You Have Your Fear: Radiophobia, Myth and Cultural Trauma in Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla (1954)

Abstract

As American military censorship ended in 1952, Japanese filmmakers began to address the psychological, spiritual and cultural dimensions of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the impact of the loss of the Pacific War in general. These had all been taboo subjects under the occupation regime since the end of the war. One of the earliest films to take on the various spectres of the atomic age and their effects on Japanese society was Toho Studios' epic 1954 monster movie Gojira, known in the west by its Anglicized pronunciation, Godzilla. Far from being a commercial science fiction potboiler like western monster movies of the same period, its scenes of radioactive devastation and human wreckage revealed Godzilla to be a serious meditation on national trauma. Speaking of nuclear technology not only in direct fashion but in the language of Shinto and Buddhist myth, the disintegration of traditional social norms and the breakdown of ancient family hierarchies. Godzilla was a scathing critique of how deeply the nuclear event had penetrated Japanese cultural conventions.