King Kong vs. Godzilla: Monster Movie as Social Satire

“While you consider King Kong simply plain combating Godzilla, it’s silly. However the way you stage it, the instances through which it takes place, that’s the thought strategy of the filmmaker.”

Ishiro Honda¹

The occasions and phenomena which birthed Ishiro Honda’s King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) spanned a few years. Honda’s unique 1954 Godzilla had been a large home hit, promoting greater than eight million tickets in Japan, and paved the best way for not solely a sequel—Motoyoshi Oda’s Godzilla Raids Once more (1955)—however comparable photos about monsters and mutants besieging civilization. The style arrived at an excellent time, when the nation’s main studios had been in wonderful form, turning out tons of of movies in breadwinning genres and supported by a ravenous public. In 1958, attendance for Japanese movies reached an all-time excessive of 1.13 billion,² a recent Ministry of Commerce and Business survey discovering the common Japanese attended twelve to twenty films every year.³ With Toho (the studio behind Godzilla) main the best way, Japanese science fiction grew to become the newest marquee model.

“The ethical of all these movies was the identical,” wrote movie historian Donald Richie in 1961. “Japan is ravaged by monsters who’re defeated, not by warlike strategies, however by technological know-how. […] The Japanese are too afraid and collectively they work for world peace.”⁴ On level as Richie’s observations had been, the style was destined for vital change. Launched that very same yr was Honda’s Mothra, which additionally concluded with an optimistic view of worldwide relations; however this time the monster peacefully returned to its island dwelling. And with King Kong vs. Godzilla, the movies started emphasizing humor on the monster degree, taking part in up teenager’s affinity for the creatures. That mentioned, the films had been a while from turning into childrens’ matinees and—particularly within the case of King Kong vs. Godzilla—continued reaching for the broadest attainable demographic.

In bringing the eponymous monsters collectively, Honda and screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa turned to a different field workplace style: the salaryman comedy. From the hustle of firm staff to fulfill their bosses and outperform opponents got here a story cause for what one character declares “the battle of the century.” The resultant movie was billed as certainly one of Toho’s thirtieth anniversary releases alongside such photos as Hiroshi Inagaki’s star-studded Chushingura, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai comedy Sanjuro, and Mikio Naruse’s biopic of creator Fumiko Hayashi Her Lonely Lane.⁵ Audiences seemingly didn’t share Honda’s consternation with monsters susceptible to anthropomorphic antics,⁶ as the image bought 11.2 million tickets on preliminary launch and to today stays (attendance-wise) essentially the most profitable Toho Godzilla film.

King Kong vs. Godzilla was not a inconsiderate comedy. In its personal satirical method, the movie continued its predecessors’ custom of utilizing science fiction eventualities to mirror social points. Whereas dire photos equivalent to Godzilla (1954) and The H-Man (1958) commented on nuclear weapons—and optimistic Chilly Warfare-era spectacles like The Mysterians (1957) and Gorath (1962) imagined future worldwide utopias—the 1962 movie mocked a media phenomenon that, just like the kaiju style, had been growing in Japan because the Fifties.

Japanese fascination with electronically transmitted photos took root as early as 1926 when Kenjiro Takayanagi of Hamamatsu Larger Technical Faculty efficiently displayed a katakana character on a Braun cathode tube, although it wasn’t till 1953 that Japanese TV broadcasting formally started. Steep costs (the most cost effective set averaged ¥175-180,000 at a time when most salarymen earned ¥15,000 a month⁷ and a home might be bought for ¥200,000)⁸ meant tv was initially a luxurious for the rich and for companies. The latter adopted it as a software for attracting clients, who readily congregated round store home windows, practice stations, and public plazas to look at recorded stage acts, expertise reveals, and sports activities.

By 1958—the yr Japanese cinema hit its attendance peak—the common value of a set had fallen to ¥60,000, and the variety of subscribers grew from 866 to over 1,000,000.⁹ That determine doubled the next yr—in no small half due to Crown Prince Akihito’s televised wedding ceremony with commoner Michiko Shoda. Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda’s “revenue doubling plan” of 1960 elevated the affordability of at-home leisure apparatuses, a professor rationalizing the fixation on tv as: “There’s much less to do in Japan; in our leisure time, folks right here both do nothing—that’s, take a nap—or watch tv, or do different issues inside the home. There are fewer locations to go, due to the inhabitants density.”¹⁰ Some filmmakers mirrored the obsession with TV. Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 comedy Good Morning centered on elementary-age brothers pressuring their mother and father to purchase a set. And in 1962, by which period 64.8% of Japanese households owned a set, Honda and Sekizawa skewered the scores racket.¹¹

Having grow to be Japan’s first broadcaster in February 1953, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai—Japan Broadcasting Company) campaigned to dam different competing licenses, failing when NTV (Nippon TV—Japan Tv) ran applications of its personal that August.¹² The conflict for the general public’s consideration intensified from there, spawning leisure of the frivolous type: quiz reveals, on-camera meals fights, “expertise contests” highlighting the worst singers attainable for the most important laughs attainable, and actuality/stunt applications equivalent to NTV’s aptly named Let’s Do Something Present. In February 1957, social critic Soichi Oya cynically remarked to Shukan Tokyo: “Once we take a look at the state of right now’s mass media, we see that the plenty will grow to be comfortable to devour something… A marketing campaign to show us into ‘a nation of 100 million idiots’ by means of […] tv has developed.”¹³

“All a drugs firm must do is simply produce good medicines, ? However the firm doesn’t suppose that means. They suppose they’ll get forward of their opponents if they’ll use a monster to advertise their product. Mr. Sekizawa satirized social situations properly. That was his speciality.”

Ishiro Honda¹⁴

In his guide A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots?: A Social Historical past of Japanese Tv, 1953-1973, Jayson Makoto Chun remarked: “TV executives thought that applications wanted to be flashy, generally grotesque, filled with spectacle, and straightforward to grasp. Lengthy dramas or education schemes failed to draw informal viewers.”¹⁵ Fittingly, King Kong vs. Godzilla begins on such a be aware. Mr. Tako (Ichiro Arishima), an promoting govt for Pacific Prescribed drugs, sits earlier than a mind-numbing academic program his firm sponsors, each bit as bored because the viewers. Certain sufficient, he receives a displeased name from his boss and comes to find the present’s ascertained a depressing score of 5%. From right here, he devises a brand new technique (one thing flashy and filled with spectacle): carry a monster to Japan as their mascot. “Again then, Sekizawa was engaged on pop track lyrics and TV sequence,” recalled Honda, “so he actually had a transparent perception into tv.”¹⁶

King Kong is efficiently captured on the distant Faro Island, however not earlier than Godzilla emerges from an iceberg and begins carving a path of destruction to Japan. Mr. Tako’s response is certainly one of outrage—{that a} monster aside from his personal is consuming media consideration. (In a sly little bit of commentary, certainly one of Tako’s assistants remarks {that a} film’s being made about Godzilla, whereas one other says Godzilla-yaki is at the moment obtainable in eating places.) Information of Kong’s seize ultimately turns scores in Tako’s favor, and the notion of a monster combat comes up. Envisioning full-page advertisements of Kong selling his firm’s prescribed drugs, Tako pitches a tagline: “I’ll pulverize Godzilla, as a result of I take advantage of Pacific medication.”

“Who’s stronger: King Kong or Godzilla?” certainly one of Tako’s staff asks. “Fool!” one other says. “It’s not a wrestling match!” As touched on earlier, the monster antics on this image are often humanlike, the battle strikes usually patterned on skilled wrestling, which itself remained a TV sensation in Japan. Certainly one of Japan’s first tv celebrities was skilled wrestler Mitsuhiro Momota, higher recognized by his stage identify Rikidozan. Capitalizing on anti-American sentiment lower than ten years after World Warfare II, Rikidozan gained a thrown match with the “American” (in fact Canadian) Sharpe brothers, to the delight of Japanese spectators. (Including to the subterfuge: Rikidozan, just like the foreigners he triumphed over, was not of his claimed heritage—reasonably, a Korean.) Just a few months previous to King Kong vs. Godzilla, overseas wrestler Freddie Blassie gouged the brow of opponent Nice Togo in a broadcasted match, the resultant blood inflicting two aged spectators to break down and die. In response to the tragedy, an NTV supervisor brushed apart their deaths and commented that scores soared to 50-80%.¹⁷

King Kong vs. Godzilla will not be as fierce as a few of its up to date satires—Yasuzo Masumura’s Giants and Toys (1958) is relentlessly cynical, vicious, and sad—ignoring the uglier components of commercialism in favor of spectacle and a feel-good tone. “The primary factor I needed on this image was enjoyment,” director Honda acknowledged.¹⁸ Although the very factor he poked enjoyable at factored into the decline of Japanese cinema—together with the Godzilla sequence. The executives behind Japan’s scores wars had been, sadly, all too profitable. Frivolous applications stored audiences at dwelling; and by the point Honda’s movie was in theaters, ticket gross sales had fallen to 622 million (about half of the all-time peak 5 years earlier). The next yr, it was all the way down to 511 million.¹⁹ “I used to go to [the theater] three to 4 instances a month to look at [movies],” confessed one subscriber. “Nonetheless, after we acquired a tv, I finished going. Even within the village, if a touring theater got here two instances a month to indicate films, now even when we purchase tickets, no person in our home goes out to look at it.”²⁰ Then got here the announcement of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the nationwide demand to look at the video games from dwelling; the introduction of colour TV additional distracted audiences.²¹

As numbers for Godzilla shrank all through the rest of the last decade (in 1967, Jun Fukuda’s Son of Godzilla bought a meager 2.48 million tickets), the lack of audiences impacted the movie firms. Studios downsized and once-popular genres equivalent to interval and residential dramas started migrating to the small display;²² in the meantime, Toho and others began producing TV reveals of their very own.²³ In 1988, the consequences of TV (and later dwelling video) had been so robust that attendance plummeted to a depressing 161,000.²⁴ These days, Japanese movies take pleasure in a better share of the home field workplace, with about 152 million tickets²⁵ bought in 2022, however has but to regain the market of the Fifties. Even with the fashionable smartphone epidemic and a slight wane in TV consumption in Japan (a day by day common of 159.4 minutes versus the 180 reported in 1980), broadcasting stays a significant industrial presence. “Smartphones are undoubtedly handy as communication instruments,” reported The Mainichi in 2019. “Nonetheless, there are issues that can not be conveyed by something aside from the ability of TV photos.”²⁶

Works cited and additional studying:

Ryfle, Steve and Ed Godziszewski. Ishiro Honda: A Life in Movie, from Godzilla to Kurosawa. Middletown: Wesleyan College Press, 2017, p. 187
Yomota Inuhiko. Translated by Philip Kaffen. What Is Japanese Cinema? A Historical past. New York: Columbia College Press, 2019, p. 109
Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie. The Japanese Movie: Artwork and Business (Expanded Version). Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1982, p. 412
Richie, Donald. “‘Mono no conscious’: Hiroshima in Movie” in Broderick, Mick (ed). Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Picture in Japanese Movie. New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 29
Ryfle and Godziszewski, pp. 185-6
Ibid, p. 188
Chun, Jayson Makoto. A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots?: A Social Historical past of Japanese Tv, 1953-1973. New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 55
Companion, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Items and the Making of the Japanese Client. Berkeley: College of California Press, 1999, 165
Chun, p. 72
Riesman, David and Evelyn Thompson Riesman. Conversations in Japan: Modernization, Politics, and Tradition. New York: Fundamental Books, 1967, p. 170
Chun, p. 73
Ibid, p. 54
Ibid, p. 3
Ryfle, Steve. Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of “The Huge G.” Toronto: ECW Press, 1998, p. 82
Chun, p. 159
Ryfle and Godziszewski, p. 187
Chun, p. 157
Ryfle, p. 82
Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Japanese Filmography: A Full Reference Work to 209 Filmmakers and the Extra Than 1250 Movies Launched in the US, 1900-1994. Jefferson: McFarland & Firm, Inc., 1996, p. 471
Chun, p. 132
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Movie: A Concise Historical past, with a Selective Information to DVDs and Movies. New York: Kodansha Worldwide, Ltd., 2001, p. 177
Schilling, Mark. Up to date Japanese Movie. Boston: Weatherhill, 1999, p. 15
Ryfle and Godziszewski, p. 237
Galbraith, pp. 470-1
“‘One Piece’ Tops Japan’s Field Workplace in 2022.” com. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01590/ Accessed 30 April 2023

“Editorial: The ability of tv nonetheless robust regardless of smartphone period.” The Mainichi, 13 Might 2019