Others include Shohei Imamura’s 1988 movie Black Rain or Akira Kurosawa’s Record of a Living Being released the same

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Published: September 7, 2010

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Others include Shohei Imamura’s 1988 movie, Black Rain, or Akira Kurosawa’s Record of a Living Being, released the same year as Godzilla, or later Kurosawa work such as Rhapsody in August in 1991, all analysed in books such as Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film” edited by Mick Broderick. “With its images of panic and mass destruction – including spectacular nightly attacks on Tokyo – and its references to nuclear contamination, black rain, bomb shelters and the incineration of Nagasaki, Godzilla struck a chord of terror with Japanese audiences traumatised by recent history and still living with the fear of radiation poisoning,” Ms Deriaz said. Having cost 60m yen (about $900,000 in the rates of the time), it took 152m yen from 9.6 million viewers at the Japanese box office and is now widely regarded as one of Japan’s most important feature films. Although it owed much to the 1933 thriller King Kong, which had been re-released in Japan after the war, and to Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a 1953 film about a pre-historic sea giant written by Ray Bradbury, Godzilla was one of a raft of Japanese films to address the atomic age.

Nothing was more likely to grab Japanese public attention than a story in which bomb tests awaken a long-dormant, 30-storey high, monster with white-hot radioactive breath. Only a decade after Japan surrendered to the Allies after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of nuclear attack and radiation were still a sensitive subject for the country’s citizens. ” The bombings created a deep collective fear,” Ms Deriaz said. Those concerns were compounded when America, followed by the Russians, first exploded the newly-developed hydrogen bomb in 1952.

And two years later there was public outcry in Japan when American H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, caused radiation sickness among the crew of a Japanese tuna boat, Lucky Dragon. Faced with hundreds of people dying from radiation, he relents. The film concludes, however, with a warning that more monsters could be provoked unless nuclear testing is ended. The whole project was Japan’s first foray into big budget science fiction and cost 10 times the budget of the average Japanese film, and twice as much as the same studio’s The Seven Samurai which was also released that year. Godzilla was realised by Eiki Tsuburaya, a special effects expert who had spent the war making propaganda films including a recreation of the bombing of Pearl Harbour using miniatures that were so real the Americans were convinced it was documentary footage. Transformed and provoked by mankind’s nuclear bomb tests on the floor of the sea, Godzilla goes on the rampage, creating scenes of devastation that clearly recall wartime Japan.

Only a machine invented by the scientist, Dr Daisuke Serizawa, can kill him, but the doctor worries about his invention falling into the wrong hands. “When this original version was finally shown in America last year, people flocked to see it. They said it was an expression of nuclear anxiety to rank with Dr Strangelove [Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy starring Peter Sellers] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [directed by Alain Resnais in 1959].” When Godzilla – or Gojira in Japanese – was made by the Toho studio in 1954, it was a last-minute substitute for another project that had fallen through. Directed by Ishiro Honda, whose own experience of the bombing of Tokyo encouraged him to translate the horrors of war into film, its star was undoubtedly the monster Godzilla. “Along with King Kong, Godzilla is one of the most celebrated movie monsters of all time, yet hardly anyone in this country has seen the original that sparked the phenomenon,” she said.

“That’s why it’s fascinating to go back to the original and see how it all really started as opposed to the terrible distortion of the film that was caused by the release of the butchered American version. Next month, in the wake of the 60th anniversary commemorations of the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, the British Film Institute (BFI) is releasing this landmark in science fiction movie-making in its original form. Margaret Deriaz, the BFI’s head of film distribution, said the film had proved an important cinematic phenomenon. But now British audiences are to get their first opportunity to see the complete Japanese version of the film deemed politically unacceptable for ordinary Americans – and hence the rest of the world – half a century ago. Without the politics, the re-cut dubbed story of the dinosaur-like creature with radioactive breath, was an anodyne monster-on-the-loose picture which none the less added the name “Godzilla” to the lexicon of popular culture.
Such has been the success of the spin-offs, including more than 20 sequels from the Japanese studio that invented him, a major computer-generated Hollywood movie version seven years ago and assorted cartoons, that even fans may not know there was ever a serious point to the plot. Who knows: even the elusive Bostridge might finally turn up.. When the Japanese monster movie Godzilla was sold to an American distributor 50 years ago, it was re-edited to excise every mention of the strong anti-nuclear message that had made it such a hit in Hiroshima and Tokyo.


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