Thread by @NBCNews

When ‘Godzilla' premiered in Japan, many who watched left in tears. American audiences, however, had an opposite reaction.

The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it of its political message. nbcnews.to/31EU3OM (1/10) #NBCNewsThreads

“Most Americans think if you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of 'Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,' tells @NBCAsianAmerica. (2/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica The movie served as a strong political statement, intended to be a metaphor for the ills of atomic testing and use of nuclear weapons, and representative of the traumas and anxieties of Japanese people in an era of censorship after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (3/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica The scales on the fictional creature — a giant dinosaur depicted in the 1954 film as having been aggravated by a hydrogen bomb — were imagined to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the 2 atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan 9 years earlier to end World War II. (4/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica This month marks the 75th anniversary of the bombings, and while many Americans today think of the film as an almost campy relic of its time, that may be because the film was heavily edited before being shown to American audiences roughly 2 years later in 1956. (5/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica An estimated 20 minutes of the original Japanese film, predominantly the politically charged portions, were cut out of the American version. Among the axed scenes was one where commuters on a train make the link between the Hiroshima bombing and Godzilla’s attack. (6/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica While the original movie ended with a poignant final line that warns if nuclear testing does not cease, another Godzilla could appear, the US version ends on a more optimistic tone: that the world is safe again and can return to normal. nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame… (7/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica Furthermore, little of the original film's intended message has been restored in later adaptations.

“It still is the case that they cannot get their minds around the nuclear issue and American culpability in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Tsutsui says. (8/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica Hollywood ultimately sought to sanitize the movie and deflect blame from the U.S. bombings, something experts say has contributed to the distorted, skewed views that Americans had of Japan at the time. nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame… (9/10)

@NBCAsianAmerica “They worked hard to protect the American public from the truth that really the Americans who watched the film never had a chance to respond to it in a meaningful way." (10/10)