Monster Zero x SciFi Japan

eabaker wrote:Details like this contribute to my believe that Omori, while an uneven writer, was solidly the best Godzilla director of the Heisei era.

What Sugiyama and his fellow revisionists (or, to use a more correct term, negationists) are doing is something different. They think the scale of Japanese atrocities is simply a concoction of the West, that the years of testimony and research supporting the use of “comfort women” (something acknowledged by the Japanese government itself in 1993) is actually a collection of “fallacies, distortions, biases and factual errors”. Some of his colleagues in negationist movements like the “Committee for Historical Facts” even believe the Rape of Nanking simply didn’t take place.

These men, all of them politically conservative and many of them of an age to remember the war, can be found lightly scattered amongst Japanese politics. Shinzo Abe, for example, Prime Minister of Japan in 2006-07, held similar views. They are deeply committed to their beliefs, to the extent that on June 14, 2007, they took out a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, in which they argued that the use of comfort women was “anything but the truth”.

(This report even states Sugiyama initiated the whole thing).

Galvan: Continuing on that note, I learned via your site Ifukube was something of a nationalist: he was very much ashamed by Japan’s defeat in World War II and, as you said, saw Godzilla (1954) as a movie in which nature retaliated against technology. Having said that, in the most famous films Ifukube scored, we often see Japan attacked by giant monsters or alien invaders, with the Self Defense Forces promptly swinging into action to combat the menace (even if the intuition of civilians and scientists is ultimately required to save the day). Given how he felt about Japan’s surrender, do you think Ifukube was enamored by the idea of a Japanese military quick to fight off invading forces and who could—with assistance—repel the dangers threatening Japan?

Homenick: Yes, as I mentioned, Ifukube felt that Japan’s cause during the war was just. When the war was over and Japan was crushed, Ifukube became depressed and felt shame, as you mentioned. Of course, the reasons for Japan’s aggressions throughout Asia were many and the situation is too complex to paint with a single broad brush. But one of the reasons for Japan’s colonialism prior to and during the war was due to the Imperial government’s policy and philosophy of Pan-Asianism. This is the idea that Japan had the divine and moral obligation to liberate other Asian countries from their Western captors. Ironically, “liberating” didn’t just mean kicking the Europeans and the Americans out of countries like the Philippines or Burma — it meant kicking the Europeans and the Americans out and then recolonizing under the flag of the Rising Sun. After the war, Japan, “the great liberator,” if you will, itself was invaded and taken over by the very forces that the island nation was seeking to remove from the region. Indeed, an ironic twist of fate and a huge humiliation, at least as far as Ifukube was concerned. I don’t think he ever really got over those feelings of humiliation. For the first year directly after the war, those sentiments were especially strong; his depression was such that he thought that he should give up composing. His inspiration to write music had been completely dissolved, at least for a short period. Thankfully, his lack of will to compose was only a passing phase and he would go on to write some of his best music after the war.