The Horrifying Symbolic Origins Of Godzilla

Publish date: 2024-05-08

William Tsutsui, author of 2004's "Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters," told NBC News that Godzilla was as "innocent as the kids on their playgrounds in Hiroshima." In his 1954 movie, a nuclear attack awakens the creature from his slumber in the ocean. His body is covered in the same thick, scab-like keloid scars that survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts bore. He's in pain — a victim seeking to destroy. He's boundless rage itself, uncorked and roving unchecked.

As Tsutsui says, the more obvious indicators of this message were excised from the U.S.' 1956 imported version of the film, such as a scene on a subway tying Godzilla to Hiroshima. In the wake of World War II, he says, "The movie [Godzilla] served as a strong political statement, representative of the traumas and anxieties of the Japanese people in an era when censorship was extensive in Japan because of the American occupation of the country after the war ended."

The nuclear attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not just a source of great pain and true horror, but "guilt and shame," Tsutsui continues. Japanese society and its creatives couldn't breach the topic directly, and so spoke through story instead. All such meaning went over the heads of American audiences. In 1956, The New York Times dismissively described Godzilla as a mere "miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $20 worth of toy buildings and electric train."

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