While it’s mocked frequently in the west, the fear of giant monster attacks makes much more sense in Japan. Folklore describes many mysterious titans, while earthquakes and their aftershocks feel similar to how you’d expect the floor to rumble if a behemoth lurched over the horizon. When film director Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla debuted in 1954, it spoke to a far more contemporary anxiety: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only nine years prior. When Gamera, the very neat made-of-turtle-meat monster celebrating his 50th birthday this month, debuted in 1965, it too reflected Japan’s sentiments, or at least how radically they had changed.
Honda’s film didn’t hide its metaphors. Godzilla, a massive mutant, terrorized Japan, and the only thing more frightening than a stompy lizard was the thought of the technology needed to destroy it (the “Oxygen Destroyer” bomb) plunging the world into more war. It’s a stark, bleak film that airs its anxiety about human destruction more than the inhuman, despite its legacy.
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Gamera, on the other hand, is renowned for being the opposite. You may know the fanged fire-breather in a half-shell from multiple rounds on rounds on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K), but the franchise is far more popular in its home country, spawning 12 films and four video games to his name. Something MST3K’s hecklers panned is also what most prominently defined Gamera from that other more famous giant reptile: Not a radioactive fiend in the slightest, the monstrous Gamera is a friend to all children.
Gamera wasn’t mutated by atomic energy (he eats gasoline), but he was awoken by the bomb during a US/Soviet snafu in the Arctic. While he goes on to fuck up Tokyo like so many of his peers, Gamera is a misunderstood giant, and Toshio (Kenny in the English version), a boy who has bonded with ol’ tusky, knows it. Gamera saved Toshio from falling to his death, and while Gamera’s rampage will probably ruin, y’know, hundreds to thousands of lives, Toshio knows that deep in Gamera’s heart is a loyal friend.
This only amplifies over the course of Gamera’s saga. Gamera goes further and further to save Japan’s children, rescuing sprouts from aliens and other monsters. In the 90s remake, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Gamera was straight-up engineered by Atlanteans to protect the human race. In 2006, Gamera the Brave reboots the lore into more of a “boy and his dog” narrative.
Feeling the heat of TV’s bug-eyed zentai avenger Ultraman and Gamera’s popular heroism, Godzilla also gave into the pressure of becoming a superhero in the mid-60s, and went on to lock horns, claws, and scales with the likes of invading alien King Ghidorah, terrorists like the Red Bamboo gang, and a sentient toxic lump of pollution called Hedorah. Whatever anxieties Japanese society felt about radiation and its monsters had faded to the point where moviegoers embraced them as protectors, which syncs up uncannily with the country’s nuclear timeline.
The federal budget began to accommodate for nuclear power plants in 1954, the same year Godzilla was released. In 1955, Japan passed the Atomic Energy Basic Law, a bill that outlined their atomic endeavors and limited them for “peaceful purposes.” Gamera was released a year before Japan’s first reactor in Tōkai began to operate in 1966, where a nuclear plant is still being contested after the 2011 earthquake, even by a former mayor of Tōkai.
It’d be a stretch to call the dozens of giant monster dramas propaganda, but the Japanese government went to extraordinary lengths to alter the public conception of nuclear energy, so Godzilla-goes-good might be more reflective of the outcome than the causation. Political dissent in Japan isn’t as commonplace as it exists in other cultures, but it is there, particularly for critics of atomic energy who have become more vocal since the 2011 earthquakes.
Before 2011, roughly 30 percent of the country’s energy was produced by nuclear plants, and only now is nuclear power’s role in Japan’s energy mix returning to that. Gareth Edward’s Godzilla, the 2014 American blockbuster, touched on catastrophic nuclear imagery, but largely stuck to Godzilla being a defender, part of that Justice League of monsters, and isn’t nearly as critical as Honda’s original film.
Gamera’s birthday present is a new film, a computer generated affair where Gamera returns to devote himself to protecting children. So happy birthday Gamera, here’s to 50 years of friendly disasters!
