Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4
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Monster of Mourning, Ritual of Remembering: Ishirô Honda’s Gojira / Sigmund Shen
Abstract: It is widely accepted among scholars that Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954) contains an allegory for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scenes involving Dr. Serizawa, the scientist who destroys the monster and commits suicide, reveal a combination of ambivalent affect, psychological defenses, and ritualistic body language that are inadequately explained by the nuclear metaphor, and suggest a more deeply repressed subtext. I argue that these moments allude to regret over the Meiji Era westernization of Japanese culture and guilt for an “open secret” of wartime biological weapons research and human experimentation conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army.
I. Introduction: Meaning and Methodology
<1> Works of science fiction and fantasy can offer speculations about the future, but they can also provide us with surprising ways to remember and abreact the past. A few days after the 2010 meltdown in Fukushima, Peter Wynn Kirby wrote an essay in The New York Times about nuclear anxiety in Japanese film, noting that in November 1954, ten years after Hiroshima, “Japanese audiences […] watched Gojira in somber silence, broken by periodic weeping.” “Believe it or not,” recalled the film’s director Ishirô Honda, “we naïvely hoped that the end of Godzilla was going to coincide with the end of nuclear testing."
<2> In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag writes that 'the imagery of disaster in science fiction films is above all the emblem of an inadequate response [...] The interest of the films [...] consists in this intersection between a naïvely and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.'" (48) But as we’ve seen in recent films like Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Argo (2012), the realist mode can be a problematic choice too. An interesting compromise between Honda’s hopefulness and Sontag’s skepticism can be found in the work of Cynthia Erb, whose book Tracking King Kong is the most comprehensive scholarly study in English of the King Kong movies, their production history, and their cultural significance. About halfway through her book, Erb steps aside from her focus to devote a full chapter to Gojira (1954) (1), remarking that the film’s depiction of the human toll of war has a “poignant quality not to be found in comparable American monster films” (149). In her argument, it is exactly the outlandish element of such monster movies that imbues them with a uniquely haunting and potentially cathartic quality: “In the surrealist aesthetic, King Kong is both primitive and automaton – a doubly coded figure of the uncanny, invested with the power to inspire in the civilized spectator a memory of the archaic realm of nature” (110).
<3> Many of the films of the “giant monster movie” or daikaiju eiga (Japanese, “big mysterious creature cinema”) subgenre are oddly compelling spectacles, worthy of Erb’s description in that they construct complex symbols which suggest fleeting and distorted glimpses into a repressed unconscious. In this essay, I will argue that, through a combination of words, silence, symbolic action, and subtly ritualistic body language, a major human character in the first Godzilla film evokes guilt and mourning over the history of Japanese military atrocities during World War II, some of which are still hidden or denied today.
<4> Because many aspects of this history are remarkably painful, and some are contested, I would like to clarify the limitations of my chosen method up front. I am attempting to illuminate a socio-historical record via close theoretical readings of a filmic text that I believe alludes to that record. As Cynthia Erb’s work on King Kong draws its power and interest from a similar melding of research and critical analysis, I am mindful of her caution that such an approach may risk assuming that her “own patterns of interpretation” directly correspond to the experience of “historical film audiences” (252). I am especially aware of the questions that any U.S. critic does and should invite by taking it upon herself to unearth suppressed history in a film from Japan, almost sixty years after its conception and distribution. Erb points out, though, that confining one’s scholarship to abundantly documented history and recorded audience reception could leave one’s analysis limited by discursive patterns of attention and omission, which in the case of the King Kong films has truncated our understanding of the perspectives and insight of “marginalized people long ignored by the traditional academy” (162), and in the case of Gojira, I believe, has robbed an important character of his nuance, and blunted the film’s psychological and sociopolitical challenges.
<5> Erb would also warn us that even the most conscientious interpretation is forged in the context of ideological pressures, yielding “highly negotiated forms of commentary” and “compromise text” (188, 190). U.S. critics must be especially attentive to such reminders. But as cultural scholars presented with images that, even in the 1950’s, were already “global” in conception, production, and distribution, we also recognize that potentially, all texts are “compromise texts,” and fantasy films themselves quite obviously so, in their unabashed contortions of realist conventions. Such negotiation with various forms of power can even lead to a failure to fulfill desire that ironically helps to renew the elaborative impulse. Despite their fantastical trappings, science fiction technology, and utopian visions of international cooperation, the so-far interminable production of the Godzilla movies begun by Ishirô Honda may be driven not so much by the confident imaginings of a more humane future as by the sense that there are many things that were hoped for in the past that are still undone, or done wrong, or misremembered. The resulting expostulations of regret may then be seen as a compulsion to re-member the past differently, to strain to figure out what went wrong and somehow, even if in fantasy, “get it right.” Thus, in contradistinction to the usual case, explained by Erb, where “the cultural endurance of an artifact increases in proportion to its capacity to fulfill an assortment of desired functions when first exhibited” (24), the Godzilla series may be so enduring because, from the start, it was always-already a failure of catharsis, the sequels chasing with diminishing efficacy and credibility but self-refreshing hope after an unreachable goal.
<6> What could this unreachable goal be? As director Honda put it, one must have been “the end of nuclear testing.” But if it’s possible that another has to do with the hidden practices of Japan’s own government during World War II, then we should look for metaphors of a more subtle construction.
II. Folk Fantasy and American Nightmares
<7> Before Commodore Perry opened the country to western politico-commercial interests, and before cinema even existed as a mass media art form, various “monsters” were already sites of political conflict in Japan. In his book, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Gerald Figal describes popular forms of “misemono (exhibitions, sideshows)” (21) in the late 19th century, whereby beliefs of folklore and fantasy were re-presented by and for urban Japanese as communal spectacle analogous to the traveling freak shows of contemporaneous rural America. Public interest in folk monsters such as tengu, yokai, and bakemono consistently peaked around the very moments when socio-political tensions erupted into visible unrest, and narratives of how such fantasy creatures were unleashed and subdued are interpreted by some Japanese scholars as allegories, not only of government ineptitude and assertion of authority, but also of the triumphs and suppressions of “peasants, disgruntled samurai, religious groups, [and] opposition parties” (Figal 23).
<8> Figal finds that bureaucratic intolerance for the old folk spectacles of bakemono became more pronounced and strident after the arrival of Commodore Perry and during the Emperor’s ensuing efforts to centralize authority and “westernize” Japan during the Meiji Restoration (25). Such intolerance was embodied in sweeping, elaborate discipline-mechanisms that included cultural propaganda and sometimes outright legislation enabling administrative repression. As part of such “modernization” campaigns, bakemono performances were quickly supplanted by “items of entertainment appropriate to civilization and enlightenment [such as … ] the gramophone, the Edison kinetoscope, and eventually cinema” (26). Thus, street performances that involved ghosts and goblins were in a way displaced by cinematic treatments of giant monsters. These monster movies therefore originate in and take part in a longstanding tradition of artistic practice that is historically, culturally, and psychologically charged.
<9> One cultural critic of the Meiji period, a government “monsterologist” named Yanagita Kunio, collected and analyzed weird Japanese folk tales much like Freud and Jung catalogued dreams, convinced that the stranger the story, the more elaborate the fancy, the more interesting and/or important must be the idea being repressed and/or the reaction repressing it: “And is not that the purpose of critique, to reveal the shō-tai, the true form, of the monsters that modernity has spawned?” (Figal 185). At this time, the United States was already a threatening and incomprehensible spectre for some Japanese, as Commodore Perry’s shocking display of naval superiority had created unprecedented geopolitical shock waves comparable in scope to the later atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese popular culture scholar David Kalat argues that because of this historical context, Japanese filmic allegories of United States hegemony should be understood as symptoms of a national trauma.
<10> Inviting his reader to imagine what would have happened in the United States if, right after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government were somehow supplanted by Al Qaeda, Kalat points out that emotions of resentment and anger “would still need to be vented, but they could not be vented openly or honestly. In such a case, they would have to emerge in some twisted, mutated form. They would emerge in some kind of disguise” (3). Historian Yoshikuni Igarashi shares Kalat’s implicit point that the repressed meanings of mass media productions can be unearthed using psychoanalytic tools, recognizing that memories and images of the United States re-emerged in Japanese cinema productions as monstrous dreams (Igarashi 105). But it doesn’t require much work to imagine Japanese moviegoers fearing Americans, or Americans hating Al Qaeda. Any implied critique of Japan’s own authority figures, the facts of which are incendiary even today, would need to be subjected to more intricate forms of cultural dream work.
<11> American historian William Tsutsui makes clear that the symbolism of Godzilla was always recognized as complex. In addition to the giant monsters of the mountains and sea of Japanese folklore; the natural disasters such as volcanoes, tsunami, and earthquakes that comprise the island nation’s geohistorical inheritance; and the inspiration of Hollywood films like King Kong and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), (Tsutsui 16—20); Japanese moviegoers in the 1950’s also saw parallels to pro wrestling idol Rikidozan (53, 100) and the critique of Meiji westernization efforts that were expressed by nationalist folk hero Saigo Takamori (220). The allusions to World War II, of course, were never hidden. Ishirô Honda said he wanted Godzilla’s roar to sound like an air-raid siren (Brothers 66) and “the monster’s second apocalyptic attack on Tokyo [was] a virtual recreation of the Tokyo fire-raid that took place on March 9, 1945 that killed over 100,000 people” (Brothers 67). The nuclear age resonance of this wartime metaphor was likewise manifest. Honda admitted that the monster’s destructive fire breath was “an attempt to make ‘radiation visible’” (Brothers 45). Tsutsui points out that the monster suit did not emulate the smooth scales of a healthy reptile but the damaged skin of a blasted victim: “thick and furrowed like the keloid scars” (33). Indeed, Honda states, “The number one question concerning [Gojira] was the fear connected to what was then known as the atomic bomb […] when I returned from the war and passed through Hiroshima, there was a heavy atmosphere – a fear the Earth was already coming to an end. That became my basis” (Kalat 16). Honda’s producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, also saw the film as a way of framing Hiroshima as a traumatic collapse of civilization: “[Godzilla is] the son of the atomic bomb. […] He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse” (Tsutsui 87).
<12> Such a blunt reminder of the horrors of World War II, less than ten years after the destruction of Hiroshima, in a nation that was under U.S. occupation until recently, and whose constitution had been rewritten to discourage any expression or incitement of militarist feelings, could hardly fail to attract attention. United States censors starting banning Japanese filmmakers from producing depictions of Hiroshima in 1945 (Hirano 59—65), and even when restrictions were eased seven years later, a general reluctance of mainstream artists and moviegoers to delve into the topic seem to evidence a period of effective self-censorship. David Kalat explains that in such a repressive context, Gojira can be seen as a breakthrough: it “allowed Japanese filmmakers to discuss Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Bikini Island tests in a sort of code, using Godzilla as a symbol for ideas that were too painful to address directly” (158). (2)
<13> The nuclear metaphor of Gojira, far from being an academic discovery irrelevant to casual moviegoers, has always been painfully evident in Japan. The opening sequence aboard a fishing vessel that is attacked by the monster is a direct reference to the “Lucky Dragon” incident, when Japanese fishermen were exposed to the radiation from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test. This event had triggered a national panic and renewed outrage over U.S. nuclear technology (Kalat 32—33). The film also shows, after Godzilla’s raid on Tokyo, a hospital filled with the dying. In a scene reminiscent of relief efforts after Hiroshima, a doctor scans a little girl with a geiger counter, then turns to her nurse and shakes his head. Honda biographer Peter H. Brothers says
Godzilla drew in nearly 10 million Japanese – one out of every nine people living in Japan at the time went to see it – Japanese who were now able to deal with such horrific images of their not-so-distant past; indeed, the film’s apparent cathartic effect was best described by horror film historian Carlos Clarens as “…an exorcistic reenactment of the catastrophe of Hiroshima.” (72)
Thus, Godzilla’s nuclear subtext is not in question, especially in Japan. Yet despite U.S. efforts to impose official censorship and the sensitive intercultural negotiations of the postwar era, the fact that there had been a war that had ended in two nuclear bombings was never deeply repressed anyway. Beneath the manifest symbols of a dream may lurk latent content, more difficult to excavate, and not fully explored by existing criticism of the Godzilla series.
III. The Mystery of Japanese Guilt
<14> William Tsutsui perceives a triumphalist strain at the end of Gojira, noticing that right after the monster is destroyed by the Japanese scientist, Akira Ifukube’s music sounds reminiscent of Japan’s national anthem (35). Yet it would be careless to read Gojira as an unreflectingly nationalistic propaganda film. Ishirô Honda married an outspoken leftist writer, took as his creative partner on several of the Godzilla films a Communist screenwriter named Takashi Kimura, and publicly stated that he “was against the war” (Brothers 33). It would be equally facile to characterize Gojira as something on the cognitive level of Anna Freud’s childhood dream about strawberries. In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Sontag remarks that “[t]here is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it touching, some of it depressing,” (46) and her complaints about unchallenging science fiction are a clear influence on Susan Napier’s essay “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira.” Napier categorizes Gojira as “secure horror,” noting that the conclusion of the film (which she regards as a happy ending) arranges for “‘good’ Japanese science to triumph against the evil monster. The film thus offered its immediate postwar Japanese audience an experience that was both cathartic and compensatory, allowing them to rewrite or at least to reimagine their tragic wartime experiences” (332). (Considering the simmering postwar relationship between the two cultures, Napier’s choice of the word “rewrite” almost sounds like an accusation.) Corroborating this reading, Tsutsui ventures that to “a Japanese populace that […] wished to see itself as the victim – rather than the aggressor – in the recently ended war, Gojira’s implications could in some ways prove very welcome and therapeutic” (37).
<15> Neither a simply self-victimizing, anti-American polemic, nor a magical wish-fulfillment, Gojira and many of its sequels present a more ambivalent and complex puzzle than such interpretations suggest. One problem with the former reading is that Godzilla is first identified by island fisherman as one of their own local deities. This native association is maintained throughout the series, whether Godzilla is depicted as a threatening force of nature in the 1960s or a defending superhero in the 1970s. And Japanese and Western critics alike have repeatedly raised the obvious question: if the filmmakers are trying to emphasize that America is where the real guilt for the war and the nuclear attack lies, then what wish is fulfilled when the local native turns around and destroys Tokyo and other cities in Japan instead of New York or Washington D.C. (Anisfield 57; Igarashi 115; Noriega 71)? Tsutsui recalls that after giving a presentation at a nearby elementary school about his book’s topic, one of the schoolchildren asked him if Americans enjoy seeing Japanese people die in Godzilla movies (206). Awkward enough, but the next question must then be: do Japanese audiences enjoy it too?
<16> In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson reminds us that the shared memory of tragedy can become part of the impetus for a national people to unite. But in “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud points out that the very compulsion to commemorate such tragedy can often be driven by a less apparent element of self-reproach. This self-reproach is largely missing from Tsutsui’s analysis of guilt in the Godzilla series, which he catalogs as “the guilt of survival, recovery, and forgetfulness” (37). A guilt of “recovery” would include ambivalence over the economic prosperity and even more accelerated westernization that followed the war. In her book Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation 1945—1952, Kyoko Hirano notes that the “belief that the Pacific war was […] between Japanese ‘spirituality’ and American ‘materialism’ or ‘science’ was widely propagated in Japan” (23). In a film that American reporters labeled “anti-American” (Kalat 181) named Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), a former Japanese soldier, rescued by Godzilla during the war, is poignantly “remembered” and then cut down by the monster decades after he left the military and reaped millions in the 1980’s real estate bubble. As producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who first conceived the idea of Godzilla and brought it to Toho, says, “Japan is rich and people can buy whatever they want […] But what is behind that wealth? Nothing very spiritual. Everyone’s concerned with the material, and then Godzilla comes and rips it all apart. I suspect that is good for us to see” (qtd. in Tsutsui 73). Thus the guilt of “recovery” that Tsutsui mentions, while undeniably in evidence, should be understood as a symptom of cultural essentialism: look how western, how spiritually impoverished our nation has become, compared to her proud past. How guilty we should feel for allowing the betrayal of such an exceptional legacy!
<17> The guilt of “survival” and “forgetfulness” that Tsutsui diagnoses are equally entangled with nationalist tendencies. Survivor’s guilt over the forgotten sacrifices of military servicemen is certainly alluded to in the original film’s construction of affect: Akira Ifukube, who composed the iconic score for Gojira and many of its sequels, imagined the monster as embodying the ghosts of slain Japanese soldiers (Igarashi 114). This gloomy metaphor returned as an explicit plot point in a pointedly reactionary installment that featured a noble military officer: GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001) (the word for “all-out attack,” sokogeki, was also part of the title of an infamous film named Singapore All-Out Attack [1943], which occupation forces later found so propagandistic that they did not even attempt to censor it: they simply banned the whole movie [Hirano 42]). Thus the three forms of ostensible guilt Tsutsui identifies in Godzilla films are all consistent with a sense of national pride that had once served the Japanese war effort, but are in contradiction with the avowed political views of the series’ founding director.
<18> In “The Question of German Guilt” Karl Jaspers identifies what he calls “metaphysical guilt” (Buruma 150). A relative of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the term provides a way of describing communal responsibility for, or at least complicity with, destructive and inhumane acts on a mass scale. Just a year after Hiroshima, filmmaker Itami Mansaku courageously published an essay in his homeland assigning blame for the horrors of the war upon the uncritical obedience of both American and Japanese citizens (Buruma 260). Of course, the more general and sweeping the condemnation, the more banal the observation itself risks becoming. But is it possible that Gojira and its sequels are meant to stir an uneasy sense of specifically Japanese, and not just universally “human,” guilt for actions taken during the war?
<19> At the end of Gojira, the scene of the creature’s annihilation is marked by the affect of grief. With a striking similarity to George Orwell’s Burmese elephant, the beast is stalked to its natural element, where it reposes among lazily passing fish, oblivious and strangely innocent. The tone is more one of inevitability than suspense, the now-concluded rampage like a fading and almost unbelievable dream. The filmmakers deploy slow-motion cinematography, a dirgelike children’s chorus, the clamor of surging seawater, and the troubling final shriek of the monster as it surfaces one final time before sinking and dissolving into lifeless calcium. In Lao Tzu’s classic Chinese text, we are instructed that “victory in war should be observed as if it were a funeral,” but in this modern Japanese film, there is more than just somber respect to a formidable opponent. There is a haunting and disorienting sense of regret that was not consciously anticipated. The scientist Dr. Serizawa sees his invention slay the dragon, but instead of celebrating his triumph, he commits suicide. What is this vague sense of guilt doing here, if the movie is just a metaphor for the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
IV. From The Black Ships to Enola Gay
<20> A tradition in the visual arts of allusions to the nuclear bomb, often incongruously placed alongside nostalgic fantasies of communal living and pastoral tradition, implies that the modern Japanese zeitgeist of mourning and regret looks back further in time than 1945. My Neighbor Totoro (1988), other Studio Ghibli animés such as Pom Poko (1994), and television dramas of the 1980’s such as NHK’s tremendously popular Oshin (1983) depict village life in rural Japan through the lens of both nostalgic memory and poignant loss (Buruma 282). The Enola Gay may have destroyed a city, but the sentimental pining for country living and faith in nature in such stories suggests an older trauma: the eradication of an idyllically remembered, premodern Japanese way of life. In writing of King Kong’s fatal plummet as a symbolic suicide, Cynthia Erb shares Judith Butler’s insight that the lost object in Freudian melancholia is not always just a loved parental imago, but sometimes can encompass entire “social entities or worlds” (216), raising the possibility that the unique psychological frisson of giant monster movies can ultimately point to concerns and conflicts on a cultural or national scale.
<21> The arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854 triggered the island nation’s revolutionary social transformation into an industrial power which, in less than a hundred years, stood ready to compete economically, militarily, and technologically with the most opportunistic predators of the West. Ian Buruma recalls that a “well-known [Japanese] filmmaker” of his acquaintance once stated to him that Perry did nothing less than rob the Japanese of their identity (36). But the Meiji government, fearful of losing control to foreign interests, became itself complicit in this “robbery.” As Daniel Barenblatt puts it in A Plague Upon Humanity:
[…] it had been only a few decades since Japan had suddenly emerged from isolation and medieval backwardness, and the governors of Japan had dodged the bullet they feared most: becoming a colonized nation, as Korea and the Phillipines were to become. The possibility of this fate had become clear to these feudal rulers back in 1853, when a surprise gunboat flotilla of ironclad U.S. navy frigates haughtily steamed into Edo Bay […] and out onto the deck planks stepped Commodore Matthew Perry. […] Not surprisingly, this initial opening to the West was considered by Japan’s rulers to be a humiliation and a potential disaster. […] The Meiji Restoration of 1867—68 marked the beginning of the process by which Japan’s leaders sought to guard their nation’s sovereignty and culture by adopting Western technology and institutions. (97—99)
Thus the full cultural import of the nuclear attacks – inclusive of both their irony and their Greek tragedy – can be more clearly beheld if one regards the entire era, from 1854 to 1945, as a sort of narrative arc, complete with beginning, middle, and end, possessed of a karmic teleology.
<22> William Tsutsui observes that Susan Napier’s idea of the “elegiac mode – ‘a mood of mournfulness and melancholy, perhaps mixed with nostalgia’ – has a long history in Japanese cultural expression [….] The original Gojira was an excellent example of this aesthetic as well, an elegy for lost prenuclear innocence” (211). Similarly, David Kalat characterizes the first movie as a plaint of regret over the loss of old imperial traditions, noting that the Japanese writer Norio Akasaka “compares [Gojira] to a story by Yukio Mishima, ‘The Voice of the Hero Spirits,’ in which ghosts of fallen kamikaze pilots accuse the emperor of allowing Japan to decay spiritually (Kalat 23). But if the national sense of loss after Hiroshima cannot be fully understood without consideration of the Meiji Restoration, then likewise, the monster of the Godzilla series cannot be understood without consideration of the role science played in its creation and demise.
V. Unit 731 and the Open Secret
<23> Historian Gerald Figal notes that even before the war, Education Ministry official Inoue Enryo, one of the architects of the Meiji drive to consolidate power over folk superstition through rationalistic discipline mechanisms, advocated for the use of modern medicine as a weapon of enlightenment: “Casting the cause of illness as a modern demon-enemy threatening the homeland of the body turns the body into a public battlefield in which the state, as guarantor of public security and well-being, wages war with the new weapon that Western medical technology represented” (96). He explains that the “political, social, and economic cataclysms” of the Meiji era “disturbed the emotional safety of many” but this “dis-ease […] was also in part nurtured by the rulers of the Meiji state so as to create the need for a cure that they could administer under their own control” (197). To convince people that they needed science, the state needed to ascribe even more menacing power to the persistence of superstition. As Freud might say after his essay on “The Uncanny,” the new “God” of medical science, in its ascension to divinity, used an army of bureaucratic acolytes to demonize the old “God” of folk belief.
<24> With its purported status as a god of a small fishing village, Godzilla would appear to be aligned with the old beliefs. But because of its nuclear mutation and its oft-remarked identification with the United States military (first as ravager, and then as overbearing guardian of Japan) it could also symbolize the new. Erb leans toward the latter:
Godzilla is the product not only of nature’s avenging force, but also of the horrific scientific mistakes that characterized the atomic age. […] [The filmmakers …] ensured that the film would never directly blame the United States for arms testing, locating arms development and testing within a national setting – an implausible point, since the Japanese were prohibited from arms manufacture after the war. A decision born from censorship, however, proves dramatically effective, as a powerful message about the social responsibility of scientists in the nuclear age is grafted onto a pervasive sense of gloom and guilt held over from World War II. (152)
Such an argument can be restated in classical Freudian terms: repression by occupation authorities leads to the incomplete distortion of the nuclear memory, responsibility for which is fictionally displaced onto the Japanese authorities, creating an illogical nightmare that conceals its own wish to cry out the censored truth. But as detailed above, the nuclear “subtext” of Gojira was actually spoken of openly by filmmakers and critics alike, and even acknowledging Erb’s warnings about subjective close readings, it is hard to imagine adult Japanese moviegoers blissfully oblivious to the metaphor’s resonance less than ten years after Hiroshima. But if there is another secret behind the confluence of science and guilt in Gojira, one repressed by both the Americans and the Japanese government itself, then Erb’s argument requires a distortion of only the form of the guilt, not the holder of it.
<25> The Meiji Restoration was not just marked by industrial and military advances. Daniel Barenblatt reports that from 1894 onward, Japan “quickly distinguished itself as a world-class center of medical research in the new field […] of microbiology” (94). Driven by fear into becoming even more fearful aggressors, Japanese leaders became obsessed with tapping into the strengths of their talented microbiologists.
By the 1930’s Japanese culture had gone into a moral tailspin. A country whose conduct with regard to humane and ethical treatment of prisoners of war had once been among the world’s best was now speedily building its first bio-war weapons programs and using both prisoner POWs and civilian prisoners as human guinea pigs along the way. Japan was engaged in the severe oppression of the populations in its overseas territories and had abandoned its traditions of battlefield honor and mercy that had existed in the old samurai code. (Barenblatt 101)
The government’s boldest work in this realm was led by a division of the Japanese Imperial Army named Unit 731, where doctors performed experiments on non-consenting humans (prisoners of war and insurgents, mostly Chinese) in order to test medical treatments and develop biological weaponry. Nearly 600,000 prisoners were killed in the research rooms. In interviews, these doctors revealed that their experiments included almost unimaginable atrocities. In a 1995 New York Times article, Nicholas Kristof reports that subjects were stripped naked and drenched with ice water to facillitate the study of frostbite, observed dying inside poison gas chambers and pressure chambers, and infected with bubonic plague and then vivisected without anesthetic. Barenblatt writes of a Russian soldier who had been bisected and stored in a six-foot high glass case of preserving liquid; of women prisoners who were raped, both directly by researchers, and indirectly by being forced into sexual contact with other prisoners who carried venereal disease; and even of infants who were subjected to unspeakable suffering in order to facillitate their utility as research specimens (54).
<26> Like the familiar German refrain after the the war, wir haben nichts gewusst, Japanese civilians were not supposed to know of the practices of Unit 731. The program’s highest ringleader, Shiro Ishii, even called it the “Secret of Secrets” (Barenblatt 46). But much evidence and testimony suggests that during the war, it was an open secret in military, academic, and scientific circles.
<27> Barenblatt argues that many scientists must have known humans were being used as experimental subjects because, in order to advance their careers, the lead researchers of Unit 731 would publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. In refereed scholarship, the paradoxical open secret was accomplished by language that would be opaque to a layperson but transparent to specialists. For example, human research subjects were identified by the coded name “Manchurian monkeys,” and by physiological details, such as body temperature ranges, that were impossible for monkeys but plain markers for homo sapiens. (Need one add that this also served an ideological function, namely that of denying the test subjects their proper humanity and reimagining them as lower animals?) Because of this sharing of information in the scientific community as well as the military, Barenblatt believes that medical experimentation on humans was widely recognized:
In a 1946 postwar interview with an American military investigator, Dr. Ryochi Naito, one of the leading Unit 731 experimenters, testified that so many civilian doctors worked for the BW [“Biological Warfare”] program that knowledge of the human experiments and use of germ warfare became widespread within Japan’s medical and scientific research communities. […] ‘Most microbiologists in Japan were in some way or other connected with Ishii’s work,’ Naito said, and it quickly became ‘common knowledge throughout Japan … that humans were used for experimentation at the Harbin installation.’ (Italics mine, 46—47)
So if it was an “open secret,” why claim to keep the work of Unit 731 “secret” at all? Perhaps it was to maintain the Emperor’s deniability, or to prevent demoralization. Barenblatt shares regretful testimony from many veterans, including Osamu Hataba, who, “disgusted with Japan’s germ warfare and human experiments, had defected from Ishii’s Nanking force to the Nationalist Chinese side during the war (he was one of thousands of Japanese soldiers to defect during the war, either to Nationalist or Communist-governed areas)” (214). And the work was also “secret” in the sense that even when people knew the truth, any who might be tempted to air dissenting views about it were intimidated into silence. Ken Yuasa, a Unit 731 surgeon who joined a traveling educational exhibit in the 1990’s, puts it this way: “If you made a disagreeable face, when you returned home you would be called a traitor or a turncoat” (Barenblatt 151). Enforcement of this repression was as terrifying as it was ironic: during the war, Imperial Army memoes made it clear that “a person even suspected of dissent against the Japanese regime or harboring subversive thoughts became a candidate for shipment to the experiment chambers of Unit 731” (Barenblatt 59).
<28> Immediately after the war, conversation about Unit 731 continued to spread nationally, if quietly. Frederick Dickinson, writing in Asia-Pacific Journal, finds that, as early as one year after Hiroshima, local newspapers gave coverage to “Japanese communist leaders’ allegations that a ‘Japanese Medical Corps’ had inoculated American and Chinese prisoners-of-war with bubonic plague virus.” In January 1952, two and a half years before Gojira was first screened, the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi published an essay by an anonymous biological warfare “veteran” who recalled attending an orientation where the presenter told young recruits to the project, “the research work upon which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of [ethical] principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors” (Barenblatt 42). Three years after Gojira, Endo Shusaku published a novel named The Sea and Poison, which described a medical experiment on a prisoner of war and the experimenter’s struggle with his troubling absence of guilt afterwards (Buruma 255).
<29> As mentioned above, Gojira director Ishirô Honda had a “lasting pacifist streak,” not only disagreeing with the war but also working alongside a communist screenwriter (Kalat 16). But he was also conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army three times, deployed to occupied China, and detained as a prisoner of war in China the day Hiroshima was bombed (16). Peter Brothers’ biography also mentions that “Honda’s eldest brother graduated from medical school to become a medical officer in the army” (Brothers 28). There is no reference in Godzilla scholarship of Honda having ever spoken aloud about Unit 731, but considering what is known about his unique combination of political perspective, military experiences, and family ties to the medical establishment, one can imagine the mixed emotions Honda might have felt about Unit 731’s treatment of POWs in China.
VI. Destroyer of Memory
<30> At the end of Gojira, the monster dies by a terrible chemical weapon. The “Oxygen Destroyer” was invented in secret by a scientist named Serizawa, whose eye-patch covers a scar he received “in the war.” For his fiancée, Emiko, he demonstrates the weapon on an aquarium of fish, who skeletonize and dissolve as if Serizawa’s invention had turned the freshwater into a powerful acid. When Emiko reveals Serizawa’s discovery to her secret love, Ogata, they visit him together and implore him to use the weapon against Godzilla. At first he is reluctant to go public with such a dangerous invention. But after a television broadcast of a children’s choir at a memorial for the victims of Godzilla’s Tokyo raid, Serizawa makes up his mind. He burns his files, and accompanies Ogata on a scuba diving mission to deploy the Oxygen Destroyer in Tokyo Bay and kill Godzilla. With Emiko looking on anxiously, Ogata surfaces, triumphant over the final defeat of the monster. But their joy is short-lived as they learn that Serizawa has decided not to return. As he severs his diving cord, Serizawa’s final vision is of a dark, ephemeral world beneath the waves, with Ogata’s tinny voice over the headset calling his name like a fading radio broadcast.
<31> David Kalat lists several moments in the film that refer to the war, to nuclear research, and to the filmmaker’s pacifist perspective that were simply removed from the United States version of the film (Godzilla, King of the Monsters [1956]) (28—30). A couple of these changes indicate that the filmmakers knew Dr. Serizawa would present uncomfortable associations. Kalat notices that for the American version of the film, the “wartime experiences of Dr. Serizawa were deleted […] and replaced with a reference to Serizawa being [the American reporter’s] former college buddy” (37). He also remarks that
Serizawa’s eye-patch stood as a constant reminder of his war-time experiences, and as such an ominous symbol of his darker side […] One war reference removed from the American cut has interesting implications. A reporter interviews Dr. Serizawa, saying that he has learned from one of Serizawa’s German colleagues that his current line of research might be of use against Godzilla. Serizawa curtly denies knowing any Germans and ends the interview. (29)
Beginning to muse that the scientist “seems […] anxious to hide any connections to Germany,” Kalat suddenly abandons this line of inquiry, settling into the position that “[i]t is doubtful that this passing moment carries any genuine political significance, and to posit that Serizawa has any Nazi ties would be a considerable stretch” (29). In the Classic Media DVD commentary, Steve Ryfle and Edward Godziszewski likewise acknowledge that the scene “has led some […] to conclude that Dr. Serizawa must be a sinister scientist who collaborated with the Nazis on weapons research during the war” (36:36—37:47) but then a moment later pronounce the theory to be of no merit.
<32> It is jarring to contemplate the idea that there is supposed to be an undepicted collaboration between Dr. Serizawa and nameless German scientists. The tragic resolution of the love triangle subplot already blends the “elegiac mode” noted by Napier, the trope of the honorable suicide, the obvious nuclear allegory, and masculine anxiety over the postwar evolution of traditional gender roles, in a satisfying symmetry that almost feels like a kind of socio-historical closure. Yet even as our attention is thereby riveted, the reporter’s question and Serizawa’s denial are still there, the implications so stark that at least three Godzilla scholars have acknowledged the scene before hastily denying its relevance to history.
<33> Like many of the facts about Japan’s Unit 731, evidence that German and Japanese scientists did collaborate on research into internationally banned weapons during the war is wide-ranging. Sheldon Harris notes that Hitler himself disapproved of biological weapons research and ordered several Nazi facilities shut down early on (218). But later in the war, Unit 731 scientists are known to have infected test subjects with glanders, a disease that “Germans were accused of deploying in World War I” (Barenblatt 28). Furthermore, the U.S. State Department documents that in 1939, a Japanese spy named Ryoichi Naito claimed to have “studied at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin for over a year” (202). In his study, "Japanese-German Collaboration in the Development of Bacteriological and Chemical Weapons and the War in China," Bernd Martin confirms that this same Dr. Naito met with German scientist Kurt Blome as part of a Nazi/Unit 731 collaboration that included sharing of yellow fever samples. And after the war, Pentagon officials have testified that both German and Japanese biological weapons experts were held in such high regard that they were brought in to Texas and Maryland to provide military advice on germ warfare (227).
<34> If the filmmakers did intend to evoke Unit 731 through these reference to secret weapons research, inhumane experiments on living animals, and Japan’s wartime alliance with Germany, then why would the metaphor be so elaborately obscured, especially when the nuclear references are so plain in comparison? Unlike Hiroshima, Unit 731’s work continued to be an open secret even after the war, because suppression of its discussion served state interests: not only those of the Japanese government, but those of the U.S. occupation authorities as well. After the war, many Unit 731 orchestrators were quietly pardoned and compensated by the U.S. government in exchange for their data. It could hardly have escaped the public’s notice that many were awarded prominent positions in postwar Japan including “Governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and head of the Japan Olympic Committee” (Kristof). When Russia publicized the atrocities of Unit 731 in 1949, General MacArthur closed ranks with the Japanese government, denouncing the Russian war crimes trial as “false communist propaganda” (Barenblatt 221—222), even though declassified documents show he knew about Japanese experiments on humans as early as 1946 (xxii—xxiii) and the U.S. Army itself had sent out an “urgent memorandum” as early as August 15, 1944, alerting soldiers about the Japanese biological warfare program (Barenblatt 190).
<35> Why would U.S. forces allow the ringleaders of such ghastly atrocities to go untried? There was certainly concern that if the United States didn’t cut a deal quickly, the valuable medical findings might be lost to Russia (Barenblatt 209—212). But two years before the Russian trial, in a 1947 letter by Dr. Edwin Hill of Maryland’s Camp Detrick, the banal self-interest of the deal could not be more clear:
Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which has been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. . . . Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation. These data were secured with a total outlay of ￥250,000 [about $700] to date, a mere pittance by comparison with the actual cost of the studies. . . . It is hoped that individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it and that every effort will be made to prevent this information from falling into other hands. (Barenblatt 224)
This American deal created more incentive to protect two great secrets of the 20th century: the past practices of the Japanese government in the work of Unit 731, and the past and continuing efforts of biological warfare researchers in the United States (Barenblatt 194—195).
<36> In The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, Ian Buruma theorizes that after the conclusion of World War II, segments of German society effectively engaged in a communal “work of mourning” (trauerarbeit) which helped individuals to attain a kind of “moral purification through guilt” (betroffen) (21). In other words, those who remembered the past saved themselves from the psychic compulsion to repeat. Freud’s argument in “Mourning and Melancholia” is similar, that one cannot move past grieving for a lost object until one abreacts the painful, guilty, and aggressive feelings he or she remembers having harbored toward that object before it was taken away. Buruma constructs a simplistic and highly problematic dichotomy between German and Japanese “cultures” in the postwar era that is more poetic than rigorous, but his intuitions of how daily life in Japan can seem haunted by memory and repression are extraordinary:
In the seventies and early eighties, you still saw the blind and maimed veterans of the Imperial Army standing on crude artificial limbs in the halls of railway stations or in front of Shinto shrines, wearing white kimonos and dark glasses, playing melancholy old army tunes on their battered accordions, hoping for some spare change. Young people, smartly dressed in the latest American styles, mostly passed them by without a glance, as though these broken men didn’t exist, as thought they were ghosts visible only to themselves. Older people would sometimes slip them a few coins, a bit furtively, like paying an embarrassing relative to stay out of sight. The ghostlike figures in their white kimonos brought back memories that nobody wanted. And now they too had disappeared forever. The only reminders of the last world war in Tokyo were mere fragments in the air, like the military marches blaring from the pinball parlors. (31)
<37> The Japanese imagined in this reverie evoke Buruma’s description of Germans who neglected the work of penance: “their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. […] Germans wished to shield themselves not only from punishment or guilt but also from the sense of utter impotence that followed their defeat (21). If, in line with Buruma’s theory, a failure to undergo the trials of trauerarbeit leaves betroffen out of reach – or, in Freudian terms, if a refusal to admit one’s own aggressive impulses in the past leaves one trapped in compulsive mourning in the present – then secrecy, silence, or censorship over the development and use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry must only make such traumatic memory even more confusing and painful. For some Japanese, even if only in the shared fantasy of the cinema, the nightmares of World War II could have been difficult to dispel precisely because American amnesty in exchange for Unit 731 data forestalled the public “working through” of national guilt – or at the very least, a relatively healthy projection of that guilt onto government officials.
<38> Clearly the broad “application” of clinical psychoanalytic tools to an entire ethnic or national group would be questionable if the aim of the exercise is to arrive at some kind of diagnosis, much less a “cure.” But if that theory provides insight into the unique psychic complexity that is made possible in a specific socio-historic context, then such analysis may afford us a more nuanced understanding of the emotions and ideas that can be subtly catalyzed by public works of art. Is it too much to dream that the framing of such emotions and ideas can then create the conditions for productive questioning? When Godzilla’s nuclear origins are revealed, the film depicts a heated parliamentary debate over whether to share this knowledge with the public. “The truth is the truth. . . . the truth must be made public!” cries a woman in the left-wing contingent (Tsutsui 92). On the opposing side stands a company of
self-satisfied middle-age men, the very picture of establishment power with crisply pressed suits and brilliantined hair, who clearly represent conservative, pro-American interests, the dominant line in Japanese politics in the 1950’s. ‘Professor Yamane’s report is of such extreme importance,’ their leader blusters, ‘it must not be made public.’ With the backbenchers nodding and grunting in agreement, the speaker reflects on the delicate balance of world affairs […] (91)
The political and rhetorical contours of this scene already fit perfectly into Japan’s fraught relationship to nuclear technology: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Lucky Dragon incident, and even the push by right wing politicians and businessmen, including war criminals, to embrace nuclear energy in the 1950’s (Johnston). Yet the scene also aligns with the postwar suppression of discussion about Unit 731. Because the nuclear allegory of Gojira is so obvious and undisguised, the Unit 731 allegory can be thought of as an accompanying shadow subtext – like the latent content of a dream, effectively masked by the less challenging, more obvious, and therefore distracting manifest content.
VII. Wishful Revision
<39> If the film is to facilitate public discussion about Unit 731, then the shadow subtext should first be unearthed through catharsis. In psychoanalytic theory, such a release can only be accomplished if the repressed memory is simultaneously made conscious in two distinct ways – as both idea and emotion. By pointing to a hidden wartime truth that is so starkly and categorically different from the U.S. nuclear attacks that it can no longer be credibly disguised, the journalist’s question and Serizawa’s denial of his German associates makes the idea conscious. The remaining task, to trigger affects associated with guilt and penance, can be accomplished by causing the viewer to identify with the melancholic Serizawa. This is helped by Emiko’s outburst of tears as he decides to use Oxygen Destroyer, and of course by his noble suicide, which both frees Emiko from her engagement so she can marry Ogata, and imparts a sense of historical closure by ensuring that the deadly weapon cannot be used again. But there is a wordless choreography to his physical performance in this scene that seems to fulfill a specific wish, not only of finally permitting the expression of horror and grief over the actions of Unit 731, but also of magically dispelling guilt and regret by symbolically revising the past.
<40> When Emiko and Ogata appear at Serizawa’s lab to ask him to use the Oxygen Destroyer, he refuses violently, physically lashing out at Ogata. As Emiko tends to the injured Ogata, Serizawa remorsefully explains why he is so resistant to the idea:
Serizawa: Ogata … if the oxygen destroyer is used even once, the politicians of the world won’t stand idly by. They’ll inevitably turn it into a weapon. A-bombs against A-bombs, H-bombs against H-bombs – as a scientist – no, as a human being – adding another terrifying weapon to humanity’s arsenal is something I can’t allow.
Ogata: Then what do we do about the horror before us now? Just let it happen? […] Even if you use it to defeat Godzilla, how can it be used as a weapon if you don’t publish your research?
Serizawa: Ogata, we human beings are weak creatures. Even if I burn my notes, everything’s still in my head. As long as I’m alive, who can say I wouldn’t be coerced into using it again?
This chilling allusion to the ease with which a ruthless government could compel a scientist’s compliance has little to do with Oppenheimer. The idea of an unwilling collaboration meshes more neatly with a wish-fulfilling narrative and warning about Unit 731 – don’t you get it? We didn’t want to do it either, but we had no choice. It’s a fair amount to chew on, and it leaves both Ogata and Emiko speechless and resigned. But after the three of them hear the children’s choir on TV, Serizawa decides to use the Oxygen Destroyer anyway, and peacefully seals this pact with his own conscience by undertaking a methodical destruction of his files.
<41> It’s important to realize that this file-burning is an illogical and unnecessary ceremony – he just said “[e]ven if I burn my notes, the secret will still be in my head” approximately four minutes ago. But for some reason, the filmmakers include the scene, and appear to be at pains to call attention to it. So lost in reminiscences of his research that he almost seems to forget Emiko and Ogata are still there, Serizawa wistfully glances over each page before neatly folding and consigning it to the flames.
<42> Watching him, Emiko weeps enigmatically. Tsutsui speculates that her wordless tears in this scene signify that she is “recognizing his sacrifice” (30). But what is being sacrificed? Is it his life’s work? That’s unlikely, because his private demonstration of the weapon on some unlucky goldfish in an earlier scene had left her all but traumatized. Is it because it has dawned on her that her spurned fiancé has already decided to sacrifice his life? The suggestion is clear, but such an interpretation would also make her shock and grief over his death at the end of the film seem slightly hypocritical. It would also render meaningless his soothing words to her as he continues burning the files: “Don’t cry, Emiko. This is the only way to be sure that it won’t fall into the wrong hands.” So how does one explain Emiko’s tears?
<43> The moment becomes more intelligible when read as the cathartic union of idea and emotion. The peculiarly ritualistic way that Serizawa burns his files is visually evocative of Buddhist ceremony. By bending forward at the waist to place each page individually into the fire, he effectively kowtows, or bows his head in submissive respect, several times. He also folds one sheet at a time before burning it, as is done in the burning of “spirit money” for ancestor worship. But the tradition of kowtowing and burning spirit money is not normally practiced in Japan. Although Japanese ancestor worship rituals in Japan are hetereogeneous, syncretic, and often entangled with local Shinto practices (Smith 216—217), the particular rite of bowing while burning spirit money that Serizawa’s behavior seems to evoke is native to China, and by and large was only “imported” into one region of Japan: the island of Okinawa. So what is the visual allusion doing in a Japanese movie?
<44> Okinawa was known during the Meiji Restoration as “the first victim of Japanese imperialism” (Rabson). Before directing Gojira, Ishirô Honda spent several years in China, both as occupying soldier and as prisoner of war, and is known to have mingled with the locals, “even buying […] vegetables himself from Chinese merchants (unlike his contemporaries, Honda always treated the Chinese as human beings, being friendly to the point of even speaking some rudimentary Chinese” (Brothers 38). Gojira’s composer, Akira Ifukube, grew up among the famously oppressed minority Ainu of Hokkaido, and three of the most ambitious examples of daikaiju eiga that these two artists collaborated on, Gojira (1954), Mothra (1961), and Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964), implicitly and explicitly dramatize the bitterness of Japanese minorities living on primitive islands. What we appear to have, then, is a postwar fantasy wherein the heroine’s tears catalyze the audience’s identification with a secretive scientist who represents the epitome (and symptom) of the same materialist rationality that was responsible for unimaginable suffering during the war. But at the moment of this identification, the scientist is neither pointing to the future nor exulting in triumph: instead, he is atavistically mimicking a superstitious, premodern funeral ritual that is culturally associated with two victims of Japanese aggression. He thus becomes an unexpected vessel for the Japanese audience’s identification with the war victims.
<45> Ian Buruma writes that during the war, many Japanese left-wing pacifists declared themselves ideologically “pro-Chinese” (193). He also notes an interesting tendency among some postwar Germans to emotionally identify with Jewish nationalism. In German National Identity after the Holocaust, Mary Fulbrook describes this phenomenon as a “desire to wallow in a degree of public guilt on behalf of their forebears, and at the same time […make] a clean and final break with the past” (qtd. in Sargeant). In a way, wartime scapegoating of Jews led in the postwar era to a backlash of the collective imagination, an idealization in reverse whereby “Israelis had become the disciplined, hardworking warriors” (Buruma 18). Serizawa’s adoption of the body language of Chinese and Okinawan ritual can be understood in the context of an era of penance and regret, where the Japanese public was not only grieving its own fallen but also wishing for peace and forgiveness. This wish is already marked in Japan (albeit controversially) by Buddhist and local state memorials to the Chinese who were killed during the war (Buruma 280).
<46> It’s worth noting, though, that this pacifist impulse was not expressed in the same way towards all of Japan’s former enemies. It was racially selective, and collaborated with the postwar rationalization that Japan’s fringe militarists had betrayed the nation’s cultural essence by allowing themselves to be infected by the imperialist mindset of the west. Literary critic Katō Norihiro writes that Japan never abreacted its trauma because it misremembered the past by telling itself that the defeat by the U.S. was actually a “liberation” from its own militarists and exactly what it desired all along (Igarashi 207). As one right-wing Japanese writer put it after the fact: “We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of Korea were all the more profoundly regrettable. They were inexpressibly tragic events” (Buruma 161). In this way, right-wingers in Japan even after the war were still able to maintain a utopian narrative of East Asian racial essentialism that was a mirror image of Hitler’s “yellow Aryan” justification for his dealings with Japan.
<47> Because of the racialist ideology by which Japanese right wingers could profess regret over “inexpressibly tragic events” while simultaneously justifying aggression against the country that sent Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships,” this ritual remembrance of the dead could be imagined to encompass not only Japanese soldiers but their Asian victims: the Chinese at the hands of Unit 731 and Japanese occupation forces, and the Okinawan subjects of Japanese colonialism during the Meiji era. In Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, anthropologist Robert J. Smith remarks that ancestor worship practices in the country are characterized by “fluidity,” and that people are “receptive to all sorts of new concepts and accord many of them some respect, however unlikely a combination may result. The exotic and the novel […] exert a formidable appeal” (216). Such is the dreamlike, psychic power of racial ideology that the distinction between simple mimicry of another culture’s traditions and actual identification with that culture can become blurred. In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945—1970, U.S. historian Yoshikuni Igarashi describes a novel named Hoshi (Stars) that was published the same year Gojira was released. The story involves a Japanese soldier who, like director Ishirô Honda, has been deployed in occupied China. While there, he experiences a spiritual communion with a dead Chinese soldier that evokes Kurtz’s embrace of primitive human nature in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Igarashi 89). Serizawa’s symbolic performance of the Chinese and Okinawan rite could thus be read as not only a racialist gesture of Asian unity, but also an unconscious articulation of a sentimental, primitivist wish. In this regard, the projection of postwar desire and anxiety upon Godzilla (both through its death, and through Serizawa’s ceremony of penance before killing it) shares much in common with the popular psychological reading of King Kong as a “noble savage,” which Cynthia Erb identifies as “an opportunity for nostalgic recall that depended on a retrospective sense of the prewar moment as innocent or prelapsarian” (82, 124). (3)
<48> Beyond forging a racial link to Okinawa and China, and a pacifist link to a wartime enemy, Buddhist shrines and cinematic ceremonies also help to maintain a spiritual economy, a balance between the two worlds of the living and the dead. Buruma points out that any memorial to the dead can function as a reminder of karmic retribution. In postwar Germany, Mahnmal or “monuments of warning” have been raised to remember the Jewish holocaust: “Four square plates, rather like an oddly shaped manhole, are lifted slightly from below by probing bronze fingers […which] suggest the victims of antisemitism rising from a mass grave. They also suggest something more abstract: shameful memories which cannot be repressed, which claw their way into our conscience, like a constantly recurring nightmare” (203). Whether through modern statues or ancient rites, the dead demand tribute or they might exact uncanny revenge.
<49> When Godzilla first invades Japan, a native of Odo Island reminisces about the days before the Meiji centralization, saying that the monster has risen because his village ended its age-old practice of human sacrifice. This cause-effect argument is perfectly in line with traditional lore. Meiji era “monsterologist” Yanagita Kunio found that ancestor worship was partly enforced by a foundational belief that the dead must first pass through the place of tengu (“supernatural creatures”) before ascending to join the ranks of the eternal senzo (“ancestors”) (Figal 147). If traditional funeral rites are not observed, the dead can become trapped, staying on earth as monstrous tengu to plague the living (Figal 148). Thus the children’s choir reminds both Serizawa and the film’s audience of the duty to not only protect the fictional living against fictional monsters, but also to maintain the ancient ways by honoring the nonfictional wartime dead, or else.
VIII. The Deal with the Devil
<50> Serizawa’s concern that drives him to burn his files is easy for U.S. audiences to dismiss as a 1950’s B-movie trope – “this knowledge must not fall into the wrong hands!” But in the postwar era, the warning was deadly serious. According to a 1982 Japan Times interview with Harumi Ishii, the daughter of the highest military official responsible for Unit 731, President Truman sent Colonel Arvo Thompson as an emissary to Japan after the war. “He literally begged my father for top-secret data on the germ weapons. At the same time, he emphasized that the data must not fall into the hands of the Russians” (Barenblatt 209). After Japanese officials signaled their willingness to deal, MacArthur urged the U.S. to give Unit 731 officials immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for their data: “In his plea, MacArthur even went so far as to cite the living human dissections performed at Pingfan as a particular bonus for America: ‘Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful,’ he advised Washington” (Barenblatt 212). U.S. officials knew how sensitive this agreement was and how it could be judged by history. MacArthur’s legal advisor, Alva Carpenter, even coached him that “should any other nation bring up these charges, the U.S. military officials could point to a lack of solid evidence that experiments and BW had in fact occurred, and thus defend their decision not to seek prosecution, while covertly collecting for themselves the valuable scientific data” (Barenblatt 213).
<51> From the American perspective, such unsavory orchestrations were all part of the grim realpolitik of the cold war. But from the Japanese side, it would have sounded like a betrayal of martyrs. Shiro Ishii, the mastermind of the Unit 731 project, won the Japanese government’s backing partly by telling them that their enemy the United States was already pursuing biological warfare research (Barenblatt 12). Even for those Japanese who did not agree with the actions of Unit 731, the decision to further enhance the U.S. government’s postwar biological weapons research in exchange for personal immunity from prosecution could not have been viewed with sympathy. The difference between Unit 731 officials and Dr. Serizawa is that in this ideological wish-fulfillment, the hero kills himself after saving Japan from Godzilla – as if implying that the Unit 731 researchers could be justified in doing anything to defend their country, so long as they were simply willing to commit suicide before doing something really deplorable, like share their data with the enemy. Dr. Serizawa’s burning of his files and his suicide may represent the guilt-ridden wish to go back in time to a deal with the devil.
IX: Conclusion: American Godzilla
<52> For historian Yoshikuni Igarashi, “working through” the pain and guilt of the repressed past may enable abreaction and ultimately even dispel some of the barriers to empathy (210). In this reading of Dr. Serizaza’s choices, conflicts, and ritualistic behaviors in Gojira, I have attempted to present cinematic images as ambivalently charged dream-distortions of a morally confusing cultural history that to this day is largely erased from high school history textbooks in both Japan and the United States. Because I am a writer of Chinese ancestry, reading through a United States perspective about an issue of Japanese war history, I should clarify my research intentions. In psychoanalytic theory, the point of talking over a dream is not to find a definitive “meaning,” which could turn out to be banal, childish, or in any case impossible to help. The point is to examine and understand the dream-work itself – the unique defenses and formations that each dreamer mobilizes to obscure that meaning from consciousness. Aggressive or “shameful” instincts are not “the problem” – something is only productively regarded as a problem if some “solution” is possible. The real “problem” is not the fact that the past happened, but that it is still being kept unconscious, in denial of the innate human desire to cry out the truth.
<53> Some Godzilla scholars, feeling a deep and protective love for the childhood moviegoing experience, have voiced concern that obsessive psychological and historical analysis of the Godzilla movies can “spoil this joy” (Tsutsui 213), but after 60 years of Godzilla movies, surely new perspectives on the films can only rejuvenate their pleasures, which, like the original fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, were never simple to begin with. It may even be worthwhile to sacrifice the beguiling mystery of a dream if that means bringing about some peace between the psyche and its myriad objects. There will always be new dreams, or nightmares, to take their place. Legendary Pictures, which brought Watchmen and The Dark Knight to movie theaters, plans to release an American version of Godzilla this year, on the 60th anniversary of Ishirô Honda’s Gojira. Co-writer Frank Darabont says the film will again be an allegory, this time of “a different contemporary issue.” If we can bring ourselves to look closely, past our own resistance, at this troubling Japanese fantasy, then we may be better prepared to look just as closely at our own.
Acknowledgements
Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York, as well as a one-year Fellowship Leave from my instructional duties at LaGuardia Community College, funded by the City University of New York. I am also indebted to Terry Cole, Carlos Hiraldo, Paolo Javier, Kyoko Toyama, Karl Joseph Ufert, Taizo Yamamoto, and Kaori Ishikura, as well as my dear wife.
Notes
[1] When referring to the Classic Media DVD of the first film, or the first film as released to Japanese theaters in 1954, I use the spelling “Gojira.” When referring to the Criterion Blu-Ray disc of the first film, I use the spelling “Godzilla.” When referring to the character or the overall franchise, I use the latter spelling, without italics.
[2] Even when the movie monster returned after a long series hiatus in 1984, Tanaka again maintained that “vivid images of nuclear war are taboo […] Godzilla, on the other hand, can bring the message to light and still be entertaining” (Kalat 158).
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