aka Japan Sinks; The Submergence of Japan
(Nippon Chinbotsu)
Japan. 1973.
Crew
Director – Shiro Moritani, Screenplay – Shinobu Hashimoto, Based on the Novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Producers – Osamu Tanaka & Tomoyuki Tanaka, Photography – Daisaku Kimura & Hiroshi Murai, Music – Masaru Sato, Director of Special Effects – Teruyoshi Nakano, Production Design – Akihiko Iguchi & Toshiro Muraki. Production Company – Toho.
Cast
Keiju Kobayashi (Dr Tadokoro), Tetsuro Tamba (Prime Minister Yamamoto), Hiroshi Fujioka (Onodera Toshio), Ayumi Ishida (Abe Reiko), Shogo Shimada (Watari), Hideaki Nitani (Dr Nakata)
Plot
The volcanologist Dr Tadokoro takes a submersible down to explore the Japan Deep and is shocked to discover that the earth’s crust in the area has created a vast rift. As is explained to the Prime Minister, this is causing Japan to sink into the ocean. As this starts to happen, the country is racked by massive earthquakes and tidal waves. The Prime Minister appeals to the other nations of the world to help relocate the populace before Japan sinks beneath the waves altogether.
Submersion of Japan was a Japanese-made entry in the Disaster Movie genre of the 1970s. The genre had begun with Airport (1970) and was followed by The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Submersion of Japan came out fairly soon into the original disaster movie fad – in fact before classics of the field such as The Towering Inferno (1974) and Airport 1975 (1974) had appeared. I have a more detailed essay on the genre here at Disaster Movies.
Submersion of Japan was produced by Toho who were known primarily for their production of Japanese Monster Movies, having created the genre with Godzilla (1954) and then a host of other monsters, before pairing them up together in title fights. In the 1960s, they had expanded into SF films but by the 1970s the kaiju eiga (Japanese monster movie) was on the wane and Toho were clearly looking to expand into other areas.
Submersion of Japan was one of the biggest box-office successes in Japan in 1973, as well as the following year 1974. The appeal of the film is the same one as in all disaster movies – watching scenes of epic-sized Mass Destruction. The effects in the film have been hailed. If you are the sort of moron that dismisses an older film for its failure to have the quality of effects that a film made today has, then there is suitable material here to ridicule. On the other hand, the effects work quite well for the most part and are a notch above the better Godzilla films of this period.
Outside of the effects, the film is fairly stolid – as always was the case with Toho’s monster movies where the actors played a distinct second seat to the spectacle. The human element is often dull stuff about people sitting around the Prime Minister’s office and in committees discussing the situation. Unlike most disaster movies, Submersion of Japan actually has a plot. The film has clearly done its geological and volcanological research and created an extremely plausible scenario for Japan to be sinking into the ocean. The film also looks at the geo-political stage (albeit in some very naive ways) and the question of how to relocate a population of 100 million to other countries of the world.
There is some dispute about the film’s runtime. The full version of the film runs to two hours and 23 minutes (143 minutes in total). There was a copy released theatrically in Japan and later to dvd where this had been cut down to 96 minutes and the full version was not released until 2022. In the US, the rights to the film were brought up by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and it released as Tidal Wave (1975). This dumped many of the Japanese scenes, kept the effects footage and added additional material with Lorne Greene and others American actors.
The film later underwent a live-action remake with Sinking of Japan (2006) and then anime tv series Japan Sinks (2020), which was also screened theatrically in an edited form. The World Sinks Except Japan (2006) was a parody.
The film is based on a 1973 novel by Komatsu Sakyo (1911-2011) who was a popular SF writer. Sakyo also wrote the works that became the basis of the tv series Pip the Alien (1965) and the puppet series Aerial City 008 (1969-70), the film E.S.P.-Y (1974), Virus (1980) about a bio-outbreak that wipes out the world, the film Tokyo Blackout (1987) where Tokyo is locked off by a mystery cloud and the film Time of the Apes (1987). He also directed the space expedition film Sayonara Jupiter (1984) based on his own novel.
Trailer here (no English subs)