南村喬之 (1919-1997)：怪物の解剖
MINAMIMURA Takashi (1919-1997): Monster Anatomy

Minamimura is the nom de plume of NUKATA Misao 額田操, born in Fukushima in 1919.  He attended art via university correspondence course until sent to fight in Manchuria during World War II.  He was captured and placed in a Siberian workcamp until he was repatriated in 1948, three years after the end of open hostilities.  Minamimura continued studying art and began illustrating popular and children’s magazines in the 1950s.  His images of monsters helped to define the aesthetic of popular art during the first monster craze during the 1960s.  At the same time, Minamimura also drew SM drawings under separate names, KIRIOKA Hiroyuki 丘裕之 and KIROKA Yūji 桐丘裕詩, for several erotic journals.

Radioactive monster Godzilla stomps through a city and eats a commuter train in a scene from Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, directed by Ishiro Honda and Terry O. Morse. The 1956 film was a re-edited version of the 1954 Japanese film Gojira, directed by Honda.

Movie Mutants Give A Face To Our Nuclear Fears

by Neda Ulaby

Within the first few days of the threefold tragedy in Japan, Wikipedia trend-spotters noticed a startling spike in searches … for “Godzilla.”

It feels callow to be discussing popular culture at a moment when bodies are still being pulled from rubble, says Grady Hendrix, co-director of the New York Asian Film Festival. “The Godzilla movies don’t have anything to do with what’s going on now,” he says.

But Hendrix admits that those Wikipedia searches prove how much our perception of the world is shaped by cultural images. Still, he takes exception to the idea that you can infer something about Japan’s current catastrophe from a movie made almost 57 years ago.

Sure, he says, the Godzilla films are about radiation — from 1945, when the U.S. bombed Japan, twice. “And,” he adds, “what happened in 1954, when the U.S. detonated a thermonuclear device in the Bikini Atoll and irradiated a Japanese fishing boat.”

Hendrix says that incident was the main inspiration for the wave of Japanese mutant monster movies that followed.

But, notes historian Bill Tsutsui, Japan hardly has a corner on the genre. He points to Them!, a 1954 American movie about irradiated 8-foot-long ants that came out the same year as Godzilla.

Enlarge  Hulton Archive/Getty Images: The ghouls in the 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead were a byproduct of radioactive contamination.

“Radiation needed a face in the 1950s, and the giant ants in Them! and the monster in Godzilla provided a horrible external representation of what that could be,” Tsutsui says.

Tsutsui says people didn’t understand radiation in the 1950s. So the U.S. government enlisted Disney to assuage their concerns with the film Our Friend the Atom. Still, fears about radiation helped launch an entire genre of horror into the next decade.

The zombies in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead (called “ghouls” in the movie) were a byproduct of radiation. Lisa Lynch, a professor who studies nuclear culture, says until the end of the Cold War, fears about mutation were conflated with fears of radiation. Then, fear of global pandemics started to overshadow concern about radiation in popular culture.

“So all of a sudden you have these mutation movies,” she says, citing films ranging from Outbreak (1995) to 28 Days Later (2002). “But they’re not radiation produced. They’re mutated viruses.”

Lynch says nuclear fears went in another direction, first about nuclear power plant accidents — like in Silkwood (1983) or The China Syndrome (1979). Today, the popular imagination is more concerned with acts of deliberate terrorism. “Hijacking nuclear power plants, stealing nuclear power plants, stealing fissionable material, dirty bombs,” Lynch explains.

But there’s also something about this moment that seems to resonate with a more heroic side of radiation — one imbued with midcentury optimism. Broadway’s most-discussed musical, after all, begins with a radioactive spider bite. And one of the summer’s most anticipated action movies is also based on a Marvel comics superhero whose powers come from radiation — Captain America.

Hollywood is even remaking Akira, a Japanese anime classic set in a nightmarish post-apocalyptic Tokyo after a nuclear explosion. (The Warner Bros. version is said to take place in New York.) Some of the characters are children given strange powers by radiation. Unlike Spider-Man or Captain America, they’re victims.

“When you make a movie, you’re able to say, ‘Hey, here’s something I’m scared of. Let me see what it’s like,’ ” says Grady Hendrix. “When I visualize it, does it make me more scared? Less scared?”

Whatever it is, Hendrix says, he hopes Wikipedia searches for Godzilla don’t distract us from real human suffering and real human costs in Japan.

I went yesterday to see a exhibition at the Kyoto Arts Center called 「幻ノ進化論―Saltationism」 (On the Evolution of Fantasy: Saltationism) by the artist EMOTO Hajime 江本創 (b. 1970).  This fun and playfully bizarre show featured a number of startlingly life-like mummies and skeletons of imaginary creatures that Emoto had created and displayed in shadow boxes like scientific specimens.

At the beginning of the exhibition, there was a sign stating that Emoto had just returned from a long trip with an (imaginary) Russian scientist, who had toured the world collecting strange creatures.  Also, there was a large quotation from a seemingly scientific text reminding us that over the billions of years of world history, countless creatures had come into being and gone extinct. Beneath each of the lovingly created creatures, Emoto had placed a label with genus species names, information about where the “specimens” had been collected, plus reflections on the creature and its evolutionary past. Nowhere in the exhibition does the display step out of character to discuss how exactly Emoto made these life-like monsters, helping to preserve the illusion that what one is seeing is a collection of real specimens.  

For instance, the notes accompanying the “ribbed squid” explain it was found in the South Pacific.  Invertebrates such as squid, he tells us, should not have a skeletal structure, but this figure had managed to evolve a bony structure in order to protect its internal organs.  In a humorous touch, he notes that this creature was used among natives of the South Pacific as a penis sheath. 

There was a wall of creatures inspired by Western fairy tales, such as winged demons, mini-dragons, and gargoyles, “collected” from various places in Europe, such as the strikingly lifelike skeleton of a “Dragon” pictured above.  In the text accompanying this and the other dragons on display, he explained that larger ones had apparently come in contact with humans and been largely exterminated, so dragons evolved to become increasingly small.

Also, in another part of the show, he had a number of “creatures” collected from a monestary in southern France.  According to the sign, the inhabitants had treated them as the person-ification of the Seven Deadly Sins.  The one, for instance, associated with avarice was chubby and had big, hungry-looking teeth, while the one associated with lust looked like a big phallus with legs.  (For pictures of this series of creatures, click here.)

In creating a world, full of fantastic creatures, Emoto seemed to be playfully suggesting  how little we know about the natural world.  His shadow boxes and old-fashioned presentations, complete with purposefully aged labels, had a steampunk sensibility, hearkening back to an early moment in early 20th century scientific history when the natural world was still full of mystery, and explorers still traveled the world in search of new discoveries.  The world, he seems to be suggesting, is a strange place, not fully understandable through the operations of science alone, despite our attempts to try.

At the same time, he also seems to be hinting at how important it is to us, as human beings, to try to understand the world (and even the imaginary) through the lens of rationality and science.  Part of the fun and adventure of this exhibition is to show how bizarre it looks when one attempts to apply scientific rationality to things that do not always make perfect sense. 

Interestingly, in this exhibition, the “mysterious world” from which the pieces came was not just the South Pacific, South America, and other “exotic” places, as it was to 19th and early 20th century explorers.  The sources of these strange creatures also also encompassed Europe, which had been made to look every bit as primitive and unfamiliar as the developing world, thanks to all of its fairy tales and weird legends.  At the same time, none of the creatures were supposed to have come from Japan.   Could it be that in Emoto’s eyes, Japan is too rational a nation for dreams? 

For Emoto’s webpage (Japanese only), click here.  The webpages contain an extensive gallery of Emoto’s creations.