Godzilla

Godzilla is a Kaiju first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd.. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games, novels, comic books, and television series. A 1998 American reimagining was produced and a second American version is currently undergoing post-production. The character is commonly alluded to by the title King of the Monsters, an epithet first used in the Americanized version of the original 1954 film.

With the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons. As the film series expanded, some stories took on less serious undertones portraying Godzilla as a hero while other plots still portrayed Godzilla as a destructive monster; sometimes the lesser of two threats who plays the defender by default but is still a danger to humanity.

Gojira is a portmanteau of the Japanese words: gorira, and kujira, which is fitting because in one planning stage, Godzilla was described as "a cross between a gorilla and a whale", alluding to his size, power and aquatic origin. One popular story is that "Gojira" was actually the nickname of a corpulent stagehand at Toho Studio. The story has not been verified, however, and, in the nearly sixty years since the film's original release, no one claiming to be the rumored employee has ever stepped forward nor have any photographs ever surfaced. Kimi Honda (the widow of Ishiro Honda) always suspected that the man never existed as she mentioned in a 1998 interview, "The backstage boys at Toho loved to joke around with tall stories".

Godzilla's name was written in man'yōgana as Gojira, where the kanji are used for phonetic value and not for meaning. Many Japanese books on Godzilla have referenced this curious fact, including B Media Books Special: Gojira Gahô, published by Take-Shobo in three different editions (1993, 1998, and 1999).

The Japanese pronunciation of the name is; the Anglicized form is, with the first syllable pronounced like the word "god", and the rest rhyming with "gorilla". When Godzilla was created, Japanese-to-English transliteration was less familiar, so it is possible that the kana representing the second syllable was misinterpreted as. In the Hepburn romanization system, Godzilla's name would have been rendered as "Gojira", whereas in the Kunrei romanization system it would have been rendered as "Gozira".