All good science fiction represents the anxieties of the age that created it and no people were more terrified of the dawning of the atomic age than the Japanese. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union meant both sides were producing bigger and bigger weapons that were capable of unleashing Armageddon. Godzilla is just those weapons come to life.
A month before filming of Godzilla was to start, the US tested their first thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The military told everyone to stay away from the Marshall Islands at the time, but they didn’t say why. One fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon no. 5) violated the quarantine and was caught in the blast. This launched a huge panic in Japan when the boat returned to Japan and it gave Godzilla its launching point for the unleashing of the beast, although the US isn’t mentioned here or anywhere else in the film. Rather than blame the United States for unleashing the prehistoric monster on Japan, Godzilla takes a more universal opinion that these weapons are bad no matter who uses them for whatever reason.
Once Godzilla is unleashed by the test of the H-Bomb, he immediately heads toward Japan to wreak havoc. (There are some stops along the way to build up the tension.) Dr. Yamane (Shimura) is a famous paleontologist who wants to study the dinosaur come to life, not only for pure scientific reasons but also because Godzilla’s immunity to radioactivity could be a clue for saving all of humanity in the future.
Yamane’s daughter Emiko (Kōchi) is betrothed to the brilliant Dr. Serazawa (Hirata), but is actually in love with Hideto Ogata (Takarada), a dashing ship captain. This love triangle proves to be a crucial part of the film, as Emiko is torn between her love for Ogata and her loyalty to and respect for Serazawa.
Serazawa is the Robert Oppenheimer of the movie as he’s invented something called the “Oxygen Destroyer,” a nonsensical macguffin that can used as a weapon to destroy Godzilla. But Serazawa isn’t convinced that giving the world the knowledge of the Oxygen Destroyer isn’t actually worse than Godzilla. He only changes his mind after Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo and an appeal from Ogata, as well as a well-timed children’s choir. Even so, he’s convinced knowledge of the Oxygen Destroyer will lead to an arms race that will eventually destroy the world. This is where the somewhat lazy “Godzilla is America” analysis breaks down, because if Serazawa is Oppenheimer, then Godzilla becomes Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan. The film certainly doesn’t let the United States off the hook, but its concerns for world peace cast a much wider net than just Harry Truman, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.
But enough of picking up on the World War II references, arms race allegory and the anxieties of the nuclear age. The star of this picture is the guy in the rubber suit, Godzilla. I don’t care that you can tell that he’s stomping on miniatures, the scenes of Godzilla on the rampage are sheer cinematic genius. They are easily better than anything Hollywood was making in 1954 in special effects in science fiction/horror films. And while Godzilla is not defanged here like he was in many of the later Toho Studios films that veered into camp, it’s almost as easy to identify with him rather than with the Japanese people. After all, he was minding his own business, sleeping at the bottom of the ocean for 200 million years when these naked apes decided to wake him up with a thermonuclear bomb. You’d be pretty cranky too! (Plus, a lot of Japanese audiences cheered when Godzilla destroyed the Japanese parliament building. People have the same opinion of politicians throughout the world!)
You can laugh at a man in a rubber suit walking around a miniature set smashing stuff, but you shouldn’t. For Japanese audiences, almost all of whom had survived a horrible air war that included two atomic bombings and the firebombing of Tokyo, those scenes were horrifying. Anything more realistic would have been triggering and honestly, for the technology of the time, the special effects were plenty realistic.
You will sometimes see Godzilla, the original Japanese version of the film, called Gojira. Those are just two different ways of transliterating the Japanese title. Neither is wrong, but neither is right either. Because “Godzilla” sounds better to Anglophone ears and is more well-known, I call it that while acknowledging the other transliteration. And let’s face it, “-zilla” has become a universal suffix for anything to denote something of massive size, both in the US, Japan and elsewhere.
Finally, these comments are about the Japanese original film and not the Americanization of the movie in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, starring Raymond Burr. The original is clearly the better picture, but the US version has its charms and can be a lot of fun. I listened to a commentary track on it by a Godzilla scholar (yes, there are Godzilla scholars) and he argues that Raymond Burr providing play-by-play of Godzilla’s rampage through Tokyo actually improves the terrifying nature of the destruction. That scholar, David Kalat, also pointed out how remarkable it was that in 1956, just 11 years after the end of the war, American producers released a movie where the Japanese, and the Japanese army in particular, were not only sympathetic but the good guys. He also revealed that the voice actor who dubbed both Serazawa and Ogata was the great James Hong, so we actually still have one living actor from the first Godzilla film, in a sense.
Anyway, while I’d love to discuss Godzilla: King of the Monsters with you in the comments, the film we’re voting on is the Japanese original.