I was 5 years old when Rodan opened in New York City. I saw a commercial for the film on TV and I was riveted. I knew I had to see this movie. Of course 5 year olds can do nothing if a parent doesn't take him or pay for the film so I asked my folks to take me to the movie. Now I went to lots of movies. I saw The Wizard of Oz when I was 3 years old — the first film I ever saw, when it started its revival circuit before CBS got their hands on it. But my folks didn't look kindly on a monster movie (like Margaret Hamilton isn't enough to scar a child for life) since it might keep me up at night in fear. So my dad figured he could give me a little test that I couldn't pass so that he'd have an excuse not to take me. He posed a vocabulary question, assuming that I didn't understand some of what was said in the commercial. He never made that mistake again. And I got to see Rodan. And from that moment on I saw every Japanese monster movie I could. Little did I know it then, but I was also hooked on Japanese culture — and in love with Japanese men.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that all of this comes together tomorrow night at the Japan Society in New York, where there will be an evening lecture on Godzilla and Japanese Culture, with Dr. William Tsutsui, Professor of Modern Japanese
History and Department Chair at Kansas University as well as author of
Godzilla on My Mind, Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.
Of course, it wasn't until I lived in Japan that I saw the original Godzilla, without Raymond Burr. Sitting with my Japanese boyfriend, watching scenes of Tokyo destroyed by fire in a film made not ten years after we firebombed the city was a harrowing experience. And the intense anti-nuclear and pacifist message of the film, which was missing in the US version, hit hard. I can only imagine how it affected Japanese audiences at the time. First released in 1954, with American troops still in Japan, and war in Korea raging, it seems almost secretly subversive. And an example of how American culture can blindly pick up something without any understanding of its origins or deeper meaning and make another kind of entertainment out of it entirely — an entertainment with an American at the center.
And now we pause for the Peanuts and their rendition of the Mothra theme song:
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