In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (review)

This collection of fifteen essays has its origin in a conference by the same name held in 2004 at the University of Kansas. That year, the Associated Press distributed an article about the conference, which was then remarked upon in over 200 US newspapers, as well as in media in Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and various European nations. The television network CNN, and radio networks all over Europe (including the BBC) and Australia covered the story as well. Sadly, the tenor of most of these reports was 'can you believe what nonsense academics are spending their time (and taxpayers' money) on?' This volume does a good job of demonstrating why Godzilla and other popular culture icons are, in fact, worthy of scholarly attention.

In his introduction, co-editor William Tsutsui (author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (2004), one of the only previous academic studies of our scaly hero) traces the transition in Japan's global role after the recession of the 1990s: from being an economically powerful exporter of steel in the 1970s and 80s, Japan is now far better known for the export of 'soft power' in the form of cultural products. And whereas once Japan's cultural exports were mainly elite art forms, such as Noh, Kabuki, classical dance and art cinema, for the past fifteen or twenty years the Japanese government has actively helped to promote the global circulation of popular culture, primarily manga, anime and live-action horror films. As Susan Napier mentions in her essay, 'When Godzilla Speaks', Japan's global entertainment industry is worth between $400 and $500 billion per year as of 2002 (12).

However, as Tsutsui points out, this is hardly the first time that Japanese popular culture has made significant inroads into global consciousness. The release of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (Honda and Morse Japan/US 1956) in the US, and its subsequent distribution around the world, marked the first time a Japanese popular culture product achieved international fame (or notoriety, perhaps, in this case). In the fifty years after that, twenty-eight more Godzilla films were made by Japan's Tôhô Studios, and one, in 1998, was even made by Tristar Studio in Hollywood. Most of these have promoted the image originally associated with the 1956 US film of a cheesy, campy, low-budget movie primarily for children; they are variations on the fan-favourite theme of 'monster on the loose'. One of the most useful aspects of this volume, therefore, is its close attention to the Ishirô Honda's original 1954 Japanese film, of which the 1956 US version is a heavily and crudely edited adaptation, which, in addition to splicing in scenes of Raymond Burr, excised all of the original's references to politics. The 1954 Japanese film, titled simply Gojira (the Japanese name of the monster, rendered as Godzilla in English), was for its Japanese audience a serious commentary on Japan's role in World War II, on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the continuing nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, on science and morality, the growing environmental movement and other hot-button issues of the time. Many of the current global fans of manga, anime and Japanese horror have no idea that the weighty themes typically addressed therein can also be found in Gojira - and their ignorance is understandable since, as Joanne Bernardi points out in her essay, 'Teaching Godzilla: Classroom Encounters with a Cultural Icon', the original film was almost never screened outside Japan until 2004 (111).

This is a slim volume - 204 pages excluding front and back matter - comprised of fifteen essays, the longest of which are three essays of twenty pages each. Not surprisingly, these are among the standout pieces in the volume, precisely because they are extensive enough to encompass a complex argument. Mark Anderson's 'Mobilizing...