Go East, Old Nerd

I thought I would post a few more shots from my Japan trip just to show that it was about more than battling robots and AV starlets in metallic underwear--although there was that. As you might expect, in addition to visiting picturesque shrines and drinking Japanese whisky in cramped attic bars, I took the time to make as many of the nerdy pilgrimages that would be expected of a geek like myself as was humanly possible. To wit:

Sadly, Toho Studios, located in Tokyo's Chiyoda District, does not offer a tour--which, though disappointing, is not all that surprising, given the studio's long-held reputation for guardedness. Nonetheless, a visit to their gates offers enough spectacle to be worth the trip. For starters, there is the approximately 7' foot statue of the Big G that greets visitors, and which adults and children alike are welcome to paw and clamor upon to their hearts' content.

After that, there are the towering murals that grace the studio's walls, one commemorating Kurosawa's The Seven Sumurai and the other, completed in May of this year, of Godzilla himself.

Also from outside, one can glimpse a massive Mothra mural that overlooks the employee parking lot. We asked if we could be allowed inside to photograph it, but were told that we would have to do so from outside the parking gate. Whatevs, Toho!

In stark contrast, Toei Studios, in Kyoto, offers itself to guests in the form of an entire theme park. Admittedly, many of its attractions are pretty cheesy, but it nonetheless features a lot of displays of vintage posters, props, and costumes--giving no short shrift to the studio's many Tokusastsu and animated productions.

And then there is the park's Animation Museum, which features enormous statues of  Grandizer and Mazinger. How cool is that?

Mandarake is a chain of super stores dedicated to vintage Japanese toys, particularly of the variety related to kaiju and tokusatsu heroes, as well as  manga and anime. The Shibuya branch was sizeable, to be sure, but the largest has to be the one at the Broadway mall in Nakano, which appears to have metastasized to take over the majority of the multi-storied shopping center's storefronts. As someone who used to collect and deal in these types of toys, it was interesting for me to explore the store's many display cases, which were crammed to bursting with myriad Bullmark vinyl figures, Popy "Chogokin" die-casts and other assorted delights. It left me wondering, though, how the store was able to command such high prices for these items, as the conspicuous display of over-abundance seemed to contradict the aura of scarcity that the collectibles market so depends on.

All in all, Japan lived up to it's reputation as a nerd's paradise. To be honest, I think I saw more  kitschy sci-fi toys and memorabilia than my admittedly voracious appetite for same could comfortably tolerate. Fortunately, we were not so consumed that we couldn't take time out to sample the local delicacies:

Gekko Kamen (Japan, 1958)

Depending as it does on formula, cult genre cinema tends to walk a tightrope between nagging predictability and cozy reliability. Gekko Kamen falls squarely on the latter side of that dichotomy, generously presenting us with one expected trope after another as if they were old friends. Present are the kidnapped scientist with a comely and available daughter, the villain in a skull mask with wave after wave of expendable minions, trap doors, ticking time bombs, and, at the center of it all, a righteous costumed hero. Gekko Kamen is also kind enough to reel all of this out with no small amount of gloomy B movie style, so that adults like myself can describe it with words like “noirish” and “chiaroscuro” to quell our uneasiness over enjoying a film with a theme song hollered by a chorus of enthusiastic Japanese children.

Gekko Kamen—known to us gaijin as Moonlight Mask--took a route to the screen that is the reverse of most super heroes, in that he made his debut on Television before making the move to comics, all via the efforts of his creator, writer Kohan Kowauchi. It should also be said that calling him a “superhero” requires some qualification, as, like Turkey’s Iron Claw, he is a masked do-gooder whose super power is shooting people. Essentially, he is a masked detective in the style of Batman or the Green Hornet. Having just returned from Tokyo, I might also add that his costume incorporates elements that are readily available to most urban Japanese—by which I refer to a surgical mask and sunglasses. This raises the possibility that he is the first hipster germophobe superhero, but I will leave that discussion to writers with a keener investigative sense than mine.

Interestingly, Toei Studios’ series of Gekko Kamen theatrical films were produced at roughly the same time as the television series, which was produced by the advertising agency Shenkosha throughout most of 1958 and 1959 and featured a different actor, Ose Koichi, in the title role. In the six films, it is Toei regular Fumitake Omura who stands front and center in the double role of Gekko Kamen and the man most likely to be his alter ego, Juro Iwai, a young private eye. The films never make explicit the connection between Juro and Gekko Kamen, preferring to keep the hero’s origins mysterious, although it could be argued that the narrative utility of Juro’s presence would otherwise be equally mysterious.

Gekko Kamen, the first of the films, sees our hero come up against Dokura Kamen, aka Skull Mask, whom attentive readers will recognize as the aforementioned skull-masked villain. Skull Mask enjoys support from an army of henchmen wearing eyeball emblazoned black hoods that welcome happy associations with the costumes worn by the aliens in Warning from Space. Because Gekko Kamen has more style than money, Skull Mask and his crew are often seen commuting from one evil assignation to another in a station wagon. Once they have succeeded in killing, assaulting, or kidnapping enough by-all-appearances innocent scientists, it is time for Gekko Kamen to make the scene, appearing out of nowhere to a combination of eerie theremin music and the ghostly intonation of his theme song—which I like to think he himself is singing.

Seeing as most of his action scenes involve a ruthless handiness with a pair of pistols, Gekko Kamen is a figure whose heroic stature depends more on presence than deed. And, to this end, director Tsuneo Kobayashi, cinematographer Ichiro Hoshijima, and composer Hirooki Ogawa do him no small service, surrounding him with creepy atmosphere both visual and aural. As a figure who moves with the shadows and announces himself with a sinister laugh, they establish him as a classic pulp hero in the tradition of The Shadow and The Spider, not to mention his kamishibai-born brethren Ogon Batto, aka Golden Bat.

Gekko Kamen, like his contemporary Super Giant, is among Japan’s first film superheroes, and as such boasts a number of appurtenances that would become standard issue for many tokusatsu heroes to come. Like Kamen Rider, Kikaider and a host of others, he roars into battle on a spiffy custom motorcycle. He also has a pair of comic relief sidekicks—a whiny overweight guy and a tomboyish girl in glasses and pigtails—who are mainly there to act scared and be threatened by the bad guys. Finally, in a tradition that has survived up to the Sentai serials of today, all of his major action set pieces involve him fighting an army of costumed goons as smoke bombs go off on all sides.

If Gekko Kamen’s predictability sounds like it would be trying, please keep in mind that it is with films like it that many of these tropes started. Also rest assured that it doles them out with a speed and enthusiasm matched by Toei’s also wonderful Golden Bat, a film whose pacing suggests a script transcribed from the fevered imaginings of an eight-year-old boy jacked up on sugary breakfast cereals. Also please note that this last is not a comparison that I make lightly, as Golden Bat is a film that is very close to my heart.

I bought my copy of Gekko Kamen at the Toei Studios theme park in Kyoto because I thought it would be wrong to leave Japan without purchasing at least one exorbitantly priced DVD. Once I got home and immediately found that I missed being surrounded by Asian people speaking a language I mostly couldn’t understand, I threw it on and quickly became transfixed. True, I have reviewed many films like it before, but that is because it is exactly the kind of spirited pulp entertainment that this blog was designed for. Fun, fast, and phantasmagorical, it has the power, at least for the moment, to make children of us all.