It’s Halloween season, which means it’s time for a Maser Patrol tradition: a review of some Japanese interpretations of a classic spooky creature. We’ve had brief discussions on a few of the Universal Monsters pantheon early on (Dracula, Frankenstein, the werewolf), but I figure today’s discussion should be a Deep One.
Huh, why did those last words get capitalized, must be something Fishy going on. Anyway, get ready for a special Amazon delivery, because today, we’re talking about the Creature from the Black Lagoon!
Uh, by which I mean the Gill-man, not Revy.
Hopefully, Creature is a familiar title, even to consummate weeaboos who eschew any occidental media, since luminaries like Hideo Kojima and Mamoru Oshii endorse it within the text of their own works.
Or, even if you’re exclusively a Godzilla-only person, you’d still recognize the Gill-man’s theme from when the US cut of King Kong vs Godzilla used Hans Salter’s Creature from the Black Lagoon music as a substitute for Akira Ifukube’s. Or you’d know his piscine face from squaring off against Godzilla on the cover of Art Adams’ Creature Features, which features stories for both respective monsters.
In many ways, Godzilla and Creature are sort of sibling franchises. Both debuted in 1954, both feature iconic man-in-suit monsters, both take some inspiration from King Kong (the Gill-man being a tragic jungle creature who becomes obsessed with a human woman, only to later be captured and brought to civilization). Both franchises had sequels on Mystery Science Theater, both have iconic movie posters from Reynold Brown, both have long merchandise lines that began with Aurora model kits and continue to this day from the likes of NECA and Super7. Additionally, both, unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, are original, cinematic creations, technically the IP of a single studio, but inspiring a whole microgenre of similar creative descendants (e.g., Zaat, Humanoids from the Deep, The Shape of Water).
The term for this kind of fish-man in Japanese is conveniently literal: gyojin (魚人), meaning “fish-person” (I might translate it as “fish-man” later for expediency, but the word itself is non-gendered), or sometimes hangyojin (半魚人, “half-fish man”), which is the opposite character order of their word for mermaid, ningyo (人魚), meaning “person-fish”. This kind of makes sense, since traditional Japanese mermaids have a human head on the body of a fish (similar to the human-faced dog of urban legend), and the more modern westernized ones have a whole human torso, but the fish-man is built in reverse: a very fish-like head on a more anthropoid body. Mermaids have tails, fish-men have legs. It’s not unusual for both taxonomies to exist separately in the same universe, like One Piece, where you have both gyojin and ningyo sharing the same world.
Mermaids have their own rich mythology unique to Japan, as do the kappa (turtle-like river imps) and the amabie (a kind of bird-headed, three-legged, scaly bear that protects against disease), but there wasn’t anything in the popular lexicon quite like the Gill-man when The Creature from the Black Lagoon released there in the summer of 1954 as “The Half-Fish Man of the Great Amazon” (大アマゾンの半魚人), and thus the term “hangyojin” was born.
But wait! Surely they’d already have the concept of fish-men from HP Lovecraft’s 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, right? Well, it turns out, that horror classic about a seaside community overrun by a cult of ichthyosapien humanoids called “Deep Ones” is indeed pretty popular in Japan, but it wasn’t published there until December 1958, when it was included in a collection of Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce stories translated by Tadaaki Onishi. A mere three months later, in 1959, came the first adaptation and also the first Japanese illustrations for the story, printed in the men’s magazine Ugoku Kao. Like many translations/adaptations of Lovecraft, this one was simplified a fair bit, and published under the title “The Half-Fish Men of Innsmouth” (インスマウスの半魚人), which definitely feels like a riff on Creature’s Japanese title. The illustrations by Shogo Matsumiya are very western-inspired, though these fish-men would not be out of place dancing in a nightclub in Godzilla vs Hedorah.
The next Japanese edition of Shadow Over Innsmouth hit in 1964, published as “The Town where Monsters Live” (怪物のすむ町) for Bokura magazine, with illustrations by none other than Shouji Otomo, the pioneer of kaiju anatomy art. He drew Innsmouth’s fish-people with a resemblance to the Universal Gill-man that one could only get away with in the pre-litigious 1960s. Otomo illustrated the story a second time, in 1968, for Mainichi Junior High Newspaper, but I haven’t been able to find any images from that one.
The mid-to-late 1960s proved to be a peak era for fish-men in Japan, bolstered by the kaiju boom that Eiji Tsuburaya enabled, the subsequent yokai boom ushered in by Shigeru Mizuki’s Gegege no Kitaro, and the burgeoning field of horror comics that were making folks like Kazuo Umezz a household name; it just so happened that the Gill-man and his ilk could straddle their flippers across all of these genres.
Speaking of Umezz, he was among the early adopters, with his story “Half-fish Man” (半魚人), which was published in Shonen Magazine in 1965. Like a few of Umezz’s stories, this one dips into body horror, dealing with a boy whose older brother is being turned into a fish-man by a mad scientist…. There may have been some Island of Doctor Moreau in there as well.
Speaking of mad scientists turning people into fish-men, the 1966 English-language Toei coproduction Terror Beneath the Sea is about just that. In the movie, a pair of reporters (a pre-Street Fighter Sonny Chiba and a pre-X From Outer Space Peggy Neal) investigate the machinations of a very James Bondian maniac with plans to conquer the world with his water cyborgs, who happen to look very Gill-man-esque. I suppose their silver tone could also have been inspired by the diving suits from the similarly-themed malicious subaquatic Mu Empire in 1963’s Atragon, but I won’t count the people of Mu as fish-men because again, they had to put on suits to look like that.
Going back to the kaiju boom that was one of the ingredients for the success of fish-men in 1960s Japan, this aforementioned boom was in no small part due to the popularity of the TV series Ultra Q and its follow-up Ultraman, which both debuted in 1966. There’s little direct continuity between the two shows, but one element that does carry over is the primordial amphibian race Ragon. These creatures are human-sized in Ultra Q but grow giant to battle Ultraman, which is amusing since playing Ragon in the first show was actually one of Ultraman suit-actor Bin Furuya’s first suit-acting gigs. Ragon has periodically shown up in subsequent Ultra shows (including Ultraman Decker, where it ties them to a town called Innsmouth), and has a seat in the pantheon of Japanese pop culture. Heck, even the first Slayers novel makes a point of differentiating their fish-person Noonsa (who’s ridiculously just a fish with human arms and legs) from a Ragon or Gill-man, which raises a few questions about the setting of that world.
Apparently Ultra Q creator Eiji Tsuburaya was quite the fan of the Creature, since he used it as inspiration for a second iconic kaiju in 1966 as well: Gaira, the green gargantua from War of the Gargantuas, which released the same month as Terror From Beneath the Sea, also a US co-production with token occidental actors, in this case Russ Tamblyn. While it doesn’t all translate into the final film, Tohl Narita’s original concept art for Gaira has quite a bit of Gill-man in it, amusing when you consider that originally this creature was supposed to be the spawn of Frankenstein. That’s a 2-for-1 on Universal Monsters!
As if two giant fish-men in 1966 weren’t enough, a third one also showed up on the cover of Shonen King, in art by noted kaiju artist Takashi Minamimura. I guess it’s possible that this is just a normal-sized fish-man with a miniature monkey, but the catchphrase “A boys’ magazine that even aliens and kaiju love to read” should totally make a comeback.
Shonen King would continue the giant Gill-man trend the following year in their 32nd issue of 1967, with an interior fold-out poster by Tatsuji Kajita, another renowned Ultraman artist. This poster, titled “Mammoth Half-fish-man” (マンモス半魚人) shows a gill-man towering over a boat and menacing a plane in proper Godzilla-inspired glory. I’ve seen multiple sources in the Anglosphere try to pass this off as the original Japanese theatrical release poster for Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is ignorant on a few levels, including the fact that, again, that movie’s Japanese debut predates the original Godzilla’s so it wouldn’t be possible to ape it yet.
While we’re talking about children’s magazines, remember how we’ve mentioned two cases of Shoji Otomo illustrating adaptations of Shadow Over Innsmouth? Well, he kind of did yet another one in 1967, this time titled “Frog Humans of Ghost Town” (幽霊町のカエル人間), which was serialized in Shonen Gaho. The titular town is even still called Innsmouth in the story; they’re just frogs instead of fish, evoking the “blasphemous fish-frogs” that Lovecraft described in the prose. I have to wonder if anyone working on the cult classic American film Hell Comes to Frogtown had heard about this one, though.
1967 also gave us Rankin Bass’s Mad Monster Party, a stop-motion musical featuring a whole roster of legally-distinct Universal Monsters, including the voice of Boris Karloff. Many people don’t realize that almost all of Rankin Bass’s stop motion work was actually done in Japan by Tadahito Mochinaga, so yeah, stuff like 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer could technically be considered “anime”. In addition to The Creature, this movie also has a King Kong knock-off in it, which is amusing considering that Rankin Bass was also producing King Kong Escapes at Toho and The King Kong Show at Toei at the same time.
While we’re at it, the 2D animated sequel Mad Mad Mad Monsters (1972) was also animated in Japan, at Mushi Productions, the studio that coined the term “anime”, as one of its last projects prior to bankruptcy.
Speaking of monster mashing anime, one of the less-discussed hits of the yokai boom (which you may recall as one of the components that contributed to the popularity of fish-men in the 60s) was Fujio Fujiko A’s Kaibutsu-kun, about a monstrous kid and companions (Dracula, Frankentein, and werewolf) battling various other monsters. The 1965 manga was followed by a 1968 anime, and another in 1980. Interestingly enough (and possibly due to copyright protections), the Amazonian fish-man character changes between versions, going from a thin green creature to a portly purple one, though maintaining the role as an investigator.
Gegege no Kitaro’s Hangyojin has also undergone a transformation, or perhaps is just two different characters. A very Universal-inspired Hangyojin appears in a number of Shigeru Mizuki’s picture books, but the one that first appeared in the manga in 1969 is short, with a bulbous nose and long hair, covered in barnacles. He’s also been in a number of the anime versions, sometimes with purple skin, sometimes with green. While an outlier in the Creature-inspired critters, the latter version’s appearance is actually fairly in line with the orang ikan, a cryptid reportedly seen by Japanese soldiers in Indonesia during World War 2. The orang ikan remains incredibly obscure, even in Japan, but since Shigeru Mizuki’s own cryptid encyclopedia says that his Hangyojin originates in New Guinea, instead of the Amazon, perhaps the fastidious folklorist heard tell of these sitings while he was recovering from his own wartime injuries in Rabaul.
Moving into the 70s, 1975 gave us Shintaro Goto’s manga “Half-Fish Man of the Amazon” (basically the same as the Japanese title for Creature from the Black Lagoon minus the word “Great”). This one was very similar to a wave of snake people manga at the time; here a young girl is menaced by fish people who exist kind of like werewolves, slowly turning her whole family into them as well. It’s interesting to see the transition of target demographics here: horror comics originally mostly sold to young boys, but by the 1970s, girls were much more of the readership, and you can see the evolution in the aesthetics.
While girls were reading horror, boys were into comedy, and in 1978 the nation’s most celebrated female manga artist, Rumiko Takahashi, made her debut with “Those Selfish Aliens” (勝手なやつら). The zany story is about a hapless newspaper boy who is independently abducted by aliens and by fish people, who each implant a doomsday device inside his body in hopes of taking over the Earth’s surface. This short set the tonal template for Takahashi’s breakout megahit Urusei Yatsura, and the fish people (called the Dappya) make such frequent cameo appearances in that series that one could even consider them unofficial mascots.
As a previous article pointed out, the late 1970s was rife with short manga adaptations (the Japanese term is “comicalize”) of popular contemporary movies. One of the lesser-known magazines to get on the act is the short-lived seinen comic anthology Gorilla, and in 1980, the 11th issue had the duo of Shinichi Takeshita (who also adapted the Richard Harris thriller Golden Rendevous) and Toshisuke Chiba (who also adapted the Peter Faulk comedy The In-Laws) did an adaptation of the 1979 Italian film Island of the Fishmen. The picture was known in Japan as “The Island of Doctor Morris” to capitalize on The Island of Doctor Moreau, which meant that a character’s name had to be changed to Dr. Morris. Still, that beats what happened in the US, where it was acquired by New World Pictures and new scenes cut in (much like they later did with Godzilla 1985). Anyway, the manga version is neat.
Speaking of New World Pictures, it’s a little surprising that Humanoids from the Deep didn’t get some sort of manga tie-in in Japan (where it was released as “Monster Panic”, coincidentally the same title as Steve Wang’s debut Adventures of Kung Fu Rascals got there). That said, there’s a tenuous Japanese industry connection in the film itself: while the film was mostly directed by Barbara Peeters, producer Roger Corman hired Jimmy Teruaki Murakami (who later directed the Seven Samurai reimagining Battle Beyond the Stars for Corman) to direct a few portions, along with the film’s third director, James Sbardellati, who was brought in to shoot some gratuitous nudity reshoots without Peeter’s consent. Anyway, Murakami was an American of Japanese descent, but did start his entertainment career in Japan working at Toei Animation as a layout artist.
Also, as a bit of aside trivia, the 1996 remake of Humanoids from the Deep was released in Japan as “DNA V” to capitalize on the same year’s The Island of Dr Moreau movie, which was released there as “DNA”. Tokuma put out a whole series of DNA “sequels” that were simply repurposed other American creature features, and also on the fish-person front, Peter Benchley’s Creature was released there as “DNA III”. Is it weird that at least three different fish-man movies were retitled because of Island of Doctor Moreau?
Transitioning directly from Humanoid from the Deep to Hello Kitty is probably not a thing anyone has ever attempted, but let’s try: 1985 would see the introduction of arguably Japan’s most iconic fish person, the Sanrio character Hangyodon. He was created by Hisato Inoue (who also created the more-popular penguin Badtz-Maru) and seems to live in a shared universe with a few of the other Sanrio mascots, but as one not too deep in the weeds on Hello Kitty lore, I’m not sure I’m qualified to exposit much on him. My wife tells me he runs a comedy club and is voiced by Ryusei Nakao, who you might know as the voice of Frieza in Dragon Ball Z. That’s range!
In 1992 the world got its first proper cinematic adaptation of Shadow over Innsmouth (ignoring War Gods of the Deep, because it’s pretty loose), in the form of a made-for-TV film starring Shiro Sano, with a script by Chiaki Konaka and effects by Shinichi Wakasa. The story is transposed to modern-day Japan, but otherwise remains pretty faithful, though it now has a female character, and Sano admits that they had to remove some of the Christian and racist elements in localization as well. The screenplay is clever in making the transition, rendering Innsmouth as 蔭洲升 (Insumasu), which even has the kanji for “shadow” in the name, with Arkham, Kingsport, and Dunwich getting similar Japanese renderings. It seems to have been an important project for noted Lovecraft nerds Konaka (who wrote a novelization of it for his very first novel) and Sano (who wrote a fictionalized account of the filming of it, which has actually been published in English as part of the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series), but alas, it’s remained pretty difficult to track down legally. There was a VHS release when it was new, but no subsequent DVD or Blu-ray in Japan, possibly due to rights shenanigans (they do use a Rolling Stones song in the background, which may be prohibitive from a licensing perspective nowadays), but thankfully Toy Video on YouTube has fansubbed the whole thing, so it’s available to watch. It’s an eerie good time!
On the topic of things lost to time, one of the greatest woefully abandoned video game franchises of the 1990s was Darkstalkers, a 2D fighter that lit up the arcade world from 1994 to 1997, getting tie-in manga, comics, anime, and even an American cartoon series. Essentially it was a Universal monster-inspired version of Street Fighter II, with a vampire, mummy, Frankenstein, werewolf, and naturally, a gill-man, Rikuo (after Gill-man actor Ricou Browning), who’s a member of some lost Amazonian fishfolk royal family. While he does show a lot of skin (scales?), Rikuo hasn’t become the sex symbol that the game’s succubus Morrigan has, and thus hasn’t transitioned into the cavalcade of Capcom-wide crossover fighters, and may be forgotten to time unless Darkstalkers gets a new standalone entry.
I’ve written about 1996’s Dragon Blue in the past, which has the weird distinction of being both the first thing that the short-lived tokusatsu imprint Rubbersuit Pictures distributed and the only one of their DVD titles that never got rescued for Blu-ray. It’s a Gaga Production from Yoshinori Chiba, kind of echoing Zeiram in that it’s about a woman with superpowers hunting down a monster: in this case a feng shui master (played by Hiroko Tanaka, who was in Return of Mothra the same year) who travels to Okinawa when a ghost tells her that there’s a dragon person there she has to take care of. Also like Zeiram, this was a theatrical directorial debut by a special effects technician who’d only done a single OV before, Takuya Wada (who went on to do makeup for The Ring franchise). Wada’s previous effort was the Jushin Thunder Liger movie, so it’s fitting that Dragon Blue also features a pro-wrestler with the Great Muta… who unfortunately never suplexes the movie’s gill-man. As for the dragon person himself, much has been made about how it was a Steve Wang design, but apparently it was a scrapped design that he had in a drawer that he gave to Wada, explaining why it feels reminiscent of both his zoanoids from Guyver and the Gill-man from Monster Squad.
Another product of the 90s that you would not see made today, the Heisei-era Ultraman relaunch is where the franchise most whole-heartedly embraced Lovecraft, so it follows that there would be some fish people there as well. 1997’s Ultraman Dyna has an ancient aquatic race named Digon (I’m guessing inspired by Lovecraft’s Dagon), the creations of an extraterrestrial tentacle monster. The Digon suits were also recycled the following year for some ghostly fish people in Ultraman Gaia.
Yasunori Mitsunaga’s 2001 manga Princess Resurrection (or Kaibutsu Oujo, literally “Monster Princess”) is pretty underrated as a monster mash, with the main characters including a phoenix, robot, werewolf, and vampire, who all clash with all sorts of other creatures in the course of the narrative. In one of the early stories they encounter a tribe of deep ones who look a lot like the Universal Gill-man, and in the anime version a giant one of them even falls in love with the werewolf girl, presumably because he’s got good taste.
Another unlikely fish-man love story was brought to us by Guillermo del Toro, and not just the one you probably think. See, when del Toro’s first Hellboy movie was released in 2004, the gill-man Abe Sapien was played by Doug Jones, but had his voice dubbed over by David Hyde Pierce. It’s amusing then that Jones returned to voice the character for the animated incarnation, namely 2006’s Hellboy: Sword of Storms and 2008’s Hellboy Blood & Iron. The animated version of Hellboy is actually my favorite incarnation of the franchise, and worth noting here because not only was the first movie about yokai, but both were actually animated at Madhouse, among a spade of foreign projects they were doing at the time for varied Hollywood titles such as Ultraviolet and Highlander. A key difference between animated Hellboy and the live-action version is that in the animated ones, Abe is the guy who gets the girl, much like Jones would later portray in The Shape of Water.
Yo-kai Watch was a powerful up-and-comer in children’s entertainment for a hot minute, with hundreds of episodes about different yokai. Thus, it’s no surprise that a fishman would be covered eventually by the series, though this one, the Gyoppiara of the Amazon, only appears briefly in an extra segment of episode 62 in 2015.
2015 also saw the release of Ririko Tekari’s light novel series Lovecraft Light, a self-described “super liberal interpretation” of various Lovecraft books to make them easier for a Japanese young adult audience. They’re set in modern day, protagonists become teenage, more (often sexy) female characters appear, but they retain the essence of the stories that most Japanese fans would only know from Arkham Horror and other RPGs. The third volume is an Innsmouth adaptation.
Lovecraft Light wasn’t the most significant Japanese Cthulhu Mythos development of 2015, though, since that year is also when Gou Tanabe began doing manga adaptations of Lovecraft stories, an undertaking that has quickly defined his career since he’s really quite good at it, with incredibly detailed, moody, grotesque artwork. The adaptation of Shadow Over Innsmouth, from 2020, was nominated for a Harvey Award. (Of course, translator Zack Davisson has a role to play with that as well, deftly re-incorporating Lovecraft’s original prose into the translation.)
Logically, the next step after “Japan adapts American IP for a Japanese audience” is “America commissions Japan to make new projects based American IP for the US weeaboo audience”, which is just what Adult Swim did in 2022. Though it didn’t get nearly as much hype as their lackluster Uzumaki adaptation, the network’s original miniseries Housing Complex C is a real hidden gem of the 2020s, perhaps my favorite of any original anime that they’ve commissioned. While fish people don’t appear for very long in this period piece about an apartment building beset by multiple Lovecraftian horrors, what we do see leaves an impression.
Another kind of cross-cultural ouroboros is the Kaiju Remix Series’s release of the “Gill Beast Namazu” figure. Acro’s Kaiju Remix Series began by redesigning monsters from the Ultraman franchise, but over time expanded to have more international original creations, such as David Meng’s Hanumaan or and Paul Komoda’s Bird Eater.
For this figure, famed toy designer James Groman took a stab at an original creature, heavily leaning on the Creature for inspiration, but also using the name Namazu, which in addition to nearly being an anagram for “Amazon” is the catfish that causes earthquakes in Japanese mythology. So, if an American artist creates a design inspired by an American IP and Japanese mythology for a Japanese toy company, what nationality do we call it?
The most recent entry on this list is quite a doozy: a Singapore-Indonesia-Japan-UK co-production. 2024’s Orang Ikan (annoyingly titled “Monster Island” for its US release) is a hoot and the fact that it’s now streaming on Shudder was the inspiration for this article. Set during WW2, it follows a pair of soldiers from opposite sides stranded together on a desert island, struggling to survive all while being hunted by the titular cryptid (basically think the intro to Kong: Skull Island as a full feature). That said, the movie version of the monster varies quite a bit from the folklore: tall, lanky, hairless, and super scary, a cool suit (when we can see it) and performance by King Ghidorah mocap actor Alan Maxson.
Before we go, it might be nice to review a few honorable mentions, where American projects incorporated Gill-man characters into Japanese IP. Since we did mention Steve Wang earlier, I have to think that the Arlen Crane zoanoid from 1994’s Guyver 2 (before he merges with a Guyver unit) is channeling a bit of the various Gill-man designs that Wang has done over the years, such as the one for Monster Squad, with giant gills extending around the neck. This zoanoid has no counterpart in the manga, so it’s a movie-original.
When B-Fighter was Sabanized into Big Bad Beetleborgs in 1996, they had an original concept for the main heroes, where their base of operations was now a haunted house complete with vampire, Frankenstein, werewolf, and mummy. Despite being a greatest-hits Universal monster-mash, a gill-man was not in the house’s roster, but one did still inhabit the town’s lake, known as either Charterville Charlie or the Swamp Scumoid. For a while it was reported that this costume was a modified version of the suit from Full Moon Entertainment’s Kraa the Sea Monster, which had been filmed earlier in 1996 (even though the movie wasn’t released until 1998). This didn’t really hold water (no pun intended), since the Kraa costume sold at auction in 2016 without those modifications, and the Scumoid costume had also been reused for a Drew Carey Show episode in 2000. It turns out that these were indeed two separate suits, but both were made by Total Fabrications Inc, so they likely reused some of the Kraa blueprints on Beetleborgs accounting for the confusion. The details in both a pretty different, so it’s mainly the face silhouettes that line up well.
As a final American creation that brushes with a Japanese franchise, we have the Devonians from the Godzilla: Rulers of Earth comic book (2013-2015), because we frequently full-circle back to Godzilla in these conversations. The Devonians are an undersea aquatic race with a whole society akin to the Atlantians or Mu, actually created last-minute when the team couldn’t secure the rights to Godzilla vs Megalon’s Seatopians, but I think that adding a race of fish people to the Godzilla mythos is the better route to take than just having a bunch of dudes in togas as antagonists. At any rate, they were also originally going to be named “Dagonians” (like Dagon, again), but for some reason pivoted to Devonians, likely a reference to the Creature gill-man being a remnant of the Devonian period.
On that note, we can probably close the book on the Gill-man phenomenon in Japanese entertainment, but in the future who knows what more may rise from the depths to take Revenge, Walk Among Us, and capture our attention just like Julie Adams. So, to all, have a great October and a happy Halloween!
Maser Patrol 
