Godzilla & Godzilla Raids Again
Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are long-selling young-adult science-fiction novellas about Godzilla, the Japanese kaiju (monster), both written and published in 1955 by Shigeru Kayama, the same writer who wrote the film scenarios for the first two films in the Godzilla franchise by Toho Studios. Background In March 1954, a fishing vessel named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 accidentally found itself near Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. military was testing hydrogen bombs as part of a project known as Castle Bravo. All of the twenty-three crew members came down with acute radiation poisoning, and one, Aikichi Kuboyama, died within the year. Subsequent investigations showed that the tuna that their boat and others had brought to Japan showed signs of radioactivity, and this sparked panic about radiation throughout Japan. Wanting to capitalize on the wave of radiation-related anxiety sweeping Japan, in early 1954, the producer Tomoyuki Tanaka from Toho Studios approached the popular science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to come up with a screenplay about a radioactive kaiju monster. When Kayama wrote the scenario that would become the basis for the screenplay for Godzilla, he conceived of the film as a means to express his concern about nuclear