For many Japanese Americans, the Oscar win for “Godzilla Minus One” on Sunday symbolized much more than just a place in the halls of film excellence.
The kaiju monster movie, which takes place in a postwar Japan that’s grappling with devastation and loss, took home the prize for best visual effects, the first Academy Award in the franchise’s 70-year history. Against the backdrop of a ceremony dominated by “Oppenheimer,” a film focused on the man behind the atomic bomb, many Japanese Americans say the win for “Godzilla Minus One” felt like a small acknowledgment of their historical pain.
“There’s so many movies that try to humanize these people who’ve done horrific things,” said Dylan Adler, a Los Angeles-based comedian of Japanese descent. “But there’s so little media or movies at all talking about the Japanese civilians that died in the trauma that [the bombings] caused. That is why ‘Godzilla’ the movie — I love that it also won an Oscar the same year that ‘Oppenheimer’ did.”
“Godzilla Minus One” follows kamikaze pilot Koichi, who fails to follow through on a suicide mission yet, while returning from the battlefield, manages to miraculously survive the monster.
But upon his return home, he discovers that his parents and neighbors have died. Wrestling with his own survivor’s guilt as Godzilla continues to wreak havoc among civilians, Koichi seeks to redeem himself by going head-to-head with the monster.
The monster was historically written as a metaphor for the ills of nuclear weapons and atomic testing. William Tsutsui, the author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” said its heavily furrowed skin or scales were imagined to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the two atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Though there’s no explicit focus on the atomic bomb in “Godzilla Minus One,” the film illustrates the enormous magnitude of grief…
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