Meet Hitoshi Hayami

8.16.2022 (revised 8.31.2022)

The earliest years of my life were so impressionable. For that reason, I’ve written a lot about the 80s. 1984 was a magical year. I can’t escape the indelible mark it left on me, my memories and my collection. The return of Godzilla transformed my childhood memories of the 70s into the passion of a teenage collector in the 80s. Godzilla had not been on the big screen since 1975, but he had been on my television screen. The local news announcement of new Godzilla was the shot in the arm that a young Godzilla fan with competing interests like Star Wars. And then Godzilla’s 30th birthday party at Rocketships & Accessories happened and I was introduced to the Japanese world of Godzilla.

From that day in 1984 until the shop closed, I went down town to Rocketships almost every weekend. I was blown away by something new on every trip. Japanese Godzilla and Ultraman collectibles filled the store display cases and the shelves. The little money I had was spent on buying the latest Godzilla figures and books.Each item is precious and full of the best memories growing up collecting Godzilla. What I amassed from that amazing shop became the foundation of my Japanese Godzilla collection today. Going to Rocketships was like going to Mandarake in Nakano Broadway. It was a toy store before its time and out of this world.

Out of all my acquisitions the Japanese Godzilla books became most important. They were superior to all my Godzilla magazines published in the U.S. My inability to read the Japanese didn’t stop me from staring at every page and collecting more. The pictures were gold and gave me Godzilla on paper well after he had disappeared from the TV screen. Years later my books became my motivation for studying Japanese.

Monster Catalog in 3D (3D怪獣全集) was one of my favorite books. It was one of two mooks¹ I bought from Rocketships in 1984. They are part of the Asahi Sonorama Fantastic Collection series (ファンタスティックコレクション)². The Monster Catalog was loaded with Godzilla stuff I had never seen before. It documented in detail the construction of a new Godzilla suit. Little did I know, three decades later I would become social media friends with its maker Shinichi Wakasa who is featured in the book. Throughout the mook are amazing model kits from Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Raider, and much more. The blog “Fukuromushi & Kobukuromushi Kaiju Anything Laboratory” describes the mook as so: “An epoch-making book that probably wouldn’t have been so addicted to the world of monster garage kits without seeing this… I’ve seen it so much that it’s worn out… It’s a bible-like mook book that all monster lovers probably have.”³

Mr Hayami created prototypes and kits that Bandai used for the soft vinyl monsters of “The Godzilla Collection” (グレートモンスターシリーズ) and Ultraman figure lines. His name and credit appear in the bottom right corner on the back of Bandai tags (原型:速水仁司). He also created prototypes used for Bandai’s The Tokusatsu Collection (The特撮Collection) model kits and for the Takara Combat Joe Godzilla! His models were the foundation for our Godzilla figure collection.

Mr Hayami’s work can be found in many Japanese publications and advertisements through the years. The Bandai Monster Hand Books (バンダイ 怪獣 The特撮Collection ゴジラ東宝怪獣編), published as a sale promotion for the model series, and Terebi Magazine (テレビマガシン) featured his Kaiyodo Godzilla kits in dioramas. For all these years, I wanted to own Mr Hayashi’s kits, especially the Godzilla 1974 figure. I didn’t know his name and I didn’t knew who made them until recently when I came across his Twitter account (速水仁司 Hayami Hitoshi). Mr. Hayami has been sharing pages from those publications along with their backstories. It has been a pleasure to read the stories of the legendary monster maker.