When the monster Godzilla, or “Gojira,” appeared to Japanese film audiences in 1954, many left the theaters in tears.
The fictional creature, a giant dinosaur that was once unaltered in the ocean, was depicted in the original film as being destroyed by a hydrogen bomb. Its heavily decorated skin as scales were proposed to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the two atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan nine years earlier to end World War II.
American audiences, however, had the opposite reaction, and found comic value in what many interpreted as a cheesy monster movie.
“Most Americans think that when you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” told NBC Asian America.
The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it from its political message before presenting it to the American public to avert the American decision to drop the bombs, critics say.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the US bombings in Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later, and although many Americans today consider the film to be an almost campy relic of its time, it was intended to be a metaphor in Japan. being for the diseases of nuclear tests and the use of nuclear weapons, saw what Japan went through after the bombings. The film served as a strong political statement, representing the traumas and fears of the Japanese people at a time when censorship in Japan was widespread due to the U.S. occupation of the country after the end of the war, Tsutsui said. The screen painted what many could not say explicitly.
“Japanese creative artists, filmmakers, novelists and so on could not really talk about the atomic bombings. It was a topic that could not be discussed. And Japanese people were also very reluctant to discuss this tragedy because it was so horrible, and because they felt a sense of guilt and shame about these events, “Tsutsui said.” But when the Japanese independence, and when filmmakers thought about giant monsters, people began to think about that connection between monstrosity and the atomic bomb. “
In the original Japanese film, the creature was depicted as a surviving dinosaur from the Jurassic Period, swimming around the South Pacific Sea. Tsutsui describes the monster as “innocent as the children at their playgrounds in Hiroshima.” After an American H-bomb test in the Southern Pacific, the creature became radiant, hurt and angry.
“The reality is precisely this kind of anger that comes from someone, essentially innocent, who is so victimized and scarred by this experience,” the scholar said.
For many Japanese viewers, watching the film was a cathartic, validating experience, the scholar said. People could witness Tokyo being destroyed once more while watching radiation given the physical shape of a monster. The end, while bitter, is a hopeful in which mankind overcomes evil.
However, American audiences saw another movie when it was released as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” roughly two years later, Tsutsui said. The film was heavily edited, placing white actor Raymond Burr at the center of the adaptation. The scholar noted that an estimated 20 minutes of the original Japanese film, especially the politically charged parts, were cut from the American version.
Among the axed scenes was one where commuters in a train made the connection between the bombing of Hiroshima and the attack of Godzilla, as well as the gripping end line in the original where biology professor Dr. Yamane warns that if nuclear testing does not stop, another Godzilla could shine. Tsutsui pointed out that the American version ended on a sensible note, that the world was safe again and could return to normal.
A bit of the intended message from the original film has been restored in later adaptations. In the 1998 “Godzilla” movie with Matthew Broderick, for example, the creature was created from an atomic H-bomb test by the French, instead of Americans, in Polynesia. In the Godzilla movies released by the production company Legendary, the monster is depicted as a prehistoric dinosaur that originated from Earth and must be destroyed by nuclear bombs, making it an “almost humanitarian gesture to save the world” of monsters, “said Tsutsui.
The dynamics of the U.S. wanting to reject its traumatic history in Japan, he said, remain.
“It is still the case that they can not get their minds on the nuclear issue and American guilt in the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Tsutsui noted of recent U.S. adjustments.
When stores like The New York Times visited the film in 1956, it was described as “in the category of cheap cinematic horror plays and it is too bad that a respectable theater should lure children and attractive adults with such danger.” The deliberate aesthetic choices that the original filmmakers made on the creature’s keloid-like scars were even interpreted as low-budget Japanese filmmakers, with critics currently likening the monster to a “miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $ 20 worth of “toy buildings and electric trains. ”
Hollywood was finally trying to sanitize the film and remove guilt from the U.S. bombings, Tsutsui said.
“Sure, all the pieces that were somehow, in one way or another, could be interpreted as critical of the United States as atomic tests, were really taken out of the movie,” Tsutsui said. “That the deep political significance and much of the heart of the original ‘Godzilla’ was eradicated to American audiences.”
Kazu Watanabe, head of the film at the Japan Society, had similar thoughts, saying that the American adaptation contributed to the distorted, skewed views that Americans of Japan had at the time.
“These ‘Godzilla’ movies were generally not received in the same way – in Japan the early movies were big budget, big studio movies with some recognizable stars, while in the US they were more than lowbrow B-movie Japanese monster movie genre fare with funny aftersynchronization that fell into an orientalist understanding of Japanese culture in America, ‘he said.
The way the film went through another layer of censorship before it was presented to American audiences, Tsutsui explained, shows just how sensitive people were to the inherent inhumanity of the atomic bombings.
“They worked hard to protect the American audience from the truth that really the Americans who saw the film never had a chance to respond in a meaningful way.”
The original film was essentially a product of the most popular monster films of the era and heavily influenced by the events of the time in Japan, Tsutsui said. A producer at Tomo Studios, Tanaka Tomoyuki, was inspired by the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to what was known as the “Lucky Dragon No. 5 Incident” of March 1954, in which a Japanese fishing boat in the US strobe-bomb tests reached of the Bikini Atoll. The crew on board was later irradiated, with one dying of radiation poisoning.
The producer threw up the concept of a radiant monster rising from the ocean to attack men. The idea resonated with his superiors and they associated him with a highly respected Japanese filmmaker, Ishiro Honda, who was a pacifist and had an interest in making the film. Honda himself had fought in the war in China and on his return to his homeland passed through Hiroshima, leaving him with a cool memory of the area.
“As the Americans did with many Japanese soldiers returning to their homeland, they had to land in Hiroshima, so the Japanese soldiers sought to see how thoroughly defeated Japan had been,” Tsutsui said. “It had a lifelong impact on him the horrors of what he saw, and he decided that with this film he had a chance to set up an important political message.”
Watanabe said that although Godzilla as a character did not retain the symbolism of nuclear warfare in the collective mind of the American public, the monster evolved to represent Japanese pop culture as a whole, “not too unlike Hello Kitty or Pikachu,” he said. He added that he is still watching a major fandom show on screens and showings of the old “Godzilla” movies.
But that does not mean that the original, intended message of the creature is irrelevant. Watanabe said it is still powerful images, three-quarters of a century after two Japanese cities were destroyed by the bombings.
“As long as nuclear weapons or nuclear power exist, Godzilla will never be irrelevant,” Watanabe said. “Godzilla reminds us that we have the terrible power to create our own monsters and contribute to our own destruction.”
