Godzilla And His Path Of Destruction
Bailey Hennen
11/29/15

The U.S thought that when they dropped the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would end the war and that there would not be any fallout or backlash from doing so. They were dead wrong. The war did end shortly after the bombs were released and they destroyed the islands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there were major consequences and back lash from the U.S. making that major power play. Shortly after the war ended the monster “Godzilla” or “Gojira” in Japanese, was created, Godzilla represents how the Japanese were affected by the two islands being destroyed and what they were doing at the time to recover. Godzilla represents the cultural fears of not being able to contain the actions of other people and of being wiped off the earth by one single entity (nuclear radiation and poisoning) that you can’t even see or detect until it is too late for you to do anything about it. He is created as a subliminal outcry to the rest of the world about what Japan is going through after the attacks and also what happens when the U.S. tests more bombs in the middle of the ocean and the effects reach the Japanese people. He represents the fear of the unknown enemy that you can’t see, can’t hear and can’t touch.

Shortly before the war would end the United States came up with a daring plan to attack the Japanese. They would drop two Atomic bombs (Fat Boy and Little Man) on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day this has been the only nuclear weapons in the entire world to be used against an enemy in any war in history. But these two attacks would finally give the rest of the world a wake-up call that nuclear and atomic warfare was here and it was real. The effects are catastrophic and have devastating after math as well. Shortly after the attacks roughly 230,000 people died from the effects of the blast, mostly from the radiation and burns from the blasts and the trauma that they sustained. Even though Japan surrendered they still were dealing with the aftermath of what America had done to them. But the U.S. was not done inflicting pain on the Japanese just yet, even if they didn’t know it at the time. On March 1st 1954 the U.S. was conducting a thermonuclear device test on Bikini Atoll, but that was not known to the Lucky Dragon N. 5, a Japanese tuna fishing boat that was fishing near the atoll at the time. When the blast went of the range was far greater than what was predicted, the crew was exposed to the radiation from the blast and when they headed back to Japan they brought the radiation back with them and the fish that they had on board. Most of the crew died within the first year after returning home to Japan. That was not the end of it though, because of the testing that was still going on the Japanese brought back massive amounts of contaminated fish on varying ships that went out fishing.

After the war ended and all the nuclear testing was going on at Toho Studios in Japan they had the idea to create a movie that told the story of the bombings and the subsequent damage that they caused. The movie was titled “Godzilla” or “Gojira” in Japanese. This movie is based around the Lucky Dragon Number 5 when it was out fishing, finding a monster in the sea that attacked them and killed the men on board and then the monster moved on to the island of Japan. Godzilla is a monstrous lizard that has been morphed and changed by the effects of radiation, he has a thread of nuclear power that has permanently been attached to his back and all the way down his tail. He storms around Japan causing destruction and chaos in his wake and he doesn’t have any thoughts about the people and the lives that he destroys when he passes through the towns. He was used as a propaganda figure after the war, he represented the U.S. and the destructive methods that they used in the war and all the casualties that we caused but that we took little to none account for in the end. He brings out the fear that once nuclear power has been released there is no stopping it and there is no stopping the damage from happening.

Jefferey Cohen wrote an article titled “Monster Culture 7 theses” which describes 7 thesis’s about the way that monsters are embodiments of things that humans fear in everyday life. The thesis that I think describes Godzilla the most is thesis number 4 “The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” (pg71) meaning that monsters are often exaggerations of social differences that are deemed unacceptable in a given culture. I think this describes Godzilla because even though the U.S. thought that it was socially acceptable to use these bombs to end the war, other people in other cultures, especially Japan did not. They use Godzilla as a passive aggressive way to tell the U.S. that the use of nuclear power is highly unacceptable and that it should never be used again because of the aftermath of the radiation and the effects on the people that it was used on. Thesis 5 “The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible” also backs this argument up because it says that Monsters offer cautionary tales about what happens when someone transgresses social limits and taboos. At this point America had crossed many social limits when they dropped the bombs. No one knew what exactly would come about after the bombs were dropped and they did not know what the long term consequences of. That is one of the messages that is hidden in the movie as well. The long term consequences are outlined very well in the movie, death, destruction, and long term damage that is more often than not non-repairable. Godzilla was born because the radiation mutated his genes and created this huge monster that only had death and destruction on its mind. The bombings also brought to the mind the cultural fears of not being able to take back your actions and not having any way of making right the wrongs that have been done. The movie also outlines these fears and emotions as well. It tells us and Japan that there is really no hope in sight and that there is no way to fix the damage that has been done in the end except to just try and move past everything and try to rebuild things after the dust has settled. After Godzilla goes on his rampages through the city you really don’t see any of the death that he leaves behind. They don’t show death the movie because when the war was going on there really was no documentation that was shown to the world about the people who died and how they died. Most of the death was hidden from the general public until much later, even now the U.S. does not really go in-depth about that part of the war when students are taught about it in history classes. Personally I think that we SHOULD go more in depth about what happened, how it happened and what the results were. I didn’t even know about the Lucky Dragon 5 or any of the other fishing vessels that were damaged because of the U.S. continuing to test until I actually started researching this subject and even then I had to dig a little more than normal to find out more details about what happened. This is something that America should be responsible to fix because of how much damage we have done to not only Japan but other countries that relied on fishing back then and now. After the testing out in the Pacific there were mass amounts of radiation that went into the ocean and effected other countries like Europe, China. Indonesia and others that did not know there was radiation in the water or that there was a chance of the fish they harvested were contaminated.

The American people have also not been taught any of this in our history classes either, we hide from the things that we did back then because they weigh on our minds still and it seems like we are still ashamed of what we (the U.S.) have done. We should embrace the fact that these events took place and we should also be able to learn about them in classes and at younger age that way the new generations know the impact the actions like this cause so that we can hopefully avoid things like this from happening again in the future. Thesis number 6 “Fear of the Monster is Really Kind of Desire” (pg. 79) from Cohen’s “Monster Culture” describes this situation very well as well. The thesis “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desir”, meaning that even though we fear this monster within us and the cultural monster says that it is taboo it is really actually more of a draw to people and it makes people feel drawn to it more and more. It is just like how the U.S. is suppressing the events almost and yet by doing so more and more people want to know about the events and know what the after math was and everything that took place before and after as well. This is one of the reasons that I chose Godzilla as my monster to write about, I wanted to be able to research the background and the events because I had not really been taught about how Godzilla was linked to the bombings at all. But Godzilla is linked 100% to the bombings because he is basically the vessel that Japan chose to tell their story through. They didn’t want to come right out and tell America what they thought about us after they collected themselves and had a moment to think about America’s actions.

Godzilla is also the face that is put to the otherwise faceless enemy that is nuclear radiation and poisoning. He is the physical presence of an otherwise ghost figure. Nuclear and atomic power is feared because once it is released you cannot see, hear, taste or feel it until it is to late and you are dying from the symptoms of the poison’s it is made of. One of the greatest fears that I believe the entire world has is fighting the invisible enemy and the fact that since it is invisible there is almost no way to fight the power. Creating Godzilla was the way that Japan was able to make the invisible, visible. They were able to start to make some sense of what had just happened to them and to try and help comfort the Japanese people when they needed it the most. Monster Culture thesis number 7 makes an amazing point, the thesis is “The Monster Stands at the Threshold….. Of Becoming”. Monsters ask us to confront our fears and to come to terms with them (rather than simply repress them).” This is important because this is what Japan did, they confronted the fears that they had when they made Godzilla. They were letting the Japanese people have a way to make sense of what had happened and a way to visualize the monster that was up till then invisible except for the first initial blasts. The entire country was able to piece together the events of what happened a lot better afterwards because they really weren’t able to know what happened to “Create” Godzillla up till then. Godzilla was the representation of not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the events that led to the radiation posion reaching the main land through the fish markets and the toll that it took on the main land after it reached the major cities. It would destroy almost everything that Japan had at the time. But it also raised hope because now that the monster they were fighting had a fight the people were able to have the hope that they would be able to defeat the monster in the end and be able to rebuild and make their lives even better than what they were before all of this took place. The fear that the invisible, bodiless monster would be able to totally destroy the country was real. Having the monster placed onto one single beast, even though it was made to represent the U.S. was a good way of encouraging the Japanese people that soon everything would be all right. It also gave the people time to reflect and think back on the events because when it all happened the events took place so quickly and decisively that no one was really able to sit down and think about what had just happened. They had no time to process or grieve for loved ones and allot of them did not even have the bodies of loved ones to grieve because the blast incinerated many of the casualties on point of contact, leaving only the shadows that they were casting at the time the blast went off. This movie was a way for the people to be able to look back at the events and process the images that they saw and the things that they lived through in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also for people of other cities and the outlying islands as well who were not so traumatically affected by the blasts. Even though the events of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki may fade from memory the movie’s made about Godzilla will hopefully live on through the ages to be able to remind people of the times when people could lose hope within a split second. Hopefully they will also remind future generations of the sacrifices that many men and women made for WWII because even though men were fighting the war the women back home were also heavily affected by the war when they would have to go to work instead of home. They would also have to help out as nurses in the armies and sometimes the battles reached them as well and that should always be remembered just as much as the nuclear blasts and impacts that were the turning point of the war and the turning point of Japanese culture as well. The pictures from the sketches and the Godzilla movies usually show Godzilla in some sort of large city and the city is usually full of fire and is in ruin as well. (Figure 1)

I feel that the whole concept of the movie series about Godzilla has a powerful impact on not only Japan but the rest of the world who views it as well. Who are we to go around wielding the power to destroy thousands if not millions of lives on a whim?? It is not an ethical thing to do by anyone’s standard and it should have never happened in the first place even if it did bring about the end of a long and hard war fought across many fronts. I wrote this article so that I could shed some light on the issues that Japan and the rest of the world has faced at the hands of the American government and hopefully it has some impact on people around the world as well. Godzilla is not just a movie about a monster destroying towns and becoming radioactive, it is a movie and a story about the lives that have been sacrificed because some people in power wanted to show the rest of the world just how big and scary they could be even though it had severe consequences that could not even be thought of until they had already occurred. The U.S. thought that the bombs would bring about the end of the war, but instead it did the opposite. It brought about a whole new war, the war against nuclear warfare and nuclear testing.

Works Cited:

Cohen, Jefferey. Monster Culture Seven Thesis. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

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