Godzilla: Symbol of the Bomb, or Japanese Aggression?

Growing up watching AMC’s ‘Monsterfest’ (back when it still featured monster movies and not stupid slasher flicks), or TNT’s glorious ‘Monstervison’ marathons, many American kids of my generation were exposed to the gloriously cheesy spectacle of grown men in rubber suits tearing their way through miniature replicas of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, confronting toy airplanes and remote-controlled tanks as they made their way across the sound stage, and sometimes stopping to battle one another in royal rumbles that made professional wrestling look like classic theatre in comparison.

Hours upon weeks were spent vegetating in front of the tube, totally content and unaware of the wider world beyond the flickering screen.

But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t worth it.

More than a decade later, as an aspiring “mature” American citizen, I am now (mostly) concerned with the “real world”- the rough world of democratic election cycles, life-changing career choices, and the evening news programs that bored me terribly as a youngster. On yesterday’s anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I spent a little while sitting and wondering what it would have been like to know the veterans who witnessed that fateful tragedy, an event that effectively changed the course of history (and one that proved to be a huge mistake by the Japanese Empire).

And then, not surprisingly, I found my thoughts turning once again to Godzilla.

From 1954 to 2004, the “Big G” starred in no less than 28 movies (compared with 22 films for James Bond), not counting the much-disliked 1998 American adaptation. While many of these movies are about as deep as your average episode of ‘Power Rangers,’ some films in the franchise are conspicuously concerned with the terrible events that inspired the first film.

When ‘Gojira’ (renamed ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ in the U.S.) was released in 1954, Japanese audiences clearly perceived the parallels to the experience of WWII, and most critics who are familiar with the film take it as a metaphor particularly for the horrors suffered by the Japanese in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla rampages through the crowded cities, engulfs buildings with radioactive fire, and annihilates any military force that dares oppose him, until (SPOILER!) finally being put to rest by Dr. Serizawa’s deadly super-weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer.

The atom bomb metaphor has been the conventional wisdom of fans for decades, but here’s my thought: What if the Japanese characters in the film were taken to represent American citizens and scientists? What if Godzilla’s unprecedented invasion of Japan were a metaphor for the Imperial Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that followed? What if the use of the “Oxygen Destroyer” is in fact a symbol for – you guessed it- dropping the bomb?

After Hiroshima disappeared under a cloud of destruction, the co-pilot of the B-29 Bomber, the Enola Gay, famously wrote these words: “My God, what have we done?” Clearly the feelings of those involved in the event that ended the Pacific conflict were clouded and ambivalent. How could they not be? But the war had to be brought to an end, and a possible land invasion of Japan was judged to be too great a risk at the time.

Hence the line uttered by the character Ogata that finally convinces Dr. Serizawa to unleash the Oxygen Destroyer on Godzilla, despite the effect that such a weapon may have on the world:

“You have your fear, which may become reality. And you have Godzilla, which is reality.”

So then, Godzilla may not in fact be a symbol of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at all, nor may he symbolize a mere natural disaster, as he has been portrayed in so many films since. Rather, perhaps the King of the Monsters is a symbol of the totalitarian behemoth that rampaged across China and Southeast Asia, and woke a sleeping giant with an attack on Pearl Harbor in the year 1941. And, like tyranny itself, he returns to plague mankind again and again, prompting the creation of new tactics, the production of more effective weaponry, and challenging each new generation to protect their nation's liberty.

And then again, maybe I’m just an adult shamelessly grasping for a reason to watch giant monster movies. (No apologies!)