Pacific Passages, Atlantic Oscillations

The atomic bombs of August 6 and 9, 1945, forced Japan's surrender to the Allied powers. Demilitarized and in the throes of rapid reconstruction, postwar Japanese society did an about-face and embraced America's influence. This chapter explores the complexity of Japan's “culture of defeat” by looking at the ways certain writers and artists, including Godzilla director Honda Ishir?, responded to this acute state of political and ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, they rejected America's inventions of (and policy prescriptions for) a pacified, effeminized, and contemplative Japan. On the other hand, they deliberately internalized what Gutai founder Yoshihara Jir? called “the psychological realism” of American humanism expressed in avant-garde art. This polarity is what this chapter calls “Godzilla's schizophrenia.”