Godzilla is, of course, an amphibious creature, so each of the Godzilla actors had experience splashing around in specialized tanks built in the Toho studios. This was especially fraught, given that the Godzilla suits were hard to breathe in as is. Getting an actor underwater requires careful planning. Sadly, that planning often went awry. Kitagawa recalls working on one of the Millennium-era Godzilla movies, and a terrifying moment when his breathing apparatus was damaged. He was to be pushed underwater by a crane. He said:
“You can’t breathe well inside the suit, so an oxygen tube is attached. […] But it’s removed during takes. Sometimes I started suffocating and had to stop filming. [For an underwater scene] I was standing by. The oxygen tube was attached the crane started to move. As I went down the tube came off. […] I screamed, ‘Stop! I can’t breathe!’ But they kept pushing me into the water. Because of the danger, those shots were stopped. I never want to do that again.”
Satsuma joined in to say “We risked our lives in that water.”
As the Godzilla films have progressed over the last 70 years, the suits have improved with each iteration. Nakajima said that he “went to the special effects studio every day. […] I’d suggest a slit here, a slit there.” Kitagawa went so far as to design suits that allowed for more flexibility. “I prepared data for the suit makers, just like an F-1 racer. […] The suit for ‘Godzilla: Final Wars’ was the most flexible ever.”
Since “Final Wars,” however, Godzilla has been visualized by CGI and motion-capture techniques, forgoing on-set suits. The effects in newer Godzilla films are excellent, but one might argue that something has been lost. At the very least, the risks of drowning are gone.