Kojima interpreted the handover between Kamen Rider 1 and 2 as a…

At the Kamen Rider 40th Anniversary Exhibition, Kojima photographed his son beside a modern Rider while Kojima posed next to Rider 1 and shouted the command to transform. Inside, parents and children divided by generation: Kojima became so absorbed by Ishinomori’s still-stained artist’s palette and an original manga page that he unintentionally let go of his son’s hand, and the boy went on with the younger families to the display of TV show costumes.

Kojima noted that in the manga Kamen Rider does not use the mask to hide a secret identity but to conceal the scars of his cyborg surgery, scars that reappear with rage or sorrow. He interpreted the hero as an artificial monster who faces total isolation and who draws from that solitude the purpose to fight when no one else can defend peace and nature.

Kojima spent thirty-five years wondering what his father had been trying to tell him with his look before dying. Reading Hoshiyadori no Koe made him understand that he had not lost his father completely: he carried his father’s voice inside him and heard it as an instruction to look after others. He connected that revelation to a future moment when he himself would pass his memes to his children and they would understand his look.

Kojima began by identifying with the climber Joji Habu, who selects dangerous, untried routes and turns into reality what no one else has done. However, the cameraman Makoto Fukamachi’s monologue shook him: Kojima recognized that his older self was no longer the pioneering leader but the one who follows behind, returns alive, and goes back to the mountain again and again because it is all he can do.

“We're both pretty close to each other in that the movie business has been near and dear to our hearts. The only difference is that he's been able to keep making adventures this whole time.”