Page 151 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

138 Nightmare Japan

with a consideration of the importance of daikaiju eiga both within their
historical context and as a profoundly influential genre for an entire
generation of Japanese filmmakers. Among the most immediately
recognisable films in Japanese cinema, daikaiju eiga provide the perfect
arena for addressing numerous social anxieties, not the least of which
constellate around the dread of mass destruction, biological mutation, and
the environmental impact of pollution resulting from rapid
industrialisation. As Japan remains the only nation to have suffered a
direct atomic attack, a cataclysm followed hard upon by decades of
exposure to US military exercises (including atomic tests) in the Pacific
Ocean, the aquatic and aerial origins of the mutated creatures populating
most daikaiju eiga seem only appropriate, as do the gigantic creatures’
intentional, and sometimes incidental, annihilation of major urban
centres. Tokyo in particular endures repeated destruction in these
narratives, a motif that has received notable critical attention in studies
such as Darrell William Davis’s Picturing Japaneseness – Monumental
Style, National Identity, Japanese Films (1995) and Mick Broderick’s
recent anthology, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the
Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996).
Additionally, the frequent conceit of portraying friction between
scientists and the military in daikaiju eiga – conflicts that often delay the
monsters’ vanquishing – seems an ideal plot device for a cinematic
tradition emerging from a nation that was at once ‘ground zero’ for
history’s most deadly union of science, technology and warfare, and a site
of wide-scale industrial, technological and economic development. As
Susan J. Napier notes, films featuring Japan’s most famous giant monster,
Gojira (a.k.a. Godzilla), often convey a substantial ‘nationalist twist’
(Napier 1996: 240), especially in their message that it is ‘American
science which brings forth the monster’ (240). ‘Even more specifically’,
she adds, ‘it is Japanese science, personified by the humane Japanese
scientist whose suicide helps destroy Godzilla, which ultimately saves the
world’ (240). When openly marketed towards children, and thus
populated with creatures characterised as friendly protectors of the
Japanese islands, daikaiju eiga remain creative forums through which
very human fears over the very human manipulation of science and