The year before Tsuburaya had forced Tanaka to go to see his beloved King Kong, which had just earned four times as much in its worldwide rerelease as it had originally, and Tanaka had also been impressed by the global numbers for Warner Bros.’ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the story of a dinosaur thawed from its hibernation by American nuclear testing in Baffin Bay.
The United States government estimated that 856 ships in the Japanese fishing fleet had been exposed to radiation, and that more than five hundred tons of fish had to be destroyed, and offered a settlement for the survivors that the Japanese government declined to accept. And Tanaka recounted that it struck him as he looked out over the Pacific below that the stories could be combined; and for the rest of the flight he scribbled on the back of a folder that his seatmate had lent him the outline of a story in which a prehistoric creature was awakened by an H-bomb test in the Pacific and then went on to destroy Tokyo.
When Tsuburaya finally returned home for dinner on the night of the Star Festival, Masano served soba noodles and mashed fish. While he ate, she was sober and quiet. He mentioned again by way of conversation a cough that wouldn’t go away and she prepared for him without comment what she called her broth of the seven plants, which included shepherd’s purse, chickweed, parsley, cottonweed, and radish. She sat with him while he drank it and, once he finished, told him he should smoke less.
For months his project was known at Toho only as Project G, for giant, but lately the staff had taken to calling it Gojira, a fusion of the word for gorilla, because of the monster’s agility, and the one for whale, because of its size. Tanaka and Honda, the director, liked that as much as anything else anyone had come up with.
Upon leaving the following morning Tsuburaya noticed the telescope in the entryway and remembered to ask how the star-viewing had gone. Masano asked how he thought it could have gone, given that it had rained.
The rest of the morning was spent laboring through an interview with the Weekly Asahi. The reporter, a young man with goggle-sized glasses, seemed to prize his own skepticism and asked each of his questions as if jabbing a tied dog with a stick. Did Eiji Tsuburaya, the Master of Miniatures and head of Toho’s Special Arts Department, feel the burden of his responsibility for the visual effects on which Toho’s new flagship production would either float or sink? Tsuburaya assured him that he did. Was it true there was a nuclear subtext to the story? Tsuburaya admitted that there was. And would Mr. Tsuburaya be willing to favor the Weekly Asahi’s readers with an exclusive first glimpse of the movie’s monster? Mr. Tsuburaya would not.
. . .
Eiji Tsuburaya was born in the village of Sukagawa, two hundred and twenty kilometers north of Tokyo in the Fukushima prefecture, and his grandmother and uncle told him every day of his childhood that he’d been delivered on a date propitious for creativity. His parents were Nichiren-sect Buddhists and as members of the rural gentry had been granted exclusive license to operate the local general-goods store, which remained the main clearinghouse, in that region, for sake, soy, and miso. His mother died when she was nineteen and he was three. In both of the photographs of her which remained, she appeared birdlike and consumptive and tilted him toward the camera much as a schoolgirl might display an examination on which had been scrawled a failing grade. In both she seemed to regard the photographer with a kind of pensive anxiety.
With his father subsequently forever at the store, he was raised by his grandmother Natsu and his uncle Ichiro. He and Ichiro were so close in age that his uncle seemed more like an older brother, and so people stopped using Tsuburaya’s given name, which meant first son, and started calling him Eiji, or second son.
When he was nine Ichiro took him to see Tokugawa and Hino at the Yoyogi Parade Grounds. Captains in the Imperial Army, they were aviation pioneers who’d made the first successful powered flights in Japan. He spent the next four years teaching himself how to build model airplanes out of wood, especially Tokugawa’s Henry Farman biplane. He’d wake each morning at four and light his lamp and work until he had to leave for school and then, when classes were dismissed, he’d rush home and pick up where he’d left off. Once he’d achieved the verisimilitude he sought, he began increasing the scale until he was working on aircraft so large their wingspans no longer fit into his room. His father disapproved, but Tsuburaya believed he was building something that would fly him away and around the world. The bigger models ended up causing enough of a stir with the neighbors that the local newspaper did a feature about him entitled “The Child Craftsman.” And throughout his career Tsuburaya was teased about the fact that the first time he saw a motion picture, he found himself more fascinated with the projector than with what was going on onscreen.
Akira was their third child and second son, born much later than the other two. Their daughter, Miyako, had died in her sleep two years after her birth. She’d had a small fever and called out in the night to Masano, who told her that she would be fine and then fell back asleep after everything had quieted.
For three months afterwards Masano could not be induced to leave the house. Neither her family nor her friends had any effect. She came around only mechanically at first to the notion that they still had a son to raise, and Hajime, who was two years older, cried himself to sleep each night in terror and helplessness while his mother gently stroked his head.
Tsuburaya was then a camera operator and kept himself busy with his production schedule and with brainstorming apparatuses that would improve his work. He’d patented and sold the Auto Snap, a pedal-operated shutter cable that freed the hands for other tasks, and had also experimented so successfully with smoke pots for in-camera effects that he’d become known around the industry as Smoke Tsuburaya. When he came home, though, such news had to be left at the front door.
Hajime had finally regained his mother’s attention by telling her he was collecting stones for the roadside Jizo image. According to the legend, the souls of all dead children went to the underground river where a she-devil got them to pile stones on the bank by assuring them that if they made their piles high enough they could climb to paradise, but then she perpetually knocked over their work. Jizo, a roadside deity, comforted them, and every stone placed in the lap of one of his statues was supposed to shorten their task. Each morning before school, then, Hajime and Masano would add one or two stones to the nearest statue’s pile.
In this way, his wife had pulled herself along, moment by moment. She enjoyed it if her husband sat quietly beside her. She submitted to his ministrations but declined to touch him. She seemed to appreciate being put to bed at night.
That was the year King Kong came to Japan. Tsuburaya had seen The Lost World some years earlier, but this was staggering: Willis O’Brien had with his little figures and suitcase jungles transformed RKO Radio Pictures from whatever it had been before into a world power. Tsuburaya wrote him with questions but never discovered if his letters had gotten through. He saw the film six times. He took Hajime, who was so terrified that they had to leave in the middle. Without a response from O’Brien, his only recourse was to use his connections to obtain a 35mm print and break down its effects himself, frame by frame. One evening he brought Masano in from where she was sitting and situated her next to him beside the projector. The following evening he let her remain where she was.