Godzilla Day Special: Let's Go To Guam

For this year's Godzilla Day post, I wanted to take a break from writing about Dr. Serizawa and look at a different Godzilla movie that Hirata had a part in (of which there were, of course, quite a few). We're going to talk about the filming of Son of Godzilla, part of which was conducted on location in Guam.

Son of Godzilla is relatively unique within Hirata's filmography, since as far as I know Toho was not really in the habit of sending him overseas to film. In fact, the only other instance of this that I can recall offhand would be 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas, in which he was (probably? I discuss it further in the post) among a handful of cast and crew sent to film in Las Palmas. If he ever traveled abroad outside of his career as an actor, I've never heard him talk about it.

Guam has been an American territory since the late 1800s, with a brief interruption when it was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army for a godawful 31 months during the Pacific War. Over 20 years had passed between then and when filming began for Son of Godzilla, though, and whatever feelings may have still been harbored locally, tourism and the film industry are both incredibly lucrative, so Toho was able to partner with Pan American to bring their cast and crew to the island for filming.

Son of Godzilla was released on December 16th(!) of 1967, and I believe filming more generally was conducted from summer to autumn of 1967, which is a fairly long production period for Toho. I'm not sure how much of that time was spent on Guam, but one guesses purely from the fact that all the actors are tan as hell that it was shot during high summer. The film's JP Wikipedia page notes that Yoshio Tsuchiya heard from locals that there were Imperial Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle on the island, and jokingly called to them to come out, not knowing that Shoichi Yokoi was actually in hiding on Guam at the time for real.

I've always really loved the artwork from this Asahi Sonorama record. See more images on this Mandarake listing.

Perhaps the most extensive quote about shooting on Guam comes from Jun Fukuda, and was published in Stuart Galbrath's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!:

[We shot Son of Godzilla] in Guam. We really had fun. It was very hard for Japanese people to travel overseas back then, and also at the time there was only one hotel on Guam. The wife of the Chief Immigration Officer was Japanese, and her Japanese Wives organization really helped us be able to shoot there. The government backed them up, and so the Guam officials provided us cars, anything we needed during our stay for free. They were very helpful, as they were in America. In Japan they don’t understand shooting films very much. Whenever I go outside of Japan, I get jealous about how film-conscious the rest of the world is. I had the experience of shooting a film in Spain, in the Canary Islands. The police stopped traffic for half a day — that would never happen in Japan.

Kenji Sahara doesn't have much to say about it in a 2009 interview:

We could enjoy the fresh air and beautiful scenery in Guam. However, for an actor, there is no difference between working on location and in studios. We do the same thing either on location or in studios.

One person who evidently did not have fun was Tadao Takashima - because he didn't even go. Takashima had such a severe fear of flying that even when Toho offered to buy his wife a plane ticket so she could accompany him, he still refused. A locally-hired double was used for some scenes instead, and everything where Takashima himself had to appear was shot in Japan.

It is likely that there will never be any way to verify exactly who that double was, but there's something kind of interesting there - if he was hired locally, could he have been Chamorro? Would that make Son of Godzilla the first and only Japanese Godzilla movie to feature an Indigenous actor?

Anyhow, many sources (mostly Toho mooks) claim that setting the film on an island was a move intended to reduce the number of characters and therefore the budget. The Godzilla franchise was beginning to show diminishing returns at this point, so it makes sense that the studio would have been concerned, but remote filming does seem like kind of a genius move on their part - they get to save money on paying actors and reap the benefits of "exotic" location shooting. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to save the film, and ticket sales fell from the previous Godzilla entry; the Godzilla suit was also deemed to be pretty ugly (fair assessment) and not reused for the following film. When Son of Godzilla was exported to America it was shunted right to television without a theatrical release.

Thanks to the blessing(?) that is the internet, although there are significant holes in our knowledge of exactly where filming was conducted, we have a few anecdotes from people who live in Guam that may give some suggestions. These include:

• "[...]somewhere down at the southern end of the island. You won't find places like that towards the northern end." - /u/roastedpig_671
• Mount Lamlam - /u/Agreeable_Menu_6142

As an aside, three years after Son of Godzilla, the first film considered to be fully a product of Guam was made: Terry Bourke's Noon Sunday, which heavily fictionalizes some real events from WWII. By all accounts it's an awful film, but it is at least historically interesting. (This is information I learned from an article by Michael Lujan Bevacqua for Pacific Daily News. Great headline; pulls no punches.)

It's surprising to me how little information there is about the Guam shoot out there, considering it was the first Godzilla movie to have been shot overseas. The series itself was beginning to slip a bit at this point, which might have contributed to the location shoot not making as big of a splash as it could have, say, five or ten years earlier.

To conclude, I have to say I was really sincerely hoping that I would be able to turn up some other behind-the-scenes pictures from Son of Godzilla, but no, it does indeed appear that whatever is going on here is all we have.

Could be worse, I suppose.