The notion of unilateral defeat and the leveling of entire cities at a single stroke were unimaginable to the Japanese, a martial society that had not experienced conquest on such a scale in centuries. In that light, it is significant that the initial Godzilla (or Gojira in Japanese) films were made by men who had personal experience with the horrors of modern war. Three of the men central to the making of Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954), “a stark reenactment of the
Second World War,” had been involved in the Japanese war effort including director Ishiro Honda, who had served in the Imperial Army in China (Miller, 1999). The movie’s music composer, Akira Ifukube, had written military marches for Japanese army and navy (1999). Clearly, the Second World War had had a psychological effect on the film’s producers strong enough to elicit an expression of utter destruction. Heroism and personal sacrifice save the Japanese nation in the end but, like the monster that cannot be utterly destroyed, he keeps returning to wreak further destruction.
The nation’s armed forces strike back bravely, but impotently. “The monster’s attack on Tokyo mirrors the destruction wrought by the U.S. Air Forces,” and only the kamikaze attack by Dr. Serizawa staves off complete annihilation (Miller, 1999). The fact that Godzilla, Japan’s personal nightmare, keeps coming back for more is an allegory for the profound defeat, which can never be wiped away, that was inflicted on Japan in 1945. Consequently, “the real threat presented by the U.S. was not defeated and continued to be depicted in subsequent films” (Miller, 1999). In the film, Godzilla and the danger he represents to the nation dawns slowly but inexorably. There are reports of ships mysteriously lost at sea and, as these mount, there is concern but it is not until the threat itself suddenly looms over the nation from the island of Oda, which Tom Miller explains stands for all of the island outposts lost to the American naval and marine forces during the war, that the full realization hits. “Godzilla/U.S. now threatens Japan directly,” and it is clear that a distant threat now threatens extermination (Miller, 1999).
Director Ishiro Honda, who harbored a lifelong fascination with dinosaurs, said that the idea for Godzilla arose from a very natural fusion of Jurassic monster and overwhelming
atomic/military power arising from an alien/foreign source. For Honda, Godzilla was much more than just a monster “awakened” and empowered by the atomic bomb. He “would be twisted and mutated by it, into a rampaging uncontainable force; the A-bomb made flesh” (Roberto, 1997). From here, the heavy use of allegory in the film’s script was part of a natural progression. Japanese ships blown out of existence in the Pacific represent the merchant vessels lost to American submarines during the war, a fact that was “greatly played upon by Honda” (Roberto, 1997). When Godzilla reaches Tokyo, the thunderous sound of his footsteps replicate the sound of American bombs which had rained down on the city less than a decade earlier (1997).
Honda and his colleagues had not been forced to look far to find inspiration for a powerfully evocative attack on their nation’s collective psyche. Still, it was a brilliant modernization of an ancient cautionary, mythological tale. Godzilla is an apocalyptic adaptation of the “Wolf symbolizing the demonic destruction of the Christian sheep,” (Otten, 54-55). Like the sheep, Japanese culture and society had lain helpless before a ravening monster and survived, but at the cost of the nation’s self image and pride. The world in which the Japanese lived and thrived had evolved a profane and blood-thirsty new monster that was always somewhere in the background, looming like a colossus eager to finish the destructive work it had only just begun.
Godzilla, King of the Monsters illuminates the effects of this destruction and invokes the cost of technology. The film is more than an attempt to repress the negative feelings and depression of defeat, it is an anti-nuclear statement from a people with an intimate understanding of what exactly this power represented. In a sense, not even the Americans, the country
responsible for letting the “nuclear genie out of the bottle,” could fully comprehend what nuclear destruction meant. Honda explained that this was much more than just a Japanese concern. “It was a matter of getting to the feeling I wanted of an invisible fear thatthis technology has now even become an environmental problem” (Roberto, 1997). After Godzilla attacks Tokyo, there are scenes in a hospital reminiscent of the footage which showed burned corpses after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. A doctor detects dangerous levels of radiation in the body of a young boy, while in another scene bereaved children watch as a sheet is pulled over the head of their dead mother’s corpse (1997).
This, then, is why Godzilla is “scary” in an international sense. The special effects of the movies themselves are not as frightening as the meaning of the monster itself and what it stands for; the widespread death that emitted from the reckless application of technology in its many forms. One is reminded of the radiation that was released from the damaged power plant after the 2011 tsunami hit the Japanese coastline. This disturbing event accords with the warning implied by Godzilla and the Godzilla movies; that human society is ill-prepared to deal with the deadly threat posed by technology, whether that technology is benign or aggressive (i.e. military) in nature. Godzilla may be a monster, but it is the “technology” that created him and made him supremely powerful that is truly “monstrous.” Godzilla obviously crosses natural and psychological boundaries for the Japanese, but the ramifications of Godzilla’s existence holds natural and psychological imputations for the entire world. Thus, Godzilla is more than a monster with specific cultural meaning: it is a “monster” that threatens the well-being of the planet.
International reaction to the Godzilla “franchise” has not always embraced the lessons that Honda set out to impart. There are critics who have held the Japanese to blame for taking an irresponsible, even immature approach to what happened to them in World War II. As such, Japanese filmmakers should have known better than to “engage in a fantasy of futuristic monsters, at the cost of confronting the monstrous reality of the past” (Kaplan, Wang and Wang, 147). Such criticism implies that the Japanese would have been better served to have looked more deeply into their past and to the violence, xenophobia and racism that spurred their emperor and military leaders on to a brutal campaign of expansion throughout the Far East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine Godzilla as an avenger, bent on revenging those killed at places like Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Shanghai and Bataan.
And yet our created monsters may serve multiple psychological purposes, as Ishiro Honda and his colleagues have shown. Thus, Godzilla can be both mindless destroyer and a punisher, or chastiser. In this role, he serves as a “pressure valve,” offering viewers a shared experience in which all “survive” the horrors taking place on the screen, relating to the dangers and challenges faced by human beings who seem remote and improbable and yet recognizable at the same time. The audience that survives the monster film together reaffirms the values and function of society, precisely because society is being threatened with total destruction. We are confronted with the prospect that if we do not survive together, none will survive. One senses that the Japanese internalized this lesson intuitively after World War II, as if, had they not worked so diligently to recover their country, some Godzilla/US/atomic bomb would materialize and exact further retribution.
One year after the release of Godzilla King of the Monsters, the film’s producers turned to the Cold War and fears of global annihilation. In Godzilla Raids Again, the monster as the United States with all of its destructive power, which had so frightened Japanese audiences is rampaging again, but this time it has a new foe to contend with, a monster named Angilas. Angilas, which some have argued represents the Soviet Union, is also supremely powerful (Miller, 1999). The two face off on an island to the north, which may represent the Sakhalin Islands, long a bone of contention between Japan and the USSR. Gradually, the two fight their way to mainland Japan, bringing catastrophic destruction to the beleaguered citizens once again. Their battle is the specter of what lay in store for the world, with peripheral damage in store for the innocent bystanders in nuclear war.
The use of symbolism that delivered such a jolt to Japanese audiences in 1954 is in evidence again. The film plays out against a backdrop of snow and ice, clear indications that this is, indeed, a “cold” war. The Japanese wait in horrified anticipation and, when Godzilla triumphs, the monster’s former prey must fight for their existence again. Japanese pilots who are veterans of the war against America fend the giant dinosaur off once again, and again at great cost and with no guarantee that he won’t appear once again. Franco Moretti’s notion of the “totalizing” monster is an overarching threat. “Essential monstrosity makes monstrosity an integral feature of very specific bodies; totalized monstrosity allows for a whole range of specific monstrosities to coalesce in the same form” (Moretti, 2005). In Godzilla, King of Monsters, there emerged a monster that hearkened back to anxiety and humiliation over military defeat and the threat from a new, terrifying technological enemy. In the sequel, a “range of specific
monstrosities” is at work, a threat of unimaginable power carrying the threat of global extinction with him.
Thus, Godzilla can be seen as an overlooked ideal of Moretti’s totalizing construct. “The ‘totalizing monster,’ a modern invention, threatens community from all sides and from its very core rather than from a simple outside. The chameleonic nature of this monster makes it a symbol of multiplicity and indeed invites multiple interpretations” (Moretti, 2005). The fact that Godzilla resists “multiple interpretations” does not dilute the relevance of Moretti’s theory. Godzilla is, in every sense, a modern creation which threatens the community alone (at least after it vanquishes other monsters). By comparison, Dracula is an “ascetic,” a monster with a specific purpose and modus operandi arising from an absolute need: he must drink blood to survive, which makes him vulnerable. His is not the ethos of total, aimless destruction that has no final solution and which cannot guarantee its monster’s total and lasting demise. There is no driving a stake through his heart.
1997). Given such parallels to real life, it is not surprising that Honda should have commented that “under (these) circumstances, the film came to feel like a documentary;” (which would have been more successful) if there had been some way to convince the viewer that it was really happening” (Roberto, 1997).
And yet, in a way, it had all happened before. It would not have taken much convincing for Japanese audiences to recognize instantly the predominant fact of life arising from the ashes of their defeat in World War II. Godzilla was a monster that represented their past and present. The true horror of the Godzilla films was the prospect that they provided a glimpse of their future as well. There is no doubt that they had been given a strong dose of a new kind of destruction, one which posed a dire threat to the entire world. If it is true that monsters are physical manifestations of our darkest, deepest fears, then one may say that Godzilla represented a fear that lay right on the surface, one that was never very far away from anyone’s mind. It may be true that Ishiro Honda and the Godzilla films’ other creators blatantly exploited and manipulated public neuroses, but reaction to the films in Japan and around the world would seem to indicate that people were perfectly willing and open to being manipulated. Indeed, it may well be argued that this is the proper function and true purpose of monsters, and monster films themselves; to find the true source of our fears and turn it into something imminent, something that could seem likely to appear at any moment and threaten everything we take for granted. This is what made the Toho Godzilla films so effective.
Works Cited
Kaplan, E. Ann, Wang, Ban and Wang, Ban. (2009). Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural
Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press.
Miller, Tom. “Struggling With Godzilla: Unraveling the Symbolism in Toho’s Sci/Fi Films.”
Kaiju-Fan, No. 10, Winter 1999.
Moretti, Franco. (2005). Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms.
London: Verso.
Otten, Charlotte F, ed. (1986). A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press.
Roberto, John Rocco. “Godzilla and the Second World War: A Study of the Allegorical Meaning
in ‘Godzilla’ and ‘Godzilla Raids Again.’” Kaiju-Fan, No. 5, Spring 1997.
