Hiroko Sakurai

Hiroko Sakurai played Akiko Fuji, a member of the Science Special Search Party, across the original 1966 Ultraman series. She spoke about the role at Monsterpalooza 2013 in Burbank, California, sharing a packed panel with fellow original cast members Susumu Kurobe and suit actor Bin Furuya during the convention’s April 12 to 14 run.

Sakurai’s route to the role wasn’t direct. She told the audience she auditioned for Ultra Q, the tokusatsu series that preceded and set up Ultraman, twice before finally landing a part, and it was that second audition that put her on the path to playing Fuji. That’s a notably different account from Kurobe’s, who said on the same panel that Toho and Tsuburaya staff approached him directly for the role of Hayata rather than having him audition at all, a small but telling difference in how the two leads ended up on the same show.

Asked to name a favorite episode, Sakurai chose “Jamila,” the story of an astronaut who returns to Earth transformed into a kaiju. It’s a pick that lines up with Furuya’s own account from the same panel: he performed the fight as Ultraman in that specific episode, and said afterward that it affected him enough that he was crying under the mask when Jamila was finally destroyed on screen. Sakurai naming the same episode as her favorite, decades later and independently of Furuya’s comment, points to a story that clearly landed with more than one member of the cast at the time.

Sakurai also joined Kurobe and Furuya in describing what shooting the series actually involved, week to week, in the mid-1960s. Production recorded picture without sound, so the full cast looped their dialogue in afterward, and a typical two-episode block took seven to ten days given the equipment and budget available at the time. Those are small logistical details, but they’re the kind of specifics that rarely survive in the finished footage itself, and on this occasion they came directly from someone who was on set for the shoot.