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Radiant Dreams and Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance

Narratives and American Intervention in Postwar Speculative
Popular Culture
Aidan J. Warlow, The University of Western Ontario

Supervisor: Blackmore, Tim, The University of Western Ontario

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in
Media Studies
© Aidan J. Warlow 2022

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Recommended Citation
Warlow, Aidan J., "Radiant Dreams and Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives and
American Intervention in Postwar Speculative Popular Culture" (2022). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation
Repository. 8373.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8373

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Preliminary Information
Abstract
This project explores three distinct sets of Japanese and American postwar popular

culture texts to demonstrate that there is a continuum of Japanese cultural interest in

pacifism through resistance narratives in speculative fiction. Through close readings of

Godzilla, Mobile Suit Gundam and Akira, and Metal Gear Solid, which I compare with

similar American texts, my project positions its objects of study as points of cultural

resistance to hegemonic pro-American cultural products. Each text produces

commentary on Japanese-American relations with specific respect to nuclear policy and

military expansionism. Significant Japanese cultural producers have grown increasingly

critical of Japanese-American cooperation since the end of the Second World War. These

producers have conveyed a series of dire warnings to Japanese and American power-

holders alike. This project broadly defines the postwar relationship between America and

its sociopolitical vassal Japan as dually cooperative and oppressive by examining key

points of nuclear, political, cultural, and technological convergence.

i
Keywords
Japanese Popular Culture, Post WWII Japan, American Popular Culture, Nuclear

Weapons, Militarism, Film, Anime, Video Games, Kaiju, Mecha, Akira, Metal Gear

Solid, Resistance Narratives

ii
Summary for Lay Audience
After the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the relationship

between Japan and the relatively newly arrived Western superpower was changed

forever. My project studies how several key Japanese popular culture franchises have

historically expressed tension and anxiety over the post WWII vassal-ruler relationship

between Japan and America, specifically concerning the questions of nuclear weapons,

militarism, and imperialism. By studying globally significant Japanese popular culture

texts against their American counterparts, my project demonstrates a disparity in how the

two nations’ postwar cultures have depicted and critiqued nuclear trauma, war

devastation, and militarism in popular forms of storytelling. This disparity ultimately

demonstrates a continued form of cultural resistance in Japanese popular culture that

continually questions the unbalanced relationship between Japan and America and argues

for increased national sovereignty for Japan that is equally removed from American

power and Imperial Japanese tradition.

iii
Acknowledgements
To my parents Ed and Donna for their unending support throughout this entire process

and my life at large. To Maddy, Pat, and Archie for never failing to make me smile. To

Tim for his patience, understanding, and insight. To Susan, Aldona, Nick, Warren, and

Luke for helping shape the project and its scholar. To my colleagues Jess, Afsana, Man,

Billie, Ryan, Charlotte, and Alyssa for listening to me complain all the time. To my

friends and family who have been constant reminders that I am supported and cared for.

iv
Table of Contents
Preliminary Information i
Abstract i
Keywords ii
Summary for Lay Audience iii
Acknowledgements iv
Table of Contents v
Introduction: Detonation 1
Postwar Ad Infinitum 3
Methods 8
Chapter Overview 11
Chapter 1: Gojira 14
Godzilla’s Roar 14
Japan and the Kaiju 16
Godzilla Emerges 22
Mutation and the Atom Pacified 29
The American Monster 38
Shin Godzilla 46
Fallout 55
Chapter 2: Mecha 57
Atomic Futures 57
A Critical Introduction to Anime 59
Youthful Bodies in Sci-Fi Anime 65
Mobile Suit Gundam: Boy Scouts and Machines 70
Transformers: You’ve Got the Touch 84
Fallout 91
Chapter 2.5: Akira 93
Pika-don 93
Fallout 100

v
Chapter 3: Ouroboros 102
Introduction to Metal Gear 104
Kept You Waiting, Huh? 108
Metal Gear Scholar 110
Let the Legend Come Back to Life 118
Venom Maps, Mother Base, and Phantom Limbs 123
Men Become Demons 131
A War Without End 136
Fallout 144
Conclusion: Proliferation 149
References 153
Works Cited 153
Texts Studied 160
Curriculum Vitae 161

vi
Introduction: Detonation
The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and
thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation
bursts forth.

—Julia Kristeva
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

I choose to begin my project with this quote from Kristeva as I feel it accurately

represents the paradox of nuclear abjection and horror. Nuclear power is creation, it is the

most basic expression of nature in the breaking down and remaking of its most vital

component the atom, but it is also terror and death. “Revelation” here for this project

serves a dual purpose, as the revelation that humanity’s ability to create and destroy now

rivals that of God, but also as the revelation that in breaking the atom humans have made

possible the near instantaneous destruction of the entire world. When I was in 11th grade

my chemistry teacher decided to open one class in March with a brief discussion of the

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster which had just occurred on March 11, 2011. At the

time I understood very little about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and even less-so

about how those two forces are two halves of the same split atom. My parents’ generation

was raised on Cold War nuclear panic, duck and cover drills, Three Mile Island and

Chernobyl, but in a post-Cold War world I found myself at a loss for the critical tools to

unpack what had once again been visited on the people of Japan, the horror, the resurgent

trauma, like a monster returning from the deeps. The Fukushima disaster ignited my

fledgling interest in nuclear weapons and nuclear trauma and this curiosity only grew as I

developed as a popular culture scholar. How can we make sense of nuclear horror, and

how does the advent of the nuclear age appear and reappear in popular culture? What

1
does a specific nation’s history with nuclear devastation do to its cultural output and

shared national psyche? This project aims to study Japanese popular culture primarily,

with American counterparts in parallel, to discern answers to these questions, and where

no answers can be found, produce more questions and more useful lines of thought to

continue to unravel this great nuclear mystery.

As work on this project continued, I came to realize that the texts I have chosen to study

here are concerned with much bigger dilemmas, ironically, than solely a rejection of

nuclear violence. Rather prophetically, my use of Takashi Murakami’s work Little Boy

has led me to understand this project as a broader sketch of the postwar relationship

between Japan and their neocolonial protectors, the United States. Initially, this project

was only concerned with the representation of nuclear imagery and themes in Japanese

and American popular culture, particularly on how these respective depictions opposed

each other. Now, after several years of research, writing, and thinking, I have realized

that what I am doing here is using key Japanese popular culture texts to demonstrate a

continuum of resistant narratives, often but not exclusively with nuclear trauma at their

core. This project will examine four key points of Japanese cultural resistance to

American military imperialism, which this project imagines as a Hydra. Nuclear weapons

are but a single head, along with cultural imperialism, military expansionism, the

conglomeration of the military and information technologies, and even the rearmament of

Japan itself. The remainder of this introductory section will provide background

historical context for both Japan and America’s relationship with the advent of the

nuclear age. I will then introduce Takashi Murakami’s work in Little Boy as this project’s

2
chief theoretical grounding and will outline what is to come in the following chapters as a

series of explorations into the Japanese cultural psyche as reflected by its popular culture.

Postwar Ad Infinitum
In surveying John Hersey’s November 1946 work Hiroshima I have had a very difficult

time picking out a particular instance of trauma that best encapsulates the effect of

nuclear weapons in microcosm. At the end of the first chapter, he describes the effects of

the blast itself rather subtly as the weapon exerted itself over one Miss Sakai,

The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above

collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down
and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first
of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and
the contents threw her down... in the first moment of the
atomic age, a human was being crushed by books.1

Hersey’s journalistic account of the bombing and the weeks that followed is painfully

thorough. Nuclear trauma doesn’t start and end with the blast, it is a long-drawn-out

process of biological, mental, and societal degradation. Hersey’s stories in culmination

propose a single narrative, that the world was irrevocably changed on August 6th, 1945.

In an instant the world as we understood it was killed, and a new one brightly burst forth,

and it made a lot of people incredibly sick. Ceaseless vomiting, skin mutations, hair loss,

these are all of the immediately recognizable symptoms that popular culture has taught us

to associate with the effects of nuclear weaponry on the survivors of the initial blast, who

are then subject to radiation sickness. The ensuing economic collapse coupled with the

1
John Hersey, Hiroshima. (New York, A. A. Knopf: New York, AAKnopf, 1966,) loc. 243.

3
seemingly perpetually understaffed and overworked healthcare system in Japan bears

certain unsettling similarities to our own current Covid-19 pandemic disaster. Beyond

that, the mental and psychic reverberations of the blast are still being felt, they will likely

always be felt. These reverberations should be felt lest we forget the terrible potential of

these weapons that were so callously cast upon a completely unprepared civilian

population in a war that was otherwise all but won.2 Howard Zinn continues this thought,

Hiroshima was not an unfortunate error in an otherwise

glorious war. It revealed, in concentrated form,
characteristics that the United States had in common with
the other belligerents—whatever their political
nomenclature. The first of these is that commission and
easy justification of indiscriminate violence when it serves
political aims.3

Zinn also explains the more insidious nature of the nuclear question and the idea of

rational logical debates surrounding the use of these irrational and illogical

superweapons,

The debate itself over the bombing proved a point. Could

any truly civilized nation debate gas chambers for Jews or
slavery for blacks? Would it matter who won the debate?
The concession that these were debatable was enough. And
after Hiroshima, the use of atomic bombs was debatable,
the extermination of villages and cities debatable, modern
wars of annihilation debatable.4

The total damage of the use of nuclear weapons extends beyond the blast, beyond the

sickness, and the psyche as well, it extends into the realm of what we deem humanly

2
Howard Zinn, Postwar America: 1945-1971., History of American Society (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1973,) loc. 308.
3
Zinn, Postwar America, loc, 497.
4
Zinn, Postwar America, loc. 278.

4
possible to inflict on others. The weapon’s existence has already altered our fundamental

humanity. If it accomplishes nothing else, I would be satisfied if this project engenders

both a curiosity and a healthy fear of and hatred for the nuclear-ordered world so that we

may never again know this type of devastation.

Another generative text of this project is Gunther Anders’ Burning Conscience, which is

correspondence between Anders himself, a German essayist and journalist, and Claude

Eatherly, the pilot who flew the Straight Flush over Hiroshima in reconnaissance support

of the Enola Gay and its nuclear payload. Wracked by his own “burning conscience”

over what he had helped deliver to the world, Eatherly turned to pacifism and staunch

anti-nuclear politics in the years following the Second World War. In particular, he was

inspired by Anders’ own writing “Commandments in the Atomic Age,” which specifies,

“your first thought upon awakening be: ‘Atom’. For you should not begin your day with

the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world.”5 This quotation again signifies

several things but chiefly that since the advent of the nuclear era, nothing else should be

of greater concern to anyone than the eventual unmaking of the world. He continues that

“we as mankind are ‘killable’...not only mankind spread over the provinces of our globe;

but also mankind spread over the provinces of time.”6

Eatherly himself engaged in correspondence with a group named “Girls of Hiroshima”

who wrote to him about the “scars or traces of injury in our faces and limbs, and we do

5
Claude Eatherly and Günther Anders, Burning Conscience: The Case Of The Hiroshima Pilot Claude
Eatherly (Verdun Press, 2015,) 11.
6
Ibid.

5
wish that that horrible thing called ‘war’ shall never happen again either for us or for

anybody living in this world.”7 Additionally, the group makes clear that they harbour no

ill will towards Eatherly for his part, “You were perhaps ordered to do what you did, or

thought it would help people by ending the war. But you know that bombs do not end

wars on this earth.”8 Until his last day Eatherly remained resolved to “lend influence

towards peace, end nuclear buildup, to safeguard the rights of all people regardless of

race, color or creed.”9 How then did Eatherly’s anti-nuclear politics pervade American

popular culture, if at all? Despite his personal efforts, can we as cultural historians and

scholars understand American popular culture output as truly anti-nuclear in comparison

with its Japanese counterparts? It is the express thesis of this project that we cannot see

the expressions as anti-nuclear given American popular culture’s implicit and explicit

closeness to entrenched American power and empire. I argue that American mainstream

culture, like the two bombs used on Japan, is deployed in a callous and cavalier manner:

little is done to impress the grave and ethereal consequences upon the world.

Ironically in the aftermath of World War II, it was Japan, and not America, that was

made to rein in its future destructive potential through “Article 9” of the Japanese

Constitution of 1946. In its second chapter “Renunciation of War” the Japanese

constitution clarifies,

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on

justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war

7
Eatherly and Anders, Burning Conscience, 25.
8
Ibid.
9
Eatherly and Anders, Burning Conscience, 31.

6
 as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of
force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph,
land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will
never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state
will not be recognized.10

Despite its proposed sincerity, this article was actually drafted by the General

Headquarters of the Allied Occupation Forces under American General Douglas

MacArthur as a means of preventing Japan from waging war again in the future. This

article greatly affected and continues to affect the Japanese national psyche as it created a

state of dependence, vassal-hood even, between Japan and the United States, its occupier

who was now free to completely rebuild the nation as its perfect free-market capitalist pet

project.11 Article 9, a reverberation of the nuclear blasts, is cited by Japanese Pop artist

and cultural critic Takashi Murakami in his exhaustive survey of Japanese popular culture

Little Boy.

Murakami outlines precisely how he believes the Japanese national psyche was altered,

or more accurately fixed in place, by the nuclear detonation in Hiroshima. Little Boys’

foreword, written by Frank L. Ellsworth for the New York City-based Japan Society

through which Little Boy work was published, outlines Murakami’s thesis precisely, “Mr.

Murakami proposes a radical interpretation of historical forces that continue to shape

contemporary Japanese art and its distinct graphic languages, locating the birth of these

new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock of World War II and its

10
“Article 9,” The Constitution of Japan, (Constitute Project, 1946).
11
Takashi Murakami, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Bilingual edition (New
York: Yale University Press, 2005,) 8.

7
atomic devastation.”12 Particularly, my project is most concerned with Murakami’s

theory of “Pika-don” which translates from Japanese to English as “light blast” referring

to the flash and boom of nuclear weapons. Murakami supposes himself that,

The two atomic bombs have left a permanent scar on

Japanese history: they have touched the national nerve
beyond the effects of the catastrophic physical destruction.
“Pika-don” symbolizes the visual, aural, and other sensory
imprints made on the Japanese psyche, which has been
completely transformed in the wake of the collective
subjection of the Japanese people to the horrendous
experience of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps from this
national trauma did kawaii and otaku cultures emerge in
contemporary Japan.13

It is the goal of my project then to make use of Murakami’s claim in light of Japanese

culture’s American counterparts, and also to study how much of the essence of “Pika-

don” storytelling remains in Japanese and American transnational products.

Methods
The methodology of my project will vary slightly depending on the medium of the texts

that are being discussed. In short, I will employ semiotic close-reading analysis and myth

analysis, informed largely by Barthes, to discuss Japanese film and animation, but when

discussing video games, the medium’s interactivity brings forth new challenges and

opportunities for analysis. My project’s close reading method is borrowed from various

examples in Jonathan Culler’s “The Closeness of Close Reading” in which he outlines

12
Frank L. Ellsworth, “Introducing Little Boy,” Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,
Bilingual edition (New York: Yale University Press, 2005,) vi.i
13
Murakami 19. Here the term “kawaii” refers to the understood Japanese obsession with cuteness, and
“otaku” denotes a culture of fandom around anime and manga products.

8
different approaches to “New Criticism”, or close reading in the humanities. He

paraphrases Paul de Man on the topic of New Criticism:

De Man’s description helpfully conveys one thing that is

crucial to the practice of close reading: a respect for the
stubbornness of texts, which resist easy comprehension or
description in terms of expected themes and motifs. The
close reader needs to be willing to take seriously the
difficulties of singular, unexpected turns of phrase,
juxtapositions, and opacity.14

Here Culler explains that there isn’t really a roadmap or set of steps a scholar can take to

apply a close-reading method to texts, especially concerning texts that are increasingly

participatory. However, my project will mitigate some complications by applying a more

historical approach at the outset of each chapter, providing a context for the texts

discussed and the media of which they are a part. Culler later goes on to paraphrase

Barbara Johnson who at least provides some reasonably specific markers, or areas of

interest for close-reading scholarship to pay attention to:

In her essay “Teaching Deconstructively,” she provides,

with an unusually bold explicitness, a series of examples of
different kinds of signifying conflicts or tensions that
students should look for in passages they are studying:
ambiguous words, undecidable syntax, incompatibilities
between what a text says and what it does, incompatibilities
between the literal and the figurative, incompatibilities
between explicitly foregrounded assertions and illustrative
examples, and so on. Such attention involves “a careful
teasing out of the warring forces of signification that are at
work within the text itself.”15

14
Culler, Jonathan, “The Closeness of Close Reading,” Modern Language Association, accessed March 23,
2021, https://www.ade.mla.org/bulletin/article/ade.149.20. 22.
15
Ibid, 23.

9
Again, these types of contradictions or the “warring forces of signification” are the main

subject of this project, an attempt to unearth the unspoken and horrible as it is reflected in

this project’s texts.

Concerning the project’s final chapter, a more intricate and specific method will need to

be applied, or at least borrowed from. I will adapt James Paul Gee’s method established

in Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, reality, virtual worlds, and video games to

study Metal Gear. Unified Discourse Analysis’ eleventh and twelfth chapters “Projective

Identity” and “Avatars in big ‘D’ Discourses” discuss the player-character or “avatar” in

digital games and how an avatar’s own practices and actions can be read as a form of

conversation. Throughout his work Gee refers to the process of gameplay as a discourse,

or conversation, of its own. The work, and my own project by extension, will then

interpret gameplay and interactions with a digital world as a language of its own, full of

signs to be read with meaning to be derived therefrom.

In “Projective Identity” Gee states that, “good games create a ‘projective identity.’ They

create a double-sided stance towards the world (virtual or real) in terms of which we

humans see the world simultaneously as a project imposed on us and as a site onto which

we can actively project our desires, values, and goals. A projective identity is a melded

identity, a melding of self and avatar in a way that gives rise to a new sort of being.”16

Considering the intensely self-reflexive nature of Metal Gear Solid, its constant breaking

of the fourth wall and its constant renegotiation between player agency and narrative

16
James Paul Gee, Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds and Video Games, 1st
edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 2014). 94.

10
drive, Gee’s work on projective identity lends a useful toolkit for unpacking how the

interactivity of Metal Gear constructs the nuclear-ordered world and places its players

within it. In his tenth chapter “Metal Gear Solid,” Gee specifically addresses some of

these issues as they appear in Metal Gear Solid 4: The Guns of The Patriots with its

protagonist “Solid Snake.” My project then aims to perform a similar type of analysis

pointed almost entirely at the game’s successor Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,

and its protagonist “Venom Snake.”

Chapter Overview
My project’s chapters are organized both by the chronological period from which their

respective objects of study originate, and by the medium of the object of study. Aside

from the first chapter providing a general introduction to the topic and its import, each of

my project’s three sections is structured similarly to include historical and medium-

specific context followed by a semiotic close reading of its respective objects. The

opening chapter of my project discusses Japanese popular culture as it appears relatively

early in the Cold War. I focus on 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla) and situate it within the

broader context of the “kaiju” film, films about gigantic monsters who represent

existential threats to humanity. Additionally, I will discuss the legacy and later

pacification of the genre’s pre-eminent monster Godzilla, as films following the series’

first film shift drastically in tone. It will also prove useful to compare Godzilla—a

uniquely Japanese film—to its American contemporary counterparts and the extended,

ultimately transnational Godzilla franchise. How do these films present contrary

narratives to humanity’s ability to survive the existential dangers posed by nuclear

11
weapons? What tone is used to describe these horrors? How is power constructed and

portrayed in these texts?

Advancing in time to near the final decade of the Cold War, my project’s second chapter

discusses the anime industry and medium generally, as well as its relation to changes in

the Japanese economy and the modernization and globalization of its cultural industry. I

then move into close readings of the original Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) anime

television series and Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime feature film Akira. The discussion of

Akira is placed in its own bridging subsection as it serves as a philosophical link between

adolescence and adulthood. Chapter two and its succeeding connecting section focuses on

the themes of technology and mecha—giant mechanical suits that serve as both armor

and weapon—and the prominence of the adolescent body as the key vessel of meaning in

Japanese postwar popular culture. Additionally, I will consider questions of how the

themes of adolescence and trauma vary in similar American/Japanese co-produced texts

like Transformers (1984). What does it mean to remove the adolescent human body from

the machine? What meaning can be derived from the increased blending of Japanese and

American pop culture products and how does this affect their narrative and formal

conventions? This analysis is continued from Gundam and Transformers to its apex in

Akira, which completely erodes binaries of military and civilian, biological and

technological, adolescent and adult.

Finally, my project closes with an extended discussion of the Metal Gear Solid video

game franchise, and the convergence of Japanese and American popular culture in the

internet age. Metal Gear represents a very fluid endpoint of convergence between

12
Japanese and American popular culture and storytelling. Metal Gear is equally indebted

to conventions of both American and Japanese cinema, animation, and mythology.

Because it’s a deeply interactive medium, I pay special attention to the role of the player

and the oft-challenged separation between player and avatar in digital games. The final

chapter addresses the Metal Gear franchise as a whole to lend historical context to the

growing convergence of Japanese and American culture but succinctly examines Metal

Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain as a culmination and occasional inversion of the series’

themes and warnings. My project's third chapter is less of a fusion between The Phantom

Pain and other more “American” forms, simply because Metal Gear represents a point of

major convergence in itself between American and Japanese culture. Additionally, the

game is positioned as a subversive anti-war text that comments on the 21st century

remilitarization of Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It was always the intended

goal of my project to understand the two nations’ cultural outputs in light of the other,

and Metal Gear provides an excellent place to conclude and speculate.

13
Chapter 1: Gojira
Godzilla’s Roar
In the summer of 2014 I had just finished my first year of undergraduate studies. I’d

asked one of my friends from residence to meet me at the aptly named Colossus theatre in

Vaughn, Ontario for an IMAX screening of Godzilla. Although I had previously dabbled

in kaiju cinema through Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, this was my first brush with

the big green lizard, and boy was it big. Godzilla’s most recent American adaptation

franchise sees the gorilla-whale looking more whale than gorilla for the first time ever; it

was slow, lumbering, incomprehensibly wide, a true expert at taking up space. What else

could we expect from America in the teen years of the new century? Director Gareth

Edwards painfully teased out glimpses of the monster for the first half of the film until

finally, during a scene at the Honolulu Airport, Godzilla’s megaton form is revealed in

full. A slow tilt moves from the monster’s feet, amidst the flaming wreckage of aircraft,

towards his fuming maw. Like a mushroom cloud boiling over and thrusting into the

atmosphere, the beast draws in on itself and unleashes its trademark roar. Godzilla’s roar

is one of those sounds that I can hear clearly in my head but can never describe

accurately. It is animal and alien, angry and mournful, like a whale song and the opening

jet of a flamethrower screeching in unison. My eyes widened; I was practically vibrating.

The audience erupted with applause, the theatregoers' cacophony reverberating Godzilla’s

own. I was in love.

This chapter is something I have been struggling to write for some time now. Amidst the

global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, my motivation has suffered but returning to this

14
material, which ironically feels comfortable despite its destructive obsession, has helped.

Perhaps it reads as macabre, but I have found a renewed vigour for my work given the

seemingly apocalyptic surroundings of our current world; quarantine, protesting,

economic collapse, all these themes are appropriately ‘zilla-esque' and have urged me on

towards writing more. This chapter aims to study the Godzilla film canon in its various

forms and argue that Godzilla’s anti-nuclear allegory is most potent in the Japanese films.

Moreover, the reason the Japanese films excel in their anti-nuclear rhetoric is because

they position both the U.S. and the monster as antagonists. At the time of writing this

introduction there are 36 Godzilla films either released or in production. To attempt a

close reading of each is beyond the scope of this project so I have instead opted to select

a few key points in the monster’s career to highlight and read closely. Except for one

sequel, each of these films can be understood as “origin stories” for the monster. Those

films are: Ishirō Honda’s 1954 Gojira, the first film in the canon, the American films

Godzilla (2014) and its sequel Godzilla: King of Monsters (2018) by Gareth Edwards and

Michael Dougherty respectively, and finally Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla from 2016.

The first and last films are both Japanese while the middle two are American. My

purposeful delineation will allow me to compare the two cultures’ respective treatment

and representation of the monster, its nuclear terror, and to explore what these films say

about the postwar relationship of Japan and America.

Accompanying the close reading of these texts will also be several contextual and

historical explorations of postwar Japanese culture and politics, a broader examination of

Japan’s relationship with the figure of the “kaiju” and monsters generally, and postwar

15
American attempts to run peace-time public relations for the destructive power of atomic

energy. As a point of order, this chapter will refer to the monster in gender neutral

terminology, even though many if not most of the films, with the exception of the 1998

American film Godzilla, refer to the monster in masculine terms. Godzilla is a gigantic

monster, an avatar of destruction, and this author views it above trite comparisons to

human gender norms. I will also explore the cross-cultural representational divide

concerning the monster and its antics, and also to argue that Japan’s approach to nuclear

kaiju storytelling specifically depicts anti-nuclear politics, whereas the American

approach is mired in propaganda, American essentialism, and ultimately the aim to make

atom a pacified and distinctly consumable entity, a pet for U.S. power holders.

Ultimately, this chapter will explore the idea that all films in the Godzilla canon are in

some way about the relationship shared between postwar Japan and America, a

relationship that the Japanese films clearly code as antagonistic and hegemonic.

Japan and the Kaiju

Before diving headlong into the atomic breach, I will make use of a few key texts that

explain, in better terms than I am able to, the existence of the kaiju as a uniquely

Japanese sci fi subgenre, and its relation to the horror genre broadly. For this, I will be

relying most heavily on The Kaiju Film by Jason Barr. In this work, Barr outlines four

distinctly Japanese traditions that lead to the birth of Gojira and subsequently the kaiju

subgenre as a whole: yokai, bunraku, kabuki, and noh. While these inspirational elements

are all visible in the 1954 film, I will demonstrate that many of the distinctly Japanese

cultural and historical elements of the kaiju film are stripped away during the Godzilla

16
franchise’s interim years mostly as a result of American meddling in and

commercializing of Gojira. This chapter culminates in a discussion of Hideaki Anno’s

2016 Shin Gojira, or Godzilla Resurgence in English, which dutifully restores the

monster itself and the franchise to its roots in Japanese horror.

Barr also begins his work with a certain concession, one that this project will make

several times, being that attempting to view Japanese and American films in respective

isolated paradigms is fruitless. There is a much more dialectic relationship between the

two, a relationship that this chapter aims to explore through a few key moments in the

transnational proliferation of Godzilla. The kaiju genre was not necessarily born with

Godzilla, in fact Barr claims that it was 1933’s King Kong, an American film, that

kickstarted the genre, early evidence of monstrous transnational convergence. Barr goes

on to explain that while King Kong may have started the kaiju film he views Gojira as the

“catalyst” for the genre. Since kaiju cinema’s inception it has represented a

conglomeration of American and Japanese myths and formal techniques. He also

specifically names Murakami’s “superflat” theory of Japanese popular culture as a key

contributing source of the dual cute-horrific nature of Japanese fascination with monsters,

but also through this introduction explains that “the seeds of kaiju were planted several

centuries earlier.”17

Beginning with the “yokai,” a term Barr describes as representing “a massive catalogue

of spirits and creatures,” Barr uses the immediate example of the Japanese folklore

Jason Barr, The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters (Jefferson, North Carolina:
17

McFarland Publishing, 2016,) 25,26.

17
character “tsuchigumo,” a gigantic spider that would terrorize villages and store the

bodies of its victims inside its belly. For Barr, this commonly found figure is a direct

inspiration for the Godzilla franchise monster Kumonga that appears in three different

Godzilla films throughout the 1960s. While similarities like these are common in the

kaiju genre, Barr points out that there is not always a direct correlation, “Yokai are often

akin to the Urban legends of the United States, intended to warn people away from bad

decisions, bad habits, or other actions that could damage themselves, their families, or

their culture... Kaiju however are relatively new phenomenon and often serve as parables

for the modern ills in society.”18 The distinction between cautionary parable and vengeful

monster is made clear here, Godzilla is not interested in human course correcting, it only

seeks to punish and destroy in retaliation for events that have already occurred. Michelle

Osterfeld Li explains that the yokai figure of the “oni”, a word synonymous loosely with

demon, is often used as a vehicle for sympathy, or as a means of connecting human

emotion with Japanese myth and folklore. She uses medieval Japanese fiction to explain

the numerous links that these monsters have to humanity and how oni figures evoke

sympathy, remorse, or pity through their closeness to humanity.19 In the more

contemporary case of the kaiju, American attempts to soften or pacify the monsters are

nearly forgotten in the Japanese tradition. Later, in the films of the 1960s and ‘70s,

18
Ibid, 27.
19
Michelle Osterfeld Li, “Human of the Heart: The Pitiful Oni in Medieval Japan,” The Ashgate Research
Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Brookfield, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group,
2012), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=4920515. 174, 175.

18
renewed efforts are made to make the monsters, chiefly Godzilla, and its long-time ally

Mothra, appear more sympathetic and relatable, even goofy.

Next for Barr comes “bunraku,” a specifically Japanese form of puppetry pioneered in

17th century Japan. Japanese theatre historian Gotō Shizuo expands that puppetry theatre

has been a Japanese cultural mainstay since the 1650s but that Bunraku was preceded by

other forms, most notably “jōruri ayatsuri” puppetry.20 The bunraku tradition included

visible onstage puppeteers who weren’t obscured like puppeteers in other continental

traditions. Barr writes, “watching older kaiju film carries with it the reasonable

expectation that the viewer would be seeing not only kaiju but the performer in the suit as

well.”21 Barr goes on to explain that bunraku is “deeply embedded” in Japanese culture,

and that the performance of bunraku in Japanese kaiju films often stood at odds with their

western counterparts. He makes note of developments in stop-motion film making made

during the silent-era “most importantly in The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933).”

Although Godzilla was being acted in the 1950s, when stop-motion techniques were both

reliable and commercially successful, Toho remained on course with its Japanese roots

and remained committed to puppet performance.22 He credits this “reliance on or

embrace” of bunraku puppetry with the perception that kaiju special effects lagged far

behind their western counterparts. Even as western monster films began to embrace CGI,

perhaps most notably in the case of Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park, Kaiju films, and

Gotō Shizuo, “Bunraku Puppet Theatre,”, A History of Japanese Theatre, ed. Jonah Salz, trans. Alan
20

Cummings. (Cambridge: University Press, 2016) 161.

21
Barr, Kaiju Film, 28.
22
Ibid, 29.

19
specifically Godzilla films, remained reliant on puppetry until Godzilla 2000 when at last

computer graphics and puppetry were combined.23 Unsurprisingly, later American

Godzilla franchise entries are heavily CGI laden, all but abandoning the theatrical

Japanese principles of bunraku puppetry. The two American films discussed later in this

chapter rely exclusively on CGI to depict their monsters, and do not make so much as a

nod to the original kaiju acting style or costume construction. Barr explains that the

eventual embrace of CGI techniques in Japanese filmmaking is “the beginning of the end

for traditional kaiju film, as a majority of low-budget studios have opted instead for quick

cash grabs.”24 This is not to suggest that CGI filmmaking is not without its own specific

set of artistic conventions and strengths, but instead that the growth of CGI in Japanese

film represents, again, an erosion of the traditionally “Japanese” quality of the text in the

postwar era mostly inspired by the influence of American markets and politics.

Lastly for Barr comes “kabuki”, which he describes mostly as the informing narrative

tradition of the kaiju film, alongside the visual cues from bunraku. It should also be made

clear that these historical techniques and conventions are not mutually exclusive: bunraku

puppetry was a common element of kabuki and noh-style theatre performances. The

forms work to complement each other as they do in the kaiju films they would later

inspire: “Kabuki plays are well known for being slow-moving at the start, building to a

large climax, followed by a rapid denouement. Perhaps more so than bunraku, kabuki

23
Ibid, 31.
24
Ibid, 32.

20
plays often follow this structure rigidly.”25 In effect, Barr has described in macro terms

the plot structure of Gojira, a film that despite its atomic allegory burns quite slowly in

its beginnings. As Barr points out, Gojira does not actually feature the full Godzilla

monster until the 45-minute mark, and the monster only appears in approximately eight

minutes of the film’s 96-minute run time.26 Where kabuki supplies a rigid narrative

structure to be followed by Gojira, noh theatre’s influence is much more subtle, and at

times seemingly erased from kaiju films as the genre matures beyond its 1954 Gojira

catalyst. noh theatre predates kabuki and was also situated as a more elite form of

entertainment, telling stories intended for noble audiences, whereas kabuki emerged

roughly 200 years later as a form of low culture. This distinction is often paralleled in the

film industry, or even situates the film industry as the “kabuki” alternative to something

like opera. Understandably then, the noh tradition does not leave as heavy a mark on the

kaiju genre, which is at its core a popular form of art and entertainment. Barr points out

that “the borrowing of noh structure has slowly ebbed, as directors and writers have

consistently attempted to put new takes and spins on the genre and the creation,” also

citing the impact of action-based Western storytelling techniques whereas noh is more

deliberate and quiet.27 Through this lens, Barr understands noh’s relationship to the kaiju

film as genetic, as a latent and foundational element that has mutated out of

recognizability over time.28 Finally, with its origins squarely tucked away, it is time to

25
Ibid 32.
26
Ibid, 33.
27
Ibid, 35.
28
Ibid.

21
move into the first film in the Godzilla franchise, the granddaddy of proper kaiju

filmmaking, and the should-be cause of endless nuclear terror, Gojira!

Godzilla Emerges
Ishirō Honda’s 1954 Gojira is perhaps the most significant piece of Japanese postwar

nuclear culture. The film follows the titular monster’s path of destruction through Japan,

as the monster makes its way inland from archipelagos and towards Tokyo. In parallel,

Gojira also follows the efforts of a team of scientists as they try to both better understand

the monster, and search for a way to stop its wanton devastation. When confronted with

the monster’s previously unimaginable power a team of scientists lead by Dr. Serizawa

(Akihiko Hirata) must resort to using experimental superweapons, chiefly the “Oxygen

Destroyer” to destroy the monster at the cost of Serizawa’s life. Serizawa is unwilling to

let evidence of his potentially world-ending weapon resurface and so he destroys all of

his notes and manually detonates the device, sacrificing himself and killing Godzilla.

Unlike the creature features of 1950s America like Them! and The Blob, Gojira is

permeated with sadness and sombre tones. The film begins aboard a Japanese salvage

vessel as an unexpected encounter with the monster results in the deaths of the majority

of the crew, and perhaps more tellingly, the complete arresting of arts and culture as

signified by the abandoned mandolin and toppled board game left behind by Godzilla’s

atomic flash.29 Godzilla scholar Bryce Bivens explains, “This Eikomaru is usually

paralleled with the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident, during which the fishing vessel Lucky

Bryce Bivens, “Godzilla: Culture through the Camera’s Lens” (Thesis, University Honors College,
29

Middle Tennessee State University, 2019), 6. https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/handle/mtsu/6014.

22
Dragon decided to fish in and around the Marshall Islands and was caught in the Castle

Bravo nuclear tests.”30 These are the first casualties we actually see in Gojira, culture and

leisure, not the physical human death toll. Throughout this section of the chapter, I will

analyse various scenes in Gojira for how they mirror anti-nuclear rhetoric as well as

investigating how the monster’s attacks reflect Japanese national psychic damage, not

just physical destruction.

Following the aforementioned boat attack that opens the film, the monster makes land at

Odo Island. The pastoral village’s survivors, now homeless refugees, flee to Tokyo to

demand disaster relief; in response, the Japanese government sends a paleontologist, Dr.

Yamane (Takashi Shimura), with a team to inspect the damage. While not yet absolute,

Godzilla’s destruction of the small Odo fishing community is a precursor of larger

destitution to follow. Equipped with a Geiger counter, the team takes readings within

Godzilla’s massive footprint revealing it to be abundant with radioactive energy,

reminiscent of the nuclear fallout that followed the real-world atomic blasts at Nagasaki

and Hiroshima. This scene also carries with it the film’s tension between tradition and

modernity, and how Godzilla’s presence blurs the lines between ancient and modern

Japan or destroys that line completely. Odo is a traditional village with a unique folklore

and a rudimentary way of life. One can only spot a few sparse hydro poles during this

scene, modern Japan is hardly anywhere to be seen on this island.31 Godzilla’s

insurrection brings modernity to the island in the form of the research team, who are then

30
Ibid, 7.
31
Bivens, “Godzilla” 8.

23
left to ask, why here and why now? A warning bell later sounds causing the research

team and Odo villagers to climb a nearby hill to catch a glimpse of the monster which

Yamane claims to be a creature from the Jurassic era; their orderly procession to the top

of the hill, shot from above, is reminiscent of a colony of ants making for the entrance to

their hill. I do not mean to draw any sort of cultural criticism against Japanese people by

making this comparison, only to elaborate the way by which the film constructs—or

rather demolishes—the individuality of its subjects. All are as infinitesimal as ants before

the monster. Godzilla’s head crests the hill and it lets out an iconic roar as the villagers

and researchers flee while trying to capture snapshots on their cameras. Here

individuality and agency are removed from the fleeing multitude, as low angle shots of

running feet are edited together with frantic clamouring. The monster and the devastation

it represents destroy order.

The monster’s design itself is of import here as well, as a recurring point of discussion

throughout this chapter. The costume and special effects techniques were pioneered by

Eiji Tsuburaya, who worked alongside Honda.32 Obviously the scenarios and

motivations Godzilla enacts will change from film to film, but so too does its physical

appearance, which can also be read for meaning. In his first inception, the monster is

stated to stand over 150 feet tall, possessing massive claws, spines, and feet. Popular

culture commentator Kristian Williams points out that the monster’s hide does not appear

to have scales like one might expect from a massive lizard, and instead explains that the

32
Kristian Williams, Godzilla - The Soul of Japan, 2016, YouTube.

24
monster’s skin is meant to resemble the radiation burn scars suffered by victims of the

atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later collateral damage suffered by

Japanese Pacific Islanders during the U.S.’s postwar atomic testing, particularly around

Bikini Atoll.33 Bivens points out that Godzilla’s devastation parallels specific instances of

American violence carried out against the Japanese civilian population, chiefly the

nuclear bombing but also submarine surprise attacks, the firebombing of Tokyo.34 Its

eyes are rather large given the rest of his proportions which also give the monster a

somewhat cartoonish look, but this is likely more of a functional requirement of the

suit/puppet than a conscious design choice. Typically, figures are given larger eyes when

they are meant to appear cute, relatable, or even human. Eyes also help establish a sense

of scale; their size proportional to the rest of the head tends to shrink the larger the whole

creature actually is. Later installments in the franchise make a sort of course correction

regarding the size of the monster’s eyes, but they are still packed with diverse meaning,

determined by the film’s overall goals for the monster.

In the following scene, Yamane reports the findings of his research exhibition to the

government. He explicitly cites that American Pacific H-bomb testing has disturbed the

ancient leviathan’s sanctuary, forcing the creature to surface and seek revenge. Here the

tension between past and present resurfaces, however it is not simply a distinction

between modern and traditional Japan, but between the natural world that was, and the

technological world that humans have created. Carried ashore and left behind in the

33
Ibid.
34
Bivens, “Godzilla,” 9.

25
monster’s footprint, Yamane finds an arthropod thought to be extinct for the last two

million years. Godzilla has quite literally dredged the pre-human world back from the

depths of the ocean’s deepest chasms in direct conflict with the oppressive underwater H-

bomb testing. Godzilla itself is stated to carry and emit the same radiation as the bomb, a

walking breathing weapon of mass destruction. Gojira’s anti-nuclear and anti-American

sentiment is undeniable during this section of the film. As we continue along Godzilla’s

path of destruction, we see that this sentiment only grows over time. Again, the conflict

between tradition and modernity emerges as the Odo Island refugees sitting in on

Yamane’s briefing insist that his findings be made public, while the government

representatives advise caution because “our fragile diplomatic relations [with the U.S.]

will be further strained.” For the Japanese officials, maintaining the economic and

political standing order takes precedence over the safety of Japan’s citizens as the newly

liberalized nation seeks to find some balance between its traditional practices and

entering the postwar economy, a balance through Godzilla will leave a trail of destruction

one radioactive footprint at a time.

Later, in what is probably the film’s most action-packed segment, Godzilla makes his

assault on Tokyo. Machine gunners in sandbagged positions and lines of stationary guns

fire relentlessly upon the monster as it is caught up in a net of hydro wires and towers.

Godzilla destroys these structures with its claws and tail while being buffeted by

incoming shells and bullets. Seemingly annoyed with the slowness of its advance, the

monster then unleashes its iconic atomic breath, melting the remaining towers to a liquid

nearly instantly. The monster’s nuclear allegory is at its least subtle in these moments, as

26
his radioactive breath melts through steel as though it were butter, similar to the intense

heat created by a nuclear blast. As in previous monster encounter scenes, the fleeing

people are shot from above, obscuring their individuality and humanity; they are more

akin to insects than humans here, running erratically from the monster’s path of

destruction. Without any real cause of distinction Godzilla continues to unleash its atomic

breath on the city, melting homes, businesses, automobiles, and people without any pause

for thought. This sequence offers the audience a glimpse of what no one was really able

to record during the actual nuclear attacks demonstrating how speculative film and

animation can be used to convey what is impossible to actually record.

In a moment of sober respite before the film’s climax, a televised montage is

accompanied by a choir of high school children singing a song of peace composed for the

film by Akira Ifukube:

Oh peace, oh light,
Hasten back to us,
May we live without destruction.
May we look to tomorrow with hope.
May peace and light return to us.
Our hearts are filled with prayer,
This we pray,
Hear our song,
And have pity on us.
May we live without destruction.
May we look to tomorrow with hope.

Accompanying the mournful chorus are images of Japan’s total devastation: completely

demolished city blocks reduced to rubble, rows of bloodied and bandaged patients

nursing cuts and burns, overworked hospital staff, children unable to find their parents,

groups of survivors huddled around a radio listening to this broadcast. Upon viewing the

destruction, Serizawa is finally convinced that he must deploy his own, potentially

27
deadlier, “Oxygen destroyer” weapon to restore peace and put an end to Godzilla’s threat.

After his sacrifice is made and the monster defeated, we are left with Yamane’s

worrisome and foreboding remarks, “I can’t believe that Godzilla was the last of its

species. If nuclear testing continues... then someday, somewhere in the world another

Godzilla may appear.”35 This moment in the film is when its allegory is at its closest to

the surface, it isn't allegorical anymore. Yamane has explicitly stated that nuclear testing

and nuclear weapons breed destruction, their causal relationship with the monster makes

them one and the same. Godzilla is the nuke, and the nuke is Godzilla.

In its inception, Godzilla is most certainly a gleaming artifact of Japanese anti-nuclear

culture that dares to name the United States as its true villain. A monstrous power made

manifest by humanity’s ceaseless meddling in the natural world, Godzilla stands quite

literally as a warning to those who would pursue nuclear energy and nuclear weapons

even after their terrible consequences are well known. The monster is only that, a

warning, an uncontrollable and unthinking force, set loose by American militarism. What

can we then attribute to the monster’s pacification over the following decades? How can

we, as scholars of the wartime atom, make sense of Godzilla’s transformation from force

of unmitigated destruction, to a campy human ally fighting off increasingly whacky

kaiju? In the interests of examining global power consolidation and hegemony, we must

explore what changes lead Godzilla from its 1954 state to its 2014 American rebirth,

tracking through the decades of kaiju filmmaking and American “peaceful” nuclear

35
Peter H. Brothers, “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called ‘Godzilla,’”
Cinéaste 36, no. 3 (2011): 4.

28
policy. The latter is most often attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace”

program, which also marked the birth of the myth of the “peaceful atom.” In this cultural

shift, both the monster, and the atom that it represents are rendered cutesy and

consumable. Additionally, by exploring the erasure of anti-American sentiment in the

Americanized and sanitized Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) rerelease, additional

insight into the original film’s criticism of U.S. imperialism, and the efforts of U.S.

hegemony will be gleaned.

Mutation and the Atom Pacified

In 1956 Godzilla finally made landfall on American shores, in American cinemas. Joe

Blevins, writing for the popular entertainment outlet The AV Club lambasts both the film

and its audiences ignoring the initial subtext of the film and for treating the film like a

popcorn romp over a sombre reflection of the horrors of nuclear technology. Blevins

explains,

The American version of the movie did away with the

subtext, however, with 20 minutes deleted. The U.S.
version also added a half hour of scenes featuring Raymond
Burr so that the events could be shown from an American’s
point of view. Any references to nuclear testing were
excised, and the original Japanese dialogue was either
untranslated or dubbed over. It was Godzilla, King Of The
Monsters!, not Gojira, that cast the die for the franchise in
decades to come. The original version of the film was not
widely seen in America for 50 years. By then, Godzilla’s
campy reputation was firmly in place.36

36
Joe Blevins. “How American Audiences Ruined the Power of the Original Godzilla,” News, accessed
June 27, 2020, https://news.avclub.com/how-american-audiences-ruined-the-power-of-the-original-
1798255035.

29
Essentially, American censorship had cut off this monster’s head before its horror had

time to manifest in American audiences. The film is scrubbed of all criticism of

American foreign policy, of the traumatic danger of nuclear energy, and the monster's

name was anglicized in a way that drew an obvious connection to deification. William

Tsutsui describes the American-friendly recuts as “major surgery” which made the film

politically stagnant. Tsutsui also argues that these edits were meant to serve the lesser or

at least differently suited attention span of American audiences.37 He quotes American

film producer and distributor Henry Saperstein who worked on repackaging several

Godzilla films for American release,

Every Japanese monster film starts with a conference.

Either the press or government officials or scientists, and
they lay the foundation for the story and the characters and
the threat and a plan of what they're going to do about it.
This goes on for five minutes, by which time every
American viewer tunes it out, particularly on television.38

Tsutsui goes on to explain the way by which the remainder of Godzilla films repackaged

for American release were given a similar treatment, always being cleaned of negative

references towards American atomic testing and American foreign policy.. He surmises

the drive of this decision as twofold, “to protect delicate American sensibilities and

ensure a bankable G rating.”39 In his chapter “The Godzilla Franchise” Tsutsui begins by

succinctly declaring,

The Godzilla that most Americans know and love is not the
sinister, homicidal, black-and-white, fresh-from-Bikini-

37
William M. Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (St. Martin’s Press,
2017), 122.
38
Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind, 122, 123.
39
Ibid, 123.

30
 atoll-and-bent-on-revenge monster of the 1954 Gojira.
Instead, the image rooted in America’s pop culture
subconscious is that of Godzilla the goofy champion, the
saurian defender of the world, the judo-kicking, karate-
chopping, bug-eyed, technicolor creature from the films of
the 1960s and 1970s.40

Here, Tsutsui makes clear the distinction between the original incarnation of Godzilla and

its later heavily pacified, consumable counterpart that rose to prominence alongside the

stream of American distributor recuts. Towards that latter point, Tsutsui points out later

that in the 1967 Son of Godzilla, the destructive titan is given a son “Minilla” as a cynical

appeal to the children’s market. It is a wonder that the monster wasn’t redesigned to

feature cargo shorts, thick socks, Teva sandals, and a Flandersian push-broom moustache.

Here Daddzilla offers lizzy-back rides and lessons in the baby's first radioactive breath

blast.41 Concerning its adversaries, Tsutsui explains that Godzilla films of this era feature

much more kaiju wrestling than they do city stomping, Godzilla begins to assume the role

of humanity’s defender rather than an arbiter of destruction and vengeful justice. Such

films have him scraping elbows with the likes of pterodactyl-like Rodan, ankylosaurus

rip-off Anguirus, and even later teaming up with the humanoid robot Jet Jaguar to defeat

the insectoid Megalon.42 These are but a few members of the menagerie of goofy kaiju

matchups that the interim Godzilla films offer their viewers, and it almost goes without

saying that through these years the original monsters’ potency as a strong nuclear and

anti-American allegory is all but sapped. I need look no further than one of my own

40
Ibid, 43.
41
Ibid, 56, 57.
42
Ibid, 58.

31
shelves to see evidence: two “chibi” proportioned Godzilla toys, sold promotionally for

the 2014 American film.

Tsutsui is very clear in his description of these changes as a primarily market-driven

exercise, but the remainder of this section will argue that alongside these very astute

claims, something less obvious was also occurring. Edits made to the films were

markedly political, pro-nuclear and pro-military, all following a trajectory from the 1956

re-release to the American films of the 2010s that will be discussed next in this chapter.

Additionally, the prior examining of the Showa era (1954-1975) films along with the

succeeding Heisei (1984-1995) and Millennium (1999-2004) as a continuum of ever-

softening critique of American imperialism and the ever-weakening of Godzilla’s nuclear

allegory proves useful as well.43 Alas, there are a total of 36 films in the Godzilla canon,

which could rightly be its own thesis, to dissect each one is well beyond the scope of this

project. However, in viewing trends in Godzilla’s representation alongside the rise of pro-

Nuclear American propaganda and a continued exertion of hegemonic power, it becomes

quite clear that Godzilla’s shift towards marketability reflects these exercises of U.S.

power and propaganda. By examining Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, a

utopian vision that Paul S. Boyer refers to as “Bright Dreams,” and more specifics of the

American-Japanese postwar nuclear relationship, these connections will be made

apparent.44 Additionally, for better or worse, the Cold War connection between atomic

43
Ibid,, 35-38.
44
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age,
(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985,) 122.

32
power and rising American Christian Evangelism will be explored; these latter atom

fanatics did not specifically try to pacify the image of atom but instead to remake the very

existence of atom and the American military as proof of God’s divine will and justice.

In their exhaustive volume Atoms for Peace and War: 1951-1963, Eisenhower and the

Atomic Energy Commission Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl outline a precise

history of Eisenhower’s administration's attempts to pacify the atom in policy and public

opinion both domestically and abroad.45 In their eighth chapter “Atoms for Peace:

Building American Policy” the two scholars pay specific attention to an Eisenhower

speech of the same name. Delivered before the United Nations General Assembly on

December 8th, 1953, Eisenhower calls upon the world’s leaders to join the U.S. in

strengthening the Atomic Energy Agency. In doing so he explains,

The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic

military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of
destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for
the benefit of all mankind. The United States knows that
peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the
future. The capability, already proved, is here today. Who
can doubt that, if the entire body of the world's scientists
and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material
with which to test and develop their ideas, this capability
would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and
economic usage?46

Here, Eisenhower attempts to make a specific delineation between two forms of atomic

energy, the wartime atom and the peacetime atom. This is the exact type of rhetoric that

45
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Atoms for Peace Speech, December 8, 1953” Text (IAEA, July 16, 2014),
https://www.iaea.org/about/history/atoms-for-peace-speech.
46
Ibid.

33
festers within the post-1956 Godzilla film canon, a distinction that this project will argue

is largely irrelevant. Hewlett and Holl go on to describe the unilateral political appeal of

this type of thinking, at least within American politics, “Senators from McCarthy of

Wisconsin and Hickenlooper of Iowa to Mike Mansfield of Montana described the

speech as ‘a good suggestion,’ ‘great,’ and ‘daring.’ Democrats and Republicans alike

saw the speech as a master stroke of propaganda, but they were divided on the feasibility

of establishing an international atomic energy agency.”47 It is not particularly surprising

that the bipartisan arbiters of U.S. empire and hegemony would applaud the

establishment of a supranational atomic regulatory body with America at its head. The

authors do not specifically comment on Japan’s reaction to the announcement, instead

focussing more of this chapter on the difficulty of approaching the Soviet Union with this

plan. The succeeding entry “Pursuit of the Peaceful Atom” makes note of a specific

incident in which Nobel prize winning geneticist Herman J. Muller’s paper on the genetic

effects of radiation on the human body was included in a 1954 Geneva survey of the

medical applications of atom. They write,

The incident did not have reverberations beyond scientific

circles until a month later, when a Washington Post
reporter called the Commission staff about the incident. A
Commission press statement released the next day
explained that Muller's invitation had been rejected because
the full text of his paper ‘was belatedly found to contain
material referring to the nonpeaceful uses of atomic energy,
namely, the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima.’48

47
Jack Holl and Richard Hewlett, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic
Energy Commission (ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2011,) 210.
48
Holl and Hewlet, Atoms for Peace, 268.

34
In no uncertain terms, the U.S. government had attempted to censor evidence that would

greatly weaken their claims about the existence of a peaceful atom.

In his chapter “Bright Dreams and Disturbing Realities” American historian Paul S.

Boyer grapples with the appearance of the opposite. He argues that public promotion of

the “peaceful atom” ideals in popular press did not shy away from referencing the nuclear

attacks on Japan. To the contrary, he points out that even liberal publications like New

York Times and Atlantic attempted to reframe the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in positive terms. He quotes an Atlantic writer who stated, “through medical

advances alone atomic energy has already saved more lives than were snuffed out at

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”49 Boyer goes on to explain “it was further implied that the

Japanese bombings were, in some way, an essential step in unlocking atom’s peacetime

promise,” a deeply Orwellian notion if ever there was one. Following along, Boyer not

only addressed U.S. hegemonic attempts to remake atom as a scientific and political

good, but also a religious one. In “Atomic Weapons and Judeo-Christian Ethics” he

details at length the multitudes of responses to atom from faith leaders in the U.S. He

rather glibly references a short September 1945 poem by Edgar Guest:

The power to blow all things to dust

as kept for people God could trust,
And granted unto them alone,
That evil might be overthrown.50

49
Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 122,
50
Ibid, 211.

35
The “evil” Guest refers to here turned out to largely be the civilian population of two

Japanese cities.51 In its rather uncritical report on the bombings, Christian Century

published “In the regime of war—that is, in the regime ruled by military necessity—the

bombing of cities, whether by an atomic bomb or by B-29s, is on the same plane as the

killing of an enemy soldier with a rifle... War has no moral character. When a nation

commits its destiny to the arbitrament of sheer might, it abandons all moral

constraints.”52 If you’re already going to blow the thing up, might as well go full nuclear.

Boyer notes that a trend then emerged among Christian authorities in the U.S., being that

while they would willingly condemn a total war strategy—the equivalence of enemy

combatants and non-combatants—they made no specific condemnation of the use of

atomic weapons themselves.53 Boyer argues that this ambivalence essentially “would

provide the ethical foundation of the nation’s nuclear policies for the next generation.”

He refers to this type of milquetoast response as a “blank cheque” for militarists.54

In her work Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares, scholar Angela Marie Lahr

explicitly makes the connection between the advent of nuclear weapons and the growing

Christian evangelist movement in the United States. She argues “the nuclear age brought

these two strands of apocalypticism (apocalyptic Christians and anti-nuclear pacifists)

together. At the same time, the Cold War created a hyper-tense world situation that made

51
Howard Zinn’s Postwar America: 1945-1971 makes an excellent argument that cites the bombings as
further exertion of American muscle and more of a sign to the Soviet’s and Chinese than an actual tactical
or necessary decision for defeating the already crumbled Japanese Empire.
52
“Atrocities and War,” Christian Century, September 26, 1945, p. 1087.
53
Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 228.
54
Ibid.

36
nuclear warfare a real possibility.”55 She goes on to explain how the appearance of

nuclear weapons and nuclear energy “inserted new components into the

scientific/religious relationship” which ultimately served to legitimize the once “fringe”

evangelists as arbiters of some new apocalyptic nuclear truth.56 Marie Lahr relies on the

work of Wilbur Smith, author of The Atomic Bomb and the Word of God to further this

point; “Evangelicals like Smith seemed to believe that understanding the basic science of

nuclear energy not only communicated the awesome power of these new weapons to

other believers but also helped them gain some credibility among nonbelievers about the

prophetic destiny of the atomic age.”57 Put simply, the existence of atomic power doubled

as the proof of the existence of the almighty. To borrow from Alan Moore’s Cold War

comic epic Watchmen, “The superman exists, and he’s American.” The Zack Snyder film

adaptation of the comic changes this line to be more explicit: “God exists, and he’s

American.”5859 As this project moves on to discuss 2014’s Godzilla and its sequel 2018

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this link between Godzilla worship and Christianity will

be made more explicit, particularly in the latter film, because the revelatory depiction of

the monster is tied most closely to a markedly pro-U.S. understanding of nuclear politics

and religion. The previously pulled Moore quote is very easily altered to “Godzilla exists,

and he’s American.”

55
Angela Lahr, “Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: Evangelical and Secular Identity in the
Early Cold War” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005), 51.
56
Ibid, 58.
57
Ibid, 59.
58
Alan Moore, “Watchmaker,” Watchmen, (DC Comics, 1986,) 13.
59
Zack Snyder, Watchmen, (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009.)

37
The American Monster
I began this chapter with my own personal recollection of seeing my first full Godzilla

film, Godzilla (2014) shortly after the end of the first year of my undergrad. As I stated

before, this viewing of director Gareth Edwards’ film was a bit of an awakening for me

but the more time I have to reflect on the film, the more distrustful I grow of its

representation of the eponymous monster, and the more insidious I see the work it does,

especially when relating it to the previously discussed ideas of “peaceful atom” and the

seamless consumption of Godzilla as a protector of humanity. I believe this is the

fundamental wrong way to portray the monster, and as seen in the 2014 film, this

depiction is quite deliberate as both Godzilla and its “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial

Organism” (MUTO for short) rivals are explicitly nuclear. The difference here is that

while Godzilla represents preservation and balance, the peaceful atom, the bug-like

MUTOs are atom-hungry, they burn through radiation as atomic gluttons. The MUTO

monsters pose a serious threat to American military hegemony, like the emergence of a

newly nuclearized ‘belligerent’ state and must be dealt with for order to resume. Thus,

the film’s primary conflict conceit again constructs the myth of the “peaceful” atom by

playing it against the “warlike” or let us say “hungry” atom. Also particularly telling of

this film’s propagandistic position as not only pro-nuclear but also fiercely pro-American

military.60 Our human hero Ford (Aaron Johnson) is a Navy EOD (explosive ordnance

disposal, military bomb squad) veteran and later leads a parachute strike on the MUTOs

60
Erin Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 15,
https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2017.0002.

38
alongside Godzilla in a sequence that can only be described as kaiju-military porn.

Although I have been glib in my initial discussion of this film, it is still important to

seriously understand this film within the larger narrative of U.S.-Japanese cultural

dialectics, and also understand how this film is a symptom of a decades-long attempt to

rehabilitate atom’s public relations image. Godzilla is a particularly useful vehicle for

pursuing these ends, as the monster doesn’t speak, doesn’t scratch its nuclear manifesto

into the earth, it is just simply a force that exerts itself freely on others. The monster then

can be understood as a sort of tabula rasa for politically interested filmmakers, whether

they adopt the origin film’s approach and politics, or the much more neoliberal pro-

empire stance of the 2014 American entry and its sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters

(2019).

Godzilla (2014) wastes no time in attempting to rewrite the series’ canon; the opening

credit montage is cut together from a mixture of imitation and archival footage showing

various Pacific Ocean nuclear blasts, much like the 1946 tests on Bikini Atoll. However,

this sequence seems to imply that these “tests” were a U.S. military effort to destroy

Godzilla, given that the monster’s likeness was painted on the body of the testing bomb

in a style like the Ghostbusters’ logo. Where previously Godzilla was depicted as a

monster woken or disturbed by nuclear testing, the monster is now remade into a target.

Additionally, while this film is still indebted to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, it also bears the scars of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011.61 The film’s

61
Hamilton, Robert F. “Godzilla After the Meltdown-the Evolution and Mutation of Japan’s Greatest
Monster-,” Meiji University Academic Repository 7.1 (2015): 50,https://m-
repo.lib.meiji.ac.jp/dspace/handle/10291/17398.

39
second sequence introduces Doctors Joe and Sandra Brody (Bryan Cranston and Juliette

Binoche), the human protagonist’s parents. The couple are working a regular day at one

of Japan’s nuclear power plants (not Fukushima itself, but an obvious proxy) when an

unexpected earthquake (later discovered to be caused by one the MUTO monsters)

triggers a meltdown. Sandra sacrifices herself to contain what she can of the damage

while Joe is forced to look on in terror as he loses his wife and the mother of his child.

This scene is painfully reminiscent of the stories told about the nuclear plant workers who

sacrificed their safety to contain the Fukushima meltdown. A young Ford watches

through the window of his schoolhouse as the plant’s cooling towers collapse and

children are hastened onto buses to get away from the blast.

A time skip 15 years into the future reveals Joe Brody’s continued obsession with the

event as he is unable to come to terms with the devastation wrought and the loss of his

wife. Ford arrives in Japan to pick his father up from a police precinct after he was

arrested for yet-again venturing into the now abandoned and overgrown quarantine zone

that was affected by the plant’s collapse. Ford, now a U.S. Navy veteran, reluctantly

agrees to accompany his father one more time into the restricted area. The disaster zone

in Godzilla is bereft of radiation as Dr. Ford discovers and understands the lack as

evidence of a cover-up.62 The two sift through the moldy mossy remains of their former

house, recovering photographs and artifacts of their past, a past that was taken from them

by a nuclear “accident.” Here then it is determined that it is the greed and dishonesty of

62
Ibid, 50.

40
large formless power structures, and not atom itself, that lead to their loss. The Brodys

quarantine zone findings create room for a positive interpretation of atom, as the film

continues to argue.

The scene that traces Godzilla’s landfall on Hawaii to confront the MUTO monster is

another example of this kind of myth making. Godzilla and MUTO are both monsters, yet

one is explicitly “evil” while the other is coded as “good,” albeit chaotically so.63

Godzilla’s destruction of human life and property in this sequence is only depicted as

haphazard. Gone are the very intentional atomic-breath blasts of the 1954 precursor,

instead it is of a singular MUTO-hunting focus. The monster goes as far out of his way as

to duck beneath the aircraft carrier vessel blockading the harbour, rather than tear through

it; it seems that 2014’s American Godzilla really respects the troops. In her article

“Beasts from the Deep” scholar Erin Suzuki refers to this treatment as the film’s “overly

sentimental portrayal of this massive and unpredictable super predator.”64 The humans on

the ground are still rightly terrified of the gigantic lizard but are also shown to regard him

with reverence and awe, until shooting starts and they scream and scatter. Godzilla truly

receives a godly welcome on the island as he marches dutifully toward the MUTO. This

sequence culminates in a massive airport runway explosion that leads to the dramatic low

angle shot of Godzilla and his roar with which I began this chapter. The destruction that

the monster causes in the form of a massive ocean surge is also abstracted from its own

involvement; watching, we know that Godzilla’s arrival has caused this wave that

63
Suzuki, “Beasts,” 22.
64
Ibid, 23

41
undoubtedly killed dozens if not hundreds of people, but the film treats its fleeing

subjects with an air of ambivalence. We see them running scared and diving for cover,

we see them duck out of frame before their deaths can be caught on screen, so the

audience is never asked to ever align itself against Godzilla. We don’t even see the

monster’s form in the wave as it ravages the coastline and its hotels, we only later see

Godzilla sauntering through the city already completely emerged from the water. In

editing, the film absolves its titular monster of guilt, the humans drowned by its

emergence are merely collateral towards a greater good. When the MUTO kills, we see

bodies falling from monorail cars and people being stepped on, but Godzilla is never

directly shown causing human death. Through this distinction in framing, the divergence

between the peaceful and warlike atoms is made very clear. Like the peaceful atom,

Godzilla must be absolved and pacified, he must be made cool and consumable, an

artifact of awe and reverence, not destruction and sorrow. For Godzilla scholar Robert F.

Hamilton explains what he believes is the core difference between Honda and Edwards’

films:

Despite the implicit warnings against nuclear testing and

condemnation of the actions of the American government,
this resolution seems to imply a lingering faith in the
Japanese government and their ability to use weapons for
good. Edwardsʼ Godzilla, on the other hand, finds
resolution in allowing nature to take its course. Instead of
dropping a weapon into the harbour to kill the monsters, the
beasts are permitted to fight it out until natural order is
restored.65

65
Hamilton, “Meltdown” 51.

42
My reading of the film takes issue with Hamilton’s assertion here. There is nothing

natural about the confluence of imperialist military might, evangelism and the split atom,

referring to the MUTOs vs. Godzilla. Every element of this film is specifically designed

to pacify and familiarize its audience with America’s newfound heavyweight champion.

The characters may say “Let them fight” as Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) does in a pivotal

moment in the film, but its action and outcomes tell a different story, one of military

cooperation, deification, and the illusion of “natural order” being restored.

Unsurprisingly, this “natural order” seems to strongly resemble global U.S. military,

cultural, and economic hegemony.

The monster’s design itself also follows suit here. This is a distinctly “Americanized” re-

imagining of the leviathan. It now stands almost always entirely upright; it is bulky and

thick and constantly in a “ready to fight” posture. Its eyes, perhaps the most telling part of

its design, are emotive and expressive, not just in terms of rage and anger but also

sorrow, understanding, and at times even compassion. Both in this film and its sequel

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, great attempts are made by the filmmakers to render

Godzilla more relatable and heroic, both in its posture, its appearance, its efforts, and by

the relationships the films allow the monster to build with its main characters. Godzilla

literally gets an “eye to eye” moment with Ford Brody, and later a sort of sombre “final

goodbye” moment with Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), the monster’s long-time foremost

human spokesperson. This all suggests that the monster acts with human or near-human

intelligence and is not just guided by some sort of feral rage or instinct. As we will

43
discuss later in this chapter, this type of work is all but undone in Japan’s 2016 answer to

the monster Shin Gojira.

Earlier I used the phrase “kaiju-military porn” to describe this film’s convergence of

American military might and unbridled atomic kaiju energy, this conglomeration is no

more potent than during the 2014 American film’s climax, as can be expected. Godzilla

and American special forces in San Francisco reach an unspoken alliance to save the city

from the MUTO attack, albeit while destroying a large chunk of it. In particular, the

sequence that depicts cascading parachuting soldiers with their red smoke marker trails

surrounding the monster like ribbons of falling blood is a great manifestation of this on-

screen alliance. If previous efforts of the film attempted to remake Godzilla’s monstrous

mythology and pacify the monster, sequences like these begin to accomplish new work

altogether; the monster’s anti-human aggression is gone and buried, his neutral

calamitous destruction goes along with it. The monster is now remade as pro-military

propaganda, a trend continued in the film’s sequel and heightened yet again. Godzilla

charges into battle against other ruinous beasts while flanked by fighter jets; they give the

monster literal wingmen for his assault on the enemies of American hegemony.

Although the focus of this section is on the 2014 Godzilla, there is a particularly useful

sequence in its sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) that makes almost

cartoonishly explicit the film’s connection to the Godly power of atom. Godzilla: KotM

features an eco-terrorist named Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) using “bio-acoustic” research

to reawaken the Earth’s dormant titans in an attempt to wipe the slate clean of humanity,

an unsubtle homage to Jonah, Sodom and Gomorrah. Through their efforts the team

44
manages to reawaken Godzilla’s ancient nemesis, the three-headed alien lightning dragon

King Ghidorah. Much like in the first film, Godzilla is naturalized as an integral part of

Earth’s healthy ecosystem, Ghidorah is pointedly described as “not from Earth”

suggesting it came here from space to upset a delicate balance. It is also heavily coded as

a Satanic figure given its serpentine form. King of the Monsters’ construction on a

Christian pseudo-Revelations foundation cannot be overstated. Godzilla is eventually

given its own guardian angel in the form of Mothra, and its own Christlike sacrifice-to-

resurrection arc. After the U.S. military deploys its “Oxygen Destroyer” weapon in an

attempt to take out both King Ghidorah and Godzilla, an allusion to the climax of the

1954 film, Ghidorah is left virtually unharmed whereas Godzilla is left near-death and

retreats to its subterranean lair. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) pilots a one-man sub into the

depths and sacrifices himself to deliver a nuclear payload to Godzilla, resurrecting him.

Seconds before detonation, Serizawa removes the glove of his radiation suit and presses a

palm to Godzilla’s snout as the two share a moment of understanding before they are

enveloped in radiant holy atomic light. King of the Monsters frames this nuclear recharge

specifically as a resurrection as it furthers the film’s frequent allusions to the Christian

monomyth. It is through this sequence we see Godzilla’s death, his entombing, and his

resurrection all of which cement the monster’s representational closeness to Christ and

empowers its remaining screen time with righteous fury. The film does not specifically

state how long Godzilla spends in his ancient tomb, but we can assume the monster is

down for approximately one holiday weekend. Newly supercharged and back from the

dead, Godzilla returns to the surface and annihilates Ghidorah amidst the flaming

wreckage of Boston, cementing his place as the one true Alpha, after which the remaining

45
released titans once again are cowed by his holy reign, rule by what is obviously divine

right.

How then can Godzilla’s image and stature be reclaimed, given the massive work being

undertaken to portray it here as a friend to humanity and yet another agent of American

military propaganda? As if to answer this call and course-correct the goliath, we then

come to Toho’s 2016 Shin Godzilla, or in English, Godzilla Resurgence.

Shin Godzilla
Written and directed by Hideaki Anno of mecha series Neon Genesis Evangelion fame,

2016’s Shin Gojira, or Godzilla Resurgence marks a return to the monster’s roots; it is

pure calamity that sees a modern Japan struggle against its own bureaucratic culture,

neoliberal technocracy, and U.S. geopolitical supremacy as much as it struggles against

the eponymous radioactive titan. The film follows Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando

Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) as he navigates the labyrinthine Japanese parliamentary

cabinet butting heads against other ministers whose approaches to governance range from

zealous, to sycophantic, to outright incompetent. Eventually, once enough red tape has

been stripped away, and once Godzilla has already wrought formidable destruction,

Yaguchi assembles a group of, as described by Kanji Tsuda’s Welfare Minister character,

“lone wolves, nerds, marginalized heretics, and enemies of the academic bureaucracy,”

into a “flat organization” without need for “titles or seniority.” One of the film’s first

major armament sequences does not depict the lining up of tanks, the racking of machine

guns, or the fueling and takeoff of jets: it is the wheeling in of office chairs, the

placement of photocopiers and the unfolding of collapsible tables. Yaguchi’s weapons

46
against Godzilla are the banal trappings of a rigidly technocratic society, and he and his

ragtag team must use them to defeat the monster through sheer administrative prowess.66

Eventually, after a series of attempts and setbacks, the research group is successful in

understanding how Godzilla’s biology operates and Yaguchi’s team administers several

tanker-loads of blood coagulant to the beast, freezing its skin and immobilizing it

completely. The hard-won victory is not without its massive destructive toll: the entire

previous cabinet and Prime Minister being counted among the dead. In many ways, the

“resurgence” of the film’s title applies equally to Japan and the Japanese national psyche

and autonomy as much as it does to the monster itself. The ultimate reward for Japan’s

victory over Godzilla is a new found sense of national pride and charisma that seventy

years of postwar subservience had denied them.67 In a conversation before the film’s final

confrontation, Yaguchi’s boss Akasaka (Yutaka Takenouchi) turns to his protege and

says somberly, “Japan is a tributary state... ‘postwar’ seems to last forever,” referencing

both the prolonged Japanese psychic and political infantilism that is imposed and

continued by U.S. economic, military, and political hegemony in the region. These

political circumstances are the direct result of treaties such as the “Security Treaty

Between the United States and Japan'' ratified in 1951 that functionally made Japan a

puppet to U.S. capital and empire interests.68 Scholar Jameson Bivens explains,

“America’s role in the film, though often incredibly helpful, is usually that of a

66
Jameson Bivens, “Shin Gojira: Return of the Angry God,” Scientia et Humanitas 10 (July 30, 2020): 71.
67
Ibid, 72.
68
Bivens, “Angry God” 74.

47
schoolyard bully, telling Japan what it should do or dictating what it will do to Japan.”69

This film serves as a rejection of Japan’s diminished autonomy and depicts, or predicts, a

second wave of Japanese cultural and economic development free of U.S. pressure.

Themes of international tension references to political vassalhood appear frequently in

Shin Gojira as a means of working through the obvious nuclear trauma, and the more

subtle geopolitical wounds that scar the Japanese shared consciousness. It is a film where

a cacophony of meetings, tribunals, councils, and boardroom gatherings often outshine

the moments when the monster itself is onscreen.

Concerning the film’s adaptation of the monster, Shin Gojira forwards what may be the

most alien and least relatable version of Godzilla yet; whereas the first attempt was

serious if not kitschy, and the American monster is stalwart and dependable, Shin

Gojira’s monster is truly a species of its own. Distinct from its predecessors, this film’s

monster appears in multiple forms throughout the film. Initially it emerges from Tokyo

Bay as a semi-formed larval or tadpole creature with sandy brown skin, exposed veins,

and perhaps most notably, massive gills that vent all manner of radioactive red gooey

detritus from the monster’s neck. Its movements are much less deliberate than previous

monsters as well, it wobbles around like a kabuki puppet and crashes itself up onto

buildings for leverage, trying to pull itself upright. Again, the monster’s eyes are also a

telling point of its design. Gone are the expressive emotive eyes of the 2014 American

monster, instead they are replaced with glassy static eyes, reminiscent of the cold dead

69
Ibid, 75.

48
stare of a fish for sale at market. The eyes are markedly inhuman and therefore convey no

intelligence or personality, just raw animality. For scholar Crînguța Irina Pelea, “without

well-established narrative patterns or original subtexts, this Godzilla represents for most

of the story a tangible foe, the reason why its weakened, and superfluid identity

is reduced to one single dimension, the one of embodying malefic forces of chaos and

illogical destruction, while perpetually threatening the cosmos and the world order.”70 In

remaking the monster the filmmakers have achieved a truly alien and monstrous

Godzilla, it is very clear that the audience is never really meant to identify or sympathise

with Shin Gojira’s monster.

Later in the film, the monster re-emerges in a more familiar bipedal form. Its limbs have

now grown, its massive tail swings about in the manner of a tentacle, and its eyes remain

the same kind of disinterested fisheyes as its previous form. Shin Gojira’s monster’s tail

is also worthy of discussion, as it is far larger and thus far more monstrous and alien than

previous forms of the monster. Where the original monster’s tail just hung lifelessly, and

the American monster’s tail was used as a sort of club, but typically just dragged behind

the monster, the tail in Shin Gojira is usually depicted reaching skywards and either

moving in a prehensile fashion or in some sort of autonomous instinctive manner. It is

deeply unsettling, and actually the first part of this new monster design that the audience

sees, as it is the first part of Godzilla to breach the water’s surface the first time it

emerges. I would be remiss to mention that the tail and its tip down also possess a phallic

70
Crînguța Irina Pelea, “Exploring the Iconicity of Godzilla in Popular Culture. A Comparative
Intercultural Perspective: Japan-America,” Postmodernism Problems 10, no. 1 (April 2, 2020): 31.
https://doi.org/10.46324/PMP2001018.

49
quality that is also previously unexplored in most of the Godzilla canon. During the

film’s climax the monsters head and tail enter a sort of radioactive pissing contest as each

sprouts a beam of ultraviolet radioactive energy that slices through buildings in a single

swoop, another new quality for the monster. Shin Gojira’s monster is packed full of new

defensive tricks that show its design has been seemingly modernized alongside methods

of war making that have all changed drastically since the film’s 1954 predecessor.

As monstrous as the creature has been made up for this film, the actual terror and trauma

it inflicts is still secondary to the film’s main interested antagonist, the United States.

Where Godzilla is an avatar of wanton destruction, the U.S. in Shin Gojira, mostly

explored through the perspective of Japanese-American consulate aide Kayoko Ann

Patterson (Satomi Ishihara), has much more pointed goals that further its global

hegemonic agenda. As a result of the previously discussed security treaty, Japan’s ability

to retaliate or seek outside military aid is capped by its subservient relationship with the

United States. Patterson enters the film about a third of the way through, acting as a

spokesperson for the very interested U.S. Department of Energy that clearly wishes to be

the sole owner of data on Godzilla. Reluctantly, she and her team share their research

with Yaguchi’s task force, but at the cost of exclusive rights to dictate the course of kaiju

intervention and in return for unlimited study of the monster’s atomic-energy-producing

powers. As the monster grows increasingly destructive and volatile, the United States,

backed by the UN Security council then move to suggest that since all other attempts

have been exhausted, the nuclear option is all that remains. In a decision that is pointedly

devastating for the only nation to ever suffer a nuclear attack, the U.S. recommends that a

50
thermonuclear warhead be deployed on Tokyo to destroy the monster, assuring the

Japanese government (whose leadership was nearly entirely destroyed by a previous

Godzilla attack, leaving the Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the nation as Prime

Minister) that were their positions reversed, it would do the same to New York or Los

Angeles.71

This major plot development has an obvious psychic consequence on the film’s

characters the previously cocksure and swaggering Kayoko Ann Patterson. “I do not want

to see a third bomb fall on the country of my grandmother, who had to suffer the other

two,” she states as the camera pulls away from her conversation with Yaguchi, across a

series of high-speed rail platforms. Here, the filmmakers highlight the sterilized concrete

modernity of Japan, a nation that weathered a nuclear storm and emerged, through

serious pressure from the U.S., to turn itself into a hyper-mechanized industrial and

technological power, only to be set back again by another U.S. nuke. Immediately after

this conversation, a short montage of two Hiroshima devastation stills takes us into a

briefing meeting on the nuclear missile plan with the newly appointed Japanese Prime

Minister, the previous Secretary of Agriculture. Having completely capitulated to U.S.

demands, he declares that he will turn power over the entire nation to U.S. authority so

that they can commence their strike. As I previously noted, it is difficult to claim that

Godzilla itself is the antagonist of this film: it is feral and angry but it does not possess

goals or motives to further itself beyond basic animalistic instinct. Anno clearly positions

71
Bevins, “Angry God”, 76.

51
the United States’ overreach as the film’s actual antagonistic force when the Americans

prevent the Japanese from martialing their own defense.

The film’s climax depicts the “Yaguchi Plan” coming to fruition; a markedly non-

military operation sees Japanese officials, workers, and drivers deliver a multipart attack

on a dormant Godzilla using explosive laden trains and tanker trucks full of blood

coagulant. Where I previously described the combination of kaiju and military as

pornographic in Godzilla (2014) I feel that I can only offer the same description to this

segment, albeit with a major caveat. This is truly civil infrastructure porn; it is the expert

technocratic deployment of a city’s public infrastructure to combat an existential threat.

Soldiers are present, as are drone weapons and high-altitude missiles, but they only exist

within the Yaguchi plan to serve as a distraction and to force the monster to play its

atomic radiation beam hand early, forcing it into a state of dormancy. Bevins explains

that the Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) is less of a military force and more of a well

armed search-and-rescue that has traditionally relied on the U.S. to make-up for its

militarist shortcomings.72 A jovial fanfare accompanies the attack on Godzilla, it almost

seems out of place in this film, were this scene not to be just an all-out celebration of

strong central planning and infrastructure. In its attempts to destroy incoming drones and

protect itself from their missile barrages, Godzilla expends all of its nuclear energy.

Immediately after its beams stop, the Yaguchi plan then sees the controlled demolition of

the vast majority of downtown Tokyo, toppling its steel and glass behemoths on the

72
Bevins, “Angry God”, 72.

52
monster. The next phase of the assault sees a fleet of crane tanker vehicles emerge from

the surrounding alleys and begin to administer a massive volume of coagulant to the

monster, an attempt to completely halt its metabolism and destroy it from within. Even

when the first wave of tanker trucks is destroyed, a second is ready to fill in the gaps, but

not before the aforementioned train bomb assault. It is hard to think of a symbol more

synonymous with a fully industrialized and mechanized Japan than its arterial stems of

high speed, high-capacity trains, and this symbol is exactly what the Yaguchi plan uses

next to halt the monster. In what is arguably the most ridiculous sequence in a film full of

ridiculous sequences, around 10 full length urban trains loaded with explosives are

remotely launched at the monster. As they ram into piles of debris at the end of their

tracks, they are launched skyward like tentacles, encasing the monster as they explode all

around. Again, there is something somewhat poetic and satisfying about seeing the

hallmarks of demilitarized industrial Japan using its civilian weapons to their maximum

effect.73 When the monster is finally defeated, it succumbs to the coagulant as it stands

above Tokyo Station, the main metropolitan train hub of Japan’s capital city, a fitting

final battleground for this ultimately civilian struggle. As the coagulant completes its

work, the monster is seemingly petrified in place above the station, a monument to

Japan’s successful defense, a markedly non-nuclear one, against a catastrophic nuclear

threat.74 I read this decision as a clear argument against U.S. militarism and foreign

73
Yuichiro Tsuji, “Godzilla and the Japanese Constitution: A Comparison between Italy and Japan,” Italian
Law Journal 3, no. 2 (2017): 452.
74
Tsuji, “Godzilla and the Japanese Constitution.” 455.

53
interventionism, a tributary nation making the absolute most of the tools that the

superpower has consigned to it since the end of the Second World War.

After what seems like an appropriate level of merry-making and planning in which

Yaguchi and Akasaka discuss the future of Japan’s politics, the film’s last shot closes in

on the tip of the frozen Godzilla’s tail. Amidst the hard cakey sinew and alien organic

forms of the tail, we see what appear to be several humanoid forms, skeletons, and fleshy

mishmashes fixed in place, reaching upwards along the tail with spine crests of their own.

According to Crînguța Irina Pelea,” this potential human-monster fusion should be

culturally interpreted in the context of the Shinto-inspired animistic belief system, where

the borders between humans and nonhumans have a fluid and dynamic character.

Therefore, the pervasive presence of animistic attitudes in the film is intimately

connected with the legacy of Japanese folklore permeated with myths of hybrid

morphing.”75 The makeup of the monster’s tail suggests a frightening closeness between

Godzilla and its victims, but also quite possibly gestures towards asexual reproduction.

There are no concrete answers as to how Anno intended for this ending shot to be read,

but given his larger oeuvre, especially concerning his work on Evangelion, it is likely that

these final shots are an attempt to confuse and conflate the roles of monster and victim

into a more dialectic relationship than any previous installments in the franchise have

attempted. As this project continues, it will further explore the representation of Japan as

both imperial monster, and postwar victim.

75
Pelea, “Exploring the Iconicity of Godzilla,” 29.

54
Fallout
When I originally envisioned this chapter I had anticipated, rather naively, that Japan and

America’s respective representation of Godzilla would exist in parallel but ultimately

separate from one another. In doing the actual work I am pleased to see that I was very

wrong. The two national cultures’ storytelling and politics pervade each other in

unexpected ways, radiating outwards, metastasizing, mutating in time and across space.

The relationship is more dialectic than I had originally perceived, which speaks to the

universality of horror that a creature like Godzilla can dredge up, and the universality of

postwar American influence on its newly formed vassal states. I also never anticipated for

this chapter to focus so heavily on the anti-American sentiment in Japanese monster

movies, but I suppose this as well can be chalked up to naivety.

The years following Shin Godzilla have not brought about a proper sequel. Toho has

moved on to distributing a trilogy of entirely animated off world science fiction Godzilla

films, so that tasty morsel of post-nuclear human and monster convergence that closes

Anno’s film still goes unanswered. I would like to interpret this lack of a clear delineation

between human and monster, and an overall lack of closure, as a metaphor for trying to

unpack nuclear fiction. There are no easy answers or tightly wrapped ribbons to unravel

through which the essence of the thing will be discovered. Having only ever experienced

nuclear catastrophe from afar I am left mostly with mere speculation and closing

thoughts. It is now the aim of this project to thrust ever upward, a ballooning mushroom

cloud of untested hunches and observations, into new areas of work and to study a subject

I have more personal familiarity with than a gargantuan atomic lizard: the tortured teen,

55
the monstrous adolescent, the metal wombs of mecha and the robotic fetishization of the

1980s.

56
Chapter 2: Mecha
Atomic Futures
Completing my first chapter on Godzilla felt like a small milestone, one I was eager to

reward myself for with copious amounts of doing nothing. I am returning now to write

about the bomb, and the anguished animated young bodies that it destroys, remakes,

hardens, and softens. Coincidentally, this new wave of inspiration comes along with the

75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Being reminded of the Hiroshima attack

as the original impetus for this project, I am also reminded of Barefoot Gen, a 1983

Japanese animated feature directed by Mori Masaki and based on the manga of the same

name by Keiji Nakazawa who himself was a childhood survivor of the blast. For

Nakazawa, the Barefoot Gen manga is a memoir of his early childhood experience and

trauma. Barefoot Gen is perhaps most notable for its astounding animated take on the

destruction of Hiroshima. The first time I watched this film I went back and re-watched

this pivotal sequence four or five times trying to catch every detail. There are still new

things I pick out and discover each time I return to it, it is a mesmerizing and horrific

sequence. With reference to the 75th anniversary of the bombing, Cartoon Brew recently

shared a small listicle recounting five major depictions of the atomic bomb in animation,

Barefoot Gen being second among them and noting that its own detonation scene is

inspired by an earlier short Pica-don from 1978. In Little Boy, Murakami refers to the

phenomenon of “pika-don” meaning “light blast” referring not only to the literal

explosion itself, but the associated cultural fallout and trauma related. “Pika-don” can be

read as a latent subgenre with its influence radiating through much of the Japanese

57
animation industry. For Murakami “Pika-don’ symbolizes the visual, aural, and other

sensory imprints made on the Japanese psyche, which has been completely transformed

in the wake of the collective subjection to the Japanese people to the horrendous

experience of nuclear annihilation.”76 Murakami does not mince words when it comes to

the psychic impact of nuclear weapons, nor should he need to.

The goal of this chapter is to trace the appearance of “Pika-don” through the anime

medium, and to compare how Japanese and American animation represents, or ignores,

nuclear and military trauma through its depiction of young bodies. Murakami makes the

argument that adolescence is so commonly depicted in Japanese pop culture because of

the psychic stunting that occurred because of the nuclear attacks in 1945. Of particular

interest to my project is the “mecha” as it stands as a cybernetic foundation of this

chapter’s work. What does the over-abundance of large robots in Japanese culture relay?

Why are they so often piloted by children and adolescents? To answer these questions

and more, the original 1981 Mobile Suit Gundam film trilogy will be closely examined

alongside Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines as a primary theoretical tool.77 Then, as

with the first chapter these themes and readings will be analysed alongside its foremost

American counterpart Transformers the Movie (1986) directed by Nelson Shin. Moving

beyond mecha and back to Japan, this chapter will then transition to an examination of

Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime masterpiece Akira as a purposeful amalgamation of

Takashi Murakami, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Bilingual edition (New
76

York: Yale University Press, 2005) 19.

77
The Mobile Suit Gundam film trilogy is the film adaptation of the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series
from 1979, repackaged into three films.

58
teenage angst, nuclear politics, and cybernetic body horror. What occurs to the body

when it is broken by energies previously unknown? What does the depiction of broken

and changing bodies tell us about nuclear trauma? Alongside Elaine Scarry’s The Body in

Pain, Akira will be examined as one of Japan’s most pre-eminent nuclear cultural

exports. Continuing from Godzilla, how can we better understand the postwar

relationship between American and Japanese pop culture through the lens of animated

media? Ultimately, it is the goal of this chapter to assert that animation, and particularly

Japanese animation, is a most effective tool for navigating nuclear trauma and this

trauma’s effects on the body and mind of the adolescent, and by extension the effects of

nuclear trauma on an entire population. American attempts to pacify the anti-war or anti-

nuclear rhetoric of Japanese cultural products in favour of commerciality and American

imperial hegemony are just as present in this chapter as they were in the first.

A Critical Introduction to Anime

Prior to delving into the texts themselves, a certain level of background information must

be established. Anime is a uniquely Japanese artform, not completely detached from

American popular animation but still possessing its own unique history and conventions.

Anime: A History by Jonathan Clements and Rayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical

Introduction will each be used in this chapter to explore these aforementioned anime

qualities. Both author’s works are exhaustive, particularly Clements’, as Denison begins

her work with a discussion of Clements’ work. The former is focused more specifically

on the history of the industry and medium while the latter is devoted to, as the title

suggests, the critical study of anime as a distinct scholarly discipline. It is not within the

59
purview of this project to provide a comprehensive summation of the history of anime,

nor is it entirely relevant to this project’s specific aims. However, work concerning the

later discussed “mecha” genre will be accumulated and discussed in this section and the

next as they are essential to describe how anime found global popularity and its own

distinct identity as a serialized narrative format in the years following the Second World

War.

In Clements’ chapter “The Seeds of Anime: Japanese animation industries 1946-62” he

begins with a discussion of Japanese animator Masaoka Kenzō who formed the “Shin

Nihon Doga-sha” or “New Japanese Animation Company” in November 1945 during the

American occupation of Japan. Clements explains that “the speed with which he began

production in Occupation Japan is still remarkable,” then goes on to point out that this

rapid expansion of Occupation Japan’s animation industry was steered by Occupation

authorities seeking centralization of Japan’s animation industry over the traditional small

studio system of previous years.78 To that point, it should also be noted that this was by

no means the beginning of animation in Japan, but more so that it marks a moment of

distinct transition in the industry’s history, a transition from small unaffiliated artisan

studios towards regimented, hierarchical large studios like the Hollywood studio system

in America.

Additionally, as Japan’s entertainment industries were modernized and expanded so too

was the access to television, which in turn led to the growth of the television advertising

78
Jonathan Clements, Anime: A History, 1 edition (London: British Film Institute, 2013). 74, 75.

60
sector, again mirroring developments in postwar America. Clements points out that in

February of 1953, the time of Japan’s first official public TV broadcast, the entire nation

only possessed 866 television sets.79 This number booms exponentially in the coming

years and by 1959 the nation had four distinct commercial television channels which

needed an equal supply of programming and advertising. The feature films of the

immediate postwar could not adapt easily to this new format, and with that legendary

anime creator Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy was born, Japan’s first serialized televised

anime program. “The broadcast of Astro Boy on New Year’s Day 1963 is generally taken

to mark the beginning of a new age in Japanese animation.”80 The runaway popularity of

Astro Boy then opened the doors to later anime series like Space Battleship Yamato in

1974, and Super Dimension Fortress Macross in 1982. Both series were later adapted for

export to America as Star Blazers and Robotech respectively. Also, among these new

series and later exports is perhaps Japan’s most notable and widely known robotic anime

franchise Gundam, the original films of which will later be interrogated in this chapter.

Already, in this brief summary, I hope that the cross-cultural element of the anime

industry’s growth is evident. Much like the kaiju films discussed previously, these

products have never been entirely Japanese nor entirely American, they are dialectic and

represent decades of tension and cross pollination between the Western superpower and

its sociopolitical vassal.

79
Ibid, 85.
80
Ibid, 116.

61
Concerning reading anime as cultural texts this project will now turn to the work of

Rayna Denison in Anime: A Critical Introduction. Denison’s work begins with this core

assertion of anime’s polysemy:

Anime constantly shifts meanings dependent on where we

are when watching it; our access to anime is being limited
or expanded by the relationships between distribution
markets, by our understanding of language and,
increasingly, by the flows of texts across the internet,
whether generated by legitimate distributors or fans
online.81

For Denison, unpacking the “meaning” of an anime text requires more knowledge than

simply what occurs in the frames on-screen, it is a deeply cool medium the meanings of

which are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated, particularly today in the age of

instant global communication. Towards this point, she later mentions that most existing

critical discourse on anime is mired in its science fiction subgenre. After all, the modern

anime industry and its eventual transnational success is in large part indebted to the

popularity of Astro Boy as Japan’s first serialized narrative anime series, a series about a

small robot boy, aimed at children. In addition, Denison turns to Japanese film scholar

Daisuke Miyao who cautions against reading anime as a specifically children’s medium,

as, particularly in its sci-fi offerings, the medium contains complex themes examining

Japan’s relationship to the rest of the world, particularly in the postwar period, but also

while alluding to the nation’s traditional history.82 Simply put, anime media is not only

81
Rayna Denison, Anime: A Critical Introduction, 1 edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 1.
82
Ibid, 31.

62
cartoons built to package advertisements: while anime is indeed a commercial medium, it

is also a medium worthy of analysis.

Denison’s third chapter focuses specifically on the representation of the body in anime,

another line of interrogation that will prove vital to this chapter’s explorations of its texts.

As much as the medium can represent bodies as beautiful objects, they are also equally

objects in change, objects that are malleable and mutable, to any extreme that the medium

permits. Considering this is animation and nearly anything imaginable is possible, these

limits are indeed extreme. Denison turns to the work of scholar Christian McCrea who

writes, “The violence done to animated bodies and to our system of spectatorship is

neither metaphoric nor metonymic. Rather, it is discursive, disruptive and incredibly

excessive. It is resolutely physical, but never truly available for us to interpret in the way

the violence of action films can be interpreted.”83 Here McCrea calls attention to these

limits I mentioned earlier. As watchers of anime, we cannot simply expect to understand

its bodily conventions in a “real” sense as these bodies aren’t “real.” They are wholly

fictitious, the stuff of imagination, and thus these bodies can serve as potent vessels of

meaning, particularly concerning pain and trauma. Anime bodies, and particularly

adolescent anime bodies, considering the aim of this chapter, can feel and express pain

and trauma in completely unhuman ways.

Lastly for the purposes of this primer, I will turn to Denison’s chapter “Early Anime

Histories: Japan and America” as it covers the early distribution of anime television in

83
Christian McCrea, “Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Dimensional Excess of Animated Bodies,”
Animation 3, no. 1 (2008): 19.

63
America, which is of interest to this project due to its focus on the transnational dialectics

of Japanese and American pop culture. Essentially, Denison argues towards the end of

this chapter that the distribution of anime in the U.S. was fraught with the same existing

postwar tensions that pervaded other aspects of the two nations’ relationship. Chiefly,

anime exports to America were meant to provide a stable and profitable flow of child-

friendly content, in accordance with several postwar educational edicts, to U.S.

audiences. On this topic, the question of violence, or more acutely what was to be

considered violent, is centered in Denison’s conclusions. She argues that even the

incredibly childish Astro Boy was often considered too violent for American youth

audiences, which in turn were embroiled in various moral panic issues, issues of

nationalism, and even xenophobia. Series like Robotech, the Americanized version of

Macross were subject to extensive editing, rewriting of dialogue and the replacement of

music. Ultimately, these changes slowed the distribution and maturation of the anime

medium throughout the West, and in Japan as well. Commercial concerns for the medium

meant that anime production always veered towards child-friendly themes, without being

able to explore mature ideas more freely like pain, war, and trauma. This aside, one

subgenre, “mecha” soon became emblematic of this tension in Japan, and can be read as a

distinctly transnational export, despite its obvious origins in Japan, because of its

booming popularity in the west during the latter half of the 20th century and beyond.84

84
Rayna Denison, Anime: A Critical Introduction, 80-83.

64
Youthful Bodies in Sci-Fi Anime
Denison positions anime’s obsession with depicting bodies because of the medium’s

“ability to depict constantly mutating, metamorphosing and transforming bodies that

exceed the possibilities of the real world, even going beyond live-action cinema.”85

Denison’s argument coincides with my own earlier assertion that the representational

verism of both film and photography mean they cannot provide an ample level of room to

represent the trauma of war. Barthes’ work on the photographic image states, “Truly

traumatic photographs are rare, for in photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the

certainty that the scene 'really' happened: the photographer had to be there.”86 He states

that captured images of trauma are pacified by the series of rhetorical codes and that the

true focus of the photographic code is to “integrate man, to reassure him.”87 This project

then asserts that atomic and war-themed anime representation does little to reassure, and

instead creates a new code of bodily signification that is unique to anime, and exists as a

result of shared cultural trauma. Denison explains that specifically in the transformation

of animated bodies—which is not itself a single technique but instead a broad group of

representational tropes ranging from “chibi” to outright body horror—room is created for

cross-genre representation that encompasses romance to horror and all in between.88 89

85
Ibid, 51.
86
Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image Music Text, (London, UK: Hill and Wang, 1977,)
30.
87
Ibid, 31.
88
Rayna Denison, Anime: A Critical Introduction, 31.
89
Chibi here refers to the shortening and simplification of characters in anime series to demonstrate
moments of cuteness or infantilism.

65
Understanding the construction of anime and animation broadly as separate from

photography and film is essential to understanding the rhetorical work performed by

anime texts in their representation of bodies and the world generally. This follows my

own earlier assertion that photographic verism is not the best tool culture has to

understand or unpack the meaning of atomic weapons or war trauma. Perhaps only

through abstraction, cartoonish abstraction, can humans be made to properly understand

their horror and their lasting psychological footprints imprinted on victims and

perpetrators alike.

Reading Mori Masaki and Keiji Nakazawa’s 1983 anime film Barefoot Gen offers insight

into this exact process; a survivor of Little Boy himself, Nakazawa’s film deals explicitly

with the transformation of youthful bodies because of nuclear trauma. The film’s most

striking sequence summarizes the detonation of Little Boy and its effects on the bodies of

Japanese children; the film’s first depicted casualty is a young girl whose eyes melt from

her skull as her skin browns, shrivels and burns as she falls to the ground; each frame of

this transformation is painstakingly rendered as a unique frame depicting a scene that is

otherwise impossible to depict. The film’s eponymous character, while saved from the

blast itself, is later seen losing his hair, becoming emaciated and suffering effects of

radiation sickness. By positioning youthful innocence as the primary target of nuclear

aggression, Nakazawa’s work cements the conflation of the bomb and Japan’s freezing in

perpetual adolescence. Pika-don animation representing bodies in change, and in painful

change more specifically, demonstrates a useful distinction between anime and other

66
forms of serial entertainment media; frame by frame animation and body horror are

matched effectively to render trauma literally and culturally by extension.

The remainder of this chapter and its shorter successor will discuss the adolescent body in

anime and animation in relation to nuclear and war trauma. The adolescent body is

perhaps the most popular and pervasive representational form in anime film and

television, particularly in the mecha subgenre and its cyberpunk cousin. Anime scholars

like Napier and Denison have written at length about the “monstrous adolescents” of

anime. Napier expands, “despair and a feeling of entrapment are emotions often

associated with adolescence. They are also frequently emotions projected onto the

adolescent body.”90 In this way the film Akira and mecha anime more generally can be

understood as a polysemic body of work and, “can be looked at on two levels: as a fresh

expression of an alienated youth’s search for identity and as a cyberpunk meditation on

apocalypse.”91 This project supposes however, that these two readings are one and the

same. The projection of despair, loss, and immense pressure onto the adolescent body—

whether that body be human, a city, a whole nation— is both a comment on adolescence

and also a tool through which viewers may peer into a deeply coded Japanese fatalism

that emerges from the rubble of wartime devastation. Mecha series are uniquely poised to

offer glimpses of this trauma through their own genre-wide obsession with the

adolescent, with their focus on what John D. Moore describes as “interiority”, and the

90
Susan J. Napier, “Akira and Ranma ½: The Monstrous Adolescent,” Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving
Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005),
39.
91
Ibid, 43.

67
constant use of grief, trauma, and loss as highlighted by Vyshali Manivannan in their

article studying these codes in mecha series Gurren Lagann. The remainder of this

section will explore these works broadly and generally as not text-specific phenomenon,

but genre-wide conventions that form the nuclear core powering the mecha suit.

In the introduction to his thesis Inside the Boy Inside the Robot: Mobile Suit Gundam and

Interiority, John D. Moore explains “Techniques of interiority are techniques of

representation, and they narrate the internal conflicts and feelings of characters. The

approach to interiority exhibited in Gundam echoes developments in other forms across

modern media, including in its Japanese context.”92 As Moore’s work’s title suggests, the

“interiority” in Gundam is layered: it refers to both the internal thoughts of the series’

child soldier protagonists, as well as their actions within the confines of their “Mobile

Suit” cockpits. In accordance, much of Moore’s argumentation revolves around the

tension created between these two insides, and the exterior world as well, a world at war

in space and on Earth. “Interiority” is a convention that can be observed throughout the

entire mecha subgenre, a constantly shifting balance between interior and exterior

representation, between causes and effects, between combat, and its lingering post-

traumatic effects. Moore describes these conventions in detail in his work but does not

draw a broader connection to Japan’s specific shared nuclear trauma as a possible inciting

factor of these codes of representation.

92
John D. Moore, “Inside the Boy Inside the Robot: Mobile Suit Gundam and Interiority” (ProQuest
Dissertations Publishing, 2017), 6.

68
In Manivannan’s work “"Later, buddy": the politics of loss and trauma representation in

tengen toppa Gurren Lagann” the 27-episode mecha series Gurren Lagann is studied as

an exercise in traumatic and post-traumatic storytelling. Central to the series’ plot,

Manivannan focuses their work on the combat loss of 18-year-old charismatic resistance

leader Kamina and the lingering effects his death has on the series’ protagonist Simon.

From this point on the series remains mired in a tension between overcoming trauma and

succumbing to trauma. Manivannan writes,

However, following the central traumatic event of

Kamina's combat death, the protagonist, Simon, embodies
major diagnostic symptoms of trauma, shown by the
hermeneutic divergence of visual and verbal
representations. At first, the imagery and dialogue collude
to convey positive messages about self-validation, human
resilience, and the ability to overcome traumatic
experience. These qualities constitute Kamina's core beliefs
and ultimately the belief system of Kamina, the remainder
of Team Dai-Gurren, and viewers.93

Contrarily, Manivannan then explains how the series challenges these notions by

conveying Simon’s continuing struggled with Kamina’s death, “Simon's dialogue recalls

Kamina's pre-trauma assumptive world, but the cumulative meaning of reflexive imagery

attest that the assumptive world, once violated, cannot be rebuilt,” mentioning that the

series ultimately presents loss and trauma as “enduring and insurmountable.”94 This

challenging of the “assumptive world” which Manivannan refers to is common

throughout mecha anime, as its protagonists, particularly in the Gundam franchise, often

Vyshali Manivannan, “‘Later, Buddy’: The Politics of Loss and Trauma Representation in Tengen Toppa
93

Gurren Lagann,” Forum for World Literature Studies 3, no. 1 (2011): np.
94
Ibid.

69
enter combat from a very similar ignorant position. Amuro, the main protagonist of the

original Mobile Suit Gundam is a prime example of this transition. He is initially

cocksure, egotistical, and positive. In the following discussion of the original series’

adaptation films, this chapter will then explore the transformative ability of trauma,

specifically war-related trauma, and its ability to shatter the rosy-eyed assumptive

worldview of mecha protagonists.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Boy Scouts and Machines

Writing as a self-identified nerd in 2021 it’s difficult to imagine a world before Gundam.

For over four decades the mecha super-franchise has inspired a love of giant robots in

people young and old the world over. Alongside Pokémon and PlayStation, it is not

difficult to view Gundam as one of Japan’s predominant cultural exports. In Odaiba,

Tokyo from 2009 to 2011 tourists and shoppers could marvel at a 1:1 scale, 59-foot-tall

RX-78-2 Mobile Suit Gundam lovingly constructed from 35 tons of fiberglass, plastic,

and steel. The original sculpture was damaged in the Tohoku Earthquake, the same quake

that caused the nuclear reactor disaster in Fukushima, but has since been repaired,

refitted, and relocated to the front of DiverCity Tokyo Plaza where it now stands as a

perfectly ironic monument to Japanese consumerism and cultural history. Here the

original Gundam stood until 2017, when it was replaced by the new RX-o from Gundam

Unicorn, at the time the latest iteration of the franchise coinciding with Tokyo’s gearing

up to host the 2020 Summer Olympic games, an ultimately fruitless endeavour due to the

70
Covid-19 global pandemic.95 Perhaps there is some poetry in this cycle of construction,

destruction, renewal, and growth that links this one small facet of the Gundam universe to

this project, but regardless of such musing it is clear that Gundam is a not only an

important past-time, but in many ways an integral limb of Japanese culture, particularly

on the global scale. Hobby shops around the world nearly always feature shelves lined

with plastic “Gunpla” Gundam model kits at a vast variety of scales and detail grades. In

cultural circles that venerate anime, sci-fi, or technology broadly, Gundam is ubiquitous,

and it is for this reason that it has been chosen as a key text for this chapter. The

following section will briefly outline the history of this franchise and its paratexts, will

introduce the work of Mark Seltzer in Bodies and Machines with specific respect to the

amalgamation of youthful body and machine, and will explore Seltzer’s theories

alongside the original Mobile Suit Gundam film trilogy providing both narrative and

formal elements, elements specific to its animation and design, that express the politics of

nuclear trauma. Climb aboard the 59-foot-tall robot and strap in!

Jonathan Clements outlines the creation of Gundam in Anime: A History by explaining

how its creator Tomino Yoshiyuki endeavoured to “take the ‘giant robot’ shows more

seriously, disregarding the vaguer, fantastical notions of children’s entertainment, and

attempting to inject more mature themes and explanations.”96 He allowed his work to age

with the audience he had built up through previous work on the less sophisticated Brave

95
“History Of The Gundam Statue In Odaiba!,” JapanSauce.Net (blog), December 28, 2018,
https://japansauce.net/2018/12/28/history-of-the-gundam-statute-in-odaiba/.
96
Clements, Anime: A History, 154.

71
Raideen, through his handling of Zambot 3 and the shocking killing of several main

characters, to the eventual global phenomenon that would be Mobile Suit Gundam.

However, Clements is also quick to point out that MSG’s original performance was

lackluster, and its initial intended 52 week run in 1979 was cut short to 43 as poor ratings

and toy sales for its sponsor Clover resulted in the decision to wrap the shop up early and

rewrite its original ending to meet this new timeframe.97 98 Due to its “artistic heritage,”

television rebroadcasts, eventual movie-length edits—the exact films that this chapter

will study—and the advent of home video technology, Mobile Suit Gundam would

eventually soar to global popularity, eventually resulting in the sale of 4.4 million plastic

model kits in the two years following the films’ release in Japanese theatres. According

to Clements, Tomino’s gamble to age his media with its audience had paid off, as the

audience that had followed his work through to maturity now had “money to spend on

spin-offs” and toys.99 For the purposes of simplicity, this project opts to study the Mobile

Suit Gundam original film trilogy, the aforementioned re-cut of the originally airing

series, as its primary Gundam text. The series by this point is simply too vast to be

wholly contained within this thesis: its texts and paratexts now span genres, mediums,

and decades. The original film series is still emblematic of the entire canon of Gundam

texts, it focuses heavily on the adolescent body at war, the body in armor, and the

devastating effects of super-weapon combat on those who take part, chiefly the child

soldiers of the Gundam Universe. It should also be noted, as Clements discusses as well,

97
Ibid, 155.
98
Moore, Inside the Boy inside the Robot, 3.
99
Clements, Anime: A History, 155.

72
that Gundam marks a drastic shift in mecha’s chief representational codes from the

“super-robot” style of earlier series to the “real-robot” style that persists more

prominently today. In short, the super-robot style was a hallmark of a less mature style of

mecha storytelling; robots were heroic and moralistic with their own innate qualities. In

contrast, the “real-robot” is simply a tool to be used by man, it is devoid of agency or

agenda and is instead just a pilotable weapon, allowing storytellers like Tomino to focus

on the human occupants more so than the machines themselves.100

The story of Mobile Suit Gundam takes place in the fictitious timeline of the “Universal

Century” during the “One Year War” of UC 0079. This flash in the pan conflict is the

result of the “Principality of Zeon”—a militaristic posthumanist human space colony

cult—seeking independence from the “Earth Federation”—a militaristic liberal-

democratic one-world-government cult—for which most of the combat occurs in space

using man-shaped bipedal robots known as “mobile suits”. The distinction between

“mobile suit” and “Gundam” is not made exceedingly clear in the films but can be

summed up as akin to the difference between a propeller aircraft and a supersonic fighter

jet: the latter is sleeker, faster, sturdier, and carries a significantly higher payload than the

former, and thus requires a new generation of pilot to meet its technological demands.

These pilots are the “new types,” psychically awakened adolescents capable of forming

bonds with their machines to pilot them through intuition rather than training. Zeon sees

these children as evidence of the evolution of humanity and have poured all their stock

100
Ibid, 154.

73
into the embrasure of the “new type” teen, while the Earth Federation is much more

traditional and skeptical of these new unknowns and only discovers their potence by

accident, through the series’ lead character Amuro Ray, son of the chief Gundam

development scientist. Regardless, neither side demonstrates any real reticence towards

jamming these teenaged bodies into nuclear robot cockpits and forcing them to duke it

out in the zero-gravity vacuum of space, the synthetic colony worlds of the Earth

Federation, or on terra firma itself. The film trilogy tracks this conflict from beginning to

end through the escapades of the crew of “White Base” a specially designed space frigate

complete with a complement of fighter vehicles and mobile suits as they are set adrift

after the surprise Zeon attack on the Federation colony of “Side 7.”

In his essay comparing Gundam to its predecessor Yamato, William Ashbaugh

summarizes the key differences between the two series/films/franchises as such:

...like Yamato, Gundam is a war allegory. Gundam, in its

television and movie forms, represents creator/director
Tomino’s counter-narrative to Yamato’s valorizing of the
military and propagation of the master narratives of ‘noble
failure’ and national victimhood. Gundam does advocate
pacifism, but that is not all...101

He goes on to argue that applying a World War II lens to the series proves useful as well;

the Dutchy of Zeon is the Axis powers, relatively newly established empire nations

striving for a larger piece of the pie, and the Earth Federation as the Allies, well

established superpowers that block newer rising powers from participation in colonial

William Ashbaugh, “Contesting Traumatic War Narratives: Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit
101

Gundam” in Postwar Literature and Film, Imag(in)Ing the War in Japan (Brill, 2010), 345.

74
markets.102 Ashbaugh goes on to later describe the Zeon’s actions as mirrors of early

Japanese imperial expansion at the outset of World War II citing the invasion of

Manchuria, the “Mukden Incident” and others not of particular use to this project. What

is of use is in discerning just how Tomino meant to remediate Japan’s involvement in the

war to counter the prevailing narrative of sheer victimhood. Ashbaugh writes:

Gundam effectively calls into question the postwar master

narrative of special Japanese victimhood. While the work
conveys the plight of all civilians caught up in total war, it
only explicitly discusses and represents the sufferings of
Federation, not Zeon, civilians. Although civilians play a
lesser role in the movies than in the television series, there
are still ample examples of the everyday difficulties and
horrors faced by noncombatants. The background narrative
explains how in the surprise attack Zeonic forces destroyed
even fellow space colonists.103

To unpack the meaning of Gundam, this project will also rely on the theoretical work of

American naturalist literary critic Mark Seltzer and is seminal work Bodies and

Machines, particularly its fifth section “The Love-Master” which begins with an

exploration of Stephen Crane’s classic war novel The Red Badge of Courage. There are

some immediate similarities of note between Crane’s novel and Gundam, particularly

their shared focus on young bodies at war, the effects of prolonged combat stress on the

psyche, and the pursuit of “manhood,” as well as the shared war-of-succession setting.

Additionally, Seltzer’s work focuses on studying the Boy Scouts of America as a similar

“man-making” project that appeared around the turn of the 20th century.104 For Seltzer,

102
Ibid.
103
Ibid, 347.
104
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 1 edition (Routledge, 2014) 149.

75
“the craft of making men was the antidote to anxieties about the depletion of agency and

virility in consumer and machine culture.”105 Seltzer argues that modernism and its

embrace of technological reproduction of goods—and even people as seen through his

study of postwar amputees given new mechanical limbs—was understood to have robbed

the male species of its essential tenets, values, and powers. Citing “The Woodcraft

movement” Seltzer explains that paramilitary organizations for organizing boys into men

were essential “to combat the system that has turned such a large proportion of our

robust, manly, selfreliant boyhood into a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky

nerves and doubtful vitality.” Degenerates, these boys are labelled. This project then

supposes that the proliferation of mecha media, of which Gundam is most emblematic,

operates as a criticism of this line of thinking, by demonstrating that “man-making” in a

technological post-nuclear era is not only fruitless, but dangerous as placing boys into

large robots does not adequately protect them from the horror of nuclear trauma, nor does

it increase their “selfreliant” character. For this project, the boy soldiers of mobile suits

and Gundams are the Boy Scouts of Earth in the stars, the logical conclusion of fascistic

man-making military projects that seek to seed the universe with hyper-masculine

weapons impervious to trauma.

Gundam grows to be critical of this type of mythmaking as a franchise: its later entries

like Iron Blooded Orphans and Gundam Unicorn explicitly criticize the use of child

soldiers on “both sides” of these conflicts, while the original trilogy perhaps stumbles

105
Ibid.

76
slightly in this endeavour. However, the assertion Seltzer puts forward that, “if turn-of-

the-century American culture is alternatively described as naturalist, as machine culture,

and as the culture of consumption, what binds together these apparently alternative

descriptions is the notion that bodies and persons are things that can be made,” is entirely

true in Gundam and bereft in the following text Transformers which will clearly outline

the critical-Japanese approach to the robot soldier figures as contrary to the celebratory

American approach. Ultimately, a vision of “manhood” as tied to a nuclear-mechanical

society is inherently flawed as one must ask, what is the purpose of “making men”

through culture and paramilitary regimen when all of their hard bodied robustness can be

obliterated in the blink of an eye by the same blast that reduces those “flat-chested

cigarette smokers” to dust. To do this, this section will study combat and post-combat

sequences of the original Gundam movie trilogy in detail while leaning on Seltzer to

provide a theoretical background in parallel to his discussion of Crane and the BSA.

What must we make of our own resident “flat-chested cigarette smoker” Amuro Ray? For

Ashbaugh, he represents the destructive emotional toll of war and combat:

At times in Gundam, the stress of combat provokes a

violent rage, and he uses the Gundam to kill or destroy
anyone or anything that moves. War leads [Amuro] to
sickening sorrow, sleeplessness, and even brief catatonia.
He becomes a great pilot, but as he grows as a person he
comes to fight solely to protect his friends. He has no
interest in heroism, unless a hero is defined as one who
survives to protect those around him.106

106
Ashbaugh, “Contesting Traumatic War Narratives,” 347-348.

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Throughout the initial film trilogy, the viewer is tasked with identifying with Amuro

through what anime scholar John D. Moore describes as “interiority,” the audience is

privileged to Amuro’s private thoughts and memories, Moore himself citing a moment

when Amuro returns to his home to see his sister’s doll which triggers an aural and visual

flashback within the series. For Moore all of these moments are employed to cement the

“focalization” of Amuro as the series’ protagonist. In addition, Moore points out that the

serial narrative structure of the Gundam television series was novel for young Japanese

audiences, used to series-style narratives that resolve minor plots each week. Unlike this,

Gundam’s—and by extension Amuro’s—narrative built on itself week after week, using

Amuro’s interiority, his memories and thoughts, as narrative cement, reminding the

viewers of Amuro’s past deeds, his emotional state, and his relationships with fellow

crew members.107 At its nuclear core, the strength of Gundam is found in this tension.

How does the series attempt to resolve Amuro the boy with Amuro the nuclear super

mutant soldier? It does so by critiquing what Seltzer would refer to as “becoming-

artifactual”:

The becoming-artifactual of persons...is perfectly

compatible with the substitution of the regimental and
regimented body for the natural body-the military ‘making
of men.’ And the ‘drilling and training’ that makes men
into members, components of the war ‘machine,’ also
substitutes the invulnerable and artificial skin of the
uniform-armor for the vulnerable and torn natural body.108

107
John D. Moore, “Inside the Boy Inside the Robot,” 42-46.
108
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 163, 164.

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Seltzer goes on to describe the phenomenon by which texts use “battle” to “make interior

states visible: to gain knowledge of the mastery over bodies and interiors by tearing them

open to view.” This is a very literal process that we will see throughout Gundam’s

entirety, as battle often consists of “tearing open” the robot suits with weaponry, but also

that battle in the series necessitates an emotional “tearing open” of traumatic wounds, the

possibility of forming new wounds, and ultimately a critique militarism and the

regimented body.

Amuro stands apart from Seltzer’s projection of the typical regimented body as Gundam

makes frequent attempts at levity in what would otherwise be a drastically more formal

militaristic lifestyle for the inhabitants of “White Base.” As the ship was the sole

surviving vessel of the Side 7 surprise attack, White Base is home to an assortment of

civilian and military personnel, so much so that the distinctions between these roles is

often obscured. For instance, the series three foremost-featured Gundam pilots, Amuro,

Kai and Hayato, were all teenaged civilian inhabitants of Side 7 before the One Year War

began. The Gundam mechanics and support staff are drafted from the civilian population,

even a trio of comic-relief children seem to have completely unrestricted access to the

ship. All civilians on White Base are refugees and are presented with no other option than

to serve the United Federation in varying capacities obviously including combat roles for

Amuro and his peers. In his first time behind the controls of Gundam he sweats, pants,

and hesitates as he slowly aligns the Gundam’s beam rifle crosshairs on an enemy

soldier. “I have to fire... he’s my enemy! Now fire!” he convinces himself as he pulls the

trigger and all rounds go wide. The enemy launches their own mechs, the “Zaku'' units, in

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response to which Amuro quickly reflects “somehow shooting the Zaku doesn’t bother

me as much as shooting people, it isn’t the same.” All of the series’ dialogue is written in

this matter-of-fact style as if their most basic internal monologue is always on display, as

Moore suggested with “interiority” and this is particularly the case for Amuro. The

trilogy’s protagonist meets his foil in Zeon Lieutenant Char; where Amuro is unsure and

driven by emotions, Char is the perfect example of the artifactual body, a fellow “New

Type” not much older than Amuro. “We all gotta die eventually, why not today?” Char

exclaims coolly and cocksure while beams fire in every direction. His character is

incredibly reminiscent of World War One’s most famous ace pilot Manfred “The Red

Baron'' von Richthofen for his skill as a combat pilot, his aristocratic upbringing, and the

distinct red colouring of his Zaku suits.109 In this first engagement Amuro scores a direct

breaching hit through an enemy Zaku exploding the unit and killing its pilot. In the

moment, all Amuro can think is “man, oh man, unbelievable!” After his first day of

combat, Amuro is left despondent back in his White Base quarters., he lays on his bed “to

rest” curled up silently. This is a rare moment when the audience isn’t met with some

quip or thought of Amuro’s, only strained sighing. His friend Frau later tries to rouse him

from his near-catatonia only for him to respond “I can’t fight... I’m a coward... Coward!

Coward! Coward!” already demonstrating the immense psychological toll of nuclear

space combat.

109
“Manfred von Richthofen,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Richthofen

80
Later, back in the cockpit of Gundam to defend White Base from more Zeon attackers,

Amuro demonstrates that he is quickly taking to combat. Over his initial bout of post-

traumatic stress, he returns to battle and defeats an entire squadron of Zeon fighter

aircraft, going as far as to slice them in two with his beam sword, a Gundam-sized energy

melee weapon. During a later scene still, Amuro hides with his mother from Zeon foot

patrols in a small civilian infirmary. He hides his sidearm and uniform under the blankets

of a gurney while two Zeon soldiers accost his mother, claiming they need to get a look at

the boy under the sheets. At this point fires his sidearm from underneath the sheets,

killing the closest Zeon soldier. Amuro then springs out of bed, chasing the soldier’s

startled companion out the door screaming while his mother yells “No Amuro!” The

young pilot completely empties his sidearm, hands shaking. This is Amuro’s first

Gundamless kill, his mother accosts him for his actions claiming that the soldier could

have had a family. He replies “What then? If you don’t think I should kill our enemies,

would you prefer I let them kill me instead?” This sequence in the first film is perhaps the

first unequivocal anti-war moment in the franchise, Amuro mistakes his mother’s horror

towards his killing as cowardice and contempt, rather than genuine concern for his

humanity, innocence, or wellbeing. She names him a murderer out of sorrow, not anger.

Amuro is drawn here with multiple beads of sweat running down his face, his eyes jitter

with insecurity as he rebuff’s his mother’s attempt to soften him and instead returns to

White Base.

Over the course of the series from this point on, Amuro is continually broken, reforged,

hardened and broken again by combat. Each sequence follows a similar narrative

81
structure to the first few, Amuro justifies his involvement in the war as survival, kills

gleefully to protect White Base, and then is incapacitated by guilt, over and over.

Gradually the moments of trauma and guilt recede, as Amuro’s mind and body become

artifactual just like Char’s. The original film series’ climactic showdown features the two

elite pilots in a duel to the death. Char blows off the Gundam’s arms and head, forcing

Amuro to eject from the chest-situated cockpit. The two finally meet face to face, free of

their mobile suits and are trapped in a confusing embrace through which the pair’s new-

type powers unleash a powerful psychological energy binding the two together and

revealing some ultimate New Type truth. In this moment they both realize that they have

been treated as weapons rather than people by their respective sides and reach an uneasy

armistice. Amuro escapes the encounter, as does Char, and as the former spots his

marooned White Base family on an escape pod he remarks, with tears in his eyes

“growing up sure wasn’t easy but I’m glad I did it.” Following the understatement of the

Universal Century, Amuro slumps out of his cockpit and floats to his friends as his

fighter craft drifts off into space. The voice over declares an end to the war after this

climactic battle which created a “new age” and “lasting peace” shared by the United

Federation and Principality of Zeon.

As made evident from its first series, Gundam marks an influential and poignant moment

in Japanese anti-war, anti-nuclear storytelling. The series manages to infuse exciting “real

robot” action, with a moralistic struggle for humanity all centered around the personal

development, or personal obliteration, of Amuro Ray. The series’ use of interiority as

described by Moore, and its focus on serial narrative all help to deliver the culmination of

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its anti-war politics. As an artifact of nuclear culture specifically Gundam poses certain

challenges, the first of which being “where are all the nukes?” Due to the “Minovsky

Particle” technology of the Gundam universe, all combat occurs over relatively short

distances with relatively low-yield weaponry as high-yield and long-range energy

weapons and communication are rendered useless. Each mobile suit is powered by

nuclear energy, making each one a bomb of its own, but the weapons they employ are

much more traditional. The mobile suits physically hold beam rifles and beam swords,

just as any soldier would brandish their service weapon. They aren’t equipped with

warheads, or any other WMD technology but this does not mean that these weapons do

not exist in Gundam’s Universal Century. The earliest engagements of the One Year War

were surprise attacks by Zeon launched three seconds after the declaration of war. Zeon

uses gas weaponry to elicit mass death upon the United Federations civilians, it also

drops an entire massive space station into a city destroying it as thoroughly as the damage

wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In their early engagements the Zeon forces are

stated to have destroyed half of the civilian population of the solar system, truly

unprecedented death in a series that otherwise focuses on the small person to person

engagements of its war. I cannot particularly reason out why such a narrative decision

would be made as it only serves to weaken the series’ attempts at reversing the “noble

defeat” narrative patterns. Mass death is a footnote in this story that otherwise seeks only

to situate the adolescent body as its main artifact of trauma. Only in the first film do we

catch a brief glimpse of huddled and blooded civilian casualties en masse, from that point

on death is relegated to robots and spaceships. Regardless, the politics and contradictions

of the body machine complex remain at the heart of Gundam, but the same cannot

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necessarily be said for its closest American counterpart, The Transformers, a franchise

which asks its viewers nothing and instead tells them “you’ve got the power!”

Transformers: You’ve Got the Touch

I still remember the Easter I got my first Transformers toy, a transforming—obviously—

manta-ray-robot hybrid named Depthcharge, belonging to a spinoff line of animalistic

Transformers toys called “Beast Wars.” My toy, while exciting and complex like the rest

of the line, was also rather different from the mainstays of the franchise, why an animal

and not a vehicle? I remember at the time feeling somehow cheated despite my

excitement because I didn’t think a manta ray was as “cool” as something like a tank or

sports car, but he still possessed a very tough-looking robot form, and the transformation

process still ignited my childhood fascination. Transformers are a global phenomenon;

Transformers fans and even casual viewers undoubtedly recognize Optimus Prime and

his iconic red and blue semi-truck alternate form, or the yellow and black sometimes-

Camaro sometimes-VW Bug Bumblebee, now the star of his own movie. In its absolute

infancy, the Transformers franchise and toy-line was not all that different from Gundam.

The first Transformers toys, the Diaclone line manufactured by Takara Toys in 1980,

“included transforming vehicles and robots that were piloted by miniature figures that

came from the Microman toy line.” Originally, the Transformers were much more akin to

the “real robot” mech suits of Gundam than their eventual “super robot” form that

millions would eventually become familiar with. In 1983 the American toy manufacturer

Hasbro purchased the “car-robot” toy line from Takara for production in the United

States. This transnational component, a shared Japanese and American origin, of the

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franchise is what makes it of particular interest to this project. Where previously we saw

the impact of American meddling in the kaiju genre, now we can see the effects of

Americanization on the serialized animated program.110 Popular culture scholar Jason

Bainbridge explains:

It is this 1986 film that also provides perhaps the best

single example of how canny marketing decisions can give
rise to complex transmedia narratives, for the narrative of
this 1986 film literally killed off characters from the 1984
and 1985 toy lines as these toys were being phased out of
retail assortments in favour of all-new characters. In this
way the death of Optimus Prime serves as perhaps the
perfect blend of creativity and commerce, simultaneously
dramatic and providing momentum to the narrative, while
encouraging children to seek out toys of the (possible) new
Autobot leaders (Ultra Magnus and Rodimus Prime).111

Like the preceding section, this section will examine Nelson Shin’s 1986 animated space

opera epic The Transformers: The Movie along the same criteria as Gundam to explore

the methods by which the Americanization of an originally Japanese concept alters its

politics regarding war and trauma through representation—or near lack thereof—of the

adolescent body. Again, like in Gundam, the explicit use of nuclear weapons does not

appear in this series or in its culminating film, but the imagery and ethos of weapons of

mass destruction, even at the planetary scale, exists throughout and thus must be

considered a clear analogue to actual nuclear bombs. The foremost example of this is

found in the planet-scale Transformer Unicron, which coincidentally served as Orson

Welles’ final acting credit before his death. The film opens with a sequence of Unicron,

110
“The History Of Transformers: From Toy To Legacy -,” January 12, 2019,
https://www.everything80spodcast.com/transformers/.
111
Ibid.

85
who is neither an Autobot or Decepticon, using his superweapon to completely destroy a

neutral robot planet and all but one of its inhabitants. A bright flash is seen followed by

an expanding dome of explosion which completely tears the planet’s surface from its

core, potent nuclear imagery on display. Additionally, there is more scholarly work

available studying the franchise’s later live-action installments, all of which continue the

same political themes established in the mid 1980s, so while the work doesn’t explicitly

reference scenes or instances of animation, the overall theoretical approach transforms

easily to suit this inciting animated film.

The Transformers: The Movie depicts the events following a Decepticon surprise attack

on “Autobot City” on Earth in the far-flung futuristic year of 2005. As a point of order it

should be pointed out that the two major factions in The Transformers, the “good”

Autobots and the “evil” Decepticons are strictly political categories—meaning any

Transformer is capable of defecting to the other side, it is not an innate racial position—

whose positions are eloquently surmised by scholar David William Underwood as

“Freedom is the right of all sentient beings” for the Autobots and “Peace through

Tyranny” for the Decepticons.112 Immediately the same postwar prevalent narratives of

Allies vs Axis emerge, the Decepticons own mantra too eerily echoing the Nazi’s own

holocaust rhetoric. Like the Nazis, the Decepticons also are noted to run forced labour

camps and mines on their colonized planets or as part of their prisoner-of-war economy.

The two factions led by Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively represent the two

112
David William Underwood, “American Socio-Politics in Fictional Context: Transformers and the
Representation of the United States” (masters, University of East Anglia, 2013), 23, 28
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/47858/.

86
struggling parties in the war for control over the Transformer home world of Cybertron,

the Autobots serving as displaced Cybertronian diaspora seeking a new life and military

existence on Earth alongside humanity. Overall, the two side’s philosophies are simple,

as this is a product for children, but when compared to Gundam the politics of

Transformers with regards to war is illuminating. While Gundam staunchly towed the

line of “war should be avoided at all costs, “the Transformers approach is much simpler,

“war is good when you’re on the good side,” an ethos that is rife with its own

contradictions. Much like in Gundam, the “good” side willingly brings a human child

into space combat, their own espoused moral philosophy fails to account for any robots

on the periphery of Cybertronian control, and perhaps the Autobots are much more

“American” in a literal imperialist sense than they are in the mythic sense the program

intends. At its core, this is a story about individualism, Reagan-era self-actualization,

American liberalism, and the rule of sublime violence. And is it ever sublime! It is also a

story of control politics, both the control of the body, the control of the stars, and

everything in between. The Autobots’ other guiding principle is “Until All are One,”

which can be read to mean “we will not stop fighting this war until all are one,” which

does not coincide with their other foundational belief that freedom should be desired

above all. Therefore, the war for Cybertron and the galaxy at large is an existential one,

unlike the One Year War in Gundam which has a clearly defined end short of total

annihilation for one side. Again, this point near perfectly mirrors the shortcomings or

downright fabrications of postwar American liberalism: freedom is only freedom when

you’re one of us.

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The main object of study in this film will be its human male lead Danny, the son of long-

time Autobot ally and scientist Spike. Danny serves the child audience as an object of

projection and identification: the viewer is meant to identify with Danny like Amuro in

Gundam, but towards drastically different ends. His first sequence depicts him enjoying a

fishing outing with the Autobot “Hot Rod,” or more formally “Hot Rodimus,” until the

Decepticon attack commences. The two race back to Autobot City while the movies’ title

track “The Touch” by Stan Bush blows out all other audio present:

After all is said and done.

You've never walked, you've never run.
You're a winner
You got the moves, you know the streets.
Break the rules, take the heat,
You're nobody's fool.
You're at your best when the goin' gets rough,
You've been put to the test, but it's never enough.113

As with Danny, the express purpose of this song is to tell the audience that they are

infallible, invincible, and always capable as long as they exhibit the traits of the

Transformers but more specifically the Autobots. The song’s target is constantly shifting

between the generic “you” of the audience and the specific “yous” of the Transformers

when it refers to “hands of steel.” Accordingly, this project posits that the absence of

human identification in the film expressly exists to lead its audience towards this end, to

want to be a Transformer, a living weapon of unimaginable power, rather than a weak

and meek 3rd grader huddled over in front of the television or in crowded 80s cinemas.

Even though during this sequence Danny falls from his hoverboard, Hot Rod is right

113
Stan Bush, “The Touch” from The Transformers: The Movie, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
(1986).

88
there to grab him, transform into a car, and throw Danny inside. This is one of very few

moments in the film when we see the convergence of human and machine bodies, unlike

Gundam where it is inescapable. Conversely, The Transformers leaves humans and

machines in two distinct technical categories, there is no artifactual body for Danny, he

remains childish and innocent throughout the story despite his friends having their

machine bodies hollowed and burned out by laser rounds and explosion and enduring

what would likely be a very demoralizing short protracted siege against Autobot City.114

Eventually the rest of the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, return to break the siege; the

Autobot leader barrels through Decepticon lackeys in truck form before launching into

the air, transforming, and placing some expert midair laser shots taking down three more

of his enemies before returning to the ground. Unsurprisingly, Bush’s ra-ra anthem is

back in full swing during this segment, declaring that Optimus “knows the moves” and is

“nobody's fool.” After soundly beating his foil in single combat Optimus is killed by a

surprise shot following Megatron’s underhanded false surrender. From this point on a

desperate Autobot diaspora once again venture out into the stars under the leadership of

Prime’s protege Ultra Magnus to avenge their fallen leader and bring “peace” to the

galaxy. The purpose of bringing this robot-on-robot combat into a discussion about soft

human bodies is twofold: first, the film attempts to present war and combat as something

wholly freeing and exciting, not terrifying as robots don’t bleed, cry for their mothers, or

experience post traumatic stress disorder. Second, it allows the film to keep Danny as its

viewer analogue as he never succumbs to the same barbarity as Amuro because he isn’t

114
Seltzer, “Bodies and Machines,” 163, 164.

89
taking human lives. Transformers aren’t human biologically, but they are people; they

have individual agency, emotions, and goals that are separate from their political

affiliations, they understand friendship and can form attachments, they just don’t bleed.

This ultimately confuses the previously drawn distinction that human bodies and machine

bodies are separate in this film, echoing the contradictions of the Autobot liberal

philosophy as a somehow perfect counter to the Decepticons.

Later in the film, Danny accompanies several of the Autobots on a space-faring combat

mission which eventually requires him to scout out with the robots using his father’s

specially designed mech suit. Unlike the mechs of Gundam, this suit never obscures

Danny’s face, thereby never obscuring his humanity, from the viewer. He sees the alien

planet through a fishbowl-type glass enclosure. “What do I do, what do I do?!” Danny

yells from inside his suit as Decepticon lasers strafe by, “Transform! Transform! You can

do anything!” replies his comrade Soundwave, a smallish blue Autobot. When cornered

by two Decepticons who refer to Danny as a “human germ” Danny is finally able to

transform his mech suit into a four wheeled buggy vehicle and ecstatically crashes

through his two assailants with a triumphant “yeah!” that is as much a laugh as it is a

battle cry. This is more or less all we actually see Danny do during the film; we are not

ever privileged to see his interior thoughts like we are with Amuro. Where Amuro is

complex and burdened, Danny is completely one dimensional. In general, a comparison

between Gundam and Transformers fares this way as well, the latter providing little

substance other than serving as a protracted advertisement for action figures. Gundam has

toys to sell too, but it is capable of pulling double duty in this respect. As the

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Transformers film franchise ages into the 2000s under the direction of Michael Bay we

see an extrapolation of these same themes. The property eschews Danny and his childlike

innocence for the more mature teenaged Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf) and eventually

upgrades again to former soldier Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg). Cultural scholar Tanner

Mirrlees points out that several of these Bay-era films specifically name U.S. Department

of Defense personnel in the “Special Thanks” sections of their credit reels. As is the

course of so many American children’s franchises, the steady decline towards pro-U.S.

imperialist dogmatism is in full effect with the remainder of the series, Mirrlees writes:

“These films make DoD’s personnel—from the top to the bottom of its hierarchy—look

great and convey a “support the brass” and the ‘support the troops’ message. The

Secretary of Defense Keller (played by DoD and Republican Party-supporting star, Jon

Voight) is smart, decisive, capable, and willing to adapt to new threats and battle

circumstances easily.”115

Fallout
Thus, where Gundam is reticent and thoughtful, Transformers serves neatly as its

antithesis, making clear this project’s argued distinction between animated war

storytelling in Japan and America. This chapter has drawn together disparate narrative

animated properties under a loose umbrella of nuclear trauma and war depiction.

Although the nuclear device itself is largely invisible in this chapter, its echoes are still

115
Tanner Mirrlees, “Transforming Transformers into Militainment: Interrogating the DoD‐Hollywood
Complex,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 76, no. 2 (2017): 417-419
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12181.

91
heard through the political choices these properties decide to make in reference to mass

death, planetary destruction, and war. What comes next then? When the simplicity of

childhood is shirked and adolescence begins, we are left to consider and imagine what

new horrors the young body will undergo, and there is perhaps no greater example than

Otomo’s 1988 animated film Akira. The following bridging chapter will introduce some

needed connective tissue, and it will view Akira as a site of serious growing pains. I had

never originally intended to separate Otomo’s text from the preceding two mecha

properties but much like adolescence itself the text doesn’t quite fit, it doesn’t feel

comfortable in its surroundings. Akira is the tumultuous teenage phase of this project that

I feel needs room to breathe on its own. Something uniquely mature, foreboding, and

contemplative emerges in Akira. Difficult to name specifically Akira contains the

impression of maturity and metamorphosis and imagines these processes as both

perfectly natural and incredibly painful. The film serves as a potent metaphor for the

maturing of postwar Japanese culture, imbued with a new sense of agency and critical

self-determination. and also marks a major leap in the popularity of Japanese culture at a

global scale. Into Neo Tokyo we go!

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Chapter 2.5: Akira
Pika-don
Up until this point in the project I have been dealing with a series of reactive texts that

follow a predictable transnational pattern: Japanese culture produces dire and unsubtle

warnings, the American market and political engine warps these texts to serve American

imperial interests, and Japanese creators react by going deeper to overwrite U.S. edits.

For this project Akira marks a turning point. I had previously struggled to make it fit in

amongst Gundam and Transformers but the connective tissue and wire wasn’t there, it is

something else and as I said, it needs its own room to breathe. The purpose of this small

section is to explore Akira through the lens of pain, trauma, and change, to see how we

can interpret the text as a site of maturation and how it represents a pained Japanese

cultural identity in flux, at the cusp of adulthood. It is obviously not the intention of this

project to dabble in chauvinism: Akira is a remarkable feat, not just a remarkable feat for

a fledgling “teenage” technological superpower. The text is also often cited as the

moment which Japanese culture entered the global consciousness through export and

distribution as well as marking a renewed and massive interest of Japanese culture in the

West. To begin, we must first outline the theoretical underpinnings that this section will

use to explore Akira’s content and make some little sense of a largely senseless world.

In her work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry

positions pain as “as primal a fact about the human being as is the capacity to hear, to

touch, to desire, to fear to hunger,” but then points out that “it differs from these events,

and from every other bodily and psychic event, by not having an object in the external

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world.”116 For Scarry, pain is incredibly difficult to represent verbally or materially

because it lacks artifact, it is objectless and therefore cannot easily be objectified. She

later explains that “the only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While

pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable

for being the only state that is wholly is objects.” This chapter then puts forth that

perhaps pain can find its object best in animation, which can itself be understood as a

material manifestation of imagination. Nothing in animation “exists” until it is recorded

on cells or in software; it may represent recognizable objects, but it is also not restricted

to depicting the real. “Imagining is, in effect, the ground of last resort,” Scarry explains.

In the context of this project, imagining through animation is situated as its own “last

resort” to both represent and work-through collective national trauma. When the world

“fails to provide an object” one can be made, drawn up, frame by frame to situate and

name pain.117

This section will focus solely on Akira as its object, and as a site of each semiotic

framework: the infantilization of Japan’s natural culture by atomic trauma, the

representation of youthful bodies in change, and the exploration of pain through the

medium of animation as a uniquely suited expressive form. Released in 1988, Akira is

based on writer/director Katsuhiro Otomo’s earlier manga series of the same name. In

brief, the film depicts a group of wayward teenagers in a biker gang, headed by the red-

clad Shōtarō Kaneda, in the post-apocalyptic city of “Neo Tokyo'' in the year 2019. Neo

116
Elaine Scarry, “Pain and Imagining,” The Body in Pain, (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1985,) 161.
117
Ibid, 166.

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Tokyo was built from the ashes of Tokyo, which is destroyed as the film opens by a

radiant white blast akin to a nuclear explosion in the “World War III'' of 1988. Now, the

neon-bathed streets of Neo Tokyo are the site of civil unrest as anti-government activists,

violent extremists and cultists alike protest a new “Tax Bill” the specifics of which are

not discussed. The film’s central teenage characters only find themselves involved in this

conflict by happenstance when they are arrested following a biker gang rumble. Prior to

their arrest, Kaneda’s underling and childhood friend Tetsuo Shima is wounded when his

motorcycle collides with a small boy, later revealed to be one of three psycho-kinetically

powered youths, subjects of military-scientific testing and containment. As the film

progresses, Tetsuo’s own telekinetic abilities develop and mature with awesome atomic-

like power as he is drawn to “Akira,” a small boy-made-bioweapon that is responsible for

the previous destruction of Tokyo, and who is additionally revered as a god-figure by the

cultists.

For Denison, the film’s significance within the genre of anime cannot be understated. She

credits Akira with being the film that spurred anime beyond its “transnational infancy”

and more broadly inspired a shift in Japanese media distribution patterns that saw other

Japanese cultural exports on Western store shelves.118 Similarly, Denison also notes

Akira as an artifact of anime culture that is itself transnational while retaining distinctly

Japanese qualities. She places the film within the larger genre of “cyberpunk” that she

states was inspired chiefly by the work of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Philip K.

118
Denison, “Sci Fi Anime: Cyberpunk to Steampunk,” Anime, 35-37.

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Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).119 She then later points out that initial

critics were quick to catch on to visual and stylistic similarities between Akira and Ridley

Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) which was based on the Dick novel mentioned above.

Denison turns to Susan Napier as well to explain the unique way that the film deals with

time and history; she describes the film’s relationship to time as “a schizophrenic

treatment of time as ‘perpetual present.’120 Time appears semiotically within the film and

is linked to both the bomb and Murakami’s theory of Japan as stuck in a cyclical and

endless adolescence. The film’s use of chiasmus through nuclear-like destruction

suggests that Japanese culture is frozen on the verge of adulthood. The film opens and

closes with images of the destruction of Tokyo—and later Neo Tokyo—by the

cataclysmic power manifested within Akira and represented through a sphere of

expanding white light.

The allegory to real-world nuclear weapons is not subtle in these instances as there is

perhaps no more immediate comparison that can be drawn between the film and Japan’s

history of subjection. Nevertheless, the “perpetual present” in which the film’s

character’s find themselves is emblematic of a sort of Freudian return to trauma ad

nauseum.121 Characters throughout the film frequently remark that they have worked hard

to rebuild their city, but fear that it will inevitably slip away once more. Thus, mirroring

its teenage protagonists, Neo Tokyo is both perpetually adolescent—the uprising of

119
Ibid, 40-41.
120
Ibid, 33.
Sigmund Freud, “Excerpt from Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in A Critical and Cultural Theory
121

Reader, ed. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 78.

96
workers and students can be interpreted perhaps best as its moody teenage phase—and

prone to massive transformation, breaking, reconstruction etc.; the city itself is a youthful

body in a state of flux. The world of Akira is simply unable to “grow up” and move

beyond the trauma of devastation, which Murakami would argue is a direct result of the

nerve touching performed by nuclear violence. In “Introducing Little Boy,” Alexandra

Munroe explains that “perhaps such indulgence is a therapeutic response of Murakami’s

generation to the loss of power and expression; through fantasy, reality—or self-

identity—is re-experienced.”122

Beyond its narrative, the film’s visual representation is also obsessed with depicting the

trauma of perpetual adolescence. The previously mentioned powered children, named

Kiyoko, Takashi, and Masaru or simply 25, 25, and 27, are constrained into sickly grey,

emaciated, and withered bodies. A flashback sequence near the film’s conclusion depicts

each child before testing began in the late 1980s prior to the first explosion of Tokyo; the

film takes place thirty years later and the children are still consigned to their youthful

bodies, childish clothing, and infantile decorative trappings. When the three attempt to

intervene as Tetsuo’s power grows beyond his control, they appear to him as a giant

teddy-bear, bunny rabbit, and toy car. They attempt to stop him by flooding his hospital

room with milk and constrict him with Lego-like building blocks. Despite actually being

much older than they appear, their own maturity appears to have been stunted as a result

of science’s meddling with this primal and atomic energy that fuels their abilities and

122
Alexandra Munroe, “Introducing Little Boy,” Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,
(New York, NY: Japan Society, 2005), 248.

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they too are forced into a state of perpetual childhood, never free to mature by the shared

trauma of scientific testing and nuclear devastation.

Tetsuo’s own personal relationship to trauma manifests in a very similar way, but to

discuss his role in the film it is also useful to discuss Kaneda, his counterpart, as well. If

Tetsuo is “Little Boy”—a manifestation of trauma, defeat, inadequacy, and immaturity—

then Kaneda is “Fat Man” for he is cocksure, strong, and often belittling his subordinate

gang members, especially Tetsuo. Murakami uses the distinction between bombs as an

allegory for the postwar cultural differences between Japan and America, which quickly

manifest in a political, economic, and cultural hierarchy that again subjected Japan to

eternal adolescence and “a state of disempowerment.”123 Like the U.S., Kaneda is dually

aggressor and protector; Tetsuo’s first appearance in the film has him seated on Kaneda’s

souped-up red bike—the depiction of which is now synonymous with the film itself—as

Kaneda chides him for lacking the skill or capacity to handle such a machine. Anime

scholar Susan Napier argues that, “while Tetsuo’s marginal status in Akira may at first

seem far from the conventional view of Japan as a largely homogenous nation, his

character actually evokes a less obvious but deeply significant side of Japanese national

self-representation, that of the lonely outcast.”124 She goes on to explain that when the

film was released in 1988, Japan was perhaps at its postwar peak and that the tension

embodied between Tetsuo and Kaneda on screen is emblematic of larger socio-political

123
Munroe, “Introducing Little Boy,” Little Boy, 246.
Susan J. Napier, “Akira and Ranma ½: The Monstrous Adolescent,” Anime from Akira to Howl’s
124

Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan,
2005), 59.

98
tensions that occurred between Japan and other nations—chiefly the U.S.—as Japan grew

into a technological superpower.125 In Akira, the exponential growth of both Tetsuo and

Neo Tokyo is depicted as wholly unsustainable; the film constantly calls into question the

same Sartrean existential quandary found in Western super hero works like Spider-man;

with great power, comes great responsibility so how should such power be used?

Furthermore, the economic boom of Neo Tokyo and the literal telekinetic boom of Tetsuo

are both depicted as bubbles poised to burst.

Herein lies the most foundational and grotesque change in the film, Tetsuo’s rapid

mutation and expansion as his body begins to self-replicate and merges with technology

after exposure to Akira’s energy. Napier refers to this rapid mutation—which really must

be seen to be accurately understood—as the “not unfamiliar horror film trop of a youth

who, made subject to sinister outside powers, is transformed into a monstrous creature,

capable of doing great harm to others and to himself.”126 This is the ultimate “body in

pain” manifest in the horrific frame-by-frame expansion of flesh, circuitry and metal.

Tetsuo’s rapidly compounding limbs sprout new limbs, his features balloon to monstrous

proportions, and at his largest he resembles a screaming infant. Birth and death present

simultaneously, another nod to the “perceptual present” in which the film is situated.

Throughout this process Kaneda, Tetsuo’s girlfriend Kaori, the three child weapons, and

Neo Tokyo’s de facto military dictator are all interred within his mass of expanding flesh.

Tetsuo’s inability to control his own power causes pain to himself and to others. Beyond

125
Ibid.
126
Napier, “Monstrous Adolescent,” Anime from Akira…, 61.

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this end, it is Akira who finally emerges and defeats Tetsuo, by absorbing his entire body

in the same sphere of light that destroyed the city thirty years prior. This devastation is

wrought once more upon Neo Tokyo with indiscriminate might. Napier turns to scholar

Peter Boss that names this type of representation the “intimate apocalypse,” described as

“the sense of disaster being visited at the level of the body itself.”127 Tetsuo is destroyed

by his pain in what is read here as an allegory for collective nuclear destruction and the

subjection of the Japanese nation to unthinkable trauma. The animated form is used to

render this complex philosophical circumstance in a way that it is uniquely suited to

doing, by embracing imagination to create what is both tonally horrific and technically

marvelous at once.

Fallout
Akira is but a single film within a large canon of anime cyberpunk films, it also

represents an even smaller portion of anime films generally, even among anime films that

deal with youth and childhood as a major theme. Although it is not within this chapter’s

immediate purview to examine each major instance of Pika-don atomic logic pervading

this popular Japanese cultural form, it is perhaps best to conclude with the knowledge

that there is still work to be done. Applying Murakami’s “Little Boy” framework to

selected influential texts from Japan’s postwar cultural exports will prove exceedingly

useful in my own future research to compare broadly how American and Japanese

cultural products diverge and overlap in their meditations on atomic weapons and nuclear

127
Ibid, 62.

100
culture. Beyond this point, examining Akira as a site of transnational storytelling is

equally interesting as advances in communication technology make international pop

culture increasingly accessible the world over. This new-found accessibility will perhaps

represent increasingly blurred lines in what were once two distinct cultural engines—

America and Japan—in the years since its release. This project will now turn its focus

towards the interactive. I know that all media is “cool” to a degree, the act of

consumption is never passive, and audiences are always bringing new information and

readings to texts, but this is perhaps no more obvious than in the case of video games.

The remainder of this project will move beyond its troublesome teenage years and into

adulthood studying one of the most sophisticated, confusing, and downright fantastic

expressions of transnational Japanese/American mythmaking, Metal Gear Solid.

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Chapter 3: Ouroboros
I am returning to this project now, for what I hope will amount to my final stint, during

what are hopefully the halcyon days of the 2020-2021 Covid 19 Pandemic. At the outset

of this project, I had imagined that the perceived nuclear end times, while still seemingly

inevitable, were much farther off than they appear to be. It has become increasingly clear

with each new wave of grim tidings from war-hawks, climate scientists, and evangelists

that these “end-times” are not some far flung peril to be dealt with by future generations:

it feels as though we are living through the apocalypse right now. I then turn to my own

work to find some form of sick parity, or parody, with respect to the world in which I am

writing, a dying world that informs this work. How better then to close this loop of

endless nuclear, militaristic, and ecological dread than by returning to a marked point of

inception in my own political and intellectual development. I did not first become aware

of the world-ending potential of nuclear weapons or unchecked military expansionism in

a lecture hall, nor through the pages of history books, but instead in my friend’s basement

on a rainy summer afternoon.

Bad weather kept us from the trampoline in my friend Asher’s backyard, we ventured

indoors to see solace in the cool, damp concrete-floored basement where his family kept

their gaming consoles. When we arrived Asher’s older brother was playing at something I

only understood at the time as a “game for older kids”: the game was Metal Gear Solid 3:

Snake Eater, a Cold War espionage and infiltration game from acclaimed Japanese game

director auteur Hideo Kojima. I had heard of the franchise before but never in any detail,

and what I was seeing on screen didn’t align with my action-junky expectations. My

102
friend’s brother Willem was controlling the game’s lead character, an American agent

using the codename “Snake,” through a seemingly endless waist-high water wading trek

down an eerily tree-lined stream. Eventually, shambling figures emerged from the fog

and worked their way lazily towards Snake. I asked Willem what I was seeing, he told me

it was a boss fight against another elite operative named “The Sorrow,” a psychoactive

spirit soldier who was simultaneously living and dead. You know, basic military fiction

fare. Prior to this experience, I had assumed that Metal Gear followed closely in line with

other militaristic shooting games, but this boss fight represented an immediate departure

from my assumptions. Willem told me that “The Sorrow” collects the souls of those that

Snake had killed up to this point in the game and sends them to serve as a grim and

potentially lethal reminder of the human cost of Snake’s meddlesome line of work. At the

same time, I learned that if the player chooses to avoid killing, this boss fight becomes

trivial; The Sorrow’s only ammunition are corpses you have previously created: no

corpses, no challenge. I was awestruck.

I had previously thought that “Mature” rated games were only truly mature in their

depiction of gratuitous violence or profanity, not that a video game was capable of

challenging its player like this. Most video games aim to challenge their player’s ability

to strategize, dexterously press buttons, or their senses of perception. I was unaware that

a game could challenge its player’s morality as well. Later that summer I begged my

parents for a PlayStation 2 of my own, and a copy of Snake Eater to go along with it. I

needed to see more. When my birthday arrived a few months later, so too did my future

best-friend and confidant Snake, what a thrill.

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Introduction to Metal Gear
The Metal Gear franchise has always endeavoured to challenge its players in unique

ways compared to its genre competitors. The franchise makes specific use of video game

console technology and hardware in breaking the “fourth-wall” and performs constant

interrogation of the relationship between its player and player character. This chapter

focuses on the series’ final canonical entry Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain as a

distinctively novel instance of transnational and unsuspectingly resistant Japanese-

American military myth-making through play. This project’s final chapter will explore

The Phantom Pain as a criticism of the concurrent rise of private militarization,

information technology, unfettered neoliberal capital expansion, and of course nuclear

domination and/or proliferation. Additionally, I will study The Phantom Pain as a unique

site of Japanese-American cultural tension and collaboration presenting a resistance

narrative that criticizes America’s postwar imperialism in kind with Japanese power-

holders’ 21st century bid to remilitarize and nuclearize Japan.

The prolific stealth-action franchise is the brainchild of the infamously eccentric Japanese

video game director and auteur Hideo Kojima. Known for its esoteric characters, sleek

and unique mechanical design—all of which originate from Kojima’s long-time artistic

collaborator Yoji Shinkawa—and its often frustratingly convoluted plotlines, Metal Gear

has delighted stealth action fans for over three decades. What’s more, without Metal

Gear there probably wouldn’t be a stealth action genre as nearly every contemporary

game of the sort can trace its roots and inspiration back to 1987 with the launch of Metal

Gear on the MSX computer system. For fans of the franchise, or gaming broadly, the

104
names Kojima and Metal Gear carry a certain level of weight. Hobbyists unfamiliar with

the acute details of Metal Gear will still likely recognize Kojima’s name as he has

become somewhat of an icon in gaming: he is either a creative mastermind or an overly

ambitious charlatan depending who you ask. Regardless, Kojima’s games have a

reputation for delivering the unexpected. In The Phantom Pain, Kojima’s final foray into

the Metal Gear universe, the auteur and his studio attempt to conclude nearly thirty years

of game development, myth-making, and ever-present societal criticism. As a final note

towards this end, it should also be mentioned that The Phantom Pain that was delivered

to fans is almost certainly not The Phantom Pain that Kojima had intended. The release

of this game marked the auteur’s sudden departure from his long-time employer Konami

amid reports of creative and financial differences while he was already working on a new

Silent Hill horror game title for the company.128 The ordeal was dragged through the

video game press news cycles for several weeks, even receiving comment from The

Game Awards’ creator, presenter, and Kojima fan Geoff Keighley at what is arguably

akin to the Oscars of video games. This awkward division between Kojima and Konami

is commonly cited in gaming spaces as the reason that The Phantom Pain is unfinished

and therefore the game’s true meaning and politics—admittedly lost on many,

particularly fans with a weaker investment in the franchise—can never be discerned.

Contrastingly, this project will argue that this game is finished and serves as the self-

described “missing link” in the series’ narrative.

Samit Sarkar, “Konami’s Bitter, Yearlong Breakup with Hideo Kojima, Explained,” Polygon (blog),
128

December 16, 2015, https://www.polygon.com/2015/12/16/10220356/hideo-kojima-konami-explainer-

metal-gear-solid-silent-hills.

105
The aim of the beginning of this chapter is to explain how The Phantom Pain exploits

veteran-player familiarity to shape and then defy player expectations and manipulate

player behaviour. The Metal Gear narrative is separated into two timelines, one

beginning in the early ‘60s and ending around 1988, the other beginning right when the

latter ends and continuing onwards until 2014.129 Analyzing the entire series’ narrative is

beyond the scope of this project: the games are known for their frustratingly dense stories

propelled by long cinematic cutscenes.130 Instead I will provide a brief overview of the

franchises’ three main avatar player characters, Naked Snake/Big Boss, Venom

Snake/Punished Snake, and Big Boss’s cloned son—one of three—Solid Snake. Big Boss

is the first player protagonist and the progenitor of the series’ final player protagonist

Solid Snake. Originally a U.S. special-ops soldier, Big Boss becomes disillusioned with

the United States and forms his own private military nation and unwittingly develops the

“war economy” that will plague the game’s world until its chronological climax in Metal

Gear Solid 4, where the world is run in tandem by supercomputer AI and several

competing private military firms. Once he realizes his massive error in judgement, Big

Boss goes to ground and begins to undo his life’s work and aid his cloned son, Solid

Snake, in the process. Solid Snake is also a legendarily skilled infiltration operative and

remains committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons through his own soldierly

enterprise “Philanthropy.” Both Big Boss and Solid Snake espouse their own forms of

129
The series final installment chronologically is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and was released
in 2008.
130
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot’s final cutscene goes on for nearly an hour and a half, all
without requiring input from players.

106
anti-nuclear views but as the former prefers deterrence through the global ubiquity of

nuclear arms, the latter seeks complete global nuclear proliferation. Throughout each

prior installment—with one notable exception in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that

will be discussed in the succeeding section—players have controlled either Big Boss or

Solid Snake. In The Phantom Pain, players believe they are continuing Big Boss’s legacy

and accompanying him on his descent into villainy, but they are actually controlling

another body double, a medic of their own design who was present with Big Boss during

the attack that left him comatose for nearly a decade.131 Through surgery and hypnosis,

this soldier who I named “Aidan” is made to resemble Big Boss and assume his mantle

while the real legendary hero works from the shadows. The player character of MGSV,

“Venom Snake”, eventually becomes the series’ first main antagonist “Big Boss” in

Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Like an Ouroboros, the series leaves its

players right where it meets them, set to eat their own tail in a cycle of endless violence—

pretty good for a franchise whose first chronological instalment is simply subtitled Snake

Eater. If anything, this cycle of violence is the central narrative and political theme of the

Metal Gear Solid franchise: violence begets violence, and more specifically, nuclear-

armed capitalist imperialist violence will consume and expand itself until there is no

room left to grow. The Phantom Pain offers an indictment of contemporary global

American nuclear militarism and addresses the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party’s and

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s constitutional re-armament amendment efforts during the

131
The game begins with the player designing an avatar, naming them and assigning a birthdate (supposed
to be their own). This avatar isn’t seen throughout the game because they have been disguised as Big Boss,
but at the game’s conclusion this is revealed to the player.

107
2010s which peaked roughly around the time of this game’s release in 2015. Similarly,

like Akira, the Metal Gear canon does not fit neatly alongside its genre contemporaries: it

is esoteric where others are self-serious, introspective where others are shallow, and

frustrating in ways that will only begin to be explored in this concluding chapter. Now

that we have our perimeter established, let’s get dug in.

Kept You Waiting, Huh?

Snake’s first real mission in The Phantom Pain is to rescue his former second in

command, Benedict “Kazuhira” Miller, from a heavily defended Soviet outpost in rural

Afghanistan. Immediately this game sets itself apart from past entries in the franchise by

giving the player free reign of an open world minutes into the game. Players familiar with

the franchise remember the previous games’ levels as rigidly contained, consisting of

military base hallways, densely shrouded jungles, and top-secret development labs. On

the surface The Phantom Pain is telling you that it is something new, something

unexpected, and it continues to do so with each new mission. Specifically, the game

conceals the identity and location of the real “Big Boss” to convince the player to act as

an unwitting smokescreen dupe for the real legendary hero's return to power after nine

years of comatose absence. Mirroring Snake’s own return to violence, it has been a few

years since I last picked up Metal Gear Solid V and returned to the game’s mountainous

landscape. The first portion of The Phantom Pain is set amidst the Soviet invasion and

occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. At first I feel unfamiliar with the game’s

area of operation but the more I muddy and bloody my boots in the unforgiving desert,

the more I feel like I’ve come back to something familiar.

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At the game’s outset players must escape a Cypriot hospital with the help of a

mysteriously bandaged patient named “Ishmael.”132 The Phantom Pain’s prologue game

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes takes place nine years prior and concludes with a

surprise attack on the player’s already established seabound military complex “Mother

Base,” destroying it completely and killing most of the soldiers Snake and I recruited in

previous entries MGS: Portable Ops and Peace Walker. Snake then spends the interim

secretly recovering in Cyprus before the perpetrators of the initial attack finally catch up

with the legendary super-soldier. After escaping with Ishmael, players will then travel

with series mainstay “Revolver Ocelot” via the Suez Canal to Afghanistan, specifically a

remote rural region outside of Kabul. Ocelot, your foremost intelligence officer, briefs

Snake on the scope of the war, the Soviet and Mujahideen combatants involved, and the

landscape itself before sending him off into the wilderness. Ocelot’s last words before

departure sound equally encouraging and commanding: “let the legend come back to

life,” a line that specifically targets long-time fans of the series, players like me who have

invested hours into the Metal Gear mythos. So, there we sat Snake and I, atop our trusty

equine companion codenamed Diamond Horse with the vast expanse of the Afghan

desert unfolding before us, radiating heat, violence, and potential. It was time to get back

into the war business, rebuild my private army, and show the world who’s Boss.

Previous chapters in this project have attempted to sketch out a paternal relationship

between “Fat Man” America and “Little Boy'' Japan, following Murakami’s lead, and it is

132
As vengeance is a core theme of this game, and the obsession contained therein, Kojima has littered this
game’s plot with references to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

109
only fitting that this project conclude with a text and franchise that is endlessly obsessed

with relationships between fathers and sons. This final chapter will first explain how The

Phantom Pain dupes its players into demonhood applying theory from James Clinton

Howell’s “Driving Off the Map: A Formal Analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2” and the

Alexander R. Galloway’s work on the illusion of choice in games as an allegory—or

“allegorithm—for our contemporary informatized military society.” Then, I will

deliberately map the plot action and themes of The Phantom Pain onto the 21st century

U.S.-encouraged attempts towards Japanese remilitarization and nuclearization under

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Ultimately, this will demonstrate that The Phantom Pain is a

misunderstood anti-war epic, a game whose true meaning and philosophy requires dozens

of hours of play to uncover, and dozens more hours of narrative and franchise investment

to truly understand. Despite the confusion of its delivery The Phantom Pain presents a

resistant narrative that is enthralling and devastating in its warnings against global

imperial militarization and informatic control.

Metal Gear Scholar

The vast majority of existing scholarly on Metal Gear focuses on its geopolitical themes,

its criticism of capital, empire and militarism, and the series’ commentary on AI and

technological development. For example, Nick Dyer-Witheford has extensively

catalogued and analysed the series’ portrayal of the military-industrial complex, systems

of information and capital control, and its commentary on specifically U.S. imperialism

as it relates to Japanese sovereignty. In “Sneaking Mission: Late Imperial America and

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Metal Gear Solid” Dyer-Witheford and Derek Noon turn to series auteur Hideo Kojima’s

own explanation of the cross-cultural tension present in his games:

Kojima, who was born in 1963, has said that his father told
him stories of how, in the bombing of Tokyo, “he was
running the streets searching for shelter from the bombs
and fires” and “carried wounded children to safe places.”
These stories had “a tremendous impact” on Kojima. His
father’s attitude to the United States “was like walking a
tightrope”; he “hates the Americans for the war” but “when
he got older... accepted and finally fell in love with
American culture.” Kojima remarks “I believe I share that
tightrope ambiguity with my father.”133

Writing broadly on the series the two also add that what makes Metal Gear a uniquely

potent tool for criticizing nuclear foreign policy and militarism is “the way it posits a

critique of imperial power from within mainstream gaming’s culture of ‘militarized

masculinity.’ It operates... by offering a subversive possibility even while remaining

within a cultural niche close to the heart of American empire’s military-industrial-life

complex—that of the ‘hard core’ male gamer who is the most reliable consumer of war

and espionage games.”134 This framework can be applied easily to the entire series, but

fits exceedingly well into a discussion of The Phantom Pain because the game’s narrative

and political goals rely on its players’ investment in the franchise and on their willingness

to participate gleefully in the brutality of militarized global imperialism.

133
Derek Noon and Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Sneaking Mission: Late Imperial America and Metal Gear
Solid,” Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play
ed. J. Talmadge Wright, David G. Embrick, and Andras Lukacs, (Blue Ridge Summit: The Rowman &
Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010), 60.,
134
Ibid, 74.

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In Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience,

scholar Jonathan Boulter argues that Kojima’s games include a self-reflexive critique of

the video game medium and industry, and its participation in the military-industrial-

entertainment complex. Boulter refers to the franchise’s phenomenon of “VR training,”

through which recruits are made battle-ready through virtual simulated combat exercises

instead of field experience, as an obvious analogue for the role of video games in our

own world. He describes an interaction between series protagonist Solid Snake and one-

time series player character Raiden:

Snake’s wry commentary ends with a representation of

hundreds of virtual soldiers—all resembling Snake
himself—marching, as it were, to war. Kojima’s
commentary, self-reflexive, perhaps in some ways typically
postmodern, is clear: the medium he exploits to offer
commentary on the negative militarism inherent in global
politics is the same medium creating that militarism in the
first place. In some ways, Kojima seems to suggest, this
game is training his fans to become the very thing he
critiques.135

This project will continue this line of questioning that Boulter, Dyer-Witheford, and

Noon have begun, to explore how these aforementioned tensions and processes emerge in

the franchise’ final canonical entry, and asks towards what end does the series aim? As

Boulter describes in his introduction, to play and inhabit worlds and avatars is to engage

in posthuman fantasy, and to participate in “virtual tourism” not only in space, but in

subjectivity as well. When we play games like Metal Gear Solid, we briefly become

games like Metal Gear Solid, and must then learn to navigate the disparities between our

135
Jonathan Boulter, Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience,
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015 np.

112
“real” selves and the posthuman subjects we become during play, and even after while

we think about the virtual blood on our hands.

Since The Phantom Pain’s release in 2015, scholars from various disciplines have

attempted to examine the game through lenses that are both contradictory and analogous

to this project and its thesis. Critics of the game’s depiction of its landscapes and

narrative action appear to have misinterpreted the game’s key narrative twist as some

form of endorsement for the heinous acts that Venom and the player will commit through

play. These arguments are predicated on the game and its developers intending to obscure

the very real political themes in favour of increased marketability. Having played the

game in its entirety twice now, I am confused as to how someone could land on this

position, as the game very deliberately asks its players to participate in imperialist

violence by constructing conquerable and conflicted nations, 1980s Afghanistan and

Angola in this case, as military sandboxes. These analyses typically point to the same

evidence as my own project (the murder, kidnapping, resource extraction, etc.), only they

seem to forget that Venom Snake is not the hero of this game and was never meant to be.

Emil Lundedal Hammar’s article on the game explores how the game inaccurately

represents its various spaces and battlefields by arguing “In the game’s depiction of

Afghanistan...there is no sign of technological progress or civilization beyond military

installations, thereby reproducing the depiction of colonized countries as uncivilized and

conflicts only struggles over land without people or infrastructure.”136 Previously, he had

136
Emil Lundedal Hammar, “Manufacturing Consent in Video Games—The Hegemonic Memory Politics
of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015),” Nordlit, no. 42 (2019), 11.
https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5016.

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turned to Soraya Murray’s work On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender

and Space where she argues that the game’s imperialist themes are largely relegated to

optional audio-cassettes that will better inform players on the concurrent geopolitical

struggles of its particular theatres of war.137 What is perhaps absent from this reading of

the game’s refusal to comment strongly on imperialism, is the fact that as its main

character you are actually committing imperialism just by playing the game. The

argument that the game’s human geography is obscured to further its “apolitical” nature

is the opposite of what this chapter will argue. Soraya writes, “throughout the game,

spaces are visually treated as uninhabited, except by occupying Soviet soldiers. In the

clusters of buildings and rundown maze-like villages, through which one engages in

semi-urban warfare, the inference [sic] made by the nature of the space is that they no

longer contain Afghanis engaged in their everyday lives.”138 The game presents its world

and characters as empty to dupe its players into being unwitting perpetrators of colonial

violence by presenting them with “dream” spaces and arsenals to play in and with.

Soraya refers to the term “dreamwork” to explain how The Phantom Pain constructs the

action of imperialism on virtual landscapes that do not resemble real spaces, but

specifically designed action combat environments. She expands:

Particular kinds of fantasies are enacted within a fully

realized simulation that purports itself as given and
inevitable, although it is not. And, in relation to third-
person perspective games, the configuration of a playable
character in the frame repeats the paradigmatic situation of

137
Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space, Reprint edition
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) 162.
138
Ibid, 151.

114
 figure within the pictorial landscape, albeit a dynamic one,
in which we, too, lose and find ourselves.139

What Soraya sees as a political weakness of this game; I interpret as one of its foremost

strengths; The Phantom Pain allows its players to construct their own villainous origins

before telling them that they’ve been controlling the villain all along. Soraya’s argument

maintains that this departure from the real Angola or Afghanistan somehow weakens the

game’s political allegory but, as I will argue in this chapter, it achieves the opposite by

empowering the player to exert their will, and Venom’s will as well, on the landscape

with no regard for collateral damage. This chapter's next section will provide a deep

description of these processes in action to better articulate how the game constructs and

empowers its player and player character as neo-colonial super-beings to directly provide

political commentary, not bury it.

More analogous to this project, scholar Amy M. Green has already mined the game for its

mediation of trauma, and post traumatic stress disorder. In her introduction, Green

actually offers her own convincing rebuttal to Soraya and Hammar’s assertion that the

game is scrubbed of politics to make it more marketable:

Although much of the critique and narrative exploration is

aimed at America’s own specific actions post 9/11 in many
areas of the Middle East and in its war against terrorism,
The Phantom Pain also explores a larger web of Western
incursions and influence across the Middle East, while also
more generally exploring despotism and cruelty, as in its
exploration of the trauma inflicted on African child
soldiers.140

139
Murray, “The Landscape of Games as Ideology,” On Video Games, 144.
140
Amy M. Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma, and History in Metal Gear Solid V (Springer,
2017) 4.

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Arguably, the fact that we only see private military contractors and child soldiers on the

battlefield is more of a commentary on the contemporary nature of global warfare, more

so than a distinct remediation of 1980s’ proxy conflicts. It is beyond the scope of this

project to comment exhaustively on the decades-long conglomeration of state and private

military power in the West, specifically concerning the U.S.’ defence spending, but

luckily writers like William Hartung for Jacobin have already done this work. Writing

about the close of the U.S. ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, Hartung explains “Since the

start of the Afghanistan War in 2001, Pentagon spending has totaled a staggering $14

trillion. And half of it has gone directly to the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. empire:

defense contractors.”141 He continues:

The number of personnel deployed and the revenues

received by security and reconstruction contractors grew
dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on.
The Congressional Research Service estimated that by
March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq
and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed
military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final
report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and
Afghanistan put the figure even higher, stating that
“contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence
in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at
times employing more than a quarter-million people.”142

Coinciding with Green’s analysis of The Phantom Pain’s space and politics, it is clear to

see that although it is set during the 1980s, the game is much more focused on

interrogating the contemporary nature of privatized military spending and the erosion of

141
“U.S. Empire Is Lining the Pockets of Defense Contractors,” Jacobin, accessed October 26, 2021,
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/united-states-war-iraq-afghanistan-profiteering-defense-contractors.
142
Hartung, “U.S. Empire Is Lining the Pockets,” Jacobin.

116
the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as determined by the Treaty of Westphalia

1648.143 This chapter will continue to argue that the game’s construction of its world and

conflicts as primarily profit-driven imperialist exercises, and its tacit invitation for

Venom and the player to take part, is at the core of The Phantom Pain’s rhetorical

potency.

As one can surmise from the game's subtitle The Phantom Pain, trauma, injury, loss, and

memory are all key themes at play here. Green explains, “The idea of phantom pain

permeates the game’s narrative and is the intended player focus of the entire game, across

all its initially seemingly disparate narrative pieces and characters. Phantom pain finds

form literally, as Miller and Snake experience the literal loss of their limbs, and

symbolically via the continued mental anguish of the characters.”144 Explaining the

psychosomatic phenomenon of “phantom pain,” Green elaborates that to feel the pain of

limbs, or comrades, lost implies that the game’s construction of the “body” is also core to

its politics.145 Mother Base becomes “crippled” after the surprise attack nine years ago,

just like Miller does, losing his arm, leg, and eyesight. Venom loses his arm, allowing the

game to provide another anachronistic biomechanical appendage for the player that, like

everything else in the game, can be upgraded and customized to suit the player’s desired

method of play. Unlike Snake, Miller forgoes prosthetics and claims that the Diamond

Dog’s new soldiers will be his limbs, and later in a bout of extreme paranoia, his eyes.

“Peace of Westphalia | Definition, Map, Results, & Significance,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed
143

October 26, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/event/Peace-of-Westphalia.

144
Green, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 108.
145
Ibid.

117
Green’s work deftly navigates this tension with respect to the game as a tool for better

understanding how post-traumatic injuries affect individuals, particularly soldiers. This

chapter will conclude by extending this metaphor of phantom pain onto the international

level, concerning the postwar relationship between Japan and America. In the surprise

attack on Mother Base, Kaz, Venom, and Huey essentially endure their own microcosmic

version of surprise nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating events that

will leave them literally in tattered pieces, with an urge to rebuild, re-arm, and avenge

their lost comrades.

Let the Legend Come Back to Life

I wanted this chapter to include a dense description of a typical Phantom Pain gameplay

experience I had that I feel is quintessentially Metal Gear while paradoxically only

possible in the franchise’s final instalment. Largely due to previously unavailable

hardware requirements, Kojima was never able to demonstrate “the battlefield” like this

before, as a living and changing environment. As was explained earlier, levels in previous

installments have all felt cloistered: while the games have always offered branching paths

and multiple routes through predefined areas, players have never before been able to go

virtually wherever they want. To my mind The Phantom Pain owes its critical success to

a near seamless and simultaneous amalgamation of its constantly changing open world

action gameplay and more passive base-building. The combination of completing a

perfect stealth infiltration of an enemy base while your soldiers simultaneously develop

the latest weaponry easily achieves its desired effect: as a player in control of Snake you

begin to feel unstoppable. The play session I will describe next surmises the core

118
gameplay loop in The Phantom Pain and will be used to explore the game’s mechanics

and how they operate in concert to covertly warn the player of the pitfalls of such a

ruthlessly expansive global military project.

Snake and I were out in the field completing “Side Ops,” an extensive series of optional

missions that net us specialist soldiers, base development resources, and extra income for

my fledgling soldier’s paradise. I’ve taken to calling my business “Silver Zeroes,” our

logo is a rat: I thought a rodent served the scrappy upstart nature of the biz and “Silver

Zeroes” is a nod to the game’s major “you’re not actually playing as the legendary Big

Boss” plot device. After all, he is the series’ original golden boy. I decided we should

probably move the game’s main story along so I opened my iDroid, a handheld

holographic display device through which all base information flows and selected the

sixth main mission “Where Do the Bees Sleep.” A waypoint marker appeared on my map

and Diamond Horse and I were off to find the electronic briefing package our Support

team had delivered to the field. I also took the opportunity to reequip myself, calling in a

supply drop via a marker grenade, and a change of camouflage. My old fatigues were

caked in blood and their woodland pattern wouldn’t help me in the mountain pass I

would be sneaking through next. The Phantom Pain lets players customize each piece of

their equipment either during mission deployment or through supply drops delivered to

the field. I opened my map to plot my course, D-Horse and I would need to sneak along a

winding mountain road, through a Soviet array base and a couple of scattered lookout

posts into a captured Mujahideen base at the end of the trail. This was going to be a trek.

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Along the pass I was discovered by enemy patrols several times. I mentioned I haven’t

played in years; I like to think that the rust in my own gamer gears makes sense in light

of Snake’s nine-year coma. We were just warming up. Eventually I was able to infiltrate

the base at the end of the pass, I took a surveying glance through my scope being sure to

focus on each enemy combatant and piece of equipment I could spy so they would be

marked and visible. Game mechanics like marking help emulate Snake’s nearly

superhuman sensory awareness: once an enemy has been surveyed deliberately through

your scope, you can always tell where they are. The pass opened up into a wide

cylindrical basin, the opposite side of which was excavated into cliff dwellings, shelter

for the Mujahideen resistance fighters. I knew that the guerillas would have stashed the

experimental “Honey Bee” launcher system—a play on the “Stinger” missile system

supplied to the Mujahideen by the United States for shooting down Russian gunships and

other aircraft—would be deep in the encampment. Through my reconnaissance I was able

to tally up around ten enemy combatants in the basin, but I had no way to tell how many

more were inside the cliff dwelling searching for Uncle Sam’s secret weapon. Snake and

I crept slowly around the outskirts of the basin, keeping low and sticking to shadows to

avoid detection. When enemy soldiers were directly in our path a quick headshot from

my suppressed tranquilizer pistol made for a quick fix. I planted C4 explosive charges on

the base’s radar array, its anti-air gun installment, and its comms equipment. My trap was

set.

Snake and I took a moment to survey our surroundings once more before calling in the

cavalry. I dialed up Pequod on my iDroid and requested a fire support mission. Moments

120
later I could hear the distant reverberations of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” playing as my

helicopter approached in support.146 Predictably, the Soviet guards scrambled to

defensive positions, at which point I detonated my C4, destroying their bases’

infrastructure, protecting Pequod, and cutting them off from calling for reinforcements. A

few more soldiers emerged from the cliffs to aid their comrades in the basin, and I snuck

right past, grabbed the “Honey Bee” and made for the exit. At this point the game’s main

plot takes over and in usual Metal Gear fashion Snake is attacked by psychoactive

commandos called “Skulls Parasyte Soldiers” who infect the newly dead and return them

to the line of duty as shambling zombie soldiers. Unfortunately for Snake, Pequod and I

had wracked up quite a body count, meaning more zombie soldiers to deal with on top of

the Skulls already in the field. Eventually we were able to fight our way through and

rejoin Pequod to extract back to Mother Base, mission complete.

I have chosen to include this deep narrative description of one single outing in The

Phantom Pain because it is paradoxically typical and completely novel. I had never

attempted to complete this particular mission in this way but knowing that I had the

freedom to try whatever I wanted just made me want to come back and replay it with a

completely different approach. I chose a very lethal method which also means no new

recruits, no expansion for Mother Base. What if I went in completely silently instead, no

fire support and no lethal weapons? What if I had a “liberated” Soviet T72 tank deployed

with me from Mother Base? For a player raised on a healthy stream of Arnold and Sly,

146
The game features a robust catalogue of 1908s’ pop hits and series mainstay songs that can be hooked
up to your helicopter’s AV system to play as it enters the level. When called in on fire missions the
helicopter provides a backing track for whatever carnage Snake is currently creating.

121
the possibilities are nearly endless, and they are exciting. The game recognizes this and

traps its players in endless loops of violent possibility, offering them a constant stream of

upgraded weapons and gear to use against Big Boss’ enemies. The Phantom Pain is

essentially an open world military sandbox that presents problems with no fixed

solutions, it is up to Snake and the player to decide how each objective is met. Ultimately

this level of freedom and control directly leads to a deepened investment in the game, its

story, its systems, and most of all its avatar. In addition, nearly every single decision or

tactical choice I described making in the field was related to a previous managerial or

administrative decision I had made concerning Mother Base. I knew Pequod could

survive a sustained firefight because I had upgraded the helicopter’s armour, I knew what

the Russian soldiers were saying because I had previously recruited a linguistic

interpreter to my intelligence team. This is The Phantom Pain working exactly as

intended, a concert of strategic planning, resource development, and on the fly thinking

all aided by the game’s various overlapping systems. The customization doesn’t end

there.

Players can kitbash different assault rifles together into their dream weapon, apply

cosmetic and equipment changes to your transport helicopter designated “Pequod” and

even personally outfit your base’s elite security detail. This hardly scratches the surface

of what The Phantom Pain allows its players to do with regards to managing their own

soldiers' paradise. Mother Base’s management systems all flow together into a seamless

convergence of military bureaucracy and childish experimentation in a manner that is

surprisingly engrossing. It also serves to deepen my connection to the Silver Zeroes: I

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recruited these soldiers myself by out of their outposts and bases using the “Fulton

Recovery System,” a rather cartoonish device with a self-inflating balloon that whisks

unconscious or surrendered soldiers into the air for high-altitude retrieval. From there

they are sent to the brig until they can be reasonably convinced of the righteousness of

the Silver Zero’s plan to establish a stateless nuclear superpower, all for revenge. More

experienced soldiers with specific skill sets may take longer to convince than more

rudimentary grunts. These elite soldiers’ skills—like the Russian interpreter, or the

gunsmith I need to kitbash my weapons, or the bio-augmenticist I need to upgrade

Snake’s multifunction bionic arm—connect me to my private army, and further indulge

my power and revenge fantasies. They thought they could destroy the army I spent

hundreds of hours assembling in Peace Walker? They’re going to learn from their

mistakes.

Venom Maps, Mother Base, and Phantom Limbs

Readers will notice that I have only mentioned the game’s official “antagonist” in vague

terms, a secret U.S. military organization known as “Cipher” represented by a burned and

disfigured Jack Palance-type named “Skullface.” In short, Skullface plans to disseminate

a language-activated parasite that will rid the world of every language except English and

to arm every conceivable world power with its own nuclear weapon, all of which he will

retain secret control over. Players will eagerly battle this organization across the globe all

the while expecting some great reveal: which enigmatic fan-favourite villain will

Skullface be revealed to be? As it turns out, he’s no one, just another lost dupe spreading

violence in the name of revenge, he isn’t even the main villain of this story. You are. I

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am. In the game’s final mission, a restructured version of “Prologue: Awakening” the

player learns that the character they have played as the entire game is not Big Boss.

Instead, the player has been controlling a medic character—named “Aidan” in my case—

who was present during the coma-inducing helicopter crash and who underwent plastic

surgery to resemble Big Boss.

In James Clinton Howell’s work “Driving off the Map: A formal analysis of Metal Gear

Solid 2” he refers to player expectations as “maps” to be followed based on existing game

knowledge and insight,

A map can be dangerous. We tend to see what we are

prepared to see, and maps prepare our expectations. A
traveler might wander for hours when he trusts a flawed
map more than directions from the locals.147

When read through this mapping lens, it is clear that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom

Pain prefers uncharted territory. The game manipulates its players’ expectations and

continues to uproot them completely through a series of deliberate design decisions.148

The aim of this section is to explain how The Phantom Pain exploits veteran-player

familiarity with Metal Gear broadly to first shape and then defy player expectations and

manipulate player behaviour. Specifically, the game lies to its player about who the real

“Big Boss” is—remember Ishmael?—to convince the player to act as an unwitting

smokescreen dupe for the real legendary hero's return to power after nine years of

comatose absence. Originally, Clinton-Howell was writing about Metal Gear Solid 2:

147
James Clinton Howell, “D-T-G || Driving Off the Map,” https://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/.
np.
148
Ibid.

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Sons of Liberty which begins with a short prologue section where players control Solid

Snake through “the tanker incident.” Two years later narratively, play resumes with

“Raiden,” a VR (virtual reality) trained recruit on his first infiltration mission picking up

the threads left by Snake’s disappearance two years prior. As Howell points out, Raiden

was meant to be a clearer analogue for the players who obviously had more in common

with a bratty, over-eager gamer than a stoic and legendary infiltration expert:

MGS2 used the medium’s particular qualities to manipulate

both the player and the actor when they stitched their
identities together. At the start of the Plant Chapter,
Raiden’s Commanding Officer (C. O.) told him to access a
digital node, to which Raiden responded: “Did you say
nerd?” When Raiden accessed the node, the player had
input his own name that later appeared on Raiden’s
dogtags. MGS2 bound Raiden to the player—a nerd—when
Raiden accessed the node, and it bound the player to an
actor who he didn’t always like but who obeyed his
commands, even when those actions violated Raiden’s
character.

I am choosing to return to Howell’s work on MGS2 as it provides an excellent foundation

for exploring The Phantom Pain. As with Solid Snake, the franchise has worked

tirelessly to establish a mythos for its protagonist Big Boss throughout MGS3, MGS:

Portal Ops, MGS: Peace Walker, and MGSV: Ground Zeroes. These myths and markers

are then operationalized against The Phantom Pain’s player by exploiting their

expectations and emotional investment in Metal Gear and its characters. Howell’s work

also helps establish the continuum of subversive meta-commentary that Kojima’s

hallmark franchise has employed since their inception: players rarely know what it is

they're actually doing, let alone who they’re doing it as, and even less who they are doing

it for. The remainder of this section will closely examine the differences in the

125
expectations and Big Boss myths as they compare to the reality of “Venom Snake” who

players control in The Phantom Pain. By feeding the player an endless stream of

encouragement, often bordering on hero-worship, the game allows its players to tell on

themselves, to act in ways they believe a legendary soldier like Big Boss would act and

begin their descent into posthuman demonhood. Borrowing Howell’s terminology, it is

clear to see that players of The Phantom Pain experience this same phenomenon, based

on the game’s key narrative twist. The Phantom Pain denies player expectations of

navigating the “Big Boss Map” and instead they come to realize they have been

constructing a new narrative for a character that neither acts nor performs exactly like the

real Big Boss, only as a double made in the image of his myth and reputation: a demon.

This dissonance is what allows players to apply their expectations for the performativity

of Big Boss to Venom Snake, and also allows for a deeper implicit connection to the

latter who becomes the series’ main villain moving forward. Continuing with Howell,

The Phantom Pain intentionally confuses the dichotomy between puppet and player,

following behind one of its predecessors, Sons of Liberty, but the meaning is nearly the

inverse. If Sons of Liberty taught its players that anyone could be the hero Solid Snake,

The Phantom Pain teaches its players on its surface that anyone could become a demon if

one makes the wrong choices. However, the work the game actually achieves is in

instructing its players that personal choice rarely matters and that militarism for any sake

is an exercise in depravity, no matter how noble, emotionally driven, or egalitarian its

original intentions may have been. In short, players may have nearly unlimited choice

over how they complete their missions, so long as they continue to complete those

126
missions, amass more wealth, resources, weaponry, and soldiers. Al is accomplished in

the name of revenge, to heal phantom wounds.

To further my exploration of one of The Phantom Pain’s core themes I have turned to

Alexander R. Galloway’s essay “Allegories of Control” which argues that increased

freedom of choice in games is evidence of a strengthening of control politics and not the

opposite, as one might immediately assume. Galloway uses the allegory of the freeway to

explain his thinking here, and to draw connections between the material world and the

digital worlds presented in games. He makes a point of noting that “to play the game

means to play the code of the game. To win the game means to know the system.” With

relation to freeways, he explains that the material form—what would be “the code”—of

the freeway is antithetical to the signified concept of freeway. These roadways emerged

at a particular point in history with supposedly liberatory aims: freedom of mobility,

speed of transport, the expansion of supply chains to serve greater geographic distances,

but in actuality a freeway is simply a new form of control. It constrains its users by

offering the illusion of freedom so that they don’t seek more; a freeway offers limitless

potential for motorists so long as they stay within the lines, use the proper entrances and

exits, and continue along in the seamless flow of bodies and steel. Galloway concludes:

Video games are allegories for our contemporary life under

the protocological network of continuous informatic control
In fact, the more emancipating games seem to be as a
medium, substituting activity for positivity or a branching
narrative for a linear one, the more they are in fact hiding

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 the fundamental social transformation into informatics that
has affected the globe during recent decades.149

Metal Gear’s gameplay works in a nearly identical fashion, players are presented nearly

limitless choices on how to commit violence and develop nuclear-military proto-

statehood, but they are not given the choice to pursue different ends. Narratively, this is

because the player is not actually the game’s hero and never was, but informatically we

must consider that this is also a limitation of the game’s material existence, of the fact

that it is a digital object confined by computer language. Although the game presents its

players with various open military sandboxes, its narrative and political conclusions are

not fluid. Whether the players understand the stories’ core twist or not, they still must

play by the game’s rules. Beyond just games themselves, Galloway argues this shift from

disciplinary control to informatic control appears as “a larger process of

postmodernization that is happening the world over.150 Galloway expands on the

symptoms of informatic control in contemporary culture:

[These symptoms] are seen whenever a company like

Microsoft outsources a call center from Redmond to
Bangalore, or in the new medical surveillance networks
scanning global health databases for the next outbreak of
SARS. Even today’s military has redefined itself around
network and computer-centric modes of operation: pilot
interfaces for remotely operated Predator aircraft mimic
computer game interfaces; captains in the U.S. Army learn
wartime tactics through video games like Full Spectrum
Command... in the military’s Future Combat Systems
initiative, computer networks themselves are classified as
weapons systems.151

149
Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Electronic Mediations 18
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006,) 106.
150
Ibid, 88.
151
Ibid.

128
His last few examples here are of the most immediate relevance to this project, as they

too are concerned with the conglomeration of information technology and the military.

Anachronistic information technology is littered all throughout The Phantom Pain but is

mostly localized in the player’s “iDroid” device that acts as an omni-tool for all your

militaristic superpower needs. The game’s choice to provide a technological object within

its story that serves this purpose, rather than just non-diegetic menus, like all other

choices in this game, is a pointedly political one. The iDroid offers players nearly

limitless freedom to commit violence the way they want, so long as committing violence

is what they aim to do. The fact that the player and avatar interface with secret futuristic

military hardware frequently throughout the game furthers The Phantom Pain’s critique

of the conglomeration of informatic control and the global military industrial complex by

placing the power to participate in that future, our future, in your hands.

The iDroid is also remarkably adept at obscuring and offshoring death, destruction, and

profiteering into easily digestible trickles of on-screen data through the game’s “Combat

Deployment” feature. As Venom Snake and the player continue to rebuild Mother Base

they are eventually able to assign combat units to military support contracts the world

over. Deployment missions are carried out offscreen and include such objectives as “Far

Waters Exploitation,” “Ambush the Medical Supply Caravan” and “Assassinate the

Dictator.” Completed combat deployments award Gross Military Product (GMP) which

is the game’s main unit of currency. The player’s payment is accepted through the

“Rewards” menu which also provides casualty and injury information for your deployed

units. I rarely spend any time focusing on these losses as replacing my dead comrades has

129
never been easier or more efficient now that I can just deploy units on “Staff

Headhunting” missions that are tantamount to human trafficking campaigns. Combat

Deployments are a key facet of The Phantom Pain’s gameplay loop which aids in the

player’s construction of an endless cycle of violence, and the deployment missions’

rhetorical potency stems mainly from their completely clean, streamlined presentation.

We don’t get to engage in the action occurring on deployment, we only see the numbers,

and the numbers are always climbing. As the game goes on, Snake can construct

additional “Forward Operating Bases” (FOBs) and dispatch more concurrent deployment

missions. Eventually, you are even able to use the game’s online multiplayer

functionality to invade other players’ FOBs, kidnap or kill their soldiers, and steal their

materials.

What more potent allegory could we need for the limitations of individual choice in

informatic society than to view our own lives as coded, scripted events. Moreover, the

point of Metal Gear demanding its players grapple with this idea is the opposite. Players

are encouraged to break the cycle of violence in their own lives where Venom Snake is

found incapable of doing so. This dissonant element—a narrative and ludological schism

between the player’s goals and Snake’s goals—of The Phantom Pain’s rhetorical work

demonstrates a maturation of the series’ politics into adulthood. As was previously

discussed, games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty directly confront the

informatic control society as a rhizomatic and nearly inextinguishable blight on the

formation of the contemporary self. The game calls constant attention to its own

construction as code, as a game, to inform its players. The Phantom Pain offers an

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inversion of this concept, and as series fans are quick to notice, represents a formal

ludological and narrative inversion as well.

Men Become Demons

As The Phantom Pain’s narrative continues, players are tasked with diversifying their

military industrial portfolios, so to speak. Supposedly an act of altruism, Snake will

eventually begin to swipe child soldiers off the battlefield and hold them at Mother Base

where they can do “simple jobs” and “have a chance at a real life.” Only Huey Emmerich

voices any opposition to this trend, and over the latter half of the game his voice is

employed sparingly to serve as opposition to Kazuhira Miller’s paranoid machismo.

Huey eventually helps the children escape with the Diamond Dog’s newly acquired Metal

Gear superweapon “Sahelanthropus,” helps Snake’s enemies launch a second viral attack

against Mother Base and is eventually exiled for his attempts to sabotage the player’s

ruthless military expansionism. He is also adamantly opposed to the idea of Mother Base

developing its own nuclear arsenal, a plan that is obviously championed by Kaz, with the

player caught in the middle. Ultimately, the choice to go nuclear is up to you, up to me.

In the game’s logic, developing a nuclear weapon serves as a deterrent for other players

who might try to steal your resources and soldiers, knowing they could be nuked if they

are found responsible.

“Episode 43: Shining Lights, Even in Death” requires the player to murder his own

soldiers to prevent the outbreak of the weaponized virus on Mother Base. In this strictly

linear mission, the player is forced to procedurally sweep from room to room on their

“quarantine platform” systematically executing the soldiers that they recruited earlier in

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the game. Although the game does not offer the player a choice, there is still a level of

implied responsibility, which serves to strengthen the player’s emotional attachment to

Venom Snake, but also to the Diamond Dogs at large. In an overtly dramatic scene,

bordering on the absurd, Venom is named by Huey as the inciting cause of the disaster,

he then spreads the ashes of his fallen comrades over his face and declares,

I won’t scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will

always be with you. Plant your roots in me… I won’t see
you end as ashes, you’re all diamonds… We’ll make
diamonds from their ashes, take them into battle with us.

Here, Venom is at his most sympathetic, portrayed as a loving father figure to his fallen

soldiers, while paradoxically being presented at his most demonic. Preceding cinematics

show the forlorn “hero” trudging through the blood-caked halls of Mother Bases’

quarantine platform, while equally caked in blood himself. This moment is an outlier in

the game, as Huey blames the player for the murder of Diamond Dogs, ironically, when

they are not given choice. In previous installments, players are criticized for committing

excess violence by other characters in the game, but throughout the majority of The

Phantom Pain, the player is free to act as violently as they desire, to perform as Big Boss

and lend credence to his terrifying legend without criticism from the game or its

characters, save Huey.

The game also features a number of torture sequences where captured soldiers, loyal

Diamond Dogs, and named series mainstays alike are zapped, injected, and beaten.

Scholar I. Girina explains:

Crucially, the reification of power is a statement of the

agency of the torturer, which can only be uttered through
the pain exhibited on the body of the tortured. In visual
terms, the agency of the torturer is vicariously shared with

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 the spectator via camera, who takes part in the event as a
witness through the photographic apparatus. The
problematic relationship between torture, its representation
and fruition is not exclusive of video games which are only
an instance of wider discourses on media violence.152

If the reader needed further clarification or evidence to support this project’s claim that

you are not the hero of this story, this example should serve. In The Phantom Pain, the

player is both the perpetrator, voyeur, and victim of torture, the latter albeit is less literal

and more emotional. Girina extends their analysis of the game’s torture mechanics

beyond its cinematics and criticizes the core gameplay “interrogation” mechanic as an

exercise in torture as well. To interrogate an enemy soldier, Venom must sneak up behind

them and initiate a grab and choke hold. From this point, the player is free to interrogate

the soldier for crucial mission information, execute the soldier by slashing their throat, or

subdue the soldier nonlethally by choking. For Girina:

The metaphor of the world is literalised in The Phantom

Pain, as the interrogation takes place on the field and the
player gathers information on the virtual world, mapping it
in order to achieve control of it. The torture-interrogation
mechanic mirrors the structure of torture as it becomes a
manifestation of the player’s agency over the world through
the tortured body.153

Each soldier we torture, capture, interrogate, train, and brainwash is another facet of the

game’s overarching warning to players, that militarism is akin to demonhood, and that its

logics and politics should be resisted with intense vigour. As Venom we torture our

I. Girina, “‘Needs to Be Done’: The Representation of Torture in Video Games and in Metal Gear Solid
152

V” (Routledge, 2018), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429397851-9, 3-4.

153
Ibid, 14.

133
enemies, torture our allies, torture the natural world, and torture the completely innocent,

all in the name of expansion and revenge. In games where players control “Solid Snake,”

the actual hero of the franchise, this is made clear, as it is only the “Big Boss” games

where players build these destructive forces, Solid Snake’s only interest is in tearing them

down.

As a cultural product of Japan, Venom’s tendency towards violence is seen mirrored in

Japanese mythology, due to his representation as a demon, or “oni”. Michelle Osterfeld

Li explains that in Japanese mythology, an oni is “sorrowful” and shares a deep

connection to human emotion.154 Additionally, the transformation from human to oni is

connected to an unrelenting desire for revenge. Osterfeld Li goes on to explain how

diachronic representations of demons have become more sympathetic, rather than being

outright monstrous. Venom Snake can be understood as an extension of this tradition; his

protruding shrapnel horn grows as he commits more violent actions but also marks him as

“demon.” This process is abstracted from the player in the form of a hidden “Demon

Score” that accumulates if players choose to develop nuclear weapons or kill enemy

soldiers rather than recruit them. As my second play through of the game concluded, I

too decided to develop a nuclear weapon for the Silver Zeroes. After spending an

immense amount of fuel, metal and GMP, I was then asked to wait one real world day for

my R&D team to complete development. When I logged back in the next day, my

“Heroism” score had dropped 50,000 points from 200,000 to 150,000, and my Demon

Michelle Osterfeld Li, “Human of the Heart: The Pitiful Oni in Medieval Japan,” The Ashgate Research
154

Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Brookfield, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group,
2012), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=4920515. 174, 175.

134
score had likely risen in parallel. I also noticed that Snake’s fatigues would stay bloody

even when I changed them in the equipment menu; I took a ride back to Mother Base and

hit the showers, only to find that the blood wouldn’t wash off. Developing the Silver

Zeroes’ first nuclear weapon had transformed Venom into “Demon Snake,” a hidden

alternate state for the character that kept him caked in dried blood and extended his

shrapnel “horn” further out of his head, adding to the villain’s demonic characteristics,

again an unsubtle nod to the character’s growing villainy. Hero and Demon scores affect

whether Snake is loved or feared by his soldiers, the skills and temperaments of recruits

that Mother Base will periodically attract, and the types of ghost stories enemy soldiers

will tell each other about the legendary “Big Boss.” Every time I hear a Soviet grunt

recount one of my vicious exploits, I smile. It should also be noted that what the game

considers “Heroics” are not actually altruistic, they simply represent the economic growth

of Mother Base. Soldiers and children captured and brainwashed add to your Hero rating

because they grow your company’s influence and resources. This system would perhaps

more accurately be titled the “Imperialism Score” but that sounds a lot less heroic.

Demonhood is the game's goal for its player as evidenced by The Phantom Pain’s

narrative which sees the transformation of Venom Snake into the villain “Big Boss” who

served as the series’ first villain. Essentially, through nearly unlimited acts of malice and

coercion, one unsuspecting helicopter medic and his gamer puppeteer have become the

worlds’ foremost militarized monster, a nuclear-equipped boogieman who kidnaps and

brainwashes soldiers into joining his aimlessly violent cause. During the game’s

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conclusion, the player will receive an audiocassette from the actual Big Boss himself,

stating that,

You’ve written your own history, you’re your own man.

I’m Big Boss, and you are too… no… he’s the two of us
together. Where we are today, we built it. This story, this
‘legend,’ it’s ours. We can change the world, and with it,
the future.

Thus, the game implicates both player character and player in the larger series’ plot

movements. The change observed in the world is one towards militaristic control and

neoliberalization which eradicates all state power in favour of privatised industrial

military. Again, this is the real Big Boss continuing the lie, he does not ever intend to aid

Venom Snake in world domination, only to continue to inflame his—my—ego and

encourage future villainy. Until this point in the chapter my work has dealt near-

exclusively with how The Phantom Pain achieves its political aims through dissonance

between myth, player, and avatar but I have not yet acutely covered the why, the so what?

What can we make of the world I helped build in Kojima’s game, and how can we apply

its lessons to our world outside the gamespace?

A War Without End

As this project begins to close, I will continue to interpret this game as both an indictment

of U.S. militarism and a warning to Japan teetering on the cusp of remilitarization.

Earlier sections of this project have already discussed the socio-political vassalhood that

the American re-writing of the Japanese postwar constitution created, but this concluding

chapter is more focused on the future than the past, as is The Phantom Pain. This

chapter’s concluding section will draw on scholarship and coverage of recent Japanese-

136
American military policy changes that point towards rearmament and will then explain

how this debate, between remilitarization and continued anti-militarism, serves as the

core dramatic and philosophical thrust of The Phantom Pain, particularly in its latter half

once the player has defeated Skullface and his plots. With no enemy left to seek

vengeance on, the Diamond Dogs begin to look inward with intense scrutiny, paranoia,

and a tragic descent into villainy.

Writing in 1993, scholar Thomas U. Berger claims that remilitarization is unlikely for

postwar Japan, not due to any “structural factor” like dependence of foreign trade or an

absence of foreign political threats, but instead because what he describes as “Japan’s

postwar culture of anti-militarism” that he claims, “has its roots in collective Japanese

memories of the militarist takeover in the 1930s and the subsequent disastrous decision to

go to war with America.” He continues to explain that “Japan’s culture of anti-militarism

originally developed under the aegis of a benevolent U.S. hegemon during the 1950s and

1960s.” Given what this project has already explored concerning the “benevolence” of

this hegemon, perhaps anti-militarism in Japan does not originate from American

intervention, quite the opposite. The purpose of Japanese constitution Article 9, drafted

by U.S. statesmen, was to install pro-U.S. puppet leadership and to prevent the rebuilding

devastated nation from taking up arms against its new occupier, among other things.155

As relations between the two powers have smoothed through the rise of neoliberalism

and the collapse of the Soviet Union we see a very clear trend of cooperative

155
Japan: Interpretations of Article 9 of the Constitution, Law Library of Congress: Global Legal Research
Center, 2015.

137
remilitarization occurring between The U.S. and its long-time vassal, particularly under

the leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Abe is a legacy career politician whose family has remained firmly entrenched in

political and economic power through the Japanese Empire and throughout the postwar

period. Abe’s maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi oversaw the occupation of China and

Manchukuo, the WWII Japanese puppet state in Manchuria.156 Upon Japan’s defeat,

rather predictably considering America’s postwar rehabilitation of Nazis officials and

scientists, American powermakers sought only to reward Abe’s inscrutable instrumental

rationality with prestigious political appointments in their anti-communist “Liberal

Democratic Party.”157 This is the same party under which his grandson Shinzo would lead

the nation from 2006 to 2007 and then again from 2012 to 2020. It is also the party that

was massively supported by the CIA and other U.S. state apparatuses throughout the

early postwar period as a means of combating the growing trends of socialism and

communism that largely sought to—correctly—distance Japanese policymaking from

external imperialist factors, chiefly the U.S.158 Throughout his terms as president, Abe

made significant efforts to remilitarize the island nation. His cabinet argued for

remilitarization as a means of securing increased political autonomy for Japan, a stronger

156
Ofer Feldman and Linda O. Valenty, Profiling Political Leaders: Cross-Cultural Studies of Personality
and Behavior (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001), 173.
157
Ibid 177-180.
158
Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,” The New York Times,
October 9, 1994, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-
japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html.

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prepared self-defence force, and perhaps most importantly, the ability for the Japanese

military to deploy its forces in support of its long-term Western ally.

Concerning this ally, scholar Christopher W. Hughes has written at length about what he

describes as the “Abe Doctrine” and the contemporary state of U.S.-Japanese alliance

relations. Hughes argues that a return to actual military autonomy for Japan is unlikely

given its current subservient relationship to the U.S. He explains,

Abe’s attempts to strengthen Japan’s great power profile

through deepening integration into the military alliance can
only really spell dependency. Japan is gearing its security
doctrines and capabilities in the revised NDPG, its
breaching of collective self-defence and the revised
Defence Guidelines to the service of U.S.–Japan alliance
ends, rather than building genuine military autonomy.159

His work explores the continuum of slackening official Japanese pacifism, as efforts at

greater security cooperation have been pursued by the U.S., ramping up during the late

‘90s coinciding with China’s massive economic growth and now an emerging nuclear

threat from North Korea. U.S. and Japanese power holders have sought to redefine “self-

defense” as permitted by Article 9 as something more “situational” than specifically

“geographic.” Hughes argues the intent of this change is only to revise Japan’s ability to

operate combat zones alongside the U.S.:

The Abe administration’s stance that there now needs to be

no direct attack on Japan itself for the exercise of the right
of collective self-defense, and the possibility to argue that
in line with the ‘three new conditions’ any contingency,
without geographical specification, if left unaddressed
could impact on Japan’s security and mandates the use of

Christopher W. Hughes, Japan’s Foreign and Security Policy under the “Abe Doctrine”: New
159

Dynamism or New Dead End?, Palgrave Pivot (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015) 94.

139
 collective self-defence, means that the JSDF could be
despatched under the revised Defence Guidelines to
support the U.S. in a contingency in any part of the
globe.160 161

Drawing connections to The Phantom Pain deliberately here, your company’s largest

client remains the United States throughout the majority of the game, despite their

complicity in the destruction of the first Mother Base. You will kill, plunder, torture

Soviet military forces in Afghanistan for GMP while claiming no actual allegiance to the

Western superpower. As the series progresses chronologically, the conglomeration of

Mother Base, later renamed “Outer Heaven,” and American state power is made more

deliberate as U.S. ground forces are nearly entirely replaced by private military

contractors originating from one of the corporations apparently under Big Boss/Venom

Snake’s control. These soldiers are dispatched globally according to the whims of a

supercomputer AI which orchestrates all global conflict into standardized supply and

demand proxy wars meant to enrich defense contractors at the expense of everyone else.

Sounds familiar.

The process of remilitarization in this context does not only concern “boots on the

ground” deployment for soldiers, remilitarization also includes a revitalization of Japan’s

military technology exporting guidelines as defined in the 1967 “Three Principles of

Arms Exports” which has prohibited Japanese industry from selling arms to communist

160
Ibid.
161
From Hughes on “three new conditions”: “The draft Cabinet Decision provided for ‘three new
conditions’ (shinsanjōken), drawn from the 1972 statement, stipulating that Japan could exercise collective
self-defence in instances where an attack on another state threatens to overturn the people’s right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness; where there is no other appropriate means to repel the attack; and
where the use of force is restricted to the minimum necessary to repel the attack.” (63)

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bloc nations, nations embargoed by the United Nations Security Council, and any nation

currently experiencing or perpetrating global conflict.162 Scholar Bee Yun Jo explains:

The first significant easing of TPAE took place in 2011 by

the release of ‘The Guidelines for Overseas Transfer of
Defense Equipment, etc.’ The guidelines are critical as they
loosen the previous TPAE by permitting the overseas
transfer of defense equipment under exemption.
Specifically, the new guidelines no longer limit the joint
research and production, e.g., BMD systems, under three
conditions: (1) each partner country is in cooperative
relationship with Japan in security; (2) the joint program
will contribute to the security of Japan; and (3) the case-by-
case overseas transfer of defense equipment, e.g., with prior
consent from the government.163

The remainder of their article catalogues the continued erosion of these provisions while

pointing out that Japanese manufacturers, stylized and generalized here as “Japan Inc.”,

have never really demonstrated postwar inclination towards pacifism and also that certain

firms, chiefly the nation’s largest Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, demonstrates reluctance to

re-arm. Jo describes the firm’s reluctance as “risk-aversion” given the ambiguity of the

Japanese state and population’s general position on rearmament. As this project

concludes I will attempt to map these various points of view onto The Phantom Pain’s

core characters to better demonstrate how the game allows players to play through this

discussion by applying emotional and narrative stakes.

Further yet, characters like Miller who insist that Mother Base have its own arsenal of

nuclear weapons also echo recent U.S.-driven calls for Japan to do the same. The United

162
Bee Yun Jo, “Japan Inc.’s Remilitarization? A Firm-Centric Analysis on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
and Japan’s Defense Industry in the New-TPAE Regime,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 16,
no. 1 (2016): 137–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/irap/lcv011.
163
Ibid.

141
States has effectively used the island nation and its returned Pacific island colonies as

missile bases akin to Mother Base itself, a flotilla of offshore sites housing devastating

weapons to act as deterrents. Writing for The Federation of American Scientists,

Mercedes Trent explains, “In 2016, the U.S. government officially declassified the fact

that nuclear weapons were deployed to Okinawa before 1972. It also declassified ‘the fact

that prior to the reversion of Okinawa to Japan that the U.S. Government conducted

internal discussion, and discussions with Japanese government officials regarding the

possible re-introduction of nuclear weapons onto Okinawa in the event of an emergency

or crisis situation.”164 Following U.S. President Obama’s visit to the Hiroshima blast site

in 2016, the White House records of his remarks solidify that rhetorically, both he and

Abe are committed to “a world without nuclear weapons.” To his credit, Obama’s anti-

nuclear agenda remained a key focus of his second term in office, going so far as to spur

on the 2017 formation of what would eventually become the U.N. “Treaty on the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” which the U.N. itself describes as “comprehensive set

of prohibitions on participating in any nuclear weapon activities. These include

undertakings not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to

use nuclear weapons.”165 The treaty was ratified on January 22, 2021 with nearly

unanimous support from member nations, save for a vote of “No” from the U.S., in the

164
“The History of U.S. Decision-Making on Nuclear Weapons in Japan,” Federation Of American
Scientists (blog), accessed October 29, 2021, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2019/08/the-history-of-u-s-
decision-making-on-nuclear-weapons-in-japan/.
165
“Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – UNODA,” accessed October 29, 2021,
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/.

142
opening days of the Biden administration and an abstention from Israel.166 It appears that

whatever anti-nuclear progress was made under Obama, however uncharacteristic of a

liberal establishment politician, the following four years of Trump have represented a

slide back towards nuclearization. President Trump’s apparent fondness for North Korea

and his general disregard for political conventions placed the U.S.-Japan alliance in new

and uncertain waters. Writing for Foreign Policy William Sposato elaborates:

Trump has railed against Japan on numerous occasions,

even as he seems to retain some fondness for Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. But he has even kinder words
for Kim [Jong Un]. Trump’s much-heralded North Korean
deal is still up in the air, but he famously declared when he
returned to Washington from the pomp of the Singapore
summit that the United States was now safe. The choice of
words was not lost on the Japanese government, which
rushed to ensure that it was not being left out in the cold (or
the rain).167

Now, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, his successor Yoshihide Suga, and U.S.

President Joe Biden have already expressed their unequivocal desire to remain military

allies. Whether or not Abe’s thrust for militarization will persist remains to be seen, but

given joint statements like the following, this scholar predicts it is likely: “President

Biden and Prime Minister Suga exchanged views on the impact of China’s actions on

peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and the world, and shared their concerns

over Chinese activities that are inconsistent with the international rules-based order,

166
Ibid.
William Sposato, “In Trump’s World, Nukes Are Self-Defense,” Foreign Policy (blog), accessed
167

October 29, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/28/in-trumps-world-nukes-are-self-defense/.

143
including the use of economic and other forms of coercion.”168 So long as there is

anticommunism and imperialism to pursue, or a new Cold War to prosecute, these two

will surely remain thick as thieves. Obviously, The Phantom Pain could not offer

commentary on these post-2015 developments in U.S.-Japanese nuclear and military

policy making, but it has proved itself to be a prophetic text and a useful tool for helping

its players understand how they fit into this violent atomic equation.

Fallout
The Phantom Pain’s main theme “The Sins of the Father,” is a harrowing ballad written

for the game and performed by Donna Burke. Paternity is another core theme across the

Metal Gear canon, as players are constantly asked to consider the morality of cloning, the

tension between free-will and genetic programming, and the relationship between father

and son. The gendered aspect is important here, as Metal Gear’s female characters

typically resist violence or find themselves as unwilling participants without other

options. Specifically, the games critique a form of dual Japanese-American masculinity

best exemplified by its core male characters all of which demonstrate elements of

American and Japanese cultural identity. Kaz Miller is an ethnically Japanese and

European-American military-base brat, Huey Emmerich, and his son Hal “Otacon”

Emmerich are Americans obsessed with Japanese culture. Even Snake himself exhibits

countless specifically Japanese physical mannerisms tying him to a long tradition of

168
“U.S.- Japan Joint Leaders’ Statement: ‘U.S. - JAPAN GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR A NEW
ERA,’” The White House, April 17, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
releases/2021/04/16/u-s-japan-joint-leaders-statement-u-s-japan-global-partnership-for-a-new-era/.

144
anime and theatre while being named for and chiefly inspired by Snake Plissken, the

protagonist from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York played by Kurt Russell. In

short, the series' DNA is transnational which aids in its dual critique of America’s

military imperialist history and present, and the potential of Japan’s neocolonial

resurgence. Together, Venom Snake, Huey, and Miller serve allegorically in Kojima’s

imagined wrestling-match for the future soul of Japan and its continued pacifist

existence.

These three characters cannot be so easily mapped onto figures in our world as to allow a

one-to-one literal connection. Kazuhira Miller is as much Trump as he is Eisenhower,

Abe, or Hirohito. The characters don’t represent fixed points in history or space, but

instead broader ideas addressing Japan’s continued existence as an officially pacifist

state. In short, Kaz is a war-crazed and deeply traumatized lifelong soldier whose

presentation and viewpoint is equal parts Imperial Japanese and Cold War American. He

thirsts for revenge and conquest, he inflames the suspicions and anxieties of Mother

Bases’ soldiers, and more than anyone in the series, he is obsessed with amassing power

and influence according to the cruel order of a neoliberal world. His foil is found in

Huey, an effeminate and pacifist biomechanical scientist, the original designer of the

game world’s first true “Metal Gear '' weapons. Now, endlessly remorseful for the part he

played in building the nuclear age, Huey preaches compassion and patience to the

soldiers of Mother Base. The player and Venom Snake, completing this dramatic trifecta

are only informed by their own expectations of the series and its themes. The inversion of

these themes present in The Phantom Pain allows players to discover the evil of their

145
deeds as the story unfolds, revealing the game’s true pacifist intentions. In keeping,

Venom and the player can simply represent the potential of Japan’s return to military

imperialism. With all of this in mind then, we can better understand how The Phantom

Pain mediates Japan’s constantly evolving debate over remilitarization while also

acknowledging the immensely potent external pressure that is applied by the U.S. war

machine, represented in part by Kaz Miller.

At the close of this project, just like its beginning, I will turn to Julia Kristeva’s

“Approaching Abjection,” the introductory chapter to her work Powers of Horror: An

Essay on Abjection. Kristeva’s work describes the role of the “abject” in the formation of

the self, as both something that exists within and without. In Metal Gear the illusion of

choice is granted to players that ultimately leads them towards singular violent ends;

while we have control over Venom Snake and how he chooses to complete his missions,

we don’t have control over what missions the game offers us, and the narrative results of

completing these missions are unchanged whether you play Snake as a paragon of virtue

and honour or as a ruthless hired killer. Players are forced to confront “abjection of self”

in The Phantom Pain through “the shame of compromise, of being in the middle of

treachery,” and as a result the game’s most potent political meaning emerges by

furthering the abjection of the individual and projecting it towards the abjection at

national or supranational levels.169 The game forces its players to confront the horror of

their actions as a criticism of a particularly globally pervasive brand of U.S. imperial

169
Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” Powers of Horror, (New York, NY: Colombia University
Press, 1941,) 5-7.

146
militarism but also to serve as a warning against the remilitarization, or even

nuclearization of the Japanese state under the Abe Doctrine.

When first devised I had intended to write about the dialectical struggle between

Japanese culture and American culture concerning nuclear weapons. Now after a couple

years and several rounds of personal abjection experienced through play, the COVID-19

pandemic, the ever-increasing crumbling of U.S. military global hegemony, this project

and its scholar have new things to say. In my ignorance I viewed the Japanese response to

American intervention as homogenous, and I viewed Japanese cultural producers like

Kojima, Otomo, Anno, Tomino, and Honda as voices of cultural and political authority

within Japan. While this is still true, I now better understand that these voices are

divergent from the actual sites of Japanese power. I thought that their work had to

represent a totality of Japanese thought on nuclear weapons, militarism, and sovereignty,

but I now better understand their value exists chiefly in their subversive transnationalism.

Here I have argued that each text is uniquely Japanese and American, which makes them

capable of telling potent and unignorable allegories about the relationship between Japan

and the U.S. Moreover, while they may not represent a schism in the actual foundations

of power between Japan and America, they do represent an entire continuum of resistance

narratives that have only grown in sophistication and complexity since Gojira first

lumbered out of the ocean after its nuclear wake-up call.

I first chose to name this chapter Ouroboros as a joke to myself. My long-time favourite

game in the Metal Gear franchise was the first chronological installment, Snake Eater, a

game about a man called Snake who eats snakes to survive in the jungle. It was the first

147
Metal Gear game that I ever saw, it was the first video game that ever truly asked me to

consider its meaning and is the sole piece of media responsible for my decision to view

games as more than just toys. As I continued to work on this project and develop my

ideas, I kept returning to this idea of cycles of violence, cycles of abjection, all while

trying to navigate what it means to truly feel stuck wedged between the scales of a

massive serpent hell-bent on self destruction. I have found that the Ouroboros, a serpent

devouring itself, is a uniquely potent metaphor for describing both the topic and

conclusions of this project and for describing my own relationship to writing it

throughout a global pandemic during what feels uncannily like the end of the world as we

know it.

148
Conclusion: Proliferation
It has been more than two years since these ideas first dredged their way out of my brain

and onto the page, lumbering up from dormancy. In that time, by writing, reading,

watching, playing, and thinking, I have attempted to trace the veins between several

Japanese mega-franchises and consider how these different franchises demonstrate anti-

nuclear and anti-military politics through signification. By close reading and semiotic

analysis, my project has explored a pervasive tension found in several of Japanese

popular culture’s most successful global offerings: a deep-rooted anxiety about American

intervention, militarism, and global nuclear supremacy. Undoubtedly when this project

began, the latter anxiety, the atomic one, was at its core. As work proceeded, it became

apparent that collective nuclear trauma was only one facet of a much larger and evolving

traumatized pacifist tradition in Japanese popular culture.

I made the mistake of imagining Japanese culture as homogenous, as though its cultural

output would perfectly mirror what its power holders worked towards. As I began to

research the texts and learn more about the nation’s political history I started to see a

schism between what the texts were arguing for and what Japan’s institutions

represented. As much is made obvious at the beginning of Gojira when the Odo Island

refugees see themselves cast aside by an uncaring power system more concerned with

placating America than helping its own citizens. While each of these texts is undoubtedly

concerned with mediating the relationship between Japan and the United States, they are

each also concerned with Japan’s relationship to itself in the present, its own imperial

past, and its hopes for a radically different future. As this project made landfall, like the

149
monster Gojira’s ascent on Odo, I carved broad strokes through the terrain while still

stumbling to find my proper footing. What emerged at the end is a blend of cultural

criticism and history that traces the Godzilla franchise’s anti-militarist and specifically

anti-nuclear views from its inception through to its most recent Japanese iteration.

Ultimately, Shin Gojira argues for an autonomous Japan that is as unlike the United

States as it is unlike Imperial Japan, rejecting militarism in the name of civil

coordination, rejecting the stymied gridlock of traditional postwar Japanese politics in

favour of something new, collaborative, and exciting.

Pun unintended, Gundam followed suit, presenting a series of complex questions about

the negative psychological impact of combat, training, and militarism broadly on the

body, particularly the youthful body in change. Gundam’s “Zeon” and “Earth Federation”

factions drift semiotically between historical spaces and approaches occupied by Imperial

Japan, the Axis Powers, and the Western Allies as well. We have seen the Americans’

answer to mecha prove all but unwilling to address these same ideas with the same

consideration, all in the name of increased action figure sales. Where Gundam is

thoughtful and grows increasingly so over time, Transformers is pallid and shallow by

comparison. Akira answered for this disparity by demonstrating the true horror of the

technological body, one caught in a permanent state of change and stasis at once, but also

offered glimmers of hope, of a radiant light that is not wrathful or scourging, but healing

and representative of new beginnings. Where there are beginnings, we also find endings,

from Snake Eater to The Phantom Pain, my own Metal Gear fantasy drawing to a close

after a decade and a half. Concluding this work felt like a journey of minor self discovery

150
with one of the Japanese video game industry’s most prolific and politically sophisticated

franchises. Working with Metal Gear provided new challenges and opportunities for

interrogating how Japanese popular culture continues to reflect the aforementioned

anxieties in the age of technological globalization and how the increasing transnational

quality of popular culture production affects the representation of these traumas, fears,

and hopes.

Here we have seen how major Japanese texts have established a tradition of questioning

the paradoxically evolving yet apparently stagnant relationship that the small island

nation has shared with its World War II conqueror for over 70 years. The texts studied in

this project demonstrate key points of resistance to American militarism, political and

cultural hegemony, and Japanese remilitarization as well. Whether the texts’ critiques are

fixed in a specific historical moment, or attempt a broader societal realignment for Japan,

it is clear that Godzilla, Gundam, Akira, and Metal Gear Solid have each made clear their

existential distrust in the American power machine, its operation in Japan, and its effects

on the world broadly. While their lessons and goals are not homogenous, the texts

surveyed demonstrate a clear reticence towards postwar American militarism, specifically

as it concerns Japan.

Moving forward from my project could take a number of different paths. Future

scholarship could look inward to perform similar semiotic readings on different offerings

from my subject franchises. There are numerous Gundam series that are simply beyond

the scope of this work to consider, much like the numerous installments in the Metal

Gear canon, and the continually growing library of Godzilla kaiju films, each with their

151
own politics and warnings. Additionally, due to their commercial nature, each of these

franchises are horizontally integrated across toys, movies, games, web series, animation

etc. One could easily pick a single medium and explore all of these texts’ offerings: a

games studies look at Godzilla, a histological study of the Gundam model kit hobby and

its spread across the world, or a return to Akira’s expanded manga source material.

Alternatively, one could search for these cores anti-militarist, anti-American themes in

other U.S.-dominated nations’ cultural output. Would we see the same antagonism at play

in German popular culture, or on display in the numerous Latin American nations that the

U.S. has considered its backyard playgrounds for so many decades? Regardless of

approach, there is still work to be done and battles to fight over the warring forces of

militaristic signification, but for the time being I am more than ready to give peace a

chance.

152
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Curriculum Vitae
Name:
Aidan Warlow

Post-secondary Education and Degrees:

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
2014-2017 B.A.

Honors and Awards:

Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), 2019-2020

Social Science and Humanities Research Council MA Scholarship (SSHRC) 2018-2019

Dean’s Honour List and Western Scholars Status 2014-2017

Western Faculty Association Scholarship 2015

Western Scholars Scholarship Award 2016

Faculty of Information and Media Studies Gold Medal – MIT 2017

Faculty of Information and Media Studies Convocation Gonfalon Carrier 2017

Related Work Experience:

Teaching Assistant,
University of Western Ontario 2018-2020

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