Godzilla

Godzilla (1954)
Toho Studios
Directors: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also discussed: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Or, to give it its full title from the cinematic trailer: The Beast, the Beast, the Beast, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

Not also discussed: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956). Bear with me, we’ll come back to that another time. This post will refer to a specific additional source, however: Jeffrey Angles' 2023 translation, with afterword, of Kayama Shigeru's 1955 novelisations of his scripts for the first two Godzilla movies.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922.

I'm sorry, I was briefly possessed by the spirit of Estelle Getty there. Let's try that again.

Picture it: Tokyo, 1954. Two years since the post-war American occupation of Japan ended, except for Iwo Jima and Okinawa which the United States would hold onto for another decade and a half, plus all the US troops still stationed in Japan. The Japanese public's relationship with all things American was... complicated. On the one hand, resentment over the occupation and the terms under which it officially ended continued to boil over into large public protests. On the other, the imposition of a new political constitution and the inevitable influence of all those American troops wandering around had liberalised Japanese society a bit, at least compared to what had gone before. I think it's fair to say some Japanese were happy to see the back of the military regime that had dragged their nation through World War Two, notwithstanding the circumstances.

On the third hand, Japanese interest in American culture wasn't a new thing. It might be possible to chart an increase in American influence in Japanese cinema and, through that, Japanese fashions and lifestyles post-1945, although that's outside the scope of this blog. But one thing I can confidently state is that King Kong (1933) had made a huge impact on Japanese cinema audiences and filmmakers - local imitations such as Japanese King Kong (1933) and King Kong Appears in Edo (1938) had quickly followed, and the RKO original had enjoyed a re-release in Japan in 1953. So that's one of three important factors in the development of Godzilla, Toho's surprise hit of 1954.

The second is that Toho Studios producer Tanaka Tomoyuki had just had a film fall through and needed a quick replacement. He’d been expecting to work on a historical drama shot overseas and co-produced with an Indonesian company, but they’d backed out under public pressure because of ill feeling over Japan’s wartime actions in the area. He’d had a wasted journey to Jakarta to try to change the Indonesian producers’ minds. On the flight back, he thought of capitalising on the popularity of Kong and came up with a proposal that also took in some of the flavour of another hit monster movie, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The Beast hadn’t been released in Japan, but some details of the movie and its success in America were known through the film trade press. Tanaka’s outline revolved around a similar core concept: a reptilian behemoth brought out of hiding by nuclear tests, attacking ships and wading ashore to cause havoc on land.

The third important factor is The Bomb. America had taken control of the Marshall Islands, formerly occupied by Imperial Japan, during the course of the Second World War. They were formally put in charge in July 1947, as administrator of the United Nations' Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, but a full year earlier they’d already tested nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll. These were plutonium fission implosion devices of a type similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. In March 1954, the US Army went back to Bikini Atoll to test a new variety of two-stage, fusion-fission thermonuclear weapon that employed a combination of heavy hydrogen isotopes and uranium. The test exceeded expectations: the Castle Bravo explosion was measured at 15 megatons, two and a half times the expected yield, lighting up the sky 250 miles away and contaminating more than 7,000 square miles of the surrounding area. A Japanese fishing boat called Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Lucky Dragon Number Five” – the “Maru” suffix just indicates that it’s a ship’s name) was fishing for tuna 40 miles outside the anticipated danger zone, but was one of several fishing vessels to be showered with radioactive fallout. By the time the boat returned to port two weeks later, the crew were showing severe signs of radiation sickness; one crewman died later that year.

The incident caused an international scandal and was the subject of Shindō Kaneto's biopic film Daigo Fukuryū Maru (1959). By the time that came out, the administrator of the United Nations' Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands had carried out two further series of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, in 1956 and 1958. But let’s turn our attention back to 1954.

Tanaka, formulating the idea for a movie with some superficial similarities to the atomic-era cautionary tale The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, commissioned a script treatment from Kayama Shigeru, one of Japan's most popular science fiction authors. Kayama wove this topical bit of news about nuclear testing into his script. Directors Honda (overall/live action) and Tsuburaya (special effects) were brought on board. Honda had strong pacifist leanings and turned the script into something more about and against the war and its aftermath. Tsuburaya was a firm Kong fan and was keen to make a stop-motion monster movie, but that would have been impossible in the time available to him, so Godzilla was instead realised through a combination of miniature models, puppetry and stunt actor Nakajima Haruo wearing a monster costume. Thus a legend was born.

The story opens in the Pacific waters near the fictional Ōdo Island. In rapid succession, the cargo ship Eiko Maru, the rescue vessel Bingo Maru and a local fishing boat are destroyed in a blinding flash of light. The islanders blame the disasters on the folkloric sea creature Godzilla, and shortly after their whole village is flattened during a storm. The paleontologist Dr Yamane visits the island and discovers a gigantic animal footprint, along with a prehistoric trilobite and a high dosage of radioactivity. As if these clues weren’t enough, Godzilla himself appears over the brow of a nearby hill.

(Google Translate suggests, and Jeffrey Angles' afterword to Kayama's novelisation of Godzilla confirms, that the name of Ōdo Island can be rendered in English as "Big Door Island", making it quite literally the portal through which Godzilla enters our world.)

Godzilla is a large dinosaur-like creature. He walks upright, like a Tyrannosaur but with proportionally longer arms (or like a man in a costume!). He has a distinctive line of plates down the length of his spine, with something of the shape of a sycamore leaf about them. He towers similarly over the hill on Ōdo Island and over the National Diet Building in Tokyo, which gives some idea of his size.

(It seems to be a generally accepted convention that all daikaiju, barring a very few exceptions, are referred to as "he". This will be worth considering in more depth in a later blog entry. Suffice here to say that it often leads to rarely answered questions about the social and reproductive habits of daikaiju. Angles confirms that gendering of this kind isn't required in Japanese, and that it doesn't happen in Kayama's Godzilla script. That's not to say that it doesn't happen in any other kaiju movies - sometimes it's clearly stated, but mostly I'm unable to tell because I don't have the necessary linguistic skills. I suspect the general bias might be down to the choices of the people who scripted the US dubs of these movies, and probably following the precedent set by the male Kong.)

Dr Yamane theorises that Godzilla is a prehistoric creature who’s been driven from his underwater home by the hydrogen bomb test. The government is convinced to reveal his existence to the public, which causes panic across Japan. The government are keen to find a way to protect Japan by killing Godzilla, to the distress of Dr Yamane who wants to study him. Godzilla wades out of Tokyo Bay several times, causing increasing damage and venturing ever further inland. He is undeterred by depth charges, a high voltage electric fence, conventional artillery and missiles. He also reveals the alarming ability to exhale a radioactive mist at will, which he uses to melt the high voltage pylons and to level central Tokyo. (His dorsal plates light up when he does this.) His attack leaves thousands dead and the city in ruins.

As luck would have it, one of Dr Yamane’s associates, the chemist Dr Serizawa, has made a discovery that could save the day. Dr Yamane hopes that his daughter Emiko will marry Serizawa, but she’s secretly engaged to Ogata Hideto, who works for a salvage company. Emiko and Ogata confront Serizawa and persuade him to use his invention, the Oxygen Destroyer, against Godzilla. The Oxygen Destroyer attacks the oxygen atoms in water, dissolving any living matter around it. Serizawa is horrified by his discovery’s destructive capabilities and its potential as a weapon, and fears that if it were more widely understood, it could lead to an arms race that would leave the oceans ruined. To prevent this, he agrees to oversee the use of his device against Godzilla but destroys his research.

The mission is a success: Godzilla is found napping underwater in the bay, and a team supervised by Serizawa dives to plant the Oxygen Destroyer next to him. Serizawa contrives to remain on the sea floor with Godzilla as the device goes off, thus ensuring that he won’t be made to create another one. Just to cast a final downer on the proceedings, Dr Yamane speculates that the continued nuclear tests will probably rouse more creatures like Godzilla.

There’s not much I can add to what’s already been said about Godzilla. Its roots in the topical plight of the crew of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru are plainly shown in the opening scenes of ships blasted with light and the surviving fisherman in hospital raving about what he’s seen. Contemporary critics found this tasteless – one of the crewmen of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru had died between the film’s production and its release, and there was a more general concern about playing on the public anxieties over nuclear testing. Nonetheless, the film was a success. Naturally there was a reflex sequel, which we’ll look at next week.

As far as commenting on nuclear testing is concerned, both Godzilla and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms go there but I think the way Godzilla does it is fundamentally more honest. In The Beast, we see an American team carrying out the test that awakens the titular threat, but it’s being conducted safely away in an uninhabited part of the Arctic circle, and it’s easy for the characters to feel remorse for their part in the nuclear arms race when the monster they’ve unleashed devastates their own homeland. Godzilla comes right out and says: the American tests are happening on our doorstep, and they have a human cost that the Americans won’t feel. (What it doesn’t add is any mention of the Marshall Islanders themselves, whose story is a harrowing one.)

Judging by the example of Dr Serizawa’s sacrifice, the makers of Godzilla also had something pretty pointed to say about how they thought the fathers of the atomic bomb ought to feel.

What I don’t recall seeing anyone else mention before is the very specific imagery of the Oxygen Destroyer as a fantasy super-version of the hydrogen bomb. Like the bomb, it has a spherical chamber inside a larger casing (transparent in this case, so we can see the sphere inside it), but instead of imploding on a payload of fissile material when it’s detonated, the two halves of the Oxygen Destroyer’s inner sphere pop apart. And instead of triggering that implosion with a fusion reaction of isotopic hydrogen, it targets oxygen – the other atomic component of water – and tears it apart. It’s actually a kind of Opposites Day H-Bomb. I find this striking.

The imagery of Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo has some further resonance with Japan’s experience of being firebombed during the Second World War, and the film doesn’t stint on the trauma in showing the survivors cowering during the attack and huddled in makeshift hospitals afterwards. With the exception of Godzilla Minus One (2023), I can’t think of another Godzilla movie that’s presented scenes quite this grim.