Godzilla and the Kaiju: Radiation Mutants of the Atomic Age Explained

Godzilla is the only monster with a birth certificate. On March 1, 1954 the United States detonated Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll, at fifteen megatons the largest bomb it ever tested and more than twice the yield its designers had calculated; the fallout fell as white ash on the tuna boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru, the Lucky Dragon 5, eighty miles outside the exclusion zone, and its twenty-three crew came home to Yaizu with radiation burns. The radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died in September. Japanese newspapers followed the contaminated catch through the markets, and the producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, flying home from a collapsed deal in Indonesia, looked at the ocean and thought of a monster raised from it by the bomb. Ishirō Honda, who had walked through Hiroshima in 1946, directed; Eiji Tsuburaya built the creature as a suit; Akira Ifukube wrote the march. Gojira opened on November 3, 1954, and its first scene is a fishing boat destroyed by a flash of light.

The film is a war film about a bomb. Godzilla's attack on Tokyo is shot as an air raid, with the city in flames, hospitals of burn victims and a Geiger counter held to a child; the scientist who can kill it, Serizawa, destroys his notes and himself so that his weapon will never be used again. The American release of 1956 cut forty minutes, added Raymond Burr as a reporter and removed most of the politics, and it was that version the world saw for fifty years. The original was not released in the United States until 2004.

The word means strange beast, and the genre it names was invented twice in one year. Warner Bros.' Them!, released in June 1954, five months before Gojira, has giant ants bred by the Trinity test emerging from the New Mexico desert, and American cinema spent the rest of the decade on the pattern: a tarantula, a mantis, a scorpion, grasshoppers over Chicago, each enlarged by radiation and killed by the Army. Toho's version was a suit rather than a puppet, a city rather than a desert, and a monster that was the bomb itself rather than one of its side effects, and Toho kept making them. Godzilla was joined by Anguirus in 1955, Rodan in 1956, Mothra in 1961 and King Ghidorah in 1964, and by the late 1960s the monsters were fighting each other for children on a set the size of a warehouse.

The genre's biology is consistent in one respect: kaiju are animals made vast by human technology, not aliens, and the ones that are aliens, Ghidorah and the invaders who control him, are the exception that the films mark as such. Godzilla's own nature has shifted with each series. The Shōwa films made him a defender of Japan; the Heisei films of 1984 to 1995 restored the bomb; Shin Godzilla (2016) made him an evolving organism born of dumped nuclear waste and the story a satire of Japan's government after Fukushima; Godzilla Minus One (2023), set in 1947, returned to the original's dinosaur mutated by the Bikini tests and won the Academy Award for visual effects on a budget of about fifteen million dollars.

The American Godzilla is a different species with the same face. Legendary's Godzilla (2014) and the Monsterverse films that followed make him a member of an ancient order of giants, Titans, that ruled a radioactive Earth in the deep past and retreated underground as surface radiation fell; the bomb tests of the 1950s, in this version, were attempts to kill him, and radiation is his food rather than his cause. He is 108 metres tall in the 2014 film, against the 50 of 1954, fights Kong in 2021 and 2024, and is, in the series' own words, a force of balance. The version removes the guilt: this Godzilla was not made by anyone, and the films can end with him swimming away to applause.

Toho's reply was to go smaller. Godzilla Minus One gives Japan in 1946 a monster the size of the original, a kamikaze pilot who did not fly his mission, and a country with no army, no allies and no way to fight it, and it is the first Godzilla film since 1954 in which the destruction of a city is filmed as grief. Its success, the largest for a Japanese film in the American market, and its Oscar, put the two Godzillas side by side in cinemas the same year, the god of balance and the bomb with feet, and audiences chose both.

Radiation does not enlarge. The ants of Them! and the dinosaur of Gojira belong to a fear the 1950s could not check, and the animals that have actually lived in irradiated places, at Bikini, Chernobyl and Fukushima, have been studied for decades: Chernobyl's birds have smaller brains and more cataracts, its trees grew slowly and rot slowly because the soil's microbes were damaged too, and the Bikini lagoon's coral, seventy years on, has recovered in the absence of people. Damage to DNA in a developing animal produces deformity and death, not scale, and an animal the size of Godzilla could not stand up under Earth's gravity or feed itself if it did. The films know this; the 1954 film's scientist says the creature should not be possible, and then it walks out of the bay.

Japan's monsters share a coastline with its sightings. The UFO sightings in Japan article covers a history that runs from the Utsuro-bune of 1803, a round vessel with a foreign woman inside that washed up on the Pacific shore, through the postwar flaps that coincided with Toho's heyday, to the town of Iino that declared itself the country's UFO capital; the sea that produced Godzilla has produced visitors as long as there have been fishermen to see them. The foo fighters that Allied and Japanese aircrews reported in the last year of the war and the summer of 1947, when the Roswell press release came from the base that housed the bomb group, are the same atomic-age sky from the other side of the Pacific: something in it that the war had put there and no one could identify.