Content area
Full Text
A critic and fan of Asian film, Grady Hendrix founded and codirects the New York Asian Film Festival. In this piece, he shines light on a movie category familiar to most only through the Godzilla movies.
There were science fiction movies in Japan before 1954, but that was the year science fiction became one of the dominant genres in Japanese film. It was less than ten years after the greatest scientific minds of the age had used cutting-edge physics to vaporize a quarter of a million of Japan's citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was the same year that the United States grossly miscalculated the yield of a hydrogen bomb test-blast on the Bikini Atoll, irradiating twenty-three Japanese fishermen. These two events were infused with cash by Toho Studios, then smashed together inside the particle-accelerator mind of director Ishiro Honda, and Godzilla was unleashed, a walking nuclear nightmare stomping on wounds that were barely healed. This single movie spawned Japan's entire tokusatsu genre, special-effects films that generated half a century's worth of giant robots, masked heroes, enormous monsters, epic disaster flicks, and sci-fi spectacles.
Deeply conservative, these movies celebrated the preservation of the status quo and the defense of good, clean Japanese/human blood from alien miscegenation and mutation. Peaceful aliens come to Earth to bonk nice Japanese girls in The Mysterians (1957) but get shot to hell by patriotic Japanese. A spacesuit is contaminated with a tiny bit of green goo that subsequently mutates into a savage slime monster hungry for human blood in The Green Slime (1968). Scientists go too far and unleash The Human Vapor (1960), and radiation turns humans into lumbering mushroom people in Matango (1963) and the crew of a Japanese fishing boat into the bloodthirsty group-mind monster of The H-Man (1958).
Meanwhile, Godzilla was hell-bent on keeping the planet "For Humans Only," exterminating all nonhuman visitors from giant baby moths (Godzilla vs. the Thing, 1964) and roach people (Godzilla on Monster Island, 1972) to underwater Seatopians disturbed by nuclear testing (Godzilla vs. Megalon, 1973). Despite the fact that Japan, like the rest of the world, was rocked by social and political unrest in the 1960s and '70s, the only whiff of countercultural politics in tokusatsu movies came wafting...
