In Ishirō Honda’s Gojira (1954), the titular monster is a creature out-of-step with the world of twentieth-century Japan. It does not seek violence, but cannot exist without causing it. The monster is too old, too vast and too different from humankind. This article extrapolates this thought, applying it to theories of the post-imperial, in which similarly out-of-time ways of thought collide catastrophically with the present. This is done with a particular emphasis on the character Dr Serizawa. Serizawa is a disabled war veteran who is read against both the monster Gojira and the writer ) contemporaneous depictions of disability in his novel Temple of the Golden Pavilion . The monster is also considered as a sort of vector: standing in for the Americans, the old Japanese empire and the natural world all at once. Each of these readings is supported by reference to the release(s) of the film, or concurrent political events such as the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing incident. Thought too is given to the film’s style: the visual effects are read as thematically consistent with my various readings of the narrative. As such, the article asserts that Gojira is a film of multiplicities: its enduring appeal lies in its mercurial, shifting nature.
Thomas Caffrey (Sun,) studied this question.