Was Akira Takarada Originally Supposed To Play Dr. Serizawa? (aka What's Up With Those Still Photos?)

When I read Stuart Galbraith's masterful book Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, I came across a quote from an interview the author conducted with Akira Takarada. Takarada mentions that he and Akihiko Hirata were originally cast for each other's roles, with Hirata playing Ogata and Takarada playing Dr. Serizawa. The entirety of the quote goes like this, emphasis mine:

"At the time we had the very controversial news story of the tuna boat that was exposed to radiation. That was a major social issue. The radiation - the sleeping Godzilla - is coming from the deep sea, Honda said. Those were the kind of discussions we had. Akihiko Hirata and I switched roles. Mr. Hirata had more of a scientist-like face - simple as that."

I had no real reason not to accept this until I translated an interview with Ishirō Honda. The book that the interview was included in printed one photo from a series of stills of Hirata in what appears to be a student uniform, no eyepatch, with Momoko Kōchi. When the interviewer brings these stills up to Honda, Honda seemingly denies the story about Hirata originally having been cast as Ogata. Or so I thought at first.

I'm a bit rough on the exact wording due to the machine translation, but the gist of the exchange went like this:

1. The interviewer mentions the photos and asks Honda if this was a scene that was shot for Godzilla and then cut from the film.
2. Honda says no, they were still photographs, and that it was like they were "old lovers".
3. The interviewer brings up the stories about the role switch. (It isn't framed as a question: the interviewer essentially just states "there are stories that Hirata was originally supposed to play Ogata's role.")
4. Honda says "No, that wasn't the case".

So I read this and I immediately thought, "oh, that's interesting". Honda says the role switch didn't happen? But then I realized that there are two ways you could interpret Honda's response of "No, that wasn't the case":

1. No, Hirata was never meant to play Ogata's role.
2. No, that wasn't the case for those specific stills. As in, Honda neither confirms nor denies whether Hirata was meant to play Ogata. He just says that isn't what's going on in those stills.

But those stills still bothered the hell out of me.

I thought hard about this. I thought way, way too hard about this. I had been assuming that the uniform in the stills was a university uniform, and that led me to believe the stills did show Hirata playing Ogata, since Serizawa would canonically have been a little young to be in university¹ until the last year of the war or just after it, and we do know that he lost his eye at some point during the war. But I took another look at the interview, and the interviewer is just saying "student clothes", not "university". And so, considering that style of cap was worn by schoolboys from early age up to university, I don't think there's much reason to doubt that the photos are meant to depict Serizawa as a teenager. 

Ed Godziszewski mentions this in his 13-minute featurette on the development of the film's story, and says that there's "conflicting information" about the images, bringing up all possibilities: deleted scenes, promotional still photographs, or photos from the casting process during which time Hirata was slated to play Ogata. 

So it's probably Serizawa in the stills, but what about the switch? Well, we're gonna go back to Godziszewski on this one.

Godziszewski printed a fine article on the development process of Godzilla in issue #12 of G-Fan, which included the most elaborate explanation of Hirata's original casting as Ogata that I have yet found. I would still like to see a Japanese primary source for this, but I respect Godziszewski, and if he says something, I believe it. Also, although the article in G-Fan ran in 1994, it's a reprint of an article from an issue of Markalite that ran in 1981, so we have a source that goes even farther back than the 1985 interview. This is the relevant paragraph of the article in full:

"Director Honda was able to tap a fine cast of actors from the Toho lot. The distinguished and highly respected Takashi Shimura was selected to play the eminent paleontologist Dr. Yamane. Akihiko Hirata was originally selected to play the role of Ogata, but after several screen tests he was deemed unsuitable for the part, instead being given the role of Dr. Serizawa. The handsome young actor Akira Takarada was given the role of Ogata, his good looks more appropriate to a romantic lead."

I'll go ahead and keep my mouth shut about that last bit. I also want to note that filming on Godzilla began around the first week of August, which means the casting process was probably underway in July. So... happy 70th anniversary to all that business.

I know that in the end none of this really matters, but it compels me. I am [gestures to blog] slightly biased, I admit, but the fact that Hirata absolutely nailed that role is an objective truth, evidenced by Dr. Serizawa's lasting impression not only on the Godzilla franchise even up to its American MonsterVerse iterations but also on movies that have nothing to do with Godzilla - Pacific Rim and its "Serizawa scale", for instance. I dearly love Akira Takarada, but I think Hirata was the natural choice for that role: not only had he been acting for slightly longer than Takarada, but he had also shown, in films like Farewell Rabaul and Tetsuwan Namida Ari, that he could convey a character's internal strife very well.

And it's crazy to think that the role of Serizawa as we know it today almost just kind of... wasn't.

____

^{1 This in and of itself is interesting and somewhat convoluted. If we assume that Serizawa is 27 when Godzilla takes place in 1954, as canonically stated, and that he lost his eye at some point during the war, it would mean that, if he were a veteran, he would have been in the military - presumably in active combat - in his late teens at the oldest. However, aside from early script drafts in which he was planned to be much older (at one point he was 40 and widowed), I cannot recall any finalized material specifically referring to him as a war veteran, so I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that he could have been wounded as a civilian. My personal theory to explain this slightly iffy timeline is that Serizawa as a character retains some backstory from earlier drafts in which he was written as older, even though his age was shifted down in the final film. This would also negate the theories of him having worked with Nazis during the war as he could not possibly have gotten a university-level education until, again, the last year or so of the war or immediately after it.}

^{2 I cannot add a footnote to a footnote so I will amend the above by clarifying that the only source for placing Serizawa's age at 27 is a Godzilla encyclopedia published in 2004. I have no information on if the entries in this encyclopedia have been confirmed canon by anyone at Toho. I would tend to accept 27 as a reasonable assumption of Serizawa's age for the sole reason that he and Ogata are meant to have been friends since childhood who are around the same age and I highly, highly doubt Toho would have attempted to sell Akira Takarada as any older than 27 (which is already a stretch given that he was actually 19).}