Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 41

“The Mutated Flowers of Hiroshima”:
American Reception and Naturalization
of Toho’s Godzilla
One good thing did come from the dropping o f the two atomic bombs on
Japan, Godzilla!

—Anonymous author o f the American Godzilla fan
webpage Oblivion

In 1998 Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich produced the first Ameri
can-made Godzilla film, entitled simply Godzilla, which promised to recreate the
famous Japanese movie monster using big budget, state-of-the-art special effects.
However, despite its use of Godzilla’s name, the film bore little resemblance to its
Japanese predecessors. In fact, the film’s narrative was far more reminiscent of the
American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), one of the first “monsteron-the-loose” films, in which a dinosaur is awakened by nuclear testing, returns to
its ancestral home, which has since become the city of New York, and is eventu
ally defeated through the use of radioactive isotopes.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was also one of the key influences on the
first Japanese Godzilla film, Gojira, which was produced by Japan’s Toho Studios
in 1954. According to Frank McConnell, Japan’s interest in American monster
movies, particularly The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and King Kong (1933), was
part of a much broader cultural influence following WWII: 'T he ‘Americaniza
tion’ of Japan,” he claims, “is itself one of the mutated flowers of Hiroshima”
(119). However, the use of this narrative in a Japanese film in 1954 carried a far
greater political significance, not only because Japan was the only nation in the
world to have suffered a nuclear attack, but also because of the disaster which
occurred in March of that year when the Fukuryu Maru fishing vessel went too
close to the Bikini atoll during American testing of a fifteen-megaton H-bomb.
This event, in which the entire crew suffered severe bums and one man died of
radiation poisoning, focused Japanese resentment over the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, and it was precisely re-enacted in the opening shots of Gojira, where
Godzilla attacks a boat at sea. Godzilla himself is not visible in this sequence, but
rather there is a bright light and the crew members are burned and later die of
radiation; Godzilla’s attack thus mimics precisely the experience of witnessing an
H-bomb. The film also contains explicit references to the bombings of Hiroshima