What is Kaiju?
The following is an excerpt from the ‘What is Kaiju?’ author roundtable featured in the introductory chapter of Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture (edited by Camille D.G. Mustachio and Jason Barr), published by McFarland Press in 2017.
Kenta McGrath: Growing up in Japan, I didn’t consider kaiju to be fearful or antagonistic as a matter of course. Sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren’t. However, they were always gigantic without qualification. To this end I agree with Jase Short’s observation that kaiju are “akin to the yokai of Japanese lore”; like yokai, kaiju can be frightening or innocuous, objects of dread and anxiety, or of goodwill and sympathy. As outlined by Justin Mullis in his wide-ranging response, this diversity can be attributed to cultural and religious factors, resulting in “two very different sets of monster movies” as represented by the near-uniform hostility of Hollywood’s monsters, and the wide range of characteristics—often hostile, often not—embodied in the kaiju of the Japanese cinema.
For me, “monster” doesn’t adequately acknowledge this multiplicity. Kaiju is most commonly translated as “creature” or “monster”—of the strange, giant variety, of course—but these two English words carry negative connotations that kaiju does not. By some definitions humans are considered “creatures,” but we typically reserve the use of this word to describe species other than our own. King Ghidorah, my dogs, the fly that i’m swatting away as I type this under the hot Australian sun—are all creatures. However, we also use “creature” to distinguish between those species that we find safe, familiar, and lovable, and those we find alien, grotesque, and threatening. In an everyday context I’d never refer to my dogs as creatures, but a flying cockroach will remain a vile creature every hour of the day. Nigel Farage understood this convention when he referred to Obama as a “creature” after Trump’s election victory—an insult designed to appeal to his base of followers who might chuckle at the racist undertone, and which simultaneously allows Farage to hide behind a word whose literal meaning, if one insists upon it, covers everything from American presidents to deep-sea fish.
“Monster” is a similarly flexible term. It can be used literally to describe fearsome (and sometimes, not-so-fearsome) imaginary creatures, but it’s often used metaphorically—and often quite lazily—to ascribe moral value upon humans who have committed monstrous acts, or who have demonstrated cruel, antagonistic qualities that seem to transcend human-ness. Thus Mothra, King Kong, the Minotaur, the chupacabra, and the Grootslang are monsters in the literal sense, while Queen “Bloody” Mary, Josef Stalin, Jack Torrance, Nurse Ratched, and Trump may be considered monsters in a metaphorical sense. Kaiju, on the other hand, only describes; it doesn’t connote anything other than a certain kind of (literal) monster, and it doesn’t discriminate. This isn’t to suggest that the differences in how Japanese and non–Japanese regard their monsters can be reduced to a simple matter of semantics, but there are clearly many connotations gained in translation when one describes a kaiju as a “creature,” “beast,” or “monster.”
In any attempts to define kaiju it’s crucial to consider cinema itself, as the medium—the only medium, really—responsible for the fame, interest, and study that this peculiarly Japanese breed of monster has attracted. In my view, kaiju and cinema (and to a lesser extent, television) are inseparable. Although the origins of kaiju can be traced back to long before Godzilla and indeed, cinema itself, the fact remains that the rise of kaiju in popular culture occurred in tandem with the rise of the kaiju eiga. But first we must be attuned to the fact that the kaiju eiga spans decades, covers many aesthetic trends, and varies widely in its use (and non-use) of allegory and socio-political commentary. It is not static but, like Godzilla, always evolving and adapting, according to when, how, and why it is produced, and who is behind the wheel. As with any genre, it has produced formidable works that will stand the test of time, and forgettable efforts designed to do little more than cash in on what came before it. Any attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all meaning for kaiju or kaiju films will inevitably result in a series of definitional dead-ends.
It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the word kaiju didn’t come into popular usage in Japan until it popped up in the title of a film, and it wasn’t even Japanese. The Japanese title for the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is Genshi Kaiju ga Arawareru, which translates as “An Atomic Kaiju Appears”—and “Atomic Kaiju” describes very well a famous Japanese monster that announced itself to the world just one year later. But it’s Godzilla and not the earlier American film with which kaiju have come to be associated, and this isn’t surprising. As clear “losers” in World War II, and in a nation still reeling from the trauma of the dual atomic bombings and the indiscriminate firebombing of its cities, the Japanese had more to invest in the allegorical potential of a powerful, destructive monster than anybody else. But it also has to do with the fact that Godzilla is a far more interesting, and far superior, film.
It still surprises me that Godzilla is more often discussed as a film that introduced a powerful, allegorical, and iconic monster, and less as a powerful, allegorical, and iconic work of filmmaking. The visceral impact of the film does not, and never did, rest on the shoulders of Godzilla alone. We mustn’t underplay Ishiro Honda’s inspired direction, he and Takeo Murata’s superb (and in 1954, frighteningly relevant) screenplay, Akira Ifukube’s modernist score, and Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects, which paved the way for an entire tradition of tokusatsu filmmaking, and which was worlds apart from how Western filmmakers were representing their monsters. It speaks volumes that Haruo Nakajima, the suit actor who played Godzilla in a dozen consecutive films between the 1950s and 1970s, was considered indispensable by both Toho and Tsuburaya, and is today regarded as a crucial factor in the films’ success. Where many saw only the strange, giant monster, others recognized the art and craft behind the strange, giant monster. More than anything else, it is the art of cinema—the combination of image and sound, the collaboration of artists and craftspeople, and the considered use of the resources at their disposal—that allowed the meanings and allegorical potential of kaiju to be articulated in the first place. Beasts, creatures, monsters, and yokai—strange, giant, or otherwise—never needed cinema; it is just one medium in which they have appeared and flourished. Meanwhile, discussing kaiju as separate from cinema seems to me a fruitless exercise. Without cinema, kaiju are relatively unremarkable—just another variation of monsters of which there have been many throughout history.
In keeping with my view that kaiju and cinema are inexorably linked, my clearest understanding of kaiju is derived not from their physical appearance or their characteristics, but from something that could only be expressed in the audiovisual medium of cinema. It is not an image, but a sound. Regardless of the context in which it is heard, Godzilla’s roar sounds to me in equal parts a warning of a horror about to be unleashed, like an air-raid siren, and the cry of anguish of a wounded and confused animal, which has found itself somewhere it doesn’t belong. For me, it is this sound that is emblematic of kaiju, as both a genre and a cultural construct, in all their complexity and multiplicity.