Godzilla was a man in a suit stomping a miniature city, by design
Japan's special-effects tradition, tokusatsu, rests on a gloriously physical trick: put an actor in a monster costume, surround him with scaled-down buildings and film from just the right angle. Effects master Eiji Tsuburaya refined that approach, later called suitmation, for Godzilla in 1954, and it spawned decades of monsters and masked heroes.
The word means special filming. It entered Japanese media around 1958 as a plain way to describe effects work and caught on during the first monster boom of 1966 to 1968; before that, people spoke of special technology. The roots run deeper, to kabuki's staged fights and the puppetry of bunraku. Film pioneer Shōzō Makino is credited as the father of the techniques, and Yoshirō Edamasa used effects in his 1917 Journey to the West.
Tsuburaya studied the effects of King Kong from 1933 and had early breakthroughs with Princess Kaguya in 1935. With director Ishirō Honda he made Godzilla, a distinctly Japanese answer to a genre Hollywood had dominated, and the film helped his employer Toho become the world's most successful effects studio. Miniatures remain a hallmark: sets are arranged relative to the camera so that characters look far bigger than they are.
Heroes soon rivalled monsters. Shintoho's Super Giant serials began in 1957, and in 1958 Moonlight Mask launched televised superhero drama, with a young Sonny Chiba starring in follow-ups by creator Kōhan Kawauchi. Colour television brought Ultraman, a hero who grows to giant size to battle equally huge beasts, founding what fans call the Kyodai Hero subgenre. Toei then built long-running franchises: Kamen Rider from 1971, Super Sentai from 1975, and Metal Hero from 1982. Its Japanese Spider-Man series even shaped later Super Sentai shows.
The form keeps branching. Since 2003 TV Asahi has aired Super Sentai and Kamen Rider together each week as Super Hero Time, and from 2006 Keita Amemiya's Garo showed that tokusatsu could go dark and late-night. Some productions skip suits entirely, using stop-motion or puppets. Although hugely popular at home, only a small share of these works is widely known abroad, with Godzilla the great exception, starring in American films too.
Source: Tokusatsu
