The Beast and the Bomb: Godzilla’s Evolution Through Cinematic History
by Emma Yanai, Yale University ’25
Written for AMST 361: Comparative Colonialisms
Advised by Lisa Lowe
Edited by Jae D'Alessandro, Evan Daneker, Alison Tae, Thi Ha Phyo, Daniel Yim, and Kevin Guo
Immediately following Japan’s 1945 surrender to the Allied Forces in World War II, the United States began a seven-year occupation of the country. Though the scars of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki persisted in the form of hibakusha, bomb survivors who were often left sick, disabled or scarred,1 and in the rubble of the two cities,2 the occupied government led by US General Douglas MacArthur tightly controlled any discussion of the damage wrought by the nuclear blasts. And though overt protest was rare, resentment boiled beneath the surface; as film studies scholar Chon Noriega puts it, “what is repressed must always strive to return.”3
In 1952, the same year control of Japan was officially handed back to the Japanese government, the US began nuclear tests in the Pacific, beginning with a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb a thousand times more powerful than the one used in Hiroshima. Two years later, the US commenced Castle Bravo, a nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll. The test sent fallout thousands of miles, hitting a Japanese fishing boat called the Fukuryu Maru and ultimately killing one of the men aboard.4 The blowback was immediate and fierce; once again, the US military was using devastating nuclear technology, killing yet another Japanese citizen as a result. Suddenly, nationwide protests unleashed seven years of pent-up frustration. Amidst this furor, production company Toho Studios began work on a film called Gojira, in which a vicious beast angered by nuclear testing seeks to destroy Tokyo. The movie was simultaneously a financial hit and deeply political; Gojira symbolized American militarism and growing nuclear power, and Japan’s powerlessness in the face of it. However, when the movie was re-released in the United States two years later, this politics was nowhere to be seen; American censors had cut out much of the film and renamed it Godzilla: King of the Monsters.5 Thus began a decades-long evolution of the character of Gojira, or Godzilla. Through the dozens of movies in the franchise, the character was written and rewritten—at different times a vicious monster, a protector of humanity, and even a loving father to a cartoonish son named Minilla.6 Though seemingly arbitrary, these changes reflect transforming perspectives on warfare, militarism and US-Japan relations through time and space. Through an analysis of the two most recent Godzilla movies—Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Gojira Minus One (2023)—as well as the original Gojira (1954), three different perspectives on nuclear warfare and militarism become clear. These different visions offer glimpses into the temporal and national contexts in which they were created: the despair of postwar Japan, the eager militarism of modern-day America, and the complex relationship between war, guilt, and nationalism in modern-day Japan.
The original Gojira from 1954 stars Professors Yamane and Serizawa, two scientists from Tokyo. As ships begin mysteriously disappearing off the coast of Japan, the two realize that the cause is Gojira, a holdover from an ancient species of dinosaur. Though it had been sleeping peacefully underground for millions of years, American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll destroyed his natural habitat, forcing him above water and enraging him enough to invade Tokyo. What follows is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the movie, as Gojira’s rampage destroys the city. Though conventional weapons prove useless against his onslaught, it is revealed that Serizawa has developed an “Oxygen Destroyer,” the only weapon on Earth more powerful than a hydrogen bomb. Though he is at first unwilling to use the weapon, fearing that its use will open a Pandora’s box of yet more inhumanity, news coverage of children begging for a peaceful future ultimately convinces him to use the weapon. However, he first burns his notes on the weapon to prevent it from being recreated, and as soon as he has killed Gojira, he removes his oxygen tube while on the seafloor and drowns himself, believing even the knowledge of the weapon is too dangerous to continue existing.7
As Joey Palluconi and Damian Schofield, two researchers at SUNY Oswego write, “The film Gojira (Honda, 1954) was crafted purely to place on screen a small fraction of the pain, loss and agony felt by the Japanese population after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”8 As such, allusions to Japan’s recent losses abound in the film. In its opening scene, a fishing boat floats at sea until suddenly, a bright light consumes the screen, and the sailors are heard screaming.9 The opening scene is a clear gesture towards the sailors aboard the Fukuryu Maru, another fishing vessel destroyed on the path towards nuclear development. Tellingly, the actual deaths of the men are obscured by the light on screen, also obscuring the exact nature of their deaths. Though it is later revealed to be Gojira, this moment precedes any mention of the monster, and so the ambiguity of the radiation-coded death is meant to lead the viewer to wonder if they have just seen a reenactment of the Fukuryu Maru incident. The blinding light also demonstrates the unprecedented horror of nuclear bombs in two ways. First, the light that engulfs the screen shows a uniquely devastating kind of power, an almost godlike display too bright, too powerful for the human eye to comprehend. The power of the bomb, it is demonstrated, can do more than extinguish individual lives; it can wipe out any trace of their life or death at all. The light also displays the trauma that lay unresolved in the Japanese psyche. The atomic bomb’s destruction was not just beyond comprehension but also something many did not want to comprehend. Just nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear war remained a fresh memory, and so the bright light represented the best compromise for Japanese filmmaking of the time: an account that communicated the devastation of the bomb but avoided the gruesome images that so many Japanese, having seen it in person, had no desire to see on screen.
Further examples of Japanese postwar trauma are clear during Gojira’s attack on Tokyo and its aftermath. As Gojira’s fire breath ravages the city, cries of “It’s all a sea of flames” are interspersed throughout the scenes. Not only is the “sea of flames” imagery reminiscent of the Tokyo firebombings just ten years prior, in which large swaths of the city were consumed in flame, but the spaced repetition mimics the experience of the city—burned down just a few years before, the city once again finds itself ablaze, so quickly that the viewer feels a sense of déjà vu watching the scene, one further reinforced by the repeating line. Another example is a mother huddling with her children as Gojira approaches. She whispers to her children, “We’ll be with Daddy soon,” suggesting their father was killed in World War II. The scene makes concrete the never-ending trauma of a family who, just ten years after the death of their father in war, is about to be crushed underfoot.10
But the clearest symbol of warfare is Gojira itself. Gojira begins as a victim of colonial violence; its emergence, after all, is only because American nuclear tests destroyed its home. Nevertheless, its anger at the injustices done to it compels it to reproduce the very same violence that wounded him in the first place. In this way, Godzilla is both a victim of imperialist violence and the embodiment of violence that must be exorcized. In other words, it is monstrous legacies resurrected in flesh, highlighting the violence that created it. In Gojira’s case, this is the devastation of nuclear warfare; as Daniel Durkin of Bowling Green University puts it, “Toho [Studio]’s efforts to display radiation as not a silent, unseen killer, but rather a giant, formidable, visible monstrosity capable of destroying Japan amalgamated into the giant lizard that is still recognizable today.”11
Gojira’s monstrous origins also allow him to embody one of the main themes of Gojira: the dangers of inhumane modern science. Gojira is a dinosaur-like creature that emerges from the ocean. Though his appearance is also likely an allusion to the Fukuryu Maru (Fukuryu means “lucky dragon” in Japanese), Noriega argues his intermediate status between land and sea also parallels how “Japan in 1954 is a transitional monster caught between the imperial past and the postwar industrial future.”12 Further, Gojira’s transformation into a destroyer of cities is caused by Castle Bravo, tests aimed at the development of new nuclear technology—showing the devastation that emerges from modern warfare. And that his first land-based attack is on a remote, rural village on Odo Island symbolizes the incursion of modern forces on traditional livelihoods. The island, which lacks electricity or telephone poles, is the first place ruined by a living manifestation of modern war, and his return soon sparks scientists to overrun the island with Geiger counters and other modern technologies.13
Gojira’s connections to the water further emphasize this danger. Though the Pacific has historically captured imaginations, from Gojira to Moby Dick,14 modern science fiction has tended to preoccupy itself with space as the new frontier.15 Yet Gojira focuses on an ancient creature from the sea as a reminder of both tradition’s power and modernity’s violence. Indigenous scholar Joanne Barker reminds us of water’s tremendous symbolic power: it is an archive, recording everything ever done to or dissolved in it, including legacies of imperial violence and environmental destruction; it is a reminder of humanity’s reliance on a larger, mutualistic network of living beings; and it is an awesome power capable of inflicting damage in retribution for the violence it has absorbed in the form of hurricanes and floods.16 That Gojira comes from the ocean, then, highlights both the centrality of water to life and the damage that can come from abuse of it.
It is important to note, however, that the critique of Gojira was inconsistent in its application. Certainly, it highlights the devastation of nuclear violence and warns about the dangers of continuing militarism. But it lacks any meaningful confrontation with Japan’s own wartime atrocities. In that way, at the same time it critiques nuclear proliferation, it also engages in what anthropologist Yukiko Koga calls “inverted victimhood”—that is, the portrayal by and of Japanese society as straightforward victims rather than war’s perpetrators.17 Therefore, Gojira can be understood as a deeply imperfect examination of militarism—one that warns against continued warfare and violence but does not contend with Japanese militarism the way that Minus One would 70 years later.
Hoping to bank on the success of Gojira, American production group Embassy Pictures purchased rights to the film and released it to an American audience. However, the company took great lengths to strip the movie of political meaning. Most immediately, the name of Gojira was anglicized to Godzilla—18a name that evoked religiosity, suggesting that Godzilla was a supernatural or cosmic force rather than a product of man-made violence. The censors also cut 20 minutes of footage, including any mention of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or nuclear testing.19 In its effort to eliminate any content even hinting at American responsibility, the producers went so far as to edit the scene mentioned above, where a mother tells her children they will see their father soon. In the American version, the woman’s cries are drowned out by Godzilla’s cries and dramatic music. Here, the cries of the Japanese people are literally silenced.
Since the 1956 re-release, even Japanese Gojira films have softened their critique, as US-Japan relations became warmer and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed—at least on paper—to be receding beyond living memory.20 The American-made film Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), or KotM, is the culmination of these changes. The film is part of the larger “Monsterverse,” a franchise of connected movies created by Legendary Media. In this new canon, militarism and nuclear warfare are not just obscured but valorized. In the Monsterverse, Godzilla is just one of a species of giant creatures known as Titans who were born in the core of the Earth and ordained from birth with radioactive powers. Not only is nuclear warfare nowhere to be found in this new origin for Godzilla, but Castle Bravo is also rewritten as an attempt to kill Godzilla before he attacks.21 In making Godzilla’s power predate humanity, the movies absolve humans, and especially the United States, of any culpability in the damage Godzilla inflicts. Further, that his radiation predates humanity serves to naturalize nuclear warfare as an inevitable force rather than one explicitly created to inflict harm. Finally, that Castle Bravo, part of an arms race in a bloody “Cold” War, is recast as a heroic attempt to save humanity justifies nuclear warfare as not merely a natural force but, at times, even a positive good.
As much as the Monsterverse is the story of ferocious Titans, it is also the story of Monarch, a secret branch of the US government tasked with containing the threat posed by the Titans. To do so, the organization indulges in several fantasies of modern imperial control. For instance, Monarch hosts extraterritorial, secret bases across the world, including in Mexico, Germany, and Antarctica. These bases are placed at locations where Monarch has discovered sleeping Titans, in order to prevent them from awakening. Whenever terrorists attack these bases, the awakened monsters immediately wreak havoc on the surrounding area, sowing global disorder—when Rodan is awoken in Isla de Mara, for instance, he kills countless local residents with his fire breath.22 While morally unambiguous in the world of the Monsterverse, this narrative works as a justification for the military bases that the US actually maintains across the globe. As Catherine Lutz elucidates, bases are not only critical tools and central fixtures of the American empire, but are legitimized under the rhetoric of security, for both the US and the host country, even as they do little to offer anyone protection.23 Yet Godzilla: KotM offers a straightforward cautionary tale about what happens when America is not there to protect native people from unspeakable horrors. Further, that the attacks are perpetrated by a group labeled simply as “terrorists” further ties the fictional politics of KotM to the realities of post-9/11 America—the threat of terrorism, after all, has been used to justify the modern security state.
Another fantasy of the Monsterverse is the notion of precise and biological control. By KotM, Monarch has developed “bio-acoustic” technology to surveil the Titans. Using this tool, Monarch is able to record Godzilla’s location, heart rate, and blood pressure, which they use to glean information about his physical and emotional well-being throughout the film. The notion that the entirety of the self can be reduced to quantifiable data reflects the fantasy of the empire that they can capture all that needs to be captured. As Daniela Agostinho, professor of information studies at Aarhus University, and her team explain, this stems from an Enlightenment-era drive for absolute control through data—even though life cannot be reduced to mere numbers, and any attempt to do so will inevitably fail to capture the contexts and complexities of human life.24 Yet Monarch can extract a seemingly endless supply of information from Godzilla’s vitals, a move which does discursive work to actualize an imperial fantasy. Even more dramatically, bio-acoustic technology is later used to control the Titans—in mimicking the Titans’ calls, the protagonists are able to stop their rampages, at least until their technology is destroyed. This furthers the fantasy of the state; not only does their scientific prowess render everything knowable, but it renders it controllable, too.
One of the most dramatic reinscriptions, however, occurs at the film’s climax. The transformation of Professor Serizawa demonstrates how the anti-militarism of the original film has been corrupted into wide-eyed glorification. For much of the movie, Serizawa embodies the anti-militarism of his namesake in the 1954 film. Though often overruled, Serizawa argues at a congressional hearing near the beginning of the film that the Titans “returned because of us. It was our atomic testing that awoke Godzilla—other creatures like the MUTOs [Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms], by [our] strip mining and seismic surveys.” Here, he seems aware that, though monsters possessing radioactive powers have always existed and always could have awoken, it was human militarism and environmental extraction that accelerated their return. Yet, by the end of the movie, this awareness has evaporated. When Godzilla, who has allied with the humans against the other Titans, is defeated by the Titan King Ghidorah, he is left weakened at the bottom of the sea. In a parallel to the original, Serizawa dons a diving suit and heads to the seafloor to confront Godzilla. But this time, instead of taking his “Oxygen Destroyer” to slay the beast, he takes nuclear weapons to revive him in time to defeat King Ghidorah and save humanity. This new Serizawa thus betrays the ideals of the first; not only does he use nuclear bombs when his predecessor was so against any kind of weapon of mass destruction, but he uses them in a positive, even healing way. Entirely gone is his 1954 effort to erase any trace of the Oxygen Destroyer that saved Japan.
The shooting of the scene further highlights the divide between the Serizawas. Before detonating the bombs, Serizawa approaches Godzilla, who lies on the ground defeated. Because he is on the floor, Serizawa is able to see him face-to-face—the first time a human is at eye level with Godzilla. Knowing his death is inevitable, Serizawa removes his helmet and glove in order to place his hand on Godzilla’s snout and look into his eyes. Because the old rubber suit Godzilla had been replaced by a computer-generated image (a trend started by the 1998 American Godzilla movie and resisted for many years by Japanese versions),25 Godzilla’s eyes are expressive and human. Godzilla and Serizawa can then enjoy a moment of understanding, where Serizawa comforts the beast before sacrificing himself to empower him again. In framing this moment of connection as equals looking face-to-face, the characters’ placement suggests an equal relationship, in which Godzilla has been successfully tamed into an ally of America. Further, Serizawa removing his suit represents a shedding of the nuclear anxiety that had gripped his predecessor. This scene, therefore, finally and thoroughly rejects the perspective of the original movie, instead embracing a fantasy where Godzilla—and the nuclear warfare he represents—can be tamed and controlled.
Crucially, Serizawa’s turn from critic of human violence to ardent believer in the world-saving potential of nuclear bombs is never examined. In this way, the film follows the legacy of post-Hiroshima American monster movies. Noriega writes, “The films’ apparent self-examination—“look at what we've accidentally created”—lasts until the monster's autonomy and threat shifts responsibility from American science onto the monster itself.”26 While KotM makes initial gestures towards anti-militarism, such concerns are almost immediately subsumed in the larger stakes presented by the release of the Titans by eco-terrorists. These eco-terrorists are cartoonishly evil, willing to kill anyone who gets in their way, and apathetic to the lives lost as Titans destroy cities, making it difficult for a viewer to have any sympathy for their position. To the viewer, their unjustifiable actions make any response by the US military wholly righteous; to put otherwise, the eco-terrorists play into the trope of cartoon villains that the US military must destroy at all costs. Further, because the most dramatic action scenes in the movie occur between Titans, human responsibility in these monster-against-monster battles is obscured. The narrative of KotM, then, comes to resemble the rescue narratives that sociologist and UC San Diego professor Yến Lê Espiritu describes in the context of the Vietnam War; though it was American militarism that created refugees in the first place, the US nevertheless framed itself as the savior of these same refugees.27 Though none of the Titans would have reappeared without human intervention, in the chaos of the Titan’s incursion, such blame becomes obscured, and only human defeat over the monsters remains.
Though KotM appeared to be the end of the original critique of the 1954 Gojira, the latest addition to the franchise offers a fresh perspective on the anti-militarism of the original. Gojira: Minus One (2023) was released by Toho Studios, the company behind the original Gojira. The Minus One’s director, Takashi Yamazaki, stated, “I love the original Godzilla, and I felt I should stay true to that spirit, addressing the issues of war and nuclear weapons,”28 a goal made clear in the film. The movie opens with a kamikaze pilot named Koichi Shikishima in the last days of WWII, fleeing his suicide mission and landing on Odo Island—an homage to the island from the original film. There, Gojira attacks, but Koichi becomes too scared to shoot him, allowing others on the island to be killed. After returning to Tokyo after the war, Koichi lives in shame for his unwillingness to die for his country. After Gojira is angered and given new nuclear powers by testing at Bikini Atoll, Koichi witnesses his rampage in Tokyo and resolves to kill the monster in his final kamikaze mission. At the last second, however, he chooses to parachute out of his plane right before he crashes into Gojira, killing the monster while saving himself.
Set even closer to the bombing of Hiroshima than the 1954 iteration, Minus One emphasizes the despair of postwar Japan. The name Minus One alludes to how Japan was already at “zero” postwar, and Gojira brought them to a previously unfathomable low.29 In the film, Koichi gets a job as a minesweeper, finding and destroying mines in the Pacific—literally cleaning up the debris of war. Further, when Koichi attempts to recruit a group of Navy veterans to help attack Gojira, one man’s justification for volunteering is that he does “not want to see Tokyo go up in flames again,” an explicit mention of the firebombing of the city. And beyond the characters’ voices, the film’s editing resurrects memories of WWII and its aftermath. The movie makes extensive use of historical footage, including of General MacArthur supposedly telling Japan that the US, preoccupied with the Cold War, would not send help to Japan amidst Gojira’s rampage. The use of real footage strengthens the film’s historicity by using real figures to emphasize the real political circumstances the film aims to recreate. Additionally, because 1940s footage is in grainy black and white, it contrasts with the HD suffering of the characters in the film. In other words, while fictitious news reports use blurry footage of MacArthur, the devastation faced by ordinary people is real and in vivid color.
Gojira himself also aligns more closely with the original 1954 monster. Unlike the savior of humanity from KotM, Minus One’s Gojira is ferocious, full of rage, and incapable of being reasoned with. When he comes to destroy Tokyo, his radioactive breath does not merely melt steel, as it did in the original. Instead, it destroys entire city blocks, engulfing them in enormous mushroom clouds reminiscent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Further, the movie recreates many of the scenes from the original, both as an homage and a signal of the film’s dedication to its predecessor’s anti-nuclear, anti-war message. For example, Gojira destroys the exact same structures, including Ginza’s famous Nippon Theater. Even the reporters who died while covering his rampage make a reappearance, meeting the same fate as their 1954 counterparts.
Though more faithful to the original, Minus One introduces a new and nuanced critique. Seventy years after the original, Minus One is comfortable problematizing the imperial violence of not just the US, but Japan. In the original Gojira, Japan is painted straightforwardly as a victim whose people suffered unfairly at the hands of American cruelty. This depiction typifies postwar attitudes, in which the devastation of nuclear warfare allowed Japan to obscure its own extensive list of wartime atrocities. Even the Japanese constitution writes that “the Japanese people…resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government,” a phrase that suggests the Japanese were victims who had war thrust upon them by complex political machinations out of their control.30 The film also grapples with the poor treatment of returning soldiers following World War II. Veterans like Koichi became the target of fierce hostility; as historian John Dower writes, “They were, after all, losers.”31 This sentiment explains why Koichi is berated by a former friend immediately upon returning to Tokyo. She demands to know how a kamikaze pilot could have returned alive and concludes that he is a coward who failed his mission. “If not for you, my children wouldn’t have died,” she screams.
Yet Minus One challenges this postwar attitude in two ways. First, it criticizes the mistreatment of soldiers and veterans by the Japanese government. The movie displays Koichi’s PTSD in agonizing detail; he often suffers mental breaks where he forgets when and where he is, instead asking himself and those around him, “I returned alive, right? This is Japan?” He often refuses to believe people’s reassurance, instead convinced that he must be haunted or in hell—why else would he be suffering so much? Amidst this honest portrayal of postwar suffering, the film also highlights the resentment held by men who had served in the Imperial Army. In a scene where Koichi tries to recruit other soldiers for a mission, they ask, “Why is it always the poor who have to suffer?” pointing to the inequality and suffering that characterized life in the Japanese army. Further, when Koichi finally convinces them to join him on an entirely civilian-led mission, one man asks, “If we join this mission, are our deaths certain? If not, it’s better than wartime,” to the delight of the other veterans. This moment demonstrates the disillusionment that had wholly gripped veterans by the time the war had ended.
Another criticism of Japanese militarism is the modified origin of Gojira. In the film, Odo Island is attacked even before the tests at Bikini Atoll. This is because Gojira has always existed, awake and bloodthirsty; the only difference now is that the nuclear tests gave him new radioactive powers. In this new backstory, Yamazaki makes the case that what Gojira represents—militarism and barbaric war—long predates the Enola Gay. Though nuclear power made Gojira more powerful, it is only the scale of militarism, not its monstrosity, that has changed. In de-exceptionalizing nuclear bombs, Yamazaki challenges the notion that there is something uniquely evil about the atomic bomb. Instead, all manifestations of militarism—American nuclear bombs, but also Japanese war crimes— contribute to the monstrosity that Gojira embodies.
A final point of divergence is Minus One’s emphasis on human life as valuable and worth preserving. Throughout the film, human sacrifice in the name of war is a recurring theme. Koichi, a kamikaze pilot who fled his suicide mission, is labeled a coward and is wracked by guilt, continually wailing that he “is supposed to be dead” and that his suffering postwar—Gojira killing his partner, for instance—are ghosts punishing him for not dying for Japan. His surname furthers this message; Shikishima is both an old name for Japan, used frequently in classical poetry, and the name of a kamikaze squadron during WWII.32 Even his name, in other words, seems to signal that Koichi is “supposed” to die in honorable sacrifice, much like how both Serizawas laid down their lives to save humanity.
Yet Koichi demonstrates a stubborn dedication to survival. Though the plane he had flown during the war had no escape hatch (soldiers were meant to die with their aircraft), it is revealed that his new, postwar plane does, letting him avert death at the last second while still accomplishing what he had to. Wartime planes offered no chance at survival, but his new plane provides an alternative vision for the future. Wartime rhetoric framed continued war, even at great personal loss, as something admirable; amidst the mass casualties of Japan during WWII, Emperor Hirohito claimed he felt the dead’s pain but resolved to continue his campaign.33 Yet Koichi refuses to let himself die. When he reunites with his girlfriend, she asks, “Is your war finally over?” Not only does this allude to Koichi’s PTSD, but his answer in the affirmative shows that it is only a defiant will to live—not a valorization of death—that can end war.
Today, Gojira/Godzilla is one of the most enduring characters in transpacific culture. As Noriega writes, he has achieved “icon status in Japan and America, making plausible James Twitchell's jibe in Dreadful Pleasures that ‘it is one of the first images Westerners think of when they hear the word ‘Japan.’”34 Through an analysis of Gojira, Godzilla: KotM, and Gojira: Minus One, one catches a glimpse into three different perspectives on war and modernity. And though each movie tells a story about the particular historical, cultural, and political circumstances around its production, it is also crucial to view the films as parts of a larger franchise, woven together as a transnational, transhistorical metaphor for the beasts we fear.
Endnotes
1. “Testimony of Hibakusha,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/un/disarmament/arms/testimony_of_hibakusha/
2. Matthew Edwards, “Introduction,” Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema, McFarland Press, 2015. Pg. 13
3. Chon Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When ‘Them!’ Is U.S.” Cinema Journal 27, no. 1 (1987). https://doi.org/10.2307/1225324. pg. 65
4. Noriega 57
5. Daniel J Durkin, “Godzilla and the Cold War: Japanese Memory, Fear, and Anxiety in Toho Studio's Godzilla Franchise, 1954-2016,” Bowling Green State University, 2021, pg. 27
6. Fukuda, Jun. “Son of Godzilla.” Criterion. https://www.criterion.com/films/29346-son-of-godzilla
7. Ishiro Honda, director. Gojira. Toho Studios, 1954. 1 hr., 36 min.
8. Joey Palluconi, & Schofield, Damian, (2021), The Kaiju as Beholder: Finding Empathy in Godzilla, 5, 1.
9. Honda, Gojira.
10. Honda, Gojira.
11. Durkin, 23
12. Noriega, 68
13. Aidan J. Warlow, “Radiant Dreams and Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives and American Intervention in Postwar Speculative Popular Culture,” The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2022, pg. 23
14. Erin Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2017.0002. pg. 11
15. Thomas Schnellbächer, “Has the Empire Sunk Yet? The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (2002): 382.
16. Barker, Joanne. “Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 3 (2019): 4, 6.
17. Koga, Yukiko. “Inheritance of Loss.” 11
18. Noriega, 69
19. Durkin, 27
20. Warlow, 35
21. Palluconi, 10
22. Michael Dougherty, director. Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Legendary Pictures, 2019. 2 hr., 12 min.
23. Catherine Lutz, “U.S. Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 7(12). 2009.
24. Daniela Agostinho, Catherine D’Ignazio, Annie Ring, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and Kristin Veel, “Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive,” Surveillance & Society, 17, no. 3-4 (2019): 65.
25. Pallucino, 7
26. Noriega, 67
27. Yến Lê Espiritu, “Chapter 2: Militarized Refugees,” in Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. University of California Press, 2015, 39.
28. Yuri Kageyama, “Director of new Godzilla film pursuing ‘Japanese spirituality’ of 1954 original.” AP News, 3 November 2023. https://apnews.com/article/godzilla-minus-one-movie-yamazaki-japan-7958c1f336840dea1444acf893dcbae9
29. “GODZILLA MINUS ONE Official Trailer,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7DqccP1Q_4
30. Constitution of Japan, Preamble, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html
31. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, WW Norton & Company, 1999, 59.
32. Jaime Erickson, “Honor in Death: Kamikaze Pilots of World War II,” Marquette University, https://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/erickson.html.
33. Dower, 36.
34. Noriega, 63
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