Yutaka Kobayashi

Yutaka Kobayashi plays Kumon Kaito, Kamen Rider Baron, in Kamen Rider Gaim, a role built around a fruit motif he happens to personally dislike. In an interview with Hyper Hobby, he talked candidly about the mismatch: Baron’s entire design is organized around a banana, and Kobayashi doesn’t much care for them.

The casting conversation, he said, went through producer Naomi Takebe directly, rather than being left for him to sort out on his own once filming started. She walked him through the design in person and spent roughly twenty minutes checking whether he was actually comfortable with it before moving forward. Kobayashi traced his aversion to a specific bad experience eating bananas during a marathon, and said he had treated getting past it since as a kind of running personal challenge, something to work on rather than something to simply avoid on set. He joked that he still checks every new script first, before anything else, to see whether an on-camera banana scene is coming, a habit that suggests the challenge was still ongoing at the time of the interview rather than fully resolved.

The interview also surfaced a near-miss earlier in his career. Kobayashi had auditioned for the lead role in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and made it all the way to the final round before turning it down over a scheduling conflict with another job. Ryota Ozawa was cast instead, and Kobayashi said the two are frequently told they resemble each other, a comparison he seemed to find more amusing than not. He described Kumon Kaito as close to his own opposite in temperament: a character driven by a hunger for power who reads as arrogant on the surface, not a natural fit for his own personality by his own account. Part of what drew him to Kamen Rider as a franchise in the first place, he said, was its reputation as a launching point for young actors’ careers. That reputation mattered enough to him that he had gotten a motorcycle license in preparation before he had even landed the role, betting on the genre before he had any specific part lined up.

On the character’s physical design, Kobayashi credited a deliberate collaboration with suit actor Eitoku: the two coordinated to keep Baron’s fighting style and transformation pose simple, matching the character’s cocky, understated attitude rather than building something showier. That restraint, he said, helped him look past the banana motif almost entirely once filming actually began, a production-level choice that worked alongside, rather than instead of, the earlier conversation with Takebe.

Kobayashi’s connection to the role resurfaced years later in an unrelated context. In January 2018, he was announced as a torchbearer representing Japan at the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. The announcement itself came through the website of BOYS AND MEN, the J-pop group Kobayashi belongs to and first made his name with, known for hit singles including “Boymen Ninja” and “Wanna be!” It was through that group, not through his Kamen Rider work directly, that the torchbearer news reached the public. The timing put the announcement into an unusually charged moment: it landed amid friction between Japan and South Korea over an official PyeongChang Olympics map that had omitted Japan entirely, an omission organizers called accidental only after Japan’s Sports Agency demanded a correction. Japan competed in the Games as scheduled regardless, held February 9 through 25 that year.

Taken together, the two appearances sketch a performer whose relationship to Kamen Rider Baron ran on two very different tracks. One was private and almost comic: a negotiation with a fruit he didn’t like, worked out with a producer willing to spend twenty minutes making sure he was on board before he ever put the suit on. The other was public and long-running: a career built partly on the visibility the role gave him, one that eventually carried him to an Olympic torch relay nearly five years after the Hyper Hobby interview ran.