Japan’s First ‘President’ and the transformation of Japanese Comics: From Godzilla to Aircraft Carrier Ibuki

Beginning with Godzilla (1954), the Japanese film industry has repeatedly returned, at steady intervals, to the spectacle of giant monsters laying waste to the archipelago. From the outset, the kaiju film offered more than destruction as entertainment. It provided a framework for confronting a deeply political and unresolved question: how should Japan respond to an external attack when its constitution formally renounces the right to maintain military force? By displacing this dilemma onto the terrain of monster science fiction, Japanese filmmakers could sustain both emotional distance and mass appeal. The result was a genre that made an otherwise incendiary contradiction legible — and even pleasurable. It eventually reached audiences abroad as well. Postwar Germany pursued a different narrative settlement. Through an unrelenting condemnation of Hitler and the Nazi leadership — an approach some critics have argued had the side effect of concentrating moral culpability in a small circle — it established a story in which the ultimate agents of evil were the Führer and his inner cadre. Ordinary Germans could then be cast as victims caught within a criminal regime.1 Japan, by contrast,...