam Hell wasn't picked at random and nor did it originate with Nishimura: as a term it dates as far back as the 1930s, to the magazine Juken junpo ("Weekly Exam"), a publication geared towards students preparing to take entrance exams - any entrance exam, whether it be high school, university, or vocational. So what I'm trying to express here is that "Exam Hell" is not just a random combination of words, it's a neologism that the Japanese audience would likely have understood to be referencing a specific concept, the way English speakers might recognize a term like, oh, I don't know, let's say "shopping spree" or "terrible twos".

The story of the original work - which the 1982 film deviates from - focuses on a wealthy university student named Masahiko Kimura who decides to call in a fake bomb threat to his school after oversleeping, with the intent of forcing the exam to be re-scheduled. Kimura gets away with it initially, but later, his plot is discovered by another student, Koichiro Sato, who happened to see Kimura at the scene and connect him to the fake threat. Sato uses this information to blackmail Kimura, demanding at first 100,000 yen and then increasingly exorbitant sums. Eventually, Kimura becomes fed up, goes to Sato's house, and murders him as he's in the middle of writing another blackmail letter, but there's the twist: the contents of that last letter were an apology and Sato's plans for his own suicide due to guilt and his conviction that he'll never get into university.

Where the 1982 version differs (and don't read on if you plan to watch it) is that instead of murdering the other student - who is renamed Sayama in the film - Kimura tries to lure him out in public, fails, and goes to his house with a knife, intending to kill him, but arrives to find medics carting his body out after he had committed suicide. Sayama's demand is also adjusted to a somewhat higher amount of money, obviously.

If you'd like a really good (but short) summary of the 1982 version, see this suspense drama blog here (in Japanese).

Out of the many films that were broadcast as part of the Tuesday Suspense Theater timeslot between 1981 and 2005, viewers really, really liked Exam Hell. It made such an impact, in fact, that it was ranked #1 in NTV's poll of works that viewers most wanted to rewatch. To much fanfare (at least among those who make fanfare about such things), Exam Hell was remade in 2014, and the chief producer of that remake, Hitoshi Taihira, actually joined NTV because of the impression that the 1982 version made on him. This means that Exam Hell has the distinction of being one of the only movies within Hirata's filmography to have been remade.¹ (Said remake may or may not be BL; I was never entirely clear on that.)

Image credit hassy1936-gorin on livedoor.

In the 1982 Exam Hell, Hirata plays Masahiko Kimura's father² Senichi, with Masuo Iwamoto starring as his wife. We're lucky to actually have a few behind-the-scenes pictures from this one, which you can see on this Mariko Tsubota fanpage. In the remake, Hirata's role is filled by Katsumi Takahashi. Takahashi began his acting career well after Hirata had passed away, but his Wikipedia page notes that, growing up, he was a big TV watcher and specifically a big fan of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which Hirata had a fairly prominent recurring role on. One wonders how Takahashi might have felt about getting his role.

(Ryusuke Oki, who plays Sayama in the 1982 version, starred with another Onoda sibling when he played a similarly suspicious guy in 1983's Chitei no satsui, which features Yoshiko Otowa in a small role.)

Lot of graphic design choices going on here.

The 2014 remake is available on DVD and streaming on Hulu, but unfortunately our 1982 Exam Hell remains obscure. Some blessed soul did upload it to Internet Archive (and check out that watermark!), but it's not getting a lot of attention in the way of re-broadcasts despite the nostalgia for it. It has also never received a physical media or streaming release, as far as I'm currently aware. I've only been able to confirm broadcasts in 2008, 2024 and 2025, but it's not out of the question that there were others.

Having watched the 1982 Exam Hell, I can see why people liked it so much. Kimura and Sato/Sayama are fairly sympathetic characters, and have very understandable motives for what they're doing that are laid out clearly without getting ham-fisted or cheesy the way a lot of other Suspense Theater movies tend to. It's a good movie, but even more so - if this makes sense - I can imagine it being the kind of thing that would stick with someone if they watched it as a teenager or young adult in the 1980s.

You can also find an original song from the 1982 Exam Hell called Hakyoku no seishun ("Youth's Catastrophe") collected on a Tuesday Suspense Theater soundtrack album. No one has uploaded it online, but the CD is pretty cheap secondhand, so just gimme a minute and I'll have it here.

Anyway, that's about all I can give you for this obscure but apparently well-loved TV movie. We're lucky it's extant and watchable - the vast majority of Hirata's work in TV (and I do mean VAST MAJORITY) has been lost to time or draconian network reorganizations.

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1 That is, one of the only ones that have BEEN remade, not one of the only ones to BE a remake. The only other remakes I'm aware of are 2008's I Want To Be A Shellfish, 2007's The Family, and Sanjuro, also from 2007. (You could probably get more pedantic about this if you wanted to count all the film versions of Chushingura and the story of Musashi Miyamoto as "remakes", but I wouldn't consider those remakes, just adaptations.)

2 Which is ironic considering that in real life he was Masahiko's brother.

Dr. Iwamoto Appreciation Post (Ultraman Day Special)

Last year, we ranked Dr. Iwamoto's appearances across various Ultraman '66 manga for Ultraman Day. This year I wanted to write something a bit broader in scope, just a bit of a general low-down on the man himself. If you're here, it's likely that you already have some familiarity with the Ultra series, but I'm going to try to write this post with the assumption that my audience knows absolutely nothing about the character I'm talking about - while still trying to make it interesting for those who do. 

So, please, if that sounds even slightly appealing to you, read on for lore, trivia, behind-the-scenes history, extra-canonical appearances, and... choose-your-own adventure books, I guess?

I. Okay, Who Is He? (The Part You Can Skip If You Already Know)

Dr. Iwamoto was a semi-regular character on the 1966 tokusatsu television series Ultraman, played by Akihiko Hirata. Dr. Iwamoto appeared in a total of six non-consecutive episodes that aired between August 14th, 1966 and April 9th, 1967. His very first appearance was in episode 5, Secret of the Miroganda, in which he analyzed some snot. (This did include the sniff test.) Dr. Iwamoto's role within the show was as a kind of science consultant for the SSSP (Special Science Search Party/Patrol), who would offer analysis and advice on strange phenomena the team encountered and assist in developing weapons, vehicles, and other technology for them as well. Dr. Iwamoto was the inventor of most of the Japan branch's weapons and vehicles, including the Jet VTOL, the SSSP's main all-purpose aircraft, which still remains an iconic, recognizable fixture of the original series.

In the original United Artists English dub of the series, Dr. Iwamoto is voiced by William Kiehl, a notably deep-voiced American actor who had previously voiced Hercules as well as two characters played by Christopher Lee. This dub is available in full here, although not in the best quality. More recently, in 2025, Okratron5000 produced a new English dub for Tsuburaya's compilation project Ultraman 4K Discovery; as some of the episodes selected for the compilation do feature Dr. Iwamoto, I assume he was dubbed into English as well, but unfortunately I haven't seen 4K Discovery and cannot find a credit for his English voice actor.

While Dr. Iwamoto was never really the subject of an individual storyline, the closest he got to a "focus episode" is probably episode 16, where he is involved in a contest with another scientist to develop a new rocket. Iwamoto is presented as an example of a good, diligent scientist who is willing to take extra time to ensure that his work is viable - even though it loses him the contest - in contrast to the other scientist, Dr. Mori, who rushes to complete his rocket at the expense of safety.

I really have always wondered what the stage direction was here. I imagine it was something like "Pose like you're possessed by an alien" with no further elaboration.

Dr. Iwamoto is also featured quite prominently in the series finale (episode 39). He is the victim of an Alien Zetton plot to kill Ultraman, wherein he is knocked out, has his appearance stolen, and is used as a disguise to incapacitate Agent Fuji and infiltrate the SSSP base. Alien Zetton wearing Dr. Iwamoto's black business suit has also become somewhat of an iconic image from the series, and it is directly referenced in the 2019 ULTRAMAN manga by Edo, an Alien Zetton whose default outfit is a black suit and tie. (Whether or not this is the same Alien Zetton from the finale is never confirmed or denied.)

II. Extremely Cogent and Articulate Analysis (Trust Me)

The thing about Dr. Iwamoto is that he is an absolute nothingburger of a character. He has very few traits besides being a good scientist. I personally laugh every time I watch Science Patrol Into Space, because his "Impressive. I lost." line (more or less a direct translation) is more or less the only time in the entire series that he shows any personality.

But. But! The fans love him.

The proof that the fans love him is that, in the early 2000s, when a BBS for Akihiko Hirata fans ran a poll where visitors could vote for their favorite of his many roles, Dr. Iwamoto ranked within the top 5. There is also a small but respectable amount of fanart of Dr. Iwamoto out there (cute example). I'm going to go ahead and argue that Dr. Iwamoto is a fan favorite not because people like Dr. Iwamoto himself, but because people like Hirata. It was a great casting choice on Tsuburaya's part: almost every episode of the original Ultraman has a guest star who viewers would know from some tokusatsu movie or other, but having one of the Godzilla franchise's most recognizable actors stick it out throughout the entire series instead of just showing up for one guest appearance and never returning is, to put it plainly, fun. We love to see it. We've loved to see it for 60 years now.

III. Into The Weeds (And Also Into The Gotenyama Science Center)

Now, as I just said, within the main series, Dr. Iwamoto has no characterization whatsoever. We don't get to see anything at all of his life outside of Doin' Science. We don't even know his given name¹. The most personal detail about him that any Ultraman-related media has ever offered is that he is 40 years old. (To be fair, basically all of the characters from the original 1966 series have little to no backstory as well.) In this section, and what follows, I'm going to sum up what we do know about him based on canonical and extra-canonical sources, starting with his place of employment.

Dr. Iwamoto is the director of the fictional Gotenyama Science Center, staffed by many other scientists and their assistants, seen sporadically throughout the series. Gotenyama, for my readers unfamiliar with Japanese geography (I myself am also deeply unfamiliar with Japanese geography, so don't feel bad), is a hill located in Tokyo's Shinagawa ward. I'm gonna take a vague and extremely uninformed guess and say that the decision to place the Science Center in Gotenyama specifically might have had something to do with it being Sony's headquarters for many years beginning in 1947 - it could be that the area had an association with technology, development, etc due to Sony's presence. But, again, this is an uninformed guess.

You're damn right I'm using a Hokusai painting in my article about Dr. Iwamoto from the 1966 tokusatsu television series Ultraman.

The filming location for the fictional Gotenyama Science Center was the real-life Nagasawa Water Purification Plant, which you can see more pictures of here. Below is a picture of the site as it appeared in 2015. The plant served as a filming location for not just Ultraman '66 but many other tokusatsu shows as well, both within the Ultra series and without.

Dr. Iwamoto's status as director of the Science Center actually makes him the only human character who directly links Ultraman to its predecessor series Ultra Q, although the connection is, like much of our information about him, never stated within the original series. In the game Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol, Dr. Iwamoto is established as having taken over Dr. Ichinotani from Ultra Q's job after the latter retired due to injury.

While there is some post-series media that has looked at what happened after the events of Farewell Ultraman, to my knowledge, nothing has ever confirmed with any reasonable degree of canonicity (or even an unreasonable degree) what Dr. Iwamoto did after the end of the series. My personal headcanon is that he continued to be director of the Science Center until Hoshino came of age and then handed over the post to him. It's entirely made up, but I think Hoshino fanboying for Iwamoto's rocket in Science Patrol Into Space would make it fit nicely into series continuity.

IV. What Could Have Been

If you've watched the entirety of the original 1966 series, you'll notice that several episodes feature random scientists who show up for a scene or two, explain something, and are never seen again. Behind the scenes, every single one of these characters was actually written to be Dr. Iwamoto. This is one positive that arises from Iwamoto being such a paper-thin character: giving him a distinct personality would have made it impossible to sub in other actors last-minute. (But imagine if we'd had him in eleven episodes instead of six!)

I can think of no other way to illustrate this point than with a home-cooked meme. I apologize in advance for it.

From looking at changes made between early script drafts and finalized episodes, we can get a better idea of how Dr. Iwamoto developed into a character who was specifically associated with Hirata; I.E. it seems (operative word "seems", this is a theory) that if they couldn't get him in the studio that day, they just wrote in some other scientist instead, and if they did get him, they changed the role to be Dr. Iwamoto. Case in point: in Cry of the Mummy, there was originally a different guest scientist named "Dr. Shibata" who had what ended up being Dr. Iwamoto's role in the final version.

Even within the episodes that Dr. Iwamoto did appear in, there were changes made from the early scripts. For example, in Cry of the Mummy he initially had a more involved role in defeating Mummy Man, and it was going to be him instead of Arashi who uses the Spider Shot. We do in fact have a still from a deleted scene where Iwamoto and the team try to catch Mummy Man:

Dr. Iwamoto was also initially going to be a botanist, as per the script for Secret of the Miroganda; one assumes this was scrapped because a botanist would not be of as much use to the SSSP on a regular basis as just a generic scientist. It's worth mentioning as well that there is a whole host of unproduced scripts for episodes of the '66 series that never ended up being shot, any of which could, I guess, hypothetically have featured Iwamoto.

In terms of production background, and not just Dr. Iwamoto specifically, Hirata was slated to be involved in the series as far back as before it was even decided that Ultraman was going to be Ultraman (some early ideas for the series had the main protagonist imagined as a friendly, birdlike alien named Bemular who assisted the SSSP). Around this time Hirata was also considered for what ultimately ended up being Kenji Sahara's role on Ultra Q. I think we can draw a conclusion here that, as a young company making its foray into tokusatsu TV, Tsuburaya seems to have wanted Hirata in their series from a very early stage.

V. Appearances Outside of the Main Series

While Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol establishes pretty much the only backstory we ever get for Dr. Iwamoto, he does show up in a few other adaptations, spin-offs and other extraneous materials as well. I'm skipping over manga, having already covered it last year, but I'm still going to show you Yuzo Takada's Dr. Iwamoto again because, really, truly, if anything lives rent-free in my brain it is this.

Now, we've got some other video game adaptations to look at. As mentioned above, Dr. Iwamoto appears in Ultra Operation: Mobilization of the Science Patrol with some added lore, consulting on the process of defeating a kaiju that is original to the game...

...and he also appears in Super Tokusatsu Taisen 2001, a great big sprawling confusion of a game featuring many characters from across several different tokusatsu franchises. Interestingly, the game involves characters from Daitetsujin 17, including Hirata's Captain Gomes, which makes this probably the only time he's ever appeared in a video game twice. And yes there is crossover fanart (scroll to fourth panel.)

Iwamoto also appears very briefly in the PS2 Ultraman game via archival stills taken directly from the series. It seems like the whole storyline about Iwamoto being used to infiltrate the base is deleted from this part of the game; he shows up only to deliver the Pencil Bomb to the SSSP.

As a segue out of video games and into books, I'd like to take a moment to bring up Pat Cadigan's inclusion of Dr. Iwamoto in her novelization of the original series, because while I do of course appreciate that she wrote him into the book at all, she seems to be describing an entirely different guy. Throughout the book Dr. Iwamoto is written as being old - as in old old. This is a direct novelization of the original series, so there is no time-skip at play here; there's no reason why Dr. Iwamoto would not be the age he is in the series. One could almost get the feeling the author was talking about Dr. Ichinotani if he was not also described as being noticeably taller than Ide. It's weird, it really is. I don't know what's up with it.

Anyway, moving on to other novelizations, Dr. Iwamoto also appears in Tetsuo Kinjo's 1967 novelization of the series. Unfortunately, this novelization has somehow escaped English translation for going on 60 years now, so I know nothing about what his role within the novel is or if he gets any extra backstory besides what's given in the series. There's surprisingly little information about this book out there, and secondhand copies tend to be hard-to-find and expensive. (Maybe if we try hard enough, we can summon Dr. Jeffrey Angles with the power of our minds to help with the situation.)

Another category of Ultraman '66 tie-in media that has gotten surprisingly little English-language coverage is "choose your own adventure" books (referred to in Japanese as "game books"), of which there are two that I know about. Dr. Iwamoto is featured in both. In Shoot the Mysterious Meteorite Swarm!, published in 1986 (seen below), there are a whole bunch of scenarios that involve Iwamoto, including one where he (and several other people) get possessed by Alien Baltan. This game book also introduces a few original characters, such as Dr. Iwamoto's colleague Dr. Togawa and an agent named Natasha from the SSSP's Moscow branch.

I think it's nice that they gave him a friend :)

The second game book... okay, can you bear with me for a second?

The second Ultraman game book, 1987's Tokyo Rescue Mission, is set in the 1980s, and features all of the same characters as the 1966 series, including Dr. Iwamoto. The problem here is that the 1966 series actually does not take place in 1966; as implied by Jamila's gravestone seen in My Home Is Earth, the series is set in 1993. This would mean that Tokyo Rescue Mission actually takes place before the events of the 1966 series, and if we go by the assumption that Iwamoto is 40 as of 1993, it would also mean that he'd been working as a scientist for the SSSP since his late twenties.

Or - and this is more likely scenario - it implies that the people who wrote Tokyo Rescue Mission forgot or didn't know or didn't care that the series was supposed to be set in 1993. I prefer this explanation, because if we assume the original series all took place in the '60s and the game book takes place in the '80s, then that means Dr. Iwamoto had a nice long career with the SSSP, and provides some insight into what he was doing after Farewell Ultraman.

In any case, I also own a copy of Tokyo Rescue Mission, and I can tell you that Dr. Iwamoto does not have much to do in it at all. Unfortunately, this second game book does not have any fun illustrations like the first one, just a lot of blurry black-and-white stills like any good publication from the early days of home media.

VI. In Conclusion

There's no conclusion! Now we all go and watch Science Patrol Into Space for the 500th time! And we enjoy the fact that such talented, creative people came together to produce a show whose beautiful practical effects and message of hope and collaboration are ever-green!

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1 Some sources call him "Prof. A. Iwamoto", but this is so non-canon that it's not even funny. Like, someone literally just made that up. (Real creative, too.)

A Word from Yoshiki Onoda on Television ("Mimizu no Kawagoto")

Today I'm going to test your attention span with a post that is almost entirely text, because I've got an issue of TV Drama from June of 1962 that features a short piece authored by Yoshiki Onoda. I think it’s appropriate to describe what we’ve got here as basically an op-ed. (The title is an idiom, it literally means "Earthworm's Ramblings".) I’ve got no way of knowing if writing like this was a regular thing that Onoda did, since I’ve never seen any other issues of this magazine, but considering how prolific a television director he was, I would assume that he did contribute to more publications than just this. What I'm giving you here is a quick machine translation, so don't take it as gospel, but from what I can tell it seems alright.

This is basically Yoshiki Onoda saying that he wants television networks (and those financially invested in them) to actually give a damn about producing art that matters to people instead of basing every decision on what drives ratings up and makes the most money. It's very interesting to read input from someone within the industry during a time when television was causing a massive shift in Japan's media landscape, and if you've ever seen any of Onoda's work, this gives some nice insight into his creative philosophy. Given that he'd just recently left Shintoho after its collapse, at this point in time he was in a bit of a better position to produce the kind of work he wanted to make, rather than be a studio-contracted director with little creative freedom.

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While theatrical cinema is currently trending toward larger scales and evolving into a form of spectacle, television films, by contrast, interact with viewers exclusively through the cathode-ray tubes found within the home.

Consequently, the limitations inherent in these smaller-scale films that are brought directly into the intimate circle of family life are accompanied by an even greater set of constraints. Unlike live dramas, film should offer the potential to expand the scope of dramatic expression with greater freedom and richness. The depiction of character environments, psychological nuances, and visually lyrical compositions should, in theory, powerfully instill in viewers both an aesthetic sensibility and a profound sense of reality.

Therefore, it stands to reason that television films should surpass live dramas in quality; yet, what accounts for the continued stagnation of the medium?

As television stations expanded their programming lineups, they could no longer rely solely on live broadcasts. This naturally led to a recognition of the necessity for filmed content - a need initially met by a flood of imported foreign television series. Over time, however, this influx paved the way for the rise of domestic television production. Today, driven in part by foreign currency considerations, the volume of imported content is gradually declining, resulting in the mass production of domestic television films. Given that round-the-clock broadcasting is said to be just around the corner, it is an entirely natual progression that the volume of domestic television films will continue to rise in the future.

As practitioners involved in the creation of television films, we earnestly home that broadcasters will move beyond their current mindset: one in which they produce telvision films merely out of unavoidable necessity. Rather than simply relying on film as an easy default option, we urge them to cultivate a strong, affirmative awareness: the realization that precisely because the medium is film, it offers unique capabilities and creative possibilities that are otherwise unattainable.

One of the primary reasons for the aforementioned stagnation, simply put, is that the production companies themselves have fallen into a state of merely fulfilling a "necessity". One aspect of this situation stems from the fact that, since television is typically watched in the living room - a space that is always brightly lit and fosters a sense of close intimacy between the screen and the viewer - there is a prevailing expectation for works that the entire family can enjoy together. However, if this expectation remains the sole standard, television cinema stands no chance of ever truly evolving. It would serve only to contribute to the "dumbing down" of the masses. While some argue that this constitutes the fundamental difference between theatrical cinema and television cinema, I do not share that view.

Indeed, the more intimate the connection between the visual medium and the viewer, the less difficult it should be to penetrate the viewer's inner world. Consequently, the fundamental natural of dramatic storytelling itself should, by rights, remain essentially the same regardless of the medium. Is it not the true mission of television cinema - which has found its way into the very heart of the home - to inspire viewers to contemplate life with earnestness, to feel a boundless moral indignation toward social ills, and to discover the joy of living life with a forward-looking spirit? Relying solely on home dramas¹ cannot possibly fulfill this mission. To dismiss the possibility of such depth on the grounds that "viewers lack the intellectual capacity" is an overly conservative mindset that serves merely to perpetuate the status quo.

Every television station should realize that it bears an obligation to elevate the cultural and intellectual standards of its viewers. I can only hope that, by taking a step forward beyond rigid constraints and embracing the imperative to fulfill this duty, the future will bring forth a continuous stream of truly exceptional television productions. Finally, television possesses a trump card which is held as an absolute, sacrosanct dogma: viewer ratings. Based on these results, programs are often reshuffled or canceled with alarming ease. From the perspective of nurturing and fostering the growth of television cinema, I earnestly implore all television stations and their respective sponsors to refrain, as much as possible, from wielding [viewer ratings as a] formidable and often destructive weapon.

1 Light family-centered sitcoms or soap operas.

2 Years of guzareshirei...

I have been writing this blog for 2 years now. I don't think anybody reads it, but writing it makes me happy, so I'm going to continue to do so. To celebrate my anniversary, in addition to revamping the blog's theme - I feel like can never quite get it to look good, I have to settle for "halfway decent" - I've done fansubs for episode 55 of Taiyo ni Hoero!, which introduces Hirata's character Chief Nishiyama, one of his more well-known roles within Japan despite its near-total obscurity overseas. Apart from its broadcast on Hawaiian TV decades ago, this is the first time this episode has had English subtitles.

Check it out here. It'll be on archive.org until and unless people with say-so (or their lawyers) decide it shouldn't be. Also note that Toyoko Takechi, who has a guest role in this episode, is what I (somewhat embarrassingly) like to call a "triple crown" actress: she worked with Hirata and both of his siblings at various times.

As always, there will be more posts; I have plans for the coming year. And if anyone is reading this, thank you, sincerely. 

It's been an expensive two years. 

A very, very expensive two years.

Brand New English Subtitles for Star Wolf and Comet-san!

It's still his birthday. It ain't midnight yet where I live. I've got one more post in me.

In real life, I am fortunate enough to host monthly screenings of tokusatsu films and television that, for some reason, people have actually been showing up to for a year and a half. I manage to be (...mostly) normal for the rest of the year, but when December rolls around, all bets are off. (Personally, I took the day off work so I could stay home and watch The Killing Bottle and Ironfinger back-to-back, which turned out to be a really good idea because somebody drove a car through the store where I work today.)

This year I had the privilege of holding my most special screening in an actual art gallery. This is something I spend a lot of time preparing for every year, so having such a great venue to host it was a blast. For this year's screening, I subtitled two episodes that Hirata guest-starred in which previously did not have subtitles. I've now uploaded them to Internet Archive where they will remain until and unless anybody decides to call down the copyright gods, or if somebody else fansubs them and makes mine look bad in comparison.

Here's episode 3 of Star Wolf.

Here's episode 33 of Comet-san.

Our man sounds like he had a really bad cold when they were filming Comet-san.

Ranking Every Manga Iwamoto (That I Could Find) For Ultraman Day

1) Yuzo Takada's Ultraman The First

This is probably my favorite Ultraman '66 manga. Yuzo Takada's art style is so precise and impressive on a technical level, and although he doesn't try to be realistic, he doesn't go full caricature either. I also really like that he draws all the characters' height accurately.

For the most part, the three volumes in this manga stick closely to selected episodes from the original series, but there's enough original content to make it fun. Some of the episodes are combined into one chapter ("My Home is Earth", "The Monster Graveyard", "Farewell Ultraman", and one or two others are all kinda smashed together as the finale, for example) and as a result Dr. Iwamoto ends up in story arcs that he wasn't actually a part of, which I will never complain about. Takada also establishes that Fuji is a gamer, and although it isn't canon, it is canon in my heart. There's another much-needed new female character in the mix as well: a tomboy mechanic named Hinata (who uses the "ore" pronoun); if I recall correctly, she's the only original character in the manga, and she's very cool.

At the end, Fuji is the one who gets bodysnatched by Baltans, instead of Iwamoto getting bodysnatched by Alien Zetton, which is an interesting choice. I highly recommend this manga and I wish it was translated.

Also this panel goes unbelievably hard:

Text says "I won't forgive you, Baltan!"

2) Eiichi Shimizu & Tomohiro Shimoguchi's ULTRAMAN

It's debatable whether or not Edo actually deserves to be here. His whole look is an obvious nod to bodysnatched Iwamoto from the final episode of Ultraman, but whether or not Edo is actually that specific Zetton is never explicitly confirmed. We do see Edo watching what appears to be a recording of Ultraman's fight with Zetton in a (possibly non-canon) bonus comic at the end of one volume, but for the most part Edo's relation to the 1966 Zetton is left up to the imagination.

This one bothers me a little bit though. These mangaka CAN draw likenesses (Shiro Maki from Operation: Mystery is also in the manga... for... some reason, and he looks recognizably like Shin Kishida) but Edo's human form is fully just Some Guy.

In any event, Edo gets the #2 spot because he inspired an AO3 fic that is deeply funny to me:

3) Kyōta Kawasaki's Ultraman: The Science Patrol's Battle Chronicles: Operation Giant

I found pictures of this on a closed auction listing and I was so intrigued that I tracked a copy down and bought it. I thought at first that it was just somebody's random doujin, but it's actually officially licensed. It is [takes breath] a manga adaptation of Toshihiro Iijima's novelization of his own unproduced pilot script for Ultraman. I believe this was published around 1994. 

I have read the whole thing and it's great fun. The art style is very rudimentary, but Kawasaki is really good at drawing action scenes, and it's like watching an episode of Ultraman that never got made. The story is about a little scrap-metal robot who is commandeered by an unknown force in order to announce the arrival of "G", which turns out to be an enormous - bigger than Ultraman - and extremely powerful black robot that looks like a suit of armor. The Baltans appear as well, and there are a lot of characters who are original to the manga. Iwamoto only shows up once in the second-to-last panel on the last page. 

Possibly the rarest thing on this list, but maybe not for long. If this ever shows up translated, yours truly may or may not have had a hand in it.

4) Kazuo Umezu's Ultraman

Man, something about Generic Shounen Manga Iwamoto just gets me.

I do want to award extra points to this manga because Umezu at least gives Iwamoto more of a dynamic role than he ever had in the series. He volunteers to take Mummy Man to his house since he has the requisite facilities to keep its body from decomposing(!) but the truck he's driving (with Mummy Man in the back) ends up getting scooped up in Dodongo's jaws and he has to be rescued by Ultraman. This entire manga somehow survived the MangaDex purge, and it would be just absolutely horrible if you were to read it there for free instead of paying for an officially-licensed translation (which doesn't exist).

(Edit: Well, would you look at that.)

By the way, the reason why so many artists draw him with that weird Clark Kent-style single lock of hair out of place seems to be because of one scene from Cry of the Mummy. He doesn't look like that at any point in any of his other episodes. I guess that scene made an impression on people.

4) Gendai Comics (Hideoki Inoue)

sorry about the poor image quality but the lighting situation in the original auction listing photos seemed to be "haunted basement"

If I couldn't read his name in kanji, I would have no idea this was Iwamoto. Points on for being funny, I guess. Gendai Comics' Ultraman is one of those series that has incredibly good cover art and then the actual manga itself is just eh.

5) Gendai Comics (Osamu Kishimoto)

Does he have glasses? Okay, sure. Really good Ide, though. That's what I look like after I've been doing subtitles for eleven hours straight.

Non-Manga Honorable Mention: Elisabetta Stoinich's RRParksCards Sketch Card

Sneak peek inside guzareshirei HQ. That is indeed the one and only Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari script in its shadowbox in the background.

I had to special-order this as soon as I knew it existed and a series of events then unfolded that led to what was ultimately a nine-month wait time (largely my fault for mistaking a years-old Kickstarter for an active project), but we got there in the end. Nobody ever does fanart of Dr. Iwamoto. If you're a fanartist and you're reading this, consider it your sign to do fanart of Dr. Iwamoto. I compel you. Show it to me. (Here's some.)

I hope you enjoyed this goofy post. I did. One of these days I'm going to make a "Fictional Characters I Have Heard People Say Look Like Akihiko Hirata" post and it's gonna be the craziest thing any of you have ever seen.

NHK特集 想定ドキュメント 輸入食料ゼロの日 / NHK tokushū: sōtei dokyumento: yunyū shokuryō zero no hi / NHK Special: Hypothetical Documentary: Day of Zero Imported Food [1978]

No images from this docudrama exist, but I don't like to make posts without images, so here's an entirely unrelated book about the same subject.

Intro

A while ago, I spent a very long time assembling what I believe is the most comprehensive list of every single one of Hirata's film, television and stage credits, which ended up amounting to somewhere around 350 titles (the actual list is slightly less, but I usually say "around 350" to account for anything I might have missed due to obscurity). People generally like stories about the strange and unusual, so let's ask the question: out of that number, what is the weirdest thing he was in?

Well, that depends on what we consider "weird". First off, I want to absolutely avoid the pitfall of calling something weird just because it's from Japan. His The Sound of Music or Gone With the Wind aren't "weird" just because they're Japanese productions of English-language works. None of the game shows or variety shows Hirata was on¹ in the late '70s and early '80s qualify as "weird" just because we've never heard of them. Okage wa Waga kokoro ni ari - a docudrama about the founder of a specific Shintō sect - is a bit surprising, but I'm not going to call something "weird" because it involves a religion that I don't subscribe to. And I'm not talking about movies that are "weird" in a narrative or conceptual sense. The H-Man is objectively pretty weird, but it's science fiction, so that's to be expected.

So with all of those qualifiers, I think the one thing I can say for certain is actually pretty weird is the TV docudrama about what would happen if Japan suddenly stopped importing food. Maybe "weird" is not the most precisely accurate term here, but it's the sort of thing that's just a bit unusual to see in an actor's filmography - and it would be for any actor. You could imagine your favorite British soap opera star in something like this and it would still be weird. In any event, here is everything I can tell you about Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi.

Who made this thing

Despite not having a Wikipedia article, the director of the docudrama, Sakae Okazaki, has been a part of NHK's history (and the history of television as a whole) since 1953, which is essentially when television broadcasting began within Japan. Okazaki's main interest when he began working for NHK was producing media related to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki's home had been burned down by an American air raid, and when he was stationed at the Hiroshima branch of NHK, he created radio dramas on the subject of the atomic bomb. Okazaki was initially very reluctant to move from radio to television, but he found success in the mid-1960s when he produced what is considered to be Japan's first docudrama, Sōnan ["Disaster"], about the search for thirteen students from a mountaineering club who were lost on Mount Yakushi. After that, he also produced Japan's first color taiga drama, Ten to chi to. In the late 1970s Okazaki was in charge of "NHK Special", the series that Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi belongs to more broadly. Okazaki is still alive at 95 years old and was interviewed by Yahoo! News about his long career in March of this year.

I can find virtually no information about the docudrama's main screenwriter, Mamoru Tanabe. His name appears as a credit on a plethora of NHK programs dating back to, as far as I can tell, the mid-1950s. I'm not sure where he is now or when he stopped working, if he has.

As for the rest of the cast: Momoko Kōchi's in it, I just want to say that before I get to anybody else. There are a few other fairly well-known actors in the cast as well, including Gin Maeda, Toshiaki Nishizawa, Toei "hey it's that guy" Fumio Watanabe, and prolific voice actor Akira Kume. I have no idea what Hirata's role in this was, but I think "miscellaneous scientist" is a fairly safe bet. It usually is.

What is this thing

The general idea of the docudrama is summed up in its title. At least as of 1978, Japan was importing 60-70% of all its food product, and the docudrama takes place in the year "19XX", after Japan's government, acting on top-secret information regarding the upcoming sudden stoppage of all imports, begins to assess the country's capacity for food production, an endeavor mainly undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture. The production capacity of rural agricultural areas is analyzed by computer and the answer given is apparently not reassuring: with its current production capacity, one-third of the population would starve within the year if food imports were to cease. The docudrama - which took more than a year to produce and involved real-world experiments in food production using underutilized land such as golf courses - features actual staff of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and reporting by Ryōjū Katsube, a real-life NHK reporter who was, among other things, in charge of local reports for the world's first television broadcast from Japan's Showa base in Antarctica.

Please see Hiroshi Makita's thread on the docudrama. I am clowning on it a little, but this scenario is an important thing to consider; it's very concerning knowing your country may not be able to adequately feed its own population in a time of crisis, and from what Makita says, this problem has not been fully solved even today.

This was not the only speculative docudrama that NHK produced. Within the "Hypothetical Document" series, two other scenarios were explored: an earthquake warning and a large-scale blackout in Tokyo. There is a little footage and some stills from the other two docudramas, but as far as I know not a single image from the one we're looking at today is available online.

Can we watch it

No.

Well, not unless you're affiliated with a university in Japan and/or can get special permission to view it for educational purposes. (I don't know about you, but I think my purposes are pretty educational.)

There are more NHK TV specials that are lost to time and to Japan's draconian copyright laws forcing tapes to be destroyed following television stations restructuring than there are grains of sand on a beach. Fortunately, this is not one of them: it is held in Yokohama's Broadcast Library, which is the only facility in Japan that collects and archives television programs, radio programs, commercials, and related material and provides free-of-charge viewing. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that if I am ever in Yokohama, I will find a way to watch it there. I will tell you all about it.

That's not the only place where the docudrama is held, though. As it was released to VHS in 1990, numerous universities now have a copy: CiNii, Japan's equivalent of WorldCat, a website that allows you to search for any book in any library anywhere, lists 29 universities that have a tape. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the tape seems to be unavailable for general consumption: academic institutions are the only places that got a copy, as far as I know, and I'm not even sure what the tape looks like. If I do ever find a copy, you will know about it.

_____

1 Okay, the Beat Takeshi thing was probably weird. I will eventually write something about that.

Comedy Trio [Owarai san'ningumi] with English Subtitles

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I've finished up my subtitles for two of the surviving three episodes of Comedy Trio. This is the first time any of Yoshiko Otowa's work has gotten English subtitles. Please check the episodes out here. I also timed everything completely by hand.

As always, I want to make it very clear that I don't know enough Japanese to just bang this out by ear, so this translation was assisted by dictionaries and carefully cross-referenced machine translation. This particular job was especially difficult because the style of dialogue in a live comedy show is much different from a normal scripted drama. People talk over each other, talk during audience noise, don't enunciate, speak too quietly or too far away from the mic, and so on. These subtitles are not perfect, but I really hope they're more good than bad. (I’m gonna be honest, I doubt I'll be subtitling live television again any time soon.)

If anyone out there wants to mess with these, I'm more than happy to provide the raws and my .txt files.

Some TL notes under the cut:

Rainbowman in Hawai'i

This post will be long.

Introduction

Note: This post was written before Rainbowman received new English subtitles in mid-2025.

On October 6th, 1972, the first episode of Warrior of Love Rainbowman premiered on NET. For almost a full year, weekly viewers were treated to one of Toho's most visibly low-budget productions, but one that nevertheless had a strange sense of energy and an at times almost psychedelic flavor to it. Extensive merchandise was produced for the show both during and after its initial broadcast, including - but not limited to - iron-on patches, notepads and sketchbooks, shoes, coloring books, a pachinko game¹, plastic tableware, menko cards, a menagerie of action figures, and whatever this is. A decade after the show ended, an anime adaptation was produced, which shifted the focus of the show from a human hero who fought using techniques inherited from his mentor, Deva Datta, to a human hero who fought with a mecha. Although it may not have had the staying power of Ultraman or Kamen Rider, cultural memory of the show remains: in 2023, Kodansha covered the show in volume 4 of their Godzilla & Toho Tokusatsu mook series. Notably, so many people involved with the show have since passed away or retired that the most relevant figure Kodansha could get for an interview was Yu Mizushima, who sang the theme song.

The star of the show was 17-year-old Kunihisa Mizutani, who gave a remarkably earnest performance as the generically-named Takeshi Yamato (not the one from Ultraman 80). He's young, but you can tell that he whole-heartedly believes in everything Takeshi is doing and going through. The rest of the cast included a few of Toho's older and more experienced actors in small roles, such as Yū Fujiki and Hiroshi Kōizumi, as well as newcomers Machiko Soga and Ulf Otsuki, who would go on to become some of the most recognized faces in tokusatsu. Playing Mr. K, the series' main villain and the mastermind behind every evil plot and scheme, was Akihiko Hirata, kitted out in an even worse wig and fake mustache than they put him in for Terror of Mechagodzilla, a pair of shades and, later in the series, a hook hand. (Mr. K in the anime was just sort of a goblin-looking thing.) Despite not appearing in every episode, Mr. K leaves a strong impression. The role suits Hirata well and he seemed to be having fun with it. As of 20 years ago, when the most recent popularity poll was conducted, Mr. K fell second only to Dr. Serizawa as Hirata's most popular role within Japan.

Rainbowman was Toho's first foray into the hero genre in a television format, and fittingly it was conceived by the creator of what is widely considered to be Japan's first hero series (Moonlight Mask): Kohan Kawauchi, a foundational figure in tokusatsu whose works are surprisingly little-known in the West.

Kawauchi is an interesting one. He had some nationalistic views (though it should be mentioned that he was anti-war), but was also the creator of several series that were very progressive for their time, such as, for example, Japan's first explicitly Muslim superhero (Messenger of Allah). Takeshi Yamato himself gains his powers through a distinctly non-Japanese mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism, traveling to India to undergo rigorous training and learn from Deva Datta. The lyrics to the series' theme song espouse global - global - unity and peace: "All humans are the same, except for differences in skin tone and language, they are all friends, but there are people who would destroy that." However, there is also the fact that Mr. K - cast as the villain at every turn, unambiguously in the wrong - is a man of unspecified nationality whose entire family was murdered by the Imperial Army, and as a result he has become bent on destroying Japan in revenge. While Mr. K's cartoonish supervillainy is obviously played up for funsies, it can be interpreted as being in pretty poor taste, and the show is not allowed to be re-ran on television today for this exact reason. As we'll see in this article, the ways in which Hawaiian audiences interpreted the series' views were nuanced even when it was first airing.

Now that we've gotten some background on what this series is, I want to leave its home country and explore the impact it had when it was broadcast outside of Japan. My aim here is to gather and present as much information related to the show's presence on Hawaiian television - and in Hawaiian life - as I can.

from Prefectural Earth Defense Force OVA

Same Bat Sister Time, Same Bat Sister Channel: When and Where Did It Air?

Tokusatsu hit Hawaiian shores in September 1973, when Tsuburaya's Emergency Directive 10-4/10-10 was broadcast with English subtitles. In February 1974, Rainbowman would begin airing. While it was popular with young people in Hawai'i, it would be overshadowed a month later by the phenomenon that was Android Kikaider's Hawaiian broadcast. The overwhelmingly positive response to Kikaider by Hawaiian fans is a large part of the reason why the show has any kind of notoriety in the U.S. today.

Rainbowman was broadcast on KIKU, which is currently on air as channel 20, broadcasting primarily Japanese and Filipino media. As of 1974, however, KIKU was on channel 13, and under different ownership. In 1966, Richard Eaton, owner of United Broadcast Company, bought KTRG-TV, hoping to convert it into a station that would broadcast Japanese-language programming. A scuffle ensued, involving FCC scrutiny, lawsuits regarding whether or not the previous owners, the Watumull family, were even able to sell the station, and doubts about Eaton's apparently poor track record with such endeavors, but ultimately the sale went through in July of 1967. In October of that year (after one more lawsuit for good measure), KTRG-TV returned to the air under the new call sign KIKU ("kiku" is the Japanese word for the chrysanthemum flower) and began airing nightly televised sumo matches. The next year, KIKU would introduce color broadcasting, and the year after, it began airing content with English subtitles. By 1975, half of its programming was subtitled.

So, when did Rainbowman air specifically? From looking through the February 1974 issues of Hawaii Times, I was able to find out that it seems like the series debuted on KIKU on Sunday, February 10th, at 7 PM.

Relevant to our interests, KIKU was also airing Dai Chushingura at around the same time.

Flipping through further issues, I could see that the show shifted days and time slots over the course of its run, starting off airing on Sundays at 7:00 but eventually switching to Saturdays at 7:30 and then Saturdays at 8:30. Its final time slot seems to have been on Wednesday at 6:30 PM, right before Kamen Rider was on. After February 4th, 1975, there is no further record of it in Hawaii Times.

So now that we have the bare bones of when the show aired and for how long, I'd like to try to find something a little more subjective. I want to look at newspaper mentions of the show that include contemporary reviews or impressions of it. And oh boy, do we have a wealth of exactly that.

Many Wonderful Things: Rainbowman in English

credit to August Ragone on Twitter

The sheer scope of newspaper coverage from when Rainbowman was on the air is staggering. Even cherry-picking some of the most interesting mentions leaves this post with probably more text than most people would want to read. If you made it this far, though, congratulations; you will be rewarded with some of the most fascinating information on tokusatsu in Hawai'i that I've ever read.

Phil Mayer writes in the September 6th edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

And now kids, the news: When all 43 episodes of "Kikaider" have been seen here, a new series "Kikaider 0-1" will replace it immediately on KIKU-TV, Channel 13. The new series will be about Kikaider's brother. The rest of this story is for parents and other old people. If they read it, maybe they won't ask so many dumb questions about "Rainbow Man" and "Kikaider," two Japanese hit shows on TV. For instance, a lot of adults think "Rainbow Man" and "Kikaider" are parts of the same show. [...] They're not. "Rainbow Man" is a lot like "Superman." And "Kikaider" is a robot who battles a different monster each week. 

[...]RAINBOW MAN is seven different good guys, one for each day of the week. He can change identities because he is also mild-mannered Yamoto Takeshi[sic], a college student who studied with a guru in India. When he must outwit the no-good "Mr. K" and his "Shine-Shine" gang, Takeshi can become Moon Man, Fire Man, Water Man, Leaf (or Tree) Man, Gold Man, Ground (or Earth) Man and Dash 7, who is also known as "Rainbow Man." Eat your heart out, Clark Kent. There are 19 more original "Kikaider" episodes and 28 more original "Rainbow Man" episodes to be shown Saturdays at 8 and 8:30 p.m. respectively. 

We also learn from Mayer's article that the first 26 episodes of Rainbowman were aired without subtitles (the switch occurred around early August of 1974), and we even have the name of the blessed soul who was assigned to subtitle the remainder: Alvin Hamada, staff member at KIKU.

So we know that the concept of Takeshi's seven "Dash" forms seems to have been translated into seven separate entities, with their own names that correspond to the powers each form has. I also find it very interesting that the article doesn't translate "Shine-Shine" as "Double-Death", "Die-Die", or any of the other ways I typically see it translated. I'm intensely curious if that means that they somehow decided to render the name of Mr. K's group as the English word "shine", or if they left the Japanese word intact in its Romaji form. Evidently, I'm not the only one who made a note of that - a letter to the editor in a subsequent edition points out that the word was not translated in the article.

Nadine Scott, in the September 14th edition, tells us... well, there's a lot to unpack here, so let me just show you the whole thing:

The Rev. Charles Crane of the Church of the Holy Nativity in Aina Haina tackles the impact of "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man," those two immensely popular Japanese TV hit shows, in his church bulletin this week. And he goes a step further in exploring the symbolism involved in the format of both shows particularly in "Rainbow Man." He sees a "deeply theological symbolism used in conjunction with the arch-villain of Rainbow Man, Mr. K", and says his henchmen are all robots who wear stocking masks and Texan hats.

"The molls are all round-eyed beauties with Western names such as [Diana and Cathy,] and their costumes are miniskirts and boots. Whenever one of the drones fails in an assignment, Mr. K, to the accompaniment of a Bach fugue, takes out a valise which controls his flips the appropriate toggle switch, makes the sign of the cross, says ["Amen"] and presses the button to disintegrate the offending knave."

Then, he writes, "it dawned on me: the enemy is us!" He points out the "bad guys are the Christians. They wear the Texas hats; their girls are made up in Western style; their leader uses a Christian liturgy to accompany his executions." And he concludes if that's the popular view of "us followers of Jesus Christ," it's no wonder missionaries are disillusioned when it is not a vacuum of innocence "into which they are received, but a pre-programmed resistance to that which is identified with all of the negative aspects of Western culture."

And what's more: there was discourse. In a subsequent edition, we have a letter to the editor responding to Rev. Crane:

SIR: As a non-haole resident of Hawaii, I was both amazed and amused with Rev. Crane's account on "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man." Rev. Crane tries to explain the "Kikaider", "Rainbow Man" phenomenon in a typical WASPish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) way. The two non-white heroes of Hawaii's youngsters are looked upon as something sinister. The same WASPish attitude has been described of "Kung Fu" by the same group.

Rev. Crane sees the makers of the fighting due as anti-white and even anti-Christian. Absurd! I am a student of psychology and have studied the reaction of Hawaii's youngsters. As Hawaii's people know, whites are part of a minority group here. However, almost all of the TV heroes have been haoles.

At long last, Hawaii's multi-racial, non-haole youngsters have someone they can identify with. "Kikaider" and "Rainbow Man" are indeed "breath of fresh air in a sea of white pollution." Rev. Crane should speak up for the "Golden People of Hawaii"² if he truly believes in Christianity.

Also, check out this kid in his sweet Rainbowman tee.

This is just me. This is what the author of this blog looks like.

Presumably the above kid is the same one from this disgruntled mom's letter to the editor:

To Whom It May Concern: On Monday, Nov. 4, Troy came home from school and informed me he and his classmates had listened to an album in class which he described as being "Kikaider-Rainbow Man" music. I will state firmly at this time that if it is again necessary to play this music in class during regular school hours, I must insist that either Troy be allowed to play in the playground or sent to the office until the session is over. Neither Troy nor his brother are allowed to watch the "Kikaider-Rainbow Man" series on television as I feel this program is detrimental to their upbringing, sense of reality and overall mental stability. If they are being deprived of an essential tool in education by not being exposed to this farce, I will gladly take the consequences of my actions at a later time. While I understand and realize Enchanted Lake Elementary School is a public learning institution, I feel there is: a point at which a parent must step in. If, indeed, Troy's story is true, that point has already been reached.

While the majority of my finds in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin were simply advertisements for Rainbowman merchandise, it is very clear that the show was incredibly popular and a part of life for many Hawaiians, both children and adults. We know that people were thinking about it enough to write about their theological interpretations of Mr. K's robot harem. I've always believed that a crucial yet overlooked aspect of media preservation is the preservation of subjective, personal opinions on a film or a television series. More than just the facts of when it was made and who created it, it's also important to know how people responded to something.

Now, let's draw this exploration to a close.

Amen: Conclusions

This is mine. I embroidered it by hand. I may or may not also have a Mr. K poster on my bedroom wall.

I did not expect to cover international releases of Japanese media so frequently when I began this blog. It is perennially fascinating to me that something as massively popular as Rainbowman can today languish in unsubtitled obscurity in the West, when just 50 years ago parents cared about it enough to believe it was a danger to their children's mental health. There is so, so much out there that's just like this - for example, did you know that the first Japanese movie ever fully dubbed into English was a Toho production (with our man in a small role, of course) called 3 Dolls in College, and that it's completely out of print both within its home country and here, surviving only on a VHS tape (which I will get my hands on sooner or later)? We tend to assume that the media that survives and becomes popular achieves that status because it's the best or the most historically important, but that isn't necessarily the case. There is always more out there that you haven't seen.

Old media is worthwhile. If I successfully impress one thing upon my audience through what I write on this blog - besides my goal of proving that Akihiko Hirata was so much more than the guy who played Dr. Serizawa - I hope it is that.

______

1 Incredibly important question: does this mean that, theoretically, someone could port Mr. K into Smash Brothers?

2 If you haven't heard the phrase "Golden People of Hawai'i" - I define it here because I myself had never heard of it - it refers to an advertising campaign run by Hawaii's tourism board that showed the population of Hawai'i as ethnically diverse, but did so in a way that posited the mixed-ethnicity population of Hawai'i as a colorful spectacle for the consumption of white audiences. One can imagine the writer of this letter may have been using the phrase sarcastically.