_____________________________________________________________________ CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 18, NO 1-2 Article 27b 95/06/22 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker _____________________________________________________________________ Tokyo Must Be Destroyed ----------------------- But how real is real? There is a story about security guards in a Tokyo department store stopping two suspected terrorists who had been overheard animatedly discussing the destruction of the city. The dangerous subversives turned out to be veteran director Ishiro Honda swapping ideas with special effects expert Eiji Tsuburaya for a scene in what was to become _Gojira_, the first Godzilla movie. Illusions depend a great deal upon not being in full possession of the facts. To see the ~kaiju eiga~ genre as the obsession of a culture repeatedly seeking to rehearse repressed or unacknowledged fears of nuclear obliteration or natural catastrophe is to explain little and to obscure a great deal more. It is also an attitude based upon a very selective view of Japan's filmic output. For example, in the decade that witnessed the rise of Godzilla, films explicitly confronting Japan's continuing nuclear nightmare, such as Kaneto Shindo's _Children of Hiroshima_ and _Lucky Dragon No.5_, were also being released. Ishiro Honda himself had visited Hiroshima in 1946 and had wanted to convey in _Gojira_ some of the horrors which he experienced there. Unfortunately, the film's references to bomb shelters, Nagasaki and its pleas for nuclear disarmament were deleted from the English-language version by its American distributors. Godzilla, however, had already selected a very different target for himself. It was a disaster area still waiting to happen, and each time he returned to it, he became more a part of its future than its past. By 1945, allied air raids had reduced most of Tokyo to smoking embers. Its predominantly wooden buildings had burned easily, resulting in the destruction of three-quarters of a million houses and the deaths of 100,000 of the city's inhabitants. A further three million were left homeless. Today, as well as being one of the principal centres of world economic activity, the greater Tokyo area also houses an astonishing 25% of Japan's entire population. This vast urban sprawl has come to be regarded by many as the ultimate megalopolis: the first city of the 21st Century. The planners and engineers responsible for its safety have also described it as a "disaster amplification mechanism"; a term which could just as easily be applied to Godzilla himself. There is, however, something both reassuring and unsettling about the Tokyo which Honda and Tsuburaya had Godzilla smash so repeatedly. It never changed. No matter how far into the future the films were set, Tokyo always returned looking the same. In a universe increasingly populated by alien invaders, female psychics, killer androids and giant mecha, Tokyo's vast centre-less sprawl seemed to expand into time and space, eternally rising unchanged from its own rubble. The more Godzilla demolished it, the more it came back, determined to survive. Godzilla in Paradise -------------------- Godzilla's career trajectory as an urban destroyer has never been as smooth as his continuing relationship with Tokyo might suggest. Quite often he became the victim of his own success. The cost of rebuilding an entire city is still high, even when it only exists in miniature. Furthermore, his audience was not only getting larger, but appreciably and enthusiastically younger. Consequently he was packed off, from time to time, to remote tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where palm trees were cheaper to replace than skyscrapers and he could participate in such juvenile romps as Toho's _Son of Godzilla_. This did not mean, however, that the dark forces which he had come to represent had also been sent on vacation. It is worth remembering that Japan produced many disaster films outside of the Godzilla cycle which dealt much more explicitly with the themes of catastrophe and disaster, most notably Toei Studio's _The Final War_ and Toho's _The Last War_ (both about global nuclear conflict) in the 1960s; _Tidal Wave_, _Last Days of Planet Earth_, in the 1970s; and _Virus_ in the early 1980s. As these films would inevitably have utilized similar special effects budgets and technicians as the monster movies, it is not surprising to find that they tended to be made when there was a slackening off, either of quality or frequency, in the ~kaiju eiga~ genre. Similarly, Keji Nakazawa's comic strip, _Barefoot Gen_, based upon his own childhood experiences of the bombing of Hiroshima, first appeared in the children's magazine _Shukan Shonen Jampu_ during the early 1970s, at a time when Godzilla's audience was predominantly pre-teen. To transpose Godzilla from his urban habitat in mainland Japan to the arcadian paradise of an island in the Pacific, if only for the briefest of interludes, is to place him firmly within the kind of "Technology vs. Nature" debate which he so effortlessly transcended whenever he was tearing Tokyo apart. _Son of Godzilla_ illustrates this point extremely well, if only because it raises the one question to which monster movie ~otaku~ have never been able to supply an adequate answer: who or what exactly did Godzilla mate with to produce a son? At the beginning of the film, Godzilla is seen swimming towards Solgell Island, attracted by a mysterious radio signal. However, he is not the first interloper to arrive on this tropical paradise. A group of scientists - all male - have already established a research centre amid its sultry palms to study the ways in which climatic conditions can be artificially manipulated and controlled. They, in turn, have to endure an intruder of their own: a pushy, camera-toting newshound called Goro, also male. As the story unfolds, and it becomes increasingly apparent that all of this tropical Eden's invaders are masculine, it comes as no surprise to discover that Solgell Island's indigenous population are exclusively female. As Godzilla's son, Minya, emerges from his egg, he is attended by a coven of giant preying mantises who quickly forget their duties as midwife when they discover that he is a male and true to type - attempt to devour him. Slumbering deep within the island's depths is another archetypal female predator from pop culture; the Speiga, a monstrous spider. Finally there is Reiko, the jungle girl: one of those natural born sophisticates who always use their first name when they mean "I". She is the orphaned daughter of Professor Matsumiya another male interloper - and is the only person in the film to take any real interest in nurturing the young Minya, pausing every now and again to hurl cantaloupes into his ever-open mouth. Godzilla's only contribution to the little mite's development, on the other hand, is to teach him how to blow radioactive smoke rings. In fact, as a predominantly masculine science enters into a frenzied discourse with a primordially feminine nature, there doesn't seem to be much else for him to do. This lack of purpose appears quite puzzling until Goro, in an unguarded moment, makes a reference to his home in Tokyo. "Tokyo?" asks Reiko, using the kind of basic grammar favoured by the inhabitants of tropical islands. "What kind of place?" "Well," Goro replies, "it's a man-made jungle", and it suddenly becomes evident that Godzilla has no place in this prelapsarian Eden or the thematic simplicities it engenders. Like the gangster, the salaryman and the juvenile delinquent, Godzilla is a true city-dweller. He needs its ambiguities in order to truly be himself. Mekatokyo --------- As Godzilla's audience became younger during the 60s and 70s, he quickly slid from atomic destroyer to comic avenger and science-fiction clown. After so much time spent mucking about in children's bedrooms, Godzilla had a lot of growing up to do. Literally. When Toho Films brought him back for the 1984 remake of the original _Gojira_, they had to almost double his height so that he could compete with the rise in Tokyo's skyline over the years. The Japanese capital had expanded upwards and outwards to an alarming degree, dwarfing its cinematic counterpart. "That's quite an urban renewal programme they have there," an American army major remarks of Godzilla's attack on Tokyo, but he could have been speaking about the city's actual growth rate. An anarchic process of demolition and reconstruction, in which houses, shops and tower blocks were continually being torn down and rebuilt, had resulted in an anonymous sprawl that seemed to stretch on forever. This prompted further concerns about its safety. Planners became worried that too much of the nation's future had become concentrated into its disaster proofed structures. There were calls for a radical decentralization of Tokyo's functions into other parts of the country, but how do you decentralize something which has no centre? Fragile and featureless, caught between expansion and catastrophe, Tokyo's possible futures came to dominate ~anime~. In _Bubblegum Crisis_, Mega Tokyo has been rebuilt from the ruins of the old capital city after it was devastated during "the second Kano Earthquake". Bigger and more ungovernable than ever, it is menaced by fearsome cyborgs and corporate powerplays. The series title hints at the steadily increasing state of instability that occurs the moment before the bubble bursts. Neo-Tokyo, the setting for Katsuhiro Otomo's _Akira_, has been rebuilt after Tokyo's nuclear obliteration into a high-rise labyrinth of rioting citizens, political unrest, terrorism and full-scale gang warfare. Readers of the manga version will also know that Tokyo actually has the dubious privilege of being demolished ~twice~ during the course of Otomo's 1800-page story. Even with a complete change of name, Tokyo's ruins are clearly identifiable. In _Project A-KO_, the city of Graviton has been rebuilt into an unstable business community around the waters of a bay punched out of the Earth's crust by a giant spaceship that plummeted from the sky. Olympus, in Masamune Shirow's _Appleseed_, is a city state that rose to prominence after a devastating global conflict and now staggers from one near-apocalyptic power struggle to the next. Newport in _Dominion_, also by Shirow, is in constant danger of being transformed into a demolition derby by the Tank Police; the very force sworn to protect it. _Silent Moebius_ takes place in a Tokyo which has managed to survive into the twenty-first century without having to undergo either serious destruction or a name-change, but has swollen to enormous, unmanageably overcrowded proportions. Seriously polluted, plagued with unbreathable air and acid rain, it has also become the arena for demonic incursions from another dimension. _Wicked City_, _Urotsukidoji_ and _Doomed Megalopolis_ (which features the original Kano Earthquake) all pursue similar themes of supernatural invasion. The origins of the _Patlabor_ series lie in the threat to a vulnerable Tokyo of rising tidal waters caused by the Earth's global warming. Then there's _Cyber City_, _Tokyo Babylon_, _AD Police_... the list, like a streetplan of Tokyo, seems to go on forever. The Ruins of Cyberspace ----------------------- In all these visions of the future, Tokyo is depicted as a major conurbation entering the 21st Century having already run out of time. It is also a city of glowing colours, rapid edits break-neck narratives and dizzying perspectives. Whereas in the ~kaiju eiga~ genre, Tokyo was a city of details and effects, of collapse as a theatrical spectacle, ~anime~ has transformed it into a place made out of pure velocity. A product of the video age, its depth and its structures are now created by the speed of an electron moving across the flat plane of a television screen. Both versions, however, depict Tokyo as a featureless urban mass. Landmarks are so rare that their appearance arouses suspicion. In the 1992 remake of _Godzilla v the Thing_, Mothra cocoons Tokyo's Diet building in an ironic comment on the political scandals of the time. Its fictional counterpart, the Genom Tower, broods over Mega Tokyo in _Bubblegum Crisis_, and in the manga version of _Appleseed_, the huge Tartarus arcology appears in frame after frame; a series of futuristic Views of Mount Fuji. Tokyo's real landmarks are its imaginary ruins, a point well illustrated at the end of Shinya Tsukamoto's manga-influenced live-action movie, _Tetsuo II_, where the salaryman protagonist and his family wander like tourists, sight-seeing among Tokyo's devastated towerblocks. The ambiguous feelings which Tsukamoto has expressed towards the city - enjoying the security of its utilities while yearning also for the wide-open spaces created by its destruction - have a counterpart in the thinking of Japan's more radical designers, such as Toyo Ito, who see Tokyo as a city whose life does not reside in its structures but in the energies that surge through them. Its true architecture, they argue, exists in the limitless profusion of temporary forms thrown up by computer links, information flows, networked images and disembodied voices. Computer animation, videogaming and the technology of data processing have all conspired to take destruction beyond mere physical limitations. Tokyo won't become decentralized: it will dematerialize itself instead. Paradoxically, serious questions are now being raised about what form such a dematerialization might take. As the standing ruins of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are being razed to ground, the American public is being warned that the extreme right had begun to infiltrate the Internet. In Japan, it has now been revealed that the Aum Shrinrikyo cult, accused of the Sarin gas attack upon a crowded subway train during the morning rush hour in Tokyo, appropriated themes and imagery derived from popular manga and ~anime~ series in developing their paranoid visions of the forthcoming apocalypse. While ~otaku~ use the sprawl of the Internet, a communications system originally designed to survive a nuclear attack, to swap esoteric factoids about Ultraman and Hello Kitty, there is still someone present whose influence is unmistakable. Having been there at the start of it all, he will not be quickly forgotten. One of the most immediate responses to the Kobe Earthquake was that the Nikkei Index fell by over 1,000 points in a single night. This was the result of nervous speculators fearing that Japan was about to start withdrawing capital from its investments overseas to finance the rebuilding programme. If a series of checks and balances had not previously been introduced into the system - just after the crash of 1987 and immediately before the start of Operation Desert Storm - in order to discourage dangerous fluctuations in the market, Japan's economy would have probably dropped right through the floor, taking the rest of the world with it. Godzilla, it seems, is alive and well and rampaging through cyberspace. Consider yourselves warned. _____________________________________________________________________ Ken Hollings lives in London. He is the author of "Electronically Yours, Eternally Elvis" in _The Last Sex_, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., St. Martin's Press, 1993. He recently completed a manuscript entitled _Destroy All Monsters_. _____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY is an international review of theory, technology * and culture. Sponsored by the Canadian Journal of * Political and Social Theory, articles and key book reviews * in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape. * CTHEORY includes interactive discussions among its subscribers. * * CTHEORY is published with the assistance of the Dean of Arts * and Science and the Department of Political Science, Concordia * University, Montreal, Canada. * * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker * * Editorial Board: Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Bruce Sterling, * David Cook, Berkeley Kaite, William Leiss, Geert Lovink, Eileen * Manion, Hans Mohr, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Stephen Pfohl, Andrew * Ross, Kim Sawchuk, Deena Weinstein, Michael Weinstein, Andrew * Wernick & Gail Valaskakis. * * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK), J. 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