The underrated tale of Tiger Boy

When Sōji Yamakawa was about twenty four, his original Tiger Boy story was launched to great fanfare in the streets of Japanese cities. Unluckily, that original version was a propaganda piece for the infamous Japanese occupation of Manchu lands during the early Showa period. 

In order to reveal the historical context behind the first Tiger Boy story, three currently mainland Chinese states of the far northeast were once in a puppet state ruled by the deservedly infamous imperial Japanese military. No wonder why it might have stopped running when Pearl Harbour came along! 

In the early post war years, seminal Kamishibai artist-historian Kōji Kata (1918-98) made a retelling of pre-war Tiger Boy, but only for a brief time since it’s not a totally official one.  

Near the end of October 1955, a new Tiger Boy story launched on the infamous Sankei Shimbun newspaper, but only lasted for over three years up until May 1959. Nonetheless, although it hasn’t been reprinted since the 1960s and should’ve been reprinted by Kadokawa Shoten in the 1980s, it is nonetheless much better known than its eponymous predecessor, even in Japan. Both strip and book versions of the postwar story are known to senile Japanese geeks, even though the former format decays more often. 

Its first film is likely an unofficial sequel with some Jungle Jim and Kenya Boy elements, created by the late M.P. Shankar for a Spring 1969 release. Named Kadina Rahasya, such a memorable piece of bad research starred the legend himself and then-upstarts Yusuf Khan and Tiger Prabhakar as three different characters influenced by their Japanese counterparts. Within the next sixteen years, the film itself spawned a video game-inspired sequel named Kadina Raja, thanks to the long term success of the classic Sandalwood Temple films, themselves M.P. Shankar’s best known works outside of India. 

 

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