Soul of the Future/ Monsters From the Depths: Godzilla (part 2)

Broadly speaking, everything not in consciousness inhabits the unconscious.  It includes personal memories and motivations as well as cultural assumptions and unresolved elements of personal and common experience.   Particularly powerful are those emotions and beliefs that are suppressed or ignored by personal and collective consciousness.

All of these elements are from the past: the personal past, the cultural past, the human and animal past, back beyond even imagined time.  When not in consciousness, these elements are unseen, undefined, seemingly not there anymore. As Carl Jung said, "The unconscious is really unconscious."

But they are there.  They may make themselves known in the present.  And they are another factor that shreds the idea of the future as something completely new.

So to remember the future, anticipate the past.

The original Gojira film of 1954 indirectly dealt with conscious lies and information that was available to consciousness, especially in its evocation of nuclear bomb radiation, at a time when nuclear weapons were widely tested and deployed, and seemed the most obvious threat to the future.

But Gojira also expresses complex and even contradictory emotions suppressed from Japanese consciousness most specifically, as Japan struggled with the rapid changes begun by the US Occupation after World War II that further transformed traditional culture.

In Part 1, we left the film after Professor Yamane reported to the Japanese government that Godzilla was a prehistoric beast both driven from its habitat and transformed physically by nuclear bomb tests.  Some government officials wanted to keep this information secret, while others insisted the public be informed.  Without saying anything more about it, the next scenes showed that the media was fully reporting on Godzilla, and the military efforts to stop it.

The first effort--bombing its undersea haven with depth charges--fails.  Godzilla then makes a series of forays--first into Tokyo Harbor and then onto land, each time met with escalating military attacks.  The final foray is the most extended, as Godzilla rampages through several sections of Tokyo, destroying much of the city.

The first destruction in the film was the equivalent of the atomic bomb blast--bright light and waves of force through the air (although how all this directly relates to Godzilla is never explained.)  When Godzilla comes ashore, it causes fires that rage out of control--the second destructive effect of the Bomb.

By this time it has already been established that Godzilla is radioactive, and leaves deadly radiation in its wake.  But in this final attack, Godzilla reveals another feature--the "atomic breath" that seems a kind of combination of heat and radiation.  Godzilla has become the Bomb, not simply in essence but in action.

The destruction of Tokyo is the film's long centerpiece.  It is very thorough, for the filmmakers constructed scale models of existing buildings to be destroyed.  For citizens of Tokyo, these would include familiar landmarks, with those who saw the movie in the city's largest downtown theater witnessing the destruction of the building they were in at that moment.

After the attack, the imagery of the destroyed city intentionally suggested photos of Hiroshima--particularly one image, which the US version extracted and put at the beginning of the film.   But it was still unmistakably Tokyo, which had another set of resonances.

For like some 80 other Japanese cities, Tokyo had also been devastated towards the end of World War II, not by a single atomic bomb but by many powerful but non-atomic bombs.  In a single raid on Tokyo in March 1945, American bombers killed upwards of a hundred thousand people, and left the city burning.

While it is tempting therefore to see Godzilla as representing a monstrous US, the emotions appear to be more complicated.  Many Japanese felt culpable for the suffering, death and destruction unleashed by the war promoted by their leaders, and for the savage actions of their military.  There was shame and guilt about the war itself, as well as shame for losing it.

In addition, according to literary critic and professor at Waseda University Norihiro Kato in his 2006 essay, "Goodbye Godzilla, Hello Kitty," the Japanese people never resolved their feelings about the more than 3 million Japanese soldiers and other victims who died in the war.  Heroic defenders of their country or innocent victims during the war, the soldiers in particular "came to be viewed as participants in a shameful, aggressive war..."

So conflicted feelings buried in the unconscious become expressed in a ritual reenactment of Tokyo's destruction.  The relationship, obvious in the imagery, is confirmed in one brief scene (largely cut from the US version) in which a mother huddles in a doorway with her three young daughters, promising them that they will soon join their father, a fairly explicit suggestion that he was killed in the war.

The scenes immediately after Godzilla's Tokyo rampage are almost unique in what became a series of atomic monster films.  They depict a triage center, and linger on the dying and injured, and their families--particularly children.  (To its credit, the US version includes these.)

 They are a plot device, but also an expression of empathy for the victims.  Those feelings or considerations were not often given much weight in the first decisions about the Bomb, as they don't seem to be in decisions about war and bombing otherwise.  These feelings can be driven into the societal and individual unconscious--for unwanted positive feelings can be suppressed just as can unwanted negative feelings.

Another approach to empathy for human consequences can be seen in this movie's interlocking subplot involving Professor Yamane's daughter.  While the family scenes are perhaps the most characteristically Japanese elements of the movie, mixing traditional and modern values, they can be seen as part of the human counterpoint to the Bomb.

All of this becomes tangled with the spectre of the Bomb, a monster who lurks in the depths of the unconscious, ready to maim, kill and destroy.  Who is responsible for unleashing it?  While this movie does not directly implicate human villains, it does bring forward, by indirection and contrast, a theme that is more prominently and variously explored in other atomic monster films, and in other related films of the era, as well as in science fiction itself.   That theme is the role of the Scientist.

It is generally considered that science entered fiction with Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus.  This story has itself inspired a long and various series of monster movies.  But the original story focused not on the "monster" but his scientist creator: he is the Dr. Frankenstein of the title.

In using electricity--the apparent spark of life--to reanimate dead matter, what Dr. Frankenstein did would be described by some as unnatural, ignorantly and arrogantly upsetting a balance that could well have unforeseen consequences, and by others as usurping the role of God in creating life.  It is believed to be a boundary humans should not cross--inviting punishment from God, the gods, nature or the unconscious.

From its beginning, the atomic bomb was widely seen as just such a transgression. Since Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, or a little later when the Scientist acquired that name and title, the public view of scientists has been complex and contradictory.  When finding and applying cures for terrible diseases, they are wonder-workers and benefactors.  When inventing new technologies, making new discoveries or proposing astonishing new theories, they become geniuses and celebrities, intimidating but admired.

But they are also feared, not only because of the break with the past they engineer and represent, but because of the power they unleash, and its consequences on ordinary lives.  For example, some believe that the scientists who advocated eugenics to strengthen the human race in the 19th and early 20th centuries--decades before the Nazis--scandalized and scared people particularly in the Southern US, resulting in a hostility towards scientists by Christian fundamentalists that remains to this day.

Even folk morality that sees arrogance as dangerous, or the wisdom of the Greeks that saw hubris as tragic, can be applied to the Scientist.  A more psychological approach might suggest that irrational emotions and motivations from the unconscious are often rationalized, so that one may think that a motive or belief is based on reasoning, when it actually expresses something powerful erupting from the unconscious.  That includes the motivations for denial.

All of these apply to the atomic scientists--as some of them (notably Robert Oppenheimer) eventually realized.  With their faith in "pure science," they did not see that their own obsessions and fascinations with their work was overriding or simply obliterating considerations of the consequences of that work.  Oppenheimer came to believe that his darkest emotions, suppressed from consciousness, nevertheless motivated him.

The scientists at Los Alamos of course knew they were working on an enormously destructive weapon, but that hardly makes them unique.  Many scientific discoveries (including some basic physics) and technologies were accomplishment by those on the payroll of some ruler attempting to gain a military advantage.  The difference, if there is any, might be that many such discoveries were eventually applied to much more, and lasted long after the weapons they enabled had crumbled to dust.  While the US government and industry talked a lot after the war about the peaceful uses of the atom, all the atomic bomb itself seemed to lead to was the hydrogen bomb, which an atomic bomb ignites.  So it is not surprising that the figure of the mad scientist returned to doomsday fictions, including some later atomic monster movies.  But not in Gojira.

This film Gojira features two scientists.  The first is Dr. Yamane, the elder paleontologist who spends most of the movie deeply saddened and angry that everybody wants to just kill Godzilla rather than study it--especially to learn how it survived the thermonuclear inferno.

The second is Dr. Serizawa, a haunted young research scientist.  Working alone, he has accidentally discovered a process which destroys all the oxygen in water, killing all life.  The drama of Gojira becomes whether Dr. Serizawa can be persuaded to use the Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla.

There are a few notable aspects to this young scientist.  For example, he is the only major character identified as a war veteran, which left him with physical scars that several characters mention, and resulted in his black eyepatch.  He is also a scientist working alone--already an anachronism--in a below-ground laboratory that in appearance suggests older film depictions of Dr. Frankenstein's lair.

All of this surprisingly sets up a complete reversal, for Dr. Serizawa is anguished with the knowledge that his discovery can be used as a weapon, and he is determined that its secrets do not wind up in the hands of any military.  He clings to the hope that he can still redeem his work, that his process can be turned to some good end, but in the meantime, he keeps it a complete secret--until he divulges it to Dr. Yamane's daughter, Emiko, to whom he has been betrothed since childhood.

But distraught after helping to nurse victims of Godzilla's Tokyo attack, Emiko betrays his secret to Ogata, the young man she is now in love with, and together they try to persuade Serizawa to prevent further rampages by using his device to kill Godzilla.  He explains why he cannot, suggesting that even if he destroys his notes, he might be forced by some government (using torture, it is implied) to recreate the process.

But after seeing a broadcast of a girls' school singing the Prayer for Peace ("May we look to tomorrow with hope/May peace and light return to us,") Serizawa relents: he will himself use the Oxygen Destroyer just once.  He immediately burns his research, but that is not the end of his plan.  He insists on taking his mechanism himself to the bottom of Tokyo Bay, and after he is satisfied that Godzilla is about to be destroyed, he cuts his lifeline and dies with the atomic monster in the depths of the sea.

The scientist--metaphorically the creator of the Bomb--chooses to die with the consequence that became the Bomb, in order to prevent his knowledge from being used to make an at least equally devastating weapon.  He consciously realizes that humans are unlikely to resist the motives from the unconscious leading to violence, and he makes a conscious decision to die rather than become the instrument of more death.

An unquestioned premise of the civilized life of humanity in the past ten thousand years or so is the absolute right of human dominion over animals and the rest of life.  But for hundreds of thousands of years before that, humans lived with animals and plants as part of their daily conscious life.  Humans identified themselves with animals, and that relationship is one basis for some human religious beliefs as well as science, art and ethics.  But in cultures and societies that use and serve industrial and technological processes much larger than any human individual,  the complex relationships with other organisms sinks deep into the unconscious.

This is another conscious theme in Gojira.  Several commentators have pointed out the repeated shots of birds in cages and fish in tanks, perhaps symbolizing nature as a captive of atomic science.  That proves to be a feature of Godzilla as well--exiled from its natural habitat and transformed into an unnatural monster by nuclear explosions.

The movie's last scenes are singular in the atomic monster genre.  Godzilla is located, apparently asleep in the depths of Tokyo Bay.  Even when the divers approach it, the creature is slow to respond.  The long underwater sequence (including the successful use of the Oxygen Destroyer, Godzilla surfacing for one last cry before turning to a fleshless skeleton) is accompanied by dirge-like music.  There is no pulse-pounding soundtrack here, none of the movie's signature march music; only an extended requiem.

There is a brief moment of celebration on the boat above when the monster is vanquished, but the music doesn't change.  When it becomes known that Dr. Serizawa has sacrificed himself, the mood is again somber, and the dirge continues.  There is no dramatic confrontation, no sense of triumph.  It is instead a moment of tragedy.

The last images of Godzilla are not of the destroyer, but of simply a creature. The filmmakers likely noticed that despite his destructiveness, King Kong became something of a sympathetic figure, and his death was sad, perhaps even tragic. Like King Kong, and unlike many other atomic monsters, Godzilla had mammalian eyes and a recognizable face.  Attributing human identification to this sort of anthropomorphism has some truth to it, but ultimately it is too reductive.  There is more that is stirred from ambiguous memories lodged in the unconscious.  In any case, that Godzilla had this effect on viewers is undeniable, with something like 30 more films over the next 65 years--in which Godzilla is often a hero-- as evidence.

This is another complex feature of the Bomb, which might be characterized as irony or paradox or ambiguity, or simply a statement of consequences.  The Bomb derives its power from humans unlocking a basic secret of nature, and one of its effects is to either destroy natural life or hold it captive.  This is often consciously ignored, but in Gojira and some other films of the period, it is expressed in a way that evokes feelings.

Gojira ends with a peculiar monologue by the elder Dr. Yamane as he gazes into the deep, apparently speaking only to himself.  He doubts that this Godzilla was the only creature to be changed by atomic testing, and that somewhere in the world another Godzilla might appear, especially if nuclear testing continues.

This ending did not appear in the US version of Godzilla.  That film concludes with the voice of Raymond Burr urging the world to "start living again."

This suggests some of the differences that would be obvious in American movies about atomic monsters that flooded movie theaters--and especially Saturday matinees--throughout the middle 1950s.  But they also evoked emotions regarding the Bomb in the US, and paved the way for movies that took further steps into consciousness.

To be continued...

The first Gojira/Godzilla post is here. Prior posts in the Soul of the Future series can be accessed by following this link, or the "Soul of the Future" label below. 

Soul of the Future/ Monsters From the Depths: Godzilla (Part 1)

This is part of the intermittent but ongoing series, Soul of the Future. It is a history that eventually leads to speculations on things to come, but always mindful of major current issues likely to shape the future of humankind and planet Earth.

In the 21st century, the most likely apocalyptic future we face involves effects of the ongoing and accelerating climate crisis, as well as the biological, economic, political and societal effects of other ongoing, accelerating, significant and interacting categories of environmental destruction.

In the later half of the 20th century, the most likely apocalyptic future scenario involved thermonuclear war and its effects. Though this threat is by no means over—some believe that chances for accidental triggering of a nuclear exchange are actually higher now than during the Cold War—it has largely disappeared from view. That the threat or even the nature of nuclear weapons has retreated from public consciousness—and perhaps unconsciousness—is part of the danger.

Further, the geopolitical stresses caused by climate crisis effects--which include mass migrations, drought, disease and food shortages--could result in armed conflicts.  So the climate crisis may include nuclear war as well.

How 20th century societies dealt with the looming spectre of thermonuclear war, directly and indirectly, may help to illuminate the mood today regarding the climate crisis future, and could offer useful lessons for how to deal with both the actual climate crisis future and the present set of complex responses, that include confusion, fear, anger, and a certain blankness, suggesting both passive and active psychological denial.

The strictly rational attempts to study the future foundered almost immediately, precisely because of the nature and enormity of the Bomb.

There were a number of likely reasons the futurism of the 1950s through the 1970s faded.  In some respects it wasn't an internal failure, but the result of political power and cultural mood that preferred to ignore any possible future but more of the same.

But there were internal problems.  For instance, the predictive methodology couldn’t accommodate enough of the relevant information. Perhaps the information couldn’t be quantified, or it was unknown or poorly understood, and all too often it was just judged irrelevant, basically because it didn’t fit the system. So it was just not considered.

One area of failed foresight became obvious right at the beginning of the modern approach to prediction, even if those involved could not see it.

Herman Kahn in 1950s

As described earlier in this series, the first methods and technology for predicting alternative futures were developed largely by and for the RAND corporation in the 1950s, and notably applied by Herman Kahn and associates to predicting aspects of future nuclear wars. But the atomic bomb—and even more, the hydrogen bomb—had itself revealed some of the dimensions these operations ignored, which were further focused by responses to the published results, as in Kahn’s books.

Some of these factors had to do with deciding the importance of certain data, such as the effects of radiation and the likelihood of “megadeaths.” The debates over relevant information regarding nuclear explosions and its accuracy involved evidence of government deception and outright lying.

But the Bomb broke the boundaries of the rational.  It surpassed ordinary understanding, and responses to it reached deep into the human unconscious.  As time went on, and any questioning of nuclear weapons development became unpatriotic as well as seemingly irrational, present fears were themselves driven into hiding, added to the unconscious.

At the same time, purely rational means of discussing and dealing with the Bomb were increasingly seen as absurd.  And by the 1970s, purely rational means of studying the future--through computerized comparative analysis, cross-referenced and interacting statistics and so on--were increasingly seen as inadequate.

Instead, public responses--and future visions-- were also expressed and shaped  elsewhere: in story.  Apocalyptic visions in particular dominated the movies.

The range of allowable opinions became constricted shortly after the end of World War II. But at first, the revelation of the Bomb’s existence and power, especially in the devastation of two Japanese cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) came as a profound shock to many. It was widely seen as a doomsday weapon—if not yet, then soon.

A characteristic first response was that of war correspondent Eric Severeid, who became the analytical voice of CBS television news in the 1960s and 1970s. When he first heard about Hiroshima, he wrote in his memoir: “It was like a heavy blow to the chest, and the concussion left me in a kind of mental coma for days. It seemed then for a time that everything was not only uncertain but pointless. It seemed to me that everything I had learned was junk for the trash barrel, that everything I had seen was senseless illusion, that all I had come to believe was hollow mockery, that all my life to this point had been lived for nothing.”

“Life must go on,” he concluded. “Now the issue was squarely put to me and my generation, whose real trial and test was now revealed to be not at all accomplished [by World War II], as I had imagined, but to lie just ahead. How was life to go on?”

Immediately after the war, an official US government report strongly supported the international control of nuclear weapons, partly because the US atomic monopoly couldn’t last. The idea was supported by scientists and even high-ranking military officers. But even before the war’s end, the US government had identified the Soviet Union as a dangerous adversary, and immediate postwar moves in Europe solidified this belief. So the government increasingly saw the Bomb as the American advantage.

Operation Crossroads began on June 30, 1946, with
the Able explosions and later in July, with the larger
Baker series that yielded this iconic image.

In late June and July of 1946, the US tested a new generation of more powerful atomic bombs at the Bikini atoll in the Pacific, and despite negotiations in the UN, it became clear that US government policy was to maintain and develop nuclear weapons on its own.

 After that, suggestions of international controls or world government, or other questioning of government policy regarding nuclear weapons were quickly and thoroughly squelched as unpatriotic.

Such a charge of "subversive" beliefs became particularly potent in the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when such dissent was not tolerated, and could lead to prison, loss of livelihood and exile from the community. Even without such dark sanctions, social pressure and the habits of identifying with government policy in wartime—now Cold War-time—as well as a certain logic to the standard argument (the enemy has these weapons, so we must have them, and maintain our superiority)-- and a mental and emotional paralysis in response to the inconceivable enormity of the Bomb and its ultimate threat, kept dissent and questioning to a minimum.

For most people, in day to day ordinary life it was better to ignore it all. What else could you do? So any new or nagging questions were driven underground, and those that could not be articulated—even to oneself—might very well end up buried in the unconscious.

Part of the shock was the suddenness.  The Bomb was developed and deployed in secret, and the first official news of its existence was the news of its first use to destroy a city.  But some saw it coming.

Long before this—even before the first Bomb exploded—science fiction writers were examining possible atomic futures. H.G. Wells wrote about (and named) the atomic bomb in 1914.

In the 1940s, science fiction authors wrote so much about the atomic bomb and atomic energy that John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding magazine who presided over the Golden Age of the pulps (and was trained in physics), was questioned by a US government agent, alarmed that pulp fiction writers might be stealing ideas from the still secret Manhattan Project developing the real atomic bomb, rather than using their own knowledge and imaginations. Tales of atomic warfare horrors became so common even before Hiroshima that Campbell complained he was receiving too many.

The science fiction pulps were marginal, even disreputable to both the mainstream literary culture and to much of the public. When these kinds of atomic horror stories (and the "bug-eyed monsters") made their way into the movies, they were also considered marginal, and easily ridiculed or more often just ignored by officials and official culture. It helped that many were scientifically silly, visually unconvincing and badly done. 

But some were especially effective. They were more than old scare stories with modern villains and embellishments. They were an expression and an escape valve for fears and anxieties about nuclear weapons as well as the scientists who created them, and the military industrial complex that supported them.

In particular there was one film that not only expressed layers of emotion from the unconscious, but dealt dramatically with controversies over real world evidence, particularly effects of radiation. It has the singular feature of being both one of the first such movies, and a film that went largely unseen for fifty years. Yet it also created a modern icon, and launched a series of movies that is still ongoing, some 65 years later.

When Godzilla: King of the Monsters became a hit movie in the US and around the world in 1956, the theme of a monster created or unleashed by nuclear explosions was no longer completely new.

In other respects as well, Godzilla was an unlikely success. It had no action hero, no damsel in distress. Except for one American, a reporter who did little but observe things (played by a pipe-smoking Raymond Burr, a few years before his fame as TV’s Perry Mason), all the characters were Japanese. Just a decade before, the Japanese were enemies, and widely caricatured as evil, sniveling, cruel, heartless and racially inferior.

 Americans still knew little about Japanese culture, and a movie set in Japan was rare.  Any foreign-language film was rare. Subtitles were as yet unknown outside of a few art houses.  Godzilla was dubbed, and on the cheap: the voices of all the male Japanese characters were dubbed by the same Asian American actor, and pretty much all sound the same.

Nevertheless, the monstrous Godzilla was the star, and the heavily promoted film not only became a global sensation, it generated a seemingly endless series of sequels and similar movies that transformed the Japanese film company that created this footage into an international studio.

But it took 50 years (and more than 25 Godzilla sequels) before the original 1954 Japanese film, now known as Gojira, was screened in a few US theatres. It later became available on disk and online.  We can see it today not only as an early and conscious response to nuclear weapons using symbolic means, but as a perspective from the only nation that has so far suffered nuclear attack.

(For those who have seen the 2019 bloated film travesty with the same title as the US Godzilla in 1956, I refer to a critique here. Some of the reasons for this blistering rejection can be found in the differences between that movie and the one I describe here, the 1954 original Gojira.)

The 1956 US version of Godzilla added 20 minutes of Raymond Burr and a few Hollywood actors, while cutting some 40 minutes from the original Japanese film, rearranging and re-purposing scenes and characters.

 Those 40 minutes turn out to be crucial to what this movie can tell us about how one of the first nuclear monster movies expressed a range of unconscious responses as well as consciously intentional evocations of controversies regarding nuclear weapons, by filmmakers of the country that a scant 9 years before was the sole victim of atomic attacks.

But it was not only a response to history. The precipitating event that led to Gojira happened just months before it was made, and in the same year that it was originally released.

Still, it is worth reviewing the history. (It is in fact always worth reviewing this particular history.)

On July 16, 1945, the US exploded the first atomic bomb in its only test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, not far from the Los Alamos laboratory where it was developed. It exploded with such brightness that a woman blind from birth traveling in a car some distance away saw it. "A colony on Mars, had such a thing existed, could have seen the flash," historian Gerald DeGroot wrote in his book, The Bomb: A Life. "All living things within a mile were killed, including all insects."

On the same day, a fifteen-foot long crate carrying the components of a second bomb was loaded aboard the cruiser Indianapolis at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, bound for Tinian Island in the western Pacific where it would be assembled. The cruiser left San Francisco four hours after that first explosion.

On August 6, an American bomber dropped this atomic bomb on Hiroshima, destroying much of the city. According to author Arthur Koestler, this made it the most important date in “the history and prehistory of the human race...”

Nagasaki as the Bomb exploded

Three days later, another atomic bomb devastated the city of Nagasaki. Some 75,000 people died in Hiroshima from the blast and fire. Five years later, radiation effects more than doubled the dead, to some 200,000. The vast majority of those who died from the Nagasaki bomb were from radiation, months and years later. Some effects of radiation were apparent within days and weeks, which included very ugly and painful immediate illnesses, as people decayed from the inside. Other effects, principally cancers, took years.

Nagasaki, afterwards

American officials denied these first immediate radiation effects were real, claiming the reports were Japanese propaganda.William Laurence, the only reporter permitted to follow the Bomb's development, echoed the charge.

 But the contrary truth entered public consciousness with the publication of John Hershey’s Hiroshima, first in an August 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine, and then as a best-selling book. In it, the stories of six Hiroshima survivors ended with riveting accounts of the ongoing effects of radiation. Yet even after radioactive fallout entered the news, American officials insisted that radiation exposure was painless to humans and test animals. General Leslie Groves, the head of the US atomic program, testified to Congress that radiation poisoning was "a very pleasant way to die."

This well-known image may have inspired the
mother and children scene in Gojira

US government officials were still denying that radiation posed substantial threats when the first U.S. hydrogen bombs—vastly more powerful than even the largest atomic bomb-- were being exploded in the Pacific in the early 1950s. At this point in history, the US military was occupying the defeated nation of Japan, changing its form of government as well as many aspects of its culture. That official occupation ended in 1952, just two years before Gojira.

 In 1954 Japan was a sovereign nation but still dependent on the US to a degree, as well as a political ally. There were still US troops based in Japan. But given Japan’s recent history as the only nation to have felt the wrath of atomic bombs, many of its citizens cast a wary eye on these thermonuclear bomb tests conducted very close to their shores.

On the first of March in 1954, sailors were on the deck of a Japanese fishing trawler out in the Pacific when they were startled by an astonishingly bright light at the horizon. It lingered long enough to illuminate the clouds and the ocean itself. One of the sailors ran to his cabin where another sailor was humming a song, and blurted out the same sentence as did a distant witness to the first atomic test at Los Alamos: “The sun rises in the west!” Crew members still on deck finally heard the deep rumble of an explosion, and were soon coated with gray ash.

one of the Lucky Dragon crew with radiation burns

This was the Diago Fukuryu Maru, translated into English as the Lucky Dragon #5. By the time it returned to port two weeks later, some in the crew of 23 were covered with sores from burns, and many were suffering the classic symptoms of radiation sickness: nausea, bleeding gums, pain in their eyes, headaches. The first death was recorded in September.

The bright light and radioactive ash came from the Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. exploded its most powerful hydrogen bomb. It was twice as potent as expected. Its fireball was more than four miles wide. Its 62 mile-wide mushroom cloud reached 130,000 feet into the sky, dropping radioactive dust on more than 7 thousand squares miles of the Pacific. Susceptible to this fallout were several small islands and more than a hundred fishing boats like the Lucky Dragon #5.

Doctors and scientists in Japan immediately recognized the radiation effects. They had seen them before. They also measured excessive radiation in the fish aboard the Lucky Dragon and other boats, and this new threat caused panic in Japan that spread around the world. United States officials responded to Japanese requests for information with official lies. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, responsible for the tests, denied any ill effects could be from the Bomb test. It took more than thirty years for such official lies to be fully exposed.

The story of Japanese tuna contaminated with radiation, and the denials of responsibility by American officials, came and went in in US news media but it was a persistent and detailed story in Japan.  There the media quoted one of the hospitalized Japanese fisherman: “Our fate menaces all mankind,” he said. Tell that to those who are responsible. God grant that they may listen.”

 Almost immediately, Japanese film producer Tomoyuki Tanaka took clippings about the Lucky Dragon incident to the Toho Motion Picture Company and proposed to replace a foundering film project with a movie about a prehistoric monster awakened by the Bomb. The movie would begin with a scene on a fishing boat, evoking the Lucky Dragon incident. If any Japanese viewers missed the point, the detail of a life preserver marked #5 might focus their attention.

Hiroshima

Ishiro Honda, a young documentary filmmaker and friend of Japan’s greatest director, Akim Kurosawa, wanted to direct it. The son of a Buddhist monk, he’d been drafted into the Japanese military during World War II and was a prisoner of war in China. Returning to Japan at war’s end, he passed through the devastated city of Hiroshima. This was to be his statement warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons.

This is just one aspect of Gojira, though it is the organizing principle for everything else. It was first of all a monster movie, something Japanese cinema had not previously attempted. But there had been a recent internationally successful re-release of the original 1933 King Kong in Japan as in most countries. Probably the Japanese filmmakers were aware as well of an American film of the year before, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which was the first movie monster to be unleashed by atomic bomb explosions.  But Gojira is different in several ways, most notably as reflecting a unique Japanese perspective.

There are many unconscious themes evident in this movie, that suggest the range of possibilities when applied more generally. But the subject of nuclear radiation was also a conscious theme, woven throughout the film.

After the opening scene of the bright light and explosion swamping a fishing boat, the film shows a shipping office, crowded with people worried about those missing from a series of other unexplained ship disappearances. One of the few survivors of these ships washes ashore at a fishing village on Odo Island, barely alive. He is reunited with his family there. A village elder recalls legends of a sea beast called Gojira who had sometimes raided the coast for food. In the midst of a storm at night, a huge but barely glimpsed creature destroys wooden houses and kills many villagers, including that sunken ship survivor.

After several villagers testify before an unnamed government body, an esteemed paleontologist Dr. Yamane leads a team to the island to investigate.

(Yamane is played by one of Japan’s most distinguished actors, Takashi Shimura, who appeared in most of Akim Kurosawa’s films and starred in several of the best known internationally, including Rashomon and another 1954 release, The Seven Samurai.) Yamane finds a prehistoric organism in a huge radioactive footprint on the beach. Later he is among those on the island who see Gojira’s head roaring over a high hill.

In a key scene (much of it missing from the 1956 US version), Professor Yamane reports to the same government body. He believes Gojira is from transitional species, a deep sea creature becoming a dinosaur, who was driven from his niche by nuclear explosions.

Further, he believes, those explosions transformed it. Absorbing enormous amounts of radiation, it has itself become radioactive—with the traces of Strontium 90 that link it to nuclear blasts. Gojira was not only evoked by the Bomb; it has become the Bomb. This sense of Gojira will become clearer as the movie goes on.

But this government session quickly erupts in controversy. One faction (represented by a male speaker) wants to keep these finding secret, to avoid public panic. Another (represented by a female speaker) demands that the information be made public, so that people can prepare.

This was perhaps the most political moment of the movie. Secrecy had dominated US policy concerning nuclear weapons, from the initial development of the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos to studies of the Bomb’s effects.

Nuclear bombs kill first with their titanic blast, and then with the fires they create and cause. The scale of these effects are many times greater than conventional bombs, but the basic phenomena were known from other explosives. However the longer-term effects of nuclear radiation was new, and it captured public attention, especially when it was learned that radiation—in what was called “fallout”-- can spread many hundreds of miles, through the atmosphere.

It was on radiation effects that the US government was most secretive, as well as openly deceptive. This only increased public interest and alarm.

Photos of Bomb victims in Hiroshima disfigured by blast, burns and radiation had been widely circulated, even in the U.S., by the mid 1950s. That radiation could cause mutations in the children of those exposed was a particular topic of both justified and unjustified concerns and fears. Gojira represented this aspect as well—radiation had changed it. Even its design incorporated the look of disfiguring scars from photos of victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mutation would be an even greater source of anxiety in Japan, because that’s where some of the first evidence emerged, not only as a result of Hiroshima, but of nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. The U.S. physician and writer, Dr. David Bradley, re-published his best-selling book on the 1946 postwar atom bomb tests, No Place to Hide, and included new information, such as the results of a study of 406 Pacific islanders (probably very similar to those depicted in Gojira) who were exposed to H-Bomb fallout in 1954: nine children were born retarded, ten more with other abnormalities, and three were stillborn, including one reported to be "not recognizable as human."

This film indirectly confronted the secrecy, silences and lies that fed fears, particularly of nuclear radiation. But that was only the beginning of the strong feelings that this deep sea creature dredged up from the silent depths of the unconscious.

...To be continued.  For earlier posts in this series, follow the Soul of the Future label, here or below.

Remember This

Remember this on November 8, 2016: August 6, 1945.

"But there came another event, one beyond prediction, which sprang out of minds that lived apart from my world of social context, a development of the secret laboratory and not the public market place or parliament--an unsocial event which yet bore upon society with a depthless profundity, unmatched in immediacy and portent any social idea with which I had been familiar.  I did not hear of the revolutionizing fact until a couple of days after the news had stupefied the literate world.  I had wandered into the village [on the California coast] and was reaching over the drugstore counter when my eyes fell on the headline that announced the transaction of Hiroshima.  It was like a heavy blow on the chest, and the concussion left me in a kind of mental coma for days.  It seemed then for a time that everything was not only uncertain but pointless.  It seemed to me that everything I had learned was junk for the trash barrel, that everything I had seen was senseless illusion, that all I had come to believe was hollow mockery, and that all my life to this point had been lived for nothing.

...Life must go on.  Now the issue was squarely put to me and my generation, whose real trial and test was now revealed to be not at all accomplished, as I had imagined, but to lie just ahead.  How was life to go on?"

Eric Sevareid
Not So Wild A Dream (see previous post below)

Reimagine

Media coverage of President Obama's visit to Hiroshima was not untypical.  But the historical significance of the first American President to officially visit, and especially the nature of what President Obama said, reveals that coverage as disgraceful.

For days ahead of the visit, the media buzzed about whether President Obama was going to apologize.  No one in Japan or anywhere else had asked for an apology, there was no statement by the Japanese government, no petition signed by thousands of Japanese.  It was all stuff they just made up, with a hefty assist no doubt from Republicans.  The media is increasingly controlled by corporations with political reasons to cover things in a certain way, and in order to compete for the assumed short attention spans and superficiality of their audience, they go to conflict even if they have to make it up.  Both tendencies were on full display in this coverage.

And as is very often the case these days, the blitz of nonsense before the event moved on to something else without paying much attention to the actual event, and especially the speech itself.  By Friday evening in the US, not even NPR was even mentioning the speech in their news headlines, which led with the utterly unsurprising story of yet another protest in yet another city where Donald Trump was appearing.

So do yourselves a favor and devote about 15 minutes of your life this Memorial Day weekend to actually listening to the speech--which is embedded above.

Then you might want to return to contemplate the following thoughts from the speech--or read the speech here.

"The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes; an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die -- men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death.

There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth. How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause."

"The wars of the modern age teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well."

"Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again."

"But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime. But persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe."

"We must change our mindset about war itself –- to prevent conflict through diplomacy, and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun; to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition; to define our nations not by our capacity to destroy, but by what we build.

President Obama embraces an Hiroshima
atomic bomb survivor

And perhaps above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race. For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story –- one that describes a common humanity; one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted."

"The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious; the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family -– that is the story that we all must tell. That is why we come to Hiroshima."