Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?

[David Casseres]

This immediately brings to mind Sven Lindqvist's book A History of
Bombing (W. W. Norton & Company (May 1, 2003)).

Here's an excerpt from the Publishers' Weekly review:

"Describing genocide as part of the "master story" of Western
civilizations, Swedish author and political activist Lindqvist (The
Skull Measurer's Mistake) argues that before the development of
powered flight, bombs delivered from the air were regarded as an
efficient way to kill large groups of people at a safe distance. What
the bombs and rockets have from the beginning been intended to do, he
continues, is slaughter "others" and "outsiders"--"peoples of color"
who will not submit to imperialism, or who are just somehow in the
way. Lindqvist offers here a work whose format is more striking than
its contents. The book, translated by Berkeley Scandinavian studies
professor Linda Haverty Rugg, is composed of excerpts and vignettes,
drawn from remarkably diverse sources on aerial bombardment, and
numbered 1 to 399, proceeding chronologically from the A.D. 762 to
1999, but mostly concerning the 20th century. (Number 155 begins,
"During the 1920s, novels about the future often dealt with a time of
barbarism.") Most intriguingly, according to Lindqvist, the widespread
use of aerial bombardment by Western states against each other in the
two world wars was an anomaly made possible not by dehumanizing, but
by "dewesternizing" the targets. The end of the Cold War stripped away
the mask; Kosovo was only the first stage of an aerial reign of
terror. Lindqvist's case, too simplistic and too overstated to be
convincing, is nevertheless powerful. His juxtaposition of fact-based
history with passages taken from survivalist fiction, racist fantasies
like The Turner Diaries and dystopian future-war predictions
demonstrates the extent to which aerial bombing is regarded as an
ultimate weapon for destroying the opposition. Anyone who thought
twice about what happened in the Gulf War or Kosovo will find this
intentionally fragmentary analysis compelling; others will be less
sympathetic."


Never mind the centrist grumbling, this is a book with an antiwar
point of view.  Highly recommended.  The review doesn't make clear
that this book is composed as a hypertext; each of the chronologically
arranged fragments is accompanied by pointers to other pages, and the
book should be read in this fashion; a linear reading is most
unsatisfactory.

David


On 7/25/05, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> [...] In 1953, Tanaka Tomoyuki, a young film producer
> working for the Toho Film Studio, was assigned to
> produce a film entitled In the Shadow of Honor, a
> Japanese –Indonesian co-production. It was a story
> about a former Japanese soldier who stayed on
> following Japan's surrender and participated in the
> Indonesian independence movement. However, rising
> diplomatic tensions between the Japanese and
> Indonesian governments forced the canceling of the
> project before filming began. With a substantial sum
> of money allocated for the project, Tanaka had to find
> a quick alternative project to utilize this budget to
> make an attractive popular film. Tanaka was a
> visionary who later produced some of Kurosawa
> Akira's best films such as Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and
> Aka-hige (Red Beard). Facing this crisis, he decided
> to take advantage of a recent incident that was had
> captured the popular imagination. That was the
> hydrogen bomb test Bravo shot that the U.S. conducted
> on Rongelap (or Bikini) Atoll in the Marshall Islands
> in March 1954. The radioactive fallout from the test
> enveloped a Japanese fishing boat called the 5th Lucky
> Dragon with deadly effects. Influenced by the popular
> success in 1952 of the re-release of the 1933 classic
> film King Kong, Tanaka set out to film a giant monster
> film like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the 1953
> American film. [...]
> 
> Godzilla's preference for darkness and intense dislike
> of light evokes the behavior B-29 bombers, which flew
> at night and sought to evade searchlight beams. From
> the raid on Tokyo on March 10, 1945, Brigadier General
> Curtis LeMay, the Commander of the XXI Bomber Command,
> changed U.S. bombing strategy from precision bombing
> during the day to carpet bombing with recently
> developed napalm bombs at night. The U.S. carried out
> "saturation bombing" until the end of the war in
> August 1945, repeatedly attacking cities from Hokkaido
> to Okinawa, including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Osaka,
> Kobe, Fukuoka and Naha. More than 100 cities were
> destroyed, causing one million casualties, including
> more than half a million deaths, the majority being
> civilians, many of them women and children.
> Indiscriminate bombing reached its peak with the use
> of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
> 1945, Truman's claim to the contrary notwithstanding.
> Of course, many Japanese who saw the original Godzilla
> film had first hand experience of aerial bombing and
> had lost relatives and friends as a result.
> 
> In one scene, a boy cries "Chikusho ("You
> brute"), watching Godzilla stalking away towards the
> ocean from Tokyo Bay after a rampage. This scene
> vividly reminded the audience of B-29 bombers flying
> off after dropping tens of thousands of bombs on their
> urban target. The film includes scenes of people
> trying to escape carrying household goods, of a
> burning city, of injured people being brought into a
> safe shelter, and of screaming children. These
> pictures evoked the horror of napalm attacks in cities
> throughout Japan. [...]
> </blockquote>
> 
> 
> ...read it all:  <a
> href="http://hnn.us/articles/12042.html">Godzilla and
> the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the
> Monster?</a>, History News Network, 25 July 2005
> 
> <BR>
> 
> http://pynchonoid.org
> "everything connects"
> 
> 
> 
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