It seems that almost every kid shares the same first critical thought about Godzilla: He’s a villain, except for when he’s a hero. As they get a little older, they notice how often the threat in a Godzilla film is alien in origin, how much screen time is spent on generals gathered at conference tables, or how infrequently America comes up. Maybe they learn the meaning of “nationalism” and try not to let that ruin the fun of a monster movie.
Much can be said of latent nationalism and the relative absence of the American occupying forces in Takashi Yamazaki’s 2023 film, Godzilla Minus One, but less obvious is a bit of historical revisionism that polishes the image of Toho Studios. The story is set between 1945 and 1947, climaxing less than a year before the 1948 strike of nearly a thousand studio union members. There’s a bitter irony in a film about collective strength in Japan that has seen unprecedented success in the US but is brought to America by an unscrupulous company once aided by the U.S. Military in strike-breaking. Godzilla Minus One is a fantastic blockbuster, sculpting history to serve a crowd-pleasing story while doubling as camouflage for Toho Studios’ history of anti-labor violence.
Unlike many films in the franchise, including Ishirō Honda‘s 1954 original, Godzilla Minus One centers on the working class. Yamazaki’s film shows Japan picking up the pieces immediately after World War II, with industry and government unreliable, as hero Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) struggles to provide for his new family by taking on dangerous mine removal work. As encounters with Godzilla escalate, Koichi’s arc is put to words when he tells his domestic partner, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), “My war isn’t over.”
At this point, Godzilla Minus One frames Godzilla as an allegory for the material and psychic damage of the War’s aftermath. This obstacle must be overcome for the nation to prepare for the rest of the 20th century. While the US testing of atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll aids in the creation and power of Godzilla, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are not mentioned in the film. Instead, the devastating nuclear bombing of these cities is expressed in institutional failures shared by the occupying forces and the Japanese government. By the end of Godzilla Minus One, a volunteer group saves the day as civilians, ex-military, and representatives of science and industry combine forces when their political leaders and the occupiers fail them.
A similar story of grassroots organizing unfolded at Toho Studios in the mid-1940s. With support from “New Dealers” from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration among the occupiers, Japanese trade unions achieved previously impossible rights under militarist rule. In her 1992 book, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945-1952, scholar Kyoko Hirano writes that the labor movement was such a rupture to the status quo that studio managers sponsored the formation of Shin-Toho, an anti-union group, as a desperate attempt to lure talent away from the union. However, after two consecutive successful strikes led by the National Film and Theater Workers Union, or Nichieien, organized labor’s popularity was a proven fact.
Some of the gains won in these strikes included minimum monthly salaries, eight-hour work days, and implementing a shop steward system. Their influence also spread into productions, to the point that renditions of “The Internationale” appeared in the studio’s films. Nichieien even published a list of war criminals active in the industry, including two Toho executives. On set, one of their greatest successes was creative input on Akira Kurosawa’s 1946 drama, No Regrets for Our Youth, a “women’s” picture retelling the events of Imperial Japan’s censorship of academia.
In Kurosawa’s film, the heroine, an upper-middle-class child of a professor, forgoes marriage to an imperial bureaucrat to eke out a living with a leftist documenting the country’s war crimes. When her lover dies in prison, she ignores her parents’ wishes to return home to live among the peasantry, toiling in rice paddies and being berated by neighbors as a traitor. While quaint by today’s standards, No Regrets for Our Youth was radical for its time, depicting a woman flagrantly defying the conventions of filial piety and charting her own path. It was also a critical and commercial hit, finding life in the zeitgeist of the newly liberated Japanese woman and a shocking reversal for a company that had spent the war making imperial propaganda.
In Godzilla Minus One, women of the late 1940s are reduced to just two speaking roles. Noriko serves as an almost token representation of the changing social norms, such as in the scene where she announces she’s taken a job as a secretary in Ginza, much to Koichi’s befuddlement. “Don’t I provide for you?” he asks. She insists she needs to “stand on her own two feet”, which means leaving the domestic life they’ve forged together with their adopted daughter.
Her defiance can be seen as a betrayal of the collective, in this case, the family, and it is an act quickly associated with death. When Ginza is attacked by Godzilla, we are given Noriko’s POV for the first and only time, her endangerment driving the tension. Between the tragedy that follows and Koichi’s recruiting of an engineer for the finalé’s counter-attack, Godzilla Minus One dictates how one should contribute to the cause. The only other named woman in the film is the curmudgeonly neighbor Sumiko Ota (Sakura Andô), who serves as an admonishing maternal figure and babysitter for Koichi’s new family.
If Godzilla Minus One is prescriptive in its depiction of an organized workforce, its cause is a return to a gentler culture of pre-war Japan, guided by the kindly paternal figures of the former state. Late in the film, fan-favorite Dr. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) reveals himself to be an ex-military scientist of some sort, spearheading a plan along with ex-navy Captain Tatsuo Hotta (Miou Tanaka) to defeat Godzilla. There are others involved, notably businessmen, but the group is referred to by Noda as “private citizens” to dull the impact of this scene’s familiarity to anyone who’s seen a Godzilla film before: a meeting of the military brass.
There can be no true grassroots response to the threat, only old guard officials sentimentally resuming their duty to defend the public. No screen time is spent addressing the authoritarian rule of the former empire or its cruelty inflicted on the public, save for Noda’s speech assuring the public that this time will be different. We are meant to believe the way forward is hand-in-hand with the same people who led the country to this moment.
In 1948, Toho would lead the industry in its return to top-down power with layoffs of over a thousand employees. In response, Nichieien launched their third strike with a sit-in protest on studio property that would last four months. By this time, however, businesses had aligned in their anti-labor efforts, and through a reverse course of the occupying power’s labor policies (buoyed by the escalating Cold War), this strike would prove to be the union’s last stand. In August of that year, as infighting spread amongst the strikers, thousands of police officers surrounded the studio gates with US tanks and infantry at their side. After some negotiating, the protesters accepted defeat and left the property. By 1950, there was an industry-wide purge of unionists affecting all major studios, with the notable exception of Shin-Toho.
This isn’t to say all was perfect under the union system. Misogyny was rampant, often forcing women out of decision-making processes. A rebranding of wartime ethno-nationalism was also on the table to raise awareness of the American threat to populism, often in gendered terms. Likewise, Godzilla Minus One stages masculine redemption as the only means to save the nation from Godzilla on the Pacific battlefield.
Godzilla Minus One imagines a Japan that can only be righted, not improved, in a return to an imagined ideal that the war interrupted. Nichieien’s technocratic renovations within the studio system were beyond the pale for Toho. Godzilla’s footprint has proved big enough to flatten this out of history, leaving Western audiences not in awe of the monster but only aghast that a record-breaking film could be made with a fraction of a Hollywood budget.
Works Cited
Gerteis, Christopher. “The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor’s Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan”. Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1. March 2007.
Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under American Occupation, 1945–52. Smithsonian Books. 1994.