This is a rather unusual proposal, something that sits between a fan film and a historical restoration project. The Great Buddha Arrival was a 1934 film directed by Yoshiro Edamasa, in which the Amida Buddha statue found in Shurakuen Park in the city of Tōkai got up and took a stroll. Although images and newspaper advertisements describing the film exist, The Great Buddha Arrival itself was lost during World War 2, leaving it a phantasmal presence in the history of Japanese cinema. It holds a particular fascination for tokusatsu fans, not only because the base concept sounds a lot like a proto-kaiju film, but because Edamasa was the mentor of tokusatsu effects pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya, directly connecting the film to the legacy of giant monster cinema.
Wanting to celebrate that connection, and in some way bring Edamasa’s movie back from the void, independent studio 3Y Film crowdfunded a new short film based on The Great Buddha Arrival (made at roughly the same time as Howl From Beyond the Fog, the crowdfunded kaiju film I wrote about previously), completing production in 2018 and gradually adding additional footage over the next two years to build it up into the sixty-minute “Final” version that you can find on streaming services right now. Directed by Hiroto Yokokawa, the 2018 Great Buddha Arrival is a unique little experiment, at times a mockumentary, a genuine documentary, and a narrative film, existing in a reality where the original 1934 film exerts a mysterious influence on reality. Being made by a studio that specializes in distributing fan films, it also plays up the kaiju legacy angle by filling almost every speaking part with veteran tokusatsu film actors, including several of the remaining members of Ishiro Honda’s stable going back to the original Godzilla.
The film begins and ends with an interview with Godzilla star Akira Takarada, who was born the year that the original Great Buddha Arrival released, musing about that movie and its connections with the movies that Eiji Tsuburaya would make after learning the craft from Edamasa. This interview is apparently part of a documentary about the 1934 film being put together by Murata (Kazuma Yoneyama, one of the film’s co-writers) alongside his caustic producer (Ippei Osako) and spacey editor Kita (Yuma), who spends working hours attaching a jet engine to his bicycle(!) The fictional portions of the movie take place in a world where the 1934 film exists, but is rumoured to be based on real events—Murata learns about this from a energetic Youtuber (Iwata Momokun) who talks about it using some cute graphics, informing viewers that “one theory says the event was covered up by the government”, which sounds like the kind of thing a Youtuber would claim. The only “proof” of the event are three “photographs”, which are three extant publicity stills from the 1934 movie, and you get to see them quite a bit—Murata at first treats these as real photos, until eventually learning that they are…the three extant publicity stills from the 1934 movie. In any case, we regularly cut to footage of interviews with various subjects, including Edamasa’s grandson (played by original Ultraman suit actor Bin Furuya), news reports, TV debates, and other footage, sometimes part of Murata’s documentary and sometimes separate from it, making this something of a epistolary film.
Some of the footage we see are recreations of what the original Great Buddha Arrival may have looked like, shot in grainy black-and-white with a silent film style using an actor in a costume stepping over miniature buildings. It reminds me of how Peter Jackson paid for a recreation of the “Spider Pit” scene from the original 1933 King Kong and included it as an extra on the DVD release of his remake, keeping it as close in style to the original as possible. This, however, is a little different, as the producers have even less material to base their recreation on than Jackson did, with only the barest of descriptions and those three publicity stills to work with.
The next obvious twist would be for the Shurakuen Buddha statue to get up and start walking in the modern day, which it does (using the power of CGI), much to the shock of pretty much everyone, including Murata. But it’s evidently not too much of a shock—unlike most other kaiju movies, people do not regard this giant stomping around towards Tokyo with fear, but with quiet awe. To be fair, the Buddha statue does seem to be trying very hard not to step on anything valuable, so there’s maybe less to fear about it.
The existence of the walking Buddha statue “confirms” some of the fictionalized details we learned about Edamasa’s life, with his (fictional) grandson claiming that he was “obsessed with death” (Edamasa’s real grandson did give permission for this movie to be made, by the way.) In another silent film sequence, set to unnerving chanting, we see footage of random people taking their own lives, followed by a scene where Edamasa (Masanori Kikuzawa) sees his own true love jump off a bridge, and then attempts to join her, only to be saved at the last minute by the Buddha statue. Murata’s online research brings up a real life rash of suicides in Japan in 1934, around the time the original film was made, and reads claims of Buddha sightings that also occurred after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. The real film may have been at least partly inspired by the sense of mourning after these tragedies, and that thematic connection is played out literally with the “real” walking Buddha statue in the fictional reality of the 2018 film.
The thematics of the kaiju genre are put front and centre (Takarada explains in his interview how Godzilla was meant to act as a warning about the possible disasters in our new scientific age), but with a contrast provided by the Buddha statue and its more spiritual implications. There’s the omnipresent connection between kaiju and natural disasters, including not just the invocation of the Great Kantō Earthquake, but in a scene where a TV news reporter (Shiro Sano, who appeared in a few Millennium-era Godzilla films) at first thinks the shaking caused by the Buddha’s ambling is an earthquake, and seems quite indignant when he’s told that it isn’t. Some treat the walking Buddha as a disaster: we see footage of the US president and German chancellor offering support to Japan during the “crisis”; and in a dryly hilarious one-on-one debate, a physicist and a paranormal researcher argue about whether the statue is animated by “Dark Energy”, and also what “Dark Energy” even is (these same actors had done a very similar scene in Godzilla: Final Wars.) Others are not so certain that its presence is negative: an “expert in unexplained religious phenomenon” (Peggy Neal, who played Lisa in The X From Outer Space) provides a very sincere argument that the Buddha statue is a miraculous event meant to offer divine assurance during troubled times, with Climate Change and many other modern ills brought up. This positions this kaiju of something quite different, a bringer of hope in the face of disaster rather than a representation of it—and the movie itself could be arguing that, in their own way, kaiju films themselves possibly fill a similar role, allowing us a cathartic release as we confront devastation.
In examining the legacy of giant monsters, and the potential spiritual benefits of the genre, the movie even justifies all the cameos aside from just ingratiating lifelong tokusatsu superfans. As you can tell already, there are quite a few of them, which is why sites like Wikizilla thankfully exist to make sure you recognized Yukiko Kobayashi from Destroy All Monsters and Space Amoeba, or Matango star Akira Kubo playing the Prime Minister of Japan. In one clever nod, Yoshiro Uchida, who played the main kid character in Gamera: The Giant Monster, recalls the scene from that movie where he is saved from falling out of a lighthouse as if it really happened to him, but replaces Gamera with the Buddha statue (and also references the 1960 Valdivia Earthquake, another connection to real life natural disasters.) Of course, it’s not like I would complain that fans were just having fun and giving credit to the people who have been populating and enlivening tokusatsu for the previous sixty-plus years.
All that said, for all the miraculous and positive energy ascribed to the Buddha statue and its inspirational journey, there is also a layer of ambiguity provided by a somewhat jarring ending. The statue eventually parks itself beside the Tokyo Skytree, giving off a radiant glow that seemingly draws people towards it. Murata, having made it there on his co-worker’s jet-powered bike (which was first stolen by Yukijiro Hotaru, playing the same kind of comedic character he did in Zeiram and Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera movies), tries to join in, but is stopped by the spirit of Edamasa, who tells him not to “hasten his death.” Murata wakes up in the ruins of a demolished Tokyo, hit by a massive earthquake (as he learns from alerts on his phone), and then wanders back to what’s left of his office, where he watches the last bit of footage and thinks he has finished his documentary…only to notice that he’s been staring at a blank screen. This whole sequence may be a reference to a “journey to Hell” that supposedly took place in the 1934 movie, but that’s just speculation on my part. Although it uses much of the imagery it has built up towards its conclusion, the ending is still a bit puzzling, suggesting that while the Buddha may save people both literally and figuratively (Edamasa’s grandson says that his grandfather saw the statue again before his death, and thinks it may have taken his spirit to “The Land of Happiness”), it still represents something ultimately mysterious, potentially dangerous, and beyond our grasp.
The original Great Buddha Arrival is quite similar—despite the 2018 version recreating visuals from it and discussing what it means, there is no way of knowing how accurate those things are, because nothing remains of the 1934 original but a few publicity stills and a name. No one alive has ever seen it, and while we can recognize its place in the history of kaiju, its reality will likely remain eternally misty. It is a distant and inscrutable entity, something we can project our ideals upon but never truly understand.
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