Streets of Hope

What're Japan's superteams like?

"You might as well ask what they're not like, I'd say. For starters, one of the unique points of superhero work in Japan is the way it mingles with the Idol Group culture. Half of their work is staying on call for everything between last year's incursions to more everyday cases of superhuman crime, and the other half is usually spent on tour, signing autographs arranging sponsorships with brands or picking at other disciplines for the purposes of on-stage exhibition. Song, dance, complex Veils or visual illusions standing in for common VFX - that sort of stuff. The seventies saw Japan win big with the birth of the tokusatsu genre, and that kind of viewership's never really gone down for the bigger content providers like Nippon TV or SNK. Add nanobots and magic and you're looking at Ultraman and Guyver knockoffs. The Super Sentai trend followed right afterwards and hasn't let up since, to the point where Japan's one of the few spots where you'll still find teams putting a focus on uniform designs. South Korea's not far behind, with one of their superteams being comprised of gifted K-Pop stars.

Japan's sentais tend to be a little spread out, thematically. Inner-city groups tend to involve high-schoolers all covered in damage-mitigation wards, while more suburban areas are a little more diverse. A few kami assembled their own team out in Kansai, and one of these teams is led by a distant cousin of Shen Long's, Ryujin. You're liable to at least hear of him, once Watatsumi starts shaking things up in Chinatown."