NOTHING LIKE THIS EVER ON THE SCREEN! SEE thewaroftheGIANTS! SEE the BIRTH ofthe world's most terrifying monster! SEE thearmies ofthe W world destroyed 5 by'THETHmG" . \ ESSAY There were science fiction movies in Japan before 1954, but thatwas the year sci ence fictionbecame one of the dominant genres in Japanese film. It was less than ten years after the greatest scientificminds of the age had used cutting-edge physics to vaporize a quarter of a million of Japan's citizens inHiro shima and Nagasaki, and itwas the same year that theUnited States grossly miscalculated the yield of a hydrogen bomb test-blaston theBikini Atoll, irradiating twenty-three Japanese fisher men. 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 singlemovie spawned Japan's entire tokusatsu genre, special-effects filmsthatgenerated half a century's worth of giant robots,masked heroes, enormous monsters, epic disaster flicks, and sci-fi spectacles. Deeply conservative, thesemovies celebrated thepreservation of the status quo and thedefense of good, clean Japanese/human blood fromalien miscegenation and mutation. Peaceful aliens come to Earth to bonk nice Japanese girls in TheMys terians (1957) but get shot to hell by patriotic Japanese. A spacesuit is contaminated with a tiny bit of green goo thatsubsequently mutates into a savage slimemonster hungry forhuman blood in The Green Slime (1968). Scientists go too far and unleash The Human Vapor (i960), and radiation turns humans into lumberingmushroom people in Matango (1963) and the crew of a Japanese fish ing boat into the bloodthirsty group-mind mon sterofTheH-Man (1938). Meanwhile, Godzilla was hell-bent on keep ing theplanet "ForHumans Only," exterminating all nonhuman visitors from giant baby moths (Godzilla vs. theThing, 1964) and roach people (Godzilla onMonster Island, 1972) to underwater Seatopians disturbed by nuclear testing (Godzilla vs.Megaton, 1973). Despite the fact that Japan, like the rest of theworld, was rocked by social and political unrest in the 1960s and '70s, the only whiff of countercultural politics in tokusatsu May-June 2010 155 SCIENCE FICTION Grady Hendrix isa film programmer and writer living inNew York City. For the past five years he has been a regular film critic for the New YorkSun (before itdied) and has written for Slate, The Village Voice, Time Out New York,Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Playboy Magazine, and Variety. He isa frequent guest commentator on the BBC and National Public Radio and one of the directors, programmers, and cofounders of the New York Asian Film Festival, a nine year-old film festival inNew York City that the New York Times has called "one of the city's most valuable events," 56 I World Literature Today movies came wafting off 1971's Godzilla vs. the SmogMonster, a deep bong hit of enviropolitics in which pollution gives birth to Hedorah ("Hedorah is our creation and our punishment/' one masoch istic establishment-type moans). Scenes of antipol lutionprotests and a theme song advocating ditch ing the earth for a new home on the moon create the illusion ofpolitical awareness before Godzilla solves theproblem of sentientpollution by beating the tar out of it. In the 1980s celluloid nostalgia was thedrug of choice and master animatorHayao Miyazaki its chiefdealer. His Nausicaa of theValley of the Wind (1984), Castle in theSky (1986), and PrincessMono noke (1997)were threegiant blockbuster bummers predicated on the idea that thingswere better in thegood old days before,you know, the industrial revolution and stuff.Backing up Miyazaki's dis like of thepresent were theglut of J-horrorfilms that slopped off video store shelves in the late 1990s. In J-horror movies curiosity is rewarded with death and technology is a passport to hell: The Ring (1998) featured a haunted videotape, One Missed Call (2004) has a haunted cell phone, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa gave us the haunted Internet inPulse (2000). Conservative values found their way into low-budget dystopias like Freesia: Bullets Over Tears (2007),Hellevator (2004), and Hard Revenge Milly 1& 2 (2008) and thebig-budget apocalypses such as Dragon Head (2003), The Sinking of Japan (1973), and its recent remake, Japan Sinks...
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