At the time, Gojira was the most expensive Japanese film ever produced and it returned a solid profit for Tōhō. It was the eighth most popular film of the year (with around 9.6 million admissions), behind the studio’s prestige jidaigeki (period dramas) Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, Kurosawa Akira) and Miyamoto Musashi (Inagaki Hiroshi) (Ryfle 1998).1 Tōhō released a sequel just five months later, Godzilla Raids Again (Gojira No Gyakushu, lit. Godzilla's Counterattack). As we heard in the previous chapter, numerous commentators connected the original Gojira with Japanese trauma and the ‘imagination of disaster’. Igarashi Yoshikuni has argued that the original film had meant that ‘[m]emories of the war and images of the United States as an enemy country were made visible and reappropriated into postwar society’ (Igarashi 2000, 105–6), but that tropes ‘of in-betweenness … [simultaneously] allowed postwar Japan to leap over this historical disjuncture to identify with American material culture’ (105). Both Gojira and the popular professional wrestler Rikidōzan fitted with what Igarashi called ‘a nationalist project’, as both ‘embodied the hybrid identity of Japanese who would be capable of defeating both American and traditional Japanese competitors’ (127), and thereby bridging the pre-modern and contemporary in Japan. Aaron Gerow has also argued that there is an equivalence in the bodies of kaijū and the wrestler: that the monster body came to reflect a ‘sutured national body’ that ultimately reflected intertextual references to contemporary discourses of nationality and the knowing fictionality of such a body that ultimately resists realist interpretation (2006, 78–9). They both highlighted their hybridity and the ascendance of Japanese forms through their appropriation of American forms of culture. For Igarashi, however, the economic growth of the 1960s and the death of Rikidōzan in 1963 (in a fight with yakuza) would come to erase such memories, and to incorporate monsters into a more ‘banal’ portrayal of Japanese nationalism and child-friendly movies that sat alongside the economic miracles of modernisation post-occupation: