A Review of Kaiju vs Heroes at the Japanese American National Museum
The Japanese American National Museum located in LA’s Little Tokyo is currently running an exhibit entitled “Kaiju vs Heroes”, which functions as a showcase for the works of Japanese American artist Mark Nagata. These works include paintings and drawings but are primarily toy-based, all surrounding the same titular muse.
The hero is a familiar figure to all of us. But the kaiju? For this, most Americans’ point of reference lies in Godzilla, the towering, reptilian, fire breathing monster knowing for flattening whatever city he happens to come by. But in Japan this term is much more general, simply meaning “strange monster,” most usually referring to giant alien-like creatures that wreak havoc on the island. It is this generality that lends Nagata’s work to have so much color and craziness. Even if its arrangement leaves something to be desired by not taking a full advantage of the physical space a museum has to offer, the content exhibited is fun, fascinating, and full of variety.
I drove to little Tokyo with my little brother, an avid kaiju fan. When we first entered the exhibit, which is currently occupying the bottom floor of the museum space, we were greeted by a flickering old school TV playing a series of Japanese commercials for kaiju toys, as well as their equivalent Saturday morning cartoons. To the right of this TV, a group of toys from the Godzilla franchise, which my brother and I had a fun time quizzing ourselves on the names of. Stepping a little farther into a short hall covered with plaques of a small boy and his family, providing background for the exhibit. It was at this point that I realized this was actually an exhibit and art showcase for a specific artist: one Mark Nagata. Nagata is a Japanese American illustrator, toy maker and collector, and artist who has long had a love affair with kaiju. From the exhibit’s web page: “In California in the 1970's, Mark Nagata was living an all-American childhood. When he was nine, an aunt and uncle serving on a US military base in Japan sent him a box filled with colorful figures packaged with art-laden header and backing cards featuring alien-looking beings — kaiju and heroes — engaged in battle. These Japanese toys would eventually change Nagata’s life forever.”
I didn’t realize that I had actually seen Nagata’s work before, gracing the covers of the Goosebumps books my mom used to read to me and my siblings before bed. No doubt the monsters of those stories whet Nagata’s artistic tongue, paintings and covers of them lined up along to hall leading to the main section of the exhibit: a large room filled to the brim with kaiju toys and merchandise, including original works by Nagata (who molds his own toys as well as paints them with unique designs). This hall was aptly divided into forces of good and evil, with two entrances labeled “Heroes” to the left and “Kaiju” to the right. It was interesting to see the similarities in design and marketing between the figures of a Japanese childhood and an American one. These toys, games, and posters reminded me of the ones my brothers and I had of our own comic-booky, cartoony heroes and villains — only our were transformers, Marvel and DC cartoons, He-man instead of Japan’s Ultraman.
Perhaps the strongest point of this exhibit is its multimedia aspects. It’s not just an art gallery, it makes use of other mediums and modes of presentation to draw the museum goer in. There’s the visual displays in the paintings and the physical displays in the toys and models which function as sculptures. But they also use the viewer’s own body in a section where motion tracking is used to map your movements to a kaiju on a screen, where you can cause them to topple buildings as you walk through a virtual city. There’s a room where you can draw and color your own kaiju, cardboard headsets near a poster that gives instructions on how to view a 3D, VR diorama of Nagata’s personal collection. You put the headset on and it looks like you are inside his workshop, surrounded by toys. Finally, before exiting the exhibit you enter a small theater playing a short interview/documentary with the artist himself. It’s a nice dark area to rest after walking through the other parts, and you learn more about Nagata’s childhood and how his Japanese culture affected him as an American child.
There’s an interesting connection here to the permanent exhibit upstairs. Nagata’s parents were sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War Two. Although it is a much more somber exhibit, compared to the colorful one downstairs, it is equally worth a look, and this part of the film provided some semblance of a segue. While I wish we had gone there first, as it was much more contextual and somber, I appreciate that small interaction between the two exhibits.
When it comes to negatives, there was one, but unfortunately its nature is pervasive. The physical organization of the various parts of the exhibit left much to be desired. The rooms neither seemed to be organized chronologically or by theme, and you end up bouncing back and forth between Nagata’s art and his collection of the art of others from Kaiju culture. Plaques on the wall explaining parts of the exhibited art jump between different time points in Nagata’s life with no pattern. Moreover for someone who owns many action figures and toys, the display of those was unimaginative, though for this I blame the museum and not Nagata. The VR view of his own personal workshop was much more fun and creative in its displays.
I think my expectations were definitely affected by my previous heightened interest in the subject matter, so for me personally while I enjoyed it, I also wish it had gone farther, including more of a background and depth to Kaiju in general before diving into Nagata specifically. That being said, to anyone unfamiliar with the world of Kaiju, I highly recommend this as a starting point to bring you into that world of wonder as well as gain an appreciation for an aspect of Japanese culture an average American can very likely relate to: that wondrous Saturday morning cartoon feeling captured in physical art, and a nostalgia for childhood portrayed in Japanese terms.
