by Gil Asakawa | Originally posted at Nikkei View

Although Hollywood has been making monster movies since the original 1933 King Kong, the monster with the most staying power and screen incarnations didn’t come out of California, but from Tokyo. Godzilla is back with another cinematic reboot produced by Hollywood featuring the usual array of mega-special effects, including a digitized monster instead of a man in a monster suit. Whether costumed or computer-generated, Godzilla is the most famous Japanese American in the world. He’s starred in 28 movies, stomping his way through cities on both sides of the Pacific.

Godzilla, or the Japanese pronunciation, Gojira (a combination of the words for “gorilla,” gorira and “whale,” kujira) made its first Japanese appearance 60 years ago, in 1954. The film was edited and had scenes starring Raymond Burr as an American journalist inserted for its 1956 release in the U.S. as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. I always thought this was to make the movie more palatable to American audiences, but now I realize there was a more political reason for the reworking of the first film.

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