Shin Godzilla and Japanese Political Sentiment

Due to the insistence of a young relative, I recently watched the 2016 movie Shin Godzilla. I started out watching just to do something with him, but it turns out the movie is a great reflection of Japanese sentiment about their own politics and Japanese-US relations, with some jabs at the international community thrown in. Godzilla was always a political comment, a kind of Japanese Frankenstein story about nuclear power, sometimes with an implied criticism of nuclear weapons and the US, but this movie throws it in the viewers' faces. It's a political rant with a monster in the background. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Maybe at some point I'll set aside some time to write about what's happening in Japanese politics right now with the rise of apparently Trump-inspired "far right" populist parties, but if you want an entertaining overview of what many Japanese are feeling, the movie is a really good start, I think.

Some quick notes: 

During the US occupation of Japan, we wrote their current constitution. Article 9 of that constitution bars Japan from having a military and the US promised to protect Japan. Nevertheless, the Japanese established Self-Defense Forces (SDF), which look very much like a military. Paradoxically, they did this partly at US insistence when we turned our attention to the Cold War and stopped worrying that Japan would re-arm and try to rebuild their lost empire.

After WWII, a very strong pacifist sentiment developed, so the creation of the SDF was challenged. It went to their supreme court with the final ruling being that Japan can have forces to defend itself from invasion, but nothing that could be used to project power. There are many legal restrictions on their use and capabilities. Japan cannot legally have aircraft carriers, for example, because they are tools for force projection and not considered purely defensive.

As for the movie, the ending didn't quite seem genuine to me and I wonder if establishment politics didn't get involved in this rather anti-establishment political statement. But I'll save that for a possible future post.

Meanwhile, here's the trailer and then the greatest song ever written about Godzilla.