The Long Road of Hirofumi Ishigaki Inside the Suit

Good evening. I am Ishigaki, and Ono forced me to come here. Say it as many times as you like: I was forced.

That comes from the action director Junji Yamaoka. "If your place is behind the scenes, give yourself to the work behind the scenes." The double disappears behind the camera. Back when he was still active as an action director, that was what he taught us, and we followed it to the letter. It was a different time.

It was Kitagawa, or somebody around him. And since I went on doing the Korakuen shows afterward, everybody held on to that first impression. Ikarus turned into Ika-taro, and also into Ika-chan. The special effects director, for instance, calls me Ika-chan. That is the crowd that calls me Ika-san, Ika-chan, Ika-taro.

It became the nickname, exactly as it stood. And for a while, through Goggle V and the rest, I was always the Korakuen guy, so everyone went by the image of that first character and called me Ikarus.

Right in the middle of cherry country, in a town called Sagae that almost nobody has heard of, though people sometimes know Tendo, which is close by. The place was surrounded by nature. I do not remember much about the boy himself, because all I did was play in the river and the streams. The countryside back then had no sports, no athletic clubs and nothing specialized.

I did a little judo, but the real thing turned out to be swimming, and it happened by accident. As a small boy I only jumped into the river, so I could not swim in a pool. In sixth grade they put me in the group of children who could not swim, to learn properly, though swimming in a river is if anything harder. That same year, somehow, they entered me as a starter in the district championship out of the group that could not swim. From then on I was a starter in every meet in junior high and made it to the prefectural championship, and I got into high school on an athletic recommendation, with no entrance exam.

At home we picked up three channels, counting NHK. TBS came over from the Miyagi side, with the signal crossing the mountain, so we watched through that snow, half picture and half static, which we used to call watching through the sand. So I was never much of a television child, and of the heroes I have almost no memory. I got to know Kamen Rider mostly through the manga, professor Ishinomori's original work, and with Ultraman I stopped somewhere around Seven.

I read a great deal of manga. I had an older brother and I was his errand boy: from the start of elementary school he would hand me the money and send me out to buy it, around eight or nine at night. And not to a bookstore, since the bookstore was far away. It was the dry goods shop, which at that hour was already closing up. The countryside had no convenience stores, and I had never seen one in my life. I read Shonen Magazine, things like that. Then, for reasons I cannot explain, in high school I moved over to shojo manga. Kabamaru, Patalliro. Igano Kabamaru. It was around the time of Kabamaru that I decided action was a fun thing.

My uncle was an animator, so the word animator existed in our house, and I thought about becoming one. I drew well, in fact. I went to look at the work up close, but back then it was nothing like today with computers, since everything was done by hand. One sheet was worth a few hundred yen, which was not enough to eat on. So I thought that in that case I wanted to go to America.

Going to America takes money. And then I saw it: stuntmen wanted. A stuntman piles up a fortune in a year or two. An ordinary job with a fixed salary, taking the train every day, pays very little. If you want to gather it all at once, in a short time, you have to risk your life. It was the JAC era, with Etsuko Shihomi and that crowd at their peak. I thought it was tremendous and I applied. I saw it in an ad in Sports Nippon.

I did not have any great admiration for the JAC. It was only the bridge to America, and I was going to quit after two years.

Mine was much smaller, around fifty. It came well after that peak, in a gap right in the middle. As a rule there was one class a year. But they got so popular that Sonny Chiba wanted to turn everybody into actors, which left nobody for Toei's children's programs, and those were the bread and butter. Hence the stuntmen wanted. That was the door we came in through.

Officially about thirty must have joined. But with the training, every week half of them dropped out, then half again, and five or six were left. Those were the ones who started going to the sets.

And around then there were odd jobs here and there as well.

On Goggle V it was mostly me and Shoji, Hirokazu Shoji. He was one of the first friends I made, and that group was the first crowd I got close to on a set. I remember that much.

And even once the action started, it took a while before they let us in for real. On Sentai, with ten soldiers, we were not always among them. Gavan only had five, and with five the amount of screen time each man gets goes up. In that sense the uchu keiji gave us more to do and had more to them. In the end they used me quite a lot, thank God.

Dynaman was where I started playing monsters. Tsujii said he wanted to do Korakuen and went over there, the monster slot opened up, and Koji Nakamura and I took it, third in line, more or less. A monster is a different thing from a soldier, because there is acting in it. Yamaoka told me every single time: "The monster is the lead. The monster is the only thing that changes every week. You have the starring role, so do it properly." So I decided to take the acting seriously, and it started being fun.

True, true. I was supposed to have gone.

I played Aquaiger, a full year as a monster. When Aquaiger died in the story, I also took on the Queen, Juuoh. That was the year two veterans looked after me: Kitagawa, who played Blue Three, and Michihiro Takeda, who played Pink Five. The Blue and the Pink raised me, and Takeda and I were always going out drinking.

We were the backup to the backup: one day on Dynaman, the next on Sharivan. Since I moved between the two, I made friends on both sides, and with the production people as well.

Always. At Korakuen we got hurt. I used to cover for Kitagawa, and that is roughly when I got close to him. A couple of times the zipper on the back opened up in the middle of the action, and with the zipper open you fight without ever turning your back to the audience. A suit actor thing.

A hero mask rarely comes off. But sometimes the fastener would burst, and then it is a familiar ritual: you act as though you are pinning the hero down. It gets fixed on stage, on the spot. They press it back into place, somebody says "it is open here", and the hero, for some reason, stops moving. With people who know each other well it gets done in the middle of the fight. If that is not possible, you move in close, say it under your breath, everyone holds him, it gets fixed, and the hero jumps again and the scene goes on.

Top Gunder originally belonged to Kenmochi. Among the graduates I was Dranger, and then, in the second half, I started playing Top Gunder. From the closing stretch onward, it is all me.

I do not remember.

Liveman and Black Bison. That one was announced as the work marking ten years of Super Sentai. It started with three heroes and later went up to five. From the beginning I was already doing monsters and various other things, so I was already part of the Liveman cast and already on the set. Daisuke Shima and Megumi Mori were there, people with names, and you could feel that this really was the ten-year production, with a certain air of grandeur about it. And I was right there on the set. I did not prepare myself psychologically for anything much. It was a matter of doing it, and there was nobody else to do it anyway.

Seven years. It was fun.

Every day was fun back then. On Turboranger you told me yourself that the set was too much fun right now. Red with Niibori as the leader, Black with me, Blue and Pink with the Hachisuka twins, and Yellow with another classmate. Practically everyone came from the same generation, with Niibori as the boss at the center, a tight group with terrific chemistry.

The hardest one of all. We were already training about three months before the five of us went into filming, and in my case it was drunken boxing, the suiken, the master of drunken boxing. It was rough.

Before the transformation, American actors. After the transformation, up pops the Saitama countryside.

People came over from America to observe the set. "You cannot work with this," they said. One rehearsal and we were rolling. Back then there was no monitor, it was film. We shot a hundred and thirty setups a day.

I did the body and the voice was Shigeru Chiba's. The man improvises without stopping, and matching his improvisations with my body forced me to study a great deal. Speaking, then carrying the speech with the body: I found that enormously enjoyable. And when I did Korakuen I was one of the senior villains, and normally somebody else, an outsider, did the talking. I said let me talk, put on a lapel microphone and started doing it myself, which meant memorizing the whole text. These days almost everybody wears one.

Haruta, the one I admired, has not changed. A dream of a senior. And I said that I wanted to do it too, and got onto the membership list. Except that the agency stepped in and blocked it. And then I thought that if this was how it worked, as long as I stayed in this job I would never be able to say what I wanted to do. So I gave up the position. I am not doing any of this anymore, I said, because I wanted to be on Tsuka's stage. I took odd jobs and waited for the chance, until I finally got to take part.

I learned by watching. And after that, always with Takeda, glued to him. I asked his advice and heard that the sooner the better. With the agency's permission, I became his shadow. Not just anyone becomes an action director. More than thirty years ago the head of my agency was already saying that from then on we would either become actors or become stage combat masters, and only a small share of us would make it. Sonny Chiba was the first person in Japan to give himself the title of action director, a kind of JAC exclusive, and even inside the JAC there are few of them.

When Takeda got busy, on the VS movies and so on, I covered for him. And on an ordinary day, with no time off, I rode along on the bus and studied. For some reason the only work coming in was from outside, through the agency: Onmyoji II, Azumi. Learning outside matters as well, since every company has its own way of doing things. I wanted a few more years like that, at an easy pace. And right at that moment came the do it now: Dekaranger. On the recommendation of the director, Katsuya Watanabe.

"If you are already studying stage combat, then become an action director." Me: "I am still studying." And him: "Great, then study here." Dekaranger was where I became a full action director, on my own account.

That cannot be done again. Gokaiger, I said, was my last Sentai. I am tired, let me rest. And Sentai ended for me. Fukuzawa wanted his turn as well. After that I moved over to the Rider side, and then everything opens up again, right away.

Thank you for watching so many productions for so long. These days I no longer do this work myself. But the younger ones are growing, and they will go on making interesting things. Cheer for them.

This was Ishigaki. On April 12, at the Naked Loft, the Ishigaki Festival. I cannot promise it will be fun. But come along.