tomohisa yuge and the case of the stolen bedroom

as must be obvious by this point, I’m a big fan of kamen rider – and when you’ve seen 35+ seasons of a show, you’re bound to have some favorites. setting aside the showa seasons as their own category (since to me, they’re just incomparably good), I’m particularly fond of the seasons from the early to mid 2000s. there’s just something about them that clicks, y’know? 

one season in particular that has permanently burrowed its way into the rotten apple of my brain is the 2002 season kamen rider ryuki, the twelfth installment of the franchise. now, I could go on and on about the protagonists or the plot – but I’m not here to sell you on ryuki. no, today I’m here to solve a mystery… one involving manga, magazines, and one very particular teen model… was this my toughest case yet? read on to find out!

among the pretty hefty cast of ryuki, you might think that this mystery involves one of the two main leads – perhaps you might even assume it would be a secondary character. but if you know me, you’ll know that when a clue gets stuck in my craw, it doesn’t matter how close a character is to the lead – so long as they’re close to the truth. 

…which is all a bunch of fake hard-boiled nonsense, since – if you’ve seen the show – you’ll know that this character is a fan favorite, so it’s really not that surprising that I would find myself preoccupied with solving a mystery involving him! Goro Yura – devoted secretary, bodyguard, and live-in help to Shuichi Kitaoka (aka Kamen Rider Zolda) – pretty much slots into the secondary cast category, despite not being a kamen rider himself (at least, mostly). I can also happily report that his actor, Tomohisa Yuge, takes on several future roles in later seasons of kamen rider, one of which in particular I will be talking about in excruciating detail for one of my ongoing projects sometime in the future. 

while perusing Yuge’s japanese wikipedia page for any fun facts (as any fan would do), I spotted… an unusual citation. apparently, back in the ’90s, the gentleman in question was once a teen model for the magazine Tokyo Street News. as the story goes, at some point he was featured in an article where his bedroom was photographed… at which point, unbeknownst to Yuge, a popular manga author (namely, Masanori Morita) actually copied the photograph to serve as the bedroom for one of the characters in his series ROOKIES. like I’ve mentioned previously, tracing or copying images without permission can have pretty big consequences in japan – and this situation is no different. if what I was seeing was true, then it seemed like the author later acknowledged the plagiarism (or whatever word is appropriate in this situation), and ended up giving Yuge a cameo appearance in the manga as a peace offering. 

now this… this I had to see. and if you only focus on the last part of the story – where Yuge appears in the manga – it’s actually not that hard to find, given that wikipedia says it’s in volume 5, and the author himself has even posted the original manuscript pages from the incident:

(read right to left – yuge cameos in the bottom right panel of the left-hand page)

what intrigued me far more, however, was the original bedroom picture. where did that feature in the manga? and what were the original article and photographs like? this was the real mystery that attracted me, and it was a case I planned to crack. 

so, I of course went about cracking it in the most roundabout way I could. rather than, say, reading the manga and finding what I suspected to be the bedroom, I instead opted… to try and find the magazine first, what I now suspect to be potentially the most arduous way (if not costly, if it came down to it), as well as the least likely to give up any clues on a preliminary investigation… but in the end, I love primary sources, and I figured that at the very least I would find some fun pictures of Yuge as a teen! 

so, to narrow down my options, the first thing I tried to consider was what timeframe the magazine issue I was looking for may have come out in:

• I’m unsure when he started modeling, but Tomohisa Yuge was born in 1980 and graduated from the publication in 1998, at age 18 –  therefore, any issues past 1998 were less likely to include him (if at all)   
• the magazine ran from 1995 -2002, but only became a monthly magazine in 1998, so there’s limited issues to look through – even if he started modeling from the first issue, the potential number of issues he was in is actually closer to half as much as I initially suspected
• the manga ROOKIES only started in 1998 – so while it’s possible that the author referenced an older issue of the magazine, it’s far likelier that he was checking out whatever was up-to-date at the time (for the sake of trends or whatever)

seeing all the various overlapping possibilities, I decided to work my way backwards through the 1998 issues of the magazine until I spotted something interesting. for instance, I found out that Yuge was still in the magazine until at least the november ’98 issue, and that he was on the cover (and looking great) in both the may and june ’98 issues: 

moving backwards like this, I finally started to spot some clues… in one listing for the july ’98 issue, I saw some pages that looked like they were models in their own rooms (including what appeared to be a young Satoshi Tsumabuki?) – I also spotted Yuge in some of the crowd shots, so he was at the very least in this issue: 

now that I had my lead, I narrowed down my focus to searching for listings of this particular issue, just to see any other images there might be. introducing rooms could be a regular feature across multiple issues for all I knew! but then – I stopped dead in my tracks. bingo: 

but I couldn’t celebrate just yet – that was certainly Tomohisa Yuge, in what certainly appeared to be his bedroom… but it might not be the image that was used in the manga. now it was time for me to do the far more logical step of actually reading the manga, and searching for any likely bedrooms – but with the magazine page now as my guide, I felt far more confident in what I was looking for. and finally… I cracked it:

the image appears in the 4th volume, showing one of the main characters in “his” bedroom during a flashback. it’s unmistakably the same shot of Yuge on his bed, and boy was I glad to have found it.

case closed…right? well, see – the thing is, that magazine image is part of a two page spread… the other half of which wasn’t featured in the listing I found it on. and, I couldn’t read the text to see what potentially delightful and/or crass things a teen Yuge might have had to say for himself. wouldn’t it be a shame to leave things unfinished? didn’t I want to see this through to the end..? 

so of course, I bought the magazine.

what did I find, you might ask – and was it worth it? well, lemme tell ya – it was worth every penny. mysterious paintings… a faceless mother… haunted dolls?! tune in next time to further unravel this sordid tale of depravity!