William Tsutsui: Tokyo Disaster Fantasies
[Tsutsui is dean of Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences and professor of Japanese history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.]
Of the many images of disaster coming to us from Japan, one continues to haunt me: a dark, angry, roiling wave of water, thick with cars and homes and soil, sweeps across a flat landscape and swallows farms and fields into its churning blackness.
I can’t help but be reminded of the climax of the classic 1988 animated film Akira, when the title character, mutated by government experimentation and adolescent hormones, finds his body swelling out of control and consuming everything that gets in its way....
In the years since World War II, fictional disaster has been visited upon Japan—and especially its capital city, Tokyo—more frequently than any other place on the globe. From silent movies depicting the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to the 2006 blockbuster Japan Sinks, the country has fallen victim to fires, floods, cyclonic winds, volcanoes, alien invasions, supernatural curses, viruses, toxic pollution, all nature of giant monsters, robots, blobs, and repeated nuclear explosions. Through most of the postwar period, and certainly since the mid-1960s, Japanese audiences could view the fictionalized destruction of their nation on television or at a nearby movie theater at least every week, and sometimes every day.
These fictional disasters have mirrored Japan’s real-world vulnerability to catastrophic events. In its five centuries of history, Tokyo may well have been destroyed and reconstructed more than any other major world city, suffering numerous horrific fires, a devastating earthquake in 1923, and the 1945 firebombings. Other Japanese cities have also suffered substantial catastrophes—the storm surge that swept across Osaka in 1934; the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck Kobe in 1995; the wartime bombings of 66 urban areas, including the atomic attacks that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki....
Read entire article at Newsweek
Of the many images of disaster coming to us from Japan, one continues to haunt me: a dark, angry, roiling wave of water, thick with cars and homes and soil, sweeps across a flat landscape and swallows farms and fields into its churning blackness.
I can’t help but be reminded of the climax of the classic 1988 animated film Akira, when the title character, mutated by government experimentation and adolescent hormones, finds his body swelling out of control and consuming everything that gets in its way....
In the years since World War II, fictional disaster has been visited upon Japan—and especially its capital city, Tokyo—more frequently than any other place on the globe. From silent movies depicting the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to the 2006 blockbuster Japan Sinks, the country has fallen victim to fires, floods, cyclonic winds, volcanoes, alien invasions, supernatural curses, viruses, toxic pollution, all nature of giant monsters, robots, blobs, and repeated nuclear explosions. Through most of the postwar period, and certainly since the mid-1960s, Japanese audiences could view the fictionalized destruction of their nation on television or at a nearby movie theater at least every week, and sometimes every day.
These fictional disasters have mirrored Japan’s real-world vulnerability to catastrophic events. In its five centuries of history, Tokyo may well have been destroyed and reconstructed more than any other major world city, suffering numerous horrific fires, a devastating earthquake in 1923, and the 1945 firebombings. Other Japanese cities have also suffered substantial catastrophes—the storm surge that swept across Osaka in 1934; the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck Kobe in 1995; the wartime bombings of 66 urban areas, including the atomic attacks that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki....