Borrowed words fill gaps in the lexicon.
Take, for example, the word kaiju. It’s a Japanese word that translates directly as “strange beast” but is more often used to describe bigger creatures. Like gorillas bent on kidnapping beautiful women or fantastic creatures the size of skyscrapers who get their kicks out of trashing Tokyo. In other words, kaiju is a catch-all word for the really, really big monsters. Which means it’s not quite a synonym for monster, or is it?
It’s rare that I know exactly where I heard a word for the first time, but with kaiju, I can not only tell you when I first heard it, I can tell you the episode number.
Almost from the beginning, podcasting arranged itself into genres less by following established formats and more by throwing everything at the wall and calling it all good. What I mean is, by 2005, podcasting had only just started to come into its own. People were experimenting with genre and format and creating new and interesting content before content was even a thing. By mid-2005, several of these experiments had found themselves a place in my ever-increase rotation.
Escape Pod billed itself as a science-fiction podcast magazine and ran science-fiction short stories on a weekly basis1. It set itself apart in both production quality and editorial and managerial excellence. Every week, Serah Eley, the host, would introduce the story via a quick essay and then wrap the show up after the story had finished. During the closing credits of the first episode, Eley drew special attention to the theme music, saying, “the music for the podcast is by DaiKaiju2, they’re the best Southern, psycho, surf, Japanese monster rock band around.”
If you’ve been reading Learned for any length of time you’ll know that that one sentence checked a whole lot of boxes for me and down the rabbit hole I went.
What I remember most, though, is wondering how it was that I hadn’t heard the word kaiju before. After all, I’ve been a fan of Godzilla3 since those Saturday afternoons in the early 80s when the local t.v. stations aired sliced-up and re-edited versions of all the Toho man-in-a-rubber-suit classics.
Not to mention that I’d been living in Japan for five years at that point. And, like, what the hell, man? How come no one had told me about this awesome word? The answer, it turns out, is because no one thought it was noteworthy. In 2005, kaiju was just another word for monster and even then, not one that got used much in daily life.
Monster, like all good, old, English words, has more uses than anyone really wants to count. We have the classic supernatural monsters, like vampires and werewolves. We’ve got the nightmarish human-yet-not monsters like Freddy and Jason. And we’ve got the actual monsters. The serial killers and cult leaders and everyday wastes of oxygen that occupy our news cycles and feed all our anxieties.
But kaiju doesn’t really describe any of those things. Technically, it can describe the supernatural things but, as I said above, it’s usually reserved for the skyscraper-sized forces of nature like Godzilla and his ilk. Movies featuring these giant critters are called kaiju eiga in Japan, which differentiates them from those other monster movies - the ones with girls crawling out of t.v.s and that sort of thing.
Looking through different corpora of English, we find that kaiju has existed in print, in English, for a long, long time, but almost always as a way of describing something from Japan. In other words, you would see kaiju in magazine articles accompanied by a quick explanation. But that all started to change in 2013 with the release of Gulliermo del Toro's homage to Japanese monster movies, Pacific Rim.
In the film, giant monsters from another dimension have gained the ability to open rifts between their world and ours and they come here for some to chew bubble gum and kick ass. Naturally, our only response is to build giant robot suits to fight them with. It is a hell of a fun movie and one I highly recommend to everyone. But, to the point, in the movie, the monsters are specifically referred to as kaiju.
Why should that have prompted a move into more mainstream English? A year later, Legendary Pictures debuted the first U.S. made Godzilla film in over a decade. Fans were cautiously optimistic. The trailers looked good, but a lot of us still bore the scars from 1998's Godzilla movie. So, we waited, and hoped, and were finally rewarded with a tense, well-constructed monster movie. A few years later, in 2017, Legendary followed Godzilla with a different monster in the title role.
Back in 1933, when King Kong first scaled the Empire State Building with Fay Wray clutched in his hand, the movie was billed as a horror film and a monster film, and Kong stood tall as the biggest monster of all4. But Kong: Skull Island changed all that. Kong is no longer a monster; he is a Titan. The films featuring Kong are giant monster movies where our noble ape-creature spends his time battling other giant monsters, many of whom are distinctly kaiju-esque in design. The relaunch worked and thus, a cinematic universe was born.
At the same time, perhaps even inspired by Legendary, Universal Pictures was working to create its own "Dark Universe" featuring all-star reboots of its classic monsters. Tom Cruise's The Mummy made it to screen in 2017 but flopped so badly that all other movies in the series have, thus far, failed to materialize. Which is disappointing, because the Universal Monsters line-up includes some of the best anti-heroes and pop-culture legends to ever grace the screen. Dark, noir-ish versions of the Mummy, Frankenstein, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, and even the Invisible Man could have been something truly spectacular.
But, as we know, the bottom line rules Hollywood and one franchise made money while the other did not and so, here we are, close to a decade later and we have but one monstrous cinematic universe on our screens.
For advertisers, that could be a problem. And one that kaiju seems to solve quite well. By applying kaiju as a subset of monster, we can begin to more neatly divide our monstrous protagonists. On the one hand, we have the human-scaled monsters. On the other, the giant kaiju. But let's go a step further.
Now that we've got kaiju as both a type of monster and a genre label, we're beginning to run into branding issues. After all, the Cloverfield monster is, retroactively, a kaiju. The incredibly fun Godzilla animated series on Netflix is a kaiju series. And Pacific Rim and its spin off animated series, of course. And let's not forget that Netflix, having already struck gold once with its animated Godzilla series has now set their sites on the Pepsi to Godzilla's Coke, Gamera, a flying turtle kaiju.
So, to wrap up, is kaiju a synonym for monster? Of course. Like all good synonyms, kaiju contains a nuance that separates it from monster which makes it a good addition to the lexicon. It not only describes a specific type of monster, it can be replaced with the word monster in specific circumstances and vice versa. English is full of borrowed words that do exactly this, they fill a gap in the lexicon, especially when that gap is so monstrously big.
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The Kaiju Preservation Society
by John Scalzi
I’m a pretty unabashed fan of Scalzi’s, going all the way back to Old Man’s War. So, when he announced that he had ditched his planned dark, serious novel in favor of a “pop song” of a novel that would send characters to an alternate Earth where kaiju lived and died, well, I was all in. And I was not disappointed. Light, funny, and chock full of kaiju-y goodness, this is an easy pick for any sci-fi or kaiju fan who may be out there.
Escape Pod is still going strong and absolutely worth a listen if you’re inclined towards short stories and excellent narration.
They really are a lot of fun. For best listening, pair them with Red Elvises, Cybertronic Spree, and the OGs, GWAR.
If you’ve only ever seen the American dub and re-edit of the original 1953 version of Godzilla, do yourself a favor and get the Criterion edition. It’s still a guy in a rubber suit, but it’s not nearly as dumb as you think.
Until the end, anyway. Stupid humans.