Haruo Nakajima, the actor who played Japan’s iconic city-wrecking monster Godzilla in the original 1954 movie, has died, film studio Toho said yesterday. He was 88. Nakajima, who went on to appear as the iconic creature a dozen times, died of pneumonia on Monday, said a spokesman for the studio that produced the Godzilla films. Originally a stuntman, Nakajima at the age of 25 first took on the role of the giant monster awakened by a hydrogen bomb test to rise out of a roiling sea and swim to Japan where it crushes Tokyo. Godzilla, a walking, radiation-breathing analogy for nuclear disaster resonated in Japan. Just nine years earlier the country had suffered the world’s first, and still only, atomic bomb attacks at the hands of the United States in the closing days of World War II. The US also carried out a hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific in 1954, exposing a Japanese boat to nuclear fallout, sickening the 23 crew and eventually killing the captain.