Japan's Master of Monsters

Japan's all-time box-office champion is 150 ft. (46 m) tall and has gray skin, opposable thumbs and very bad breath. Since he first lumbered onto the silver screen more than half a century ago, Godzilla has been the star of 27 feature films and countless documentaries, television series, animated cartoons, video games, comic books, T shirts, action figures and lunchboxes. There have been other Japanese movie monsters — lots of them — but only Godzilla has his own star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Behind this successful movie monster there is a formidable special-effects man. His name: Eiji Tsuburaya. He created not only Godzilla, but also Rodan, Mothra, Ultraman and a pantheon of fire-breathing reptiles and aliens. He also inspired a generation of imitators and ushered in the golden age of monster movies, or kaiju eiga, of the 1950s and '60s. If you were young and Japanese back then, you would know Tsuburaya's handiwork, perhaps even his name. He has been the subject of three or four biographies in his home country, and such contemporary movie giants as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas cite him as an influence. But for many, the monster maker remains an invisible man.

That anonymity may soon mutate. In Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, San Francisco–based writer August Ragone has produced a fond, generously illustrated biography of the tokusatsu (special effects) genius, who died in 1970. It is the first biography to appear in English. With help from Tsuburaya's family and co-workers, as well as stills supplied by his various studios, Ragone provides a monster maven's feast of detail about Japanese moviemaking in the innocent, pre-digital age. "His seemingly simple approach to special visual effects is in fact the result of a master craftsmanship like that seen in Japanese fine arts, a handmade approach," Ragone writes of Tsuburaya, "and a human touch that resonates beyond the chilly, pixellated near-perfection of today's computer-generated imaging."

Tsuburaya was a 19-year-old Tokyo engineering student when a chance meeting with a movie producer — during a 1919 teahouse brawl — led to a job as a camera operator. Tsuburaya loved the work, perfecting new techniques, including the deployment of Japan's first camera crane. In 1933 he saw American special-effects pioneer Willis O'Brien's newly released King Kong. "I thought to myself, 'I will someday make a monster movie like that,'" Tsuburaya said years later. First, however, came the horror story of World War II, which he spent laboring on propaganda films. His scale-model re-enactment of the 1941 Pearl Harbor bombing was so convincing that it was passed off as genuine in a postwar documentary by U.S. occupation authorities.

Tsuburaya was in his early 50s when he finally got his chance to make a monster. He had been working up a plot about a giant octopus that menaces fishing fleets. Then, in 1954, a Japanese trawler inadvertently sailed into the vicinity of a U.S. hydrogen-bomb test in the Marshall Islands. The crew received dangerous doses of radiation, and 500 tons of fish had to be recalled from ports nationwide after a radiation scare swept the country. The incident, coming less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, traumatized Japan. Working with director Ishiro Honda, Tsuburaya turned his octopus into a mutant dinosaur, awakened by a nuclear explosion and not happy about it. The project was quickly green-lighted by the prestigious Toho studio.

To get his scale models of Tokyo just right, Tsuburaya surveyed the city from rooftop elevations (on one occasion, when he was overheard talking with a colleague about how exactly they planned to destroy the neighborhood, the two were detained by security guards). Instead of filming a puppet of Godzilla in stop-motion, as O'Brien had done for King Kong, Tsuburaya put an actor in a rubber suit and ran the camera at high speed, making Godzilla's movements seem appropriately ponderous when played back. The suit, however, weighed 220 lbs. (100 kg), and the actor inside it lost 20 lbs. (9 kg) in six weeks of shooting. With a budget of $1.5 million, Gojira (Godzilla) was the most expensive Japanese film yet made, and it wreaked havoc at the box office. An English-dubbed version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, with added footage of actor Raymond Burr playing an American reporter, was a hit overseas.