It was spring 1954. As the story goes, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer with the Toho Motion Picture Co., was flying home to Tokyo from Jakarta, where plans for a Japanese-Indonesian coproduction titled In the Shadow of Honor had just fallen apart. The movie, the story of a Japanese soldier who fights alongside the Indonesians in their struggle for postwar independence, was to be one of Toho's major releases later that year, and now Tanaka was under pressure to come up with a replacement for it— fast. Nervous and sweating, he spent the entire flight brainstorming.
Suddenly, he had a stroke of genius.
Taking a cue from the successful American science fiction film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), in which a dinosaur is resurrected by atomic tests in the Arctic and swims south to terrorize New York, Tanaka decided to make Japan's first giant celluloid monster, a creature that would not only be reanimated by nuclear weapons but serve as a metaphor for the Bomb itself, evoking the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts still vivid in Japan's consciousness. "The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb," Tanaka recalled decades later. "Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind." Nine years earlier, at the end of World War n, Japan had suffered a defeat unlike any other nation in history. In August 1945, America's twin atomic bombs had killed nearly 300,000 civilians, and an estimated 100,000 more lives had been lost the previous March when 6-29 planes firebombed Tokyo for three consecutive days. Cities across Japan were leveled, leaving millions dead, wounded, or home less. Factories that had been converted to military production were now either destroyed or rendered useless, crippling Japanese industry and bankrupting the economy. The country's massive empire in the Pacific region was lost, and six million repatriated soldiers and civilians returned to a Japan whose mighty spirit was crushed. Then came the seven-year-long Occupation (1945-1952), in which a nation that had remained unconquered for thou sands of years suffered the shame of being governed by foreign soldiers and forced to adopt a Western style constitution that reduced the Emperor to a mere symbolic figure, abolished State Shintoism, and threatened other long-held traditions and beliefs. The late 19405 and early 19505 were a time of political, economic, and cultural uncertainty in Japan.
During the war, the Japanese film industry was booming, due in large part to the government's use of the movie studios to disseminate heavily regulated nationalist propaganda. Then, after the defeat of Japan's militarist regime, the Allied powers likewise censored the movies and other media in their efforts to democratize Japan, forbidding discussions of the war, the Bomb and America's role in the tragedy. After the Occupation a handful of Bomb-themed films began to appear, notably Kaneto Shindo's Children of the Atom Bomb (1952), a semidocumentary about a schoolteacher who returns to Hiroshima looking for former pupils who were victims at ground zero. Hideo Sekigawa's Hiroshima (also 1952) was an angrier film that portrayed the atomic bombings as a racist act in which the Japanese people were guinea pigs in a U.S. nuclear experiment. But in the 40-plus years since the American forces left and censorship was lifted, surprisingly few movies have directly addressed Japan's status as the only nation to be attacked with nuclear weapons. Film scholars cite prevailing feelings of shame, repression, and guilt but are unable to fully explain the Japanese cinema's ambivalence toward the Bomb, a subject that would seem to be important and compelling movie material. During the 19505 and '60s, several Japanese movies made references to the atomic bombs and to radiation sickness, but only two major films tackled the Bomb as subject matter. The most critically lauded of the two was Akira Kurosawa's Live in Fear (a.k.a. Record of a Living Being, 1955), wherein Toshiro Mifune plays a man nearly frightened to death by the specter of another nuclear attack on Japan; the most commercially successful was Tanaka's barely disguised allegory of the Bomb, manifested in a gigantic monster.
By 1954, Japan was peaceful and relatively prosperous again, but fears of renewed annihilation were brimming below the surface, fueled by new nuclear threats. Cold War tensions were increasing and Japan was now caught — literally — between the two superpowers' nuclear-testing programs: the Soviet Union's on one side, and the Pacific Proving Ground established by the U.S. at the Mar shall Islands on the other. The Korean War was escalating, raising fears that a hydrogen bomb might be dropped on neighboring North Korea or China and rain fallout over the region. It may have been a divine act or it may have been pure happenstance, but around the same time that Tanaka was forced to quickly invent a major new film, a historic, horrifying event was unfolding in the equatorial Pacific, an event that would forever change monster-movie history.
~~Japan's Favorite Mon-Star -by- Steve Ryfle
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