The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, inspired devastating monsters like Godzilla and anticipated the dystopian world of ruins and desolation where essential works of Japanese popular culture have been set for decades.
Its rough skin resembled the burns of those irradiated by the bombs, and its roar evoked the agonized wail of a badly wounded animal.
In its debut in Japanese theaters in 1954, it was called
Gojira
after the fusion of the Japanese words for gorilla (
gorira
) and whale (
kujira ).
).
Directed by Ishiro Honda in 51 days, a record time for a special effects film, it featured an actor clad in a latex costume destroying miniatures of Tokyo and irradiating its terrified inhabitants with his radioactive breath.
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Those creatures with a passion for destroying cities
Gojira
was billed as a hard-selling B-series product to Western audiences for its all-Japanese cast.
In the United States, producer Edmund Goldman bought the rights from the Japanese production company Toho and restructured the story around an American protagonist, actor Raymond Burr, in the role of an agency journalist.
With the help of extras filmed from behind, Burr dialogues with the characters of the original film and is integrated in key scenes as a timely observer.
The American version, which was titled
Godzilla, the king of the monsters
, eliminated the pacifist message and deleted political comments and references to the danger of atomic weapons.
Perhaps unwittingly, Goldman did justice to the plagiarism committed by
Gojira's Japanese producer,
who, in anticipation of the expected success in Japan of the American film
The Monster from Ancient Times
(1953), had copied its premise.
When describing what he considers an act of cultural cannibalism, researcher Hiroshi Morishita resorts to the Japanese onomatopoeia for gobbling,
paku
(the same one that gave the legendary video game Pac-Man its title).
"The producers of
Gojira
gobbled up the idea of the nuclear explosion unleashing the destructive fury of a prehistoric beast," says Morishita, a professor of popular culture at Soka University in Tokyo.
He explains that the trigger for
Gojira
came a few months before filming began, when the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru was irradiated in a US nuclear test on a Pacific atoll.
America's Godzilla helped create one of the longest-running monster franchises in world cinema history, with more than thirty sequels, most of them shot by Toho in Japan.
Professor Morishita adds that to improve the image of nuclear energy, the United States initiated the
Atoms for peace
program around the same time .
Reference of Japanese culture
Japan, the only country affected by atomic weapons, was turned into a promoter of the nuclear industry, and by 1957 it had contracted 20 nuclear reactors with the United States, despite being a volcanic archipelago prone to frequent earthquakes.
"In this context, the nuclear tragedy became a hallmark of Japanese culture," says the academic.
Mass destruction as a premise and ruins as a setting became recurrent in manga and animation, and Tokyo became what one reviewer called "the most destroyed capital in fiction since World War II."
While Japan consolidated its reputation as the cradle of technological excellence, a manga and animation industry was born whose exports included series such as
Mazinger Z
(1972), starring gigantic robots that were avatars of devastation.
The annihilation caused by an apocalyptic event is the reason for
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds
(1984), an
anime
signed by Hayao Miyazaki whose commercial success led to the birth of Studio Ghibli, the best-known Japanese company in the sector.
The Japanese abbreviation for animation,
anime
(with an esdrújulo accent), is internationalized with
Akira
(1988), the work of Katsuhiro Otomo that for many purists divided the history of drawn cinema in two.
His central character has powers of psychokinesis and uses them to wipe out central Tokyo with an explosion that, instead of the iconic mushroom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produces a perfect dome.
Another global cataclysm, called the Second Impact, gives rise to a post-apocalyptic world attacked by powerful creatures that evoke automatons like Mazinger Z, in another popular series titled in
Neon Genesis Evangelion
and created in 1995 by Hideaki Anno.
Moment of the Neo-Tokyo explosion in the movie 'Akira' (1988).
the geological barrier
Added to the trauma of the atomic bombings is the geological condition of a volcanic archipelago prone to constant earthquakes as a continuous source of images and stories of devastation.
The destructive power of atomic energy broke into Japanese reality again in March 2011, when the triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident left vast areas of Fukushima province uninhabitable.
The earthquake and tsunami caused thousands of deaths and the Toho producer waited five years to launch a new sequel to
Godzilla
(
Shin Godzilla
, 2016) in which the king of the monsters is now a creature that feeds on the nuclear waste that was discharged into Tokyo Bay.
Toho summoned Hideaki Anno, director of
Evangelion
, to make the film, which ends with the monster frozen and the warning that he could attack again at any moment.
A
recent
anime ,
Bubble
(2022), directed by Tetsuro Araki, seems to indicate that unable to resist the enormous appeal of decadent settings, Japanese creators are beginning to imbue them with optimistic narratives.
Bubble
is a love story set in what's left of a polluted and decaying Tokyo where a gang of rebellious orphans compete in spectacular
parkour
races .
In all of his interviews about the film, Araki explains his intention to deal with the disenchantment of the future world with his imagination: "I try to make dystopia utopia again."