Nowadays, if one goes looking for King Kong's first appearance in a Japanese film, one will land on 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla, the eighth film in the Toho Company's monster franchise, which saw the giant American gorilla face off against the iconic Japanese kaiju. While the outcome remains reliably true, Kong actually made not one, but two previous outings in Japanese cinema that are all but lost to history. These films not only predate the 1962 match-up, but they even predate the original Godzilla movie by over twenty years, technically rendering Kong the first Toho monster to appear in Japanese cinema— even though Toho was not yet involved in cinema, and the film was far from any monster movie to come out before or since. That first appearance was in the silent film, Wasei Kingu Kongu.
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King Kong and Godzilla Were Not Created Similarly
Although many compare King Kong and Godzilla as the two most formidable beasts in movie history, the characters made their on-screen debuts twenty-one years apart from each other, with different intentions and on opposite sides of the globe. Kong first appeared on March 2nd, 1933, when RKO Radio Pictures premiered the Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack-directed King Kong in New York City. It was an action-adventure-horror movie, and it broke barriers with its stop-motion special effects, which brought the animated fifty-foot-tall gorilla onto the live-action scene. Created without clear allegorical intent, the film has only retroactively been read as symbolic of the time's racial paranoia and economic anxieties, with the titular Kong as the primary metaphor.
Godzilla, on the other hand, made his debut on October 7th, 1954, with Toho's premiere of Ishirô Honda's Gojira in Nagoya, Japan. Later releases, notably the American release in 1956, relabeled the film and its eponymous monster Godzilla. Made after World War II, the film demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) a transparent allegory for nuclear destruction, as the city-crushing Godzilla is born from and powered by radioactivity. Unlike Kong, Godzilla was not animated, but played by actor Haruo Nakajima in a dinosauric costume; the use of miniatures, models, and camera tricks made him look enormous. The film properly kicked off the Toho monster franchise, which has made 38 movies featuring Godzilla alone and holds the record for the longest ongoing film franchise.
Kong Arrives In Japan and Gets an Immediate Spin-Off
Hence, Kong actually predates Godzilla as a character by over twenty years, and although RKO originally produced and released King Kong in the United States in 1933, the Japanese Shochiku Company distributed the film in their country that same year. Kong was enough of a hit in Japan that Shochiku decided to simultaneously make their own original spin-off for domestic audiences. The result was fittingly titled Wasei Kingu Kongu, which roughly translates to "King Kong Made-In-Japan". That being noted, the result was far from a one-to-one Japanese remake of the American movie.
For starters, Wasei Kingu Kongu was a silent film. Although sound film was well established in the United States by this time, silent movies were still rather prevalent in Japan. Shot on three reels with Japanese intertitles, the film was only thirty minutes long, making it the shortest Kong movie— and yet, this only scratched the surface of the film's eccentricities.
'Wasei Kingu Kongu' Was a Wild, Meta Comedy
Despite being inspired by the American Kong, Wasei Kingu Kongu was not an action, adventure, or horror movie. Instead, it was a comedy, directed by comedic Japanese filmmaker Torajirō Saitō. The plot allegedly focused on a poor man named Santa (Isamu Yamaguchi), who falls in love with a rich woman named Omitsu (Yasuko Koizumi). Omitsu's father, however, does not want his daughter to date a vagabond and arranges for her to marry a wealthier suitor. Desperate for money to compete for Omitsu's affection, Santa searches for employment in vain, only to capture lightning in a bottle when he sees RKO's King Kong on the silver screen.
Motivated by the American film, Santa decides to put on his own show, where he dresses up as the eponymous gorilla and destroys a model city on stage. The show is a hit and eventually draws Omitsu and her new partner to the performance. When Santa sees them in the audience, however, he goes into a fit of rage, racing from the stage and out into the city streets, where he commits a destructive rampage. It all comes to a climax when Santa knocks out Omitsu's suitor and puts him in the gorilla suit, thus disguising him as the culprit. With the money he earned from the Kong shows, Santa is now rich enough to win Omitsu back, and the story ends with them happily together.
Not only is the story humorous, but it could only really be considered a monster movie (let alone a Kong movie) by tangential association. The film lacks the essential iconography of a truly supernatural, towering beast delivering mayhem to a dwarfed humanity. Everything in Wasei Kingu Kongu is conspicuously plausible in the real world. On top of that, the inclusion of the original RKO film within the Japanese movie makes Wasei Kingu Kongu highly meta, perhaps even promotional on the part of Shochiku.
Things Get Even Stranger In 'Wasei Kingu Kongu's Period-Piece Sequel
The American King Kong and Wasei Kingu Kongu both did well enough in Japan for the latter to get a two-part sequel in the form of 1938's Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu (translated to The King Kong That Appeared In Edo). This two-parter could better be described as a spin-off, or even a prequel, rather than a proper sequel. As the title suggests, it takes place in Japan's Edo period. Like Wasei Kingu Kongu, it is a silent film that depicts Kong as a human-sized being, yet this is where the similarities end.
Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu is not a comedy, but a dramatic period-piece crime movie centered around a kidnapping. Zenshō Cinema produced and distributed the film rather than Shochiku, and Sōya Kumagai took the directorial reins from Saitō. The greatest difference from Wasei Kingu Kongu was probably the depiction of the monster. Actor Fuminori Ôhashi (credited as Ryūnosuke Kabayama) donned the gorilla suit this time, but unlike Yamaguchi's costumed incarnation of the beast, Ôhashi's Kong was meant to be a real gorilla in the story. Descriptions of the plot suggest that he was meant to be a trained animal, serving as some sort of muscle to the film's human antagonists— perhaps not even a central character.
Only Still Images Remain for Japan's First 'Kong' Movies
Still, many of these details are highly speculative and rife with the potential for debasement. Both Wasei Kingu Kongu and Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu are now considered lost media; no one has seen either in over seventy-five years. The exact history is uncertain, but most likely, all copies of these two Kong movies were destroyed during World War II, as firebombings across Japan turned much of the country (and its early celluloid) to ash. Although archivists have recovered lots of presumably lost media over the decades, it is unlikely that either Kingu Kongu movie will ever resurface.
What remains is just a handful of stills, posters, and personal accounts from the films. Images from Wasei Kingu Kongu show the ape climbing over a cityscape. If the synopsis is accurate, these images are likely from the performative parts of the plot, and the city is probably a diegetically miniature set. Nevertheless, with Kong holding an airplane atop a tower in one of the pictures, he looks quite similar to his American movie predecessor. Meanwhile, the poster from Edo shows Kong embodying several different statures. In images, he stands at eye-level with humans. In others, he appears enormous before people and buildings. He also looks less like the familiar gorilla, and more like a precursor to Universal's Wolfman. It is uncertain if these various sizes and distinctive design played any significant role in the film's plot.
Given the offbeat nature and sparse details surrounding Wasei Kingu Kongu and Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu, it seems dubious to truly consider them Japan's first foray into their persistent monster-verse. Nevertheless, they are both enticing slices of monster-movie trivia, causing fans and cinephiles alike to ponder what Japan's earliest filmmakers were doing with the intellectual property decades before it would return to much greater fanfare, fitting like a glove into the country's most iconic film franchise.
