The Girl Who Took a Bullet in the Leg

In late 1985, a 21-year-old actress came back to Tokyo after months of shooting a period drama at Toei's Kyoto studios, and her manager drove her straight to a costume fitting without saying which show it was for. Laid out and waiting for her were a white top, a metallic light-blue vest, a miniskirt, a pair of white boots and fishnet tights, and one look at them told Makoto Sumikawa what was going on. "It was Diana's costume, from Spielvan," she told Kyoudai Express. "So the part had already been decided without my knowing it."

What Toei had decided on was the first leading heroine in the Metal Hero series to transform. Diana, partner to Yousuke Jo (Spielvan himself) in Jikuu Senshi Spielvan, got a silver suit, a pistol, a theme song of her own sung by the actress, and a comic finishing move, delivered with her backside, that shows up in only four of the show's 44 episodes and became the single most quoted thing about the character. The young woman performing it had an Osaka accent the directors kept telling her to fix and a firm conviction that she wanted to do real fighting, the kind Etsuko Shihomi did in her kung fu movies. The gap between what she wanted and what the production asked of her runs through her entire career, and she has never once hidden it. Asked, forty years later, what she would tell the Makoto of 1986, she answered with a line that works as a summary: "You were very lucky to be part of such a wonderful show! I'd also like to give myself some credit: 'You worked really hard wearing that outfit.'"

From the Office Desk to JAC

Makoto Sumikawa was born Takayo Kadokawa on March 31, 1964, in Fujiidera, a city in Osaka Prefecture known for its keyhole-shaped imperial burial mounds. Her family name is written with the characters for "corner" and "river," which can also be read "Sumikawa," and that is where the stage name came from: a phonetic version of her own surname with a different first character, the one meaning "clear." She attended Nishiura Prefectural High School and, after graduating, took an office job with a purpose she had settled on as a teenager. "Ever since I saw Hiroyuki Sanada on television in my second year of high school, the desire to join JAC grew and grew in me," she told Kyoudai Express. The paycheck was there to pay for Sonny Chiba's school, and she was certain she would end up working alongside Sanada.

The Japan Action Club was at its peak in those years. Sanada, raised by Chiba since he was a boy, had been turned into a national idol by Toei's action movies, and the agency drew thousands of applicants per intake. In 1983, JAC opened a training school, the yoseijo, with fees that a former student later estimated at around 500,000 yen for enrollment plus the cost of wooden practice swords and other gear. Sumikawa enrolled through the Kyoto branch while still holding down her job in Osaka, and with an openly declared admiration for Etsuko Shihomi, the agency's leading lady since the Sister Street Fighter films. The class that came out of the school's first year became JAC's 14th generation, one of the strongest in the agency's history: Shinichi Tsutsumi, today one of Japan's most respected actors; Jiro Okamoto, the future suit actor (the performer inside the costume who does the fighting) of Kamen Rider BLACK and dozens of other heroes; Takeshi Maya, Kaori Kubota, Mayumi Yoshida, who would go on to play Pink Flash, and a young man from Kyoto named Shingo Sunagawa, who years later would become her husband.

The moment that pulled her out of the crowd is the one she tells at every event, and she told it again to Kyoudai Express. It happened during an intensive training session in which the exercise was to react to being shot. "Almost everyone played a person who got hit in the stomach and died. Since I never liked doing the same thing as everyone else, I played someone who got shot in the leg and tried to run away. As it happened, Chiba was watching right then. He praised me, and that's how he came to remember my name." Chiba did more than remember it. He was the one who told her to quit her job in February so she could join the JAC stage show in March, and she handed in her resignation that same day, happily.

The show was Yukai na Kaizoku Daiboken (The Merry Pirates' Great Adventure), the pirate musical JAC staged at the Shinjuku Koma Gekijo, the revue theater in Kabukicho, with Chiba, Sanada, Shihomi, Teru Kurosaki and Kenji Oba in the cast. The 1984 run went from March 24 to April 17, and a fan who kept the program noticed decades later that the school's students were still listed under their real names, which means Sumikawa's stage debut was credited to Takayo Kadokawa. In May of that year she became an official JAC member and received the name she would use for the rest of her life.

That same year she took the first audition anyone knows about, and the result helps explain what JAC saw in her. When Yuki Yajima walked out of Choudenshi Bioman and Toei needed a new Yellow Four in a hurry, the agency sent over candidates, and Sumikawa made it to the final round alongside Sumiko Tanaka. At an event marking Spielvan's 40th anniversary in 2026, she explained why she went: Chiba had told her to take the audition "as a learning experience," with no real expectation of winning, and she was still attending the yoseijo. Tanaka got the part of Jun Yabuki. Sumikawa still thinks it was better that way, and she never had any luck with Super Sentai again.

The next two years were those of a rising newcomer at a company that knew how to sell its newcomers. In August 1984 she appeared, without a character name, in the JAC youth ensemble of Norifumi Suzuki's film Kotaro Makaritoru!, with Sanada in the lead. In April 1985 she was back at the Shinjuku Koma as a shoeshine girl in the musical Yoidore Koshaku (The Drunken Duke), directed by and starring Chiba. That same April brought her first regular television role: Omatsu, the maid at the "odd-jobs shop" that served as a front for the ninja group in Kage no Gundan IV (Shadow Warriors IV), the fourth season of Chiba's series on Kansai TV, shot at Toei's Kyoto studios, in which the character dies in the line of duty in the 27th and final episode. On her 21st birthday, the newspaper Fukushima Minpo ran a short introduction of the newcomer, and the line she gave the reporter sums up the period: "Besides fixing my Kansai accent, I have a mountain of things to work on."

The accent stayed with her as a running theme in the years that followed. During Spielvan the directors kept pointing it out, and she turned to her classmate Mayumi Yoshida, who was shooting Choushinsei Flashman at the same studio, whenever she had questions about the pitch accent of standard Japanese. Twenty years later, at a roundtable for the magazine Toei Hero MAX, she admitted that after stepping away from acting she had gone back to speaking Kansai dialect, and anyone who sees her at events today can confirm that she talks pure Osaka from start to finish.

The Costume Fitting

There was no audition for Spielvan, just the costume fitting her manager took her to as soon as she got back from Kage no Gundan IV. According to Hiroshi Watari, speaking at a 40th anniversary event for the series, producer Susumu Yoshikawa had told him he could pick his co-star, and Watari asked for Yu Hayami, the idol singer then at the height of her fame. Yoshikawa turned him down without explaining why, and died in 2020 without Watari ever having asked. A few weeks after the refusal, Watari learned that his partner would be a JAC junior, and on stage, with her beside him, he made a point of saying it had been the right choice.

The two had known each other since she joined the agency. Watari, from the 11th generation, had been Sharivan and was returning to a lead role after a short, frustrating stint as Boomerang in Kyojuu Tokusou Jaspion. In 2021 he posted on X a photo of the two of them at Tokyo Disneyland in 1984, two years before they would work together, with a caption saying that even back then he felt some bond of fate with that girl. To prepare, Sumikawa did what JAC's hierarchy recommended. As soon as the casting was settled she became the tsukibito, the personal assistant, of Teru Kurosaki, who played Jaspion, following him around the set of the previous series to learn how a Toei production worked. Kiyomi Tsukada, Jaspion's Anri, would only get to know her many years later.

Spielvan was the fifth series in the line that began with Uchuu Keiji Gavan (Space Sheriff Gavan) in 1982, and Toei treated it as the last of the formula. Head writer Shozo Uehara, who had written the line since Gavan, was reaching twenty years in the business and saw the show as the sum of everything he had done. The production, Watari says, talked about "shuutaisei," the closing of a cycle, and about resetting the lineup afterward. The novelty that went down in history was Diana. Ever since Annie in Uchuu Keiji Shaider, fans had been asking why the hero's partner never transformed, and the answer came in the silver suit of Diana Lady (Lady Diana in the Brazilian dub), identical to Helen Lady's except for the Lady Sniper holster on the right hip. The character was 18, a survivor of the planet Clin like Yousuke, drove a white Mitsubishi Mirage and, before transforming, had a favorite move.

The move was a backflip that ended with the heroine sitting on top of a Kinkuron foot soldier. It appears in only four of the 44 episodes, which did not stop it from becoming the most quoted memory of the character. In 2026 Sumikawa explained where it came from, and the story explains her better than any bio ever could. The move was in neither the script nor the original concept. It came from an idea, and an order, from Osamu Kaneda, JAC's action director and today the agency's president, and she hated it without being in a position to refuse. The suit actor on the receiving end was more or less fixed, but who would take the hit at each shoot was decided backstage by rock-paper-scissors among the young JAC guys, because everybody wanted it. A fan in the audience wrote that the story sounded like something out of high school. To Kyoudai Express she was diplomatic about Kaneda, noting that she was a brand-new rookie and that following instructions felt natural. In 2005, in Toei Hero MAX, she had been more direct, saying Kaneda directed a "feminine" kind of action for Diana while she wanted to fight, "like in the kung fu movies." In 2023, at a talk show in Nakano, someone asked whether she wouldn't have liked to beat the enemies on her own, without depending on Spielvan, and she cited her usual reference, Etsuko Shihomi in Onna Hissatsu Ken (Sister Street Fighter).

In a photo book of the series published by Tokuma Shoten in 1986, she said that at first she disliked the costume and that at some point she made her peace with it for good, after trying on a pair of tight purple leggings that, in her judgment, made her legs look thicker than the fishnets did. Watari sums up the process by saying she loosened up, and she adds that the cold weighed on her more than the embarrassment, because the outfit felt colder in downtown Tokyo in winter than it did on location in the snow. When she watched the 4K restoration on a movie screen in 2026 and the episode chosen was 41 rather than the beach one, she said thank you out loud: "Good thing it wasn't the swimsuit episode."

The most remembered cold scene is in episode 3, where Spielvan and Diana go swimming in what the script calls the sea off Australia, and Watari told the story on his blog in 2016. The director's original idea was for the two of them to swim naked, like Adam and Eve, and the agency vetoed it, so director Takeshi Ogasawara went looking for a metallic, space-age silver swimsuit, which did not exist on the market in 1986, and what ended up on screen is gray. The scene was shot over two days in February: the wide shots at Manazuru, in Kanagawa Prefecture, and the high-angle shots at Onjuku, on the Chiba coast, in clear water at winter temperatures. During a film reel change, the two of them climbed onto a rock out in the sea and waited there wrapped in the same blanket.

Diana came with a theme song of her own, "Diana Action," composed by Kohei Tanaka and sung by the actress, which plays in six episodes. Years later she said that until she got the sheet music she had understood Yousuke and Diana's relationship as that of siblings who get along, and that the lyrics, about a heart that lights up every time she looks at the dazzling person, made her wonder whether they were a couple after all. She still sings the song today to open her own events, complete with the fight sequence and the pose.

On set, she became known for a talent nobody filmed. A fan who ran into her again decades later recalled that, back in the Spielvan days, Sumikawa did an impression of Arale-chan, the robot girl from Dr. Slump, so spot-on that Watari and the rest of the cast kept praising it, and that her voice sounded like that of Mami Koyama, the original voice actress. It was a talent that would find a use a few months later.

Inside the Diana Lady Suit

Diana Lady's action was performed by Shoji Hachisuka, a suit actor from JAC's 12th generation who would later play Five Pink and Blue Swallow, and the masked close-ups were done by two of Sumikawa's colleagues, Motoko Watanabe and Yoshie Seki. Sumikawa wore the close-up suit herself in the early episodes and again near the end, and the experience left her with respect for the profession: the field of vision was narrow, the suit was rigid and, in her words, it would be impossible for anyone with claustrophobia. "I realized how hard it really is to express emotion while wearing a mask. It made me understand how extraordinary the stunt performers who can do that work are."

About Hachisuka, she describes an exchange that only someone who lived inside the Toei system would understand. "I didn't talk to Hachisuka about the movements. I believe he watched and copied the way I moved. When I saw a movement of his that I thought was beautiful, I quietly copied it. Watching the finished scenes, I thought, 'Wow, how graceful!' I felt he looked more feminine than I did."

The accident that changed the course of two episodes came midway through the year, when Sumikawa broke her leg during a JAC training session and the production rewrote the series around the actress. In episode 29, "Operation Crush Diana," Helvira drives a poisoned blade into the heroine's thigh, and for the next two episodes Diana spends much of her time in bed while a double stands in for her in the wide shots. At Japan Expo in Paris in 2025, she told the story as an example of how Toei worked, with the script absorbing whatever happened on set. Episode 31, right after, brought Helen's transformation into Helen Lady and made the series the only one in the line with a team of one man and two women.

The improvisations stayed in the final cut too. Watari recalls that the ending of episode 2, with the two of them sparring, and the ending of episode 22, the two of them racing through Harajuku, were invented on the spot, as was his reaction to General Deathzero in the episode 41 scene in which the villain proposes to Diana while she is chained in front of a giant heart. She credits the improvisation to the absence of nerves. Watari was the veteran, but the two had had a bond since she joined JAC and could talk about anything. With the veterans on the villains' side there was less contact, since Ichiro Mizuki and Machiko Soga shot on different days, and the rookie never worked up the courage to strike up a conversation with either of them, something she regrets.

Spielvan ended on March 9, 1987, with an average rating of 11.2 percent in the Tokyo area, practically the same as Jaspion the year before, and a peak of 16.6 percent in July that ranks among the four highest in Metal Hero history. The numbers confirmed that the Uchuu Keiji formula still held an audience, and the drop came right after, when Metalder, the next series, which abandoned the format, closed its year at an 8.2 percent average. That year she performed live shows at Seibuen amusement park, outside Tokyo, and got an offer from outside tokusatsu, the Japanese genre of live-action special effects shows. Tsutomu Iida, director of the Devilman OVA, was a Spielvan fan and called her in to voice Miki Makimura, Akira Fudo's girlfriend, in a role that was officially cast by audition but whose offer came straight from him. In Chojinki Metalder, the series that followed Spielvan, she appeared in episodes 25 and 26 as Miki, a member of a biker gang made up entirely of former JAC heroes, with Kenji Oba, Junichi Haruta, Watari and Sumiko Tanaka. It was her last job as an agency member. She left JAC in 1987, for reasons she has never made public, though she did tell the story at a talk show in 2023, where the fan who wrote up the event chose not to repeat it. To Kyoudai Express, she described what came next. "When I left JAC and went back to my parents' house, I honestly regretted the decision. The days were boring."

Reiko Shiratori

It was chance that got her out of her parents' house in Osaka. In 1988, Motoko Watanabe, the friend who had worn the Diana Lady suit, took her along on a visit to Toei's Oizumi studios, and a producer recognized her in the hallway. Kamen Rider BLACK RX was being put together, and the heroine still had no actress. "I was very surprised when a Kamen Rider producer spoke to me at the studio. I thought, 'So miracles like this really do happen!'" She took the part of Reiko Shiratori knowing her parents might disapprove, and says the choice never felt like a mistake.

The condition was a new name. Since she had already left JAC once, the producer's request confused her, but the urge to be in front of a camera again was stronger, and she approached the job as a fresh start. The name chosen was Jun Takanomaki, after the sacred conifer of Mount Koya, a tree that grows straight, and she explained to Toei Hero MAX that the idea was to grow one step higher. With the part came a return to JAC as well.

Reiko Shiratori is the 20-year-old freelance photographer who dates Kotaro Minami, and Toei described her as cheerful, decisive and curious. RX aired from October 1988 to September 1989, and Sumikawa appears in 41 of its 47 episodes, including the 29th, in which Reiko discovers that Kotaro is RX and starts training in karate to fight alongside him. The series closed the Showa era of Kamen Rider, which by that measure makes her the last regular heroine of the classic period. In July 1989 she hosted the RX stage show at the Isetan department store in Shinjuku, as part of the Toei Manga Matsuri festival. Between 1990 and 1991, still as Jun Takanomaki, she voiced Miki Makimura again in the second Devilman OVA and in the comedy series CB Chara Nagai Go World, played the Amazon warrior Navia in one episode of Tokkei Winspector, and voiced the lead in Ningyo Hime Marina no Boken (Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid), a Fuji TV co-production with Saban that aired on Saturday mornings and has never been released on home video. It was her last credit before a break that would last more than twenty years.

The reason for the break was her marriage to Shingo Sunagawa, the 14th-generation classmate who danced in the JAC Brothers troupe and today teaches action in Kyoto. She left JAC a second time, moved to Kyoto and raised her children. The 2005 Toei Hero MAX roundtable is the only public appearance from that period, a conversation in which she retraced her career and revealed, among other things, that she had gone back to talking like a girl from Fujiidera. Her oldest daughter, Juli, became an independent singer, and the account Sumikawa keeps on X describes what she does today, between JAC, Diana, Reiko and Miki, as sharing ways to turn her own experience into the fulfillment of dreams. She does fortune-telling consultations, including by phone for event organizers, and since 2024 she has been singing almost every night on the ColorSing app, under the name Makocchan 358, for audiences that reach a few hundred people per broadcast.

The Comeback

The comeback happened in September 2014, when Hiroshi Watari held two talk shows in Tennoji, Osaka, to mark the premiere of Uchuu Keiji Next Generation. On his blog, written on the bullet train on the way there, he left fans a message: "It seems that legendary heroine is coming to the evening show. She can only make the evening one. Don't miss it!" She appeared at the evening session as a surprise guest, alongside Akira Shimizu, who had been Sharivan's suit actor in the early episodes, and Watari wrote afterward that neither of them had changed a bit, explaining that he had chosen Osaka to give something back to the fans of Kansai, the region where he himself had trained.

The years that followed brought scattered appearances: a talk show in Nakano with Watari and Junji Murakami, the suit actor of Gavan and Sharivan; an independent tokusatsu film; a workout video with her daughter on the YouTube channel of her classmate Takeshi Maya. Then it became a routine. At a Nakano talk show with Masako Morishita, Battle Fever J's Miss America, titled "How to Make Dreams Come True, With the Heroines," she delivered the line fans repeat most: "Encounters are destiny. If you keep moving forward with a positive attitude, one thing leads to another and it gets fun." At the same event she gave a dramatic reading, a skill that, she said, came from years of reading stories to her children.

She later created her own event, the Makocchan Matsuri, a fan gathering in bars in Osaka and Yokohama where she sings original songs, performs "Diana Action" with the fight sequence and the move, and welcomes guests from her own story: her daughter Juli, who made her stage debut there; her husband, who sang the Gavan ending theme and told the crowd he had joined JAC out of admiration for Kenji Oba; Yuko Kojima, Mayumi Yoshida, Motoko Watanabe and Watari himself. She signs autographs for fans under both names, Makoto Sumikawa and Jun Takanomaki. At the annual gatherings of 1980s heroines that journalist Mishio Suzuki organizes in Shinjuku, she and the other JAC alumnae, like Sumiko Tanaka and Mai Oishi, perform live stage combat, and at fan meetings with Watari the two of them stage fights against Kinkuron soldiers and redo the double transformation pose to the call of "Ikuzo, Diana!" and "OK!"

The restoration of the series from a 4K scan of the negatives, released by Toei Video on Blu-ray in the 40th anniversary year, brought the two of them to a movie theater in Akihabara to rewatch episodes with fans. Watari wrote afterward that the red of the suit had come out sharp and that he felt like he was seeing the series for the first time. She took something else away from it, the cement and napalm explosions and the fights done by the actors themselves, and summed it up for Kyoudai Express in one line: "Now that is tokusatsu!" The Blu-ray extras include the conversation between the two recorded for the 2005 DVD, the only long interview of the pair that exists on video.

It was with Watari, too, that she left Japan as Diana. At Anime Friends in São Paulo in 2023, she spent all four days of the convention at the Anhembi exhibition center with Mai Oishi, Kiyomi Tsukada, Takumi Tsutsui, Takumi Hashimoto and Watari himself, and on the panel about the women of tokusatsu, at the press conference and on the podcast Inteligência Ltda. she talked about Diana with the serenity of someone who had made peace with the costume, striking the double transformation pose with Watari 37 years after the last time. What she took home was something else. "When I took part in an event in Brazil for the first time, I was deeply moved to hear Brazilian fans talk, with tears in their eyes, about such intense feelings. It made me recognize all over again how wonderful tokusatsu is."

Two years later, the two were guests at Japan Expo in Paris, Europe's biggest Japanese culture fair, where Spielvan had aired on the children's block Club Dorothée, on the heels of X-Or, the French title of Gavan. It was there that she floated the theory that "Diana Lady" might be an indirect tribute to Princess Diana, Lady Di, who visited Japan in May 1986, a month after the series premiered, admitting that this was never officially confirmed, and defined tokusatsu as educational programming that teaches courage, justice, solidarity and responsibility. When someone asked how she imagined the lives of Spielvan, Diana and Helen after the series ended, she turned the question back to the audience, and when fans asked for a revival, she said she would gladly come back to pass the baton to the characters' children.

Sources: Makoto Sumikawa's interview with Kyoudai Express (September 2026), Japanese Wikipedia, Hiroshi Watari's blog (2014 and 2016), Hiroshi Watari on X, a fan's notes from the Akihabara UDX screening (September 5, 2026), Heroshock (Japan Expo 2025), Toei Video; fan reports from the Nakano talk shows (2023) and the Makocchan Matsuri (2024 and 2025); Toei Hero MAX vol. 12 (Tatsumi Shuppan, 2005); Jikuu Senshi Spielvan photo book (Tokuma Shoten, 1986); Fukushima Minpo, March 31, 1985; Pixiv Encyclopedia.