A 2017 post on the Maser Patrol blog poses the question, ‘怪獣 or 外獣? (Kaiju or Gaiju?)’ (Maser Patrol 2017). Its author, Kevin Derendorf, whose reviews are collected in the book Kaijū for Hipsters (2018), notes that kaijū has ‘permeated the English lexicon’ as a loanword but that the term kaibutsu (怪物, ‘strange creature’) was often used for translations from English of monster films that originated outside Japan. Yet it is kaijū that has spread globally as the most widely used term to describe giant monsters. Derendorf suggests an alternative: ‘utilizing the kanji that already exists for foreignness (外), and shortening those “gaikoku kaiju” down to just “gai-jū”, like the slang term “gaijin” for foreign people’. Derendorf's comments here highlight a common thread in kaijū cinema’s reception: its association with Japan. The kaijū/gaijū distinction essentialises the Japaneseness of the kaijū eiga and distinguishes its specifically Japanese historical and social concerns, from the end of the Second World War onwards. Yet it obscures the transnational origins of the giant monster movie. If gaijū is useful as a classifying term for the genealogy of monsters, it is in calling attention to the kaijū eiga's continuing relationship with conceptions of national cinema. This is emphasised by the introduction to The Japanese Cinema Book, released alongside the British Film Institute's series of films from Japan in 2020 (to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, prior to their postponement). Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips introduce their collection by summarising the main draws of the cinema of Japan: ‘from the work of renowned directors such as Ozu Yasujirō, Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao and Kore-eda Hirokazu to Samurai and horror films, the Godzilla series and anime’ (Fujiki and Phillips 2020, 1).

This strong connection with Japanese national cinema calls into question the relationships between nation and genres or forms of cinema that relate to transnational form. National/international binaries are complicated by, but may also overshadow, the centrality of hybridity in both national and transnational cinemas.