Real Talk for REAL×EYEZ
I want Japan to realize that you don’t need stereotypes to make your stuff good — especially when your show was doing perfectly fine without them.
I don’t talk about it super often on Twitter, but one of my favorite genres of show is tokusatsu, referring to any Japanese live action shows or films that use a lot of special effects. The example most Westerners that aren’t toku nerds will recognize is Power Rangers, which is a 20 years younger adaptation of the Super Sentai series that’s been running since 1971, kicked off by Shotaro Ishinomori (yes, the same one that created Astro Boy).
Today, I had a particular complaint about the upcoming episode of a particular toku series that I’ve been watching a lot recently and that‘s been a fair part of my life since the back half of college: Kamen Rider.
Specifically, the complaint is that it looks like there’s going to be a rapper as a major part of the next episode of Kamen Rider Zero-One — and he looks a lot like what people think a FUNKY FRESH RAPPER MIGHT LOOK LIKE YO.
The reason why this specifically bothered me is because Zero-One has generally been a strong contender as one of the better Kamen Rider series I’ve seen since I started watching with Kamen Rider OOO in 2012-ish. It’s very sincere and honest, and quite honestly a slap into the face of the likes of Detroit: Become Human in terms of how to handle the issue of “Androids in the modern-ish day” and the complications thereof. It isn’t a perfect show by any means — especially as this particular example shows — but it generally has at least a little more nuance than this.
I’m not dropping the series over this, but the next two episodes are going to be very painful to watch. So, rather than continue to complain while cooped up at home, I decided I’d sit down and make a case for why Kamen Rider Zero-One is better than this, and has proven it multiple times before.
I’m going to do my best to avoid spoilers, but this article will have some spoilers for Zero-One and a few mild ones for other Kamen Rider series. If you’d rather watch Zero-One spoiler-free, you may want to come back to this after you’ve hit around episode 25-ish, or 27 to be safe.
Like Super Sentai/Power Rangers, Kamen Rider runs in yearly seasons, with a new series each season. Generally speaking, you can categorize an individual Kamen Rider based on the era of the Japanese calendar when it aired: Showa (1926–1989; KR started in 1971), Heisei (1989–2019), and Reiwa (2019-now).
Kamen Rider Zero-One is the first series of the Reiwa era, and focuses on Aruto Hiden, a young man who’s trying to be a comedian but is plagued by the painful wordplay and overacting he uses for gags. Aruto’s world is populated by HumaGears, androids designed by the mega-corporation Hiden Intelligence which was run by Aruto’s recently deceased grandfather Korenosuke. HumaGears are designed to learn from humans and support them in various jobs, and it is a HumaGear that Aruto loses an entertainment job to in the first episode. However, when that HumaGear is hacked and turned into a mechanical monster called a Magia, Aruto is given the Zero-One Driver by his grandfather’s secretary HumaGear, Izu, and uses it to become the grasshopper-themed Kamen Rider Zero-One.
Accepting the Zero-One Driver also means that Aruto has accepted a new post as the president of Hiden Intelligence (and must keep the position in order to keep access to the powers), succeeding his grandfather despite having no experience in any of the relevant fields. Despite this nepotistic start, Aruto decides to stay in the role despite not knowing very much, mostly because he wants to keep protecting humans and HumaGears alike as Zero-One.
Over the course of the show, Aruto comes into conflict with several groups: MetsubouJinrai.NET, the hackers responsible for the first (and many other) Magia that Aruto fights against, the A.I. crimes unit A.I.M.S., and more recently, the augmented-reality engineering company ZAIA Enterprises, led by Korenosuke’s former pupil Gai Amatsu. Despite mounting pressures against HumaGears, Aruto never stops fighting to prove that while humans need to be protected from hacked HumaGears, HumaGears are not inherently dangerous to human beings, and that his grandfather’s beliefs were not wrong.
I took a swipe at Detroit: Become Human earlier in comparison to this show, and the main reason for that is because Zero-One talks about a lot of the same concerns that Detroit does but doesn’t have to shoddily invoke Civil Rights-era imagery to make its points. A manga artist literally works his HumaGear assistants to breakdown, which angers Aruto enough to call the artist lazy and tell him he doesn’t deserve to have HumaGear assistants. MetsubouJinrai.NET has to make Magia by hacking HumaGears on the cusp of “Singularity”, their individual sentience — on their own, HumaGears don’t have the desire to be nearly as malignant to human beings as their detractors might think, in alignment with what Korenosuke envisioned for them. And the very origin of MetsubouJinrai.NET is tied to the fact that Gai Amatsu — that ZAIA Enterprises dude I mentioned before — basically gave a satellite all the terrible things that humans have done and let its heuristics drive it into hating humanity and start making plants to exterminate them.
The flipside to the Amatsu problem which displays HumaGears’ good points is also clearly put on display. Many of the HumaGears that are turned into victims by MetsubouJinrai.NET have developed to the point where they can display unforced, self-determined pride in their jobs because they’ve truly grown to like them and received appropriate attention and support, such as the basketball coaching HumaGear who realized his sentience by working to support his struggling team, who in turn supported him. A HumaGear doctor was the first HumaGear to completely and wholly resist a MetsubouJinrai hack to continue working on Aruto’s initial rival and fellow Rider Isamu Fuwa of A.I.M.S., prioritizing his life above everything else. Even when developments later in the series enable HumaGears to have “negative Singularities” that let Amatsu’s hacked satellite turn them into Magia remotely, it’s because they’ve been mistreated and pushed to their breaking point by humans beforehand and overwhelmed by the satellite, not because they want to hurt people. Many HumaGears in the second arc of the show demonstrate exceptional talent for improvisation and misdirection while maintaining their good intentions toward human beings and expressing no desire to supplant them; they help Aruto of their own free will when Amatsu’s tricks turn him into a berserk version of Zero-One because he was kind to them, treated them with respect and meant it.
There is a consistent thread in Zero-One, of “What you do to HumaGears reflects on what they do to you”. There is never necessarily a question of whether or not HumaGears are humans (they’re not, and the series doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that they aren’t human), but it’s more a question of “How might we integrate AI into society and how can they be protected from threats that endanger them or force them to become a danger to others?” Zero-One is hardly the first piece of media to explore these questions, but it does so with enough nuance — especially the acknowledgment that intent very much matters when you teach learning machines, which somehow large parts of the Western tech sector has failed to grasp— that it feels like it’s properly speaking to concerns of the modern era and automation in it.
It isn’t just how well the storyline acquits itself that makes this thing with MC Check It Out coming up in episode 28 hit me the wrong kind of way. Zero-One also has two other really big things that set it aside from other Showa and Heisei-era shows. The first is that its third Rider, a position of fairly high importance in most Rider series that have as big a cast as Zero-One does, is a woman: Fuwa’s coworker in A.I.M.S., Yua Yaiba.
All women Riders before Yaiba either came into the series well after it was underway and didn’t have a lot of narrative presence as Riders (such as in Zero-One’s predecessors Zi-O and Gaim), or as part of non-serial or post-series movies (Kamen Rider Blade, Kamen Rider Decade). Though Yaiba doesn’t get quite as much billing as Aruto or Fuwa, she’s just as competent as them, was involved in the development of the Rider suits she and Fuwa wear, and has a relatively developed personality too. She’s cool and professional and has few qualms about what she has to do, but her soft spots and even her more playful sides are present in the narrative as time goes on. Her competence or ability to fight is never called into question because she happens to be a woman, and it’s refreshing to see.
The second big move is for an upcoming character, Naki, played by agender actor Satsuki Nakayama. This isn’t the first time Kamen Rider has had LGBT+ representation in a series through an actor, but the last time it happened (specifically Kamen Rider Wizard) was *definitely* hitting on the sterotypes issue I’m complaining about now. Nakayama as Naki, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be in nearly as much of a hot zone, and I was super stoked to see their preview image and even to hear that they’re openly agender. Their character has also been making waves in the series itself, currently acting as the fourth unseen member of MetsubouJinrai.NET and making power plays in the shadows of Hiden Intelligence and ZAIA Enterprise.
Both of these examples underscore very small, poignant steps in Kamen Rider history that are frustrating to see contrasted by what might be going on in episodes 28 and 29. I absolutely don’t blame MC Check It Out’s actor Jun Soejima for any of this — from what research I’ve done so far he’s currently on one of NHK’s morning programs as a host in addition to a few other drama roles — but this casting choice definitely reeks of the “we needed a foreigner” syndrome that pops up more often than not in shows, and it really sucks to see that coming off the heels of all the other great stuff Zero-One’s been doing. I’m aware that Japan isn’t the only country with a TV industry that does this kind of thing, but it was completely unexpected to see this in Zero-One mostly because it seemed to understand how to talk about these issues without needing to resort to stereotypes.
As I said in my Twitter thread, this isn’t enough to make me give up Zero-One entirely, but I know whatever good stuff is in the next two episodes is going to be soured by the whole idea that the show’s taken a step back for the two it’s put forward.
Though this kind of thing isn’t the bulk of my material on Twitter, if you liked this article and want to occasionally hear more of what I’ve got to say, feel free to follow me over there. Aside from talking about tokusatsu, anime, and video games, I also make video games; you can buy Final Spike on itch.io right now, and I’m currently posting more work about my current project, Mage Princess Anine, in this Twitter moment.