Update:
Subsequent to the release of this post, NHK (the Japanese public broadcaster) compiled this excellent video account of the events of 3.11. I would highly recommend watching that video before reading this post:
https://youtu.be/0E2Q7kr4L2c (unfortunately, they have disabled embedding)
Everyone knows what a metaphor is, right? It is one of the foundational topics studied in every class on literature or language around the world. It is not even particularly obscure in casual usage, as we can all claim to have called this or that thing “metaphorical” throughout our lives—perhaps a dream we had struck us as particularly inclined that way, or perhaps a discussion we had regarding a particular celebrity was focused on whether something they said was literal or metaphorical.
Regardless, a metaphor is a universal concept that we should all be reasonably familiar with. Mind you, this does not mean everyone has to be an expert on the academic particulars of language and its construction: Someone does not need to know how to build a car to drive one. In the same manner, the association caused by the prior sentence is itself this thing that we call a metaphor, and this is true no matter one’s level of learning.
A common approach for explaining metaphor is as a comparison to the mechanics of a simile, so we will start with that same framework: A simile is when explicit language is used to declare the similarity between two concepts. By contrast, a metaphor is when the comparison between the two similar concepts is implicit. A classic example that might be used by a teacher in the classroom should make things obvious: A simile is when someone says that another person is like a storm, a metaphor is when someone says that another person is a storm. It can sometimes be rather redundant to differentiate the two, since in both cases the audience comes to understand the person as being associated with the properties of a storm. However, the differences between these figures of speech do hint at what exactly makes a metaphor a metaphor. A metaphor is when the thing as presented is implied to mean something else.
In much conventional media discourse, the central role of metaphor is as a kind of symbolism. In this understanding, one can find a foundational bedrock of metaphorical meaning beneath the surface layer of literal meaning: The alien is a literal threat to the character Ellen Ripley in Alien, but it is also a phallic object that is a metaphorical threat to her feminine status. And to be clear, there is a great many benefits to this approach. If there were no value to it, this understanding of metaphor would not be so widespread. However, we should be weary of the stratified structure we build for ourselves when we conceive of meaning in this manner. What metaphor represents is not some true or essential meaning that is more pure than other kinds of meaning. Instead, metaphor’s place is in the interconnected systems of meaning as a whole.
Even supposing the dubious idea of “pure” meaning, metaphor is very precisely not the place where one could find that. While there is no pure meaning to be found in the absence of metaphor either, a metaphor is by its nature constrained to speaking of the thing by way of reference to everything and anything except the thing itself. By definition, one cannot use object A as a metaphor to describe object A itself. Put another way, a metaphor uses the power of analogy and parallelism to hint at the impure meaning that is exterior to the essential core of the object. And yet, this process of uncovering indirect meaning is precisely how we understand much of the world—which is to say that we only understand the world by the relative comparison of each part of it to other parts.
To rephrase the problem, when we imagine metaphor as a layer of meaning that reveals the inherent nature of an object, we have already fallen into the tyrannical trap of metaphorical thinking. We are trapped whenever we are confused by this “impurity” of meaning precisely because, as it invites us to think of meaning as a stratified structure, it conceals the multidirectional functions of metaphor. So far, our discussion has been aggressively abstract. Instead of continuing on that course, matters could be crystalised by turning our attention to one of the most direct and forceful metaphors in the history of pop culture. It is time for some detailed thoughts on Japan’s favourite radioactive monster, Godzilla.
Godzilla: King of the Metaphors
Godzilla is a character whose metaphorical role is arguably even more famous than its literal meaning. Even among those that have not seen Ishirou Honda’s original 1954 film and are therefore unaware of the particulars of the diegetic nature of Godzilla, the monster is widely known as a metaphor for Japan’s experiences in the Second World War. That war, which ended with nuclear fire being deployed on Japanese civilians, is seen in Godzilla’s fictional rampage across Tokyo. This metaphor is even preserved in the Americanised 1998 film, Godzilla, directed by Roland Emmerich—despite that film preserving little else about the character of Godzilla as understood in its Japanese incarnations. However, even a metaphor as seemingly blunt as Godzilla demonstrates the deceptive tyranny of metaphor.
It is certainly true that the parallelism between Godzilla and nuclear disaster has always been an intentional aspect of the character. Honda himself said that he “took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla.” And this is incontrovertible in the film itself: Godzilla embodies the traits of nuclear weaponry throughout its rampage in both direct and subtle ways. However, simply applying the formula that Godzilla=nuclear weapons to all aspects of the film would pervert our thinking greatly. There are traits of Godzilla that do not seem to correspond to this metaphor. For example, Godzilla’s rampage is primarily in the capital city of Tokyo, far away from either of the atomic blasts that impacted the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of the war. We must be careful of how we interpret the metaphorical implications of Godzilla’s rampage, and that we do not simply disregard all facets of the film that are distinct from the metaphorical interpretation intended by its creators.
Of course, the particular blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not Japan’s only experiences with nuclear power by 1954, and the film directly confronts this reality. Earlier in 1954, the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon Maru was exposed to lethal radiation resulting from American nuclear weapons testing at Bikini Atoll. In a direct echo of this incident, Honda’s Godzilla opens on a fictional Japanese fishing vessel called the Bingo Maru, whose crew is quickly killed by the radioactive power of Godzilla emerging from the ocean. Therefore, it is most accurate to say that Godzilla is a film that echoes Japan’s general experiences with nuclear weapons rather than the specific blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What, then is to be made of Godzilla’s climactic rampage across Tokyo? While it would be easy to say that the film is simply presenting the blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a location that was easily recognisable for the average Japanese film-goer, we must also recall the risk of treating metaphorical meaning as a source of “true” meaning for an object. Even if the creators of the film intended to imbue Godzilla with the traits of nuclear weapons, Godzilla is not simply a mask atop the naked meaning of nuclear weaponry. The audience is looking at Godzilla and will interact with the entire system of meaning that is present in the film, intended or otherwise. Therefore, Godzilla’s rampage across Tokyo is perfectly capable of taking on a variety of interlocking meanings, corresponding to the content of the film.
Let us focus in on the particulars of the Tokyo rampage. Nuclear blasts are remarkably instantaneous events. In a single moment, the entire area in the blast radius is flattened and suffers extreme destruction. Godzilla’s rampage across Tokyo is distinctly different. Godzilla is a slow-moving creature that moves in random lines across the city, flattening the buildings in its immediate wake. Even as Godzilla diegetically draws on nuclear power, the visual imagery of its rampage does not evoke just the sudden disappearance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the tortuous and random process of strategic conventional bombing by Allied forces all across Japan.
Of particular note is the distinct image this conjures in the context of the setting of Tokyo. In early 1945, a large-scale napalm bombing operation known as Operation Meetinghouse was carried out across Tokyo by the US Air Force. The largely wooden infrastructure of Tokyo was predictably extremely susceptible to an incendiary strategic bombing campaign. The destruction and loss of life was immense, and as many as 100,000 residents lost their lives on the night of March 9th alone. While the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was what ended the war, the equally destructive and indiscriminate campaign undertaken from the skies of Tokyo was experienced far more directly by most Japanese citizens. In this context, Godzilla’s slow and laborious destruction of Tokyo—surrounded by burning, wooden buildings instead of the totally flattened landscape left by nuclear weapons—takes on an entirely new meaning.
Of course, we should not be trapped into thinking that Godzilla solely represents strategic fire-bombing campaigns instead of nuclear weapons. It is more accurate to say that no single event in the Second World War is perfectly embodied by Godzilla, and that his rampage echoes the damage inflicted by the United States on Japan more generally. However, even this approach relies too desperately on an attempt to find a “true” meaning behind the mask of Godzilla. As the film critic Saburo Kawamoto correctly noted, the film’s conclusion is utterly incongruent with any reading that makes Godzilla strictly equivalent to the military might of the United States. After all, Godzilla dies, in direct contrast to the position of the United States after the war.
We should closely examine the specifics of Godzilla’s demise in the film to better illustrate Kawamoto’s point. Godzilla dies due to the effects of the fictional Oxygen Destroyer, an all-powerful life destroying weapon that occupies a very similar diegetic place to that of the force of a nuclear weapon in reality. In this sense, it is already a peculiar ending. The film has Godzilla, an incarnation of nuclear power, destroyed by an equivalently destructive weapon. This does not seem to correspond to any particular event in reality, a fact which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the film. In addition, the decision to destroy Godzilla is treated with a sombre seriousness that seems at times disproportionate to the apparent obviousness of the decision, given the destruction that Godzilla left in its wake. To explain this, Kawamoto saw Godzilla in its moment of demise as a mirror of the suffering of the Japanese in the war, rather than the United States. To quote Kawamoto:
As it vanished into the ocean, wasn’t Godzilla a symbol of the soldiers lost in the war? Wasn’t Godzilla’s slow descent into the ocean reminiscent of the sinking of the Battleship Yamato? Rather than fearing a simple monster, weren’t the citizens of Tokyo afraid of the resurrected spirits of those killed at sea?
The sinking of the Battleship Yamato referenced by Kawamoto refers to Operation Ten-Ichi-Gou, a suicide charge undertaken by the Battleship Yamato, at that time the largest battleship in the world, at the close of the war. The Battleship Yamato, with support from Japan’s minuscule remaining fleet, intended to beach itself on the Allied position in Okinawa in order to destroy as many supplies and lives as possible, and thereby delay an invasion of Japan itself—at the expected cost of the ship and the crew’s lives. However, the attempt was a total failure, leading to the sinking of The Battleship Yamato and almost a dozen Japanese ships, as well as overwhelming casualties before they even reached Okinawa’s shore. It was representative of the cruelty and nihilism that became commonplace in Japan throughout the final months of the war.
By situating his interpretation of the film in the spirits of dead soldiers who felt betrayed by the wasteful and callous war in its entirety, Kawamoto correctly complicates the simple attempts to see Godzilla as a direct and formulaic reflection of the United States’ military might. What we instead see is the ways in which metaphor cannot be reduced to a layer of truth that exists free of literalism. Godzilla represents nuclear power, yes. But Godzilla also embodies the random loss of life and property in the fire-bombing of Tokyo. And Godzilla also gives voice to the senseless loss of Japanese lives in a needless war of aggression. These metaphors do not exist separately, but instead are all products of the interconnected system of meaning present in the film. Since Godzilla is precisely Godzilla itself, its parallel associations through metaphors can take on many distinct forms that must, definitionally, be separate from the thing (Godzilla) itself. Godzilla is Godzilla, a creature capable of embodying many different frustrations and fears present in Japan immediately after a devastating war. Godzilla is the totality of the spirit of a nation that had been so utterly defeated. The illusory simplicity we seek in trying to find a single, true metaphor for an object such as Godzilla is the tyranny of metaphor.
3.11 and its limits
On the 11th of March 2011 (3.11 from here on out) the largest measured earthquake in Japanese history, and fourth largest measured in human history, occurred with little warning. The epicentre was in a terrifying position: Not far to the east of the Japanese mainland, but far enough out at sea to all but guarantee a subsequent tsunami would impact Japan. While the regions to the north of Tokyo, such as Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima, were most directly affected, the nation’s capital was nonetheless more directly exposed than it had been during other recent natural disasters such as the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. In a matter of hours, thousands were killed.
In the aftermath of the initial disaster of 3.11, the damage to a series of reactors in Fukushima, a prefecture horrifyingly close to Tokyo, led to a widespread nuclear disaster. Three reactors entered meltdown due to a lack of functional cooling, and nuclear material contaminated much of the surrounding ocean. While very few human beings are known to have died from leaked radiation since the disaster, estimating its full consequences is no easy matter. And in the uncertainty of the initial meltdown, there was widespread and realistic fears that nuclear contamination might develop into an existential risk all across Japan. This fear itself became a pervasive disaster in and of itself in the following weeks and months.
With over twenty thousand killed and the almost incalculable upending of the lives of millions of people, 3.11 was one of the most devasting events to ever impact a wealthy, technologically sophisticated nation. It was, in a very real sense, the most totalising disaster to rock Japanese society since the Second World War. Not to mention the most significant return of nuclear power to the national zeitgeist since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that same war. It was the return of the spirit of Godzilla to Japan.
In the aftermath of such a shocking event, its manifestation in art was almost inevitable. Such a pattern has been commonplace after crises, disasters, and wars in the past. For example, in parallel to Godzilla’s own creation after Japan’s collapse in the Second World War, an American adaptation of The War of the Worlds was released in 1953. Of course, its depiction of the story was adjusted to meet the ascendent post-war zeitgeist of the American empire. The original novel by H.G. Wells was calibrated to a British audience who, at the height of that empire’s power, was unfamiliar with any kind of serious military challenge. In contrast, the United States had undergone direct attack by the Japanese in the Second World War, followed ultimately by victory over that same attacker. The existential dread and introspective narration of the original gave way to an organised and scientific military response as depicted in the American film. Much of the drama of this film centres on the decision to use atomic weapons on the invading Martians, and the terror felt after even nuclear power fails to subdue the invaders. The film, metaphorically, asked audiences to ponder what would have happened if Japan had not surrendered in the face of nuclear weapons: What if the invading force was impervious to the threat of America’s greatest weapon, just as the ascendent Soviet Union seemed to be?
This tendency of art to reflect the particularity of historical circumstances can be seen even more clearly when examining the aftermath of America’s own 3.11—which is to say 9/11. The terrorist attacks of September 11th were the most direct threat to the American psyche since the Second World War, and in its aftermath many films that depicted monsters and disasters had to reconfigure themselves to meet the fears of the moment. It should come as no surprise then that another attempt to adapt The War of the Worlds was shortly in order. While the earlier film depicted a functional and unified America barely surviving in the face of an insurmountable challenge to its military might, the focus of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake was on a disordered America: Instead of the competent forces of science and the government, the invasion is filtered through the trivial and powerless character of Ray Ferrier, an estranged father who must protect himself and the children of his broken family. Much of the character drama of the film centres on the dichotomy between the natural instinct to flee from the invaders and the desire of Ray’s son, Robbie, to join the military and retaliate against the Martians who upended his life.
This is all to say that no matter how broadly or narrowly one reads the content of Shin Godzilla, 3.11 casts a wide shadow that invariably contextualises the existence of Shin Godzilla. While we are going to seek to use this post to expand our view of Shin Godzilla beyond a simple allegory of 3.11, we must not forget that this film exists because of 3.11. In the same way as the family drama present in the 2005 War of the Worlds film is informed by the residue of 9/11, any additional meaning we find in Shin Godzilla will itself be a product of a film made in the aftermath of 3.11.
Much of Shin Godzilla is quite clearly intended to be received by an audience saturated in the imagery of 3.11, and parallels to the event permeate its presentation. Take, for example, the design of Godzilla itself. While the original Godzilla from 1954 was a monster that emerged from the ocean to trample atop Tokyo, in Shin Godzilla the picture is very different. In this film, Godzilla is a fundamentally aquatic creature during the first act, and his rampage takes on the visage of the water itself as the source of terror. Rather than standing atop the city of Tokyo, Godzilla swims through Tokyo via its waterways, damaging the city by pushing aside, rather than crushing, the buildings around it. This is unavoidably evocative of the effects of an earthquake and tsunami in contrast to the warlike behaviour of the original Godzilla.
In fact, the depiction of these scenes of rampage intentionally corresponds directly to the tsunami damage that was widespread on 3.11. At first, Godzilla does not so much rampage or cause destruction as act as an avatar of the water that destroys all in its path. Compare the above scenes to the below sights of Japan on 3.11:
Even as Godzilla evolves beyond a mere aquatic creature and makes landfall, it still embodies many of these same evocative traits. Godzilla remains a creature that pushes buildings, cars, and people aside rather than crushing and demolishing them in the manner of the original Godzilla. When Godzilla rampages through Kamata, it remains close to the ground, causing destruction of much the same character as the impact of the earthquake and tsunami on 3.11.
Even when Godzilla topples its first large structure, it does so by pushing rather than by trampling or crushing. The resultant collapse is evocative of a building rocked to its foundations by an earthquake or tsunami rather than something decimated by a bombing campaign.
The parallelism that is established by the visual language of Godzilla’s initial rampage in Shin Godzilla, and how this contrasts the original 1954 Godzilla, should hopefully now be abundantly clear. These differences mean that we cannot simply see this Godzilla as a continuation of the metaphors that grew out of the Second World War in that original film. The metaphorical content of Shin Godzilla extends beyond the day of 3.11 itself, of course. Just as in the original, Godzilla is a radioactive creature in Shin Godzilla, and in that context the Fukushima nuclear disaster becomes an unavoidable subject.
In the climax of the film, the protagonist, Rando Yaguchi, orchestrates a plan to defeat the fully grown Godzilla and the perpetual nuclear meltdown that powers its body. This plan involves forcing Godzilla to shut down by injecting a coagulation drug into its internal cooling system. This is done against the clock, as a planned nuclear strike by the United States threatens all of Tokyo in the hopes of defeating Godzilla should Yaguchi’s plan fail. The nature of this setup offers clear parallels to the efforts undertaken to cool the nuclear reactors in the Fukushima nuclear disaster before they became an existential threat to Tokyo and wider Japan.
In addition, the visual language used to depict this operation clearly mirrors the images of the operation to control the Fukushima disaster as they were seen by the whole world in the aftermath of 3.11.
Godzilla’s immutable role as the avatar of nuclear force was recontextualised by the 3.11 disaster. Put another way, even when Godzilla reverts to metaphors that overlap with its role in prior films, 3.11 still looms large over Shin Godzilla. However, we should, in the same manner that was true of the original Godzilla, be cautious of building a strict equivalence out of these parallels. Shin Godzilla is not a film that solely depicts a recreation of 3.11 and treating it like such would lead to a thematically incoherent reading. The Godzilla=3.11 interpretation is ripe for the tyranny of metaphor. Instead, we have to closely read the film in an even wider context than just 3.11 in order to approach its full system of meaning.
Shin Godzilla and society
While Godzilla as a physical crisis does occupy an undeniably important role in Shin Godzilla, it would not be accurate to say that Godzilla itself takes centre stage in the film. It instead falls on the human characters, especially members of the Japanese government, to fill the connective tissue of the narrative. This fact becomes notable in light of the unique approach to character taken by Shin Godzilla. In Ishirou Honda’s original Godzilla, the drama of its human characters is essential to the structure of the story. For example, beyond the metaphorical meaning of the death of Godzilla that we discussed earlier in this post, the use of the Oxygen Destroyer also involves the sacrifice of Daisuke Serizawa, one of the main protagonists of the film. Serizawa, an implied veteran of the Second World War, wrestles with his engagement to another main character in Emiko Yamane. The sacrifice of a peaceful post-war marriage to Yamane in favour of the sacrifice necessary to defeat Godzilla—who embodies many of the consequences and causes of the war that Serizawa had survived—forms the emotional core of the film. The sacrifice of Serizawa is a human manifestation of the zeitgeist of a ruined Japan that has at least as much importance as the embodiment of this same zeitgeist in the monster of Godzilla.
Shin Godzilla is radically different in its approach to characterisation. The characters in Shin Godzilla do not have full interior lives that inform their relationship to Godzilla in a manner comparable to Daisuke Serizawa’s struggles with the aftermath of the war. Instead, the characters form a mob of bureaucracy, repeatedly being accompanied by non-diegetic subtitles that inform the audience of their shifting titles and responsibilities. These titles serve an ironical point: We are constantly reminded of the names and statuses of characters precisely to highlight that their names and statuses are too disposable to ever be remembered by the audience. Even the major characters, such as Rando Yaguchi and Hideki Akasaka, are not depicted in the context of their lives prior to and beyond the appearance of Godzilla. These people exist precisely and only as important members of society, which is itself the character being depicted in its interiority by Shin Godzilla.
We should not limit this point to seeing Shin Godzilla as a satire or allegory of the Japanese government on its own. Even characters who speak for non-Japanese organisations, such as Kayoco Anne Patterson from the United States government, are denied the interiority and introspection that is typical of modern storytelling. While Shin Godzilla has many specific things to say about the Japanese government itself, the abundant depiction of governments and their many constituent agents also serves the purpose of communicating broader concepts about society and its relationship to the kinds of ideas that Godzilla represents.
If the role of characterisation in Shin Godzilla is chiefly to develop broader ideas about society and its relationship to Godzilla, it becomes even more important to clarify the full metaphorical context of Godzilla next to which that society must situate itself. In other words, to understand the role of avatars of society like Yaguchi, we need to understand more completely what they were reacting to in the visage of Godzilla, beyond just 3.11. While Godzilla’s initial appearance as an aquatic creature that imitated the destruction of earthquake tremors and tsunami waves had an unambiguous relationship to 3.11, its reappearance in the second act of the film features several complicating factors. Godzilla’s nature as a nuclear monster does place the drama in close proximity to the Fukushima nuclear disaster that resulted from 3.11, Shin Godzilla also broadens the scope of discussion to a much wider array of issues.
Let us focus on the return of Godzilla in the second act of the film. While its initial appearance was unfamiliar to most Godzilla fans and relied on forms that mirrored aspects of the 3.11 disaster, its second rampage across Tokyo was more analogous to Godzilla as traditionally understood. In this manifestation, Godzilla crushed Tokyo from atop, and once again did so in lines reminiscent of a bombing campaign.
On its own, the sudden appearance of a classic Godzilla seems thematically incongruent: While the metaphorical implications of Godzilla have evolved in each subsequent film in the many Godzilla continuities, these metaphors have generally been tailored to fit with a classic image of Godzilla. Shin Godzilla has no obvious need for a classic Godzilla. Having already established a new Godzilla that is equivalent to 3.11, the film then suddenly reverts to a classical use of the Godzilla metaphor. This suggests that we should think carefully about the similarities between 3.11 and the prior meaning of Godzilla in its original incarnations.
As we traced out earlier in this post, the popular understanding of Godzilla as a manifestation of nuclear weapons in the original 1954 film Godzilla is too simplistic. In that film, Godzilla not only manifests as the dangers of nuclear weapons as wielded by the United States, but also the generalised trauma of Japan in the immediate post-war era, where it felt weak and vassalized, but also culpable for its own role in such a destructive war.
Kiyoshi Kasai, in Terror and Godzilla, a book that forms a wide-ranging critical analysis of Godzilla and other crisis media, locates the recurrent need for Godzilla metaphors not in the particular details of Godzilla itself, such as its numerous incarnations as nuclear energy, but in a separate tendency that he calls Japan Ideology. According to Kasai, Japan Ideology refers to the particular dialectical system that leads to the tendency of Japanese society to remain stuck in an extremely dangerous status quo even as it rockets predictably towards preventable crises. According to Kasai, the resignation with which Japan prepared for a total war to defend its mainland from a ground invasion by the United States was itself a product of Japan Ideology: By the end of the war, no one in Japan was for a continued war with the United States that would unavoidably lead to the end of Japan, but it was seen as something that could only be overturned by radical action that was beyond the control of individuals within society. In the same manner, no one in Japan simply decided on the post-war status quo of geopolitical inaction under the guidance of the United States, it came to be by inertia: According to Kasai’s analysis, this too was a product of Japan Ideology.
The specific character of Japan Ideology in its totality is the subject of Kasai’s book, and not this post. However, explaining some of its dynamics beyond the vagueness offered above will serve our purposes of establishing a deeper understanding of the meaning of Godzilla. Above, I referred to Japan Ideology as a “dialectical system;” what did I mean by this? Dialectics is a term that has some varied nuances depending on the context, but for our purposes here dialectics refers to the interpenetration of opposing historical forces. How this term applies to Japan Ideology will be best demonstrated by an example.
Let us return our minds to the close of the Second World War: Throughout Japan, there was a widespread recognition that the course that was undertaken by the existing imperial regime was almost certain to the lead to the ruination of Japan. However, this recognition precisely came from the intuition that this regime could only be defeated by what Kasai, in reference to the radical literature of 1960s, refers to as the “decisive struggle”—in other words, the status quo could only be overturned by a decisive struggle within Japan between Japanese or a decisive struggle within Japan against the United States. Rephrasing this logic slightly, the uniformity and rigidity of Japanese society is itself viewed as something that can only be overturned by radical action, which is to say something like a “decisive struggle,” or a deus ex machina from the outside that collapses the existing order. This line of thought makes the ending of the status quo something that can only be done by the creation of a “decisive struggle” crisis within society itself. As a result, even if a crisis is expected in the future, it is seen as an equivalent or even preferable option to the present “decisive struggle” crisis that would be necessary to prevent it.
Of course, some people in society will nonetheless try to prevent the future crisis by ending the status quo. However, paralysed by the fear of what a “decisive struggle” crisis entails, the majority of Japanese will quickly rally in defence of the status quo, even if they agree that the status quo is an untenable source of future crisis. Via this subtle inversion, a majority that could otherwise prevent both crises through cooperative action is rigidified into collective inaction by fear of instigating a “decisive struggle.” This is the essence of Japan Ideology: the tendency for high levels of social cooperation and consensus to lead to paralysis, and eventually to crisis in defence of the status quo. Under Kasai’s framework, we can still see this system at work today in the large and sustained majorities enjoyed by Japan’s centre-right LDP despite the politically diverse attitudes of Japan’s citizens: The desire for alternative political frameworks does nothing to alleviate a consensus in support of the current ruling party—in order to delay conflict and crisis.
By thoroughly explaining Japan ideology, Kasai seeks to demonstrate a unified theory to explain the incarnation of Godzilla in Japanese society. While Godzilla, in any particular context, may operate in a system of numerous interconnected metaphorical meanings, what ultimately leads to Godzilla as a conceptual framework is the expectation of crisis implicit in Japan Ideology. This is why Godzilla can so easily take on the visage of US military might—the crisis from the outside—and the visage of those betrayed by the imperialist Japanese regime—the crisis from the inside. In both cases, Godzilla is a flexible system for metaphorically representing the various kinds of “decisive struggle” that will inevitably destroy the complacent status quo of Japan Ideology.
With this model in mind, let us return to Shin Godzilla. When Godzilla emerges in the second act of the film in the visage of the same kind of monster that existed in prior Godzilla films, it would be insufficient to continue treating this monster as the pure metaphorical representation of 3.11, or even of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It would be more accurate to say that—whether through the theory of Japan Ideology or through a more general history of Japan—Godzilla’s emergence in the second act establishes a continuity between prior Japanese crises and the particularities of 3.11. This multidirectionality is precisely why it is so important to escape from the tyranny of metaphor: It is not just that Godzilla=3.11, it is that the various metaphors that constitute Godzilla themselves add new meaning to the idea of 3.11 in ways that are not present in the event itself: By moving the object to the realm of metaphor, the object takes on new meanings that are not implicit in the object itself.
I am perhaps belabouring on this point in an excessively abstract fashion, so we should turn to an example from the film: After Godzilla’s reappearance in Tokyo in its upgraded form, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) utterly fail to slow its advance. Godzilla rapidly tramples a straight line through Tokyo towards the centre of the city, forcing the Japanese government to turn to the power of the United States to finally end the rampage. The US Air Force itself deploys B-2 bombers armed with the heaviest firepower yet seen in the film. While these bombers dropping high ordinance weapons on the centre of Tokyo manage to injure Godzilla, the creature also responds to the threat by deploying a devastating atomic beam that destroys much of Tokyo, the American B-2 bombers, and also kills Japan’s leading government officials including the Prime Minister. This scene is one of the most startling and dramatic in the whole film. And in it, we can see how Shin Godzilla completely shatters any straightforward Godzilla=3.11 reading after going to such lengths to establish that perception in the first place.
Godzilla’s atomic breath does not straightforwardly take the form of a precise beam to eliminate the threat of the American B-2 bombers until the latter half of the scene. Instead, the elimination of the B-2 bombers is something of an aftereffect of Godzilla inundating the streets of Tokyo with a mysterious gas, igniting that same gas, and then refocusing a portion of the resultant fireball into an atomic beam. Beyond just being the details of a science-fiction-esque power, the visual imagery of this scene is unavoidably evocative of one of the most crucial metaphors of the original 1954 Godzilla: the fire-bombing of Tokyo. In fact, the film emphasises the fiery nature of Godzilla’s attacks even more prominently than its predecessors, with several shots lingering on the burning remnants of several prominent places across central Tokyo.
It is especially striking how the destruction of Tokyo in this manner is indirectly instigated by American strategic bombers. In a total inversion of their real world parallel, the bombers were acting in defence of Japan, rather than attacking it. Put another way, the scene reimagines the fire-bombing of Tokyo as an event caused by the United States protecting Japan. This point deserves a thorough explanation. While Godzilla’s attack directly and unavoidably evokes the strategic fire-bombing of Tokyo, the diegetic role of the United States in the scene itself totally thwarts any attempt to view the scene as a strict one-to-one parallel of the Second World War: However, by escaping the tyranny of metaphor, and searching for a complete system of meaning rather than using metaphor to search for a pure parallel, we can make some sense of these contraindicative factors. It is not that Shin Godzilla is invoking the fire-bombing of Tokyo to say that the United States bombed Japan for Japan’s benefit or any other kind of obtuse reading. Rather, we are comparing this Godzilla as an incarnation of 3.11 to the existing incarnation of Godzilla as the last great tragedy of Japan: It is that Japan’s alliance with the United States has done nothing to address to the underlying causes of crises like the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Hence, a parallel is drawn between 3.11 and the fire-bombing of Tokyo via the multidirectionality of the system of metaphorical meaning that is Godzilla.
More precisely, much in the manner of Kasai’s theory of Japan Ideology, the film paints a portrait where the fundamental causes of Godzilla’s rampage are deeply rooted in Japanese society, separate to the particular imagery of whatever crisis is the current manifestation of this underlying root cause. In this context, Shin Godzilla’s exotic style of characterisation becomes far more legible. The extensive scenes of bureaucratic incompetence and political infighting are not a separate source of drama from Godzilla’s rampage, and neither are they a blunt and short-term parody of the response of the Abe administration to the crisis of 3.11. Instead, the film is developing a core character that is deeply linked to the nature of Godzilla itself: that is, the structure of Japanese society. At various points in the film, the character of “Japanese society” displays an almost pathological attachment to inaction—the same inaction that Kasai linked to the nihilism of Japan during the Second World War, which is to say, the fundamental nature of Godzilla.
The anti-sekai-kei film
What ultimately defeats the incarnation of Godzilla present in Shin Godzilla is the same society that caused its rampage in the first place. The core emotional thrust of the film involves developing this ironic twist from cynical criticism to hopeful triumph. To be sure, the skeleton of this story arc does work as a direct parallel of 3.11—an indictment of the leadership of the Japanese government and a celebration of the individuals who rose above these failings to protect Japan from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, the particulars of the film do not correspond to this narrow interpretation. We cannot hope to understand why Godzilla was defeated if we view it as a simple story of individuals overcoming the limits of government.
The essential nature of the hero-centric interpretation of Shin Godzilla rests on seeing the film chiefly as a satire of particular social institutions. However, it is those same social institutions that ultimately defeat Godzilla. In order to explain this discrepancy, we should return to the exotic characterisation style present in the film. As already noted, Shin Godzilla is a film utterly devoid of the interior lives of its characters. While Rando Yaguchi is an avatar for the group within Japanese society that ultimately defeats Godzilla, we cannot isolate the particular aspects of his psychology and life apart from his role in the Japanese government that leads to his success. His special task force that develops and implements the plan to defeat Godzilla retains all of the cinematic imagery that emphasised the dehumanised and bureaucratic failures of the Japanese government at the beginning of the story. In fact, even at the end of the film when we have followed Rando Yaguchi for an extraordinary amount of time, we still see him filtered through subtitles that declare his titles and role in the Japanese government.
This is all to say that we cannot centre any view of Shin Godzilla on the triumph of individual characters and their interior lives: Society and its system are still the chief subject of the film. This fact becomes all the more blatant when one considers the creative history of the film’s director and writer Hideaki Anno. Obviously, as he is the creator of Evangelion, we already have an incredibly rich blueprint for Anno’s approach to developing a story about the introspection of individuals in the face of crisis. And comparing that blueprint to Shin Godzilla reveals two radically distinct stories. As those that have read prior posts on this blog are likely to be aware, the themes of Evangelion spawned an intense artistic reaction across Japanese pop culture known as sekai-kei media. According to Kiyoshi Kasai, sekai-kei refers to:
A group of works in which the small, everyday life problem of the relationship (kimi to boku) of the protagonist (boku, i.e. a male) and the heroine in his thoughts (kimi), and an abstract, extraordinary large problem such as ‘a world (sekai) crisis’ or ‘the end of the world,’ are simplistically connected directly without a (midway) interposition of a completely concrete (social) context.
Put another way, sekai-kei examines crisis from a perspective that eliminates society’s intermediating institutions and emphasises the struggles of characters’ interior worlds. By contrast, Shin Godzilla eliminates its characters’ interior worlds in order to analyse the structure and function of Japan’s social context. In this sense, it is a precise inversion of the storytelling systems of a sekai-kei narrative. And by being a precise inversion, it is far more related to sekai-kei than a story that is simply not influenced by the systems of sekai-kei in any way.
In fact, think back to the theory of Japan Ideology in the context of sekai-kei stories. Japan Ideology serves as an explanation for an inflexible social context that cannot resolve any crises that arise in Japanese society. This is directly mirrored in Shin Godzilla, when Kayoco Anne Patterson remarks that Japan is a country where “it is difficult to do as one pleases,” which Yaguchi swiftly amends with “by yourself.” In fact, according to Japan Ideology, the existing social context will rigidify itself and ensure that a crisis eventually arrives. In this light, it is important to note how a sekai-kei story is a kind of nihilistic existentialist narrative that has given up on Japanese society at large. Instead, it depicts the fantasy of being able to overcome the crisis through a retreat into one’s interiority.
By inverting this fantasy, Shin Godzilla demonstrates the inherent immaturity of ignoring these wider social systems: Due to the shortcomings of Japan’s social context, no matter how far removed from the Second World War it becomes, Godzilla will still return. As Yaguchi laments to his mentor Hideki Akasaka while reflecting on the possibility of a nuclear strike on Tokyo to eliminate Godzilla, “Post-war [Japan] extends forever.” The legacy and causes of the Second World War continue to be embodied by Godzilla in perpetuity. The only question is what one will do in response to this crisis. In the words of Goro Maki’s challenge as constantly repeated by the film, it is up to the Japanese people to “do as they please” in response to the repeating crises perpetuated by Japan Ideology.
In the end, it is not the interiority of individuals that defeats Godzilla. Yaguchi’s team is not simply a collection of individuals, but the manifestation of a group built on the willingness to overcome the stasis of Japan Ideology. This team is referred to as a band of “lone wolves, otaku, troublemakers, outcasts, academic heretics, and general bureaucratic miscreants,” or, basically, those willing to “do as they please” and move against the consensus-driven Japan Ideology. While this group is able to circumvent the weaknesses of Japan’s social institutions, they nonetheless operate as an organ of society as a collective rather than as simple individuals. It is not those that retreat in the face of a failing social context, but those that are willing to fight it that are able to defeat Godzilla.
Of course, Godzilla’s defeat cannot be permanent. An organ of society acting to overcome the paralysis of Japanese culture for a short moment cannot ensure that Godzilla does not return in the future. So long as the fundamental causes of its emergence remain, Godzilla will be an eternal feature of Japanese society—Godzilla is merely frozen in place, waiting to rampage again when the moment is right. It is just a question of whether Japan will be prepared to do what it takes to prevent that. In a particularly frightening image, the final shot of the film shows Godzilla’s attempt at evolving into a form that could defeat Yaguchi and the rest of Japanese society: Multiple humanoid creatures. Like every metaphor in Godzilla, this image does not correspond to one single parallel in reality: The creatures are in part a representation of the consensus that drives inaction according to Japan Ideology, they represent Godzilla’s understanding of the fearsome danger of humans when they cooperate, they reinforce Godzilla’s willingness to evolve and form a new crisis with each generation. What that image, as it lingers with audiences, evokes more than anything is how Godzilla, far from being a simple metaphor for nuclear power, manifests as an entire system of meaning lurking within a century of Japanese history.
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