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emotionallychargedtowel · 2 years ago

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Takeda Kouhei on Kamen Rider, a Primer

I’m not the only person on tumblr who’s a fan of both tokusatsu and BL shows, but there aren’t a ton of us. Which isn’t too surprising. They don’t have a lot in common aside from being genres that originated in and are still produced (in the case of tokusatsu, almost exclusively) in Japan. But, for reasons that are hard to pinpoint for those of us in the U.S., there’s quite a bit of actor overlap between these genres. From what I’ve seen the biggest contributor to the BL casting pool is Kamen Rider. My impetus for writing this post was a post by @waitmyturtles that mentioned being interested in seeing other work by Takeda Kouhei after seeing him in Old Fashion Cupcake. And really, who wouldn’t be? His performance was really lovely. Subtle, moving, funny, endearing, everything you would want in that role.

So I thought I’d post about Takeda’s Kamen Rider work in case other fans are curious. I don’t know how likely BL folks are to get into Kamen Rider but at the very least, I thought Takeda appreciators might enjoy a glimpse of him doing something really different from Cupcake.

Takeda has been in two Kamen Rider series, mostly playing two characters. The first, Kamen Rider Kiva, I’ve seen in its entirety and the other, Kamen Rider Build, I’m currently watching with my family.

Kiva is a pretty unique series within the Kamen Rider franchise. The aesthetic is bonkers. The opening credits give you a decent idea of what that’s like–basically, we’re talking about violins, rose petals, and chains everywhere with a nu-metal soundtrack. It came out in 2008 and definitely feels of that time. Opening credits for these shows are usually pretty easy to find but for some reason this one is only on Tiktok. You might have to squint to make it out but it’s still worth a look.

The basic plot of the series is that there are creatures called Fangires that are kinda-sorta similar to vampires except that they suck out your life force instead of your blood, and there are humans who hunt them and protect humanity. The Fangires can look like humans and then transform into their Fangire forms, and the Fangire hunters have the technology to turn into armored superhero-type people as well. Except there’s also this kid who is half Fangire, half human, the protagonist, Kurenai Wataru. He also transforms, in a way that is like a combination of a Fangire transforming and a human using the hunter technology. The show follows his story in 2008 and at the same time, the story of his dad’s experiences 22 years earlier in 1986. His dad, Kurenai Otoya, is Takeda’s character and at a lot of points in the series is almost a co-protagonist.

They did a pretty good job casting a realistic father-and-son pairing, I’d say.

I’m not usually a big fan of this particular type of shag hairdo that was big in Japan in the 2000s but I’d say they’re both pulling it off quite well here.

According to an interview I read, Takeda was pretty inexperienced when he played Otoya and as a result he started out overacting a bit, but the showrunners really liked how it worked–basically, Otoya is an over-the-top dude anyway. Otoya is an interesting character. He’s this overconfident, sometimes irritating wannabe womanizer who wears some seriously loud blazers (it’s the 80s, after all), but he’s also a highly skilled violinist and violin-maker who ends up making some huge sacrifices for the people he loves. In a lot of ways he’s the polar opposite of Takeda’s character Nozue in Old Fashion Cupcake.

(In case you’re wondering about the gif above, father and son are in the same timeline briefly because of some magical shenanigans here.)

Toward the end of Kiva, Takeda also (briefly) plays Wataru’s son/Otoya’s grandson, Kurenai Masao, who has traveled back in time to help his dad. Apparently in the future we’ll all be wearing a whole lot of bobby pins.

I didn’t realize until after I had started watching Old Fashion Cupcake that Takeda was also in Kamen Rider Build. I’m about a fifth of the way into that series but Takeda’s character has only been around for a short time. I’m really enjoying him, though, and I think the difference in Takeda’s skill level between the two shows is really palpable.

The basic premise of Build is that after an expedition to Mars, a mysterious cube (the “Pandora Box”) is brought back to Earth, a weird light comes out of the cube that changes people, and a wall springs out of the ground that divides Japan into three subregions that end up at war. The mechanism for the characters to transform into Kamen Rider forms involves human beings that are subjected to experiments using stuff from Mars that alters them and allows them to use these objects to transform. Sawatari Kazumi, Takeda’s character, owns a large farm before the Mars cube disaster, but environmental effects of the disaster make his land tainted and infertile. He spends all of his remaining money trying to support the workers from his farm that are now out of work, then basically goes into the villain business to try to pay the bills. It’s pretty clear he’s not going to be a villain forever. I’m on episode 20 (of 49–these shows are long) and it seems like he could join the good guys any time now. (Recognize the other two dudes below? I’ll talk more about that in a bit.)

Sawatari is super different from both Otoya and Nozue, so viewing the three together really can’t help but make you appreciate Takeda’s versatility. Sawatari puts up a very tough front most of the time, except when it comes to Misora, who is part of the main character’s core group but also has another identity as an online “idol” (kind of like an influencer, I guess) called Mii-tan. Sawatari is a Mii-tan fan with a huge crush on her. He seems oddly naïve for someone who is basically a mercenary, and she brings that side of him out in a big (and extremely goofy) way.

Sawatari is also the butchest character I’ve seen Takeda play, which is fun in some ways but not in others. On the latter end, his wardrobe on Build is his most boring I’ve seen as he wears slight variations on the same parka-and-mottled-pants combo nonstop. But on the plus side, he gets to do a lot of fighting, trash talking, and sneering and since it’s Takeda it’s all pretty cute.

My favorite thing about Sawatari so far is his “henshin” sequence so I’ll talk about that for a moment. Transforming characters are a big theme in tokusatsu, and often when we talk about that genre folks are referring more to the suit transformation type shows as opposed to straight kaiju movies like Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, etc. that are also considered tokusatsu. Having an actor disappear and then someone in a masked suit appear in their place requires some kind of neat transition in order to make it work, and these transition sequences usually have a lot of visual interest and meaning built into them.

Characters usually have something they say when they transform, like a word or catchphrase. In Ultraman shows, they usually yell out their Ultraman name. In the Kamen Rider franchise, the tradition (usually upheld) is for characters to simply say “henshin,” meaning “transform.” They usually have some kind of transformation item (in Kamen Rider it’s usually in the form of a belt) and they have a set of actions or gestures they do just before they change. Then different kinds of effects, often CGI, are used to show the normal human being turning into their masked fighter form. Below is a nice example of a henshin move by someone BL fans might recognize, Naito Shuichiro from Kamen Rider Saber and Senpai, This Can’t Be Love.

Apparently, from some things I’ve watched and read, the actors on these shows seem to come up with their own pre-henshin moves. Takeda apparently put quite a bit of thought into his, according to one interview snippet I read. It makes sense because when he transformed in Kiva (only rarely), his henshin routine was kind of dull (sorry!).

I can just imagine him thinking in the intervening years about how he’d do it a second time if he had the chance.

Well, it paid off because Sawatari’s henshin sequence is right up there with the best I’ve seen in my Kamen Rider viewing. The whole thing has an insolent quality and he tops it off with a beckoning finger that looks like he’s flipping his opponent off (which I take it he sort of is, because supposedly beckoning to someone in the American style is considered extremely rude and demeaning in Japan). Basically, it’s like the “fuck you” version of henshin and it makes him look like a badass. It’s also, frankly, pretty hot.

The gif above is just a snippet so I recommend the longer clip below if you want to see the whole thing.

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While I’m at it, here’s his first scene, when all the audience knows is that he’s a mysterious surly cutie.

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If anyone reading this decides to try watching one of Takeda’s Kamen Rider series without being familiar with the franchise, I have one thing I’d suggest keeping in mind. This is just my take so others may not agree. I’ll refrain from theorizing about why this is in this post but I’ll just say I have some thoughts. The first 10-15 episodes of most tokusatsu shows tend to get bogged down in worldbuilding, introductions, team formations, and other things that can get tiresome quickly. But this is only a relatively small portion of an entire series since they tend to go for 50ish episodes, like I mentioned above. My advice is that if you check out one of these shows and aren’t feeling it at first, you should give it a chance to get to that 15 episode mark and then see how it seems to you. You can always skip around if you have to in order to get to the point where things get juicier.

One last note–in addition to Takeda being on Kamen Rider Build, it also features two other actors that BL fans might know. The first is Inukai Atsuhiro from The Man Who Defies the World of BL and Kei x Yaku: Dangerous Buddy (which I’m not really familiar with but I think I remember hearing it was sort of an almost-BL where the Bs never end up in L?). He plays the protagonist Kiryu Sento, whose Rider form is Kamen Rider Build. Kiryu definitely has a certain level of sassiness in common with Mob from TMWDtWoBL, but he has a lot more agency in his life and the stakes are higher than whether or not he’s going to fall in L with a B.

Also, Akaso Eiji from Cherry Magic plays Banjo Ryuga, another main character who eventually becomes a Rider. His character in Build is extremely different from Adachi Kiyoshi—he’s a boxer and an impulsive meathead type, albeit one with a heart of gold and all that. A far cry from his shy cutie persona in Cherry Magic. His character also usually has some sort of tiny French braid situation going on with his hair but I’ve spared y’all from having to look at that for the moment.

If you’re curious about any other actors who are in the middle of the BL/tokusatsu Venn diagram, or just found this interesting, let me know. I might do a few more posts of this type.

#takeda kouhei #kouhei takeda #kamen rider kiva #kamen rider build #henshin #old fashion cupcake #akaso eiji #inukai atsuhiro #naito shuichiro

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emotionallychargedtowel · 11 months ago

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For the tokusatsu ask game!

1 and 19 :)

Oh, those are good ones. Thanks, @nieves-de-sugui!

How did you get into toku?

When my kids were three or four (they're twins so they always share the same age), my son saw a toy Godzilla and got obsessed with it. So we started showing my kids Godzilla movies, then branched out into other Toho kaiju like Mothra, King Ghidorah, etc. Just to give you an idea of how deep this got, at one point my kids were both obsessed with Biollante, a monster that was created when scientists fused some of Godzilla's DNA with a rose and the soul of a young girl that looks kind of like the thing from Little Shop of Horrors on steroids. This continued for a while. Then we watched Godzilla vs. Megalon, which features Jet Jaguar, a kaiju-fighting robot who they immediately adored. We were already tracking down toys of the various monsters they liked and they wanted a Jet Jaguar one really bad, but when my partner went looking, there weren't any options out there. (I think since then a JJ figure has been issued, but it wasn't around at the time.)

Then a fateful moment occurred: my spouse saw an Ultraman toy someplace, though it kind of resembled Jet Jaguar, and got it for the kids to see if they'd like it. They were immediately obsessed and wanted to know all about Ultraman, but we barely knew anything about it. I'd seen a little bit of the weirdly dubbed version of Tiga that aired on the WB on Saturday mornings at one point, but that was it. So we started looking things up and checking out shows, which led to more shows and more toys and so on. Our first series was Tiga and we just kept going from there. This was also around the start of the pandemic, so we were in desperate need of an exciting new collective obsession. Actually, I don't know how we would have gotten through that period without Ultraman.

So we mainlined Ultraman for months (maybe even a year or more?) before we checked out any other toku stuff. Then we were talking to a friend who's knowledgeable about this stuff and he suggested we try branching out into other tokusatsu franchises. Our first Super Sentai series was Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, which we all loved right away. I think our first Kamen Rider series was actually Ex-Aid, so it’s kind of a miracle that we kept going with it, because I really dislike that series--I never even finished watching it. Our second Kamen Rider was Saber, which was a way better fit for us (if not exactly representative of the franchise) and remains one of my favorite Kamen Rider series.

Kamen Rider Ryuki was a kind of milestone because it was the first tokusatsu show that my spouse and I watched without having to have kids present and paying attention all the time. It's a bit on the mature side so they only wanted to watch it intermittently. That's when we figured out that some toku shows filled that niche really well--things that we could watch without worrying about kids feeling left out but that we didn't have to refrain from watching in their presence or censor somehow (at least, most of the time). Which led to even more tokusatsu-watching since things you can watch in that way can be hard to come by.

Incidentally, a big part of the reason I first got into BLs was because of my tokusatsu fandom. Before I saw my first BL, my twin sister had already seen KinnPorsche and told me about it, so maybe she would have continued with BLs and eventually gotten me into them anyway. It's hard to say. But as it happened, I was looking for something short and not too gut-wrenching to watch on Viki one day when I saw the listing for Senpai, This Can't Be Love and got curious about it because the leads were played by Naito Shuichiro from Saber and Seto Toshiki from Ex-Aid. I talk about the tokusatsu to BL pipeline for actors, but I myself traveled down the viewer equivalent of that pipeline.

19. If you could go back and change one show, what would you change?

My first thought was something relatively small. If I could, I’d change the fact that Takano Hassei’s character in Kamen Rider Ryuki was (spoiler!) killed off so quickly. I get that the battle royale premise of the series necessitated some painful character deaths but he was so likable and made the story so much more compelling as soon as he showed up and then suddenly he was gone. They should have let him stick around at least a while longer.

But the main series I’d change is Kamen Rider Kiva. I have such mixed feelings about that series in a number of areas, but the main thing I’d change is its treatment of women characters. It's kind of confusing, though. I keep thinking over how things turn out for the women in Kiva and trying to figure out exactly what my problem is with it and what I think should have been done differently. Basically, the women in Kiva face a lot of sexism in different forms, and the show makes this pretty explicit. Women in Kiva can be incredibly competent and smart, much more than their male counterparts, and they still don't get the same opportunities. Whenever men in the show are interested in a woman romantically and/or sexually, tons of sexism also comes into play, usually in the forms of benevolent sexism and/or objectification. In one arc, for example, two men fight over a woman as if she's a prize to be won and she doesn't have a say in the matter. Otoya often insists on rescuing Yuri from situations that she's arguably better equipped to deal with than he is, with occasionally disastrous effects. These things aren't portrayed as neutral. At times, sexism is called out explicitly. At others, it's shown in a way that seems clearly designed to make it visible.

I'm used to media texts that highlight sexism giving me some kind of catharsis about it. It would be ridiculous for a story to solve the problem of sexism completely, but there's usually some kind of progress that's made, or at least a character removes herself from a sexist situation if it doesn't improve. But Kiva doesn't do that. Not really, anyway. Both of the women who want to be Riders do get to do that, briefly, which was pretty remarkable when the series aired in 2008/2009. Unlike in some Kamen Rider series in which characters always have their own distinct Rider identity, a bunch of the people (basically, all of the human beings) who become Riders in Kiva use the same tool, the Ixa System, and become variations on the same Rider. Both Yuri and Megumi, a mother and daughter shown in different time periods, become Kamen Rider Ixa at some point. But their time as Riders is short-lived, and only happens after they've proven themselves again and again while watching the dopiest men imaginable get to become Ixa first. So that doesn't constitute much progress. (Did I mention that Yuri's deceased mother/Megumi's grandmotherdesigned the Ixa System? And they each still have to fight tooth and nail for a brief chance to use it!)

Watching Kiva actually made me notice the extent to which I expect some kind of catharsis once a piece of media foregrounds sexism somehow. And as soon as I noticed it, I questioned it. Does that kind of catharsis really need to happen? Might it not be better for us to have to sit with that discomfort? Catharsis discharges tension, but maybe it's better not to do that. But I don't think the uniformly shitty outcomes faced by the women on Kiva serve any sort of useful purpose in that way. (I'm including Megumi marrying Nago as a shitty outcome. The show may treat it as cause for celebration but that guy sucks and she's totally settling.)

So what would I change? First, I'd make the sexism the women face more explicit, with more characters labeling it as such more often. Since the show features two timelines, one taking place in 1986 and one in 2008, it would make sense and provide at least a little bit of hope if the 2008 storyline involved a bit less sexism or a bit more progress toward counteracting it. Maybe some individual characters could even learn something from their experiences and become a bit less sexist. At the very least, the leaders of the Wonderful Blue Sky Organization should have learned from their mistakes since they were present for the events of both 1986 and 2008 (the other 2008 characters are too young to have been present then except as small chidren).

When the two Kurenais, Otoya and Wataru, go through a body-swap situation across time and Otoya finds himself in 2008, his attitudes seem even more egregious in the context of 2008. I'd look for other ways to use the differences and similarities between attitudes in the two time periods to make a similar type of point.

I'd definitely give Yuri and Megumi more of a chance to be Ixa. Especially Megumi, since she's in 2008 when people should be at least a little bit less sexist. And for fuck's sake, I wouldn't have Megumi marry a douchey clod like Nago in a million years.

Well, that ended up being longer than I expected! Thanks again for the questions, nieves!

#tokusatsu #tokusatsu ask game #toho kaiju #biollante #jet jaguar #ultraman #ultraman tiga #kaizoku sentai gokaiger #kamen rider saber #kamen rider kiva #senpai this can't be love

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