Hibakusha Cinema excerpt
"Discussions of Godzilla films made in Japan during the post World War II era also occupy a significant portion of the book. The film, Japan's first international hit, inspired 16 sequels and roughly a dozen other "radioactive dinosaurs". Godzilla can be interpreted as a "symbol of Japan, a monster aroused by U.S. hydrogen-bomb tests caught between the imperial past and the postwar industrial future". These movies "reveal a self-conscious attempt to deal with nuclear history and its effects on Japanese society" (Noriega, pgs. 54, 61, 62). It was fascinating to read how the story lines of Godzilla and other science fiction movies could be correlated to historical events of the Cold War era, namely the development of more lethal nuclear weaponry, including the U.S. testing of larger atomic bombs at Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1946 and in 1948 and the U.S.S.R.'s development and testing of its own hydrogen atom bomb in 1953 (Goodwin, 180). Through its films, Japan found an outlet for "repressed anxieties about nuclear disaster" (Noriega, 71). As one essayist wrote, "In Japanese films, one gets the feeling that a mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons. Science fiction films attempt to exorcise this trauma" (Sontag, 46). One of the most educational aspects of this book was its in-depth description of the Allied Occupation of Japan from 1945-1952, and the U.S. authorities' strict censorship of all forms of Japanese artistic expression. Although Japanese filmmakers felt it urgent to create a permanent record of the destruction wreaked by the atomic bombs and, amazingly, succeeded in making documentaries of the affected cities and people, their work was confiscated and could not be released until after the occupation had ended."
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