Shigeru Kayama

Shigeru Kayama (1904 to 1975), born Koji Yamada in Tokyo, was a Japanese novelist and screenwriter. He studied economics at Hosei University, worked at the Ministry of Finance, and began writing in 1940 with tanka poems. His 1947 novel Eerie Story won the New Novelist Prize, and in 1949 he left the ministry to write full time, becoming a prominent science fiction and mystery author in postwar Japan. In 1954 the producer Tomoyuki Tanaka asked him to develop a giant monster idea, and he produced a fifty page outline in eleven days that became the basis of the film Godzilla. He also wrote the 1954 novelization Monster Godzilla and a follow up, Godzilla Raids Again, in 1955.