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!

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.

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Godzilla vs Megalon

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)


This film opens with a throwaway reference to a second underground nuclear weapons test in the Aleutian Islands in the early 1970s. There’d already been three such tests by this time, two of them in the 60s, so possibly the intended meaning is a fictional test that would be the second in the 70s but the fourth in total. America had carried out the tests on the volcanic island of Amchitka, notwithstanding the presence of Aleut populations on other islands in the archipelago and the fact that it was a designated wildlife reserve. The site was chosen partly because it was nice and far away from most of mainland America and partly because it was within dick-swinging distance of mainland Russia. Testing in this geologically unstable area also gave the US Atomic Energy Commission some hints on how they might detect other nations’ underground nuclear tests using seismological equipment. The US, the USSR and the UK had signed a treaty banning atmospheric, underwater and orbital nuclear tests in 1963, so underground tests were of great interest to the signatories.

The “Cannikin” test, conducted in November 1971, was America’s largest ever underground nuclear test, forcing the ground up by six metres and registering 7.0 on the Richter scale. Public concern and protests over the test, in the wake of the previous detonation in 1969, had led to the formation of the activist organisation that would eventually become Greenpeace. There was a lot of concern, particularly in Canada, that detonating nuclear weapons under Amchitka might cause further earthquakes and tsunamis across the Pacific. Although these effects were not observed, this is presumably the basis for the seismic devastation of Monster Island at the start of Godzilla vs Megalon.

Not that the movie is particularly interested in this. The nuclear test is merely a contrivance to get Seatopia into the story, and Seatopia only exists as the launchpad for Megalon. Monster Island, which seems to be on the brink of crumbling into the sea in the pre-title scene, appears unscathed later in the movie and no mention is ever made of its partial destruction. The Seatopians have a genuine grievance against the world above them, since underground nuclear tests have reportedly ruined a third of their kingdom (which we don’t see), but they’re immediately presented as antagonists without a shred of nuance. In their few scenes, the Seatopian agents above ground commit some thuggish acts of violence and participate in a couple of car chases, while King Antonio stands around in an underfurnished temple set or an incongruous, computerised control room and barks orders to his underlings. The rest of Seatopian society and culture is represented by that shoehorned-in mo’ai statue, a temple dance that looks like one of those “exotic” Pacific Island scenes of old but performed by women in bikinis and raincoats, and an establishing shot of the kingdom that looks like a piece of first draft concept art. The entire point of the movie is the big monster fight, as evidenced by how drawn out it is and how abruptly the story wraps up once the director judges enough time has elapsed.

In short, this is a bad film. The story sits alongside those of Latitude Zero (1969) and Space Amoeba (1970) as one of Toho’s laziest, nothing but a peg on which to hang an extremely gratuitous kaiju bust-up. It’s a cynical exercise in nothing more than keeping a Champion Festival audience of kids diverted for an hour and a quarter.

The reuse of old footage is becoming more obvious, too. It’s easier to spot when you watch these films in rapid succession, no doubt, but just the change in lighting should clue viewers in to the old shots of JSDF vehicles mustering that have been dropped in here. The scene of seismic activity on Monster Island at the start is illustrated with shots of yellowish gas breaking out across the island, as seen in Destroy All Monsters (1968). There are no prizes for spotting the reused shots of Gigan manifesting in space and clashing with Godzilla in the big fight, particularly when he crashes into a building and a bridge that weren’t there in the wide shots with Megalon. Most outrageously – and I could almost praise the filmmakers for their brazenness here – it’s clear that the heat ray from Megalon’s horn has been made to look like yellow lightning only so that, in the scene of him attacking Tokyo, they can repurpose some old effects shots of buildings being destroyed by King Ghidorah’s death ray.

Let’s cut back to Seatopia’s mo’ai and Gorō and Hiroshi’s conversations about Easter Island. The real mo’ai were carved out of volcanic rock by the people of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) between 500 and 800 years ago (and certainly not the three million years ago that Hiroshi claims). They’re believed to represent the ancestors of Rapa Nui watching over their descendants, and although exactly how they were transported from their quarry and erected on the other side of the island remains unknown, there are some plausible hypotheses about how it could have been done. There’s also a much less plausible hypothesis that it was the work of aliens, popularised by the Swiss author Erich von Däniken. Von Däniken’s oeuvre consists of a combination of alien-inflected reinterpretations of religious and folkloric artefacts and speculations that ancient feats of engineering must have required alien intervention, or at least the use of alien technology and scientific knowhow. Both these elements rest on questionable ethnocentric assumptions: the first, that figurative images of the human form that don’t fit European artistic expectations must represent something else beyond the artist’s comprehension, and the second, that pre-industrial non-European peoples couldn’t have been smart enough to develop their own scientific or mathematic skills. The mo’ai fall into both categories in von Däniken’s musings and were discussed in his 1968 debut, translated into English as Chariots of the Gods?

Von Däniken wasn’t the first pseud to speculate along these lines, but he may have been the most successful. Chariots of the Gods? was a runaway bestseller and, despite contemporary rebuttals and accusations of both plagiarism and fraud, it’s remained in circulation. We know that the paranormal and the pseudoscientific were already popular in Japan from plot elements in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), and I’m sure von Däniken’s ideas, whether translated directly or relayed through local media, would have found an audience there. This could explain the mentions in Godzilla vs Megalon not only of the mo’ai, but of the myths of Lemuria and Mu as well, and consequently for the depiction of the quasi-Atlantean realm of Seatopia and the large (but curiously metallic) mo’ai standing in its main temple. Von Däniken’s juxtaposition of the ancient and the alien might even account for the extraordinary fact that Seatopia has a hotline to the nebula next door and can call in the extraterrestrial kaiju Gigan when it suits them.

More recently, there’s been a craze for imitative “moyai” pumice statues in Japan, but that didn’t start until the end of the 1970s, somewhat too late to be relevant to this film.

Jet Jaguar has an interesting history. It looks like another attempt to win over the kids by imitating Ultraman (original series 1966-67) – as if the kitchen sink cyborg designs of Gigan and now Megalon weren’t tribute enough – and it surely is that, but it started out as a child’s winning entry in a competition. Toho and Tsuburaya Productions had co-sponsored the contest, to design a kaiju to appear in the next Godzilla movie, and the winning creation was “Red Arōn”. This creature had claws, bat-like wings, an inhuman face and a kind of jumpsuit. A prototype was created to be shown off on TV in front of its child designer, and it’s at this point that someone decided to colour in parts of the jumpsuit in an assortment of red, yellow and blue. This recoloured torso is pretty much the only part of that prototype that was retained in the final design of what became Jet Jaguar, now recast as a heroic ally for Godzilla.

In terms of what it does on screen – striking poses during fights, stiffly and artificially “flying”, altering its size in order to fight the kaiju on equal terms – Jet Jaguar unmistakeably mimics Ultraman, but the late switch from kaiju to robot suggests another influence: Mazinger Z. This hugely popular manga series redefined the mecha story genre with a gigantic super robot, still piloted by a human but with a visible personality of its own. Mazinger Z first appeared in print in October 1972, with an animated TV tie-in debuting in December 1972. The timeframe is tight, with Godzilla vs Megalon premiering in March 1973, but I think that’s enough time for the filmmakers to have latched onto the idea that super robots were suddenly popular and for the designers to have incorporated at least one superficial point of similarity into Jet Jaguar’s costume: like Jet Jaguar, the robot Mazinger Z has a grille on its face that looks like a ridiculously cheesy grin. And, since they celebrated manga in the previous year’s Godzilla movie, we might fairly suppose either writer Sekizawa or director Fukuda, or both, had their finger on the pulse of current developments in manga.

Is Godzilla vs Megalon another metafictional Godzilla movie? Everything about Jet Jaguar seems to have been engineered to appeal to contemporary child viewers, but does it hint at a child’s narrative point of view? (Can I somehow argue that this film, too, is a literalisation of a daydream of one of the characters?) This would give us an excuse for the ad hoc nature of much of the plot, most notably the way the initial threat of the nuclear test in the Aleutians is quickly forgotten, the way the Seatopians are just as quickly forgotten later on, Jet Jaguar’s miraculous transformation into a giant superhero and the logic-defying inclusion of Gigan. Let’s not forget, too, that the presence of Monster Island necessarily raises questions about the story’s internal fictionality. Godzilla himself behaves even less like a destructive force of nature and more like the costumed wrestling characters on TV than before. And the dramatic car chases – especially the one featuring an entirely gratuitous motorbike – look like they’ve been imposed on the narrative by someone with a mania for Toei’s tokusatsu series Kamen Rider (original series 1971-73).

The only plausible culprit among the characters is Gorō’s schoolboy brother Roku. (In this scenario, I’d suggest he hero-worships his brother’s friend Hiroshi, given it’s Hiroshi who gets into all the showy chases with his flashy car.) He certainly is quick to recognise Gigan, as unlikely as it is that he should – unless of course he's a Godzilla movie fan dictating the narrative. Roku is played by Kawase Hiroyuki, who previously played little Ken in Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) – what more evidence do you need?

Kawase is almost but not quite the only familiar face in this movie. Playing King Antonio of Seatopia, the disco dictator, is Robert Dunham. This is Dunham’s first appearance in a Godzilla movie, but he can be seen at the church towards the end of Mothra (1961) and he took a starring role in the kaiju comedy heist movie Dogora (1964) as an international insurance agent. Unlike other American actors employed by Toho, such as Nick Adams (Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)) or Russ Tamblyn (The War of the Gargantuas (1966)), Dunham could speak fluent Japanese – he can be heard doing so throughout Dogora. It’s baffling, then, that he should have been filmed here delivering his lines in English, only to be dubbed over by another actor in Japanese and then redubbed by someone else again for the movie’s US release. Not much more baffling than anything else about Godzilla vs Megalon, though.

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Godzilla vs Gigan

Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla on Monster Island (the title of the first American release).


Godzilla vs Gigan looks like a return to straightforward slambang monster action after the metafictional antics of the previous two Godzilla movies. There’s no child protagonist, no dream sequences, no peculiar video effects intruding where we wouldn’t expect them to intrude. And yet it prominently features Monster Island, which was introduced by name just two films ago in All Monsters Attack as an explicitly fictional place. (Not to be confused with “Kaiju Land”, as seen in Destroy All Monsters – we’re decades too early for that, according to the timeline laid out in that movie. The montage of kaiju at home on the island that we’re shown the first time Monster Island is mentioned dates back to Destroy All Monsters, but was also used in All Monsters Attack where it became part of the remembered/dreamed fabric of Monster Island.) Even if we have reverted to telling stories within Godzilla’s own world, it looks like it might be the version of Godzilla’s world imagined by Ichirō rather than the pseudo-real world seen in earlier movies.

I say there’s no child protagonist, but there is another possible narrator if we want to look for one: Gengo. He thinks of his girlfriend Tomoko as a nagging mother because of the way she continually encourages him to find work, even using her as the basis for his own imagined kaiju “Mamagon”, which hints at a childlike point of view. Supporting the idea of Gengo as the author within the film, and the only real departure from conventional storytelling, are the two scenes in which Godzilla and Anguirus “talk” to each other. That their dialogue appears in speech balloons strongly suggests that Gengo, a manga artist, is literally putting words into their mouths. Perhaps the movie is his fanciful retelling of an experience with an exploitative employer?

It's interesting that manga should drive the plot of a Godzilla movie – with Gengo using his artistic skills to defeat the alien villains employing him – at a time when the movies were debuting alongside animated works in Toho’s imitation of Toei’s Manga Festival. Manga (literally “whimsical pictures”) has a centuries-long history but went through something of a boom in the 1950s and 60s. The release of Godzilla vs Gigan coincided with a period of revolution in the field of shōjo manga, aimed at younger female readers, with female creators finally taking the lead over male creators. Gengo’s stories, with their focus on kaiju action, would be more likely to fall into the category of shōnen manga, with a primarily young male audience.

I don’t think there’s a lot more to say about this movie, thematically. The topic of industrial pollution is briefly touched on. It’s suggested that the aliens are over-reliant on technology, although without much justification – what we see suggests that their fatal flaw is really a lack of imagination. Some dialogue is shoehorned into the final scene to present these ideas again in the form of simple messages for the audience.

In production terms, it’s a mixed bag. The “anything goes” look of Gigan suggests the designers were trying hard to capture the feel of an Ultraman monster. It’s striking, though. In its first appearance, in the scenes of Gigan and King Ghidorah flying through space and arriving on Earth, it’s painfully obvious that the two kaiju are rigid miniatures. (I would have said toys, but Toho’s visual effects technicians wouldn’t have had access to a Gigan toy before the movie had even been made... would they?) Once we switch to stunt actors in costumes, the level of quality starts to pick up. It also helps that the filmmakers have pulled the old Ifukube incidental music cues out of stock to beef up the action scenes. With a crazy-looking kaiju like Gigan, the peculiar, jazzy music used on Godzilla vs Hedorah would only have made the whole thing feel comedic.

There’s a story that Gigan’s name was a combination of the nickname of a popular singer-actor (Ishihara Yūjirō, who never recorded a film for Toho, was more associated with Nikkatsu and was supposedly known as “Nice Guy”) and “gan”, the Japanese word for “goose”. This sounds very similar to the old tale about Godzilla’s name (“Gojira”, a portmanteau of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”) having been the nickname of a physically large Toho employee, and if anything it sounds less plausible. The “Gojira” yarn was debunked in the 90s by Honda Ishirō’s widow, and I’m calling shenanigans on the “Guy-gan” story. I think it’s more likely to have simply been derived from the English word “gigantic”, but with the initial “G” hardened.

Finally, this is the second movie in a row in which, notably, the main cast have all been new to the Godzilla franchise, and hardly any of them will work on another Godzilla movie. This gives Godzilla vs Gigan a certain freshness, as it did for Godzilla vs Hedorah. Of Gigan’s leads, only Murai Kunio, playing Machiko’s kidnapped brother, will go on to appear in films of interest to this blog, playing authority figures in small roles in the 1980s and 2000s. Hedorah’s exception to the rule was Kawase Hiroyuki, the child actor playing little Ken – we’ll be seeing him again very soon...

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Godzilla vs Hedorah

Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)
Toho Studios
Director: Banno Yoshimitsu, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Smog Monster (the US title – technically, Hedorah’s more of a sewage monster, but a title like “Godzilla vs the Crap Monster” wouldn’t have done this film any favours).
Also discussed: Space Amoeba (1970).


Toho gave Godzilla a rest in 1970. The new feature headlining the summer Champion Festival that year was Space Amoeba (1970, a.k.a. Yog, Monster from Space), which can probably best be described as a kaiju exploitation flick. In this, an alien microorganism hijacks an unmanned space probe and rides it to a splashdown on Earth, near one of those classic fictional Pacific islands. There, it somehow inflates a cuttlefish (Gezora), a stone crab (Ganimes) and a matamata turtle (Kamoebas) to daikaiju size and pilots them around the island, terrorising the inhabitants and a visiting Japanese research team as a prelude to somehow conquering the world.

Apart from its own flaws, there are two sad things to note about Space Amoeba. Firstly, the special effects titan Tsuburaya Eiji had died of a heart attack at the start of the year, leaving behind him a hugely successful TV production company. He’d continued to offer advisory or supervisory help on Toho’s tokusatsu movies since going his own way and received an honorary credit on several of them; Space Amoeba was the first Toho kaiju eiga to definitely have no input from Tsuburaya. Secondly, it was the last Toho tokusatsu movie to be made by a dedicated special effects department. To economise, Toho underwent a restructure at this time and the special effects team was folded into a larger and more general visual production department. Most of the same people would provide effects for the Godzilla movies that followed.

In 1971, Toho’s management asked Banno Yoshimitsu to breathe fresh life into the Godzilla franchise. Banno was already on their books as an assistant director, but had just done some eye-catching audio-visual work for Expo ’70, the World’s Fair in Ōsaka. Godzilla vs Hedorah, which he co-wrote and directed, would be no less eye-catching.

Following his metafictional appearance in All Monsters Attack (1969), Godzilla walks the borderline between fiction and in-story “reality” in Godzilla vs Hedorah. He’s effectively summoned into the movie by little Ken, who is seen at the start playing with a couple of plastic Godzilla toys that clearly belong more in our own world than in the world of the earlier Shōwa era movies. In response to early news reports about Hedorah, Ken declares his belief that Godzilla will turn up and sort the beast out. When we get our first sight of Godzilla, it’s Ken’s dream image of him, accompanied by the narrated suggestion that Ken thinks pollution would make Godzilla angry. This is the second Godzilla movie in a row, and only the second ever, to feature a dream sequence, and in both cases the dreamer is a young boy calling on Godzilla for help. It’s only after this that Godzilla makes his first “real” appearance to confront Hedorah, just like Ken said he would. Ken even mimics Godzilla’s fighting moves the morning after the fight despite not having been there to see it. And what strangely human fighting moves they are, too – at one point in the later confrontation at Mt Fuji, Godzilla even strikes a pose in imitation of Ultraman, presumably another of Ken’s favourites.

Ken also seems to have some limited power over Hedorah – after all, if Godzilla’s around (whenever Ken says he is), it must mean Hedorah’s nearby too. He’s the one who names Hedorah and the alien mineral hedrium, looking for all the world like the know-it-all child hero of a Gamera movie. It’s as if he’s using the science-fictional conventions of his favourite films as a frame to interpret the news reports about oil spills and his father’s lab work. He has an uncanny knack of being where Hedorah’s about to turn up but escaping unharmed, although his uncle Yukio isn’t so lucky. And Yukio’s girlfriend Miki doesn’t seem to be any more upset about that than Ken, which adds to the sense that it isn’t quite real. I imagine Ken at the dinner table, excitedly telling everyone how this was when the monster ate Uncle Yukio’s car and that was when the monster killed Uncle Yukio, and Yukio grinning sheepishly and humouring him.

I could almost theorise that the movie never left Ken’s dream sequence, but I’ll settle for suggesting that what we’re shown isn’t meant literally, but is rather a kaiju eiga gloss Ken has put on his observation of the mundane facts of toxic chemical burns, acid rain and a sewage-filled harbour.

It’s customary to say two very obvious things about Godzilla vs Hedorah: it’s “the weird one” and it’s “the green one”. We’ll come back to the greenness in a minute. I think the weirdness is connected to what I’ve hinted at above, that this film presents a hyperactive child’s point of view rather than some documentary version of reality. In the interest of coherence, I’ve prepared a summary of the plot that doesn’t do justice to the kaleidoscope of visual non sequiturs that commentators tend to describe as “bizarre” and “surreal”. Barring one final hurrah at the end of the film, these oddities stop just ahead of the denouement on Mt Fuji, perhaps suggesting that part of their purpose is to stave off the viewer’s boredom until the big fight. Remember that Godzilla vs Hedorah debuted as part of a Toho Champion Festival to an audience of kids whose entertainment diet had shifted from the cinematic to the visual fast food of television. I don’t think director Banno was aiming for the art house crowd here. More to the point, the intrusions happen with a regularity that suggests the pattern of commercial breaks interrupting a TV show.

Some of these intrusions look like they’re emulating or commenting on other parts of the entertainment landscape that would be familiar to the kids watching. There are three animated PSAs about pollution starring a cartoon version of Hedorah – very on-the-nose for a feature that would share its Festival billing with three animated shorts. When Dr Yano holds forth on his thoughts about Hedorah’s extra-terrestrial origin and metabolism, we’re treated to flurries of illustrative images (slides of nebulas and animations of atomic reactions) as if he were presenting an educational TV programme. The frequently inserted news bulletins could also be counted as part of this narrative channel-hopping. The last major irruption of weirdness before the climactic showdown is a debate about Hedorah between two pundits in a TV studio that descends into a psychedelic collage of vox pops. Apart from the angry members of the public venting their opinions, the talking heads seem to include a baby buried collar-deep in mud, a floating skull, and Godzilla and Hedorah themselves.

Other moments seem to be just plain strange, although they could be explicable. I’m not going to attempt to reason out the third Hedorah PSA, which leads in a very Terry Gilliam-esque fashion from the silhouettes of the faces of two smog casualties to a shaded area of the same shape on a map of Fuji City in the news report about Hedorah’s attack on the amusement park. The youth club scene in which Yukio hallucinates that everyone around him has the head of a fish is something of a signature moment for this film, but I doubt it’s intended as a comment on 1970s drug culture. It happens while Miki sings about all the fish having died out, so the implication seems to be that we’re next. It presages Yukio’s turn towards fatalism after he loses his car to Hedorah. In a very weird moment, the film comments on Yukio’s Mt Fuji “go-go” party by cutting to half a dozen sombre, dead-eyed representatives of an older generation watching from the sidelines; they don’t look much more impressed when Godzilla shows up. And that final hurrah – Godzilla’s triumph, complete with heroic march music, isn’t undermined only by the question mark ending but by the ironic juxtaposition of a bay full of dead fish and Hokusai’s famous “Great Wave” woodblock print.

On to the question of environmentalism. Godzilla vs Hedorah doesn’t really dig into the “green” theme very deeply. It goes to extreme lengths to emphasise that pollution is bad, but beyond the oil tanker crashes and some animated industrial chimney stacks, it doesn’t go into any great detail about the causes of pollution and how they might be mitigated. On the other hand, the subject was in the air (so to speak) and perhaps Japanese schoolchildren were already well versed on the matter. (Perhaps, like little Ken, they were all writing poems about how angry it would make Godzilla.) International awareness of ecological issues had been growing steadily since the 1950s, with Clean Air Acts to combat urban pollution in Britain (1956) and America (1963) through regulation, and the publication of Rachel Carson’s highly influential book Silent Spring (1962) on the impact of synthetic pesticides on the biosphere. In April 1970, the first Earth Day had been held on sites across America, with strong youth involvement – there was a definite overlap between its organisers and the participants of earlier college campus protests against the Vietnam War.

We might expect this film to preach to its child audience by showing its younger protagonists finding a solution to their pollution problem. On the contrary, it gives contemporary youth very short shrift – the only response Yukio and his friends, defiant but defeatist, can mount against Hedorah is to organise a massive, impotent love-in that costs several of them their lives. One might imagine Banno had heard about the inaugural Earth Day and been unimpressed. No, this film has quite another saviour in mind.

Remember when Godzilla used to represent atomic power in the form of the bomb? Here, a heroic Godzilla saves the world from ecological collapse by using his radioactive breath to charge up the gigantic electrodes that fry Hedorah. We’re shown more than once that the JSDF can’t defeat Hedorah until Godzilla steps in and gives them the juice they need. He represents atomic power again, but this time as an energy source.

After some initial wariness, Japan’s first commercial nuclear reactor, at the Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture in the Kantō region, had commenced operations in July 1966. Two more reactors, at the Tsuruga and Mihama Nuclear Power Plants, had opened for business in 1970, the year before this film’s release – both were located in Fukui Prefecture in the Chūbu region. Chūbu and Kantō are the two regions specifically namechecked by the JSDF officer who explains the giant electrode plan to Dr Yano. These had all been built using the expertise and methods of the British nuclear power industry. In March 1971, just four months before the festival debut of Godzilla vs Hedorah, the first reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant began commercial operations. This was the first major collaboration between the Japanese and American nuclear energy industries, so if we wanted to re-establish Godzilla’s links specifically to American atomic power, we might look to Fukushima Daiichi, although it’s in the Tōhoku region to the north-east of the area specified in the film. Construction began on more nuclear plants in 1970 and 1971, in the Chūbu and Kantō regions and further afield, and more reactors would be added to the existing plants in subsequent years.

At its peak, around the turn of the millennium, nuclear power met as much as 40% of Japan’s total energy needs and was hugely popular with the public. It was widely seen as a cleaner alternative to burning fossil fuels and is still touted as such, although nowadays we can cite plenty of examples of how badly it can go wrong. (The disruption of Fukushima Daiichi by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the resulting environmental contamination, for example, which would abruptly turn public opinion in Japan against nuclear power. Godzilla would end up commenting on that, too.) I’m sure there must have been some fanfare around the 1970 launch of the two power plants in the Chūbu region and the 1971 launch of the Fukushima plant. Whether any of these directly influenced Banno’s script is moot, but I think the overall theme is clearly there.

Godzilla vs Hedorah wasn’t well received by the press, and producer Tanaka Tomoyuki wasn’t best pleased with it either, particularly the scene of Godzilla “flying”. Banno wasn’t allowed near Toho’s Godzilla movies again, but on the bright side, he did end up as an executive producer on Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014).

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All Monsters Attack

All Monsters Attack (1969)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects in close collaboration with Honda)
Also known as: Godzilla’s Revenge (the American title, although it sounds more like a British euphemism relating to spicy food).


In December 1969, Toho made their bid to win Godzilla’s audiences back from television to cinema, or at least to present a viable alternative form of entertainment for children who could now get their fix of hyperactive kaiju action every week for free at home. Tokusatsu movies released to theatres in the usual way just couldn’t hold their own at the box office any more. The last one Toho sent out to fend for itself, in July, was the execrable Latitude Zero (1969), based on an American pulp radio serial and notable for being filmed entirely in English and guest starring Cesar “The Joker” Romero as the villain. I would suggest that this item was never going to turn Toho’s fortunes around, but in any event it clearly didn’t do much to restore the studio’s confidence in kaiju eiga.

Their solution was the Toho Champion Festival: a half-day event, usually on a Saturday, run as many as three times a year at its peak. (Spoiler alert: its peak lasted about four years. From 1975 to 1978 it ran only once a year, in March, and then, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe, television held illimitable dominion over all.) For the price of admission, parents could leave their kids at one of Toho’s theatre outlets and get some time to themselves, and the kids could take in multiple features with a total runtime of a bit less than four hours. The attractions were a mix of old tokusatsu edited down to an hour and a quarter (less talk, more action!), cinematic cuts of TV episodes, animated features and shorts and the debut releases of the last six Shōwa series Godzilla films.

Toho copied this format from Toei Company’s successful Manga Festival (dedicated, despite the name, to live action as well as anime), which had been running since 1964. At least Toho had the luxury of being able to do this, unlike the Daiei Motion Picture Company which would have been too far in the red by the end of 1969 to try anything similar on Gamera’s behalf. The Champion Festival’s most lasting and infamous legacy is that those cutdown reissues of Toho’s earlier films were achieved by butchering the original film negatives, causing them severe damage.

All Monsters Attack, the first Godzilla movie to debut in this setting, leans heavily into the situation. It isn’t a film about Godzilla, but a film about an ordinary, contemporary child who reflects the intended audience, who’s watched the recent Godzilla movies and uses them as a moral compass in his parents’ absence. Perhaps some of those festival attendees were themselves “latchkey kids”, passing some time at the cinema while their parents were out working extra hours. The film has a proportional content of recycled footage that would make even Gamera vs Viras (1968) blush, but this is put into good service as the clay out of which Ichirō’s dreams are formed. Like many of the young viewers, I’m sure, Ichirō has seen those earlier movies and, in the days before home media, has relived the action scenes in his head, perhaps misremembering them or mixing them up, even projecting himself into them. The replayed scenes even anticipate the Champion Festival’s strategy of filling time between new material with reissues of older films. (Edited versions of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, the two features most heavily referenced in All Monsters Attack, would eventually headline the July 1972 and July 1973 festivals respectively.)

This isn’t a trick Toho could play more than once, but once you’ve stepped into the Land of (Meta)Fiction, it’s not that easy to step back out again. Although subsequent movies will return to the familiar model of telling stories about Godzilla, I think the question of who’s telling those stories will remain. I mentioned while discussing Destroy All Monsters that the concept of “Kaiju Land” felt like a toybox, and this movie’s Monster Island dreamscape only reinforces that. Bear that in mind when Monster Island reappears “for real” in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs Megalon (1973).

The actual message of the film is a bit of a mixed bag. Ichirō is urged to stand up for himself and fight his own battles, and sure, that’s all well and good, although it fundamentally involves him punching the crap out of Gabara and biting his arm, then adopting his gang. It also involves Ichirō causing a painter’s slapstick “accident” and leaving his father to carry the can for him. He’s become more independent, but he’s also become something of a menace. It’s not uncommon for children to be portrayed as little tearaways in kaiju eiga – see especially the Gamera movies – but I’m not sure whether this is meant as a release of pressure or incitement for the child viewers in a society as famously polite and deferential as Japan’s.

On a broader scale, is it meant to needle the kids’ parents? Is this message of defending oneself through free self-expression, and potentially through aggressive direct action, intended to map onto Japanese society or even onto Japan as a player on the global stage? America had been urging Japan to stand up and fight its own battles for some time now, encouraging it to write its own constitution following their nominal withdrawal and rearm itself. Japan was understandably reluctant to do this, given America’s prior actions against them. All Monsters Attack does seem to hint that Japanese society ought to embrace change, however troubling and occasionally violent the consequences might be.

To start with, it looks like it might offer a critique of absentee parenting, an inevitable consequence of the economic impact of Japan’s post-war rebuild. Ichirō’s father says early on that he worries he’s not spending enough time with his son, and when Ichirō’s mother says in her final scene that she’ll give up working late shifts at the office, it feels like a predictable follow-on from what’s gone before. Yet Ichirō rejects that and repeats the argument his neighbour Shinpei used earlier in the film, that those extra shifts are necessary to support the family financially. He demonstrates his maturity and independence by accepting the new status quo – which the rest of the film has presented as an undesirable set of conditions that leaves Ichirō neglected, bored and in danger – in place of the older social standard we might have expected from this film, that of a stay-at-home mother raising her child. From a 21st-century perspective, we might consider this bit of scriptwriting progressive. What Ichirō doesn’t have – but Minilla does, as seen in Son of Godzilla – is a pushy parent driving him to study and take his own place on the treadmill. He does now have his own gang, though. The kids are all right, the film seems to say, but I’m not sure how sincerely it says it.

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