“Certainly all the pieces that were in any way, could in any way, be construed as critical of the United States or atomic testing, were really stricken from the film,” one scholar said.
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| The radioactive monster Godzilla stomps through a city and eats a commuter train in a scene from "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!," directed by Ishiro Honda and Terry O. Morse, circa 1956.Embassy Pictures / Getty Images |
By Kimmy Yam
When the monster Godzilla, or “Gojira,” appeared before Japanese movie audiences in 1954, many left the theaters in tears.
The fictional creature, a giant dinosaur once undisturbed in the ocean, was depicted in the original film as having been aggravated by a hydrogen bomb. Its heavily furrowed skin or scales were imagined to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan nine years earlier to end World War II.
American audiences, however, had the opposite reaction, finding comedic value in what many interpreted as a cheesy monster movie.
“Most Americans think if you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” told NBC Asian America.
The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it of its political message before presenting it to American audiences to deflect from the U.S. decision to drop the bombs, critics say.
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