Today I set out upon an ominous quest, a quest that thus far on and off has taken me some 7 years. Back in 2007 on a 2 week stint in Japan with my friend Smithy we spent an afternoon trying to find a mythical beast, we failed. Again in 2009 as a solo effort I mooched long and hard for several minutes to find a monster that some may describe as a reptilian home wrecker. Again I was encumbered in failure. These were far from testing times as I mostly wasn’t that bothered, about anything. But upon my 3^rdreckoning to this vast Japanese metropolis I felt it high time I lured the beast out into the open, I am of course talking about Gojira aka Godzilla, ‘pure muthafuckin’ filler’ as quoted by lyrical master Zach De La Rocha.

Now for those of you….that don’t know, Godzilla is an angry sea monster that was apparently awakened by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This shit pissed him right off as he was having a really nice kip at the bottom of his ocean trench. So when he surfaced he naturally did so on the wrong side of the seabed, and due to the distinctive virtues of atomic power had managed to develop ‘Atomic Breath’. Stories vary on the big guys origins but that is the general consensus of how he came about. And despite Japan just having two big fuck off atomic bombs dropped on its head Godzilla had very little sympathy for the Japanese and set about mashing up its towns and cities ASAP.

So that’s him, that’s the guy I’m looking for, and legend has it that roaming the streets or parks of Tokyo is a statue of the famed King of all Monsters. Now given his title one would have thought that he wouldn’t be so difficult to find. My first attempt in 2007 was a whimsical one, word got out that there was a Godzilla statue kicking around Tokyo, and we walked around randomly but to no avail. ‘Oh well never mind’ was the general attitude back then. My second attempt two years later I’d heard that he haunts the streets of Ginza, an upmarket shopping district renoun for ridiculously expensive clobber. Again I lurked about briefly but found myself massively distracted by the array of incredibly attractive and classy Japanese women, virtually to the point that I basically forgot why I was even in Ginza in the first place. Push forward 5 more years to the present day (2014 I think), and a more mature me (hmm…), an asexual me (err…), I decided to take things a little more seriously. I consulted the internet, because of course when does the internet ever lie? The World Wide Web told me that I could find the big guy in Hibiya Park. So off I trundled like a serial masturbator on day release.

Hibiya Koen is a reasonable 40 acre park offering lakes, tennis courts, cafes, pissers, a fountain and an abundance of the green stuff that generally makes a park a park. Before entering I noted that the Map of the park at the entrance had no indication as to the where abouts of a one Godzilla. Then it struck me that that’s the whole point, he’s not meant to be found, it was like a little Japanese game of some sort that would require patience, style and etiquette. For fucks sake, this was going to take all day. It was very much a hit and hope approach, just muscling straight in and walking in any direction and hoping that Godzilla would just rear his Rhedosauruan head. A tactic that was clearly mentally imbalanced from the start. I wondered if asking someone was cheating, or if they would even tell me because perhaps they would be breaking some sort of unspoken code. I decided to find out. I asked an old Japanese chap on a park bench. ‘Sumimasen’ excuse me. The man looked up from his book and said nothing. ‘Err…koko de Gojira ga imasu ka?’ Is this the place where Godzilla is? He wore a straight-laced face which gave nothing away, before beginning to mumble out some words to me at about 314Mph, I had no idea what he was saying so I just nodded my head and went along with it. When it seemed as if he had finished I thanked him and fucked off none the wiser. I decided to knock any further questioning on the head. It’s a weird question anyway, who asks ‘Have you seen Godzilla kicking about?’ I’ll probably never have to ask that question again for the rest of my life. Oh well, another string to my bow as they say.

I did a perimeter check and then ironed out a few more droves that I hadn’t noticed before and came to the conclusion that Hibiya Park was a really nice little spot but not for the first time the internet had fucked me over. I knew he was going to be hard to find but this was a joke. Which just goes to show that if you believe everything you read on the internet then you’re obviously a fucking idiot! You could pretty much put up any old shit on the internet and you’ll be more or less guaranteed that some mug out there in the world is going to buy it. I could start one now, ‘Cliff Richard bums Koi carp’. You see if that was to get out into the WWW it’s going to hit some folk pretty bad. I can see it now, mother of four from Chigwell devastated by Cliff revelation, throws all her cassette tapes at a horse and turns to crack for answers. But she believed it because the internet told her so, why would it lie…WHY???

So Godzilla obviously wasn’t here, so I decided to head out of the park and into the city to feed my screaming belly. BOOM!!! Godzilla, found him, just like that, about 100 yards down the street from the park. ‘Bastard’ I muttered to myself. He was just stood there, looking at me, completely unphased by my distress to which just so happened to have completely drained upon finding him. For the 7 year hassle involved he was kind of on the small side at about a metre or so high, not that I’m a size queen or anything. You’d just propose in your mind that if it’s Godzilla you’re looking for, he would be a big bad bastard. He certainly looked like a bad bastard though and I was glad to have finally found him. Thankfully he still stands and thankfully his home is Tokyo, for if this was Mighty Blighty you can gamble some top Yen that he would be in some yobos living room by now or getting cashed in for scrap down the wrecking yard. But hey, that’s a cultural thing, we’ve all got them, some are just better than others.

Anyway, next stop Mothra.