Godzilla

[Peter B. High]

   "Re: Godzilla" ?
   "Aaron Gerow wrote?

> Interestingly, most of these criticisms rather directly translate into 
> attempts to construct national identity--not for monsters, but for 
> humans.  It is as if Godzilla is the trope for defining the national 
> self. ..................> 
> I haven't read everything written on the subject, so I suppose there is a 
> large variety of discourses operating here, but I do have some questions 
> for people:
 
> 1) Has anyone also paid attention to these discourses in Japan?  What 
> impressions have you had?
 > 2) Are similar discourses operating in the U.S.: i.e., is there an 
> attempt to distinguish the American and Japanese Godzillas in terms of 
> discourses of national identity?  How are the differences being 
> articulated?  This includes what the film is doing, but it is as much a 
> question of how it is being discussed.
> 3) Finally, just how has the original Godzilla operated in terms of 
> constructing Japanese national identity?  The thesis that Godzilla 
> represents resentment and fear about the nuclear age is not off the mark, 
> but I think the series gets more complicated as it moved on.
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  Not having seen the American GODZILLA I can make no comment other than--assuming 
Markus' report to be right, that it is another tub-thumper for Military America a la 
INDEPENDENCE DAY--it sounds pretty grim. In reference to the Japanese Godzillas, I 
must say I largely agree  with Aaron's suggestion that they tend to serve as "trope[s] 
for defining the national self." 
  In agreeing, however, I must add the qualification that in dealing with such works 
as the stream of GODZILLAs (or RAMBO, etc.) we must not try to get a direct "reading" 
of a national "psyche." They are by nature corrupt and almost infinitely corruptable 
texts, which provide commentators with free-floating, protean metaphors for social 
"insights" they probably developed elsewhere. Such seems  to have been the case of 
GODZILLA (especially the initial Honda Inoshiro, 1954 version) in Japan. There is a 
tendency here for some prominent critic to render the "established interpretation" 
(teisetsu) or meaning of a work, which is then loosely followed by subsequent critics 
and commentators. 
  In a "taidan" for the 3/'56 issue of Eiga Geijutsu, Izawa Jun and Tsurumi Shunsuke 
establish the enduring "teisetsu" for Godzilla. Under the sub-heading of "The 
Philosophy (shisousei) of Godzilla,"  Tsurumi compares Godzilla favorably with 
Kurosawa's RECORD OF A LIVING BEING, as the ultimate cinematic lesson about the 
horrors of  of The Bomb. Godzilla provides, he says, a "graspable metaphor" 
unattainable through "intellectualization (kannen)"--"The very young and those out in 
the rural areas unaffected by the war have no real sense of what really happened; and 
so they can't grasp the significance of the anti-war and anti-Bomb 
movements...Therefore, rather than hearing arguments about imperialism or pacifism,  
they see a monster born of the Bomb and visibly pock-marked through the effects of 
radiation-- a graspable image of the effects of ash which a few years ago rained down 
on us from the Bikini A-Bomb tests." 
  One wonders how many ordinary contemporary Japanese viewers, untutored by Izawa and 
Tsurumi's analysis, saw the film in this light. In many ways, Tsurumi's comments tell 
us more about his own political views and aspirations at the time than it does about 
the film. Still, we do see this "teisetsu"--that Godzilla is an important anti-Bomb 
film--at work in much subsequent commentary (that of Communist Yamada Kazuo, not the 
least). As late as  1982, Arai Katsuro pays back-handed homage to the power of the 
interpretation by attempting to debunk it in his coverage of the film in the Kinema 
Jumpo 200 Best Japanese Films (1982).
  A different sort of stab at Godzilla interpretation was taken in in a book called 
BOKUTACHI NO GOJIRA (the young author's name escapes me for the moment), published 
about six years ago, which I reviewed in my old YOHAKU ORAI column for Asahi Shimbun 
Yukan.  I don't have the column ready-to-hand and can't quite recall the books line of 
argument off the top of my head--the author held, somewhat feebly I seem to remember, 
that there was a  connection between Japan's postwar "minshushugi shisou" (democratic 
thought) and the beleaguered image of Godzilla.
  The problem with many of these interpretations is the tendency to find essentialist  
messages, whereas in the film itself these messages are actually terribly garbled, at 
best. Part of it comes from the limitations of the old critical language  still used 
by many commentators in Japan, which encourage the search for meanings encased within 
"metaphors." In his list of queries above, this is something Aaron avoids by employing 
the verbiage of "trope" and "discourse." 
   Positioning myself within the discourse of "discourses," I'd like to  hazard a few 
small theses of my own about Godzilla. First, I would suggest that the Godzilla 
phenomenon should be placed within the context of those elegiac portrayals of Japanese 
sufferings during the war which were pouring out of the studios just then, in the 
early fifties--Sekikawa's LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF THE WAVES(1950), Shindo's CHILDREN 
OF THE A-BOMB (1952), Imai's HIMEYURI NO TO (1953), Kihnoshita's TWENTY FOUR EYES 
(1954--the same year as Honda's GODZILLA), etc. Arriving half a decade or so after the 
trauma of the War Crimes tribunals, these films represent a general turning away from 
the theme of national self-disgrace (as seen in Kamei's documentary JAPANESE TRAGEDY, 
1946, and continuing in a way up through Yamamoto's BARREN ZONE, 1952). The elegiac 
films, to put it baldly for the purposes of this line of argument, wash away the issue 
of national guilt in a flood of self-pitying tears. All the suffering portrayed is 
Japanese suffering. All the "sins" imputed by the films are committed against Japanese 
people. In some cases (24 EYES, etc) the "perpetrators" are also Japanese--the largely 
undepicted Military/Government Establishment or the Militarist Mindset--but in most 
cases those who have inflicted the suffering are the Faceless Enemy, American bombers, 
etc. The general message is that the Japanese (people, at least) were at least as much 
victims of the war as anyone else. This theme of the victimization of innocents by a 
faceless Other verges on--indeed I was assert it actually enters--the realm of the 
persecution complex: forces outside us are waging a relentless campaign of punishment 
against us. Enter now Godzilla, born of the sins of others, American atomic testing. 
He attacks Japan and Tokyo is (again) destroyed. The film is also elegiac and features 
an actual funeral hymn to the the devastated metropolis. 
  In other words, the more-than-semi-persecution complex dramatically evolved in the 
elegiac "anti-war" films is inherited by the Godzilla films. In the early versions of 
both the elegiac films and in Honda's original GODZILLA, there is no overt display of 
antipathy against the pain-inflicting Other, but the potential for such is there 
already. Proof of this assertion comes in the recent, rather vile  remakes of HIMEYURI 
and LISTEN TO THE SOUND OF THE WAVES. We find it too in many of the subsequent 
GODZILLAs--in one, made in the early-mid eighties, the American military wants to drop 
an atomic bomb on Tokyo to destroy the big...because they are afraid it will go after 
their Japan-side bases! In another version--I forget which or when--Godzilla goees to 
Okinawa. He is finally beaten by Japanese intervention, but only after Olkinawan local 
culture is displayed as ridiculously impotent.
   Lest I fall into the very metaphor-hunting I dismiss above, I would have to deny 
that Godzilla represents some definable essence of the Japanese national identity. 
Indeed, Godzilla is the perfect floating, empty metaphor. He is at once a product of 
the Other and a projection of the national self, the destroyer (tragically) 
fore-doomed to be grandly (or pathetically)  destroyed, the tainted one and the one 
who purifies, perpetrator and--somehow--victim.
   I could go on, but the night deepens and I have other things to do. One other motif 
in Godzilla which I will only introduce without developing , is the evolving manner in 
which the (Japanese) military is depicted. In the original two Godzillas, the Army 
trundles out a host of cannons and tanks to do battle with the monster. But these are 
wilted like frail plastic under the fiery breath of G. The police too are helpless and 
in hysterical disarray. The ones who destroy the monster are the only part of the 
Japanese Establishment unimpugned by direct war responsibility--civilian scientists. 
In later Godzillas, we see a return of the heroic and ultimately effective Japanese 
military. In other monster films--I'm thinking here of anime--we see the emergence of 
the Monster Destroying Specialist--quasi-military elite units, openly  motivated by 
the same Spirit-ist ethos we find in Pacific War films. In other words, seen as a 
series, the Godzilla films transform away from anti-military/authority motifs and 
slowly revalorize Authority and the elite military unit.
  Well, its time for someone else to have a say, so good night.

Peter B. High
Nagoya University

--
Peter B. High
j45843a at nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp