What a 70-year-old firebreathing lizard reveals about humanity

TANAKA TOMOYUKI gazed down at the ocean, and the ocean spoke back to him. A star producer at Toho, a Japanese film studio, Tanaka was flying home over the Pacific, pondering a slot that needed to be filled in the release schedule for 1954. He imagined a creature rising from the depths in the wake of an underwater nuclear explosion and wreaking havoc on land. “Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind,” he later recalled.

On set the monster came to life as an immense beast with scaly skin, spikes along its back and radioactive breath. The raging, reptilian creature, somewhere between lizard and dinosaur, was given a lumbering gait, a long tail and powerful feet, perfect for crushing buildings; the actor inside the costume prepared for the role by observing the movements of large animals at the Tokyo zoo. Its roar, created by dragging a leather glove across a contrabass and running the sound through an echo chamber, evoked existential angst. Tanaka referred to it as “the sacred beast of the apocalypse”. Toho dubbed its new star “Gojira”, a portmanteau of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale); a name transliterated in English as “Godzilla”.

The film smashed box-office records. Nearly 10m people watched Gojira in theatres, a tenth of Japan’s population at the time. Audiences gasped as Godzilla trampled Tokyo’s stylish Ginza district and cheered as it stomped on the Diet, the Japanese parliament. The special-effects team recreated the city in immaculate miniatures on a scale of 1:25, with detailed interiors so that even the rubble of buildings looked convincing. For a country still emerging from the wreckage of the second world war, the scenes were raw.

The plot of Gojira is simple but potent. Japan must defeat the monster before the monster destroys Japan. The task falls to several individuals: Dr Yamane Kyohei, a paleontologist who wants to capture and study the strange specimen; Dr Serizawa Daisuke, a younger scientist who has created a powerful new device, the Oxygen Destroyer, which could kill Godzilla, but could also be used as a fearsome weapon later; Ogata Hideto, a sailor who rallies his comrades to humanity’s defence; and Emiko, the daughter of Dr Yamane, who is caught in a love triangle between Ogata and Dr Serizawa. In a poignant climax (spoiler alert), Dr Serizawa takes the Oxygen Destroyer underwater and detonates it near Godzilla, killing both the monster and himself and burying the secrets of his technology. Godzilla has been defeated, the world has been saved.

Less than a year later, however, the monster returned. Much as Dr Yamane warns in the initial film, if nuclear testing continues, “then someday, somewhere in the world, another Godzilla may appear.” This year Godzilla celebrated 70 years of rampaging across movie screens, making it one of the world’s longest-running cinematic franchises. It has arguably never been stronger. Godzilla Minus One, the 37th film, became the first ever to win an Oscar (for special effects) last year. “Godzilla has never been more popular, more vibrant creatively and better known...and that sadly reflects a world that is even more at wits’ end, filled with anxiety and worried about the future,” says William Tsutsui, the author of Godzilla on My Mind.

The series ranges from profound meditations to cheap schlockfests. The uninitiated tend to dismiss the monster as unserious on the basis of the latter. Yet Godzilla’s enduring appeal reveals much about post-war Japan, its relationship with America, the globalisation of culture and shared fears of the forces that threaten the modern world.

Every culture and era has its monsters. The Ancient Greeks had Scylla and the Hydra. Dragons stalked Europe during the Middle Ages, while Jiangshi, a hopping vampire, haunted China. Such creatures invite both empathy and revulsion. “The monstrous lurks somewhere in that ambiguous, primal space between fear and attraction,” writes Jeffrey Cohen, the editor of Monster Theory, a collection of essays. Monstrum is “that which reveals” or “that which warns”; the monster is thus a portent, a mirror to collective anxieties.

Godzilla’s story begins with a boat. In early 1954 the Daigo Fukuryumaru (Lucky Dragon No 5), a hulking tuna trawler, set sail from Japan, bound for the rich waters of the South Pacific. It proved anything but lucky. On March 1st the ship’s crew saw a bright white flash in the distance; eight minutes later they heard a guttural boom. White dust soon began raining down. The sailors had inadvertently witnessed an American hydrogen bomb test on the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. All 23 of them soon came down with radiation poisoning. Throughout Japan, the incident inflamed memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just nine years earlier.

The boat now stands in the hangar of a museum in Yumenoshima Park in Tokyo. The white paint on its wooden hull has faded and chipped, and its bolts have rusted. But the vessel remains intact—a monument to its cursed crew. The American and Japanese governments played down the incident, loth to upset their burgeoning alliance or to slow the use of nuclear energy to power Japan’s economic revival. “They wanted to put a lid on the issue, they wanted the fire to disappear,” says Tanaka Yoshiko, whose father, Oishi Matashichi, was a crewman on the ship. The sailors received compensation, but were feared and ostracised at home. One potential suitor of Ms Tanaka’s rejected a marriage proposal, wary of the invisible force coursing through the family.

Honda Ishiro, the director of the first Godzilla film (and seven others), saw the monster as a way to “make radiation visible”. He had seen the apocalyptic ruins of Hiroshima on his way home from the war. “Godzilla represents the anger of the victims of radiation,” says Ichida Mari, a curator at the Lucky Dragon museum. The film begins with Godzilla attacking a fishing boat far south of Japan. “This is awful: radioactive tuna, black rain and now Godzilla to top it off!” one woman on a train complains after it comes ashore. “I barely escaped the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and now this!”

Americans, however, saw a different picture. The Hollywood adaptation, released in 1956 as Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, cut all references to recent nuclear history and recast the story through the eyes of an American foreign correspondent in Tokyo. Robbed of its pathos, Godzilla was panned by critics. The New York Times called it “an incredibly awful film”.

The nuclear core continued to power Godzilla, but it also evolved with the times. Films released in the 1960s, such as Gojira vs Mothra, introduce new villains. Rapacious capitalists threaten to destroy humanity with their greed. Alien races descend, raising questions about the relationship between people and rapidly changing technology. New monsters proliferate, from the three-headed dragon King Ghidorah to the winged Rodan. Godzilla reverses roles, coming to humanity’s defence.

In the 1970s Godzilla turns to the environmental consequences of rapid industrialisation. In Gojira vs Hedorah, a heady psychedelic-inflected cult hit, a giant smog monster feeds on pollution and devastates Earth. In an attempt to appeal to younger audiences, Godzilla is given a son, Minilla, in Son of Godzilla. The series went on a hiatus in 1974, but returned in 1984 amid fresh nuclear fears—the plant on Three Mile Island melted down in 1982 and Soviet-American tensions were on the rise. The Return of Gojira harked back to the original film’s plot.

The monster’s shape-shifting—at times a hero and at others a villain—is a key to its appeal. “It’s mysterious, people don’t know exactly what it is,” says Ota Keiji, Toho’s “Chief Godzilla Officer”, who oversees all of the studio’s Godzilla-related work.

The form has ancient roots. Fujita Naoya, a critic, notes that kami, or Shinto spirits, traditionally have two sides: a protective, gentle one that can bring about rich harvests and good fortune—and a wild, destructive one that begets misfortune.

What hath Godzilla wrought?

Godzilla, like many Japanese beasts and spirits, has a complex relationship with human language. The monster roars and screeches and stomps. It pinches its fingers and swings its arms, like an Italian whose favourite football club has just lost on penalty kicks. But it does not utter a word aloud. (There is one brief, semi-exception to this rule: Godzilla vs Gigan, a film from 1972 where Godzilla fights off a monster dispatched by a race of cockroach-aliens to conquer Earth, features a scene where its words are rendered in manga-style speech bubbles.)

That silence has helped Godzilla become a global icon. “Godzilla is a figure that a lot of fantasies can be projected onto, and a big part of this is the fact that it can’t speak,” says Gregory Pflugfelder of Columbia University. The films reached both sides of the Iron Curtain during. Godzilla is an “emblem of globalisation”, Mr Pflugfelder argues, and a reminder that it need not mean Americanisation. The films made “fantasy and fear” exportable, he writes, “as much a part of global trade as soybeans and silicon”. (Toho closely guards the overall economic value of the Godzilla franchise, and Mr Ota will only say that it is a “treasure”.)

Few characters have inspired such a diverse range of fans, critics and imitators. Dave Chappelle, an American comedian, once spoofed the monster with a skit about “Blackzilla”. Joe and Mario Duplantier, French heavy metal musicians, formed a band called Gojira, which performed at the Olympic games in Paris last summer. MF Doom, an American rapper, released music under the alias King Geedorah, a nod to Godzilla’s three-headed archenemy. The cinephile North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il kidnapped a famed South Korean director and forced him to make a communist Godzilla remake called Pulgasari. Susan Glasser of the New Yorker recently likened Donald Trump to Godzilla: “the monster very often wins.”

Serious pundits have long pondered the monster’s deeper meaning. Susan Sontag, an American critic, saw Japanese science-fiction films such as Godzilla as emblematic of an age of extremity. “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror,” she writes in “The Imagination of Disaster”, an essay from 1965. “It is fantasy,” she added, “which allows most people to cope”.

In Japan many see Godzilla as a metaphor for the country’s war dead. Godzilla returns to attack Japan time and time again because it is “a revenant, the returning spirit of the Japanese who died in that war we would rather forget”, argues Kato Norihiro, a Japanese critic. In these readings, the monster haunts the survivors who went on to enjoy peaceful, prosperous post-war lives—and helps them overcome their guilt.

Fans have built communities. One balmy day in late October, a group of Godzilla-heads from across North America set off on a Godzilla-themed trip around Japan. J.D. Lees, the lanky, unassuming impresario behind the journey, bears little outward resemblance to the monster, but he is arguably the King of the Fans. A retired teacher from Manitoba, Mr Lees began producing “G-Fan”, a Godzilla fanzine, by hand in 1992. It grew and eventually spawned an annual convention—“G-Fest”—and the tour series—“G-Tour”.

Toys and collectibles have helped keep Godzilla’s spirit alive in between film releases. For Nabe Yakan, a Japanese comedian, the obsession begins with Godzilla’s image. “The story comes second, for me it’s really about how Godzilla looks: the scaly skin, the scary face, the fiery breath—it’s just so cool!” Mr Nabe gushes. His house has a room dedicated to Godzilla memorabilia, from the heads of Godzilla costumes to old film scripts and scores of toys, lined up on shelves like jewellery. Some people even treat Godzilla merch as an investment. “Rich people buy and sell them like paintings,” says Kizawa Masahiro, the owner of “Gojira-ya”, a Godzilla-themed toy shop in western Tokyo. Mr Nabe reckons his collection is worth around $1m—but he has no plans to part with it.

Deviations from the monster’s ideal form are frowned upon. Mr Ota’s team offers detailed guidelines on how the monster should look and behave. It ought to have spikes on its back and four fingers on its hands. It should “stir the soul with its overwhelming life force”.

TriStar, a Hollywood studio, acquired the rights to make “Godzilla”, a film released in 1998. But the American directors turned the monster into a whimpering animal that runs from attack. Fans “turned on it like an angry mob,” Mr Lees recalls. “The TriStar Godzilla didn’t look like our Godzilla, didn’t act like our Godzilla.” The film featured an all-powerful American military laying the monster low, a snapshot of America’s hubris when it was the sole superpower.

With the Cold War over, nuclear anxiety receded, and fearful fantasies were supplanted by cute ones, from Pokemon to Hello Kitty. Godzilla’s recent revival has coincided with the return of geopolitical tensions and a heightened awareness of existential risks, from nuclear accidents to climate change. And as fears have grown again, Godzilla has grown bigger (see chart).

In 2011 an earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown at a power plant in Fukushima. “These are not problems from a distant past: Fukushima and the Fukuryumaru are linked,” Ms Tanaka says. Shin Gojira, released in 2014, took the disaster head-on, skewering Japan’s doddering bureaucrats for their indecision during the crisis. The film resonated with viewers who had recently been reminded that “there is still this massive, destructive force that can wipe out humanity,” Mr Fujita says. “Prior to that, people had this post-modern sense of not needing to be scared.”

A world riven with new conflicts has also given Godzilla new relevance. Godzilla Minus One, released in 2023, pays homage to the original Gojira, nodding to the original train scene. As Godzilla descends, an American general tells Japan to fend for itself. As Roland Kelts of Waseda University in Tokyo notes, “The depiction of America abandoning a Japan in crisis speaks directly to Japanese anxieties today.” Godzilla Minus One broke box-office records in both Japan and America. As Mr Tsutsui puts it, “Godzilla tends to resonate most when fear is closest to the surface.” ■