It's a Monday night, and two people call me on my cell phone to ask me if I want to go out, but I politely decline. I need to watch my Godzilla movies, I tell them. They understand and hang up. I have a personal date with a radioactive dinosaur, the kind that is prone to stomping through Tokyo and melting buildings with its atomic breath.
I am voluntarily holing myself up in my muggy apartment to watch four hours worth of Godzilla movies because I decided at some point that I want to write a full-length play that somehow involves Godzilla, and this is all a part of the research process.
I figure that this personal summer project can also serve as my very bizarre way of learning more about my Japanese culture. And what better way to learn about your own culture than watching cheesy sci-fi movies involving mutant reptiles?
It's been pretty fun reading articles on one of Japan's most famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) personalities to emerge from the postwar era. Further research on the subject reveals just how big of an influence Godzilla still has on global popular culture.
Making its premiere onto Japanese cinema nearly 50 years ago after being awakened by a hydrogen test abomb, Godzilla now boasts 28 movies and is probably one of the most popular kajiu (monster) to grace the cinematic screen, not to mention one of the few monsters to ever win an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award.
In a 1985 survey conducted by the New York Times/CBS asking 1,500 Americans to name a famous Japanese person, Godzilla ranked in the top three along with Hirohito and Bruce Lee (who isn't even Japanese, of course.) Even to this day, Godzilla fans across the globe still organize fan conventions and even academic talks based on this famous lizard whose trademark scream was created by the composer running a glove across a contrabass string.
You would think that there is nothing serious about the Godzilla franchise, but I was surprised to learn that the original Godzilla movie was meant to be a serious allegory on nuclear warfare and a psychological catharsis for the only country in the world to truly experience an atomic holocaust.
While people may now laugh when they see this movie, back then the Japanese audience openly shed tears when they saw scenes of familiar buildings being destroyed and people being carried to hospitals in stretchers as a result of Godzilla's mayhem because it struck so close to home in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
In the heavily edited American version, an American character who wasn't even in the actual film is spliced within the original footage to create an English-speaking protagonist who somehow convinces the main protagonists to use the only nuclear weapon that is capable of destroying Godzilla.
Important dialogue concerning the moral dilemma that arises from using weapons of mass destruction is also noticeably cut, which turns what was a serious meditation on weapons of mass destruction into a typical Westernized storyline in which the American saves the foreigners from further mayhem.
Who would have thought that a movie about a radioactive dinosaur carried so much political commentary that the Americans felt the need to heavily edit down its original message?
Throughout the course of this research, I realize more and more that Godzilla is more than a man in a rubber dinosaur suit, but in actuality a monster of complex proportions who embodies Japan's ambiguous attitudes towards militarism, nuclear warfare, power structures and Japanese society at large.
Ultimately, though, I suspect that the raw appeal of Godzilla is much simpler than that. Cultural and social connotation asides, I think we all secretly love and envy Godzilla because it appeals to the darker id of our human natures. After all, who wouldn't want to wreak havoc on a big city just because they've been woken out of a really long nap?
Published July 21, 2006
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