Radiation research had begun as a hopeful and publically welcomed enterprise, with experiments over the early twentieth century meeting widespread public admiration—for instance, Marie Curie’s groundbreaking work with radioactivity. However, the bodily disfiguration and fatalities of those exposed to high doses of radiation within this formative era, including Curie herself, began to curtail the universal support for this research. The remedial radiological technologies developed by way of this initial research (e.g., X-ray technology) have not lessened this initial motion towards negative perception.

The Second World War was critical to this perception of nuclear technologies in Japan. In the decades preceding Gojira, the citizens of Japan witnessed a series of events which would cast radiation, artificial or otherwise, in an entirely negative light. The firebombing of Tokyo in early 1945 was only eclipsed in its disparaging effect on the Japanese psyche by the detonation of nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima later that year. Although significant loss of life had already been inflicted upon the Japanese over the previous years of war, the impact of the atomic bombings resulted in physical and psychological damage of unprecedented immensity, irreparably distorting the Japanese psyche over the next decades towards the present. As Palferman discusses, human beings tend to fear technologies that are “unbounded or that have catastrophic potential, imposed on a community, or managed by organizations or individuals that are seen as untrustworthy or incompetent” [6, p. 34]. In the context of Japan, this list of factors reads as if written specifically for nuclear weapons: catastrophically imposed, as they were, during wartime by an enemy combatant. Thus, the latent accumulation of apprehension towards nuclear technology instantly ascended to the forefront of public concern.

The era that followed would be considerably less forgiving to experimentation within the emergent nuclear sciences. The Japanese would view radiation and its antecedent materials as mysterious and harmful, scientists as persons meddling beyond the proper limits of human control, and the entire enterprise of scientific investigation as morally dubious [7, p. 32]. These beliefs were particularly accentuated by the accounts of mutation suffered through radiation exposure, where seared, fireless wounds fed into ancient beliefs of transmutation to human flesh, elevating alchemist narratives, having long been internalized within the population and cultural ethos, into modernity.

In 1954, the public interest in nuclear technologies peaked once more with the aforementioned Lucky Dragon incident. That same year, Russia introduced the AM-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor capable of feeding into an energy grid [8]. The former event had a particular effect on the Japanese, being the first instance of irradiation inflicted upon civilians following the atrocities of wartime. Thus, the mentality of the Japanese public as victim of circumstance, having initially formed with unwanted inclusion in the Second World War at the behest of the presiding government, was further emboldened by this accidental irradiation upon the Japanese population. This mentality was visible in two regards: The first by which the Japanese perceived themselves as victims of American military aggression—both during the war and through the cultural influence and media censorship immediately following—and as previously mentioned, as persons involuntarily bound to domestic policy and most directly affected by the disasters originating from government directives. The citizens of Japan, having endured this imperious era, would later seek to produce cultural vessels that encapsulated the anxieties of falling victim to political and technological device. Arguably, the most impactful of these was the motion picture.

Prior to our explication of the film itself, a brief section on nuclear fear and perception as presently understood is required, within which we will shortly illustrate the potency of cinema as a medium of transporting these fears to the audience.

In discussing the fears associated with radiation, Weart posits that “the fact is, emotions came first, and the powerful devices themselves came later” [9, p. 30]. Scholarly concerns regarding the fear of radiation, or radiophobia, often adjoins with studies of afflictions caused by real or perceived risk, most apparently post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Once inscribed in genetics, through traumatic or repeated exposure, fear necessitates a host of expressions at the physiological (micro) level, eventually manifesting itself in the societal (macro) level. From the approximate locus of fear in the brain’s amygdala,² the following are characteristic of fear response: human perception of threat of danger, pain, or harm³; conditioned response paired to an unconditioned stimulus⁴; organization and coordination of the defensive behavior system to environmental threats; and interpretation of emotional stimuli or people’s emotional state [10–13]. To the latter, “macro” cultural terms, the impressions of fear are held within group dynamics or what scholars have recognized as collectivism: a counterbalance to individualism that includes norms, history, and geography, as variables in considering the strength of relationships between individuals in various communal groups. Observations of collectivism traverse the spectrum of collective groupings from families to, in the case of Japan, prefectures and the population en masse. Thus, the complexity of nuclear fear in Japan is such that the individual within the collective must be regarded as a vessel of cultural influence, simultaneously containing and promulgating, through their interactions (and intensity of these reactions) with others.⁵