The Mysterians (Japanese title: 地球防衛軍, Earth Defense Force) (1957) Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, and Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay by Takeshi Kimura and Shigeru Kayama based a story by Jojiro Okami.
It’s not possible to truly separate any film from the political context in which it is made. That’s a fairly bland observation about cinema. But context really does stand out in some cases more than others, and movies from the 1950s about aliens visiting Earth are one very obvious example. Last week’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and this week’s The Mysterians are companions in many ways, exploring the same themes and ideas that dominated so much of 1950s science fiction, but they are doing it from different perspectives, in different ways, with very different results.
And with very different robots that shoot death rays, but we’ll get to that.
The Mysterians came out in the middle of an absolute deluge of 1950s movies from Toho Company, the film production company behind so many beloved Japanese movies. Toho has some interesting history behind it, so pardon me for a brief detour. Toho started as a kabuki theater company in the 1930s and began producing films shortly thereafter. After Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, one of the things the American-led Occupation government did was encourage the organization of labor unions, and one of the industries that seized this opportunity was Japan’s film industry. The workers at Toho organized into a union in late 1945, and between 1946 and 1948 they participated in high-profile labor strikes.
But the anti-communist hysteria that was running rampant in the U.S. was also in full force in occupied Japan, and the Occupation government began thinking they had encouraged things to get a bit too liberal. The third Toho strike began when the company president fired over a thousand workers with the stated goals of ridding the company of both communists and debt. The union responded by occupying the studio from April until August 1948. They had the public support of many in the Japanese film industry, including director Akira Kurosawa and rising star Toshiro Mifune, but the strike was finally broken by a joint force of Japanese police and American military, who showed up with armored vehicles and tanks. As a result, Toho ended the 1940s nearly bankrupt and barely producing any movies at all. The company entered the 1950s badly in need of a smash hit to keep itself afloat.
In 1954 it made two: Seven Samurai, which contemporary critics expected to succeed based on Akira Kurosawa’s rising domestic and international fame, and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, which contemporary critics expected to flop because it was about a giant monster stomping around.
Godzilla did not flop. Instead it launched one of the most successful media franchises in history, still going strong seventy years later, and sparked an entire genre of atomic age monster movies. It also brought fame and recognition to the partnership of Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya pioneered what came to be known as the tokusatsu genre and style of films, which involve the use of elaborate practical effects. The two men would go on to make many kaiju films together, including Rodan (1956), Mothra (1961), and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). But they weren’t only making giant monsters. Somewhere in there they found time for a few sci fi movies, including The Mysterians.
Just as Godzilla was inspired by the success of American monster films King Kong (1933, but re-released in 1952) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the idea behind The Mysterians came in part from wanting a successful science fiction movie in the vein of War of the Worlds (1953) or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Japanese studios were making Japanese movies for Japanese audiences, but they were also very much aware of the fame and moneymaking potential of getting their films in front of international, and particularly American, audiences.
Big-budget movies about space and aliens were all the rage at the time, so that’s what Honda, Tsuburaya, and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka (also the producer of Godzilla) set out to make. Tanaka got science fiction writer Jojiro Okami to come up with a treatment for an alien film; Godzilla screenwriter Shigeru Kayama revised the story—adding, among other things, the mecha-kaiju that comes along to fuck things up—which was at last finalized by Rodan screenwriter Takeshi Kimura. They also brought in familiar cast members from Godzilla, Rodan, and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). All of that, plus a massive budget and full-color filming, was designed to make The Mysterians a big hit.
The movie was successful, both in Japan and later when it was dubbed and released in the U.S. Even at the time, however, many critics recognized that it was mostly the visual spectacle of The Mysterians that made such an impact, rather than its story or themes or overall quality. And that’s as true now as it was then. The film has a pretty thin plot with pretty shaky writing, and the talented cast can only do so much with the bland characters.
But the spectacle! We can’t deny the spectacle of it all. The incredible miniatures, the vibrant colors, the sweeping scenes of disaster—it’s all so much fun to look at.
The Mysterians opens with two young couples enjoying a festival in a rural village. One of the young men, Ryoichi Shiraishi (Akihiko Hirata), has broken off his engagement to one of the young women, and when his friend Joji Atsumi (Kenji Sahara) asks him about it, he gives no reason except that he must stay in the village to complete his work. This makes little sense to Atsumi, as they are astrophysicists and the village is not exactly a hotbed of scientific research. It’s about to become one, however, because a unnatural forest fire disrupts the festival, and soon thereafter the village is swallowed whole when the land is split by a massive chasm. Atsumi is back in the city when he receives this news, but Shiraishi was still in the village and is presumed dead.
Atsumi is part of the team sent to investigate the disaster. The village and temple are gone, the river’s fish poisoned by radiation, and the ground is hot enough and radioactive enough to melt the tires of their trucks. But the real problems start when an enormous mole-like robot burrows out of the mountainside and comes after them. This is Moguera, a mecha-kaiju who would decades later return to the movies in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994).
Apologies to all giant mole robots, but it must be said: Moguera is very, very silly looking. He’s wreaking havoc, but I still want to boop his pointy little mole nose.
I love the first part of this movie, with the mysterious destruction of the village, the strangeness left in its wake, and Moguera’s implacable advance—shooting death rays out of his eyes all the while—on the city while people race to evacuate. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and there is a real sense of triumph when the humans manage to stop Moguera by blowing up a bridge.
This sequence was made using Tsuburaya’s signature method: building elaborately detailed miniature landscapes and filming an actor in a monster suit at a high frame-rate as he stomps around. This is very different from the way American movies were creating giant monsters at the time; King Kong and the films of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen mostly used stop motion animation combined with live footage and projected backgrounds to put giant monsters into scenes. Tsuburaya had initially wanted to use stop motion animation with Godzilla, but constraints of time and money meant he had to use an actor in a monster suit instead, and that’s what he kept using throughout his career. (The men inside the Moguera suit are the same actors who were inside the Godzilla suit: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka.)
It may not have been the method Tsuburaya wanted when he started making giant monsters, but “suitmation” is undeniably effective when it comes to capturing the scale of destruction needed to make these scenes work. The quality of the miniatures is so important too, and I absolutely love how well they trick me into seeing villages and landscapes. It’s not that we can’t spot the difference when we look closely; what matters is that the overall scale and spectacle of the scene remains exciting to watch even when we can.
After Moguera is defeated, Atsumi and his mentor Adachi (Takashi Shimura) determine that the robot came from outer space. Helpfully, before he was swallowed up with the destroyed village, Shiraishi sent them a research report regarding a planet called Mysteroid that once existed in the solar system. (Note: The English subtitles sometimes refer to Mysteroid as a “star,” but that seems to be a linguistic quirk lost in translation rather than an egregious scientific error. The word they use is星, pronounced hoshi, which can refer to a star, planet, or other celestial body in either a literal or a figurative sense.)
Almost as soon as Atsumi and Akachi make the connection, the Mysterians themselves make an appearance, as their massive, hidden dome emerges from the ground near Mount Fuji. They claim to come in peace and ask to negotiate with Adachi, Atsumi, and a few other scientists. The humans are very skeptical, on account of the destroyed village and the giant mole-robot that just blasted a city with its laser eyes, but they agree to talk. They head into the Mysterians’ dome, which is wonderfully designed with bright colors and weird tubes and spinny things, and meet with the aliens directly.
The skepticism turns out to be justified, because the Mysterians have an offer they really don’t think the Earthlings should refuse. The Mysterian leader (Yoshio Tsuchiya, unrecognizably clad in an orange cape and helmet) explains that they destroyed their own planet in a nuclear war several generations ago, and they have been living on Mars ever since. The long-term effects of that war mean they all have high levels of strontium-90 in their bodies. All they ask of Earth is a plot of land three kilometers square to live on and access to human women to breed with. It would be very unfortunate for the humans to refuse, says the leader, because that would force the self-proclaimed pacifist Mysterians to respond with great force.
Let’s be clear about something. Not every science fiction story is symbolic or allegorical. Not every alien race is an analogue to people or governments in the real world. I think it is a disservice to both storytellers and audiences to view every work of science fiction through the lens of being required to dissect and determine its real-world meaning.
However, I also think that when Japanese filmmakers in 1957 make a movie about a shocking and indiscriminate act of destruction that causes radiation poisoning and has the purveyors of that destruction show up and say they really only want peace and all they ask is a bit of land to establish themselves on so they can make sure everybody does as they say… It’s maybe not a stretch to contemplate multiple levels of meaning.
The latter half of the movie, unfortunately, is not nearly as exciting as the beginning. There are a lot of meetings. Shiraishi is revealed to be alive and working with the Mysterians in their base. Women get kidnapped. The Mysterians take more land. Tokyo is in danger. There is a lot of military action. Through all of this, the special effects are still great, even if the plotting and pacing leave much to be desired. The dome itself is weirdly effective as a threat considering that it is literally just a dome that lights up and spins. It shouldn’t feel dangerous at all—but somehow it does. I am also impressed by the scene where water spouts from a lake and floods a village; the water rushing over the miniatures is very effective. But: there are so many meetings.
In a lot of ways, the meetings are the point, because this is a movie that ultimately advocates for international cooperation in response to an existential threat. There is a nice moment of Cold War commentary where a character remarks that whether they like it or not, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exist on the same planet and ought to act like it. The Mysterians was made just after Japan joined the United Nations in 1956, so the theme of international cooperation and mutual defense was very much on people’s minds. The movie does not create any tension around the notion of cooperation; the other nations show up as soon as they are needed to form the Earth Defense Force of the original Japanese title.
When the Mysterians prove difficult to defeat and somebody brings up the possibility of using a hydrogen bomb, the Japanese scientists react with horror. So, in the end, Earth’s victory comes from technological advancement that turns the Mysterians’ own weapons against them. The Mysterians flee Earth but are not destroyed. The movie ends with the message that they are still out there in the solar system, with potential to return in the future.
Even with its flaws, I find this movie to be an interesting addition to sci fi of the post-WWII atomic era. The ultimate message is very much the same as in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still: the development of nuclear weapons has set humanity on a dangerous path, and if we continue unchecked we will destroy ourselves. But where The Day the Earth Stood Still has an alien visitor show up to sincerely warn us about our own future actions, the alien visitors in The Mysterians show up unrepentant about their own past actions and fully prepared to visit that same destruction onto Earth.
And, yes, in the most obvious interpretation, that is an unsurprising difference between a film made in the country that dropped the atomic bombs and a film made in the country the bombs were dropped on. But there is also optimism in The Mysterians, not just in the success of cooperative action, but also in the ability of science to solve problems, even those problems that science has created in the first place. There are moments of individual heroism and sacrifice—Atsumi and Shiraishi in the dome at the end—but for the most part the focus is on the actions of the group, not the individual, from the large-scale civilian evacuations to the military operations.
It is a war movie, never mind the fact that the war is started by a giant mole-shaped robot that shoots lasers from its eyes and perpetuated by aliens dressed in fabulous citrus-bright capes, and more specifically it is the type of war movie where everybody working together saves the day. The Mysterians is, in a way, providing one answer to the question posed by the uneasy ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Is it a particularly plausible or convincing answer? Well, not especially, but I still find it notable, because it is yet another example of science fiction as a genre looked around after the end of WWII and tried to make sense of how the world had changed and would continue to change.
What are your thoughts about The Mysterians and where it sits in the subgenre of atomic era sci fi? Do you want to see more of Eiji Tsuburaya’s practical effects? You’ll get your chance; we are definitely going to watch Godzilla. I’m thinking there is a giant monster month in the future, so feel free to drop suggestions below.
Next week: We’re stepping away from the aftermath of WWII and jumping headfirst into the 1980s. We head back to the United States for some hijinks in Harlem with The Brother From Another Planet. Watch it on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.
