Godzilla & nationalism

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

I forgot to tell people about this sooner, but there was an essay in the 
June 25th _Mainichi_ by a reporter Kawasaki Hiroshi on the cultural 
differences between Japan and the US that he sensed in watching the 
Hollywood Godzilla.

While stressing that the basic outline of the new Godzilla movie is much 
the same as that of the old, Kawasaki emphasizes that Emmerich, while 
being German, "is one of the directors who excels at the Hollywood 
sensation (kankaku) of bigness, speed, and spectacle."  Honda, on the 
other hand, depicted "human feelings."  Emmerich, while positing Godzilla 
as a "thing" which serves as a "provisional threat," never makes it the 
"ultimate threat."  All-powerful human beings will ultimately win out.  
The Japanese Gojira, however, Kawasaki points out, has, except for the 
first film, never been defeated by human power--it is superior to human 
beings and that is the source of its fearsomeness.  It is the 
manifestation of pure anger and the threat of nature--an abstraction from 
the start.  The American Godzilla is just a big lizard.

Emmerich said he wanted to depict basic fear, but to Kawasaki, this only 
represents the fact that to Europeans/Americans, fear is visual--that 
nothing is frightening until it appears.  The Japanese Godzilla, however, 
like Japanese ghosts, is fearsome because it only "may appear."  This 
basic difference is, according to Kawasaki, that between a people who 
have experienced fear and those who have not.  The fear that there may be 
a ghost under that willow tree is completely different from the attitude: 
"If it comes out, shoot it"; or, "Just cut down the damn tree, then!"  
The fact that only Godzilla's legs appeared in the American previews is 
telling: it is the opposite of legless Japanese ghosts.

The American perception is related, Kawasaki concludes, to the 
over-confidence that says, "The bomb's not scary until you drop it."  

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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