An Evening with Showa- and Heisei-Era Tokusatsu Legends!

Director Shusuke Kaneko and actor Tatsuhito Go. Photo by Brett Homenick.

Tonight, I attended a special event with director Shusuke Kaneko and actor Tatsuhito Go. While most readers of this blog are familiar with Kaneko-san's credits in tokusatsu, I'm sure most may not be familiar with Go-san's. So let's take a quick look at the highlights.

Tatsuhito Go (whose previous stage name was Haruo Nakazawa) was a regular on the Super Sentai-esque TV series Strada 5 (1974) as Ichinen Takenaka/Apollo (Strada 3), and appeared in episode 8 of the series Jekyll and Hyde (1973) and episode 11 of Zone Fighter (1973) as the jealous racecar driver Yukio Sasaki. (This episode features both Godzilla and Gigan and was directed by Jun Fukuda.) 

Tatsuhito Go. Photo by Brett Homenick.

On the big screen, he appears as a youth in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971) and in Conflagration (1975) as helmsman Tamura. I brought my Blu-ray of Strada 5 for Go-san to sign, as well as a DVD sleeve of Conflagration. When Go-san saw it, he laughed and exclaimed the title of the film in Japanese.

I had fun chatting with Go-san about his tokusatsu experiences, although his memories of those projects have mostly faded these days. Still, he was an entertaining storyteller who had everyone (including me) laughing about his memories.

Shusuke Kaneko. Photo by Brett Homenick.

I also enjoyed hanging out with Kaneko-san again. We chatted about various tokusatsu topics, as well as more mundane, everyday things. Earlier in the evening, Kaneko-san signed my DVD sleeve of GMK (2001).

And that's about all. It was a very fun evening, with two cinematic luminaries whose career cover works as vastly different as the Heisei Gamera series and Zone Fighter. But I wouldn't have it any other way.