Beams of unyielding atomic breath glowed just a little less brightly on Dec. 16. 2023, as news of the passing of Godzilla actor Kenpachiro Satsuma made the rounds. The beloved Japanese performer died after battling pneumonia. He was 76.
And when we say “Godzilla actor,” we really couldn’t be more literal. Satsuma – born Yasuaki Maeda – was part of an elite and selective group of performers chosen to portray the post-nuclear behemoth in the Toho Studios motion pictures. From underneath dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pounds of rubber monster skin, he brought Godzilla to life during the franchise’s Heisei era.
Kenpachiro Satsuma’s Godzilla journey
Satsuma, who started out in the kaiju business playing the toxic slime creature Hedorah in 1971, couldn’t have joined the industry at a more exciting time. His second at-bat as a gargantuan terror beast, 1972’s Godzilla vs Gigan, in which he played the latter, was longtime Godzilla suit performer Haruo Nakajima’s last go-round in the giant lizard suit. Nakajima’s retirement after nearly 20 years left big, scaly shoes to fill, and after a few false starts with fill-in actors, Satsuma was chosen as heir to the extra-extra-extra wide throne.
Satsuma’s debut as King of the Monsters, 1984’s The Return of Godzilla, marked a whole new era of Godzilla movies. Getting a jump on a generation of high-profile soft reboots that would follow in the years to come, it ignored 14 of the last 15 movies in the franchise, retconning every entry except for the 1954 original. The series, which started as a startling, trauma-driven interpretation of the existential horrors of the nuclear age, had lowered its own bar, becoming a theatrically released Saturday morning cartoon at the tail end of its “Showa era.” Wiping the slate clean, this fresh new “Heisei era” would be more mature. A return to its main character’s roots. It was a nice idea.
The many trials of Kenpachiro Satsuma’s Godzilla
In practice, Godzilla did what Godzilla tends to do, given enough time and liquid latex: He went back to body-slamming monsters-of-the-week, using Tokyo as an arena, and Satsuma stayed on as the man in the suit for a little over a decade. All told, he played Godzilla eight times, suffering for his art in ways that are hard to sum up succinctly, but which ranged from carbon dioxide-induced unconsciousness to – no kidding – being tricked into traveling to North Korea in order to star in a propaganda film directed by a kidnapped man.
No, really. It turns out that Kim Jong Il was a huge fan of The Return of Godzilla and wanted his own kaiju movie, so he and his people tricked a bunch of Toho employees into coming to North Korea and filming Pulgasari, the story of a giant monster that eats iron. It was directed by Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean filmmaker who’d been kidnapped in 1978, and it was shot on a budget of less money than you probably have in your wallet right now. Satsuma played the monster. He said he still liked the finished product better than the Matthew Broderick Godzilla.
Back in his main gig, Satsuma was in constant discomfort while portraying Godzilla. His costumes were made cheap and bulky, with his The Return of Godzilla suit weighing nearly 250 pounds. He would lose consciousness due to exhaustion and insufficient airflow. In the 2008 documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size, he recalled the horrors of working in the studio’s ocean set. “I know people peed in there,” he stated.
In 1995, Satsuma shot a sequence for Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in which Godzilla, undergoing a nuclear meltdown, began to exude plumes of steam. Said steam was created through the liberal application of pure carbon dioxide, pumped through a suit that the actor couldn’t breathe properly in at the best of times. Satsuma, inhaling the gas, lost consciousness.
Whether this was the final straw, or just another in a long list of monster-based indignities, we may never know. Whatever the case, he elected to end his tenure as Godzilla, making way for Tsutomu Kitagawa to don the suit between 1999’s Godzilla 2000: Millennium and Godzilla: Final Wars in 2004, with Mizuho Yoshida subbing in briefly for Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack in 2001.
Satsuma would spend much of his post-Godzilla time traveling to fan conventions, happily greeting fans and entertaining them with stories from his time in the suit. With everything he went through, he remained vocal in his belief that Godzilla should not be portrayed via CGI. After a decade of braving intermittent unconsciousness and toilet water swimming pools, he still wanted somebody to have to put on that 200-lbs suit.
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