The Death of Godzilla

As one of Japan's most enduring screen icons, Haruo Nakajima was one of that nation's most popular actors, yet audiences rarely got to see his face.

For Western moviegoers, Japanese cinema, except for the occasional samurai picture like "Seven Samurai," was difficult to relate to, while familiarity with Japanese actors was extremely rare.

Without a doubt Japan's greatest actor, Toshiro Mifune, known predominantly for his work in director Akira Kurosawa's samurai and ronin films like "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo," and "Sanjuro," became a recognized presence in such Hollywood and European productions as "Grand Prix," "Hell in the Pacific," "Red Sun," "Midway," and "Shogun."

Notably, Steven Spielberg's notoriously humorless comedy colossus "1941" gave Mifune, cast as a Japanese submarine commander, his first opportunity to use his own voice for his English-language dialogue. Until then, his speech in Western movies had been dubbed, usually by voice-over wizard Paul Frees, best known as the voice of Boris Badenov in "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" and Ludwig Von Drake in Disney cartoons.

A scraggly bearded Toshiro Mifune plays a mercenary ronin in
"Yojimbo," which inspired the seminal spaghetti western "A Fistful
of Dollars," with Clint Eastwood as a scraggly bearded gunman.

Christopher Lee, as a German captain, looks on as sub commander
Toshiro Mifune orders an attack on the ferris wheel at Santa Monica's
Ocean Park - "Destroy that industrial complex!" - in "1941."

It took nearly two generations later for just one other Japanese actor to attract the attention of American audiences. Active in Japanese theater, television, and motion pictures from the early 1980s through the '90s, Ken Watanabe (pictured below) made an impression on Western filmgoers with his charismatic performance as a rebellious warrior in 2003's "The Last Samurai," featuring Tom Cruise.

Watanabe followed that with memorable turns in "Batman Begins," "Letters from Iwo Jima," "Inception," and the 2014 reboot of "Godzilla."

Dr. Serizawa, inventor of Godzilla's original undoing, the "Oxygen
Destroyer," is portrayed by (left) Akihiko Hirata as a scarred WWII
veteran, and, 60 years later, by Ken Watanabe in 2014's "Godzilla."

Which brings us to the actor in the creature suit in the original 1954 "Godzilla," the above-mentioned Haruo Nakajima, who died of complications from pneumonia August 7, 2017, age 88. Nakajima, who was 16 when Japan surrendered to the Allies, started his show business career as a stuntman in war pictures and samurai movies, including "Seven Samurai." He recalled, "I often played the guy who gets killed." His first credited role was in 1952's "Sword for Hire," starring Toshiro Mifune.

In a 1953 war film titled "Eagle of the Pacific" (also known as "Operation Kamikaze"), the 24-year-old stuntman portrayed a Zero pilot jumping out of a plane in flames. His exuberance caught the attention of the director, Ishiro Honda. Nakajima said, "Mr. Honda saw the scene and thought, 'This guy is full of energy.' They came to see me as someone who had guts, and I think that's why they wanted me for the role of Godzilla."

"Godzilla" (1954) introduced a new, uniquely Japanese film genre called "kaiju" (from Japanese "strange beast") in which giant monsters attack major metropolises and engage the military and other gigantic creatures in combat. The term kaiju originally related to monsters from ancient Japanese legends, before the advent of writing. There were no traditional depictions of kaiju-like beasts.

Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer for Toho Studios in Tokyo, needed a film after a previous project was abandoned. He admired how well the American giant monster genre fared in the box office of Japanese theaters, from 1933's "King Kong" to 1953's "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms."

Stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien brought the
gargantuan ape to life in "King Kong."

Willis O'Brien's protégé, Ray Harryhausen, was given his first full-
fledged stop-motion animation assignment with "The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms," giving life to a Rhedosaurus (a fictional breed of
dinosaur), thawed out in the Arctic Circle by a nuclear bomb test.

Another fan of these movies was Eiji Tsuburaya, a pre-war cinematographer and director of propaganda films who eventually established the visual effects department at Toho Studios. "I never forgot that movie," Tsuburaya said of "King Kong." "I thought to myself, 'I will someday make a monster movie like that.'"

Tanaka and Tsuburaya set out to make a new movie that would combine a gigantic monster with Japan's wariness of atomic weapons. It had, after all, only been nine years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As well, on March 1 of 1954, the U.S. test of a high-yield thermonuclear bomb dubbed Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll - accidentally packing more of a wallop in its yield than predicted, 1000 more times powerful than each of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - caused fallout that contaminated the crew of 23 men aboard the Japanese tuna fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5.

The crew of Lucky Dragon 5 (pictured above) recovered from acute radiation syndrome (ARS) - except for the boat's radio operator, who succumbed to other health complications - although, during their ARS treatment, they were all unluckily infected with hepatitis C through blood transfusions.

So, playing on their nation's re-emerging anxiety over nuclear devastation, producer Tanaka and special effects supervisor Tsuburaya created a gigantic radioactive creature that emerges from the ocean depths to wreak havoc in Tokyo. "The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb," Tanaka emphasized. "Mankind had created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind."

The man who would direct "Godzilla," Ishiro Honda, said, "If Godzilla had been a dinosaur...he would have been killed by just one cannonball. But if he were equal to an atomic bomb, we wouldn't know what to do. So I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla." Its attacks mirror the horrors the Japanese experienced at the end of World War II.

Instead of the stop-motion animation technique as perfected by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, Tanaka utilized a man in a rubber suit. This technique, which would become a staple of kaiju films, came to be called suitmation and is regarded as a Japanese craft art. Tsuburaya insisted on a slow, ponderous weightiness to his creation for realism.

The men who created Godzilla: (top) producer Tomoyuki Tanaka;
(center) special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya;
(bottom) director Ishiro Honda

The dinosaur, not unlike the "Rhedosaurus" from 20,000 fathoms, was fictitious and was dubbed "Gojira," a portmanteau from the Japanese words for "gorilla" and "whale." Through a convoluted process of phonetics and the system of spelling Japanese words using the Roman alphabet, as well as the system of transcribing the Japanese language into Latin, "Gojira" could be rendered as "Gozira," which, in turn, could be mispronounced as "Gozilla," and finally "Godzilla."

The first version of Godzilla's "suit" weighed 220 pounds. Its construction consisted of bamboo sticks, wire, metal mesh, cushions, latex and molten rubber. Eiji Tsuburaya struggled during Japan's post-war shortages and rationing to find enough rubber and latex to make a single costume. Almost immediately upon donning the costume, actor Haruo Nakajima fell due to the inflexible materials and heavy latex. The suit was cut in half and used only for close-ups or partial shots of just Godzilla's legs, manipulated by Nakajima in rope suspenders (pictured below).

They even made a toy of Nakajima in his Godzilla suspenders.

A second suit was lighter, although Nakajima, despite his enthusiasm and stamina, was only able to work inside the getup for a few minutes before passing out. He recalled that the costume was so hot that the sweat he wrung from his shirt would fill half a bucket. He lost 20 pounds during production of the first picture.

Nakajima, who asserted that his Godzilla was grand and complex, said he created his characterization from scratch, developing it by visiting zoos to study how elephants, gorillas, and bears moved. He believed it was important to show the pathos of the creature. "If Godzilla can't walk properly, it's nothing but a freak show," he remarked. "It's not some cowboy movie."

In his latter years, Nakajima told an interviewer, "We had to improvise, and make it all look real on screen." He donned the rubber suit, or variations and upgrades of it, a dozen times, from 1954 to 1972. Remembering the early years, he commented, "You don't learn this from a textbook but by doing."

Considered by many to be the best suit-actor in the long history of the Godzilla franchise - Toho Studios produced, to date, 27 more Godzilla pictures after Nakajima hung up his rubber costume, while Hollywood cranked out three CGI Godzilla films, including the upcoming "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" - Haruo Nakajima once proclaimed, "I am the original, the real thing. My Godzilla was the best." Eiji Tsuburaya considered Nakajima completely invaluable.

As a not so thinly veiled fable about the dangers of nuclear weapons, "Godzilla" struck a chord with 1950's Japan. Some Japanese audiences even saw Godzilla as a victim. In the film, it's atomic bomb testing by the U.S. that awaken Godzilla, and so it could be viewed as a way of blaming America for the struggles the nation endured after World War II.

In America, The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther commented, "One might remotely regard him as a symbol of Japanese hate for the destruction that came out of nowhere and descended upon Hiroshima one pleasant August morn. But we assure you that the quality of the picture and the childishness of the whole idea do not indicate such a calculation. Godzilla was simply meant to scare people."

For several years, "Godzilla" was only shown in the United States with subtitles in Japanese community theaters. In 1956, American producers heavily re-edited the film and dubbed in English dialogue, calling it "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" An American director shot new footage of actor Raymond Burr as a visiting reporter named Steve Martin. Much of the original movie's political and anti-nuclear content were cut for the Americanized version, leaving more room for "lead actor" Burr's stentorian interaction with Japanese-American actors and the lookalike backsides of original cast members.

Raymond Burr blends in with the local citizenry
in the revamped "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!"

The success of "Godzilla" launched Japan' golden age of "tokusatsu," or "special-filming" movie, in which rubber-suited actors portraying a vast array of colossal beasts destroyed scale-model sets, thus providing Haruo Nakajima ample opportunities to give life to a cornucopia of cryptozoological creatures beyond Godzilla, as delineated below:

In "Rodan" (1956), Haruo Nakajima played the winged
reptile described as a mutant pterosaur.

Nakajima was ensconced in what looked like a stack of cardboard
boxes as Moguera, a robot utilized by a race of extraterrestrials
hoping to conquer Earth in 1957's "The Mysterians."

"Varan the Unbelievable" (1958) gave Nakajima the opportunity
to play a cross between Godzilla and a giant butterfly.

In this autographed still from 1961's "Mothra,"
Nakajima pointed out that he was the head and
neck of the larva that transforms into a giant moth.

"Gorath" was a 1962 Japanese disaster movie about scientists
attempting to move Earth's orbit to avoid a collision with a
runaway star. The Americanized release cut out Nakajima's
appearance as a thawed-out mutant walrus called Maguma.

As if portraying a deviant marine mammal wasn't
enough of a challenge for Nakajima, he was called
upon to impersonate a hybrid human toadstool in
1962's "Attack of the Mushroom People."

Baragon, a four-legged, unicorn-horned beast with oversized ears
and armed with a mouth-spewing heat ray (played by Nakajima),
made its debut in 1965's "Frankenstein Conquers the World."

"The War of the Gargantuas" (1966), pitting an evil gigantic Yeti-
like beast against its gentle twin, cast Nakajima as the green,
people-eating monster. The movie featured slumming American
actor Russ Tamblyn, the Jets' Riff from "West Side Story." 

Yû Sekita, as the good, brown Gargantua, and Haruo Nakajima
rest between takes on the set of "The War of the Gargantuas."

Off-camera, Nakajima escorts American model and costar
Linda Miller on location for 1967's "King Kong Escapes."

Haruo Nakajima enjoys a 2016 reunion with "King Kong Escapes"
costars Linda Miller and Akira Takarada.

In the Jules Verne-like adventure "Latitude Zero" (1969), which
imported Hollywood actors Joseph Cotten, Cesar Romero, and
Richard Jaeckel to Toho Studios, Nakajima appeared as a winged
lion and a giant rat.

Nakajima pulled double-duty again in 1970's "Space Amoeba,"
portraying Kameba (a giant fresh water turtle) and Gezora
(a giant squid-like cuttlefish...that's right, a cuttlefish).

Haruo Nakajima's final portrayal of Godzilla was in 1972's "Godzilla vs. Gigan" before he retired from the screen in 1973. Living in a suburb of Tokyo, Nakajima remained employed by Toho Studios, transferred to a job at a bowling alley located on the studio lot.

The old guard flanked by new blood: Tsutomu Kitagawa played
Godzilla in the early 2000s, while Kenpachiro Satsuma portrayed
Godzilla through the 1970s into the '90s.

There are still countless fans who prefer the vivacity and personality (occasionally with a tinge of comedy) Nakajima brought to the characterization of Godzilla over the sterile computer-generated depictions in the Hollywood reboots, which they say resemble nothing more than pissed-off animals.

The most recent incarnation of Godzilla from Japan - Toho's 29th Godzilla picture - "Shin Godzilla" ("shin" could variously mean "new," "true," or "god"), also known as "Godzilla: Resurgence," relied on a hybrid of suitmation and CGI for its 2016 release. Mansai Nomura, a specialist in the traditional Japanese comic theater Kyōgen, had his movements duplicated through motion capture technology (pictured below), not unlike Andy Serkis' performance in the "Planet of the Apes" franchise reboot.

The Last Word

"In the end, the Godzilla I played remains on film forever," Harou Nakajima said in 2016. "It remains in people's memory, and for that I feel really grateful."