Ryuta Tasaki

Ryuta Tasaki directed Kamen Rider Gaim, joining the production after finishing work on Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger and Nintama Rantarou. By the time he came aboard, the show’s samurai, fruit, and lock motifs were already fixed, and so was Gen Urobuchi as writer. In an interview with the Japanese magazine Uchusen, Tasaki walked through what he inherited from the production and what he built on top of it.

The dancing woven through Gaim, an unusual choice for a Kamen Rider series, was Urobuchi’s idea rather than his own. Tasaki said it was designed to track the cast’s coming-of-age across the run: cool spectacle for younger viewers in the early episodes, giving way to more mature concerns as the characters aged out of it. The rival dance teams doubled as a stand-in for the Warring States period the series drew on more broadly, with Rider powers settling disputes that the show’s adult characters initially wrote off as children playing with toys.

Asked about Urobuchi, new to Kamen Rider at the time, Tasaki described the opening episodes as deliberately simple and accessible for newcomers, then characterized the larger structure in blunter terms: “all just a clever trap,” familiar-looking setup built to be dismantled by twists planted later in the run. He credited producer Naomi Takebe’s push to move the show away from the two-Rider format that had defined recent seasons like Kamen Rider W, a shift Urobuchi, a longtime fan of Kamen Rider Ryuki, was also eager to make. The explicit goal, Tasaki said, was pulling the series back toward its early Heisei roots. He pointed to specific callbacks planted in the first two episodes: Gaim’s oversized Rider roster echoing Ryuki, and its corporate antagonist, Yggdrasill, standing in for Faiz’s Smart Brain.

On the design side, Tasaki was candid that Baron’s banana-themed helmet ears caught him off guard when he first saw them, in a franchise where he said he’d already been surprised by unconventional designs going back to Ryuki and Faiz. He described his own job in practical terms: making a design work in motion, regardless of how strange it looked on paper. He credited suit performer Gaku Takaiwa’s movement specifically for selling looks that might not have landed otherwise. Among the early Rider cast, he singled out Gridon, armored around a persimmon motif and wielding a small hammer, as a design he expected adult viewers to warm to as much as the staff already had.

The interview closed on a different production entirely. Tasaki looked ahead to The Fateful Sengoku Movie Battle, the follow-up to Kamen Rider × Super Sentai × Space Sheriff: Super Hero Taisen Z, celebrating the fifteenth Heisei Rider series with all fourteen previous Riders returning as “Warrior God” variants, part of it filmed on Toei’s standing Edo-period set in Kyoto.

Tasaki’s connection to the franchise’s dance-team predecessor surfaced again the following spring. A report from a fan event marking the second season of Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger, the tokusatsu parody series he had directed before moving to Gaim, confirmed his return in that role. He appeared alongside the returning cast as the production unveiled a new opening theme, “Akibaranger Season Two,” and previewed a reworked edit of the second teaser video covering part of the first episode. The event laid out where the story picked up: roughly nine months after the defeat of the villainous Stema Otsu Corporation, Akagi had gone back to an unglamorous life as a deliveryman, only to discover the team’s makeshift MMZ-01 device was now being sold as an official toy, the DX AkibaLaser. The cast lineup shifted too. Luna Iwashimizu, an aspiring idol, joined as the new Blue, and Yumeria returned as Yellow, no longer working as a businesswoman, while a new villain, General Two, played by Ryo Horikawa, led an empire whose name combined organizations from half a dozen earlier Sentai shows. None of that detail came from Tasaki directly; it was the surrounding context of the event he appeared at, not his own remarks. His presence there, roughly seven months before the Gaim interview above, places him mid-transition between the two productions: one dance-parody series wrapping its return, the other, built by a very different writer around a strikingly similar rival-teams structure, already taking shape.