“How many is a gazillion?”
A Japanese friend asked me this after returning from a trip to California. An American had advised him not to go to a particular restaurant. He said it would be too crowded and added that “There will be a gazillion people there.”
My friend knew the words “million” and “billion” and thought that “gazillion” must be an even larger number. He wasn’t sure, though, of the precise number of zeroes.
Actually, I think gazillion is slang. I know I used it growing up in California. It refers to an imaginary number. It’s unimaginably large—bigger than a million, bigger than a billion . . . a number as large as, well, Godzilla. Yes, the root of the word gazillion is “Godzilla”.
My friend’s question brought back memories. As a child, my images of Japan came from Godzilla movies. I saw them on television dubbed into English. I watched Godzilla smashing his way through Tokyo, turning over trains and stepping on cars.
Godzilla was one of Japan’s first pop-culture exports. And as we can see from the word gazillion, he made an impact on the English language as well.
Yet until my friend asked me, I hadn’t made the cultural connection.
Upon reflection, I realized that watching Godzilla movies was one of my first intercultural experiences. Not only did they come from Japan, they were different from other movies I knew. As a child they sometimes didn’t make sense to me.
I was used to movies full of “good guys” and “bad guys”. The cowboy in the black hat was the bad guy and the sheriff was often the good guy. This was true for monsters as well. Frankenstein is a monster that seems at first bad, but is in fact a victim of the mad scientist that created him.
Yet I could never tell whether Godzilla was a “good guy” or “bad guy”. There were tanks and guns firing at him as he smashed up whole neighborhoods. Yet he also fought off other monsters and was seen as a hero. And there were children excited to see him—they watched him fight from some distant hilltop. Who were they?
I understand Godzilla movies better now. And I know that Japan has a long and unique cinematic tradition. Japanese cinema has its own aesthetic tradition—I particularly love Ozu Yasujiro—that is different from that found in Hollywood or European film. It may be that I sensed these differences watching Godzilla movies, even as a child.
My friend’s question also reminded of something I had asked when I was first learning Japanese. I wondered what “counting word” one would use for Godzilla. If there were two Godzillas, would it be futari, or perhaps nittou?
I love the never-ending exchange between language and culture. My Japanese friend went to California and brought back a piece of Godzilla without even realizing it. Watching those movies as a child I never could have guessed that I would learn Japanese. But this has raised a new culture and language question for me.
How do you say “a gazillion Godzillas” in Japanese?
