Month: August 2024

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
Written by Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata, and Ishirō Honda
Directed by Ishirō Honda

6 August 1945. Hiroshima, Japan. Three American B-29 heavy bombers passed over the city. One of them, the Enola Gay, dropped a 15-kiloton atomic bomb. That is the equivalent of about 15 thousand tons of TNT. Over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. Those who didn’t die immediately were blinded by the flash of the bomb, were crushed under the weight of collapsing buildings, suffered radiation poisoning the following days and months, and more. The U.S. would drop another even larger bomb on Nagasaki. There were plans to drop yet a third bomb on Japanese civilians. Japan had been in talks with the Soviet Union to surrender and end the war. For the United States, a post-war era in which the USSR was seen as a hero was a danger. The atomic bombings of Japan are up there with the Holocaust as some of the most horrific acts of violence humanity has committed on itself. It’s no surprise that many films have been made about this event and the atomic bomb itself. In this series, I want to look at how the bombing is analyzed and made a part of the culture, both through the eyes of the Japanese and the perpetrating nation, the United States.