Sentai Locations 2018: Sumida River

On March 27, 2018, as the bus headed from Haneda Airport to the Tokyo City Air Terminal near my hotel not long after my arrival, we crossed the Sumida River and I looked to the left and even though night had fallen, I clearly saw a waterfront location that had been used in KAMEN RIDER ICHIGO, the 2016 Kamen Rider movie that I’d seen in a theater in Osaka during my 2016 trip to Japan, and which I now owned on DVD. As it turned out, it was only minutes from my hotel, so I resolved to make that my first stop the next day.

Sentai Locations 2018: Chiba City

In Chiba City, about an hour’s subway ride straight east from downtown Tokyo, there are a number of locations often used for Japanese superhero shows in the Super Sentai and Kamen Rider franchises, usually for elaborate fight scenes. There’s an office complex that has two large plazas that I’ve seen used in many shows over the years. Just a short distance southwest of that is the Makuhari Messe International Convention Complex, which has a large convention center and a separate exhibition hall, slightly smaller, across the street from it. Adjacent to the convention center is a ground-level plaza that reminded me of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. Next to the Exhibition Hall is a small park with a couple of unusual sculptures and fountains.

Japan Journal 2018, Pt. 2: Adventures on Odaiba

A month ago, I was flying back from Tokyo to New York. Here I continue my search for Tokyo locations used in live-action Japanese superhero shows, specifically the Super Sentai and Kamen Rider franchises, all of which stage elaborate action scenes at accessible locations in and around Tokyo. This entry is devoted to Odaiba Island in Tokyo Bay on the other side of the Sumida River from mainland Tokyo. Here’s a travel brochure shot:

Japan Journal 2018, Part 1: Adventure on Harumi Island

I was in Tokyo from March 27 to April 11, 2018, on a mission to see five J-pop concerts and visit a couple dozen locations used in Super Sentai and Kamen Rider shows and movies. I covered similar locations on my previous trip (March-April 2016) and wrote about them here. My goal was to see for myself the urban spaces that are used in such a unique way on these shows and how they’re used in everyday life when not hosting costumed superheroes and rubber-suited monsters. A collateral benefit of these explorations is the discovery of parts of Tokyo not seen by many tourists. One of my most interesting excursions this time was to the Harumi Island Passenger Ship Terminal, which led to my witnessing quite an unusual cultural phenomenon that I would not have seen had I gone on any other day and which made use of this particular urban seaport space in a most creative way. The Harumi Terminal faces Tokyo Bay and was built on an island that was created in the 20^th century and seems to be devoted to residential districts and high-rise apartment and office towers. (New Yorkers: Think Roosevelt Island if it was about half the size of Central Park.) The terminal has a number of large plazas and staircases that lend themselves to the kind of sprawling fight scenes found in the shows I follow, as seen in these pictures:

Japan Journal, Part 9: Sentai Locations

The Power Rangers franchise gets its action footage from the Toei Studio’s long-running series of sentai (superhero team) programs, which began in 1975 with “Goranger” and continue right up to this year’s “Uchu Sentai Kyuranger.” What I’ve always liked about the sentai shows was their frequent use of Tokyo locations at which to stage the many action scenes. It gives the far-fetched proceedings some kind of anchor in the real world. (Many of these shots turned up in the American version.) Some of them are well-known locations and many are documented on a website called Neo Kerberos Universe: The Real Tokusatsu and Sentai Universe. As I was planning my Japan trip in 2016, I watched a lot of sentai episodes and looked up their locations on this site, with the hopes of visiting some of the most oft-used places.

Japan Journal, Part 8: Japan Anniversary Album

One year ago today, on March 8, 2016, I arrived in Japan for a four-week stay, a dream trip that I’d waited until my retirement to take. I’ve written about the trip in seven previous installments in the Japan Journal series, mostly from a film and pop culture orientation, but I had so much more material to cover that I decided to put together an album for the one-year anniversary using mostly previously unpublished photos covering the full span of my trip. I spent three weeks in Tokyo and one week in Osaka, with day trips from there to Kyoto and Nara. I took thousands of photos and had to spend a couple of days going through them. I’ve devised some broad categories with which to group them.

Japan Journal, Part 7: Eiga Story 1965

One of the things I picked up during my trip to Tokyo that I wanted to share with readers is a Japanese film magazine from 1965 called Eiga Story, found at a flea market table in Ueno Park amidst tons of other old film magazines and comics. On the cover is a photo of Hayley Mills, who’d been a child star in Disney movies (e.g. POLLYANNA and THE PARENT TRAP), and had finally graduated to teenage roles at the time, getting her first screen kiss that year in THE TRUTH ABOUT SPRING. I opened the magazine on the spot and was happy to see excellent-looking color spreads devoted to popular Hollywood films and stars of the time with b&w entries devoted to numerous releases in Japan of Hollywood and European films. Since I was going to films regularly in 1965 and had even seen some of these films during their initial release, I was curious to see what Hollywood films got the most hype during their release in Japan.

Japan Journal, Part 6: Toei Kyoto Studio Park

One of the absolute highlights of my trip to Japan was the visit to Toei Kyoto Studio Park, in Kyoto, on Wed. March 30, 2016. This is a combination theme park, museum, and studio run by the Toei Company, one of the leading film, TV and animation studios in Japan. Since 1950, Toei has been turning out a steady array of Japanese pop culture staples, including samurai and yakuza movies, martial arts films, superhero TV shows, animated sci-fi and all sorts of other time-honored Japanese genres. The Toei Kyoto Studio Park offers a samurai village backlot that visitors can explore to their heart’s desire, as well as a visitors center filled with galleries devoted to Toei’s 60-year animation output, live-action tokusatsu and sentai TV series, Japanese film history in general, and the singer Hibari Misora. The backlot is in active use as a set for Toei TV shows, plenty of which I’ve seen, and I will share images from shows that were filmed there. It was an immersion in Japanese pop culture history like I’ve never experienced anywhere else.

Japan Journal, Part 5: Gundam, Ghibli and Pokémon

In my last Japan Journal (Part 4, April 28, 2016), I concentrated on the Suginami Animation Museum in Ogikubo, Tokyo and said I would save the other animation museums for another entry. Here I’m going to recount my trips to the Gundam Front Museum in Odaiba, Tokyo, the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, and the Pokémon Center and J-World Tokyo in Sunshine City in the Ikebukuro section of Tokyo, more proof of Tokyo’s status as anime heaven.

The Gundam Front Museum doesn’t have as many different exhibits and attractions as the Suginami Museum, but what it does have is pretty spectacular, starting with the giant model of the original Mobile Suit Gundam outside the shopping center where the museum is located.

Japan Journal, Part 4: Animation Museums in Tokyo: Suginami

While I was in Japan, I visited three museums in Tokyo devoted to animation as well as various stores that catered to anime fans. When I was in Kyoto, I visited the Toei Studio’s theme park, Toei Kyoto Studio Park, which had an animation gallery devoted to the output of Toei Animation. The three museums in Tokyo were the Ghibli Museum, located in Mitaka and devoted to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli; the Gundam Front Museum in Odaiba devoted to the Mobile Suit Gundam anime franchise; and the Suginami Animation Museum in Ogikubo, which offered a full panoply of anime history, covering Japanese animation from the early 20^th century on. Of these, the most rewarding was the Suginami Animation Museum in Ogikubo, Tokyo, which took up a whole afternoon and offered enough interesting material to justify its own blog entry.