I know that we touched on this a little bit during our discussion after Gojira on Thursday but I wanted to elaborate on Gojira as an anti-American work. I wouldn’t say that Gojira is anti-American but rather anti-nuclear. It’s true that the US dropped the nuclear bomb and it caused Japan a great deal of turmoil given that the radiation effects persisted several years after the bomb was dropped. But Japan would have gone through that regardless of whether the US dropped it or any other world power.  It was only a coincidence that the US happened to be the one to drop the bomb. Gojira seems to be a major symbol for nuclear weapons in the film. It comes to destroy Tokyo much like a nuclear bomb would as Gojira emits an atomic breath that melts buildings, causes fires and destroys the city landscape. The oxygen destroyer becomes a new nuclear bomb considering the potential for mass destruction in the world’s oceans if other countries had access to it. Most of the film focuses on how the Japanese attempt to defeat Gojira. I think the film tries to portray the negative effects of the nuclear bomb in a way that allows its viewers to feel a little bit of what the Japanese felt after the bomb. It could be read as anti-American – because the Americans were the ones who dropped the bomb, released the radiation and thus allowed Gojira to become as strong as it did – but I think there’s a lot more to the film than that.

–Julia Ng