R.I.P. Kenpachiro Satsuma, 1947-2023

[Benjamin Haines]

Sadly, it's been reported that iconic Heisei Godzilla suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma has passed away at age 76.

https://twitter.com/5KQ4s7lo74vcR1s/status/1735876703921295378
"2023.12.16 10:49 GODZILLA 2nd generation suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma passed away due to interstitial pneumonia. Thank you to everyone for your support"

This one really hurts. I was very fortunate to meet Haruo Nakajima at a convention in 2013, and Tsutomu Kitagawa at a convention in 2017, but now I'll never have a chance to meet Satsuma.

His performances as Hedorah and Gigan in the '70s films left such an impression on me as a kid. The way he brought Godzilla to life is one of the most defining characteristics of the Heisei Series. He shared so much with the Western kaiju fandom with all of his interviews and convention appearances since the '90s. I know that he wrote several books about playing Godzilla that were published in Japan and it would be fascinating to get those translated into English.

Here are archived transcripts of David Milner's three interviews with Satsuma, all translated by Yoshihiko Shibata, from December 1993, July 1994 and December 1995:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150123035025/http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20140419012759/http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum2.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20150123035032/http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm

R.I.P. Kenpachiro Satsuma

[Dai]

One of the greats of suit acting. It takes a special kind of mettle just to be able to stand up to the heat of studio lights under hundreds of pounds of latex, but to give such memorably ferocious and animalistic performances too is on another level. A real loss for kaiju fans everywhere.

This caught me totally off guard. We've lost so many of the showa-era stars, but it hadn't quite sunk in just how long it's been since the heisei series at this point.

[Kailem]

Likewise, this was a terrible surprise to see. I was just thinking about how these past few weeks have been some of the absolutely best for Godzilla *ever*, but now, not so much.

Godzilla 1984 was one of the very first films that got me into Godzilla back in the day. I remember renting it from what was then Ritz Video, the precursor to Blockbuster here, and crying at the end when it seemed like Godzilla died. We only got G'84, Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and Godzilla vs Mothra over here, but Kenpachiro Satsuma's Heisei Godzilla was right up there with Haruo Nakajima for me in terms of defining the classic Godzillas of my childhood, to say nothing of his turns as Hedorah and especially Gigan. He gave so much personality to Gigan in those films.

Even though I was growing up while the Heisei era was going on, and didn't even get to see many of them until the 2000's thanks to DVD imports, I've always considered the Heisei era to be the end of the "classic" era of Godzilla for me (obviously in a different way than I regard the Showa era as classic), with the start of the Millennium series being the beginning of the "modern" era. Satsuma had huge shoes to fill, but he took on the role of movie's greatest monster and really made it his own, with an iconic performance that stood proudly alongside Nakajima's original as defining a newer, but still to me very much classic era of Godzilla.

Very unexpected and very sad. Thanks for all the great memories, Mr. Satsuma. You were one of the greats.

[lhb412]

Satsuma was one of our last bridges to the old days, and a unique bridge between the classic and modern (at least of my lifetime) eras of tokusatsu.

And he had a personality as big as Godzilla!

As with Nakajima, I'm kicking myself for not meeting him at one of his various public appearances. What a treasure. I'd love for his books on suit acting to be officially translated and released in English.