Bin Furuya

Bin Furuya performed as the suit actor inside Ultraman for the entirety of the character’s original 1966 series, and he later appeared unmasked as Amagi in the follow-up series Ultraseven. Of the three original cast members who spoke on a packed Monsterpalooza 2013 panel in Burbank, California, held April 12 to 14, Furuya was the longest-tenured at Toho and Tsuburaya, the production companies behind the franchise, a contrast to Susumu Kurobe’s account on the same panel of being approached directly for the role of Hayata and Hiroko Sakurai’s account of auditioning for Ultra Q twice before landing her part.

The physical demands of the role, Furuya told the audience, went well beyond standing inside a rubber suit. He described extensive training that included tap dancing and karate, disciplines meant to give him the balance and control the fight choreography required. Away from set, on his own time, he rehearsed Ultraman’s signature moves at home: the Beam pose and the “Shuwatch” jumping stance, each drilled hundreds of times until they became automatic under the mask.

That preparation didn’t spare him from the job’s real hazards. Furuya explained that the actors playing the kaiju he fought typically wore heavier padding than he did inside the Ultraman suit, which left him absorbing most of the impact from every exchange directly through comparatively thin material. Set floors compounded the risk further; exposed nails were among the hazards he had to work around scene to scene, a detail that says as much about 1960s tokusatsu production conditions as it does about the choreography itself.

Much of the physical mismatch traced back to the suit, or rather suits, plural. Furuya said three distinct versions of the Ultraman costume were used across the original series, and he singled out two of them by name for the panel. The first, an “A-suit,” had been built specifically to his own measurements, but it fit poorly enough that it forced him into a hunched posture on camera. A second version, the “B-suit,” fit better and read as more visibly muscular on film, a change that accounts for why Ultraman’s on-screen stance shifts partway through the series, from the stooped early episodes to the more upright figure audiences associate with the character later on.

Asked about his favorite kaiju to fight, Furuya named Red King without hesitation. A separate question, about what became of the original suit he wore, drew a more resigned answer: he said it was likely destroyed, “probably melted,” though he added that a later Ultraman suit was reportedly auctioned off for close to a million yen.

The most personal moment of the panel came when Furuya discussed the “Jamila” episode, in which an astronaut who has mutated into a kaiju returns to Earth. Furuya performed the fight as Ultraman in that episode himself, and he told the Monsterpalooza audience it affected him enough that he was crying under the mask when Jamila was finally destroyed on screen. It’s a small admission, delivered decades after the fact, but it’s a specific enough memory that it clearly hadn’t faded.

Furuya also gave the audience a window into the mechanics of the shoot itself, corroborating what Kurobe and Sakurai described on the same panel. Production recorded picture without sound, he said, which meant the entire cast, himself included, had to loop all of their dialogue after the fact in a separate session. Working within the equipment and budget of the era, a typical two-episode block took seven to ten days to film.

When asked to compare the two very different roles he had played in the franchise, fighting in full costume as Ultraman versus acting unmasked as Amagi in Ultraseven, Furuya didn’t reach for a clean answer. Ultraman, he said, was more fun. But playing Amagi meant his own face was on screen, a trade-off he clearly still weighed as a real one rather than dismissing either side of it outright.