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- Title
Monster of Mourning, Ritual of Remembering: Ishirô Honda's Gojira.
- Authors
Shen, Sigmund
- Abstract
It is widely accepted among scholars that Ishiro Honda's Gojira (1954) contains an allegory for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scenes involving Dr. Serizawa, the scientist who destroys the monster and commits suicide, reveal a combination of ambivalent affect, psychological defenses, and ritualistic body language that are inadequately explained by the nuclear metaphor, and suggest a more deeply repressed subtext. I argue that these moments allude to regret over the Meiji Era westernization of Japanese culture and guilt for an "open secret" of wartime biological weapons research and human experimentation conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army.
- Subjects
NUCLEAR weapons; HONDA, Ishiro, 1911-1993; BEREAVEMENT; NUCLEAR excavation; BIOLOGICAL weapons research; HUMAN experimentation; BODY language
- Publication
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 2013, Vol 13, Issue 3/4, p12
- ISSN
1547-4348
- Publication type
Article