Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?

[pynchonoid]

[...] In 1953, Tanaka Tomoyuki, a young film producer
working for the Toho Film Studio, was assigned to
produce a film entitled In the Shadow of Honor, a
Japanese –Indonesian co-production. It was a story
about a former Japanese soldier who stayed on
following Japan's surrender and participated in the
Indonesian independence movement. However, rising
diplomatic tensions between the Japanese and
Indonesian governments forced the canceling of the
project before filming began. With a substantial sum
of money allocated for the project, Tanaka had to find
a quick alternative project to utilize this budget to
make an attractive popular film. Tanaka was a
visionary who later produced some of Kurosawa
Akira’s best films such as Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and
Aka-hige (Red Beard). Facing this crisis, he decided
to take advantage of a recent incident that was had
captured the popular imagination. That was the
hydrogen bomb test Bravo shot that the U.S. conducted
on Rongelap (or Bikini) Atoll in the Marshall Islands
in March 1954. The radioactive fallout from the test
enveloped a Japanese fishing boat called the 5th Lucky
Dragon with deadly effects. Influenced by the popular
success in 1952 of the re-release of the 1933 classic
film King Kong, Tanaka set out to film a giant monster
film like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the 1953
American film. [...]

Godzilla's preference for darkness and intense dislike
of light evokes the behavior B-29 bombers, which flew
at night and sought to evade searchlight beams. From
the raid on Tokyo on March 10, 1945, Brigadier General
Curtis LeMay, the Commander of the XXI Bomber Command,
changed U.S. bombing strategy from precision bombing
during the day to carpet bombing with recently
developed napalm bombs at night. The U.S. carried out
“saturation bombing” until the end of the war in
August 1945, repeatedly attacking cities from Hokkaido
to Okinawa, including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Osaka,
Kobe, Fukuoka and Naha. More than 100 cities were
destroyed, causing one million casualties, including
more than half a million deaths, the majority being
civilians, many of them women and children.
Indiscriminate bombing reached its peak with the use
of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
1945, Truman's claim to the contrary notwithstanding.
Of course, many Japanese who saw the original Godzilla
film had first hand experience of aerial bombing and
had lost relatives and friends as a result. 

In one scene, a boy cries “Chikusho (“You
brute”), watching Godzilla stalking away towards the
ocean from Tokyo Bay after a rampage. This scene
vividly reminded the audience of B-29 bombers flying
off after dropping tens of thousands of bombs on their
urban target. The film includes scenes of people
trying to escape carrying household goods, of a
burning city, of injured people being brought into a
safe shelter, and of screaming children. These
pictures evoked the horror of napalm attacks in cities
throughout Japan. [...] 
</blockquote>


...read it all:  <a
href="http://hnn.us/articles/12042.html">Godzilla and
the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the
Monster?</a>, History News Network, 25 July 2005

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