Ultraman

If you’re an Ultraman fan, then you’re probably like me and wondering when, if ever, they are going to release SHIN ULTRAMAN into US theaters. Ultraman the franchise is something I think about 16 hours a day at least. I stay up way past an appropriate adult bedtime wondering things like what would happen if Hayata (played by Susumu Korobe) has to go to the bathroom, but then has to use the beta capsule and become Ultraman? Does Ultraman now also feel like he has to pee? Does Ultraman pee? I don’t really see any holes in the suit. He’s only got a limited amount of time as it is. I think using that time to grow into a giant just to unleash a giant pee sounds like something a villain would do and not very hero-like at all. Which is probably why Ultraman doesn’t pee. See, I walked it back and figured it out. All night I do this to myself.

I think about Ultraman an unreasonable amount because there is an unreasonable amount of stress and sadness in my life that I’m pointedly trying to ignore. It wasn’t until this past year that I realized that the franchise is a safe space for me. But I shouldn’t be surprised. If you look in a closet at my parents’ house, you will find a Care Bear suitcase filled with Ultraman figures and monsters that my relatives in Okinawa have sent me over the years. Although Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is my first love, Ultraman has always been there waiting for me knowing I would need him.

Now here at 3 AM when I miss my mom and everything about growing up half Japanese, I watch Ultraman swing kaiju in circles on my television while Fuji (played by actress Hiroko Sakurai) stands alone as the coolest, sweetest girl on a team of bumbling men.

Fuji is also my mother’s name. It feels meant to be that I have rediscovered this franchise at this specific point in my life.

For the twenty some minutes that it is on, I feel comforted by the people speaking Japanese. I am fascinated by the model work of 1966 special effects. I am laughing at the obvious zipper in the back of Ultraman’s suit, and I get excited seeing what cute goofy monster he’s going to fight this time. During these episodes, I am five years old again. I am laying on the tatami floor of my grandparents’ house, and it is a humid 107 degrees. My Baba is picking her teeth with a toothpick and yelling at my uncles who are only ten years older than me. It’s a great life lived in 24-minute chunks.

This story may sound unique to my American friends, but many kids growing up in Japan probably have similar nostalgic memories as me for Ultraman. He is, after all, their Superman. And just like Superman embodies the American “values” such as small-town humility, immigrant success, and overall strength of the American spirit, Ultraman is an almost spiritual representation of Shinto values and Japanese resilience.

Ultraman has been running consistently since 1966 so the sheer amount of content and lore is enormous. Its fandom spans generations. The key to the franchise is that an alien race of Ultras lend human hosts their powers to save Earth. Most often it starts like this, an ordinary human is making some heroic sacrifice to save others and an Ultra intervenes to make sure they live and uses them as a host for their fantastic alien power. The antagonists of each episode and in the movies are usually monsters of some kind brought to life by some disruption in nature or an alien race seeking to take control. A human team of people will try to help and fail, but then the human host turns into Ultraman and becomes giant. He fights the monster. Happy ending. It’s simple but effective.

Ultraman is the most “Japanese” of all its superheroes. The set up for the show is a terrific analog to some of the most foundational of Shinto values.

The idea of a God in the symbolic heavens, in this case the Ultras, giving an ordinary Japanese human god-like powers (beta capsule, etc.) to use when nature or balance gets out of whack follows a lot of Japanese folklore where ordinary humans make sacrifices for the greater good and/or unknowingly help Gods. They are then often rewarded in return with great power or fortune. It's an integral part of Shintoism that humans can reach the realm of the gods if they do something worthy and in much folklore are granted the agency to help fix the balance of things. The monsters aren't evil. Often, they happen because of some human caused imbalance with nature.

In the instances where it's outside aliens causing the plot ruckus, again it mirrors stories of Gods acting a fool and not being impervious to having bad character. They always get called out.

What Japanese audiences see in Ultraman episodes is their ancient origin and folklore myths being played out in contemporary sci-fi and horror. I’d also like to note that these episodes often feature horrific disasters both human and natural where the Japanese people seem normalized to living in a traumatic environment. Given Japanese history, particularly after the 1940s, it is not lost on me that the children in these shows are hardened to death, devastation, and ruin, and see it as a normal way of life. This seems to be a huge part of Toho entertainment in that Japan is a land of monsters and the people coexist in that chaos. The resilience to keep living on and adapting while the world repeatedly falls apart around them feels like a result of Japan’s generational trauma. So, for a kid’s show, Ultraman subtly hits some hard notes on repeat. Yet, at the end of the day, it’s always a human with no special power other than being kindhearted who gets touched by grace, that saves everyone. It’s the story that believes that no matter how small you are, if you fight for the greater good, your actions make a giant difference.

I’d like to believe that Ultraman planted one of the many seeds in my heart to fight for the greater good. I will attribute to Ultraman the idea that every person has the potential to be a hero if your heart is there. And I think that I am one of thousands in multiple generations of Ultraman fans that feels this way. Ultraman persists and is beloved by the Japanese people, because it reinforces and reflects a religion, optimism, and resilience they already culturally believe in. Ultraman on its surface is aliens and monsters, but at its core it is community, faith, and hope. Ultraman is love.