In November 1954, a film hit Japanese theaters that would permanently change the movie industry. Godzilla — known in Japan as Gojira — was directed by Ishirō Honda, with special effects masterminded by Eiji Tsuburaya. The cast included Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, and Takashi Shimura. But the creature itself was brought to life by two men inside a rubber suit: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka. What audiences saw on screen was the result of months of painstaking, physically grueling work that pushed Japanese filmmaking into entirely new territory.
The name “Gojira” is a blend of two Japanese words: gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira). Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka initially considered giving the monster a gorilla or whale-like appearance to match that name. The filmmakers moved away from that concept and settled on something far more menacing — a dinosaur-like creature that felt ancient, unstoppable, and deeply connected to nuclear destruction. Storyboards were drawn by Kazuyoshi Abe, who had earlier been hired to design the monster but was dismissed because his version looked too human and mammal-like.
The final design was developed by Teizō Toshimitsu and Akira Watanabe, working under Tsuburaya’s direction. They pulled from dinosaur reference books and blended features from three prehistoric animals: the upright frame of a Tyrannosaurus rex, the thumb spike of an Iguanodon, and the distinctive dorsal fins of a Stegosaurus. The result was a creature that felt rooted in prehistoric reality while still being wholly original.
Tsuburaya had originally wanted to use stop-motion animation — the same technique used in Hollywood monster films of the era. The timeline for production made that impossible. Stop-motion was too slow and too costly given the schedule. He turned instead to a technique that would define Japanese monster filmmaking for decades: suitmation. A performer wears a monster suit and moves through a set built to a smaller scale, making it look as though a giant creature is tearing through a real city.
Toshimitsu sculpted three clay models of Godzilla before the team found one they were satisfied with. The first two were rejected outright. The third was approved and used as the blueprint for the actual suit. Building that suit fell to Teizō Yasuei, Kaimai, and a craftsman named Yagi. They started with a skeleton of bamboo sticks and wire, then reinforced the structure with metal mesh and cushioning material. Layer by layer, the suit took shape.
The outer skin of the suit was built to look like the scarred, irradiated hide of a creature born from nuclear testing. Workers coated the suit in molten rubber, then hand-carved indentations into the surface while it was still workable. Latex strips were glued on top to create the rough, uneven texture audiences would see on screen. When finished, the suit weighed 100 kilograms — roughly 220 pounds. The men who wore it could only endure it for a few minutes at a time before they had to stop and rest.
For close-up shots of Godzilla’s atomic breath, the team built a separate, more detailed head model. That prop was rigged to spray streams of mist from its mouth, giving the impression of the monster’s signature radioactive blast. The main suit and the close-up head model worked together to sell the creature as something real and terrifying.
The miniature sets built for the film were extraordinarily detailed. Tsuburaya’s team constructed scale models of Tokyo’s streets, buildings, and landmarks. The sets had to be solid enough to withstand a suited performer walking through them, but also built to break apart convincingly on camera. Filming through low camera angles helped sell the illusion of scale — making a man in a suit look like a 50-meter monster leveling a city.
Principal photography on Godzilla lasted 51 days. The special effects work — the miniature destruction sequences that Tsuburaya oversaw — took even longer, running for 71 days. In total, the production was an enormous undertaking for a Japanese film industry still rebuilding after World War II.
The film drew directly from a real and terrifying event that had shaken Japan just months before cameras rolled. In March 1954, the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru — Lucky Dragon No. 5 — was caught in the radioactive fallout from the United States military’s Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. The bomb yielded 15 metric tons of explosive force, far more than expected. The crew fell ill from radiation exposure, and one crew member died from radiation poisoning. The contaminated catch caused widespread panic across Japan over the safety of eating fish.
That event directly shaped Godzilla’s opening scene, in which the monster destroys a Japanese fishing vessel at sea. For audiences in 1954, the connection was immediate and unmistakable. The Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was founded in the aftermath of the Lucky Dragon incident, giving rise to a major anti-nuclear movement. Godzilla walked straight into that national wound.
Researchers who studied early Japanese audience reactions noted that many viewers saw Godzilla not just as a villain but as a victim — a creature awakened and mutated by American nuclear testing. The film placed the blame for Godzilla’s existence squarely on atomic weapons, and since it was U.S. military tests that triggered the monster, many saw the film as a pointed commentary on American actions in the Pacific. The creature embodied both the horror of nuclear war and the unresolved trauma of World War II.
Academics have also described the film as a cultural coping mechanism — a way for Japanese society to process the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. occupation, and the ongoing nuclear testing that continued to affect the region. Honda and Tsuburaya gave those fears a face, a roar, and a body. They made the invisible threat visible.
The film received mixed reviews on its initial release in Japan. Critics were divided, but audiences showed up. The mixed critical reception did not reflect what was happening at the box office or in the culture. Over the following years, Godzilla was reappraised as a serious work — a monster movie that carried genuine weight about nuclear fear, national identity, and survival.
In 1956, American distributor TransWorld released a heavily re-edited version of the film in the United States under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters! New footage featuring Canadian actor Raymond Burr was cut into the film, and large portions of the original Japanese version were removed. This Americanized cut stripped away much of the film’s political and emotional context, softening the anti-nuclear message for U.S. audiences.
The suitmation technique Tsuburaya developed for Godzilla became the foundation of a whole category of Japanese filmmaking called tokusatsu — a word that roughly means “special filming” or “special effects.” The approach spread quickly through Japan’s film and television industry. Tsuburaya himself went on to co-found Tsuburaya Productions, the studio behind the long-running Ultraman franchise. The methods pioneered on the Godzilla set became standard tools for decades of Japanese genre filmmaking.
The men inside the Godzilla suit paid a serious physical price for their performances. Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla in the original film and continued the role through 12 sequels, described the experience as exhausting and painful. Inside the sealed rubber suit, temperatures soared. Sweat pooled at the bottom of the costume. Nakajima could only film for a few minutes before the suit had to be removed, and his body temperature monitored. He trained by watching bears and elephants at the zoo to understand how a massive creature moves.
Director Ishirō Honda brought a sober, almost documentary-like approach to the material. He was a World War II veteran who had witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima firsthand. For Honda, Godzilla was never just a monster film. He treated the story seriously and pushed his cast to respond to the creature’s destruction with genuine grief. The scenes of survivors in hospitals, scarred and dying from radiation, were filmed with a gravity that was unusual for the genre.
The franchise that grew from this single film became, according to Guinness World Records, the longest-running film franchise in history. Godzilla has now appeared in 36 films produced across Japan and the United States, as well as video games, comics, novels, and toys. The original 1954 production — built on bamboo, wire, latex, and the sweat of performers working inside an unbearable rubber suit — launched all of it.
Looking at the behind-the-scenes photographs from the 1954 production, the gap between what audiences saw and how it was actually made becomes striking. What looked enormous on screen was achieved on cramped soundstages, with crew members crouching below camera line, carefully timed takes to make a rubber-suited performer look like a 50-meter prehistoric predator. Every trick was practical, physical, and built by hand.
The production design team worked at a relentless pace to keep up with both the principal photography schedule and Tsuburaya’s separate special effects unit. Tsuburaya ran his team almost like an independent production — building sets, rigging destruction gags, and capturing footage that would be cut together with Honda’s live-action material. The coordination between the two units was complex, and the final film made the seams almost invisible.
The score was composed by Akira Ifukube, whose thunderous, march-like main theme became one of the most recognizable pieces of music in monster movie history. Ifukube created Godzilla’s roar by rubbing a resin-coated leather glove along the loosened strings of a contrabass and then slowing the recording down. The sound was unlike anything audiences had heard, and it matched the creature’s imposing presence perfectly.
Way to be a terrible columnist. Most of these images are not from the 1954 original film.