Can someone please explain to me the origins of the term seijin? I tried to find something here already, but to no avail. When I Google it, there are a handful of definitions and I can only assume it's direct meaning to the world of kaiju is "adult" and not necessarily the pornographic anime... or am I wrong.

School me

New topic

This has been discussed previously in other threads (in fact, more than once if I can recollect correctly). I am pretty certain that the more accurate translation in the kaiju sense is 'alien.' But I stand to be corrected. Where's Oli at?

This might be of some help.

it's reserved for humanoid extraterrestrials, i believe.

Ah yes, that would make sense. Just acts as a default since so many of these are humanoid in all the shows that we think of (e.g. guys in rubber suits). And of course differentiates them from the other crazy monsters. Probably depends a lot on whether the could come up with an otherwise creative name or not. Thanks Bill!

'Seijin' [星人] literally translates to 'star person'. I guess 'alien' would probably be the closest word we have in English, but the inclusion of the character for 'person' would limit it to humanoids.

I think I've seen 'Seijuu' [星獣] somewhere before, which would be 'star beast'... maybe suitable for extraterrestrial non-humanoids.

If a giant monster comes lumbering out of the side of a mountain then it's a terrestrial beastie, always - if the the funny looking dude arrived in a space ship, is short and chats with folk he's always a seijin. In the case of something like Zetton, from the last episode of Ultraman, the man-sized form that looks like Kemur is called Zetton-Seijin, but the full sized monsta (who looks like Zetton ) is just called Zetton.