Godzilla In "Japan's Cold War"

"Godzilla" copyright 1954, Toho Co., Ltd.

The Wall Street Journal has a review of a new book, Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature and the Law by Ann Sherif (Columbia University Press, 304 pages, $50). In the article (and, I presume, in the book), Godzilla gets a good mention:

Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, Ms. Sherif's volume is successful in other ways, especially when it comes to identifying the main themes that creators explored during this period. One of the most significant of these was the fear of nuclear annihilation.

More than six decades after Hiroshima, it is easy to forget outside of Japan how pervasive this fear was and how deeply it affected cultural productions, even the most popular ones. While "Godzilla" Director Ishiro Honda could have cast his monster as yet another alien landing from outer space or the simple creation of an ambitious scientist gone mad, he did not. Instead, he consciously chose hydrogen-bomb testing, then being conducted by the United States in the South Pacific, as the means to awaken Godzilla from its long period of undersea slumber.

Further anchoring the film within the political debates of the day, the very first scene of the movie, in which a fishing boat is exposed to what appears to be the brilliant flash of a nuclear explosion, was inspired by a real incident which had taken place in March 1954, several months before the release of "Godzilla," when a Japanese trawler, Lucky Dragon No. 5*, had sailed too close to a test site in the Marshall Islands and had been exposed to nuclear fallout. Today, few would be able to connect the film's opening scene with this incident, but back in the mid-1950s, everybody did.

[*See G-FAN #80 for more on the Lucky Dragon.]

To read the full article, go here.