Gojira as Japan’s First Postwar Media Event

Abstract

Why should we care about Gojira, arguably just a monster movie with a guy lumbering around in a rubber suit? Why should we stop and take note of a movie that has an obvious multicultural appeal and spawned a series of similar movies for more than five decades? My own understanding of Gojira (1954) is from the perspective of a bridge between Japan’s imperial war from 1931 to 1945 and the postwar. In my work on the cultural and political continuities between the war and the postwar, Gojira becomes an interesting case study as a media event. In fact, it was Japan’s first international postwar media event. Gojira is a way for me to extend my research from the war into the postwar, but to explain the popularity and the film’s longevity we have to grapple with Japan’s postwar media, its international image, and the understanding that foreign communities had of Japan in the early postwar period. I examine the film historically, not as a film scholar or film critic. Yoshimi Shunya and others explain that a media event is an event in which the original event is outpaced by the attention that the media pay to the event as it continues to linger in the public mind, the news, and the social psyche. In Yoshimi’s estimation, media create the reality of an event through the dissemination, distribution, and diffusion of the event itself. It is important to note that the media need not be privately owned, nor can it only be the news agencies that create a media event. Governments as well as international organizations can accomplish this task equally as well. Gojira was a popular hit in Japan; it traveled abroad, returned to Japan, and became a franchise unto itself. Gojira marks Japan’s return to the international stage—before the 1964 Olympics, before the success of the shinkansen (bullet trains), and before the postwar economic miracle that launched headlines about Japan’s dominant workforce.