Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster (the title of the US dub – it was going to be “Godzilla vs the Bionic Monster”, but Universal Pictures thought that sounded too much like their TV series The Bionic Woman (1976-78) and threatened legal action, so the title was changed).

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla marked 20 years since the release of the original Godzilla (1954), and was even marketed as Godzilla’s 20th anniversary film!

This film opens with a scene of the spiny quadrupedal kaiju Anguirus, last seen falling into a chasm at the start of Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), trudging through a snowy landscape and roaring plaintively. The focus of his attention seems to be an erupting volcano. The signifcance of this will become clear later.

On Okinawa Island, a small crowd watches Nami, the descendant of the ancient Azumi royal family, performing a ceremonial dance. She’s abruptly seized by a vision of a city in flames, terrorised by a kaiju. (Misleadingly, the kaiju in her vision is King Ghidorah, who won’t be appearing again in this movie.) Among the crowd are brothers Keisuke and Masahiko. As he drives back to the excavation site he works at, Keisuke drops Masahiko off at the Gyokusendō cave, a recently opened tourist attraction. When he reaches the site, Keisuke is shown another cave that his team has discovered, which contains some cryptic murals and a small shrine. Saeko, an archaeologist from the local university, suggests that the murals depict some kind of prophecy involving King Caesar, the guardian of the Azumi royal family. The mural of King Caesar looks a bit like a squatting lion, and there’s a very similar looking statuette in the shrine inside the cave. Saeko takes the statuette and some photos of the murals back to the university to decipher them. Unknown to her, a couple of shady looking men are in the otherwise deserted faculty building, hanging around outside her office.

Keisuke and Saeko both travel to Tokyo to visit Professor Wakura, she because she wants the professor’s opinion on her findings and he because the professor is his uncle. Masahiko is also in the area – he found a mysterious fragment of metal in the Gyokusendō cave and has taken it to the physicist Professor Miyajima for analysis. Miyajima insists that the metal is “space titanium”. An earthquake shakes the lab; Miyajima’s daughter remarks that this has been happening daily for the past 10 days.

As Saeko and Professor Wakura work into the night on the mysterious artefacts, one of Saeko’s stalkers breaks in and, pointing a gun at the archaeologists, demands the statuette. Keisuke chases him off after a brief fight. The next morning, Mt Fuji erupts and ejects a large rock which turns out to contain Godzilla. This fits with the prophecy outlined in the murals, which suggest the world will be threatened by a destructive monster, although Saeko is surprised that Godzilla should be that monster. (Which is funny given his track record, but reinforces his recent shift into heroism.) Meanwhile in Okinawa, on hearing the news, Nami’s grandfather regrets that his family has lost the secret of summoning King Caesar, the only being who might defeat Godzilla, but revels in the thought that Godzilla laying waste to Japan might be divine vengeance for the historic oppression of the Azumi.

A few things might clue us in to the fact that something’s not right about Godzilla. He walks quite stiffly, making strange creaking sounds as he does so, and his roar sounds a bit hoarse. He’s ambushed en route to Tokyo by Anguirus, supposedly his old friend, who bursts up out of the ground to attack him. (So either Anguirus has been studying commando tactics or he’s now taken to burrowing through the Earth like Baragon.) Anguirus grazes Godzilla’s arm, revealing a shiny metallic patch underneath the skin, but Godzilla soon gains the upper hand and brutally breaks Anguirus’ jaw before marching onward. Keisuke drives over to Professor Miyajima’s lab to check in on his brother and happens upon the debris of the kaiju’s battle, including a metallic brick-like object. He takes this with him, and Miyajima confirms that it’s made of the same stuff as Masahiko’s metal fragment. Miyajima decides to take a closer look at Godzilla.

Godzilla destroys the dockside area of Tokyo with a yellow beam that doesn’t look much like his usual radioactive breath. He’s intercepted by the real Godzilla, whose sudden appearance amuses the false Godzilla’s operators watching from a distant control room and surprises Miyajima, his daughter Ikuko and the two brothers, who are watching from the sidelines. With the deception exposed, the impostor drops its disguise and reveals itself to be a cyborg. Miyajima suggests calling it Mechagodzilla, which happens to also be the name the aliens use for it.

Mechagodzilla looks, unsurprisingly, like a blocky, angular, metallic version of Godzilla, with a pointy muzzle and very pronounced nostrils. It fires missiles from its fingers and some kind of destructive beam weapon from its eyes. As we’ll discover later, it also packs hidden weapons in its kneecaps and a concealed hatch in its chest and can produce an impenetrable force shield by rapidly spinning its head. In a bit of a camp touch, it has a sort of logo, comprised of the Roman letters "MG", printed on its upper arm. When it needs to return to base after sustaining damage in this first fight with Godzilla, it flies away on rockets embedded in its heels.

Miyajima, Ikuko and Masahiko return to Okinawa and go to Gyokusendō in search of Mechagodzilla’s alien controllers, since that was where Masahiko found the first piece of extraterrestrial metal. They walk straight into the hands of the aliens, who have a hi-tech base hidden behind the rock wall of the cave. The aliens’ commander tells his guests that he and his minions have come from the third planet of a black hole to conquer Earth. The aliens’ commander has Ikuko and Masahiko locked up to coerce Miyajima into helping complete the repairs to Mechagodzilla.

On a barren island, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Godzilla is struck several times by lightning. Far from harming him, this seems to energise him. (Perhaps a callback to Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966), when Godzilla took on a role originally intended for King Kong and was reinvigorated by lightning because that’s just something Toho thought King Kong did?) In fact, it makes him glow with electric power. (A bit like the Ready Brek kid, but blue instead of orange. (One for the Brits there.) This narrative non sequitur will prove important in the big fight towards the end of the film.)

Following further research, Professor Wakura has determined that the King Caesar statuette can be used to summon the real guardian by placing it in the shrine on top of the gate of Azumi Castle. Keisuke and Saeko make their own way back to Okinawa by ship, aboard the Queen Coral passenger liner, but soon realise they’re being followed. The man who invaded Wakura’s home earlier on breaks into Saeko’s cabin by night and steals the statuette, but is discovered and shot by Keisuke. Wounded, the man drops his human disguise – he’s actually a green apelike creature, one of the aliens. He takes the statuette and runs up on deck, but is shot by Saeko’s other stalker, a man in dark glasses, and falls overboard. But when the Queen Coral arrives in dock, Saeko discovers that Keisuke had entrusted the real statuette to the ship’s captain and replaced it with a replica, which went overboard with the assailant. (So when and how exactly did Keisuke make that?!)

Saeko and Keisuke soon learn that Professor Miyajima has gone missing. Keisuke goes to Gyokusendō to look for them and finds the Professor’s metal smoking pipe in the cave, but is caught by an alien. The alien is shot by the man in dark glasses, who’s followed Keisuke into the cave. He’s an Interpol agent called Nanbara, who’s been investigating the aliens for the past six months. He forces the alien to let him and Keisuke into the secret base, just in time to save Miyajima, Masahiko and Ikuko from being steamed to death. Although they escape the base, Nanbara, Masahiko and Miyajima head back in to sabotage Mechagodzilla’s controls.

Keisuke, Saeko and Ikuko take the statuette to Azumi Castle, only to find that two of the aliens are waiting at the shrine with Nami and her grandfather. They threaten to kill their prisoners unless they’re given the statuette, but are shot dead by one of Nanbara’s colleagues. Saeko gets the statuette into position, and the gems in its eyes focus the light of the rising sun into laser-like beams that blow a hole in a nearby cliff face. The real King Caesar is revealed within, sleeping upright inside a hollow chamber. Since they’ve been unable to prevent this by securing the statuette, the aliens dispatch Mechagodzilla to kill King Caesar. Nami, as a descendant of the Azumi royal line, is able to wake King Caesar up by singing his signature song.

King Caesar looks a bit like the lion-dog guardian statues commonly found in Japan and China. He also looks a bit like a shaggy, demonic poodle with glowing red eyes. The way his large ears prick up is reminiscent of the old “Coco the Clown” fright wig. He’s able to take Mechagodzilla’s beam weapon in through one eye and fire it back at the cyborg from his other eye, which is a very neat trick. He’s also strong enough to wrestle Mechagodzilla and give it a good pounding, but he’s soon subdued by a barrage of finger missiles. Just when all seems lost, Godzilla wades ashore and joins the fray.

Mechagodzilla gives the two kaiju a thorough beating, firing its full range of weapons and defending itself from Godzilla’s breath with its head-spinning force shield. This fight includes some of the most graphic violence yet seen in a kaiju movie, with Godzilla sustaining a gushing wound in the side of his neck and being stuck like a pincushion with missiles. This is when Godzilla makes use of the electric energy we saw him absorbing earlier, giving off his blue glow again and somehow turning himself into a giant electromagnet. His pull is strong enough to overcome Mechagodzilla’s rockets and drag it out of the sky (along with a couple of nearby electricity pylons). King Caesar batters Mechagodzilla’s torso and Godzilla twists its head off. While the aliens are distracted by this turn of events, Nanbara rushes one of the technicians, uses his gun to shoot the alien leader and shorts out the master computer with Miyajima’s metal pipe. The heroes escape as the alien base self-destructs (and what’s that going to do for Gyokusendō’s value as a tourist attraction?), and the others at Azumi Castle watch as Mechagodzilla explodes. Godzilla swims off home, while King Caesar settles back into his cliffside cubby and is sealed in by an impromptu avalanche. The statuette is enshrined at Azumi Castle; Nami’s grandfather says that his ancestors can rest peacefully now.

The idea of villains discrediting heroes with robot duplicates dates back nearly as far as the idea of the robot itself. The Maschinenmensch, used by the mad scientist Rotwang to undermine the workers’ hero Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), might be the earliest example. The modern use of the word “robot” to mean an artificial servant dates back to Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R. (1920), although the robots in that play aren’t mechanical, but are more like a genetically engineered underclass. The concept of malevolent robot doubles might also have been familiar to contemporary viewers from the Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1966), which features the plot device used in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla of a double being exposed when metal is revealed beneath its artificial skin. Toho had previously borrowed the character of Mechani-Kong from the animated King Kong Show (1966-67), in which Mechani-Kong is used to discredit the real Kong, for their movie King Kong Escapes (1967), in which it’s just a vaguely Kong-shaped robot. It’s perhaps surprising that it took them this long to come up with Mechagodzilla.

But Mechagodzilla is just a fun gimmick. The real point of interest in this film is its setting: Okinawa. Okinawa is the largest of the Ryūkyū Islands, a chain of small islands stretching between Taiwan and the main body of Japan. This location made the Ryūkyū Islands an ideal trading post for international mariners and consequently a target for invasion. The Ryūkyū Kingdom, unified and centralised on Okinawa in the 15th century and already a Chinese tributary, was made a tributary of Japan as well at the start of the 17th century. In 1879, Japan formally annexed the Ryūkyū Islands and Shō Tai, the last monarch of the Ryūkyūan Shō dynasty, was forced to abdicate and retire to Tokyo while the bulk of his territory was redesignated Okinawa Prefecture under the Meiji Emperor. (The northernmost islands in the chain, grouped as the Ōsumi, Tokara and Amami Islands, were folded into Kagoshima Prefecture instead.) China was made to renounce its interest in the islands in 1895 after the First Sino-Japanese War.

The people of the Ryūkyū Islands had their own culture, their own ethnic identity and their own entire family of languages, related to but distinct from Japanese. All of this was suppressed following annexation because it didn’t fit with Imperial Japan’s narrative about itself, that it had been one nation united by one identity and one language since the dawn of the Yamato dynasty more than a thousand years earlier. In common with many minority languages in colonial and colonised countries in the 19th and 20th centuries (and elsewhere in Japan – the Ainu in the north suffered similar treatment), the Ryūkyūan languages were ruthlessly stamped out in schools to facilitate a standardised education in the language of, and to the obvious benefit of, the governing authorities. When Nami’s grandfather talks about avenging the injustices done to his people, he isn’t talking about ancient history – he’s of an age to have experienced this cultural imperialism directly himself.

After the Second World War, America assumed exclusive authority over many of Japan’s smaller territories, including the Ryūkyū Islands. The US military used Okinawa as a base of operations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and built up a significant presence on the island. The people of Okinawa had several reasons to resent this second occupation of their land, including the predictable behaviour of American GIs stationed overseas, the fear that Maoist China might attack Okinawa in an escalation of the Vietnam War, and related rumours (later proven true) that America was secretly deploying nuclear weapons on the island with the Japanese government’s consent. America held onto the islands of Okinawa Prefecture until 1972, when it formally handed control of them back to Japan. As with its handover of other Japanese territories, this was conditional on America continuing to maintain a military presence; Okinawa still hosts the overwhelming majority of US troops in Japan. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was conceived at least partly as a way of celebrating the 1972 handover of Okinawa.

And so, in addition to the novelty of Mechagodzilla, we get a new kaiju personally tailored for Okinawa. The Okinawan shisa is a guardian statue equivalent to the Chinese shishi or the komainu of mainland Japan, a sort of lion-dog hybrid. They’re usually found in pairs – one male and one female, one with its mouth open and the other closed. One of them’s meant to welcome good luck into a house or keep it in, the other to forbid entry to evil spirits or to chase them away, and opinions differ as to which roles the open-mouthed and closed-mouthed shisas play. But there’s general agreement that the female one is the welcoming one and the male one is the one fighting off evil. This, and the use of the title “King” (see also King Kong and King Ghidorah), indicates that King Caesar falls into line with the majority of cinematic kaiju as being presumptively male. “King Shisa” is his actual name, but because the Japanese language habitually softens the “si” sound to “shi” (...yes, everyone in Godzilla vs Megalon was pronouncing Seatopia as “Shi-topia”...), it’s ended up being perversely rendered in English as “King Caesar”. Toho liked the name and have adopted it as the kaiju’s official Anglo name.

King Caesar is one of the most culturally appropriative things ever to appear in a Godzilla movie. It’s a bit like... Well, imagine if a more powerful nation had taken Northern Ireland from the British after World War Two, then handed it back in 1972, and the British film industry marked the occasion by releasing a James Bond movie in which Bond is sent on a mission to Northern Ireland and teams up with a seductive leprechaun secret agent called Blarney Galore. It’s a little bit like that.

And yet it’s clearly well intended. The world is saved by the revival of something at least vaguely resembling traditional Okinawan culture (in a team-up with Godzilla) and, as silly as he might look to Western eyes, King Caesar isn’t played for laughs. And Nami’s grandfather’s outburst when he wishes Godzilla would give Japan a pasting is a frank admission of how a lot of people in Okinawa felt – and still feel – about the people who spent the first half of the 20th century trying to erase their identity. That’s a bold move for a kids’ film.

(Incidentally, what does Godzilla represent in this movie? Does he still stand in for some aspect of America? Or does Mechagodzilla represent America, being the product of alien invaders with superior technology, and has Godzilla become a fully Japanese hero now? And would the people of Okinawa be any happier to see their kaiju champion playing second fiddle to a symbol of Japan than to the embodiment of American militarism?)

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla doesn’t get everything right – as noted above, the name of the royal family of the Ryūkyū Islands was Shō, not Azumi. Azumi is, however, the name of a completely different ethnic community that lived further north, on the other side of Kyūshū. They’re believed to have had common ancestry with the diverse peoples of the Pacific Islands, dating back to a diaspora from Taiwan some 5000 years ago according to one current theory. Although their culture revolved around the sea and they also traded with China, there’s nothing to suggest that they ever occupied or became monarchs of the Ryūkyū Islands.

Gyokusendō cave, which figures so prominently in this movie, is a real place. It was discovered in 1967 and part of it was opened to the public in 1972, so it was quite a new tourist attraction when Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was released. Its inclusion looks like the sort of thing Daiei used to do to economise on the Gamera movies – I wonder if there was any sponsorship or cross-promotion. Obviously the real cave doesn’t include a section of rock wall that slides away to reveal a secret alien base, although I shudder to think of the movie’s child viewers pestering their parents into taking them on holiday to Okinawa so that they could run around the cave tugging on the stalactites in the hope of finding a hidden door control. It’s now part of Okinawa World, a theme park which was opened in 1996. A commercialised representation of traditional Okinawan culture is at least better than the total denial of it, and if Okinawa World does its part to preserve at least some of one of the old cultures of the Ryūkyū Islands, I guess some good will have come of it.

Speaking of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla not always getting it right... The English language subtitles for this film credit the actress playing Princess Nami as Barbara Lynn. She’s not the American blues singer! She's actually a South Korean actress listed on IMDb as Bellbella Lin. The rest of the cast includes some familiar faces, in what looks like a call back to the “good old days” after the more adventurous casting of the last few movies. Koizumi Hiroshi appears in his last '70s Godzilla film as the sympathetic Professor Wakura – hardly more than a guest appearance, but don’t worry, he’ll be back. Playing the other sympathetic scientist character and the much beefier role, Professor Miyajima, is Akihiko "Dr Serizawa" Hirata. He will be back in the next Godzilla film, and so will Sahara Kenji, who can be briefly seen here as the captain of the Queen Coral handing the shisa statuette in its box back to Keisuke. Mutsumi Gorō is new to the Godzilla franchise, but he’ll be back next week too. Although his character, the alien leader, dies here, Mutsumi will be back in the next film playing a practically identical character.