Kaiju

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Kaiju" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Kaiju (Japanese: 怪獣, Hepburn: Kaijū, lit. 'strange beast'; Japanese pronunciation: [kai(d)ʑɯː]) is a Japanese term that is commonly associated with media involving giant monsters. The kaiju film genre is credited to tokusatsu director Eiji Tsuburaya and filmmaker Ishirō Honda, who popularized it by creating the Godzilla franchise and its spin-offs.^[1] The term can also refer to the monsters themselves, which are usually depicted attacking major cities and battling either the military or other creatures.

Godzilla (1954) is often regarded as the first kaiju movie. When developing it, Honda and Tsuburaya drew inspiration from the character of King Kong, both in its influential 1933 film and in the conception of a giant monster, establishing it as a pivotal precursor in the evolution of the genre.^[2] During its formative years, kaiju movies were generally neglected by Japanese critics, who regarded them as "juvenile gimmick", according to authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski.^[1]

Kaiju are often somewhat metaphorical in nature; Godzilla, for example, serves as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, reflecting the fears of post-war Japan following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. Other notable examples of kaiju characters include King Kong, Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, and Gamera.