What a 70-year-old firebreathing lizard reveals about humanity
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.
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