by Jim Shepard
Gojira, King of the Monsters
Once again he weathered an afternoon of unease and little progress. He’d forgotten that today was the Star Festival, one of his wife’s favorites, and was beginning to wonder at which he was more adept: hurting Masano inadvertently or intentionally. He’d settled into the backseat that morning and spread onto his lap his section of the production board, glued on heavy stock and color-coded, when the driver had reminded him about the festival. The driver had noticed the paper cows and kimonos Masano had hung in their potted bamboo out front. They had to have been there when Tsuburaya had come home the night before.
The driver at that point had already turned onto the main street and Tsuburaya had considered asking to be returned to his home, but then had finally said, “Oh, keep going.” Immediately he’d understood how that compounded his offense. He imagined himself telling Masano, “I forgot. And when I remembered, I kept going anyway.”
She had signed the first love note she’d ever sent to him “Shokujo,” the name of the Weaver Princess Star, the central figure of the festival. It had been a reference to the extent to which their discipline for work had suffered in the face of their feelings. According to the legend, the princess had fallen in love with a cow-herder; and as a reward for their diligence and industry, the king had allowed them to marry, but their lovemaking had become for them such a delirium that she had neglected her weaving, and the herder had allowed his cows to stray, so in his exasperation the king had forced them to remain on opposite sides of the Milky Way, to approach each other only once a year. Every July Masano had celebrated the festival, in recent years more and more often with only Akira, their youngest child. The previous July, while Tsuburaya had looked on, she had shown Akira through his toy telescope how on this night and this night alone the Weaver Princess Star and the Herdboy Star were allowed to meet on the banks of the river of heaven. Tsuburaya had watched as if she were having this conversation with her son in order to have it with him. And if it rained? Akira had asked. If it rained, his mother told him, the two stars had to wait an additional year.
He was falling behind everywhere: in his wife’s affections and his work’s responsibilities. But in the case of the latter, whether he put in fourteen- or sixteen-hour days, each evening left his production team with still more to accomplish, with principal photography set to commence one way or the other on August first.
He told his staff whenever they protested that there was no sense in blaming Tanaka, since he hadn’t misled anyone. “Well, then he’s the first producer who hasn’t,” one of his assistants grumbled. But it was true, Tsuburaya reminded them: at the meeting at which Tsuburaya had agreed to come aboard, Tanaka had begun by saying, “The good news is: do you want to make this movie with me, or not? The bad news is, we won’t have enough time.”
Tanaka had a huge hit with Eagles of the Pacific a year earlier, in 1953, but only bad luck since. Two projects collapsed when rights he’d thought were in hand turned out to be too expensive, and the most recent production had been all set to go until the Indonesian government panicked in the face of all the anti-Japanese protests and canceled the cast and crew’s visas. Tanaka said he spent the flight back from Jakarta bathed in his own sweat. Toho, poised to regain its market leadership, had seen its hottest young producer allow its biggest project of the year to blow up in his face. He’d telephoned from the Jakarta airport to ask Mori, the executive production manager, how soon he’d need to come up with a replacement for that spot in the production slate, and Mori had answered that he’d better have one by the time he landed. He spent the flight peering miserably out his window at the endless ocean and found his mind wandering to Lucky Dragon No. 5. He claimed he’d been so animated when his big idea hit him that the woman beside him had been startled out of her sleep.
In March the Americans had detonated a fifteen-megaton hydrogen weapon over Bikini atoll in the central Pacific, and Lucky Dragon No. 5 was one of those little trawlers out for tuna that found itself inside the test zone. They’d been where they were supposed to be but the detonation was twice as large as predicted. They reported seeing the sun rise in the west and then being covered by a powdery white ash for the hour that it took them to retrieve their nets. Back in port it was determined that all twenty-three crew members and their entire haul had been heavily contaminated. And it turned out that the radioactive tuna had entered the Japanese market from other trawlers before the contamination was discovered, and the result was months of nuclear fear and anti-American hostility. Tabloids had called it the Americans’ third atomic attack on Japan.
The year before Tsuburaya had forced Tanaka to go to see his beloved King Kong, which had just earned four times as much in its worldwide rerelease as it had originally, and Tanaka had also been impressed by the global numbers for Warner Bros.’ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the story of a dinosaur thawed from its hibernation by American nuclear testing in Baffin Bay.
The United States government estimated that 856 ships in the Japanese fishing fleet had been exposed to radiation, and that more than five hundred tons of fish had to be destroyed, and offered a settlement for the survivors that the Japanese government declined to accept. And Tanaka recounted that it struck him as he looked out over the Pacific below that the stories could be combined; and for the rest of the flight he scribbled on the back of a folder that his seatmate had lent him the outline of a story in which a prehistoric creature was awakened by an H-bomb test in the Pacific and then went on to destroy Tokyo.
When Tsuburaya finally returned home for dinner on the night of the Star Festival, Masano served soba noodles and mashed fish. While he ate, she was sober and quiet. He mentioned again by way of conversation a cough that wouldn’t go away and she prepared for him without comment what she called her broth of the seven plants, which included shepherd’s purse, chickweed, parsley, cottonweed, and radish. She sat with him while he drank it and, once he finished, told him he should smoke less.
For months his project was known at Toho only as Project G, for giant, but lately the staff had taken to calling it Gojira, a fusion of the word for gorilla, because of the monster’s agility, and the one for whale, because of its size. Tanaka and Honda, the director, liked that as much as anything else anyone had come up with.
Upon leaving the following morning Tsuburaya noticed the telescope in the entryway and remembered to ask how the star-viewing had gone. Masano asked how he thought it could have gone, given that it had rained.
The rest of the morning was spent laboring through an interview with the Weekly Asahi. The reporter, a young man with goggle-sized glasses, seemed to prize his own skepticism and asked each of his questions as if jabbing a tied dog with a stick. Did Eiji Tsuburaya, the Master of Miniatures and head of Toho’s Special Arts Department, feel the burden of his responsibility for the visual effects on which Toho’s new flagship production would either float or sink? Tsuburaya assured him that he did. Was it true there was a nuclear subtext to the story? Tsuburaya admitted that there was. And would Mr. Tsuburaya be willing to favor the Weekly Asahi’s readers with an exclusive first glimpse of the movie’s monster? Mr. Tsuburaya would not.
. . .
Eiji Tsuburaya was born in the village of Sukagawa, two hundred and twenty kilometers north of Tokyo in the Fukushima prefecture, and his grandmother and uncle told him every day of his childhood that he’d been delivered on a date propitious for creativity. His parents were Nichiren-sect Buddhists and as members of the rural gentry had been granted exclusive license to operate the local general-goods store, which remained the main clearinghouse, in that region, for sake, soy, and miso. His mother died when she was nineteen and he was three. In both of the photographs of her which remained, she appeared birdlike and consumptive and tilted him toward the camera much as a schoolgirl might display an examination on which had been scrawled a failing grade. In both she seemed to regard the photographer with a kind of pensive anxiety.
With his father subsequent
ly forever at the store, he was raised by his grandmother Natsu and his uncle Ichiro. He and Ichiro were so close in age that his uncle seemed more like an older brother, and so people stopped using Tsuburaya’s given name, which meant first son, and started calling him Eiji, or second son.
When he was nine Ichiro took him to see Tokugawa and Hino at the Yoyogi Parade Grounds. Captains in the Imperial Army, they were aviation pioneers who’d made the first successful powered flights in Japan. He spent the next four years teaching himself how to build model airplanes out of wood, especially Tokugawa’s Henry Farman biplane. He’d wake each morning at four and light his lamp and work until he had to leave for school and then, when classes were dismissed, he’d rush home and pick up where he’d left off. Once he’d achieved the verisimilitude he sought, he began increasing the scale until he was working on aircraft so large their wingspans no longer fit into his room. His father disapproved, but Tsuburaya believed he was building something that would fly him away and around the world. The bigger models ended up causing enough of a stir with the neighbors that the local newspaper did a feature about him entitled “The Child Craftsman.” And throughout his career Tsuburaya was teased about the fact that the first time he saw a motion picture, he found himself more fascinated with the projector than with what was going on onscreen.
Akira was their third child and second son, born much later than the other two. Their daughter, Miyako, had died in her sleep two years after her birth. She’d had a small fever and called out in the night to Masano, who told her that she would be fine and then fell back asleep after everything had quieted.
For three months afterwards Masano could not be induced to leave the house. Neither her family nor her friends had any effect. She came around only mechanically at first to the notion that they still had a son to raise, and Hajime, who was two years older, cried himself to sleep each night in terror and helplessness while his mother gently stroked his head.
Tsuburaya was then a camera operator and kept himself busy with his production schedule and with brainstorming apparatuses that would improve his work. He’d patented and sold the Auto Snap, a pedal-operated shutter cable that freed the hands for other tasks, and had also experimented so successfully with smoke pots for in-camera effects that he’d become known around the industry as Smoke Tsuburaya. When he came home, though, such news had to be left at the front door.
Hajime had finally regained his mother’s attention by telling her he was collecting stones for the roadside Jizo image. According to the legend, the souls of all dead children went to the underground river where a she-devil got them to pile stones on the bank by assuring them that if they made their piles high enough they could climb to paradise, but then she perpetually knocked over their work. Jizo, a roadside deity, comforted them, and every stone placed in the lap of one of his statues was supposed to shorten their task. Each morning before school, then, Hajime and Masano would add one or two stones to the nearest statue’s pile.
In this way, his wife had pulled herself along, moment by moment. She enjoyed it if her husband sat quietly beside her. She submitted to his ministrations but declined to touch him. She seemed to appreciate being put to bed at night.
That was the year King Kong came to Japan. Tsuburaya had seen The Lost World some years earlier, but this was staggering: Willis O’Brien had with his little figures and suitcase jungles transformed RKO Radio Pictures from whatever it had been before into a world power. Tsuburaya wrote him with questions but never discovered if his letters had gotten through. He saw the film six times. He took Hajime, who was so terrified that they had to leave in the middle. Without a response from O’Brien, his only recourse was to use his connections to obtain a 35mm print and break down its effects himself, frame by frame. One evening he brought Masano in from where she was sitting and situated her next to him beside the projector. The following evening he let her remain where she was.
A week after the Star Festival, Tsuburaya was beginning dinner at his desk when Honda telephoned with news of yet another logistical catastrophe, then caught himself in the middle of his narrative and said, “Oh, but today you have to be home. It’s the Obon.” And he was right: of all the days of the year, this was not the one to come home late. If the Star Festival for Masano was all about how exhilarated they’d once been as lovers, the Obon was the principal commemoration of her lost little girl. She had reminded Tsuburaya once, at the beginning of the week, and then had not mentioned it again. She’d be celebrating for the full three days, and on the first night she intended that as a family they would light the paper lantern and hang it on the grave to invite their daughter’s spirit to come forth and visit their home. On the table for the dead her meal would already be set out, with tiny portions featuring her favorite dishes. Akira, as always, had been given charge of arranging the display.
Hajime, now nineteen, was invited, but had yet to indicate whether he would appear. Masano had requested it when they’d last seen him, on a school holiday, and he’d answered that he’d see what he could do. He then pointed out that he’d finished his technical training, and asked his father whether he might work with him as assistant camera operator on the miniatures team.
Tsuburaya discussed what that would involve, and Masano interrupted to ask if they could return to the subject of their daughter and Hajime’s sister. Then Hajime said he would make every effort, and his mother told him he should see that he did.
That night she informed Tsuburaya that she considered their son’s request a bad idea, at least for the time being; that he should stay in school; that he didn’t need additional training in how to ignore his family. Tsuburaya felt the need to defend his profession.
“Well, at least promise you’ll do nothing without consulting me,” she finally requested.
“Who Toho hires is none of your concern,” he reminded her.
“What you do with our son is my concern,” she answered. And neither of them pursued the matter after that.
When Mori and Honda first approached him, he’d been thrilled at the prospect after all of those years of finally being able to work on the kind of stop-motion effects he had so admired in King Kong. But when Mori asked him to write up a projected preproduction and shooting schedule for his unit, even after every shortcut he could conceive, he was forced to report that to do the job right he would need a little less than seven years. On the phone he could hear Mori repeating what he’d said to the others in his office, and there was a general hilarity in the background. When Mori returned to the line he was still chuckling. He said he could give Tsuburaya two months for preproduction and another two for shooting.
That left Tsuburaya’s department with few options other than what they knew best: miniature building. Which was what everyone expected of him anyway.
His big break had come when Toho was urged by the government during the war to pour nearly all of its resources into The War at Sea, the epic charged with the task of persuading the public that the new war with the Americans was one the Japanese could win. Using photographs supplied by the navy, his unit had recreated Pearl Harbor on a six-acre outdoor set on Toho’s backlot, and had done so with such persuasive detail that the footage of the attack on Battleship Row was confiscated by U.S. occupation officials after the war because they’d taken it to be real. The movie returned the highest grosses ever recorded in Japan, tripled his budgets and staff, and ensured that anyone in the country with a special-effects problem would seek out the celebrated Tsuburaya.
So if on this new project O’Brien’s solutions were denied to them, it meant only that they had to approach the situation in a new way. This didn’t dishearten them, since they already understood that whenever fixed rules were applied to a problem, only parts of it might be perceived. They operated on the principle that you weren’t ready for a task until you admitted it was beyond you.
He came up with the idea of an entire 1/25 scale miniature set of the capital, detailed inside as well as out in order to be convinci
ng when trampled. Breakaway walls would reveal entire floors with all of their furnishings when the monster sheared away the outside surfaces. Various aspects of the city’s infrastructure, such as mailboxes or street lamps, would be rendered in wax and melted by huge offscreen heat lamps to simulate the monster’s radioactive breath. Small and precisely calibrated pyrotechnic charges would be installed to reproduce the explosive destruction as fuel and automobile gas tanks ignited.
And 1/25 scale would allow a monster of the proper size to be generated by simply putting a man in a suit.
The simplicity of the plan held enormous appeal. He’d always been drawn to the handmade approach, and of course the studio appreciated the relative lack of expense. Something made from nothing was how he liked to put it.
Mori and Honda loved the budget and feared the plan. A man in a suit? Tsuburaya only shrugged at their unease. They either trusted him or they didn’t. Proof was stronger than argument.
The day after the logistical catastrophe, Honda called to report that he’d handled it without Tsuburaya’s help. Honda was probably Tsuburaya’s closest friend, though at that suggestion Masano once responded that she would love to see Honda’s face when someone told him as much. Honda was forever sporting an American’s rumpled little fishing hat and was fond of walking great distances. He and Tanaka met when hiking the Diamond Mountains in Korea in the early thirties. Mori and Tanaka had both thought Honda would be the perfect director for this new project since he’d had so little trouble with all the visual effects in Eagles of the Pacific, and had worked so well with Tsuburaya. Having been a longtime assistant to Kurosawa, he was experienced in dealing with lunatic perfectionists. “Or, in other words, Tsuburaya,” Mori had said at their first full staff meeting.
