Foam Rubber Suit Appreciation Zone: Warrior Of Love Rainbowman Special

Today is the birthday of my favorite actor, Akihiko Hirata. You almost definitely know him from Godzilla (1954), but he had a 30ish-year career, during which he was in a great many¹ films and television series that run the gamut from science fiction, to war films, to comedies, to epic historical dramas, to hardboiled crime flicks, to corporate propaganda for Toshiba²... to... a stage production of The Sound of Music, apparently. One of my personal favorite roles of his was the villainous but extremely suave Mr. K, from Toho's 1972 television series Warrior of Love Rainbowman.

I've recently acquired a mook (magazine + book) dedicated to Rainbowman. This was released in May of 2023 as part of a series highlighting Toho's tokusatsu productions. For about a week, I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time every day working to translate the whole thing into English. I think the part of my brain that goes "OK I'm tired of this now, let's do something else" is broken.

As we all know, Hirata never had any leading roles, and the mook doesn't have that much in the way of Mr. K Content™, all things considered, but I decided to translate the entire thing anyway, because... in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess? There are some interesting things in these pages, like a very sweet interview with Yu Mizushima, who sang the theme song, and a profile of Sadamasa Arikawa, who's well-known for his work in tokusatsu.

A BIG DISCLAIMER: I used Google Lens for this. Although I understand a tiny bit of Japanese and can read kana, I don't know more than, like, 10 kanji. What I did was clean up the machine translation to be more coherent, fixing things like pronouns, sentence order, and past/present tense as best I could. I've also watched the entire series, some episodes 2 or 3 times, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with what I'm talking about here. I am not claiming that this is in any way a perfect translation, or even a very good one, but considering the dearth of English Rainbowman content - the series hasn't even been subtitled³ - it is, at the very least, something.

If anybody is seeing this who can actually read Japanese and wants to help correct or even replace this text wholesale, please get in touch with me through the contact form at the bottom of my blog. I would be more than happy to take care of the typesetting to produce the best and most accurate version of this scanlation. (I would of course give you the main credit because I'm not a jerk.)

I also typed up supplemental notes for each page, which give context to terms and phrases, background on the various other television series and movies mentioned throughout, and my own silly running commentary. I would appreciate if you took a look at them; I spent almost as much time on them as I did on the pages themselves. Here they are. If nothing else, you'll want to read them just to find out what Google Lens tried to call L-Banda.

Blogger is inevitably going to squash these images down, and the text is quite small, so I would recommend either saving them to your device and zooming in on them, or opening them in a separate tab on your browser to zoom in. But anyway, here it all is.