A well-loved monster takes Japan’s box office by storm once again

NOW a battle-scarred 62, Japan’s king of monsters refuses to die. Godzilla is again lumbering across the big screen, menacing Tokyo with his radioactive breath and walloping attendance records. His 29th cinematic appearance, “Shin Gojira” (“Godzilla Resurgence”) has drawn over 4m people and earned ¥6.6 billion ($65m) making it the most-watched film in Japan this year. Fans in America will be able to see the oversized reptile’s latest outing from next month, starting with a premiere in Los Angeles on October 3rd.

Godzilla has mined box-office gold since the early 1950s, partly by channelling the anxieties of successive eras. Initially a repository of fears about the American nuclear bombs that had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he morphed into a family favourite during the optimistic post-war decades, periodically rising from Tokyo Bay to smite external threats.

From the 1980s, amid unease about the suddenness of Japan’s runaway economic growth and the ostentatious displays of wealth that accompanied it, a darker-themed (and much taller) Godzilla challenged the wits of dithering bureaucrats and smashed his way through Tokyo’s new office buildings. One climatic fight from the film of 1991 results in the destruction of the city’s Metropolitan Government Building, a towering symbol of bureaucratic power.

There has been a hiatus of more than a decade since the last Japanese-made film, 2004’s “Godzilla: Final Wars”, which was a rare flop. The beast’s last American-made incarnation, “Godzilla”, was released in 2014 and grossed over $500m worldwide (including $30m in Japan itself). That success prodded Toho, the Japanese studio behind the franchise, to unleash the iconic brute once more.

Godzilla’s triumphant return shows that Toho, which bestrides the world’s third-largest cinema market by revenue, has not lost its knack for making money by surfing the zeitgeist. Its new film references the government’s confused response to Japan’s 2011 disaster, particularly the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Instead of just bashing elite bureaucrats, however, it shows them working with the country’s popular Self-Defence Forces (SDF) to send Godzilla back to the bottom of Tokyo Bay. The message seems to be that Team Japan works together, and the credits to the film list over 250 companies that helped in the filming, from railway firms to concrete suppliers; many were asked to co-operate so that Godzilla could pulverise their buildings in Tokyo on screen.

Other, darker interpretations of what malign force the monster may represent once again abound; for some, the soft nationalism of the new film makes the monster an obvious metaphor for China’s rise and military expansion, which is feared by many Japanese. For others it is a reference to the government of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, whose detractors see him as a sinister figure bent on taking the country backwards in the direction of its militaristic past.

Yet the film’s strongest resonance with the public, says Mark Schreiber, a pop-culture expert, lies in its portrayal of adversity in a city that has been levelled twice in the past century, and which lives with the inevitability of another destructive quake and tsunami. Four years ago scientists said that up to 323,000 people would die if a big earthquake hit the Tokyo area. The beast represents irresistible force, be it wars or natural disasters. “The force is terrifying, but always transitory,” says Mr Schreiber, “and then Japanese know they will be able to pick up the pieces and move on.” The reptilian franchise appears to have many decades of life left in it yet.