Tiger Mask life-size hand-painted display figure, 183 cm tall

Tiger Mask: The Manga Hero Who Stepped Into Real Life

Tiger Mask life-size hand-painted display figure, 183 cm tall, standing in a yellow tiger hood and cape
A life-size Tiger Mask display figure, 183 cm tall, hand-painted, from the Showa era.

An orphan in a tiger's hood

Tiger Mask began in the January 1968 issue of a Kodansha monthly for boys. The writer was Ikki Kajiwara, already the author of two of the great sports manga of the age, and the artist was Naoki Tsuji. The story moved to the publisher's weekly edition in 1969 and finished in 1971 in its leading boys' weekly. It ran to fourteen collected volumes.

The plot is a fable with a hood on. Naoto Date grows up in an orphanage called Chibikko House. As a boy he wins a fight in front of the tiger cage at a zoo, and is spotted by the Tiger's Den, a secret school that trains orphans to be villains in the ring and takes half of everything they earn. He becomes Tiger Mask, a feared villain on the American circuit, wrestling under the name Yellow Devil. Then he comes home and hears a boy at his old orphanage say he wants to grow up to be a villain like Tiger Mask. Naoto changes sides, gives his money to the children, and spends the rest of the story fighting the assassins the Tiger's Den sends to punish him.

Two touches made the story feel real. Real Japanese wrestlers walked through its pages, among them Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki, and the matches were drawn with the brutality of the real business. And the hero's struggle was about money and loyalty, not magic. A Japanese reading of the manga sets the Tiger's Den, which helps only the orphans who survive its training, against Naoto, who helps every orphan without condition. That argument is the reason the name could later be borrowed for charity.

See also: our glossary of anime, manga and game franchises.

The Yellow Devil on screen

Toei's animation studio adapted the manga for television. The series ran for 105 episodes, from 2 October 1969 to 30 September 1971, on Yomiuri Television and the Nippon Television network. It was the first Japanese television anime to use a tracing machine to transfer drawings onto the cels, a small technical step that sped up the whole industry. The score was by Shunsuke Kikuchi, who would go on to write the music for a generation of hero programmes.

The first episode was called "Yellow Devil", the hero's old villain name. The anime gave more screen time than the manga to real wrestlers, and renamed several foreign ones. It was later shown in Italy as L'Uomo Tigre, and in 2016 Toei put the first episode on its official channel for the studio's sixtieth anniversary.

That villain name still turns up on clothes. The Cropped Heads and Tiger Mask "Yellow Devil" reversible sukajan in black satin uses it, a licensed jacket from the 2010s that wears the hero's dark past on the outside. Look closer: a jacket that reverses is the right garment for a character who changed sides.

See also: the sukajan, born near the American bases.

The doll that kept the anime on air

Tiger Mask arrived at a dangerous moment for Japanese television animation. Since Astro Boy, studios had covered the losses on costly anime series with income from toys and other licensed goods. Then two toy companies that had grown rich on character goods went bankrupt: Marusan in 1968 and Imai Kagaku in 1969. The toy trade decided that characters were a risk, stopped licensing them, and fewer anime series were made. The series' own script writer later recalled that it felt as though television anime might have died.

Tiger Mask broke the spell. The series ran for about two years, a long run for the time, and the Japanese record credits two causes: high ratings, and a soft vinyl doll by Nakajima Seisakusho that sold in great numbers. The doll had a trick. Its tiger hood came off, and underneath was Naoto Date's own face. The licensing income from the series was among the highest of any anime of its day.

The success fed straight into the next great Japanese hero. Kamen Rider, which began in 1971, borrowed several things from Tiger Mask: a masked hero, a runaway from an evil organisation, and a soft vinyl doll whose mask could be removed, the same trick as the Nakajima Tiger Mask. In our reading, that removable hood is one of the small hinges of Japanese toy history.

The Nakajima Seisakusho Tiger Mask soft vinyl figure with removable hood and cape, a first-owner piece is that doll. In 2015 the toy maker Medicom Toy worked with Nakajima on new editions, and the sealed Medicom Toy and Nakajima pair of Naoto Date and Ruriko Wakatsuki gives the hero's unmasked face a companion from Chibikko House.

See also: soft vinyl and the monster boom.

1981: the hood comes to life

A new anime, Tiger Mask II, began on TV Asahi in 1981, and Kajiwara proposed that New Japan Pro-Wrestling, whose matches the same channel broadcast, create a real Tiger Mask. Antonio Inoki chose Satoru Sayama, a young wrestler then working in England. Sayama, born in 1957, had joined New Japan in May 1975 and had wrestled in Mexico and Britain, where he learned the aerial style of lucha libre and the British mat game.

He came home for what was meant to be one match. On 23 April 1981, at the Kuramae Kokugikan, the old sumo hall in Tokyo, he walked out in a hood made by hand by several women on the promotion's staff, out of whatever materials they could gather. It was a little too small and clung to his face. Many traditional fans scoffed at the idea of a cartoon hero in a real ring. His opponent was Dynamite Kid, the English junior heavyweight Tom Billington. Sayama beat him with a German suplex and a style nobody in Japan had seen: kicks from the martial arts, flips from Mexico, holds from Britain.

The one night became a career. Japanese fans called his style fourth-dimension wrestling. On Friday nights at eight, when the matches were broadcast, families waited in front of the television for Tiger Mask, and his cards sold out. The broadcast below, from the promotion's own archive, shows the first match.

This is the night the manga became a man, posted by the promotion on the anniversary of the match. Look closer at the hood: it is the hurried first version, tight to the face, nothing like the gold-trimmed hoods that followed.

See also: our guide to tokusatsu heroes, the masked heroes of the screen.

Twenty-eight months at the top

Sayama's career as Tiger Mask lasted two years and four months. He fought Dynamite Kid again and again, and also Kuniaki Kobayashi, Bret Hart and the original Black Tiger, the English wrestler Mark Rocco in a dark copy of the hero's hood. In May 1982 he became the only man to hold the WWF and NWA junior heavyweight championships at once. A Japanese collection of his matches remembers a bout against Dynamite Kid at Madison Square Garden before more than 22,000 people.

He was never fully at ease with it. He had not become a wrestler to wear a mask, and he wanted the matches to look like real fighting. On 12 August 1983 he announced his retirement, at the height of his fame and holding two championships; his last match had come on 4 August. In 1985 he founded Shooto, one of the first mixed martial arts organisations, and taught a generation of fighters. The boy's hero had become a teacher of real combat.

The first Tiger Mask fanged early-type hood by YN, a signed and numbered Weekly Pro Wrestling issue with papers belongs to the world of ring hoods that grew around him: replicas of each design he wore, made by the craftsmen who sew real masks.

See also: our authenticity guarantee, for how we check signatures and papers.

Five wrestlers behind one hood

The hood outlived the man. In 1984 the rival promotion All Japan Pro Wrestling acquired the rights to the character and gave it to Mitsuharu Misawa, who wrestled as Tiger Mask until May 1990, when he pulled off the hood in the middle of a match and fought as himself. New Japan's Koji Kanemoto became the third Tiger Mask in 1992, and lost the hood to Jushin Thunder Liger in a mask-against-mask match in 1994. From 1995 the name passed to a wrestler trained and endorsed by Sayama himself, Tiger Mask IV.

In October 1997, at an event marking ten years since Kajiwara's death, four Tiger Masks shared one tag match at the Ryogoku Kokugikan. Collectors who say "first Tiger Mask" mean Sayama, and the label matters: most hoods and dolls are made for one generation.

See also: our glossary of Japanese creators and personalities.

Reading a Tiger Mask piece

Tiger Mask collecting has three shelves: the toys of the anime years, the ring culture of the 1980s, and the clothing and display pieces made since. The table sorts the families we see most often.

The 183 cm life-size Tiger Mask display figure in hand-painted FRP is the largest of these. Figures like it once stood outside shops and at exhibitions, and our guide to life-size shop display figures explains how they were made and why so few survive. The grading terms for every family are in our glossary of toy terms.

See also: Showa toys, era by era.

Naoto Date's Christmas

The first gift came on 25 December 2010: ten satchels, five black wrapped in blue ribbon and five red wrapped in pink, left at the child guidance centre in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture. The satchel, the stiff leather randoseru, is built to last a child's six years of primary school, and for a family without money it is the hardest thing to provide. On 1 January 2011 a guard at the Odawara centre in Kanagawa found six more, with a note that ended: "May the Tiger Mask movement live on."

By 11 January 2011 more than a hundred gifts in Tiger Mask's name had been reported across Japan, to a country with about 580 children's homes caring for some 30,000 children. People gave satchels, toys, food and money, and some signed with the names of other orphan heroes from manga. The story ran in newspapers around the world.

The first donor stayed anonymous for six years. In December 2016 he announced that he would show his face at an event at Korakuen Hall in Tokyo marking thirty-five years since the first real Tiger Mask. He was 43, from Oita, and had lost both parents young; he had gone to primary school without a randoseru, carrying his things in a shopping bag. By then he had met Sayama and joined the wrestler's foundation for children leaving care. The man in the hood and the man behind the name had found each other.

See also: why Japan is so cool, and what that coolness is for.

The masks that followed

Tiger Mask set a pattern. In 1989 New Japan did it again with Jushin Liger, a wrestler dressed as a superhero from a manga by Go Nagai; Liger debuted at the Tokyo Dome on 24 April 1989 and became one of the great junior heavyweights. In 2016 the promotion announced a new anime, Tiger Mask W, which began on TV Asahi in October that year and ran for 38 episodes, with real wrestlers again in the story.

The character has also returned to film. A live-action Tiger Mask opened in Japan in November 2013, starring Eiji Wentz as Naoto Date, and in November 2023 an Italian studio announced an international live-action film with Kodansha. Game designers have paid tribute too: the masked King of the Tekken series and an early concept for Street Fighter II both owe him a debt.

See also: Medicom Toy's Be@rbrick, from vinyl to vault, the modern maker of Tiger Mask editions.

Opinion: the hero belongs to the children

This section is our opinion. Wrestling fans will say that Tiger Mask's legacy is Sayama: the athlete who mixed Mexico, Britain and the martial arts, and who later helped build mixed martial arts in Japan. They have a strong case. Without the 1981 debut, the character would be one more Showa manga hero on a reprint shelf.

We think the deeper legacy is the gift. A character written to argue that orphans deserve help without conditions was taken at his word, forty years later, by strangers with no connection to wrestling, publishing or toys. No campaign planned it and no company owned it. The fairest view on the other side is that anonymous gifts cannot replace steady public support for children in care, and the first donor himself seemed to agree when he came forward to ask for wider support for young people leaving care. We agree with him. But the gifts showed something no ratings figure can: that a Japanese manga could teach a moral and that readers would act on it.

See also: what happened to Cool Japan.

Where the record differs

Tiger Mask has been retold by manga historians, wrestling writers and journalists, and a few dates disagree. Where accounts differ, we print both.

Our reading

Tiger Mask is a story that keeps escaping its frame. A manga hero became a doll whose hood came off, and the doll helped keep Japanese television animation alive. The doll's hero became a real wrestler in a hood sewn by hand, and the wrestler changed the ring. The wrestler's real name in the story became a signature on satchels left at the doors of children's homes. At each step something made for children was taken seriously by adults.

That is why a Tiger Mask piece is never just a toy or a souvenir. The Nakajima doll is a hinge of toy history, the ring hood is a record of a sporting revolution, and the sukajan carries a villain's name that the hero left behind. Collect one and you hold a chapter. Collect several and you hold the whole fable.

That is our reading.

Answered plainly

Who created Tiger Mask?

The writer Ikki Kajiwara and the artist Naoki Tsuji, in a Kodansha boys' magazine, from the January 1968 issue.

Who was the first real Tiger Mask?

Satoru Sayama, who debuted on 23 April 1981 at the Kuramae Kokugikan in Tokyo against Dynamite Kid, and wrestled as Tiger Mask until August 1983.

What was the Tiger Mask movement?

A wave of anonymous gifts to children's homes signed with the hero's real name, Naoto Date. It began with ten school satchels on Christmas Day 2010 in Maebashi.

Why does the Nakajima doll matter?

Its removable hood, with Naoto Date's face beneath, made it a hit that helped the first anime run for two years, and the trick was borrowed for the first Kamen Rider dolls.

Can you find a particular Tiger Mask piece for me?

Yes. Tell us the doll, hood or generation you want and our Tokyo team will look for it in Japan, with maker marks and papers checked before anything is sent.

Further reading

References

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