The Man Behind the
Mask of Kamen Rider Black

On weekends in the 1980s, the heroes of Japanese children's television fought live on the open-air stage at Korakuen, an amusement park in central Tokyo. Jiro Okamoto, a trainee at the Japan Action Club (JAC) who stood nearly 6 feet tall, played monsters and enemy foot soldiers there, the parts that go to whoever just walked in the door. Then one day the people running the Kamen Rider show pulled him from the back of the stage and put him in the middle, in the hero's place. Okamoto told the story in 2021, in an interview with the comedian Sujitaro Tamabukuro for the Japanese site GetNavi web:

His size got him the lead in Kamen Rider Black in 1987, when he was 22. It was the franchise's first TV series in six years, and it later aired in Brazil as Black Kamen Rider. In 2016, at 51, he wore the suit of Kamen Rider 1 in the film that brought back Hiroshi Fujioka, the original hero Okamoto had watched on television as a boy. In between, he lived through a changing of the guard in Toei's action unit and moved from heroes to villains. He has spent all of it with the same company, Japan Action Enterprise (JAE), the name the JAC adopted in 2001.

Miyakonojo

Okamoto was born on January 5, 1965, in Miyakonojo, a city in Miyazaki Prefecture on Kyushu, Japan's southernmost main island. Kamen Rider premiered in April 1971, with Fujioka as Takeshi Hongo, a student turned into a cyborg by the evil organization Shocker. Okamoto said:

In middle school and high school he competed in track as a jumper. That spring would show up years later in the fights of Black and RX, where his high leaps and flying kicks earned a nickname among fans: the "Jiro kick." He was modest about the résumé:

JAC

A classmate who loved Jackie Chan is the one who brought Okamoto to the JAC. The school had been founded in 1970 by the actor Shinichi Chiba, known in the West as Sonny Chiba, to train stunt performers and actors who could handle a fight scene. By the 1980s it was home to Hiroyuki Sanada and Etsuko Shihomi and handled the action on Toei's Super Sentai and Metal Hero series. Okamoto remembered:

Enrollment for that year had already closed by the time the two of them asked. Okamoto finished high school, applied again at the end of his senior year and took the entrance test in Kyoto. His application number was somewhere in the 3,000s, and he was admitted to the school's 14th class, which started in May 1984.

The program lasted two years, at a facility in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, with voice, acting and jazz dance on top of the physical training. Each class started with 30 to 40 students, and his year had a few hundred trainees in all, who dropped out one by one over the following months. Okamoto arrived with no gymnastics background and picked it up from a classmate, after hours:

From Chiba's teachings, Okamoto kept a working rule that runs through his whole career. He repeated it in the 2021 interview, three months before Chiba died that August:

Black

Kamen Rider Black premiered on October 4, 1987, on MBS, the Osaka station that fed the national TBS network. It was the first regular Kamen Rider series since Kamen Rider Super-1 ended in 1981. The hero, Kotaro Minami, is a 19-year-old student kidnapped by the cult Gorgom and turned into a cyborg to compete with his foster brother, Nobuhiko, for the title of the cult's king. He escapes before they can wipe his mind and goes to war against Gorgom and against his own brother, reborn as Shadow Moon.

The series took the fights away from the Ono Kenyukai, the swordsmanship troupe that had choreographed Kamen Rider since 1971, and gave them to the JAC, with Osamu Kaneda and Jun Murakami as action directors. The actor cast as Minami was Tetsuo Kurata, who at 19 was the youngest lead the franchise had ever had. Okamoto credits his own casting, once again, to height:

Okamoto studied Kurata so that the masked hero and the young man without the mask would read as the same person on screen. According to Kurata, he even copied the actor's haircut so his field of vision inside the helmet would match. His fighting stance, with the fingers held straight, came from Bruce Lee movies, and he kept it even after a director asked him to change it. Kurata started calling him "aniki," big brother.

The Cliff

Black was shot on 16 mm film, and every blown take cost film, lighting and the time of an entire crew. When Tamabukuro asked whether the job involved real danger, Okamoto answered:

The most dangerous moment of his career, he has said, was a fall down a cliff on Black. The suit actor Takayuki Kitamura, a JAC colleague who played Gorgom monsters in the Black movies, posted this on social media in November 2021:

Kitamura posted it on November 26, a date fans call "ii Jiro no hi," Good Jiro Day, because 11 and 26 can be read in Japanese as "ii Jiro."

RX

Black ended on October 9, 1988, after 51 episodes, and Toei decided to follow it with a sequel starring the same hero, something the franchise had never done. In a 2018 conversation with Kurata published by the Japanese magazine @DIME, Okamoto said nobody had told him in advance that he would be the next Kamen Rider too:

Kamen Rider Black RX premiered on October 23, 1988, and ran 47 episodes, through September 24, 1989. Minami gains a new form after being exposed to sunlight in space and takes on the Crisis Empire, invaders from another dimension. The show introduced the franchise's first form changes, the heavily armored Robo Rider and Bio Rider, who can dissolve into liquid, and Okamoto played all three versions of the hero.

Kurata recalled that the action director, Kaneda, "had Jiro do everything," and Okamoto answered, laughing, that every day was a struggle. They shot in abandoned factories and schools full of dust. The Revolcane, the glowing staff behind the hero's finishing move, was lit with fluorescent tubes and so fragile that the crew barely let anyone touch it between takes. Kurata described his partner this way:

The Wilderness Years

RX ended in September 1989, and Kamen Rider went more than 10 years without a regular TV series. Toei kept the brand alive on home video and in theaters, and Okamoto played all three heroes of that stretch. The first was Shin Kamen Rider (1992), released straight to video, a dark, organic take on the character. Then came the films Kamen Rider ZO (1993) and Kamen Rider J (1994), both directed by the designer Keita Amemiya.

On ZO, the action suit was split at the chest so Okamoto could move, because the one-piece version used for close-ups locked up his torso. J was shot in about 20 days, half the schedule of ZO, on locations near Tokyo such as Okutama. For Amemiya he also played the android in Hakaider (1995), a film that turned the villain of Kikaider into its lead.

Choukou Senshi Shanzerion (Super Photon Warrior Shanzerion) aired on TV Tokyo from April 3 to December 25, 1996, for 39 episodes. It was a comedy about Akira Suzumura, a broke, womanizing private eye played by Takashi Hagino, who gets his powers by accident. The armor was designed to look like crystal and was so heavy that JAC staff said Okamoto was the only one who could wear it without getting hurt. Hagino was forbidden to try it on, in case he fell and broke it.

For the aerial shots in the closing credits, Okamoto stood for hours on Nakajima beach in Hamamatsu, inside the armor, with the tide coming in and no idea when they would wrap.

Ouja

Kamen Rider returned to TV in January 2000 with Kuuga. Starting with Kamen Rider Agito in 2001, the lead Riders were played by Seiji Takaiwa, from the next generation of the JAC. Okamoto, then 36, was moved to villains, secondary Riders and monsters.

On Kamen Rider Ryuki, which aired from February 3, 2002, to January 19, 2003, he and Hagino shared a character again. Hagino played Takeshi Asakura, a 25-year-old killer who breaks out of prison and joins the war between Kamen Riders for the pleasure of the fight. Okamoto wore the suit of Kamen Rider Ouja, Asakura's snake-themed battle form, and invented on set the gesture that defined the character. In January 2023 he told the Japanese movie site Cinema Today:

Hagino, who voiced Ouja in post-production, said in the same interview that the character's tone came from there: "Ouja's voice, the voice of a man who enjoys fighting, came out naturally in the dubbing booth from watching Jiro move." He also recalled that the two of them had spent "38.5 of the 39 episodes" of Shanzerion clowning around before arriving at the madness of Ryuki. Okamoto said that of all the Kamen Riders he has played since Black, Ouja is the one that stayed with him most, because it gave him room to experiment in the action.

Kintaros

In his years as a supporting player, the broad frame became Okamoto's trademark. Fans named it "Jiro-san taikei," the Jiro body type, and learned to spot him under any mask. On Kamen Rider Blade (2004 to 2005) he played Leangle. On Kamen Rider Den-O (2007 to 2008) he wore Kintaros, one of the Imagin, spirits from the future who possess the hero.

Kintaros is based on Kintaro, the strongman boy of Japanese folklore. He speaks in a thick Kansai dialect, cracks his neck with a hand under his chin and falls asleep mid-conversation. After every fight he hands his opponent a tissue and says "nakeru de," roughly "that'll make you cry." His voice belongs to the actor Masaki Terasoma. Kintaros debuted in episode 9, which aired on March 25, 2007, and Okamoto appeared in the same episode without a mask, as the owner of a karate dojo.

To play Kamen Rider Ixa on the next series, Kamen Rider Kiva (2008 to 2009), Okamoto dropped 10 kilos, about 22 pounds, in two months on his manager's orders, while he was still finishing Den-O. The Kintaros suit started to hang loose on him, and the actor Kenjiro Ishimaru, who played the Owner of the DenLiner train, asked whether he was entering Kinniku Banzuke, a TBS show built around feats of strength. After Kiva, the weight came back.

On Super Sentai, Okamoto played Shinken Gold on Samurai Sentai Shinkenger (2009). The actor behind the character, Keisuke Soma, had grown up watching Black on video because of his older brother and said he was thrilled to learn who was inside the suit. Gosei Knight on Goseiger (2010) followed, then the robot gorilla Gorisaki Banana on Go-Busters (2012) and Kyoryu Silver on Kyoryuger (2013).

Fujioka

On July 26, 2009, in episode 26 of Kamen Rider Decade, Kurata played Kotaro Minami again for the first time in 20 years, and Okamoto was back inside Black and RX. In the 2018 conversation, Kurata said neither of them felt outclassed by the young actors when it came to action and that he hoped to see his partner performing for a long time:

In January 2016, Toei unveiled the new suit for Kamen Rider 1, the film marking the franchise's 45th anniversary, with Fujioka, then 69, back as Takeshi Hongo. Fans online asked whether Fujioka himself would wear it, and others bet on Okamoto. The film opened on March 26, 2016, with Okamoto inside the suit of the Kamen Rider he had watched on TV in Miyakonojo at 6.

In 2023, at 58, he played Ouja again on Kamen Rider Outsiders, this time with a new form, Ouja Survive. On Kamen Rider Gavv (2024 to 2025) he played Dente Stomach, the hero's great-uncle. Okamoto also teaches stage combat at the Showa University of Music in Kawasaki, just outside Tokyo.

Jiro Matsuri

Since March 10, 2007, fans have gathered once a year at Loft Plus One, a talk-show venue in Shinjuku, for the Jiro Matsuri, the Jiro Festival. The evening is hosted by Mishio Suzuki, a journalist at the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, who in 2023 published the book "Suit Actor no Kyoji," The Pride of the Suit Actor, which includes an interview with him. The announcement for the first edition warned that the guest had "a heavy mouth that makes hosts cry" and wondered how much he would say.

The event settled into March, close to Okamoto's birthday. The ninth edition, in 2015, was billed as "sweet fifty," for his 50th, and the 20th took place on March 20, 2026. In the 2021 interview, asked what keeps him going, he said:

Okamoto was 56, with 34 years in hero suits behind him, when he told GetNavi about the job:

Sources: GetNavi web, @DIME, Cinema Today, Otakuma Keizai Shimbun, Loft Plus One and Japanese Wikipedia.