Our series NUCLEAR HORROR: AMERICA X JAPAN hopes to compare and contrast the ways American and Japanese cinema addressed the fears of nuclear devastation that ramped up following the detonation of the first thermonuclear device by the United States at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, 70 years ago. The series consists of four films in two dueling pairs. The first film in the series, Them!, was a 1954 American film and was contrasted with the second, the Japanese film Godzilla from the same year.

Them! told a story of giant irradiated ants from the New Mexico desert created by the 1945 Trinity Test spreading out and posing a threat to the western United States. In that film, we saw state and federal law enforcement, scientists, politicians, and the military all work together competently, effectively, and with the best interests of the American people at heart to eliminate the threat, which after scientific investigation and operational co-ordination required simply sending soldiers into the nests with machine guns and flamethrowers to kill the ants.

Godzilla is also about a giant radioactive monster created by atomic testing threatening a major populated area, but the treatment of that monster and man’s effectiveness in combating it is handled very differently. After all, Godzilla comes from the victims of nuclear warfare, rather than its perpetrators.

On the morning of August 6th, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, detonating in the air. There was a flash of light and then a deafening boom, leaving a blast zone with a mile radius and sparking fire storms across another four miles. 70 to 80 thousand people were killed. 16 hours after the bombing of Hiroshima, President Truman announced by radio what had occurred and reiterated the need for an unconditional surrender of Japan.

*A cloud from the atomic bomb strike in Hiroshima, Japan. August 6, 1945. U.S. Army*

In Hiroshima, 69% of the buildings were destroyed between the blast and the ensuing fire storms including hospitals and vital infrastructure, leaving little support for the civilian casualties requiring immediate help. Along with the usual wounds from a destructive bomb were new injuries of burns, inflammation of the eyes and throat, mouth sores, nausea, and other symptoms of radiation sickness.

Japan’s leaders of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War debated, and determined that surely the Allied forces hadn’t been able to mass produce such a weapon, and decided not to surrender. So, the decision was made by the United States to drop a second bomb on Japan.

On August 9th, 1945 the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Though a more powerful bomb, the rolling hills of Nagasaki within the Urakami Valley helped confine the mile radius blast area, and limited fires to within a 2 mile radius. At least 35 to 40 thousand people were killed instantly with 60 thousand injured.

Symptoms of radiation sickness and poisoning, now called Acute Radiation Syndrome, include nausea and vomiting, fever, anemia, headache and dizziness, red skin, hair loss, inflammation of mouth and throat, mouth sores, bleeding into the skin, and necrosis of wounds. Victims often had radiation scarring from the unique burns and wound necrosis, called keloid scars.

Deaths from radiation began to be reported around one week after the bombs, and deaths peaked at three to four weeks after. Including those who died from the immediate blasts, a total of 129 to 226 thousand people were killed.

Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were termed hibakusha, or “bomb affected people.” It was a term used previously for survivors of any kind of bomb. But now, it became a label to describe the people affected directly by these atomic bombs and their immediate aftermath.

Nuclear fallout and radiation was not understood very well at that time, and unfortunately hibakusha became ostracized due to fears that radiation sickness was contagious. Long-term effects of the radiation showed birth defects, instances of leukemia and other cancers up to five years later. Hibakusha were avoided in work places or even in family relations for fears that the radiation could be spread through close proximity, or through blood relations. These fears are unfounded, but resulted in hibakusha being discriminated against.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th respectively shocked the civilian population. However it was the invasion of Russia into Manchuria on August 9th that spurred the Emperor into ordering the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War into surrendering. Japan’s surrender became official on August 15, 1945. For Japan, that surrender meant complete agreement to the terms laid out by President Truman that July. This included:

The removal of authority and influence from those leading the war efforts

Allied occupation anywhere in Japanese territories
Japan’s sovereignty to be limited to the major islands Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku, and minor islands as decided by Allied forces
The disarmament of the Japanese army
Removal within the government to “all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies including freedom of speech, though, and religion”
And for Japan to maintain her industries, but not those enabling rearmament for war; This included access to (not control of) raw materials like steel, coal and cotton.

Once these objectives were achieved, any Allied occupying forces were to be removed. The occupation was led by US general Douglas MacArthur. Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne, though the wartime cabinet was replaced with an Allied-approved cabinet invested in meeting the Potsdam terms.

MacArthur and the new Japanese cabinet began drafting a new constitution that would introduce a parliamentary democracy system. A major goal of the occupation was the reprogramming of Japanese culture along lines that would maintain as many traditional values as possible while eliminating the military-religious doctrine that had fueled the nation’s imperialism. The Emperor was to be a symbolic figurehead, akin to the British crown, not a divine figure. Shinto was removed as a state religion, and decoupled from military and nationalistic elements. The new constitution also enfranchised women, instigated human rights, and decentralized police and local governments. Also included in the new constitution was Article 9, the “Peace Clause.” As part of Japan’s demilitarization, this clause banned Japan from maintaining any armed forces. Eventually, after the end of the occupation, it was decided to allow the creation of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, a small army in everything but name that is prohibited from waging war or taking aggressive actions and is mostly used for disaster relief, kept ready in the event of an attack on Japanese soil. The JSDF came into existence the same year that the film, Godzilla, was released.

As the government changed, so did Japan’s economic system. Japan faced a process of “de-industrialization” followed by “economic reconstruction” under American direction. To combat perceptions of colonialism, MacArthur instigated two immediate orders upon his arrival: no Allied personnel were to assault a Japanese person; and, no Allied personnel were to eat or take any of Japan’s scarce food resources.

Censorship of Japanese media under the occupation was managed by the Civil Information Educational Section. These censorship rules included:

No reference to censorship in and of itself
No criticism of the occupation
No reference to the Cold War, or reference to a potential Third World War
No promotion of nationalism or patriotism, justification of war, militaristic content, or mention of a divine Japan
No mention of the black market, the food shortage or starvation, or coverage of criminal activities
No mention of the atomic bombs or nuclear power.

During this time, the Cold War was increasing tensions between the US and the USSR. The US wanted to ensure a strong Japan to withstand any Russian influence. The democratization of Japan was one step to fortify Asia against Russia, as was allowing the creation of the JSDF.

With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US had positioned themselves as a nuclear world power. But in order to keep that lead in the arms race against the Soviet Union, the American government continued to fund nuclear testing. The first tests to occur after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was called Operation Crossroads, held in mid-1946 in a small pacific coral rim called Bikini Atoll.

Not quite an island, an atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef that can include a string of islands. There are many atolls in the Marshall Islands, just 5 thousand kilometers south east of Japan. The US gained control of the islands from Japanese forces in 1944 and, according to the terms of surrender, the Allied powers could manage minor islands like the Marshall Islands to their discretion. Operation Crossroads was testing the effects of atomic bombs on naval ships, and given Bikini Atoll’s remote location from typical sea and air traffic, it seemed an ideal location for the tests.

The indigenous population at Bikini Atoll was approached and requested to move. The US military explained the tests would “better all mankind and protect the world from future conflicts.” With this information, the Bikinians agreed to move to Rongerik Atoll some 200 kilometers south.

Now uninhabited, Bikini Atoll saw 23 nuclear tests total between 1946 to 1958, with neighboring Enewetak Atoll seeing 43 tests. While the 1946 test Operation Crossroads was publicly announced and included a press junket, future tests were considered top secret in order to counter possible surveillance by the USSR.

For Bikini Atoll, these tests resulted in the coral, fish and nearby ecosystems becoming radioactive, and the soil so contaminated that food grown was itself radioactive. While this was inevitable given the frequency of testing, a major contributor to the radioactivity was the Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954.

Castle Bravo was the first test of a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon that was a new escalation in the arms race. Hydrogen bombs are two-stage devices utilizing nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, to allow for greater destructive power in a more compact device with less mass. It was suspected that the bomb for the Castle Bravo test would exceed expectations by 20%. However, when Castle Bravo was detonated, it was 150% more powerful than expected, with an explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT, still the largest nuclear detonation perpetrated by the United States. The atom bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima had been equivalent in power to 15 kilotons of TNT.

The nuclear fallout from Castle Bravo was significant. Due to the increased destructive power and wind patterns, the fallout spread across Bikini Atoll and to neighboring Atolls. 239 civilians across the Marshall Islands were affected, as well as 28 Americans stationed at nearby Rongerik Atoll. But none were so directly and immediately impacted as the 23 Japanese fishermen on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru fishing boat, known in English as the Lucky Dragon No. 5.

While fishing for tuna, the Lucky Dragon was sailing near the pre-established “danger zone” determined by the military to keep civilians out of danger, as well as maintain the secrecy around their tests. However, Castle Bravo was far more powerful and had a larger fallout radius than expected; and the Lucky Dragon was right in the middle of it.

Fine, radioactive dust made of disintegrated coral and sand fell upon the crew in such amounts they could scoop it off the boat’s deck with their hands. Realizing the need to leave the area, the crew went to retrieve their nets, delaying departure by six hours and further exposing them and their catch to the radioactive ash.

Later called death ash, the substance stuck to the crew’s faces, hair, and inside their throats. Symptoms of radiation sickness began within 24 hours of their exposure, but they were still at least a week out from port. Their symptoms included red mucous-leaking eyes, blisters, darkened and reddened skin, and hair loss.

Once they returned to port, their catch was thrown away and the crew was taken to hospital, though some radioactive fish caught by other boats farther away did make it to market and had to be recalled. A crewman had kept a sample of the death ash, which Japanese scientists analyzed and confirmed to be the result of a hydrogen bomb due to the presence of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope caused by the fallout from a hydrogen bomb - of which there had only been one.

Lucky Dragon No. 5 and her crew became evidence proving that the US was conducting secret nuclear weapons tests in Japan’s backyard not even 10 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ONLY two years after the American occupation had ended. The resulting anger from Japan was exacerbated by America’s caginess around the whole incident.

American officials first denied the incident, then claimed the fishermen were at fault for being within Bikini Atoll’s danger zone, and later suggested the fishermen were Russian spies. Meanwhile, American doctors were sent to study as well as help treat the Lucky Dragon crew.

The Lucky Dragon incident sparked a grassroots anti-nuclear movement in Japan and abroad. When crewman Aichi Kuboyama died from radiation sickness complications in 1955, the movement gained further traction. Kuboyama is considered the first victim of the hydrogen bomb, spurring the National Council for a Petition Movement to Ban Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs to hold their first annual Ban the Bomb convention.

Kuboyama was the only crewman to die from the incident, but the other Lucky Dragon crewmembers faced a long recovery period from the radiation. Once healed, they also faced the same stigma hibakusha faced, with many of the fishermen needing to move and change careers or even their names in order to earn a livelihood. Eventually, the crew received a compensation settlement from the American government of two million yen each. However, the crew was not given hibakusha status and therefore could not access health and financial benefits from the Japanese government given for other bomb-affected people. The rationale for this was those benefits and status were specific to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, not this new hydrogen bomb.

The Lucky Dragon incident occurred two years after the end of the occupation, and it reignited much of the trauma and anger the Japanese people had previously bottled up. During the occupation, Japan was unable to culturally and socially address their experience of WWII, their country’s loss, and trauma from the atomic bomb.

For seven years, 1945 to 1952, these experiences and feelings had no outlet unless it was through subversion. Once the occupation and its censorship ended, Japanese creatives in art, literature, and of course film, could now directly address the effects of the war and the subsequent occupation. War films began to be produced, and they tended to be tragic and retrospective of war and violence. Dramas, both contemporary and historical, reflected on violence and the occupation. But anger about the occupation, the atomic bombs, and indeed the hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific islands was sparked due to the Lucky Dragon incident; and Japanese creatives had an outlet for it.

In 1954, the major Japanese film studio Toho had three very big productions on the docket, the most expensive they’d ever produced: Sojiro Motoki’s production of Seven Samurai by Akria Kurosawa, Kazuo Takimura’s production Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto by Hiroshi Inagaki, and a Japanese/Indonesian co-production called In the Shadow of Glory produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka.

However, anti-Japanese sentiment in Indonesia led to the cancellation of the project, and returning home by plane with no movie, Tanaka conceived of the idea of doing a movie about a giant radioactive sea monster inspired by the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident in March. Tanaka felt the combination of addressing the topical nuclear themes with the spectacle of a giant monster would be a hit, particularly given the recent box office success of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 and the re-release of King Kong in 1952.

The project was approved in April of 1954 when Toho’s top special effects man, Eiji Tsuburaya, confirmed that the film would be financially feasible. He was lying, but Tsuburaya really wanted to make a giant monster movie. The working title was Project G, for giant.

Tsuburaya had been the biggest name in Japanese special effects since the 1930s, after being inspired by seeing King Kong in 1933. He had been the head of Toho’s special effects department since 1938, and during the war he had overseen the special effects on a film called The War at Sea, From Hawaii to Malay which featured a depiction of the Pearl Harbor bombing so convincing that when the film was seen by US agents they were convinced the Japanese must have somehow snuck spies into Hawaii ahead of time to shoot the attack. Ever since seeing King Kong, Tsuburaya had dreamed of shooting a giant monster movie, and was the natural choice to direct the special effects sequences of Project G.

Tanaka brought on Ishiro Honda to direct, who accepted the project due to his wartime experiences and his interest in science fiction. Honda, Tanaka, and Tsuburaya decided to depict the movie’s events in a sober documentary tone rather than sensationally, as an attempt to combat the perception of science fiction films as silly and childish, not worthy of serious critical appraisal.

*Ishiro Honda on the set of Godzilla* (1954)

Honda had been working at Toho since the 1930s but was drafted into the military in 1935 and underwent horrible experiences in Manchuria as he was served tour after tour as punishment for an attempted coup by his commanding officer, including being placed in charge of a “comfort station” - a traumatic experience he would later write a book about. In 1944 he was captured by the Chinese and held prisoner. After his release, he passed through a post-bombing Hiroshima on his way home. He would suffer nightmares of the war 2-3 times a week for the rest of his life.

After returning home, he resumed his film career at Toho, serving as assistant director to his best friend, Akira Kurosawa. When he began directing his own films, one of his earliest projects was a documentary that included the first successful underwater photography in a Japanese production.

Tanaka hired science fiction author Shigeru Kayama in May 1954 to expand Tanaka’s initial idea about a giant octopus attacking fishing boats into a full treatment. Kayama’s original version took inspiration from Hollywood horror movies, with a mad scientist who lived in a castle and a monster with an interest in human women similar to King Kong.

Ishiro Honda and screenwriter Takeo Murata then co-wrote the screenplay in three weeks together in a hotel room. They redeveloped the characters, introducing the film’s central love triangle of sailor Hideo Ogata, his girlfriend Emiko Yamane, and her fiancé scientist Daisuke Serizawa. This new iteration of the story emphasized a slow build to the creature’s reveal, a realistic tone, and the nuclear allegory.

The design of the creature went through many iterations. A gorilla like appearance was considered in homage to King Kong, but Tanaka wanted a sea monster of the depths who could attack fishing boats. From the Japanese words for gorilla and whale, gorira and kujira came the creature’s name Gojira. There is a long standing urban legend that Gojira was the nickname of a particularly bulky studio employee at Toho, but years later Honda’s wife revealed this was just Toho publicity, and that the name was decided upon by Honda, Tanaka, and Tsuburaya.

Early designs were more mammalian, and one featured a head shaped like a mushroom cloud, but the finalized design was the product of artists Teizo Toshimitsu and Akira Watanabe under Tsuburaya’s direction. The decision was made to model Gojira on a dinosaur, like the monster from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, combining elements of a tyrannosaurus, iguanodon, and stegosaurus. While the statuette made to model the creature was much more traditionally reptilian, with scales and a crocodilian face, by the time the full sized monster was being created for filming the design had shifted thanks to input from Honda and Tanaka, who wanted the design to incorporate elements of the divine as well as emphasize the creature’s nuclear origins. Gojira’s face was modeled on a traditional Asian dragon with a mammalian snout, prominent fangs, and small pointed ears. The creature was given skin with the texture of Keloid scars like those of the hibakusha, to show that Gojira too was a victim of the nuclear bomb.

Tsuburaya had hoped to shoot the movie’s special effects using stop-motion animation, the same as Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and his personal favourite King Kong. But using the resources available to Toho at the time, Tsuburaya estimated it would take seven years to complete the movie if done in stop-motion.

Instead, Tsuburaya developed the effects technique now known as “suitmation”, where the monster would be portrayed by a performer in a suit, acting on a scale miniature set, shot in slow motion to give the appropriate sense of scale to the monster’s motions. This technique would revolutionize Japanese special effects films and form the basis of the tokusatsu genre of giant monster and robot shows that continues to this day. Eiji Tsuburaya worked on every Toho “tokusatsu” (special effects) film until his death in 1970.

The suit for Gojira, the first of its kind, was made using bamboo and wire for an interior frame with metal mesh and cushioning over top of that for structure, followed by coats of latex for shape. Coats of molten rubber and strips of latex were then applied to create the creature’s hide. All in all the suit weighed over 120 kilograms.

Two stuntmen were hired to portray Gojira: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka. Ultimately, however, Tezuka couldn’t handle the intense physical demands of the role, and Nakajima became the primary performer. The original suit was so heavy and constrictive that ultimately it was cut in half at the waist and used for shots that did not show Gojira’s full body. A second suit was made that was only 100 kilograms, though Nakajima was still only able to wear it for about three minutes at a time before passing out under the heat of the studio lights. To breathe and see there were small holes in the neck that Nakajima could look through past a black nylon liner. Underwater, he was blind, and when moving on set he could only see his feet. Furthermore, he had to move and smash through the miniature cityscape at a fast rate so that the slow motion photography would look natural when projected at normal speed. All with no air conditioning in a soundstage under 1950s studio lights during the Japanese summer. Nakajima would go on to play Godzilla 11 more times until he retired in 1972.

Honda and Tsuburaya worked in tandem to plan sequences early on, with each director visiting the other’s sets for lighting reference and to ensure the film had a consistent visual style and editing rhythm across sequences. The miniature set of Tokyo was built on a 1:25 scale using blueprints of the real buildings, and were fully detailed with interiors so that when destroyed they would crumble realistically. Japanese audiences of the time would have been able to recognize several Tokyo landmarks in the film, including the Ginza Wako clock tower, the National Diet building, and the Kachidoki bridge. The buildings were made of thin wooden boards reinforced with plaster and chalk with small cracks and fractures already pre-cut so they would crumble more easily. The buildings destroyed by Gojira’s atomic breath had explosives placed inside and were coated with gasoline. To spray the mist that acted as the atomic breath, a small scale hand operated mechanical puppet of Gojira’s upper body was created which could be connected with a spray nozzle. Frame by frame optical animation was used for the monster’s glowing dorsal spines, and the film involved so much more special and visual effects work than was common at the time that Toho had to hire 400 new staff.

The film’s budget of 63 million yen was three times the average budget of a contemporary Japanese film - slightly less than the budget for Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which was 125 million yen. Still not a large amount by Hollywood standards, only $900,000, but an A picture by Japanese standards. Tsburaya’s special effects unit shot for 71 days, while Honda’s unit shot for 51 days.

The film’s A picture status was seen in its cast - leading man Akira Takarada was an up and coming heartthrob, female lead Momoko Kochi was one of Toho’s latest romantic starlets, and acclaimed character actor Takeshi Shimura - known to audiences in the West best from his appearances in many Akira Kurosawa films such as Ikiru and Seven Samurai - lends his gravitas to the role of Professor Kyohei Yamane. When principal photography began, Honda addressed the cast and crew and let them know that anyone who considered the film silly or beneath them was to leave the production - which he believed would only succeed if everyone committed 100%.

The film’s score by Akira Ifukube has gone on to become iconic. In addition to the memorable themes in the movie, Ifukube also created key sound effects for the monster. At first, the sound department attempted to create Gojira’s roar by combining and manipulating real animal roars, similar to how many creature sounds are still made today. But none of these were considered acceptable as the team wanted something unearthly and unrecognizable. Ifukube created Godzilla’s roar by rubbign a resin-coated leather glove through the loosened lower strings of a double bass, and Godzilla’s foot stomps by striked an amplifier box with a baton. Akira Ifukube would score 10 more Godzilla movies before his death in 2006, with his themes being used in many many others, including Godzilla Minus One.

Gojira premiered in Japan on October 27, 1954 and was a huge hit, earning 183 million yen. Approximately 10% of the Japanese population in 1954 saw the movie. It was Toho’s #3 earner that year, behind Seven Samurai and Samurai I: Mushashi Miyamoto. Initial critical reaction, however, was negative. The Japanese press had been negative during production, predicting a massive flop and accusing Toho of cashing in on the tragedies of World War II and the Lucky Dragon incident. Hoping to create the flop they predicted, initial reviews criticized the film for being unrealistic, as a creature like Gojira could never possibly exist.

However, when the box office receipts began to come in and it was clear the film was a hit, critical appraisal began to become more positive, and Gojira would be nominated for Best Picture by the Japan Movie Association. It would lose that award to Seven Samurai, but win the award for best special effects.

When the film was released in the United States in 1956, it was in a heavily re-edited form as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! The Americanization was fairly true to the Japanese original but added new scenes directed by Terry Morse with actor Raymond Burr inserted into the action as a foreign correspondent on the scene in Tokyo, and removed dialogue in the film directly critical of American nuclear policy.
The success of the Americanization worldwide led to Japanese critics beginning to see the picture’s value as a competitor to American nuclear horror movies but from the perspective of the people who had actually experienced true nuclear horror.

The name “Godzilla” was chosen as Toho’s official Anglicization, it is simply an alternate Romanization of the three syllables in the name: “GO-JI-RA” becoming “GO-DZI-LLA”, but of course an English speaker tends to pronounce it “GOD-ZILLA”. For 50 years, the original Japanese version was unavailable in North America, until a re-release from Rialto in 2004 spurred future releases of the original version on home video.

Tomoyuki Tanaka said, “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind had created the atomic bomb, and now nature was going to take her revenge on mankind.” He would go on to produce 22 Godzilla movies in total among many other special effects films before his death in 1997.

Ishiro Honda said, “Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy.” Honda would direct many Toho science fiction projects, including 7 Godzilla sequels, closing out his career in the 80s and 90s as a 2nd unit director and creative consultant on his friend Akira Kurosawa’s films.

In Godzilla, we see a monster who represents nuclear power as seen by the Japanese. Inextricably linked with American military might, massively destructive, unstoppable by any conventional means, implacable. All of the avenues which succeeded in Them! are powerless, and watch helplessly at the devastation. Unlike many American monster movies where the destruction of the city is a cathartic finale, the rousing climax, in Godzilla the attack on Tokyo forms the end of the 2nd act, with a large portion of the film devoted to the death toll, the suffering, the human cost caused by the monster’s destruction, culminating in Akira Ifukube’s Prayer for Peace sung by the girls of Toho’s High School of Music in a scene that never fails to make me cry. Ultimately, the only thing that can stop Godzilla is an even worse scientific weapon of mass destruction, placing the character of Dr. Serizawa in the difficult shoes of the Americans nine years earlier - is it worth using such an awful weapon, even if its use can save lives?

Written by Ben Rowe

Examining Nuclear Horror: Godzilla (1954)

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