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Overview
Ever since Godzilla (or, Gojira, as he is known in Japan) crawled out of his radioactive birthplace to cut a swath of destruction through Tokyo, he has claimed a place alongside King Kong and others in the movie monster pantheon. He is the third most recognizable Japanese celebrity in the United States, and his fan base continues to grow as children today prove his enduring appeal. Now, Bill Tsutsui, a life-long fan and historian, takes a light-hearted look at the big, green, radioactive lizard, revealing how he was born and how he became a megastar. With humorous anecdotes, Godzilla on My Mind explores his lasting cultural impact on the world. This book is sure to be welcomed by pop culture enthusiasts, fans, and historians alike.
“Godzilla On My Mind is a good read, well written, occasionally provocative and full of facts that show it to be well researched as well as a labour of love.” —Dr. Dolores Martinez, author of The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture
“William Tsutsui’s Godzilla takes a fresh, original, and appealing look at one of our more intriguing pop culture icons. Although informed by careful scholarship, the book is highly accessible. It’s funny, stimulating, and an overall pleasure to read. I’ll never look at Godzilla the same way again!” —Susan Napier, author of Anime from Akira To Princess Mononoke
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781137055576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 258 |
| Sales rank: | 276,304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
William Tsutsui is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Kansas.
Read an Excerpt
Godzilla on my Mind
Fifty Years of the King of Monsters
By William Tsutsui
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 William TsutsuiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-05557-6
CHAPTER 1
THE BIRTH OF GOJIRA
Every few months, someone will ask me, innocently enough, "So what's your favorite Godzilla movie?" And invariably I respond that it's the original 1954 Godzilla film, called Gojira in Japanese. "Why that one?" is usually the next question. I always begin to explain that Godzilla's debut was a somber, gripping, and thought-provoking film, though I seldom get to complete my explanation. "What?" my incredulous friend, relative or co-worker will interject, "There was actually a serious Godzilla movie?"
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and there was a dead-serious Godzilla movie. Well before the series degenerated into big-time wrestling in seedy latex suits, well before Godzilla had a laughably unlikely son, well before a giant technicolor moth was passed off as a gruesome monster, well before Tokyo was besieged by rapacious aliens or vengeful undersea civilizations (all fluent in Japanese, of course), Gojira was a solemn affair, an earnest attempt to grapple with compelling and timely issues, more meditative and elegiac than block busting and spine chilling. Godzilla did not begin his career in the Japan of the 1950s as the tail end of a double bill, a B-list laugher, or a tongue-in-cheek parody. The original Gojira was a sincere horror film, intended to frighten rather than amuse, which engaged honestly — indeed, even grimly — with contemporary Japanese unease over a mounting nuclear menace, untrammeled environmental degradation, and the long shadows of World War II. "Classic" is a terribly overused word in the vocabulary of film critics, yet this label undeniably applies to the dark, brooding, and still profoundly compelling 1954 Gojira.
* * *
The origins of Godzilla, both as a film and as a creature, are a little murky. The time-honored story of Godzilla's genesis begins in the spring of 1954 with Tanaka Tomoyuki, then a young and aspiring producer at Japan's Toho Studios. Once dominant in Japan's domestic film industry, Toho had fallen on hard times in the wake of World War II and was struggling in the early 1950s to regain its market leadership. The studio was looking to Tanaka to restore some of its sheen and assigned him In the Shadow of Honor, a splashy, big-budget Japanese-Indonesian coproduction that would be Toho's headlining blockbuster in the competitive fall movie season. But a variety of snags — most notably rising diplomatic tensions between Tokyo and Jakarta well beyond Toho's control — compelled Tanaka to shelve the project before filming had even begun. This left a gaping hole in Toho's release schedule, and Tanaka was responsible for filling it.
Godzilla, as the legendry has it, was Tanaka's brainchild, the result of a brilliant "lightbulb" moment at a time of intense pressure. Flying home dispirited from Indonesia, Tanaka looked out over the expansive Pacific Ocean and agonized over the box office hit he was expected to deliver in six short months. His mind racing through the headlines of the day, the trends in the film industry, and, just perhaps, a personal nightmare or two, Tanaka hit upon a notion. "The thesis was very simple," Tanaka later recalled. "What if a dinosaur sleeping in the Southern Hemisphere had been awakened and transformed into a giant by the Bomb? What if it attacked Tokyo?"
Many later commentators have been skeptical of Tanaka's dramatic, bolt-from-the-blue account of Godzilla's creation, but even if there is a "true" story of Godzilla's birth out there, we are unlikely ever to discover it. What we can be certain of, however, is that Godzilla did not emerge from a vacuum, even if the monster was originally conceived in the pressurized cabin of a transpacific airliner. Godzilla in all his glory was spawned from a virtual primordial soup of political concerns, cultural influences, cinematic inspirations, genre traditions, economic crassness, simple opportunism, and sheer creativity.
* * *
Godzilla was not, as some people may still believe, borrowed wholesale from Japanese folklore. Nonetheless, Godzilla the raging reptile, breathing fire and shattering cities, resonated with legends — both Japanese and Western — stretching back through millennia of civilization. Japanese traditional art and literature, so scholars tell us, boasted bizarre supernatural demons and monsters "in an abundance unequaled in any other culture." Giant serpent deities inhabited remote mountain valleys, and dragons moved across water, land, and sky. In East Asia, according to one folklorist, "the dragon is not the monstrous destroyer found in [Western] tradition, but a majestic and benevolent beast, whose close association with the element of water turns him into a dispenser of fertility in a wet rice growing community. He becomes a potential source of disaster, through flood and storm, only when wrongly treated." In Godzilla one senses the echoes of such legendary beasts, aweinspiring and ever threatening, associated with the oceans, with longevity and, above all, with ruin and calamity. Godzilla also fits comfortably into the bestiaries of Western mythology, joining a rich heritage of Norse monsters, beasts of Revelation and medieval dragons that ate children, ravaged cities, and heralded apocalypse. As one author plainly put it, Godzilla lies "squarely in the tradition of the fire-breathing dragons of folklore."
The figure of Godzilla played on other long-standing Japanese fears, and particularly on a deeply rooted vulnerability to the awesome and erratic forces of nature. Japan, as geologists, geographers, and meteorologists will attest, lies directly in the crosshairs of almost every destructive power Mother Nature can command. The natives of the Japanese islands have always had to endure the unpredictable assaults of earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tidal waves, floods and landslides. Fire has been another ever-present natural enemy, especially to the dense, wood-built, readily inflammable cities of Japan. The Japanese have an old proverb, jishin kaminari kaji oyaji, which lists the four most fearsom things in the world as earthquake, thunder, fire, and father. Given Godzilla's volatility, capriciousness, and propensity for devastation — as well as the monster's fundamental character as a natural phenomenon that brings disaster — that old Japanese saying might well be rewritten as jishin kaminari kaji Gojira.
But the original Godzilla film also drew on more immediate and agonizing memories of man-made destruction. Although the Japanese government wishfully announced in 1956 that "the postwar period is now over," the Japan of the mid-1950s still bore the scars — both physical and emotional — of total war and defeat. Japan's cities were still rebuilding from wartime fire bombings, families remained broken and grieving, and a complex sense of loss — lost lives, lost dreams, the lost war — tormented many survivors. Long after Japan's surrender in 1945, even long after the departure of General MacArthur and the American occupation forces in 1952, the shadows of war tenaciously haunted the Japanese people. Despite the guarded return of economic prosperity in the 1950s and steady progress on physical rebuilding, the dark memories of war — so compellingly evoked in Gojira — remained fresh and traumatic.
Godzilla's first stroll through Tokyo, 1954.
The specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though repressed formally and informally by Japanese society, the Japanese government, and the U.S. occupation forces, were particularly vivid, harrowing, and unresolved in 1950s Japan. Worsening Cold War tensions and accelerating nuclear testing contributed to anxiety around the globe, but nowhere more so than in Japan, which alone had suffered the ordeal of atomic warfare. Such issues weighed heavily on the minds of Godzilla's creators. As Tanaka Tomoyuki later observed: "The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb. Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind."
The climate of nuclear anxiety in Japan reached new heights in 1954, even well before the film Gojira was released. On March 1 — only a few weeks prior to Tanaka's storied trip from Indonesia back to Japan — the United States detonated a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, a weapon almost one thousand times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima, on Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific. A small Japanese trawler in search of tuna, named (ironically enough) the Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Dai-go Fukuryu Maru), had strayed perilously close to the testing zone. The twenty-three-man crew reported seeing "the sun rising in the west" and being covered with a powdery white ash as they pulled in their lines and headed for port. The seamen were subsequently found to be suffering from radiation poisoning, tainted tuna entered Japanese markets before the radioactive contamination was discovered, and the news media erupted in a fury of nuclear fear and anti-American hostility. Millions of Japanese (including the emperor) refused to eat fish, the tabloids proclaimed the incident yet another U.S. atomic attack on Japan, and strident antinuclear peace movements sprouted around the country. That Gojira emerged from this environment suggests not only the canny opportunism (or, as some at the time complained, bald cynicism) of its creators, but also the extent to which the film and its message engaged with the most profound, contentious, and chilling issues of the day.
But not all of the inspiration for Gojira came straight from the current events headlines. Tanaka Tomoyuki and Toho Studios were well aware of trends in the international film industry and, perhaps most important, of what sorts of movies were delivering big box-office returns, both in Tokyo and in Hollywood. The year 1952 saw the re-release of the 1933 classic King Kong, the prototype of the "giant monster on the loose" genre and a masterpiece of Willis O'Brien's stop-motion special effects. The film earned four times as much in 1952 as it had in its original release and was a hit in Japan as well as in the United States. In the wake of Kong's success, Warner Brothers pushed into distribution the independently produced The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which proved a worldwide blockbuster in 1953. In this story of a dinosaur thawed from its prehistoric hibernation by American nuclear testing in Baffin Bay, the eponymous beast wreaks havoc on lower Manhattan before expiring in the flaming ruins of Coney Island, a deadly radioactive isotope — launched, of course, by the scientific and military good guys — firmly embedded in its neck. The Beast was perceived by many as a mere low-budget rip-off of King Kong, but it was based on an original story by sci-fi pioneer Ray Bradbury and featured the impressive special effects of O'Brien disciple Ray Harryhausen. Although hardly a thoughtful musing on the dangers of nuclear weaponry, The Beast was — as Tanaka and Toho were well aware — a financial bonanza for its creators and distributors.
Many critics have been tempted to see the 1954 Gojira as a thinly veiled Japanese remake of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. And the similarities between the two films are numerous: both Godzilla and the Beast result from H- bomb testing, both are amphibious dinosaurs who sink fishing boats and inexplicably attack major cities, both occasion debates between scientists intent on studying the monster and army officers preoccupied with exterminating it. The team from Toho Studios even quietly admitted that much of their inspiration did indeed come from King Kong and The Beast: "The basic film is American," the director of Gojira once confided to a reporter. Indeed, the Godzilla project allegedly began under the confidential working title "The Giant Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea," a smoking gun if ever there was one. But inspiration is far different from imitation, and today no one who has seen Gojira would, I suspect, damn it as a simple, slavish copy of earlier American blockbusters. In any case, compared to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (or even, if I may be sacrilegious, to the great Kong), the message of the original Godzilla film is so much more nuanced, the special effects so different, and the emotions stirred so much more profound that any charges of cinematic plagiarism seem all but irrelevant.
* * *
Given the personnel, effort, and expense Toho invested in Gojira, there can be no doubt that the studio intended the film to be an original, polished, serious, honest-to-God blockbuster. The first Godzilla was certainly not a self-consciously cerebral, art-house film like the period drama Rashomon, which had won an Oscar and the 1951 Venice Festival grand prize, bringing unprecedented international attention to the Japanese movie industry. But neither was Gojira a cheesy, low-budget exploitation film, just another example of the "plethora of nudity, teenage heroes, science-fiction monsters, animated cartoons and pictures about cute animals" that the esteemed critic Donald Richie once decried as the stock-in-trade of Japan's popular cinema. The Godzilla series would, of course, soon descend into the B- movie morass, but the script, acting, special effects, and spirited, confident style of Gojira would set it apart from the cinematic run of the mill.
The men who made Godzilla were talented, committed professionals who still remain largely unheralded outside fan circles. Tanaka Tomoyuki, the producer, had only overseen his first film in 1944, but he quickly earned a reputation for delivering quality pictures on time and on budget. Tanaka was also remarkably prolific: he often produced more than ten films in a single year, and Gojira was his fifth movie in 1954 alone. Tanaka would later produce critically acclaimed works — including the samurai favorites Yojimbo and Sanjuro, both directed by the modern master Kurosawa Akira — as well as twenty-two films in the Godzilla series and a long list of Japanese sci-fi stunners. Honda Ishiro, Gojira's director, studied film at Nihon University and directed dozens of features — including eight starring Godzilla — over a long career. Honda was deeply committed to international cooperation and the cause of world peace, very likely as a result of his experiences in World War II, during which he served three tours of duty in the infantry, was a prisoner of war in China, and passed through the ruins of Hiroshima upon his repatriation to Japan. Honda was a lifelong friend of Kurosawa's and served as associate director on five of Kurosawa's later films, including Kagemusha, Ran, and Rhapsody in August. Tsuburaya Eiji, who brought Godzilla and his rampages to life, was one of Japan's pioneers in special effects, inspired as a young man by the marvels' of King Kong. During World War II, Tsuburaya used meticulously detailed miniature models to achieve new standards of realism; his work on naval scenes in one effort, The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya, was said to be so convincing that occupation authorities initially mistook some sequences for actual newsreel footage. Intense, creative, skilled, and blessed with a childlike joy in making fantasies real, Tsuburaya worked on fifty-six feature films, won numerous professional awards, and went on to create the campy icon Ultraman. As one author acutely observed, Tanaka, Honda, and Tsuburaya were "sophisticated men working in a highly unsophisticated genre."
Making Gojira was a substantial financial outlay for Toho Studios. The film cost more than ¥62,000,000 — about $175,000 at the exchange rate of the day — which was well beyond twice the budget of the average Japanese film. This total was laughable by Hollywood standards, even at the time; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, for instance, was a low-budget indie production and still came in at $200,000. Gojira also took far longer to shoot than was the Japanese industry norm. In the mid-1950s, Toho generally aimed to get all of its features in the can within fifty days; for that first Godzilla film, the special-effects crew alone required a whopping seventy-one days to complete its work. The on-screen talent further reflected the importance accorded Gojira: while the cast included its fair share of unknowns and fresh faces, its star — at least its human star — was the distinguished actor Shimura Takashi. A longtime favorite of Kurosawa, Shimura had major roles in both Rashomon and The Seven Samurai (considered by many to be the greatest Japanese film ever made) and was praised by the New York Times as "the best actor in the world" for his 1956 lead in Ikiru.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Godzilla on my Mind by William Tsutsui. Copyright © 2004 William Tsutsui. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Credits,
List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
INTRODUCTION Godzilla Mon Amour,
CHAPTER ONE The Birth of Gojira,
CHAPTER TWO The Godzilla Franchise,
CHAPTER THREE Understanding the Monster,
CHAPTER FOUR The Making of an American Icon,
CHAPTER FIVE A Personal Godzilla,
CHAPTER SIX Godzilla's Spawn,
CONCLUSION Godzilla Forever,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,