Japan’s greatest monster, Godzilla, turns 70 on November 3 2024, the anniversary of the first movie to feature the character. Godzilla (1954) was a stark exercise in processing the trauma of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, but its success inspired the longest-running film franchise in history, with 37 sequels.
The many Godzilla movies made by Toho, one of Japan’s biggest film studios, reflect the country’s complex history as victims of the only nuclear bombings and as a rapidly developing economy in the 20th century.
The two most recent live-action films, Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla Minus One (2023), updated these themes for this century. They respectively criticised the response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima meltdown. The films nostalgically captured a resurgent Japanese nationalism.
