Say Hello To 'Starfish Hitler', The Weirdest Japanese TV Supervillain Of The 1970s
- Nov 14, 2024
- 6 min read
Episode 26 of the 1974 Japanese TV series Kamen Rider X is titled "Underworld's Dictator, Starfish Hitler!!" The double exclamation mark is doing real work there. The episode features exactly what the title promises: a supervillain who is, in both concept and execution, a cyborg fusion of Adolf Hitler and a starfish. He has the moustache, the salute, the general aesthetic of the historical original, combined with the formidable combat capabilities that nature has bestowed upon the echinoderm.
Yes, this is real. It aired on Japanese national television. Children watched it. It has a heavy metal tribute. And once you understand the context, it makes a kind of sense, while simultaneously making no sense at all.
What Tokusatsu Is and Why It Matters
Tokusatsu is a Japanese genre of live-action film and television that uses elaborate special effects, particularly people in monster and hero costumes doing battle in miniature sets or outdoors. The word translates literally as "special filming." It gave the world Godzilla in 1954, Ultraman in 1966, and the Super Sentai franchise that was adapted for Western audiences as Power Rangers in the 1990s. It's one of the most commercially durable genres in the history of Japanese entertainment, with new productions still running today.
The genre has a particular visual grammar: a masked hero with a transformation sequence, a villainous organisation sending a monster of the week, a climactic fight, and a resolution. The monsters are almost always a person in a rubber suit, designed with varying degrees of elaborateness, and the fights involve a mix of martial arts choreography and stunt work. For a genre aimed primarily at children, the budgets were modest and the production schedules were punishing, which is partly why the monster designs occasionally took directions that adult observers might question.
The Man Who Built the World
Kamen Rider X was the fourth series in the Kamen Rider franchise, which had launched in 1971. The franchise was created by Shotaro Ishinomori, one of the most significant figures in the history of Japanese popular culture. Born in 1938, Ishinomori had been drawing manga professionally since his teenage years, mentored early in his career by Osamu Tezuka, the artist generally considered the father of modern manga. By the time Kamen Rider launched, Ishinomori had already created Cyborg 009, the first superpowered team series in Japanese comics history.
Over the course of his career, Ishinomori produced more than 128,000 pages of manga, earning him a posthumous Guinness World Record for the most comics published by a single author. He created the Super Sentai series that would eventually become Power Rangers. He won the Shogakukan Manga Award twice. He died in January 1998, three days after his 60th birthday, and was mourned as a national figure. A museum dedicated to his work opened in Ishinomaki, Miyagi in 2001, and trains in the region were decorated with his artwork.
Kamen Rider X, then, was not the work of some fly-by-night production. It was part of a franchise created by one of Japan's most important popular artists, produced by Toei Company, one of the major studios in Japanese film and television. It ran for 35 episodes in 1974 and was watched by millions of Japanese children. Starfish Hitler appeared in episode 26.
The Government of Darkness and Its Monster Policy
The villainous organisation in Kamen Rider X is called G.O.D., which stands for Government of Darkness. G.O.D. is a global secret society whose hand, the show implies, reaches into every major government on Earth. Their foot soldiers are cyborg monsters, and the show has a clear system for how those monsters are designed.
The first half of the series features what are called the Shinwakaijin, or Mythology Monsters: cyborg creatures based on figures from Greco-Roman mythology. Neptune, Medusa, Hercules, Prometheus, Chimera. The hero fights his way through the classical pantheon one episode at a time. Then, around the midpoint of the series, a new villain called King Dark emerges as the true power behind G.O.D., and the monster design policy changes.
King Dark's arrival brings in a second category: the Akuninkaijin, or Villain Monsters. These are reincarnated historical and fictional villains, fused with animals. The logic, such as it is, being that history's most dangerous figures have been resurrected by G.O.D. and merged with creatures that enhance their destructive capabilities. The roster includes Scorpion Geronimo, Ant Capone, and Condor Genghis Khan, among others. The system is, by any measure, one of the most creative and deranged monster-generation frameworks in the history of children's television.
Starfish Hitler, episode 26, is the most famous product of this system. He combines the martial authority and ideological menace of the historical Adolf Hitler with the physical attributes of the starfish, an animal that can regenerate severed limbs, clings tenaciously to surfaces, and moves with a kind of inexorable slowness that is, in its own way, unsettling. Whether the writers thought through the starfish's regenerative abilities as a deliberate metaphor for fascism's tendency to resurface, or whether someone just needed a creature for that week's slot and a starfish was available, is not recorded.
Hitler in Japanese Popular Culture
To a Western viewer, Starfish Hitler looks like an extraordinary act of either provocation or obliviousness. In the German context, where the use of Nazi imagery is a criminal matter, it would be simply unthinkable. But Japan's relationship with Hitler and Nazi imagery in popular culture is genuinely different, and understanding that difference helps explain how the character came to exist.
Japan was an Axis ally, not an occupied nation or a Holocaust-perpetrating state. The Holocaust had no direct Japanese dimension, and Japan's own wartime atrocities were processed through a completely different cultural and political framework after the war. Germany faced denazification, occupation, and the Nuremberg trials. Japan faced occupation, the Tokyo trials, and a different kind of national reckoning that left a distinct cultural residue.
In the decades following the war, Nazi imagery appeared regularly in Japanese manga, novels, and television. Academic scholars have documented what one researcher called a "Nazi-cul" phenomenon, the reproduction of Nazi aesthetics and imagery as a form of pop culture rather than ideology. In the 1950s and 60s, Nazis were primarily shorthand for absolute evil in Japanese popular media, useful villains with a recognisable look. In the 1970s, the period of Kamen Rider X, a more romanticised and aestheticised version began to appear in science fiction. The cultural gap between how Germany and Japan processed the same history produced radically different outcomes in popular media, none more visible than a rubber-suited starfish man performing Hitler salutes on prime-time television.
The Episode Itself
Episode 26 features Starfish Hitler as one of King Dark's new generation of monsters, tasked with carrying out some scheme against the population while the hero, Kamen Rider X, works to stop him. The design puts the Hitler moustache and visual markers on a humanoid suit that incorporates starfish elements. The episode title, with its double exclamation mark, suggests the production team were not unaware of the absurdity of what they were making.
The episode was part of a single season that ended with Kamen Rider X defeating King Dark and dismantling G.O.D. The series was followed by Kamen Rider Amazon. Starfish Hitler was not mentioned again. He achieved a kind of immortality not through any sequel or spin-off but through the internet, where clips of the episode circulated decades later among people who couldn't quite believe what they were seeing, and who then had to share it with everyone they knew.
There is, genuinely, a heavy metal tribute. The band is called Starfish Hitler, the track is titled after the character, and it runs to about three minutes of exactly what you'd expect from a heavy metal tribute to a 1974 Japanese TV monster. It exists.
Why This Matters Beyond the Joke
It would be easy to treat Starfish Hitler as pure absurdist footnote and leave it there. But the character is actually a useful lens for several things simultaneously. It reveals how the tokusatsu genre operated under production pressure, generating monsters with a logic that made internal sense to the writers even when the output looked deranged to outside observers. It reveals how Japanese popular culture processed World War II imagery in ways that had no equivalent elsewhere. And it reveals something about Ishinomori's creative world, where the freedom to combine anything with anything was a fundamental operating principle.
Kamen Rider X was made in the same cultural moment as the wild formal experiments happening elsewhere in Japanese popular culture in the early 1970s. The country was processing rapid economic modernisation, the legacy of the occupation, student protest movements, and a popular culture industry that was feeding an enormous appetite for new content with genuinely limited resources and constraints. The result, across manga, anime, and tokusatsu, was a body of work that took risks a more cautious industry would never have permitted. Some of those risks produced masterpieces. Some produced Starfish Hitler. Both are part of the same story. For more on the stranger corners of 1970s popular culture, our piece on Anita Berber and the wild edges of Weimar-era performance covers a roughly contemporary European counterpart to the same spirit of doing whatever seemed interesting and dealing with the consequences later.
