Godzilla Minus One
A monster movie that is really about Japan’s repressed memories of the Second World War, albeit with its own constraints in how it deals with those memories.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warning: Suicide; Bereavement.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Godzilla Minus One is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Godzilla Minus One begins with kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) having arrived in 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War, at a Japanese base at Odo Island, feigning a mechanical fault with his airplane. That night, a giant lizard-like creature, known as Godzilla, appears at the base and eliminates everyone there, save for Kōichi, who has the opportunity to fire on the monster with his aircraft gun, but freezes, and mechanic Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), who holds Kōichi responsible for his comrades’ deaths. Kōichi returns to a bombed out Tokyo to find his parents are dead, and is chastised by his neighbour Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando), whose children have also been killed in the war, for having evaded his suicide mission.
Kōichi subsequently meets Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe), and they, along with Akiko (played as a child by Sae Nagatani) – an orphaned baby whom Noriko rescued from amid the rubble – form a makeshift family unit. Kōichi finds work aboard a mine-clearing ship, alongside its captain Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), and novice crewman Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), though he remains badly troubled by his wartime experiences. Then on one voyage, they encounter Godzilla, now grown to a far vaster size. When Godzilla subsequently attacks Tokyo, both the occupying American forces and new Japanese government are reluctant to take drastic action against the monster, leaving it to Kōichi, his colleagues, and other war veterans to address this new existential threat.
Godzilla as metaphor
As with the original 1954 version of Godzilla, the film’s eponymous monster functions as a barely disguised symbol of the atomic bomb, and nuclear warfare. Initially assumed to be some new form of American weapon when it attacks Odo Island, Godzilla it seems is awoken and radioactively magnified by the American nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Its exponential growth and development of additional destructive powers emblemise the development of evermore powerful weaponry, superseding already seemingly unimaginable levels of devastation.
Yet on another level, Godzilla is a metaphor for the trauma of the war experience itself, epitomised by the decision to set the film in the 1940s rather than the present. Kōichi cannot escape his sense of guilt for his wartime double evasion of duty, is haunted by recurring nightmares, and wonders when he awakes if he is still dreaming. Tokyo is rebuilt after the war and yet destroyed again. The intractability of Godzilla from the war, its melding of that reality with its unreality, its capacity to recompose itself and rapidly grow, illustrates how for Japan the war is over and yet never over.
Re-fighting the war
The film turns on a geopolitical plot device. The US will not come to Japan’s aid because of the conditions of the Cold War, while the Japanese government prefers to keep the situation a secret rather than act to stop Godzilla (in another metaphor for the war experience). This contrivance creates the conditions whereby Kōichi as a pilot, Tachibana as a mechanic, Akitsu as a sailor, Noda as an engineer, and others like them, can come to the country’s rescue, as veterans and experts.
Godzilla Minus One explicitly criticises the Japanese Empire’s disdain for its subjects’ lives, for championing self-sacrifice for its own sake. Its characters, above all Kōichi, are exhorted to abandon guilt that they did not die in the war, to live on in a world where the war is over. In the state’s absence comes a new contractus belli: leadership is consensual and acknowledges its uncertainties; service is freely offered, according to one’s own moral sense of obligation; and the extent of sacrifice delimited.
Yet we might nonetheless question the limits of this sort of wish fulfilment, given the nature of the war Japan did wage: aggressive, expansionist, and eliminationist, in which other groups were racialised as a prelude to unconstrained violence. The re-fighting of a good war in its stead addresses one part of Japan’s repressed memory of the war, of the suffering inflicted upon its people. Yet it can only do so by displacing another part of that repressed memory, of the suffering it inflicted upon others.
Found families and communities
Kōichi learns the real meaning and value of making sacrifices and taking responsibility in the context of the family he forms with Noriko and Akiko. Absent his own parents, he gradually accepts his position as breadwinner and as surrogate father, with neighbour Sumiko coming to fulfil a grandmotherly role in relation to this unit. Godzilla Minus One is also about the need for Kōichi to find contentment by recognising this family, rather than his nightmares of war, as his reality.
This creating and embracing of new communities in the wake of the catastrophe and losses of war is mirrored through the other collectives Kōichi forms part of. Firstly, the minesweeper crew who also become his closest friends (and also encourage him to embrace his responsibilities to Noriko and Akiko), and in whose company he finds the confidence to display his military expertise. Secondly, the broader community of former military personnel, who come to stand in for the nation as a whole.
There is nonetheless a strong gender conformity to these new communities, in which men function as providers and protectors, and women are tasked with the work of childrearing and caring for damaged men; a system that Noriko only slightly subverts. Again, this perhaps highlights the limitations of the film’s worldview. On the one hand, it offers a more humane and sensitive version of masculinity than that which underpinned Japan’s war. On the other, fighting a very different version of that war as a means of catharsis still constrains who can stand in for the nation, and how.
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