Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider

Episode 7

We've known for a while that Nakao admired Shocker rather than Kamen Rider—hence why he started the “Shocker Robberies” in the first place. However, there had to be something that made him come to think that way—and that's what this episode is about.

Nakao, much like Tojima, was raised mostly by a single parent and found escape in his life through Kamen Rider. However, unlike Tojima, whose mother worked long hours at an honest job to make ends meet, Nakao's father opted to risk it all on a dream. This got him indebted to the yakuza and forced him to abandon his son while being basically enslaved.

Yet, when all this went down, no hero showed up to rescue Nakao. He learned in that moment that it is the bad guys who win in the real world. Thus, to win, he would become a bad guy, be that pretending to be Shocker on the playground or joining the mob in his adult life as an enforcer. It's a tragic story and one that serves as a dark mirror for our heroes—especially those like the Shimamura brothers. Their tragedy taught them the opposite lesson—that if there were no heroes, they would become the heroes instead.

On the more meta-textual side of this episode, with this week's episode, one thing became clear: this show has left me completely unbalanced as a viewer. What I mean by this is that, with almost every show I watch, I get a sense of the tone of what things are likely to happen and which are not. However, with Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, things are so crazy, this is basically impossible. Things switch from humorous to over-the-top on a whim.

What I am getting at is, this whole episode, I was waiting for Spider Man to come out of nowhere to murder Nakao and his motley crew of yakuza thugs for knowing too much. As we've seen before in the Shimamura siblings' backstory, Shocker is more than happy to kill anyone (other than, perhaps, children) who makes Shocker stand out—be that combatants or normal human witnesses. Transforming over and over again, walking around transformed in public, and getting into a yakuza turf war while transformed—yeah, I was almost certain that Nakao was already at the end of his second life.

In the end, the only reason he might be spared that fate is because of how un-shocker-like his actions were. No one would expect a Shocker minion in full costume to save a simple food truck owner from yakuza thugs. From this, you wouldn't suddenly believe Nakao is a member of a secret evil organization hell-bent on world domination; you'd think that he is a cosplay crimefighter, inspired by the Kamen Rider cosplayer crimefighters. In other words, his actions have inadvertently made Shocker less likely to be considered real.

All that said, I suspect that Nakao will be getting a beating at best and a total reprogramming at worst—we'll just have to find out next week.

Rating:

Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.