T/le Unfrutkvrize,^tnvarfrvhw

of "Tfo &iy 9 *

STEVE R Y F L E

ECW PRESS

JAPAN'S FAVORITEMON-STAR

Copyright © Steve Ryfle, 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form by any process — electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the priorwritten permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS.

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Ryfle, Stevejapan's favorite mon-star: the unauthorized biography of "The Big G"

ISBN 1-55022-348-8i. Godzilla (Fictitious character). 2. Godzilla

films - History and criticism. I. Title.PN1995.9.G63R93 1998 791.43'651 C98-93O251-2

Research associate and translator: Addie Kohzu.Front-cover: Alex Wald

Back-cover photo: Koji Sasahara, AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

Imaging by ECW Type & Art, Oakville, Ontario.Printed by Webcom, Toronto, Ontario.

Distributed in Canada by General Distribution Services,30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Ontario MSB 2T6.Distributed in the United States by LPC Group,

1436 West Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 60607Toll-free: 1-800-243-0138.

Published by ECW PRESS,2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2.

http://www.ecw.ca/press

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

& v nt &nt$

INTRODUCTION: The Godzilla Era

PART 1: GROUND ZERO - The 1950$

1. Birth of a LegendGodzilla a.k.a. Godzilla: King of the Monsters/ 19

2. You Can't Keep a Bad Monster DownGodzilla Raids Againa.k.a. Gigantis: The Fire Monster 61

PART 2: GOLDEN AGE — The 1960$

3. Clash of the TitansKing Kong vs. Godzilla 79

4. Madame ButterflyGodzilla vs. The Thing 103

5. Enter the DragonGhidrah: The Three-Headed Monster 113

6. Voyage into SpaceMonster Zero 121

7. It Came from Beneath the SeaGodzilla versus The Sea Monster 133

8. All in the FamilySon of Godzilla 139

9. War of the WorldsDestroy All Monsters 145

10. Unknown IslandGodzilla's Revenge 155

PART 3: DARK DAYS — The 1970$

11. Toxic AvengerGodzilla vs. The Smog Monster 161

12. Twilight of the CockroachesGodzilla on Monster Island 173

13. Lost ContinentGodzilla vs. Megaton 181

14. Robot MonsterGodzilla vs. The Gosmic Monster 195

15. Bride of the MonsterTerror of MechaGodzillaa.k.a. The Terror of Godzilla 199

PERSONNEL FILES AND INTERVIEWS

The Cod(zilla) Fathers: Tanaka, Honda, Tsuburaya, and Ifukube 39The Heavy: Raymond Burr 59City-Smashing to the Beat: Masaru Sato 75Monster Scribes: Shinchi Sekizawa, Takeshi Kimura 92The King's Court: Actors and Actresses 94The Controller Speaks: Yoshio Tsuchiya 127The Rebel: Nick Adams 129Successor to the Throne: Teruyoshi Nakano 167Godzilla in the Flesh: Haruo Nakajima 178White Guy in Monsterland: Robert Dunham 185Modern-Day Monster: Kenpachiro Satsuma 261Swan Song: Akira Ifukube 315New Wave Godzilla: Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott 330

PART 4: RESURRECTION - The 1980$

16. The Legend is RebornGodzilla (1984) a.k.a. Godzilla 1985 215

PARTS: SECOND COMING — The 1990$

17. The Name of the RoseGodzilla vs. Biollante 251

18. The Time TravelersGodzilla vs. King Ghidorah 265

19. Earth's Final FuryGodzilla vs. Mothra 279

20. CyborgGodzilla vs. MechaGodzilla 287

21. Enemies: A Love StoryGodzilla vs. Space Godzilla 295

22. Requiem for a HeavyweightGodzilla vs. Destroyer 305

PART 6. GODZILLA VS. HOLLYWOOD — The Future

23. Remade in AmericaGodzilla (1998) 321

PART 7: APPENDICES

i. Cast and Credits 351ii. Godzilla on Video 367iii. Cyberspace Godzilla 370iv. Endnotes 371v. Bibliography 373

SIDEBARS AND SPECIAL SECTIONS

Godzilla's Birthplace: A brief history of Toho and theJapanese movie industry 24

Godzilla Talk: English dubbing in Japanese monster movies 149Godzilla, American Style: Hanna-Barbera's cartoon series 209Pop Monster: Godzilla references in books, music, etc 243Godzilla Invades LA 317

THE G-ARCHIVES: UNMADE AND OBSCURE GODZILLA PROJECTS

Hot Lava: Synopsis of The Volcano Monsters 70Moth Holes: The evolution of the Godzilla vs. The Thing screenplay,

by Jay Ghee mGodzilla Conquers the World: Frankenstein vs. Godzilla,

by Jay Ghee 119Evil Brain from Outer Space: Godzilla vs. The Space Monsters,

by Jay Ghee 176Monster for Hire: Godzilla vs. Redmoon, by Jay Ghee 177Ultra-Goji: Godzilla and Japanese TV super-heroes 188The Electric Kool-Aid Kaiju Test: Cozzi's colorized Godzilla 207Godzilla versus. .. Cleveland! 224Begin the Bagan: The Return of Godzilla, by Jay Ghee 226Synopsis of Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3-D, by Fred Dekker 227The Giant Rat and the Killer Plant: the original story of Godzilla vs.

Gigamoth, by Jay Ghee 259S.O.L on the Satellite of Love: Godzilla vs. MST3K 276Development Hell, Toho-Style: Mothra vs. Bagan and Godzilla vs.

Biollante, by jay Ghee 284

One

BIRTH OF A LEGEND

qoDZULA: KW of THE ^otfSTTRS!RATING (OUT OF FIVE STARS): * * * * *

JAPANESE VERSION: GOJIRA (GODZILLA). Released on November 3, 1954, by the Toho MotionPicture Company. Academy ratio, black-and-white. Running Time: 98 minutes.

U.S. VERSION: Released on April 4,1956, by Trans World Releasing Corp. and the Godzilla ReleasingCompany. Running Time: 80 minutes.

STORY: Hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean reawakens a long-dormant prehistoricmonster, which rises from Tokyo Bay, terrorizes the superstitious natives of Odo Island and finallyburns Tokyo to the ground with its white-hot radiation breath. Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, a reclusivescientist researching the properties of oxygen, inadvertently invents a doomsday weapon, theOxygen Destroyer; reluctantly, Serizawa deploys the device on the ocean floor and Godzilla iskilled, but the scientist does not return to the surface — guilt-ridden, he cuts his air hose and dieswith the monster, ensuring that his invention will never be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

O R I G I N S

According to legend, Godzilla was born aboard anairplane.

It was spring 1954. As the story goes, TomoyukiTanaka, a producer with the Toho Motion PictureCo., was flying home to Tokyo from Jakarta, whereplans for a Japanese-Indonesian coproductiontitled In the Shadow of Honor had just fallen apart.The movie, the story of a Japanese soldier whofights alongside the Indonesians in their struggle

for postwar independence, was to be one of Toho'smajor releases later that year, and now Tanaka wasunder pressure to come up with a replacement forit— fast. Nervous and sweating, he spent the entireflight brainstorming.

Suddenly, he had a stroke of genius.Taking a cuef rom the successful American science

fiction film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), inwhich a dinosaur is resurrected by atomic testsin the Arctic and swims south to terrorize NewYork, Tanaka decided to make Japan's first giantcelluloid monster, a creature that would not only

19

"(yevrae, here- in Tokyo time /ww been turne((1wck.

trio million yefan, T/u5 is my revert fa$ it kfryvent."

— Steve Martin, United World News reporter

be reanimated by nuclear weapons but serve as ametaphor for the Bomb itself, evoking the horror ofthe Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts still vividin Japan's consciousness. "The theme of the film,from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb,"Tanaka recalled decades later. "Mankind had cre-ated the Bomb, and now nature was going to takerevenge on mankind."1

Nine years earlier, at the end of World War n,Japan had suffered a defeat unlike any other nationin history. In August 1945, America's twin atomicbombs had killed nearly 300,000 civilians, and anestimated 100,000 more lives had been lost theprevious March when 6-29 planes firebombed Tokyofor three consecutive days. Cities across Japan wereleveled, leaving millions dead, wounded, or home-less. Factories that had been converted to militaryproduction were now either destroyed or rendereduseless, crippling Japanese industry and bankrupt-ing the economy. The country's massive empire inthe Pacific region was lost, and six million repa-triated soldiers and civilians returned to a Japanwhose mighty spirit was crushed. Then came theseven-year-long Occupation (1945-1952), in whicha nation that had remained unconquered for thou-sands of years suffered the shame of being governedby foreign soldiers and forced to adopt a Western-style constitution that reduced the Emperor to amere symbolic figure, abolished State Shintoism,and threatened other long-held traditions and beliefs.The late 19405 and early 19505 were a time of poli-tical, economic, and cultural uncertainty in Japan.

During the war, the Japanese film industry wasbooming, due in large part to the government'suse of the movie studios to disseminate heavilyregulated nationalist propaganda. Then, after thedefeat of Japan's militarist regime, the Allied pow-ers likewise censored the movies and other mediain their efforts to democratize Japan, forbiddingdiscussions of the war, the Bomb and America'srole in the tragedy. After the Occupation a handfulof Bomb-themed films began to appear, notablyKaneto Shindo's Children of the Atom Bomb (1952),a semidocumentary about a schoolteacher whoreturns to Hiroshima looking for former pupilswho were victims at ground zero. Hideo Sekigawa'sHiroshima (also 1952) was an angrier film that por-trayed the atomic bombings as a racist act in whichthe Japanese people were guinea pigs in a U.S.nuclear experiment. But in the 4o-plus years sincethe American forces left and censorship was lifted,surprisingly few movies have directly addressedJapan's status as the only nation to be attacked with

nuclear weapons. Film scholars cite prevailing feel-ings of shame, repression, and guilt but are unableto fully explain the Japanese cinema's ambivalencetoward the Bomb, a subject that would seem to beimportant and compelling movie material.

During the 19505 and '6os, several Japanese mov-ies made references to the atomic bombs and toradiation sickness, but only two major films tackledthe Bomb as subject matter. The most criticallylauded of the two was Akira Kurosawa's / Live inFear (a.k.a. Record of a Living Being, 1955), whereinToshiro Mifune plays a man nearly frightened todeath by the specter of another nuclear attack onJapan; the most commercially successful was Tan-aka's barely disguised allegory of the Bomb, mani-fested in a gigantic monster.2

By 1954, Japan was peaceful and relatively pros-perous again, but fears of renewed annihilationwere brimming below the surface, fueled by newnuclear threats. Cold War tensions were increasingand Japan was now caught — literally — betweenthe two superpowers' nuclear-testing programs:the Soviet Union's on one side, and the PacificProving Ground established by the U.S. at the Mar-shall Islands on the other. The Korean War wasescalating, raising fears that a hydrogen bomb mightbe dropped on neighboring North Korea or Chinaand rain fallout over the region. It may have been adivine act or it may have been pure happenstance,but around the same time that Tanaka was forcedto quickly invent a major new film, a historic, horri-fying event was unfolding in the equatorial Pacific,an event that would forever change monster-moviehistory.

Early in the morning on March i, the U.S. deto-nated a i5-megaton H-bomb — with 750 timesmore explosive power than the atomic bombs thatdestroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki — near theBikini Atoll, 2,500 miles southwest of Honolulu.The explosion, code-named Operation Bravo, waslabeled a "routine atomic test" by the AtomicEnergy Commission but it proved far more power-ful than expected, vaporizing a large portion ofBikini and sending a plume of highly radioactivedebris floating eastward over a 7,ooo-square-milearea of the Pacific Ocean. Into this nuclear night-mare zone errantly wandered a 140-ton woodenJapanese trawler, the Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (SS LuckyDragon #5), which was on a tuna-fishing trip about100 miles east of Bikini. The boat's 23 crewmenwere showered with a sticky, white radioactive ash;within a few hours several men became sick withheadaches, nausea, and eye irritation, and a few

20

days later some of theirfaces turned strangely dark.The ship's captain, not understanding what washappening to his men, abandoned the fishing tripand returned to the boat's home port at Yaizu inShizuoka Prefecture. Six months later, on Septem-ber 23, Aikichi Kuboyama, the chief radio operator,died of leukemia in a Tokyo hospital. His last words,according to newspaper reports, were, "Please makesure that I am the last victim of the nuclear bomb."Five other crew members later died from cancersand other diseases that were believed to be bomb-related.

The incident was first reported on the morning ofMarch 16 in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. Atfirst the U.S. government denied it was responsiblefor the "death ash" that had poisoned the ship; theAmericans later admitted the ash was fallout froma hydrogen bomb but accused the Lucky Dragon ofentering the restricted testing area on a spy mission.The U.S. government sent the dead fisherman'swidow a check for 2.5 million yen as a "token ofsympathy" in an attempt to put the matter to rest.Only years later would America admit that Opera-tion Bravo was the most powerful nuclear bombever detonated and that it caused the single worstfallout incident in the H-bomb atmospheric-testingprogram.

Throughout 1954 and '55, the Lucky Dragon trag-edy released japan's pent-up anxieties about theBomb— an unprecedented public outcry followedit, including a boycott of tuna and other radiation-contaminated fish, a national ban-the-bomb signa-ture campaign (by August 1955, 32 million signatureswere collected), the formation of the Council AgainstA- and H-bombs, and the rise of the Japanese peacemovement of the 19505.2

It also gave birth to the King of the Monsters.

T H E M A K I N GO F GJH^SLLLA

Before there was a screenplay, a story line, or evena concrete idea of what his monster would looklike, Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka decided on aworking title: The Giant Monster from 20,000 MilesBeneath the Sea. His first task was to present hisidea to Iwao Mori, a powerful executive producerwho had overseen much of Toho's moviemakingoperations since the studio's formation back in1937, and whose approval was needed to get theproject off the ground. Seizing upon the clamor

over the fallout-poisoned fishermen, Tanaka usednewspaper clippings about the Lucky Dragon inci-dent to show Mori that the time was right for agigantic monster, stirred from an eons-long sleepby rampant atomic testing, to come ashore andtrample Tokyo.

Tanaka's idea was outlandish — no Japanesemovie studio had ever attempted anything like it.The moviegoing public was accustomed to warfilms, family melodramas, and samurai sagas. RKO'SKing Kong (1933), which was re-released interna-tionally with great success in 1952, was the onlycomparable film that Japanese audiences hadseen. But Mori was interested in this odd proposal.A decade earlier, he had orchestrated Toho's suc-cessful string of special-effects-laden war movies,and now he was looking for a new way to parlaythe talents of Toho's chief special-effects man,Eiji Tsuburaya, into big box-office yen. Stoppingshort of green-lighting the project, Mori told Tan-aka to meet with Tsuburaya and determine if it wastechnically feasible.

Tsuburaya was heavily influenced by King Kong,and he had long wanted to make his own monstermovie utilizing the type of stop-motion animationtrickery Willis O'Brien employed in thatfilm. He wasalso a man who seldom refused a challenge tocreate something new, so he quickly latched ontoTanaka's wild idea. Tsuburaya and his craftsmenwere well experienced in filming re-creations ofmilitary battles and other illusions rooted in reality,but now Tanaka was asking them to create a larger-than-life, fictional creature, something no Japanesefilmmaker had ever done.

In mid-April 1954, with Tsuburaya on board, IwaoMori approved both the production and Tanaka'schoice for its director. Senkichi Taniguchi, who hadbeen slated to make the aborted In the Shadowof Honor, had already been reassigned to film anadaptation of The Sound of Waves, a popular YukioMishima novel. In his place, Tanaka chose IshiroHonda, who had worked twice with Eiji Tsuburayaon war dramas featuring heavy use of special effects,Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell, Rabaul. Mori alsoshortened The Giant Monster from 20,000 MilesBeneath the Sea to simply Project G (G-Sakuhin, the"G" an abbreviation for "Giant"), and orderedthat the production be given classified status, withdetails kept top-secret among the participants. "Itwas even said that Mr. Mori highly recommendedthat if you even told your children about it, thatthey'd wring your neck," Tanaka recalled. Believingthis could be a historic eventforToho and the entire

21

/4- Tfdl TfrU?Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka often said Godzilla was the product of his clutch creativity in ahigh-pressure moment. But was Godzilla really born while Tanaka was sweating nervously in a planeflying over the Pacific? While Tanaka's story is certainly rooted in fact, the events leading to themonster's creation actually transpired much less dramatically.

According to several Japanese-language books and articles, it went something like this:

FEBRUARY 16,1954: Tanaka and director Senkichi Taniguchi leave for Jakarta to finalize a contractwith the Indonesian government's film agency for production of In the Shadow of Honor. Thingsproceed well.

FEBRUARY 25: Tanaka and Taniguchi leave Indonesia, fly to Hong Kong for a meeting with actressShigeko Yamaguchi, one of the film's stars, and then return to Tokyo on February 28. The movie isto begin shooting within a few weeks.

EARLY MARCH: The Indonesians contact Toho to report that filming will be delayed until April,due to rainy weather.

MARCH 20: Toho receives a letter from Indonesia saying that the script for In the Shadow of Honoris unacceptable and the project is canceled. The underlying problem, however, is the tenuouspostwar relations between japan and Indonesia. Tanaka suggests going to Jakarta to try and savethe production, but executive producer Jwao Mori tells him instead to come up with an idea foranother movie. A few weeks later, the cancellation of In the Shadow of Honoris officially announced.

Japanese movie business, Mori ordered Tanaka tominimize his work on the other films he was pro-ducing at that time and focus on Project G.

Just as the American science-fiction movies It Camefrom Outer Space and The Beast from 20,000 Fathomswere based on stories by acclaimed genre authorRay Bradbury, Tanaka sought to give Project G credi-bility and commercial appeal by hiring science-fiction and horror novelist Shigeru Kayama to writean original story. Although his works have fadedinto obscurity today, Kayama (1906-1975) was thenriding a crest of popularity that began in 1947 whenone of his early stories, "Orang-Pendek's Revenge"(based on a legendary, Bigfoot-like creature in theSumatran rainforests), won a literary prize from Thejewel magazine; another work, "The Curious Sto-ries from the House of Eel," won first prize fromthe Detective Story Writers Club of Japan in 1948.Kayama was one of the most prominent mysterywriters in postwar Japan, and because his storiessometimes involved mutant reptiles and fish andother monsters, Tanaka felt he was the ideal choice.On May 12,1954, Kayama accepted the assignment.

Around the same time, two key decisions were

made. First, the monster was named "Cojira"(roughly pronounced CO-jee-rah, later Anglicizedas "Godzilla" by Toho's foreign-sales departmentwhen the film was offered to the English-speakingworld). Second, the monster was given a shape.Contrary to popular belief, it appears Tanaka didnot decide from the outset that the monster wouldbe of the prehistoric-reptile variety. In fact, it ispossible that he originally imagined a giganticgorilla-whale, as its name suggested (see sidebar,"Gorilla-whale vs. Godzilla"). In memoirs publish-ed in Japan, Shigeru Kayama recalled that when hewas first hired, he was told Godzilla was a seamonster that was "a cross between a whale andgorilla." The first conceptual drawings of Godzillaby Kazuyoshi Abe (a cartoonist who had illustratedsome of Shigeru Kayama's novels) show a monsterdefinitely more gorilla-like than reptilian. Evidencesuggests that, at least until the early stages ofKayama's story-writing, ideas about the monster'sphysical form were still being discussed. At onepoint, Eiji Tsuburaya suggested a story he had writtenyears before, inspired by his love of King Kong, abouta gigantic octopus running amok and attacking

22

Japanese fishing boats in the Indian Ocean. Screen-writer Takeo Murata has also recounted howhe and Tsuburaya devised a scenario in which agigantic, whale-like creature came ashore in Tokyoand caused havoc.4 Ultimately, Tanaka followed thewildly successful example set by The Beast from20,000 Fathoms and elected to make Godzilla adinosaur-like creature capable of posing a majorthreat to Japan. Tanaka said he felt a giant reptile"was more suited to the time period."

Kayama worked fast (according to his diaries, hehad written 50 pages after just 11 days' work) andturned in his completed story before the end ofMay. While he was writing, Kayama received inputfrom several Toho officials, including Tanaka andrepresentatives from Toho's literary department, agroup of people charged with cultivating storyideas. But perhaps the most key contributions tothe development of Godzilla's story came from theaforementioned Murata, who co-wrote the screen-play with director Ishiro Honda. Murata (b. 1910),had directed Japan's first 3-D movie, The Sundaythat Popped Out (1953), and was one of Toho's

senior assistant directors. Although Shigeru Kayamaestablished the framework of the story includingthe four pivotal roles (Dr. Yamane, Emiko, Ogata,Dr. Serizawa), it was Murata who fleshed out thedramatic structure and refined the characters. Dr.Yamane, for example, was originally written as awildly eccentric character reminiscent of the worksof Edogawa Rampo (a Japanese horror novelistpopular in the 19305 and '405, whose name is aJapanization of "Edgar Allan Poe").

"He (Yamane) was wearing dark shades and ablack cape, and he had a very strange feel in theoriginal story," Murata recalled in an interviewpublished in Toho SF Special Effects Movie SeriesVol. 3. "He was the type of man who lived in anold, European-style house, and he only came outat night. No one knew what he did for a living.Godzilla himself was weird, so we didn't want tomake the main character weird also. That would beoverkill. So, I suggested that the doctor shouldbe an ordinary person who had lost his wife, andhe lived with his daughter. . . . They should be liv-ing a very ordinary life."

"fyvrillfr-'W fable" ̂ tyojzillfbGodzilla owes his name to a bad joke aimed at a Toho employee whose co-workers found himvery ugly. They combined gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale) to form "Godzilla" in Japanese andslapped the impolite nickname on him."

— From an Agence France Presse story, July 29,1994

According to Toho folklore, the monster Gojira was named after a big, burly stagehand who workedon the Toho Studios lot. This man had earned his nickname, a compound of "gorilla" and kujira(Japanese for "whale"), due to his huge physique.

Over the years, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka often recounted how he thought the man's monikerperfectly suited the monster. Even director Ishiro Honda, shortly before his death, reaffirmed thestory. "There was a big — I mean huge — fellow working in Toho's publicity department and otheremployees would say, 'That guy's as big as a gorilla.' 'No, he's almost as big as a kujira.' Over time,the two mixed and he was nicknamed 'Gojira.'" Honda's version of events seems somewhatrevised; it makes less sense that someone working in the publicity department would be knownfor his girth than would a laborer. Regardless, the real name of Gojira (the man) has never beenrevealed, nor his job in the company and when he worked there.

Just who was "Gorilla-Whale," and why hasn't the studio ever brought him forward? Perhaps it'sbecause he never really existed. "I expect the [monster's] name was thought up after very carefuldiscussions between Mr. Tanaka, Mr. Tsuburaya and my husband," Honda's widow, Kimi Honda,said in a 1998 BBC-TV documentary. "I am sure they would have given the matter considerablethought." As for the burly man called Gojira, she added, "the backstage boys at Toho loved to jokearound with tall stories, but I don't believe that one."

23

CfV^zillfr's 'frirtkylfrtz

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TOHO MOTION PICTURECOMPANY AND THE JAPANESE MOVIE INDUSTRY

Godzilla was born at the right time, and in the right place.In 1954, fueled by a postwar economic boom, Japanese movie studios were entering a period of

unprecedented productivity. The Toho Motion Picture Company, which had already establisheditself as an innovator in the film industry, was engaged in box-office battles with its rivals(Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Shin-Toho, Toei, and Daiei studios) as it attempted to solidify itself as Japan'sbiggest and most ambitious moviemaker. It was this competitive climate, in which movie studioswould take chances in order to make a splash, that made Godzilla possible.5

Toho was founded in 1937 by the merger of four small production companies that had allembraced the production of sound films while older, more established movie studios were stillclinging to the tradition of silent movies with live narrators (benshi). The merger was orchestratedby Ichizo Kobayashi, a railroad tycoon who had successfully revived the struggling Arima ElectricRailway Co. in Osaka by combining transportation with show business. In the early 19305,Kobayashi extended a new railroad line out to a sleepy Osaka suburb, and at the end of the trackshe built a theater staffed with an all-female opera troupe, the Takarazuka Company. Located offthe beaten path and kept under monastic conditions, Kobayashi's girls developed a mystique andsoon became all the rage — a burgeoning entertainment city sprang up around the theater, witha zoo, a circus, and restaurants, and Kobayashi made a fortune on his railroad. Then, in hopesof building an entertainment empire, Kobayashi began buying theaters in the Tokyo area,envisioning a nationwide chain of movie and opera houses. To produce "talkies" for his theaters,in 1935 Kobayashi acquired two movie studios, PCL (Photo Chemical Laboratory) and jo, andformed the Toho Motion Picture Distribution Company to distribute the two companies' movies,along with imported American films. Two years later, he bought out two more small companiesand solidified the entire operation into the Toho Motion Picture Company. (The name "Toho" is

actually an abbreviation for "Tokyo-Takarazuka"; the Chinese character "Takara" can also bepronounced "ho." Toho's birth date is usually listed not as 1937, but 1932, the year that its precursor

PCL was established.)Toho hit its stride in the late 19305 and early '405 by becoming the foremost producer of "national

policy films," a nice name for war propaganda movies. ns=

Honda and Murata holed themselves up in a Jap-anese inn in Tokyo's Shibuya ward to write thescreenplay, which took about three weeks. "Direc-tor Honda and I ... racked our brains to make Mr.Kayama's original story into a full, working vision,"Murata said. "Mr. Tsuburaya and Mr. Tanaka cameby and pitched their ideas, too. Mr. Tanaka's stanceas a producer was, 'Please don't spend too muchmoney.' Mr. Tsuburaya's stance was, 'Do whateverit takes to make it work.' Mr. Tsuburaya gave us

such encouragement. Whenever I wondered, 'Cawe do something like this?' he would say, 'I'll givit some thought.' Then he comes back the next dayand says, 'This is how we can make it happen.'"

Murata and Honda also introduced the Ogata-Emiko-Serizawa love triangle (originally, Ogata andEmiko were lovers, while Serizawa was merely acolleague of Yamane's), which gave deeper mean-ing to the characters' actions and lent a profundityto Serizawa's suicide. They nixed Kayama's idea of

24