The argument arrives in the same shape every time. Someone sees a rubber suit, or a spark-gun explosion, or a stock henshin sequence used for the fortieth week running, and concludes that tokusatsu is what Western superhero cinema was before it grew up. Cheap. Childish. A stepping stone.
It is a comfortable conclusion, and it is wrong. Not because tokusatsu is secretly better, but because the comparison is being run on one set of metrics belonging to one tradition, and then presented as a universal standard. Ultraman turned sixty in July 2026. Kamen Rider is fifty five. Super Sentai is fifty one. Something has been working for a very long time, and it is worth understanding what.
The weight problem
Start with the thing people mock first: the suit.
Suitmation is not a workaround for an absent computer. It is a physical solution to a physical problem. When a performer in a Godzilla suit steps on a miniature Ginza set built at roughly one twenty fifth scale, the balsa buckles because a real mass moved through it. The dust that comes off the collapse is real dust, lit by real lights, photographed at high speed so that debris falls at the rate a building’s worth of concrete would fall. Nobody had to decide what weight looks like. The camera recorded it.
Digital work has to simulate all of that, and simulation is a series of judgement calls made by people under a deadline. When those calls are good, the result is extraordinary. When they are rushed, and modern blockbuster schedules rush them constantly, you get the specific weightlessness that audiences have learned to recognise without being able to name: a body that moves like an object with no cost, an impact with no consequence, a city that crumbles like sugar.
There is also the matter of ageing. Practical effects date the way a painting dates. You can see the year it was made and it still holds. Software dates the way a phone dates. A digital creature rendered to the limits of its era’s hardware looks like the limits of that hardware forever after.
None of which means practical is superior. It means the two traditions solved the same problem in different currencies, and one of those currencies happens to hold its value unusually well.
Sixty years without a reboot
Ultraman began on July 17, 1966, following Ultra Q earlier that year. Kamen Rider began on April 3, 1971. Himitsu Sentai Gorenger launched Super Sentai on April 5, 1975. Godzilla has been running since November 3, 1954, with a thirty fourth Toho film, Godzilla Minus Zero, arriving on that same anniversary date this November.
Those franchises have produced new entries at close to annual cadence for five decades. Not sequels. New shows, new casts, new suits, new tonal experiments, running inside a shared identity that never needed to be demolished and rebuilt to stay legible.
This is a genuinely different production philosophy, and it is worth being honest about why it works. Toei and Bandai built a model where merchandise finances the show, the show sells the merchandise, and the annual reset is structural rather than an admission of failure. Every year is a fresh premise with a fresh toyline, so nothing has to be retconned, nothing has to be undone, and no continuity ever collapses under its own accumulated weight.
Compare that to a tradition that has to periodically declare its own previous decade void. Reboots are not a moral failing. They are what happens when a story model depends on escalating stakes inside a single continuity, and the stakes eventually run out of room. Tokusatsu sidestepped that trap by never building the trap.
Heroes who lose
The thematic charge here is often missed entirely by people sampling one episode.
Ultraman’s original run ends with episode thirty nine. Zetton kills him. The Science Patrol has to be saved by Zoffy, and Hayata walks away with no memory of having been a giant at all. That is the ending of the show that founded the genre: the hero dies, and the humans have to keep going.
Kamen Rider opens with a man being surgically converted into a weapon against his will. Takeshi Hongo escapes Shocker before they can finish the brainwashing, which means the series premise is a body horror survivor fighting the organisation that built him, wearing the proof of what they did to him as his costume. Kamen Rider Black spends its entire run knowing that the monster it must eventually destroy is its hero’s foster brother.
The monsters carry the same freight. Godzilla vs. Hedorah in 1971 built its kaiju out of industrial sludge at the height of Japan’s pollution crisis. Ultraseven produced episodes about colonisation and extermination pointed enough that one of them, episode twelve, has been withdrawn from circulation for decades.
Weekly and seasonal formats are the mechanism, not the limitation. Fifty episodes lets a show sit with a character’s doubt for a month, kill someone in week nineteen and still be dealing with it in week thirty four, and vary its register from farce to funeral without breaking. A two hour film cannot do that. It has other virtues. This is not one of them.
The influence runs both ways
Anyone calling tokusatsu derivative should account for the direction of travel.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered in August 1993 and was built directly on footage from Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, and for thirty years every season after it was sourced the same way. Only in 2023 did Cosmic Fury finally shoot its own Ranger footage, and even then it still took its Zord material from Uchu Sentai Kyuranger. That is not homage. That is the Western product being assembled from Japanese material.
Beyond that, the grammar has been absorbed so thoroughly it has stopped being visible. Colour coded teams with defined roles. Combining machines. The transformation as a held, ritualised beat rather than a cut. The city scale monster fight as a genre unto itself. Guillermo del Toro made Pacific Rim in 2013 as an open love letter to kaiju and mecha, and Legendary has spent over a decade building an American franchise on a monster Toho created.
Cross pollination is the actual history. Calling either side inferior requires ignoring most of it.
What constraint actually buys you
The clearest recent evidence is Godzilla Minus One. Takashi Yamazaki made it with a visual effects team of roughly thirty five people at Shirogumi and a reported budget under fifteen million dollars, a fraction of what a single American tentpole spends on effects alone. It took more than a hundred million dollars worldwide and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in March 2024, the first Godzilla film ever to win an Oscar.
That did not happen despite the constraint. It happened because the constraint forced every shot to be chosen. When you can only afford a limited number of shots of the monster, each one has to carry meaning, and the film becomes about anticipation and consequence instead of volume.
Scarcity has been tokusatsu’s design brief since 1954, and it produced a visual language: the low angle that makes a suit performer read as three hundred feet tall, the held pose that sells power without animation, the cut to a screaming crowd that does the work a wide shot would have cost a fortune to build.
Cultural specificity is the point
Godzilla is a nuclear metaphor made two years after the Allied occupation’s press restrictions on discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were lifted, and only months after the Daigo Fukuryu Maru came home from Bikini Atoll irradiated. Ultraman is what the same studio made a decade later, when Japan was building a technological future and needed a story about protection rather than punishment.
Tokusatsu heroes work in teams, report to organisations, and are frequently answerable to someone. The genre’s recurring anxiety is what happens when the institution is compromised, not whether the individual is exceptional enough. That is a different moral engine from the one driving most Western superhero fiction, where the hero’s singular gift and singular responsibility sit at the centre.
Neither framework is more advanced. Judging one by the other’s priorities is not criticism, it is just unfamiliarity wearing criticism’s clothes.
The ritual
The henshin call, the pose, the catchphrase, the roll call: these look like padding to an outsider and function as participation to an audience. Children perform them. Adults who performed them as children recognise them instantly thirty years later. The repetition is the delivery mechanism for continuity of feeling across generations, and it is why a Japanese parent and child can watch different Riders and be watching the same thing.
Western blockbusters chase the opposite model: the event, the opening weekend, the surprise. Both are legitimate. Only one has demonstrated it can hold an audience continuously for six decades.
Not frozen in 1972
The idea that tokusatsu is a preserved artefact does not survive contact with what it has actually been doing.
Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi rebuilt the genre’s own foundations with Shin Godzilla in 2016 and Shin Ultraman in 2022, and Anno carried on alone with Shin Kamen Rider in 2023, using digital tools to reproduce the framing logic of suitmation rather than to escape it. Netflix put out Ultraman: Rising in 2024 as full animation. Ultraman series have been running in high definition with digital compositing for years while keeping suit performance at the centre.
The technique keeps moving. What has not moved is the conviction that a person should be inside the monster.
Parallel, not lesser
Tokusatsu and Western superhero media are two traditions that started from different anxieties, chose different tools, and built different relationships with their audiences. One optimised for spectacle at scale and event cinema. The other optimised for longevity, craft under constraint, and a ritual that renews itself every year.
Sixty years of Ultraman, fifty five of Kamen Rider, fifty one of Super Sentai and seventy two of Godzilla are not a long apprenticeship. They are the finished argument.
Official sources
For the latest from these franchises, follow Tsuburaya Productions, Toei and Toho through their official channels above, and follow @tokuasia.sg on Instagram for more tokusatsu history, analysis and news.
This article is written with assistance from Claude.
Previous Next