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# Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke

## How could Japan take a man in a suit so seriously? As Gareth Edwards's Godzilla is released, Tim Martin looks at the nuclear nightmares that created the 1954 original

Roar talent: director Ishirô Honda on the set of 1954's Godzilla Photo: retronaut.com

By Tim Martin

11:00AM BST 15 May 2014

Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.

But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.

Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.

Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.

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To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.

Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.

It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.

In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.

Incendiary: the 1954 incarnation of Godzilla (Rex)

But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie? The answer lies with Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Toho Studios in Tokyo, who in early 1954 found himself faced with a professional catastrophe. The film he was preparing, a co-production between the cinema industries in Japan and Indonesia, had just collapsed after the Indonesian government cancelled visas for the main actors.

Tanaka was confronted with a gaping hole in his autumn release schedule, but he had been an admirer of American monster movies since King Kong in 1933 and had recently read about the latest example, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the year before. Could he, he wondered, use a similar conceit to explore Japanese fears about the use of nuclear weapons in the postwar age?

Tanaka hired the science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to produce a script. Initially, this document made no bones about its influences: its Japanese working title translates as Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea. More importantly still, Tanaka began to discuss the project with two other Toho regulars: the special effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya and the director Ishiro Honda.

Each came from an unusual background. Tsubaraya was a mechanical genius who claimed to have built his first film camera as a child. During the war he had also specialised in modelmaking for Japanese propaganda films. So realistic was his re-creation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to legend, that the American occupying forces assumed it was real and sent it home to be used in newsreel footage. Tsubaraya was as fond as Tanaka of the nascent genre of monster cinema in America. In fact, he clung on for some time to the early suggestion that the antagonist in Gojira should be a giant octopus.

Tsubaraya agreed to undertake the vast task of recreating and destroying a model Tokyo in return for equal billing with the film’s director. This was Ishiro Honda, a former colleague of Akira Kurosawa’s who had assisted him on films such as Stray Dog (1949) and directed several features of his own.

READ: Bryan Cranston on Godzilla and Breaking Bad

Honda was an ex-soldier who had survived the firebombing of Tokyo, had been captured and imprisoned in China and, on his return to Japan, had passed through the devastation that the A-bomb had wrought in Hiroshima. “There was,” he later said of the experience, “a feeling that the world was already coming to an end. Ever since I felt that this atomic fear would hang around our necks for ever.”

Honda recruited another screenwriter, Takeo Murata, to develop these ideas in the script. At some point, too, the men changed the title to one less baldly revealing of its American origins. The word Gojira is a portmanteau of two Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira) but it is not clear who decided to apply it to a radioactive dinosaur the size of a mountain. One legend runs that it was the nickname for a burly member of the film’s technical crew, but no one has ever explained exactly who; and, as Honda’s wife later observed, the filmmaking team “loved to joke around with tall stories”.

Planning the destruction of the capital was not without its problems. Two members of the team were detained by security guards as they stood on the roof of a department store, discussing the trail of devastation that Gojira would cut across the city. Back in the studio, Tsubaraya was working on the problem of his lifelike monster.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had already demonstrated the stop-motion animation that would make Ray Harryhausen a legend among 20th-century animators, but Tsubaraya chose to employ a different approach. He built a latex dinosaur suit, fortified with bamboo spars, with jaws that could be snapped at will by the technician inside. He would, he decided, shoot the monster scenes at double speed, then slow them down to give an impression of stomping inertia.

This technique came to be known as "suitmation", and became an integral part of the camp allure of subsequent Godzilla films. The actors playing Godzilla based their lumbering performance on the bears at Tokyo Zoo, but the thick rubber monster suit, combined with the fierce set lighting required to shoot at double speed, placed drastic limits on their performance. Neither could spend more than two minutes inside it, and both fainted frequently from the stress. One of them lost 20lb on the shoot, and found himself pouring a cupful of sweat out of the suit at the end of each take.

With the film well under way, the producers turned their attention to the music. Akira Ifukube, a university professor and one of Japan’s top composers of classical music, was recruited to develop a score that complemented the doom-laden, apocalyptic tone of the film, as well as to provide the noise of the monster’s footfalls and the sound of its roar. He did so by covering a leather glove in rosin and rubbing it across the strings of a double bass, producing an unearthly dissonant howl. Applying an electronic echo to the instrument’s deep sounds created a noise like thundering footsteps.

For Honda and Tanaka, the allegorical aspect of Gojira was paramount: “Mankind had created the Bomb,” as Tanaka later commented, “and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind”. Contemporary references abounded (“First contaminated tuna,” complains one woman to her neighbour on the train, “and now Godzilla”) and the film’s protagonists carried on a running debate about the validity of using violence against violence.

The final lines abandoned indirectness for a cliffhanger warning: “If we keep conducting nuclear tests,” intoned a wise old palaeontologist over the monster’s remains, “another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world.”

The sternness of this message made the film a divisive proposition in Japan. Audiences turned out in droves, attracted by a sinister radio drama that was broadcast on national radio for weeks before the film’s release, but many critics felt that its grim scene-setting and overt references to the Lucky Dragon catastrophe were simply too close to the bone.

Its thematic preoccupation with nuclear energy proved even less acceptable to the American distributors who, after buying the film, began an extensive reshoot and recut for Western markets. Scenes were inserted featuring the actor Raymond Burr (later famous for his roles in Perry Masonand Ironside) as an American reporter covering the destruction of Tokyo, while references to American testing and the dangers of radioactivity were assiduously hacked out.

But this radical intervention would prove strangely influential on the franchise's development. Released as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956, it was panned by critics (one of whom complained of “a dinosaur made of gumshoes and about $20 worth of toy trains”) but a hit with the public, who flocked to see what the posters called its “psychotic cavalcade of electrifying horror”. Bizarrely, this recut version was even exported again to Japan, where audiences turned out once more to watch it with subtitles.

What the public wanted, it seemed, was not grim nuclear allegory but more monster movies, and Toho Studios was there to oblige. In the years that followed, Tanaka found himself presiding over the development of the most famous creature in a new genre of so-called kaiju (monster) movies, battling a cast of bizarre foes in films that soon became a cultish pleasure for children of all ages. In the adventures of Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Son of Godzilla and a host of city-stomping animal freaks, the political philosophising and existential terror of the first film soon became little more than a black-and-white footnote.

William M. Tsutsui, an American historian and Japan expert who has written extensively on Godzilla, explains that the series was at its wackiest and most humorous “in the decades when Japan’s economy was booming. In the Sixties and Seventies, when Japan was growing at 10 per cent a year, the monster became a sort of happy monster, a protective monster, a goofy monster, not a threatening one.”

Despite the giant lizard’s growing international fame, the Godzilla films in the intervening years have appealed more to dedicated fans of monster combat than to mainstream cinemagoers. Toho has insisted on using physical effects rather than CGI, and while Godzilla aficionados may treasure the way in which this limits the films to puppetry and so-called ‘suitmation’, they look fascinatingly low-tech in an age of CGI.

Gareth Edwards's 2014 version of Godzilla

The human cast, meanwhile, seem wearily conscious that their cheesy lines and daft situations are only there as placeholders before the biff-pow gigantomachy resumes, and low receipts have twice forced Toho to call a halt to its flagship series. Godzilla took a nine-year holiday from 1975-1984, and after the disappointing 50th-anniversary special Final Wars in 2004 Toho demolished its main water stage and refused to license or make any more films for a decade.

Recent events, however, suggest that the moment may be right for Godzilla to return. “In the days immediately after the Fukushima disaster in 2011,” Tsutsui observes, “Google hits on Godzilla spiked. People went back to look at the movies, and look at the lessons filmmakers had been bringing forward about the fears of untrammelled nuclear energy and weapons testing.”

Gulliermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, released the next year and dedicated to Ishiro Honda and to Ray Harryhausen, suggested a renewal of the fitful interest in the giant-monster movie that had been stirring in America since the millennium with films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and JJ Abrams’s Cloverfield. (Even Godzilla fans prefer to forget Roland Emmerich’s disastrous attempt to reboot the franchise in 1998 with a giant iguana.)

Ultimately, though, Pacific Rim was more of a eulogy to the tradition than an exercise in political comment. “I want the joy I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank,” del Toro commented. “There’s global anxiety about how fragile the world is, and the safety of citizens, but the film is in another realm.”

This year’s effort, set in the aftermath of a Fukushima-like nuclear meltdown and evoking the panic and disaster of a decade of natural disasters, looks a more serious proposition. As Tsutsui points out, though, the franchise “allows filmmakers to reflect on the tensions and problems with society, and how those can be brought to the surface through a gigantic irradiated lizard walking through a city,” and has, even in its darkest moments, trod a certain line between absurdity and acuity.

It remains to be seen where on this scale Gareth Edwards’s contribution to Godzillan history will fall. But if there’s one thing the franchise has delighted in proving over the past 60 years, it’s that Japan’s most famous monster is always capable of rising again.

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