Naomi Takebe

Naomi Takebe produced Kamen Rider Gaim, and in a September 2013 interview with Hyper Hobby, she laid out how a series built around a Sengoku-era theme ended up expressed through fruit. The starting point, she said, was a decision to break from the two-Rider format that had defined every series since Kamen Rider W, in favor of a larger roster with more room for factional conflict. She compared the idea to large idol groups and sports teams, structures built around numbers rather than a single lead figure.

The production settled early on Sengoku-period Japan as a stylistic core, with each Rider drawing on that era’s imagery, but a large cast of similarly armored warriors created a practical problem: differentiating them visually. Bandai’s suggestion of fruit as an organizing theme solved it, and Takebe said it was chosen specifically because no Rider series had used fruit as a motif before. Research into which fruits tested best with children put orange at the top, ahead of banana, grape, and melon, which is how Gaim’s lead Rider ended up wearing an orange rather than any of the others.

Some of the show’s supporting design language came from elsewhere on the team, even as Takebe held the overall format together. The “nut” designation applied to stronger or more antagonistic Riders, including Kamen Rider Gridon, came from head writer Gen Urobuchi, who wanted a ranking system comparable to the Cell Medal and Core Medal hierarchy in Kamen Rider OOO. The “lock” concept behind the Lockseeds grew out of language the design team kept circling during development. Phrases like “opening a new world” and “unlocking potential” recurred in early meetings, before the team settled on a mechanism the franchise hadn’t used before.

Takebe was also the one who brought Urobuchi onto the writing staff. The two had exchanged messages online before meeting through a mutual friend, and by the time he formally joined, Gaim’s visual design was largely finished; his own contribution, once aboard, included proposing the show’s dance-crew factions. Casting followed a similarly unconventional path. Lead actor Gaku Sano was given the role of Kouta Kazuraba without a formal audition, identified early as the right fit given how demanding Urobuchi’s scripts were likely to be. Director Ryuta Tasaki, a veteran of early Heisei-era Kamen Rider, was brought on for a specific reason: Takebe wanted the production to return to that period’s tone while still building something new under a head writer who came from anime rather than tokusatsu.

Takebe’s producing career extended beyond Gaim itself. A March 2013 report on a planned film adaptation of Sea Jetter Kaito, a local hero from the city of Ishinomaki built from a discarded Shotaro Ishinomori design, credited her as co-producer alongside Jun Hikasa, and listed her prior work on Kamen Rider Kiva, Kamen Rider OOO, and Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters. The Sea Jetter Kaito project itself had an unusual history: Ishinomori originally sketched the character for a hero called Iron Devil Shadol, that concept was scrapped and reworked into a different character entirely, and the Ishinomori Manga Museum revived the abandoned design in 2004, giving it the Sea Jetter Kaito name and a modest following of its own. The film was set to screen at the museum starting March 23, directed by Hidenori Ishida, whose earlier credits included Kamen Rider Kuuga and Kamen Rider Ryuki, and written by Riku Sanjo.

Across both projects, the throughline in how Takebe described her own work was structural rather than creative in the narrowest sense. She set the format-level decisions, from roster size to which motif would carry the show’s visual identity, tested those decisions against real data where she could (the fruit research being the clearest example), and then handed the room to specialists to execute inside the framework she had built. On Gaim, that meant an anime writer given creative latitude within a design already largely fixed, and a director chosen specifically to anchor tone rather than build the show’s visuals from the ground up. On Sea Jetter Kaito, the same instinct showed up differently: a producing partnership with Jun Hikasa on a project reviving someone else’s abandoned design, rather than a concept built from scratch in-house.