Introduction

To use early Japanese films to study, the most dominant and influential film series is Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira) which exposes many Japanese film themes that are dominant in other films, and genres including anime. In the Godzilla movies, the positioning of the monster "Other" differentiates the Japanese films from their American releases. Godzilla is another form of other; the apocalyptic "other," calling forth images of the World War II Japanese apocalypse. Godzilla’s destructive path is a re-enactment of the atomic bomb experience, a figure which works to alleviate the traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by substituting the US's calculated motives for the destruction with the beast's overt animalistic, natural instinct for chaos and death - this instinct being easier to contend with, or Japan’s conception of, the dark realpolitik of the US government.

The difference in perceiving "Other" between the two cultures is further drawn out by the identification involved with Godzilla. Godzilla films equate the monster with the atomic bomb, and Noriega shows how the Japanese versions, by symbolically repeating the trauma of Hiroshima, establish the monster as an "archetype of Japanese horror that explicates the present."

For Americans, however, the Other is overcome, and Godzilla's death "represses American guilt and anxieties about nuclear weapons" (Noriega). The Japanese embrace the bomb/monster into their cultural conscience, whereas Americans push it away.

godzilla

introduction

genesis

evolution

conclusion