Committee:
Tom Goodnight (chair)
Steven O'Leary, Akira Lippit

Dissertation Title:
Godzilla the Atomic Monster

ABSTRACT:

In 1985, a New York Times/CBS poll asked fifteen hundred Americans to name a famous Japanese person. The top three responses where Hirohito, Bruce Lee, and Godzilla: thus we have an emperor, a US-born Hong Kong-raised Kung Fu star who was and still is practically the king of martial arts, and the king of the monsters sharing one stage as the most prominent characters Japan had exported so far, as perceived by the average Americans in the mid-80’s.

Godzilla, the longest running film franchise that has begotten a pantheon of Japanese monsters be it big or tiny (Rodan, Ghidrah, Ultraman, Pokemon, Tamagochi, to name a few), as he fights other monsters (primarily the US King Kong and the US/EU Frankenstein), is arguably the most prominent pop culture icon of Japan.  

My dissertation tackles the fascinating ambiguity of Godzilla in relation to war, memory, and Japan’s national identity. What is Godzilla, a monster, a god (kami), or a trickster? What is the topography of monstrosity and what is monstrosity’s cultural significance as it pertains to Japan? What is his nationality: Japanese or American? What would the Japanese engage in terminating a very Japanese monster (without apology)? What kind of guilt, resentment, fear, caution, hope, and oblique references (such as the military industrial complex, the US/Japan complex) is mediated by the incessant resurrection and termination of Godzilla as the city is wrecked and rebuilt? What kind of a historic sensibility does that represent? Is Godzilla’s destruction of the city and his own (albeit temporary) destruction at the hands of a collectivity of human effort led by the gov/military represent a Freudian transference of guilt, the return of the repressed, the eviction of the other from self (the tactics of scapegoating and purification) or, more interestingly, an apology issued in a very Japanese way: an apology without being apologetic, a seppuku of the great Samurai in dignity and responsibility yet refused to be diminished and mortified? Is Godzilla’s seppuku a very Japanese way of saying “sorry” and be relieved of guilt---performative and therapeutic that is? Why would a country bent on the delicacy of flower arrangement and the meditativeness of zen be so taken by Godzilla and monsters in general?