Shinohara Masaki

Shinohara Masaki was a Japanese supporting actor and suitmation performer at Toho.

Shinohara served as a reliable extra and bit-part actor in numerous prominent Toho productions stretching from the early 1950s well into the 1970s. For genre fans, he is most notable for his suit actor roles, having portrayed a terrifying mushroom man in Honda Ishirô’s Matango (1963) and, crucially, stepping in to portray Rodan in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), becoming the third suit actor to play the monster, after Nakajima Haruo and Uruki Kôji.

He retired from acting in 1971 and successfully transitioned into a completely different career, spending decades managing a private taxi service. He passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-one.