Mark Musashi

Mark Musashi built a career in Japanese tokusatsu and action television as a stuntman before moving into acting roles. He is most visible as the suit performer for Kamen Rider 2 in the 2005 film Kamen Rider the First and as Kodama in the first season of GARO, and he later played Duke Watari in Cutey Honey the Live. In an interview conducted mid-career, he laid out the unlikely route that took him from a small town in Maine to the Japanese stunt industry, and years later he returned to discuss that same series as a guest on a podcast covering one of its feature films.

Musashi is half-Japanese, half-American, born in Japan but raised in Buckfield, Maine, a nearly all-white rural town. He said growing up there made him more conscious of his Japanese heritage rather than less, an inversion of the usual assumption about assimilation. His first exposure to tokusatsu came on a childhood family trip to Japan, where he caught broadcasts of Bioman and Space Sheriff Shaider, genre television unavailable to him back home. Shaider stuck with him despite its reputation as the weakest entry in the Space Sheriff series; he credited it directly as the reason he got into martial arts and stunt work in the first place.

Formal training came later, at Dartmouth College, where he studied East Asian Languages and Literatures with a Drama minor. In his senior year he traveled to China with fellow members of the Dartmouth Kung Fu Club, training for five months under a teacher connected to actor Yu Cheng-Hui. He called it the most physically grueling stretch of his life, and the point where martial arts stopped being a hobby and became something closer to a discipline he’d carry forward.

The break into the industry came sideways, through a Wacoal underwear commercial that needed motion-capture work. A demonstration with the Tokyo Wushu Team landed him the booking, and the shoot led to an introduction to action coordinator Mitsuo Abe, who invited him to train with the AAC Stunts team. AAC was small, eight members total with six based in Japan, and Musashi singled out fellow stuntman Namihei Koshige, frequently cast as a female Ranger, as one of the most talented performers he worked alongside there.

On the craft itself, Musashi described a specific philosophy for suit acting: playing a transformed character as the same person underneath rather than swapping in a more “invincible” persona once the mask goes on. He applied that approach across GARO, where the role of Saijima Koga rotated through seven different actors over the course of the show. He pointed to one sequence in particular as work he was proud of: a wire-heavy fight against Zero in the series’ seventh episode, which took roughly two and a half days to film and left him collapsed from dehydration at one point. He said it frustrated him to see that kind of physical work dismissed by some viewers as “just CGI,” a comment that gets at a recurring tension for suit performers whose labor is often invisible by design.

Landing the role of Kamen Rider 2 in Kamen Rider the First came down to something more mundane than casting chemistry: build. AAC had few performers with the right height and frame for the character, and Musashi happened to fit it. He said he’d watched several modern Kamen Rider series before the film, naming Ryuki as his favorite, followed by Agito. During production he met Hassei Takano, the film’s human lead, along with co-stars Masaya Kikawada and Eiji Wentz, and said he stayed in touch with Takano afterward.

Asked about his ambitions beyond stunt work, Musashi said acting had always been the deeper passion behind the physical training, not a secondary goal that grew out of it. He was weighing a future attempt at working in the United States at the time of the interview, despite the career reset that move would likely require after years of established standing in Japan.

Nearly a decade later, Musashi resurfaced on a podcast episode reviewing Soukoku no Maryu (Demon Dragon of the Blue Cry), a GARO feature film, joining as a guest host alongside panelists Keith Justice, IgaDevil, and Vangelus. The conversation ranged from the Garo novels that predated the film, including one that introduced a worldwide tournament of knights, to how the film’s fight choreography compared against earlier set-piece fights from the series, such as the Garo/Dark Garo confrontation on the Yami train. For Musashi, it was a chance to revisit the same production experience from his earlier interview from the other side of the microphone, discussing the stunt work rather than performing it.