Big Man Japan (2007)
Shochiku Co., Ltd.
Director: Matsumoto
Hitoshi, Hyakutake Tomo (special effects)
Also discussed:
Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008),
Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster (2009).
As this blog starts to cover films released within the last 15 years, I thought it was worth reiterating that these essays will include plot spoilers, and probably not only in the summary sections. Read on at your own risk!
As Godzilla rolled over and went back to sleep and Gamera took his final bow, a spate of self-mocking Japanese special effects films stepped up to fill the gap. What can I say, it was the late 2000s, suddenly everything was “ironic” (and not in the Alanis Morissette way). This isn’t to say humour was a new thing for kaiju eiga – there’d been openly comedic movies before (King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Dogora (1964), arguably the Tri-Star Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla Final Wars (2004)), plenty of funny moments in mostly straight movies and more than enough movies that left themselves open to mockery. But this was something different – an attempt to mine comedy out of the movies’ premises and tropes themselves.
I should just note up front that these movies have been less widely distributed in English-speaking markets than the average kaiju eiga, and interested readers may struggle to find copies. They do sometimes pop up on YouTube, and even if they’ve been uploaded without Anglo subtitles, YouTube does at least offer an attempt at simultaneous on-screen translation. I’ve used a variety of sources, subtitled and Youtubetitled, and made extensive use of Google Translate in getting what sense I can out of any on-screen Japanese text.
What seems to have opened the floodgates (pun intended) was Sinking of Japan (2006) and its immediate parody, The World Sinks Except Japan (2006). Sinking of Japan was a new adaptation by Toho of a popular 1973 novel by author Komatsu Sakyō that they’d previously adapted as Submersion of Japan (1973). (Note: the Japanese titles of both films and the book are identical – as with the Godzilla movies, I’ve used Toho’s preferred Anglo titles here. Further note: the 1973 movie was released in America with substantial edits and new scenes of actor Lorne Greene as Tidal Wave (1975).) The premise of the story is that a series of massive tectonic upsets causes Japan to sink into the Pacific Ocean and millions of Japanese people find out who their friends are as they try to secure flights out of the country and asylum overseas. The independent production The World Sinks Except Japan, funnily enough, was based on the literary parody of the book, a short story by Tsutsui Yasutaka also published in 1973. I can’t say how similar the full-length film is to the short story, having seen only highlights of one and not read the other, but I’m going to guess it’s a loose adaptation. Although it featured no kaiju (barring a low-grade TV show within the movie), the scenes of geological disaster showed the capabilities of the CGI technology then available to the makers of low budget comedies. It could only be a matter of time before someone produced a full-length parody kaiju movie.
Sure enough, the very next year the Shochiku film studio produced a film that was released to overseas festivals as Big Man Japan.
I would assume Big Man Japan isn’t literally concerned with the state of kaiju eiga in 2007. It’s more likely just a shorthand for late 20th century Japanese culture falling away in the rear-view mirror, and the film is offering a broader comment on how Japan sees itself heading into the 21st century. The outlook seems bleak. The world of Big Man Japan is one that’s been drained of all wonder. The freakiest creatures invade Japan’s cities and are (usually, just about) repelled by a stick-wielding giant in purple underpants, and not only does this not command people’s attention, it can’t even justify a 2am TV spot. Even the guards at the Dainihonjin operational sites don’t seem particularly to care about what they’re doing – the solitary gatekeeper at the first site turns the cameraman away on general principle, but at the second site he’s allowed full access, because why not. Even the Shintō priest conducting the ceremony that precedes Daisatō’s transformation is fine with stopping halfway through and taking it from the top again for the camera’s benefit. At one point, sitting in Daisatō’s living room, the cameraman gets him to clarify that what he fights are “kaiju” – up to then, and for most of the movie, he and the other characters just say “ju”. These aren’t seen as “weird beasts” anymore, just plain “beasts”, no more noteworthy than Daisatō’s cat. They’re merely a nuisance – and so, it would seem, is Daisatō.
This is a tragic comedy about the downtrodden “little guy”, notwithstanding the “little guy” in this case is physically huge. It’s interesting to compare the movie with Hancock (2008), which did something similar a year later with the tropes of the American superhero. In that film, the protagonist shares many superficial traits with Superman, the generic archetype – super-strong, bulletproof, can fly, mysterious origins, wades into emergency situations and “solves” them with excessive shows of force. But he’s an alcoholic living in a trailer park who has to deny himself all meaningful human contact in order to survive. It could be taken as an expression of national self-doubt at a turning point in modern history, and so could Big Man Japan.
The ending, bewildering as it is, could be taken several ways. (Assuming, that is, that you don’t just want to dismiss it as the final absurd straw.) It certainly doesn’t offer a simple conclusion to the film. We might imagine that Daisatō will be redeemed by a final victory, or that at least he’ll learn some important life lesson – but then that wouldn’t be an honest follow-on from what’s gone before. Instead he gets a thorough beating and then stands impotently by while someone else saves the day. Despite having a superpower, he’s ultimately powerless. We might, alternatively, expect that the appearance of his grandfather at the big showdown is going to lead to a cross-generational team-up and some kind of heart-warming family moment. The film has spent a fair bit of time prior to this showing us that Daisatō has a genuinely loving relationship with his grandfather, perhaps the last family member or friend who hasn’t run out on him or screwed him over. Surely there’ll be some kind of payoff to that? But no, the film rejects that option too. The older generation, it seems, doesn’t have the answers (or in this case, the fighting moves) needed to resolve the younger generation’s problems.
Perhaps it’s a metafictional thing. The low production values make the final scene stand out against the rest of the film, but that wasn’t any more “real”, it was just a different kind of fake. The documentary style of most of the film is fraudulent precisely because it’s trying to imitate reality (and let’s not get started on the degree to which documentary or “reality” TV is staged). The Dainihonjin fight scenes are rendered with what, in 2007 and since, looks like second-rate CGI, crawling along the floor of the uncanny valley. It helps to make the rogue monsters unsettling as well as laughable, properly weird, but it’s just as obviously false as the rubber costumes the Super Justice family turn up in. And they’re just as unsettlingly weird in their own way. They seem to inhabit a plane of reality that belongs in a 1960s TV studio. We’ve heard Daisatō pining for the days when his grandfather was kept busy by weekly kaiju attacks, he enjoyed respect and his adventures were broadcast on prime time TV – in other words, the 1960s and 70s when the pulp superhero output of Tsuburaya Productions and their rivals ruled the airwaves. There’s more than a touch of Ultraman about Super Justice and his relatives. Perhaps this is a way of telling Daisatō (and us) to be careful what he wishes for – those “good old days” weren’t as glamourous as he imagines.
Or maybe there’s a political angle. After all, Super Justice may have the look and the trappings of Ultraman, but he’s explicitly an “American Hero” – an on-screen caption tells us so, in large, unmistakeable katakana characters. (Just in case the nuclear family, the way they greet Daisatō with a loud, slow “Nice to meet you!” in accented English, the red-white-and-blue colour scheme and the stripe and star motifs on the costumes didn’t give it away.) Maybe this is a belated comment on Japan’s involvement in America’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, or Japan’s broader relationship with America at this time, with Daisatō pressured into supporting the family’s excessively violent antics even though he’s clearly surplus to requirements.
But one way or another, the ending of this film provokes thought and comment. It might be the most interesting part of Big Man Japan – I’ve certainly found it easier to write about than the rest of the film. Honestly, that’s Big Man Japan’s failing, as cinema and as comedy – plot out its moments of interest, weirdness, humour or just anything happening, and you’ve got an exponential curve upwards. It takes 20 minutes to get to a point where you’re not just watching a social dropout describe how drab his life is. This movie asks a lot of the viewer on the way in, but it does reward patience with... something. There’s something substantial here, even if it’s hard to pin down exactly what that is.
Which is more than can be said for Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit.
The “Monster X” in question isn’t the one that appeared in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) – it’s Guilala, The X from Outer Space (1967), the one Shōwa era daikaiju Shochiku owned the rights to. Kawasaki Minoru, the director behind The World Sinks Except Japan, hooked up with Shochiku to make this knockabout kaiju farce.
Where Big Man Japan was open to interpretation and even, dare I say it, sophisticated, Monster X Strikes Back is obvious and crude. There are some clear similarities with World Sinks – the two movies have several actors in common, notably those playing the American, Russian and North Korean heads of state; there’s the surprise reveal of Kim Jong Il as a punchline; and the focus of the humour is more on the characters than on the special effects scenes. Monster X bolsters its effects budget by reusing the scenes of Guilala’s attacks from the 1967 film, which may inspire laughter but weren’t made with it in mind, although the new scenes – achieved with good old-fashioned costumes and props, mind you – were obviously meant to be funny. Probably the funniest moment in the movie for kaiju fans is the Gamera-spoofing bit where a random kid pops up in the briefing room and tells everyone what the monster should be called.
The use of the “foreign” characters in Monster X, at least as far as I can tell, differs from that in World Sinks. World Sinks seems to be concerned with xenophobia as a theme, as once-powerful people are forced to abase themselves in the hope of winning favour with a Japanese people who are at once happy to exploit their guests and suspicious of them. Monster X only seems interested in playing with national stereotypes – the bland British leader who goes along with whatever the American leader says, the devious Russian leader, the food-obsessed Italian leader, the French leader who beds his translator because it’s simply what his people would expect of him. The only impersonations as such are those of the then-current and previous Japanese Prime Ministers, and credit where it’s due, they’re on the nose. I don’t think the script attempts any deeper political commentary than that. The parody version of the liberal Koizumi Junichirō is explicitly an impostor and not the real politician, so I don’t think there’s any statement intended in the reveal that he’s Kim Jong Il in disguise. There’s certainly no mention made of the conservative Abe Shinzō’s repeated denials of Japan’s war crimes (60 years after the fact and 20 years after the Emperor started apologising for them...), but who knows, perhaps it’s significant that the parody version is sidelined for much of the film because he’s literally full of shit.
And then, in 2009, NHK television broadcast the 20-minute skit Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster. Fun fact: the writer, Miura Jun, was one of the pundits who appeared in the “talking heads” scene in Monster X Strikes Back.
Geharha is a checklist of kaiju eiga tropes: the opening scene of a boat under attack, the deranged survivor, the mysticism, the fantasy superweapon, the trite messages tacked onto the denouement. It’s purely concerned with sending up the kaiju genre, and it does it with precision and obvious love. On top of this, it features a classic motif of Japanese horror fiction in Geharha’s hair. The international boom in J-Horror cinema, which was subsiding by this point, had given the world plenty of examples of vengeful ghosts with long, dark hair, notably in the Ringu (1998) and Ju-On (2002) cinematic franchises. In a less prominent example, Exte (2007), the victims are actually killed by haunted hair extensions. But this wasn’t a recent thing – the anthology film Kwaidan (1964), based on folk stories transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn at the turn of the 20th century, included the tale of an unfaithful husband being attacked by a disembodied head of hair.
Geharha lands all its jokes, boasts some surprisingly good special effects and doesn’t outstay its welcome. They say brevity is the soul of wit, and at a trim 20 minutes, Geharha illustrates that point very well.