In July 1985, when the United States was in an uproar about heavy Japanese investment in this country, the New York Times and CBS News conducted a nationwide poll of American attitudes about the Land of the Rising Sun. One of the questions asked respondents to name a prominent Japanese individual.
“Third place went to Bruce Lee, who wasn’t even Japanese,” said Bill Tsutsui, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. “Second place went to Emperor Hirohito.
“First place went to Godzilla.”
That’s right. The 10-story monster, who at that time was being seen on movie screens in “Godzilla 1985,” was Japan’s best-known personality among Americans.
And now he’s back in “Godzilla 2000,” flattening landmarks and exhaling deadly laser beams.
Forget about the 1998 American “Godzilla” with its computer-generated lizard. This is the real Godzilla, made in Japan by Toho, the studio that started it all 45 years ago.
That means a stuntman in a green latex suit, stomping on models of downtown Tokyo, surrounded by smoke and sparks and explosions. Oh, this time around the effects have been sweetened a bit with the latest digital bells and whistles, but it’s still a guy in a Godzilla costume.
“The Japanese are fully committed to their low-tech Godzilla,” said Tsutsui, a long-time fan of the monster movies. “To some extent it’s a financial and technical decision, because Japanese studios don’t have as much money as American studios do.
“But it’s also a conscious choice, because `Godzilla’ audiences want that campy pleasure. What we really want from one of these films is a bit of big-time wrestling with guys in rubber suits.”
Campy pleasures notwithstanding, Godzilla is also a subject of serious academic study. For while Americans see the big green guy as a pure and simple hoot, Tsutsui and other scholars claim that Japanese audiences sense something deeper. Resonating and resolved in this nuclear-generated monster, they say, are some of the Japanese’s deepest fears as a nation.
The first “Godzilla” appeared in 1956, telling the tale of a huge prehistoric lizard brought back to life and mutated by the radiation from American atomic tests in the Pacific. The creature appeared unstoppable — conventional weapons were useless against it.
“Godzilla” (the Japanese title was “Gojira”) fit neatly into the much larger format of monster movies then in vogue, said James Gunn, director of KU’s Science Fiction Writing Institute. That tradition stretches back to the 1925 Hollywood silent film “The Lost World,” based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel and starring Wallace Beery. In that film explorers bring back to London a living dinosaur, which gets loose and starts knocking down buildings.
“But what you get with Godzilla is a coming-out of our fears of living in a nuclear age,” Gunn said. “The Japanese, of course, had a personal experience with nuclear war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so this was a very real and significant concern to them. There was a genuine fear of science and what it might unleash.”
American films of the era — like “The Giant Claw” and “Them!” — also dealt with the nuclear mutation of common creatures into rampaging giants.
Viewed today, the original “Godzilla” with its primitive special effects seems silly. But early Japanese audiences took it very seriously.
“The version released in the U.S. was considerably different than the Japanese cut,” said Grey Ginther, a former graduate student in KU’s Department of East Asian Languages and Culture. Ginther’s recent master’s thesis was titled “Godzilla: The Assault of Modernism and the Counterattack of Tradition.”
Ginther noted that for the U.S. version of the original “Godzilla” the distributor shot additional scenes with actor Raymond Burr so there would be a character American audiences could identify with.
“Burr wasn’t in the original Japanese film, which is a lot more somber,” Ginther said. “The Japanese film has some really shocking scenes of nuclear radiation victims in a hospital. Those were trimmed for the American version.”
“Godzilla” was an immediate hit not only in Japan but all over the world, launching an apparently never-ending series of sequels. So far there have been 23, or one every other year. In most of these plot-thin efforts, Godzilla is seen fighting yet another nuclear-spawned monster — creatures with names like Biollante, King Ghidora, Megalon, Monster Zero, Mothra and even King Kong.
Along the way, the role of Godzilla in Japan’s national mythology subtly shifted, according to the KU experts. If the original “Godzilla” examined Japan’s nuclear trauma, subsequent productions played to the fear of many Japanese that the modern age was robbing them of traditions that have supported their culture for hundreds of years.
“Godzilla has roots in traditional Japanese mythology and is a God-like figure,” Ginther said. “But it’s a traditional creature that has been exposed to American radiation and so is changed into something destructive. One reason the Japanese became obsessed with Godzilla is because they see him as traditional Japanese culture mutated by outside influences into a monster.”
The “Godzilla” films also reflect the Japanese sense of vulnerability, Tsutsui said.
“The Japanese have always felt they’re subject to the whims of the world,” he noted. “First there’s the natural world — they live on a volcanic island that experiences earthquakes and typhoons and other natural disasters. And they also feel politically vulnerable because they’re surrounded by superpowers that have nuclear weapons and a certain amount of economic control over Japan.”
Curiously, over time Godzilla has evolved into a near-heroic figure, from an impersonal force of nature to a benefactor with a near-human personality. And, remarkably, he has become a protector of traditional Japanese virtues.
“In more recent films Godzilla is summoned up to defend Japan from rampaging monsters of another kind,” Gunn said. “Godzilla has been transformed into a kind of savior.”
Or, in the case of some sappy “Godzilla” films of the 1970s, as a sort of big best friend for cute Japanese tykes. Even die-hard fans of the series groan over efforts like “Godzilla’s Revenge” (`69), in which the monster inspires a young boy to capture some bandits and overcome a bully.
But Godzilla endures, a cultural landmark as monolithic and enduring as Mt. Fuji.
“I was asking a Japanese friend why they keep the guy in the rubber suit when there’s all this digital technology available,” Ginther said. “And she said it was on purpose. The Japanese take comfort in this guy stomping on model buildings and being shot at with missiles that don’t fly straight.”
Tsutsui agreed, pointing out that the films — and their audiences — take perverse delight in seeing Godzilla smash the newest, biggest and best buildings in Japan.
“Whenever there’s a new port facility or city hall in Tokyo, in the next film Godzilla always goes and sits on it,” Tsutsui noted. “The citizens of other Japanese cities actually feel slighted if Godzilla has never attacked them in a movie.
“So the entire culture has appropriated Godzilla. He’s one of them now, and the entire country takes pride in the fact that here is something created by the Japanese and known by everyone in the world.”
