It was 1954, nine years after the first atomic bombs were detonated — first on the testing grounds of New Mexico, then on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — that the fears of nuclear annihilation felt by the Japanese and the world first manifested themselves in the form of a giant lizard monster.
It’s a weird confluence of time, or a sign that history and irony are close companions, that Haruo Nakajima, the 88-year-old former stuntman and actor who wore the monster suit in the original “Godzilla” and 11 sequels, would die just as his country was marking the 72nd anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.