HIROSHIMA
ON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere.
Hiroshima is impossible. At Auschwitz or Dachau, one is asked to fill in what happened, the ruins urging the imagination to conjure what is no longer there. At Hiroshima, the ask is altogether different: We are forced to subtract from the life of one of the busiest cities in southern Honshu, the country’s largest island, to re-enter its near-total annihilation on Aug. 6, 1945. In the last weeks of World War II, the United States chose this city of about 300,000 at the time (today it has a population of 1.2 million) as the target of the first-ever atomic bomb to be dropped on civilians. Pikadon is the Japanese word for the white bleaching light and thunderous boom from the detonation of Little Boy, a light so brilliant that it etched human shadows over stone stairs, as in a photograph. Then a searing wind, a deadly cloud and a fire that turned human skin to rags. “Trying to visualize, trying to imagine … I fail,” writes the American essayist Donald Richie, who first came to Japan in 1946, in his memoir “The Inland Sea” (1971).
My grandfather was in the British Indian army, fighting the Japanese in Burma (now Myanmar) when their guns threatened Calcutta. Years later he spoke to me of having killed a Japanese officer and finding his letters, which were in English. He had been given the officer’s traditional Japanese sword as a trophy, something that filled him with distaste, and he was glad to be dispossessed of it (along with everything else) when he became a refugee after the 1947 partition of India. The Second World War had not merely pitted Asian against Asian; it had also dashed the hopes of the region’s lesser developed countries, such as colonial India, whose freedom fighters had rejoiced at the rise of Japan’s power when it stunned the world by bringing czarist Russia to its knees in 1905. But by the 1930s, Japan’s expansionism and militarism looked much like an Asian version of European colonialism. That hubris of prewar Japan gave way to a docility in defeat that puzzled observers of the country. “There is something almost uncanny,” wrote the Indian diplomat K.P.S. Menon in the late 1940s, “in the welcome which the people of Japan have given to their ex-enemies, their acquiescence in the drastic measures introduced by SCAP [Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers] and the homage, almost amounting to worship, which they pay [General Douglas] MacArthur.” Eighty years on, gazing out at this delta city of sprawling green waterways from the reconstructed Aioi Bridge, the target of Little Boy, I found myself still puzzling over where Japan had filed away the pain and anger of that time. There was the defeat, then the imposition of a largely U.S.-written pacifist constitution and the added humiliation of an occupation that lasted from 1945 until 1952, resulting in the establishment of dozens of military bases, many of which remain to this day.
Two years after the treaty that ended American occupation, a Japanese film came out that would enthrall the nation and the world beyond for generations to come. Godzilla, as the professor character in the first film says, “was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb and survived.” Awakened by nuclear testing, he emerges from Tokyo Bay to terrorize a newly rebuilt country. All conventional weapons fail to stymie Godzilla on his path of ruin, which culminates in a rampage through Tokyo. Ultimately, a weapon called an oxygen destroyer is found to kill him out at sea. It comes at the cost of vast quantities of marine life, and also the life of the bomb’s inventor. In the film’s final underwater scenes, full of pain, pathos and futility, man and beast, both hostage to the calamitous effects of a new weapon, are laid low together in the deep.
Godzilla belongs to a species of postwar monsters called kaiju (the word is a composite of the characters for “strange” and “beast”). He inhabits a land of earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural terrors, to which we must add what men have wrought in the form of the atomic age — not just wholesale destruction but also the fears of mutation. These would have been powerful catalysts on any collective imagination but, in Japan, where there existed a premodern world of animist Shinto — the substratum of all belief in this island nation — there was already an unusually high preponderance of fantastical beings. Monsters are born from oblique, undealt-with emotions. We relegate to them what we dare not do, say or feel ourselves. I had come to Japan to trace a course between monsters past and present — and, in doing so, get a glimpse of the fears that still lie beneath the surface of this country’s preternatural composure.
GHOST EDUCATION
IN JAPAN, AS in Iceland, with its galaxy of elves, trolls and land spirits, there exists a folklore that is every bit its own. I had read of a tradition of yokai — a half-playful, half-terrifying world of demons, wraiths, ghosts, goblins and murderous enchantresses. “Superstitions with personalities,” the writers Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt (who are married) call them in their 2008 illustrated book, “Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide.” An architect I met in Tokyo told me that the supernatural is so intrinsic to Japanese culture that even everyday objects have their own spirits. As proof, he pulled up an image on his phone of the scroll known as “Night Procession of One Hundred Demons,” attributed to the artist Mitsunobu Tosa, who was active during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, depicting a malevolent umbrella, a drum with a reptilian body and 98 other animated items. Already in the 1700s, Japan had almanacs, gazettes, dictionaries and encyclopedias. At the time of the birth of the American republic, the poet and artist Sekien Toriyama began to produce his illustrated encyclopedias of yokai (published in 2017 in English under the title “Japandemonium”), which even then were both entertainment and folklore. Not unlike Godzilla, they represented the repurposing of old mythologies to meet the needs of a new time, through mass media, fads and crazes.
In his essay “Monster Evolution,” written in the early 20th century, the Japanese physicist Torahiko Terada says that monsters are among the “most outstanding masterpieces” of human creation — “legitimate children born from the contact between humans and nature,” sitting at the crossroads of religion, science and art. He credits the “ghost education” he received as a child for making him a better scientist. In being able to look at the orthodoxies of science through the “curved surface” of his “own ‘ghost mirror,’” Terada believed he was able to expand the scientific imagination. “If this mind-set disappears,” he wrote, “science will die.”
Japan, more than any other modern society on earth, has known the special violence that can arise at the nexus of mankind, nature and technology. It has seen typhoons, earthquakes and fires, as well as ruinous wars. In 2011, it experienced an event that seemed to combine elements from all of these tragedies. An earthquake struck near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, causing a tsunami, which in turn led to a nuclear meltdown. The irony and pain implicit in such a tragedy feels integral to Japan. The weather here, to quote Joan Didion on Los Angeles, is also “the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.” All this fed the Japanese imagination, which was endowed with a unique talent for ensouling meaning in figures and characters.
ONE NIGHT IN Hiroshima, in a coincidence for the ages, I found myself sitting on a stool in the street next to a young man, Jun Yoshida, who had come to the city to promote craft beer. As we awaited entry into a teppanyaki restaurant, he asked me what brought me to Japan. When I told him of my interest in monsters, he revealed that his father was a senior executive at the North American distributor of “Ultraman,” a legendary television series from the 1960s that pits superheroes against kaiju. It was created by Eiji Tsuburaya, who worked on the first “Godzilla” film and was a pioneer of Japanese special effects, or tokusatsu. Like Toriyama’s yokai encyclopedias, the films and TV shows were entertainment, to be sure, but also an expression of Japan’s lingering animism. “God,” Yoshida said, for want of a better word, “resides in everything, so please cherish each and every one.” Popular culture with that spiritual underlay is what gives these characters, be they yokai or kaiju, a kind of gravity, a seriousness, even as they were never wholly divorced from the element of make-believe.
In Tokyo, I sought out Yoda and Alt, in part because I had wanted to understand the connections between an old world of belief and its modern iterations. “Techno-animism” is the term that the cultural anthropologist Anne Allison uses in “Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination” (2006) to describe a sphere “where familiar forms have been broken down and reassembled into new hybridities,” whether machine, organic, human or, increasingly, digital. These implied continuities were difficult for an outsider such as myself to grasp. After a lunch of pickled mackerel over rice, Yoda took me to a small shrine in a side street, with a red lacquer torii (or gate). She had thought at first that the shrine was to a Shinto Inari, a divinity of sorts, but on closer inspection saw from the white letters that ran down the red banner that it was to a Japanese iteration of the Buddhist goddess Dakini. But this was much the point. “You see,” she said of religion in Japan, “it’s fundamentally additive.”
We were on our way to a shrine of another kind: Mandarake, an emporium of toys with a warren of rooms given over to individual passions: train sets, Godzilla, Ultraman — a veritable pantheon that easily threw together yokai with kaiju and Pokémon (“pocket monsters”). It was a physical testament to the capacious character of belief in Japan and its potential to bring new cults into its orbit. “In Japan, prayer and play are not necessarily exclusive,” Yoda said. Outside Mandarake, she pointed to an advertisement for a festival of good luck rakes — “you’re raking in your happiness.” Those of Abrahamic faiths tend to describe Japan as irreligious, but this is to misconstrue the texture of the sacred in this country, she said. Here the sacred is far more free flowing than in the West. No single divinity holds a monopoly on its distribution.
The fluidity of the sacred in Japan (as in India too) makes possible a great diversity of reverence and worship, where things big and small, light and dark, each need to be acknowledged in their own way. At lunch, Alt and Yoda had spoken of aratama and nigitama, rough and gentle spirits. These are not consigned to separate realms of good and evil, as they are in the Abrahamic religions; instead, malevolent and beneficent influences are in a perpetual dance. The sacred does not have to be attained but is already among us. During the height of the Covid pandemic, for instance, a 19th-century mermaid yokai called Amabie, with a beaked mouth, flowing hair and fishlike body, resurfaced in the popular imagination as a talisman of hope against the spread of disease. No one seriously believed she would ward off illness, but nor did they not believe; it was that half-world of myth recycled into a new fetish that was integral to the porous boundaries of belief in Japan. Just as it would be ridiculous to think of adding a book to the Bible, so, too, was it ridiculous here to think of belief as a closed circle. When I asked Yoda if people believed in yokai, she laughed. “I don’t know if belief comes into play in the yokai concept even back in time,” she said.
These partial states of belief, of fallen pantheons of gods and semi-divine beings, coexisting alongside those who had superseded them, were a feature of the Old World everywhere — in Rome, in Greece, in India (to this day) and even, to some extent, within Roman Catholicism. Cults rose and cults sank. Nothing was banished; no temples were cleared of idols. It all remained as part of the institutional memory of belief. Many old cultures, including that of Japan, imagined they lived in a concrete reality of visible things alongside that of a figmentary world of spirit peopled by unseen things. To live thus, distributing reverence as one saw fit, moving between science and superstition, was considered normal, even within Abrahamic religions, where it was possible to believe in the jealous unitary god of Moses while still retaining a side bet on jinns and poltergeists. It’s far more radical, in fact, to conceive of a scientific temper that demands the disavowal of superstition and the spiritual world. I suspect it was these new hard lines erected in the 20th century fencing off one system of belief from another that the physicist Terada was rebelling against for, even today, in any number of places, versions of his ghost education are alive and well.
I WAS SURPRISED by my discomfort at Mandarake. I thought at first that it had to do with having grown up an only child with a single mother, wanting nothing so much as to be part of the world of adults. I have never not been bored by comic books (manga), animation (anime) and video games, but the source of my unease at Mandarake, a vast toy shop with a largely adult clientele, came from a suspicion of prurience in this adult fascination with children’s things. I had read of a culture of withdrawal in Japan, represented by certain words such as hikikomori (“pulling inward” or “self-confinement”) and otaku (a polite second-person pronoun like “thou” or “thee” used to describe an obsessive fan whose ruling passion allows him to retreat from social life). This culture had produced a species of man-child for whom the real world beyond, with all its ability to ambush you with unpredictable experiences, was intolerable. He (for it was mostly men, but not always) chose instead to withdraw into a sexless virtual sphere, governed by the private law of shared interest. To me, such a phenomenon was tantamount to a fear of life, a pathological need for safety in which all of life’s terrors and joys were cautiously toned down into controllable stimuli. The contagion was in the West too, where a superfandom (of “Lord of the Rings” or Taylor Swift) now reigned and people actively exchanged the real world for the cosseting protections of other worlds, electing to commune with their fellow human beings not in all their fullness but only as ciphers of a devouring passion.
Alt, who loved toys, robots and monsters, described the otaku as one “who consumes something that eventually consumes him,” but he defended the advent of the superfan. He saw in it a way to cope with a loss of agency in an increasingly complex world. Alt felt it was natural that people, when faced with different forms of heavily mediated reality, should want to retreat into fantasy spaces of their own making. Speaking about the ways Japan blurs lines between childhood and adulthood, the feminine and masculine, he used the word “infantilism,” which made his wife bristle. Playfulness, she protested, was not the prerogative of children. “Even a grandpa can play!” Yoda said. Alt withdrew the freighted word, acknowledging that it had an ugly history. In World War II, U.S. propaganda depicted the Japanese as subhuman. Evidence of atrocities — such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937-38, Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Bataan Death March of 1942 and the 1945 Battle of Manila — presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946-48, an international court modeled on Nuremberg, seemed to paint the Japanese as a race apart, even after the crimes of the Nazis were public knowledge. That dehumanization, which started with monstrous depictions of the Japanese during the war, had prepared the ground (many felt) for dropping the atomic bomb. The other side of demonization was infantilization. “Measured by the standards of modern civilization,” said General MacArthur in 1951, the Japanese “would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years [of age].”
Japan, in turn, seemed almost to have internalized its experience of caricature in the postwar years, speaking to the world beyond through an export of monsters, a set of nonhuman characters who were in effect supercaricatures. Godzilla was by far the fiercest, a beast of destruction and vengeance, but the creature culture he engendered eventually graded into the cloying cuteness of Hello Kitty in the 1970s. Many of these characters were as nuanced as any human character might have been, but each represented an unwillingness to reveal the human self, a kind of hiding in plain sight. After all, no society had known the corrosive power of an alien gaze as directly as Japan. How unsurprising, then, yet wonderful somehow that it should fall back on the imagination, always a kind of armor, as a way to prepare a mask to meet the hostile faces that one meets.
As the first non-Western nation to attain Western levels of industrialization, Japan had always been the Supreme Other, a mirror in which people saw reflections of themselves. I was no different. The spiritual culture of Japan was hardly exotic to me but, whereas spirituality in India was used to explain away the country’s failure to master the scientific world, in Japan I was confronted by a dazzling mastery of technology, industry and economy. Japan’s cities, its infrastructure and its systems were the envy of the world. Spirituality here was not the dirty cop-out it was in India, but did Japan’s progress come at a cost? Was something vague, unnamable yet quintessentially Asian lost somehow? Community, conviction, vigor? The question had to be asked, because it was against the ennui of this postindustrial landscape that its modern monsters arose. In these cities, rebuilt from the rubble of war, one felt a distinct hush, a melancholy, an overpowering sense of meals bought and consumed alone. Away from the crowds and stacked lights of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, lonely old people trudged home with their shopping. The country seemed to possess an urban sadness that anticipated late-industrial conditions everywhere, and it was what Godzilla, like the suppressed seed of a darker impulse, returned generation after generation to shatter, shake up and (perhaps) invigorate.
THE SHAPE-SHIFTERS
BEFORE MY PILGRIMAGE to Toho Studios, the home of Godzilla in Tokyo, I wanted to spend some time around an earlier folklore, without which it was impossible to imagine the kaiju of the present era. In Kyoto, at Toei Studio Park, amid film sets of Edo-period towns, there was a nocturnal parade of yokai every Sunday evening. Threading their way through ninja and samurai there walked yamamba, the mountain hag, and feline beauties with blue hair. There were three-eyed gorgons with tall black hats and a Cyclopean dorotabo (a muddy rice field man), whose drunkard son had sold the land he had tilled diligently all his life. Avenging the injustice, his restless spirit stalked paddies. These were characters of ancient folklore who lived within the collective imagination of Japan, and who could be summoned up at any time.
I went to the park with Junya Kohno, 42, a Kyoto-born university lecturer who had recently devoted himself entirely to this world of spectral beings.
He wore steel-rimmed glasses and a fedora, gliding among the yokai in a Nehru-collared shirt and a beige cape. Wraiths, ghouls and enchantresses marched in procession, then gathered on a stage and plunged into a danse macabre. Crowds gathered while the yokai made a spectacle of their spookiness. Watching Kohno, a confessed otaku, try to turn yokai into a made-for-Instagram business, hoping to exploit the public’s growing fascination by holding paid yokai-themed events, I doubted the authenticity of what I was witnessing. But what was interesting about Japan was that whereas tradition could feel false, the seed of tradition, carried forward into the industrialized present, with all its channels of dissemination, felt incredibly real. Japan, like much of the old non-West, had once sought to forgo what might make it look ridiculous in Western eyes. During the Meiji period, writes Allison in “Millennial Monsters,” Japan’s “new forward-looking leadership” tried to eradicate all forms of superstition, including the lightly held belief in entities such as yokai. But belief is never more powerful than when it’s either casually held or actively stamped out. “A fascination with monsters (bakemono)” — a kind of shape-shifter — “and other ‘strange’— supernatural, mysterious and fantastic — things (fushigi) endured into the 20th century, stimulated by the very endeavors intended to contain it,” Allison observes.
Yokai are said to lurk on the edge of the known world, almost as if they represented forces banished by the spread of modern municipality and electrical lighting. The outskirts of Kyoto, the capital of Japan for more than 1,000 years and a symbol of urbanity, are a favorite haunt. Kohno, driven both by material motivations and nostalgia, wanted to write a new chapter in the book of yokai. “It reminds us of the past we lost,” he said, suggesting that the growing preoccupation with yokai had a deeper origin. Japan had been robbed of so much of its material past during the war with the firebombing of its cities. It had rebuilt along Western lines and turned its back on so many physical expressions of its culture. The country experienced an impoverishment that is felt through much of the developing world today. It fed a hunger for other kinds of cultural nourishment such as folklore. These had been expelled in order to meet Western ideas of modernity, but they lived on in the unconscious of the society and, once the demystification of the landscape was complete, they were sorely missed.
GODZILLA
NONE OF THIS — not the war, nor defeat, nor the sense of cultural subjugation at the hands of a triumphant West — was incidental to the birth of Godzilla. Ishiro Honda, the director of the first “Godzilla” film, had passed through the ruined city of Hiroshima while returning to Japan from China, where he was stationed during the war. The studio head Tsuburaya himself had spent the war making models of battleships, naval ports and army bases. Tomoyuki Tanaka, the film’s producer, drew his inspiration for Godzilla directly from the secret detonation of a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb (1,000 times the atomic power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) by the United States on March 1, 1954, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A Japanese fishing boat called Lucky Dragon No. 5 was exposed to the fallout from the explosion, and one crew member died from radiation poisoning shortly after. Given what Japan had been through, this incident, in its smallness and futility, must have seemed the unkindest cut of all, allowing the society to recall in miniature the magnitude of what it had endured.
Everyone I met in Japan had their own version of what Godzilla represented. Here was an amphibious monster to whom an ancient origin had been retrofitted. He started out at 164 feet, growing into a 984-foot behemoth with dorsal plates, atomic breath and a prehensile tail. Godzilla was not so much born as he was awakened from his 400-million-year slumber at the bottom of the sea by U.S. nuclear testing. He was undeniably a cultural response to Western power, yet he was homegrown, a mutation himself of yokai and a Western love of the movies. Almost 40 films later, of which 30 were produced by Toho, he belongs as much to Hollywood as to Tokyo, but it is only in Japan that he can be understood in all his complexity as the barometer of the national mood. He is a villain and hero, savior and destroyer. He sometimes speaks to a threat from beyond, other times to inner fears. His contradictions are those of the Japanese soul itself. This is, after all, a country that has been both victim and perpetrator, now racing to catch up with the West, now streaking ahead of it, now shrugging off colonial domination, now doing a little dominating of its own. It has felt the sting of racial prejudice, even as it has been prejudiced against other Asian nations. It has been both inward looking and outward looking, an island nation as well as a colonial power, both actor and acted upon. Godzilla is the sum of these contraries, a symbol of Japan’s convulsed history.
Yoda said she believed he stood for “the illogical things in humans,” or anger from nature. “That’s why Japanese people don’t see Godzilla as the enemy,” she said. Kohno felt he represented human guilt. “Godzilla did not want to be born,” he said, “but humans created him — but human beings want to kill him. It fills us with pity.” This emotion of having to kill what you have birthed felt demonstrably different from that which runs through Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to his monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818), though I couldn’t immediately say why. Godzilla’s makers could have chosen to invent him from scratch, but they elected to root him in mythology so that he was at once old and new, modern and traditional, a living link to the continuities of the past titrated by the scientific present. Though he spoke to some of the same fears as Frankenstein’s monster, Godzilla felt more like the product of a collective imagining. His makers also owed a cinematic debt to the American movie “King Kong” (1933). These interconnected layers of media and provenance each play their part in the complexity of Godzilla but, to be clear, neither Europe nor America has ever asserted the same sense of ownership over Frankenstein or King Kong as Japan does over Godzilla.
On a gray afternoon in Tokyo, I went at last to Toho Studios in the residential neighborhood of Seijo. I arrived early and watched a group of Japanese tourists gather in a semicircle around the Godzilla statue at the studio’s entrance. To my left was a giant black-and-white mural of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (1954). The two films, working in very different spaces, one horror and sci-fi, the other high cinema, speak to the tremendous creative vitality of postwar Japan. An older man in orange painter’s clothes on a blue lift was touching up the mural. With the arrival of the studio’s president, Mitsuru Shimada, a man in his 50s in a dark suit, and Kohei Umino (a.k.a. Dr. Godzilla), a solemn 35-year-old in a green jacket and cream-colored T-shirt who served as the global brand manager for Godzilla, I learned that the man on the lift was Masao Hanawa, 65, the original muralist, who also worked for years on churches in Italy. He explained, as Umino translated, that he was renovating the mural, despite knowing that it will eventually be repainted.
Once we were inside Toho, a low-lying gray complex, Umino took me to “the secretest of secret rooms,” as he called it, a vault of sorts that housed the replicas of the original Godzilla costumes. There we met Kohei Sugiyama, who was restoring models of Godzilla’s foes such as the three-headed dragon, King Ghidorah. A bald man with a face full of laughter, he told me that Godzilla had been a metaphor for the war but, by the 1960s, everyone had begun to forget the war. The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 ushered in a climate of optimism, he said, and the “Godzilla” films of that era were relegated to entertainment. Yet these periods of peace and stability in Japan were invariably bookended by the return of calamity. The hubris of the 1980s ran smack into the economic stagnation of the 1990s. Then the new century rolled along, bringing with it a host of new terrors, not least of which was the meltdown at Fukushima. “Now we have to tell the fear again,” Sugiyama said, referring to the penultimate film, “Shin Godzilla” (2016), in which the monster born of atomic fears returns to his origins, as it were.
During my time in Japan, I had become aware of a tendency here to paper over the great convulsions of history, making them seem tidier (and less emotional) than they must really have been. This was never truer than about the war. A few days earlier, in Tokyo’s Chiyoda neighborhood, I’d made a point of visiting a monument erected by the Japanese at Yasukuni Shrine to the Indian justice Radhabinod Pal. The Bengali judge sat on the tribunal presiding over the Tokyo trial, which was convened in 1946 with the gargantuan task of bringing the Japanese militarists to justice while shielding its emperor from blame, as well as handing down a precedent in international law for the ages. Pal, having agreed to sit on the court, issued a Himalayan dissent of some 1,200 pages that questioned the legality of the court itself. Many, in turn, have questioned the legal soundness of his judgment, but few have doubted the emotion behind it. As one of the few Asians on the panel, he was the only judge to bring up issues of racism, anticolonialism and hypocrisy. His dissent excoriated the court for its highhandedness and its wish to make an example of an Asian nation so brutally vanquished. Pal was only too aware that unspeakable atrocities had been committed on both sides, yet only one was in the dock. The cult of hero worship by Japanese nationalists that sprang up around Pal in the postwar years is as suspect as his judgment, but there is no denying that he gave voice to an anguish related to Western hegemony and moral grandstanding that’s still felt today.
Shuttling between Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, eating my lunch aboard the Shinkansen (or bullet train) in time-honored tradition, I had been intrigued by what lay beneath Japanese decorum. It was so extreme that even the messiness of history was not exempt. I could not help but wonder if, behind all that poise and self-possession and perhaps a wish to keep foreigners at arm’s length, there was not some kind of raw emotion that I had been shut out of. When manners are so blanketing, and the pressure to meet rigid cultural norms so oppressive, then perhaps a monster comes along that allows us the luxury of having our guts hang out a little.
IN THOSE LAST hours at Toho Studios, I had the privilege of seeing the mask slip a little and of witnessing the pain of history laid bare. Umino was questioning Shimada, 20 years his senior, as to how Japanese children were educated about the war and how they were taught that Japanese militarism was to blame for the disaster that befell their country. For a while, the two men echoed a lack of rancor that was almost alarming in a people on whom an atomic bomb had been dropped.
I pressed them on how Japanese audiences could, in film after film, witness the ritual destruction of rebuilt Japanese cities at the hands of Godzilla yet feel such sorrow upon his death. Umino put my question to his older colleague and the answer surprised me. “We get so angry, so upset at everything,” Shimada said, his soft voice belying the strength of his emotion. He likened the satisfaction Godzilla made them feel to that of a child rampaging through its toys, all but confessing that Godzilla was not just a metaphor for the war but also for the feelings of powerlessness that came afterward. “Godzilla destroys everything in that movie,” Umino said, “and at the end of the movie, Godzilla is killed by a very new weapon. It’s so pitiful.” That word had come up in almost every conversation I had had about the great kaiju. The mood in the room now grew somber. Umino and Shimada exchanged glances, then, turning to me, the younger man said, “Godzilla is similar to the Japanese people. We see our own death through him in that movie.”
We sat awhile just like that, not moving, letting the force of what had just been said sink in. This was an island society, formal, guarded, a touch reticent around outsiders, but utterly devoted to a serious interrogation of its culture. I had come, a wheeling stranger in their midst, prodding them about the nature of Godzilla and such. They heard me out; then, like a gift to a visitor, they decided to let me in on a secret and now, in an instant, the veil was rent. A searing analogy had been drawn between the nation never allowed to look away from the prospect of its own destruction, like someone witnessing their own funeral, and the monster they had conjured from that trauma.
I had been living so long with the darkness of Godzilla in Japan. Stepping out into the chill autumn air, I felt the unexpected relief of an invalid who cannot say why he feels well again. It was the first time in six months that I was free of monsters.
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