In 1915, at the age of 14, he graduated the equivalent of High School, and begged his family to let him enroll in the Nippon Flying school at Haneda. He attended elementary school at the Sukagawa Choritsu Dai'ichi Jinjo Koutou Shogakko beginning in 1908, and two years later, he took up the hobby of building model airplanes, due to the sensational success of Japanese aviators, an interest he would retain for the rest of his life. Eiji was raised by his barely older uncle, Ichiro, and his paternal grandmother, Natsu. His mother died when he was only three and his father moved to China for the family business. He was the first son of Isamu Shiraishi and Sei Tsuburaya, with a large extended family. Tsuburaya described his childhood as filled with "mixed emotions." Eiji was born in Sukugawa, Fukushima on July 7th, which coincidentally fell on the same day of the Japanese holiday, Tanabata. 1.4 Foundation of Tsuburaya Productions.
EIJI TSUBURAYA MASTER OF MONSTERS KINDLE TV
USA TODAY Executive Editor Colton has been in love with monster movies ever since he watched King Kong on TV in 1956. Not that we will ever forget, but moviegoers cheering a giant monster shows things are back to a less scary normal.Įither way, I can't wait to see what the Big G has left in him. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that Godzilla 2014 is opening during the same week as the museum at Ground Zero, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago, is a sign of hope. So is there room for the most "realistic'' Godzilla ever, with Bryan Cranston standing in for last century's Raymond Burr? Well, director Gareth Edwards for sure knows his monster stuff, and last summer's Pacific Rim showed giant monsters can still have viewers suspending disbelief if done just right. Comic book writer Mark Waid, among others, calls the trend "destruction porn.''
More recent films showing computer-generated destruction such as Transformers and especially Man of Steel have made many filmgoers uncomfortable as skyscrapers topple. Godzilla's popularity faded, even in Japan, where the last film in 2004 did poorly. Hollywood responded to 9/11 with shows like 24 instead of monsters. Then came 9/11 in 2001, and the toppling of cardboard buildings by a man in a rubber suit didn't seem right anymore. Actors don't cry - you just do your job until it's finished!"Īs a monster kid of the 1960s, I went along for film after film, even though most were played for laughs, with Godzilla pitted against other giant monsters such as Rodan and Mothra. "It could get up to 122 degrees in the suit. "It was a really difficult job, very impossible," Nakijima says.
Nuclear allegory? Hidden meanings? Nakajima just remembers the 200-pound suit. One of the unsung heroes of that craze was Haruo Nakajima, 85, the actor who played Godzilla in the original and 11 other films. Godzilla (no one remembers who came up with that iconic name) was a huge hit, sparking 29 sequels or remakes, and the monster craze of the 1960s. The Americanized version, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, cut some of the more overt political scenes, adding actor Raymond Burr for English-speaking audiences in 1956. "Stark, brutal and genuinely beautiful," says August Ragone, author of Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters. "Everyone involved knew they were making a dark and bitter allegory about real things, disguised as a monster movie."Įven 60 years later, the Japanese black-and-white original remains a grim example of monster noir. "When Gojira was made in 1954, that experience was even more recent in people's memories than 9/11 is to us today,'' film historian David Kalat told me. A lumbering 160-foot reptile seemed just a next step. Tsuburaya had recreated triumphant scenes of the attack on Pearl Harbor for Japanese war propaganda films. And now this!" cries a desperate woman in the Japanese original.īut the Japanese director, Ishiro Honda, and especially special effects genius Eiji Tsuburaya knew exactly what they were doing.
"I barely survived the bombing of Nagasaki. Called Gojira (a morphing of the words for gorilla and whale), the beast destroys Tokyo in scenes reminiscent not only of atomic bombs but of the fire raids during World War II. The beast was way bigger than King Kong - 400-feet high in some versions - dwarfing anything ever seen on screen. Think about it: In 1954, a mere nine years after atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, filmmakers at Japan's Toho Studios came up with the idea of a huge fire-breathing monster spawned by - no subtlety needed- American H-bomb tests in the Pacific. The monstrous truth is that the Big G has always been a creature of his times, thundering ashore like a force of nature, yes, but making a gigantic political statement as well. In an era of 9/11, Katrina, tsunamis and typhoons, is it too soon for Godzilla to return?
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