Good girl, Godzilla! (#9)
The whitewashing of Japan's most famous anti-nuclear film represents America's insistence to forget one of its worst sins.
When Godzilla, King of the Monsters! premiered in U.S. theaters in 1956, it was written off as a cheap attempt at the monster movie genre that was trending at the time.
The New York Times decried the film as a “King Kong” rip-off (hah!) but with “a miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $20 worth of toy buildings and electric trains.”
Even so, American moviegoers ate Godzilla up and the film grossed an estimated $2 million at the box office — an incredible feat not just because of the sizable profit (what was considered a lot of money for a single movie at the time) but also based on the fact that Americans weren’t accustomed to foreign films. Though, labeling 1956’s Godzilla as a foreign film is a slight stretch considering it was heavily edited and repackaged from the original film, Gojira, which had premiered in Japan in 1954.
The most notable difference was that the 1956 American cut was void of politically-charged scenes regarding nuclear warfare, which were plenty in the Japanese original. While Godzilla was revamped into an almost campy low-budget monster film in its U.S. debut, Gojira was an expensive production helmed by one of Japan’s most revered filmmakers, Ishiro Honda, and featured a star-studded Japanese cast.
Honda, a World War II veteran and pacifist, drew inspiration from his memory of walking through post-bomb Hiroshima. Another incident, the “Lucky Dragon No. 5 Incident,” which involved the crew of a Japanese fishing boat that died of radiation poisoning after their boat strayed into the U.S.’s H-bomb testing range of Bikini Atoll in March 1954 in the Pacific; that, too, influenced Honda.
For Honda, the destruction wrought from nuclear weapons came alive in the form of a fantastical beast, a prehistoric dinosaur that turned monstrous after it was exposed to radiation by U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific. His 1954 Gojira was imbued with references to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — even Godzilla’s rough exterior was designed to resemble the keloid scars of the bombing victims.
There was plenty of dialogue to drive the point of anti-nuclear warfare home. At the end of the original film (but cut from the U.S. version), biology professor Dr. Yamane warns against the peril that will surely come from continued nuclear testing — a clear jab at America’s nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean which didn’t cease until 1958, four years after Honda’s film premiered.
Gojira’s debut in Japan couldn’t have been more different from Godzilla’s reception in the U.S. As Kimmy Yam at NBC Asian America wrote: moviegoers left Japanese theaters in tears, drenched in the anguish of sitting through a film rife with reminders of the atomic bombs that ravaged the country just 10 years before.
Two years later, ahead of its U.S. debut, Godzilla’s anti-nuclear (and, by extension, anti-U.S.) messaging was scrubbed. The film was poorly dubbed in English and repackaged with scenes shot using American actors, including Raymond Burr. In essence, Hollywood de-fanged Japan’s political icon and turned it into a mindless monster film, likely because America didn’t want to remind audiences of the terrible atomic tragedy in Japan that the U.S. had been responsible for.
The legend of Godzilla underwent heavy commercialization following the success of its U.S. debut, with cheesy follow-ups like Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) — in which Godzilla fights a giant moth monster — and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) — in which Godzilla goes up against extraterrestrials (!) These bastardized sequels capitalized on the marketability of Godzilla and expunged politics from the monster icon. Japanese studio Toho, the original creators of Godzilla, has since tried to return the franchise to its political roots which fans saw in 2016’s Shin Godzilla.
Shin Godzilla was critically-acclaimed in Japan and won numerous awards for its critique against Japanese government bureaucracy. Notably, the film also had a healthy dose of anti-nuclear criticism against the U.S. I’m not going to spoil it here but that painful history between the U.S. and Japan becomes a big part of the story toward the end of the film (go watch it, it’s good).
While the Japanese aren’t skirting around the history of America’s atomic bombings, Americans would clearly rather forget about it. Hollywood has put out a number of reboots and sequels since 1998’s Godzilla that very much minimizes America’s role in mainstreaming nuclear warfare even though Godzilla is a monster that obtained its powers from exposure to nuclear radiation — at least according to the original film.
In 2014, the remake cast Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad fame) as a nuclear scientist who loses his wife during a power plant disaster and later discovers that the sneaky Japanese have been hiding a giant monster (which looks suspiciously like a modern-day Mothra) from the public! This is what caused the tremors that decimated the nuclear power plant and killed Cranston’s wife in the first place! And somehow, the reappearance of Mothra 2.0 awakened its ancient natural enemy, too: Godzilla.
Cue epic monster battle!!! 🦟🔥🦖
To their credit, the 2014 remake acknowledged the U.S./Japan nuclear war history in one small scene; but blink and you’d miss it. This version, however, went even further in distancing the U.S. from any blame regarding nuclear weapons. Godzilla, in the 2014 film, was reimagined as a prehistoric monster that existed long before any nuclear program, with the U.S. actually attempting to kill the beast through their nuclear bomb “tests” during the 1950s. This remake essentially set up a series of sequels that have re-cast Godzilla as a “king monster,” a creature out of ancient mythology rather than a product of modern U.S. military history.
The latest installment in the Hollywood franchise, Godzilla vs Kong, has — you guessed it — Godzilla fighting the mythical giant ape known as King Kong for the ultimate title of king of monsters.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Godzilla vs Kong (which premieres on March 31 on HBOMax, by the way) is going to be really fun to watch. It’s meant to be pure entertainment. But I think it’s important to recognize it as part of a long Hollywood tradition of whitewashing Godzilla — and to an extent rehabilitating the U.S.’s image — by stripping the Japanese icon of its political claws and dumbing it down to a monster mayhem machine.
Outside of movie theaters, the fact that U.S. President Harry S. Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians during WWII is frequently painted as an unfortunate but necessary deed done for the greater good, something Truman had to do to avoid even worse bloodshed during the war.
“What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” — Harry S. Truman after the bombing of Hiroshima
(You can watch the entirety of Truman’s address on the bombing here.)
When you look up what led to Truman’s decision for a nuclear attack, especially if you seek it out from a government agency website or western media news source, that argument is often paralleled with justifications that mention Japan’s own war crimes, which is 100 percent accurate but not really the point.
The U.S. has never issued a formal apology to Japan or the bombing victims and past presidents have outright refused to do so; President Bill Clinton said that the U.S. “owes no apology” to Japan, and President George H.W. Bush even offensively remarked, “hey let’s forget that, let’s go forward now together.” (excuse me??) President Barack Obama did make history with his official visit to Hiroshima in 2016, but stopped short of a formal apology.
The defense of American war crimes (which was what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were) is a severe case of American exceptionalism, if anything. Do you think Americans would call an atomic bombing of civilians a justified act if it had been, say, China who had done it instead? Me thinks not.
I’m not going to get into too much of the nitty-gritty, but the story of events leading up to America’s nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which involves Albert Einstein) is certainly worth knowing. Discover Magazine did a good job retelling it with some great detail here. I think the chain of events demonstrates the magnitude of the consequences of our actions, no matter how small we think they are.
It’s also worth remembering the extent of the effects of the U.S.’s atomic bombings. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 300,000 people and maimed and traumatized hundreds of thousands more, altering regular people’s lives forever. It also triggered the nuclear arms race we see today and the long-lasting health and environmental decline suffered by Polynesians due to America’s arrogant bomb tests in the Pacific in the decades after the war ended.
All this was perhaps what the scientists who had warned Truman against setting precedent for nuclear warfare had meant in their letter to the president, which closely echoes Dr. Yamane’s message from the original film:
“The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future deployment. Thus, a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”
When The Watchmen Are Finally Being Watched
Today was Day 2 in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who killed George Floyd during his arrest over a fake $20 bill. The day’s events involved eyewitness testimonies. Darnella Frazier, now 18, also bravely took the stand. She was the teenage girl whose video capturing Floyd’s death by Chauvin ended up circulating the internet, galvanizing protests against racial violence last summer.
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS News Hour recapped the first day of the murder trial with a legal analysis by former public defender Mary Moriarty (warning: PBS’s news video shows some graphic footage of Floyd’s death that was presented as evidence during the trial.)
You should watch the segment first to get a sense of how the trial kicked off before getting into news reports about today’s proceedings. Today there was a lot of processing of trauma that the witnesses — some of them too young to appear on camera — experienced when they watched Floyd get murdered on the side of the street. It’s really heartbreaking.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
✨✨✨
SOME THINGS TO KNOW
🔥 The violence amid the military coup in Myanmar is getting worse with 120 civilians killed just this weekend as the army celebrated Armed Forces Day. | The Diplomat
🔥 Some European countries are experimenting with “controlled” mega concerts amid the pandemic and the petri-dish crowd photos are truly terrifying. | VICE
🔥 Is the U.S. Manifest Destiny-ing on Mars? It seems so. | Slate
🔥 Amazon workers in Alabama are fighting to become the first to unionize in the U.S. and their union campaign is getting a lot of attention. | Wired
🔥 Republicans are so utterly adamant about destroying trans people’s lives they’re now trying to criminalize trans kids who play in sports. | Vox
🔥 A poignant look at what migrating families carry — and lose — during their perilous trek across borders seeking asylum. | Los Angeles Times
🖊️ My piece on the mainstream media’s failure to cover the Asian communities affected by the Atlanta mass shootings adequately and ethically. | Nieman Lab
🖊️ My piece examining the messy reasons as to why it’s so difficult for America to recognize — and ultimately prosecute — anti-Asian hate crimes. | Mic
Today another racist attack against a 65-year-old Asian woman, on video as she was pushed to the ground and had her head repeatedly kicked and stomped on at a bustling section near Times Square in New York City, was reported. Some of these hate crimes have happened while bystanders were watching nearby. Learn the basic “5Ds” rule to prepare yourself when you see someone being harassed/attacked in public and give your time and $$ to support victim funds and organizations doing important advocacy work for Asian American communities.
✨✨✨
If you like this, check out past issues of The P Word, like issue #8 where I explained why Britain still has a Queen or issue #6 where I dove into how anti-science sentiments have infiltrated both the Left and Right of America.
Thanks for keeping up with The P Word! Drop a line by replying to this email or commenting on the original post on Substack.
Take care of each other,
Natasha