I knew they were doing a kaiju-homage episode, but what a surprise to build it around Ishiro Honda himself! Although they played fast and loose with the chronology and biographical details. Honda was serving on the Chinese front when Hiroshima was bombed. It seemed they put this during the production of Honda's first feature film,
The Blue Pearl, but the idea for Godzilla was conceived by producer Tomoyuki Tanaka three years later in 1954, inspired partly by the 1953 Ray Harryhausen film
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and partly by
a March 1954 incident in which the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was irradiated by American H-bomb testing. Making a monster-movie allegory about that incident let them protest it in a way they couldn't do openly given the political climate of the time.
I love it that they showed the title card in Japanese. The spoken Japanese sounded pretty authentic to me, but it bugged me that Sara kept calling the director "Ishiro" instead of Honda-san. Addressing a non-family member without an honorific is pretty rude.