Dr. William M. Tsutsui is an award-winning historian and teacher, frequent public speaker and media commentator, and a seasoned academic administrator with a record of innovation.  Born in New York City and raised in Texas, he holds degrees from Harvard (A.B. 1985), Oxford (M.Litt. 1988), and Princeton (M.A. 1990, Ph.D. 1995) universities. 

He began his academic career at the University of Kansas, where over 17 years on the faculty he served as acting director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies, chair of the Department of History, founding executive director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas, and associate dean for international studies in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. 

From 2010 to 2014, he was dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and professor in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  In June 2014, he assumed the presidency of Hendrix College, a top-tier national liberal arts college founded in 1876 and located in Conway, Arkansas.  

He is currently Professor Emeritus of History at Hendrix.  During the 2020 to 2021 academic year, he is the Edwin O. Reischauer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University.

Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice is a series of informed, sustained, and enriching dialogues looking at how environmental toxicity and risk disproportionately impact populations based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and social standing. Environmental Justice brings awareness to these disparities, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future.

Guest: Dr. William M. Tsutsui
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Public Podcasting in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.

[00:00:04] Dr. William Tsutsui: It became impossible in public discourse in Japan, at least, to really reflect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and certainly to express any kind of critique of the American decision to drop the bombs, or of American censorship of the bombs during the occupation. What's remarkable is that one of the most public ways in which the Japanese began to address this painful history was through the medium of film, and particularly through a science fiction movie about a dinosaur that is irradiated by American H-bomb testing, rises out of the sea and destroys Tokyo.

[00:00:49] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Heritage Future present Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice. This series explores environmental racism and climate injustice. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been choking our waters with waste, poisoning our soil, and contaminating the air we breathe, all in the name of progress. In the most vulnerable communities, with the least amount of representation and power, suffer through the worst effects.

Environmental justice brings awareness to these marginalized communities, their activism, and the path forward, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future.

In this episode, we connect with East Asian historian, Dr. William Tsutsui, to discuss his favorite topic, Godzilla, and how this beast has become a 'cinematic conscience' for viewers in Japan and globally in the aftermath of World War ii. Here is Dr. Tsutsui.

[beep]

Godzilla was introduced to you at a young age, this character. Did this introduction of Japanese culture through this iconic monster, is that what led your educational path?

[00:02:19] Dr. William Tsutsui: It's a interesting question because I feel like I have lived my whole life with Godzilla in one way or another from the time I saw that first movie when I was seven or eight-years-old growing up in Central Texas, to today when I find myself being asked to speak on Godzilla and give quotes to the media on Godzilla more than I could imagine possible. This big cinematic lizard has been a part of my existence, of my identity as a Japanese American, and of my professional life as a historian trying to educate people about Japan. It's a chicken and the egg. I don't know if Godzilla took me down that path or if I was headed down that path and I realized along the way that Godzilla was a great way of doing what I wanted to do.

Nonetheless, it's entirely tied up together. I'm one of those people who, at almost every important juncture in my life, felt I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and was 180 degrees wrong in what I expected. When I went off to college, this was back in Reagan's America, I really wanted to be a businessman. I imagined myself working on Wall Street, maybe in Goldman Sachs or one of the big investment banks of the day, pocketing a huge paycheck, wearing beautiful suits, working in the skyscraper. I remember taking my first economics class as an undergraduate and thinking, wow, I expected this to really be about people, and I expected it to be more interesting. Instead, this is just math.

That fantasy of going into business didn't last too long. I ultimately drifted to history, because history is about those human stories that I really wanted to relate to. It also resonates with movies. Movies in essence are stories. For me, that just hit home. After four years and having a degree in what I like to tell people sometimes seems like the least practical major in the world, East Asian Studies, I began to think, boy, how am I going to feed myself when this college gig is done? My roommates and I watched LA Law every week, and I said, heck, why don't I become a lawyer. Looks like a good life. Fast cars, downtown LA, half my roommates were becoming lawyers as well. I said, wow, we can go to law school together. Six weeks. I hated law school. I decided I'm going back to what I love. It's stories, history, Japan, and rolled into that was these monster movies that had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.

What I tell a lot of young people is, it's become hokey, this idea of following your passion, yet, that's exactly what I ended up learning from these experiences of trying really hard to be practical and pre-professional and failing miserably, that my spirit was someplace else and I followed that. Lo and behold, it led me to a place where I get paid to talk about Godzilla movies and share my passion with others.

[00:05:58] Host: It was a early age that you first fell in love with this character, love or admiration or awe. At that young age, were you aware of the socio connections to the trauma that this story and this character was based on?

[00:06:18] Dr. William Tsutsui: I'll tell you, I don't think anyone in America was aware of this history to the Godzilla series, and really the cultural, historical context in which the first film was made in the 1950s, until the start of the 21st century. The original Japanese film from 1954 was not available in broad release in the United States until 2004. Most Americans had not actually seen it. They had seen a very heavily edited version of that original. The original was called Gojira, or Godzilla. The American version was called Godzilla: King of the Monsters, came out in 1956.

While it contained raw material from the original film edited up for American consumption, it was a very different movie, and didn't really give us insight into the political nature of the film, or the trauma of the Japanese people were feeling at the time that it was made, less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the middle of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Like most people growing up, when I looked at a Godzilla movie, I saw a big lizard walking through a toy city making things explode. That was fun. It still I think is what draws a lot of people to those films. Yet it gives an entirely new level of comprehension when you realize, wow, there's actually something I can learn from this. This is not just a fantasy, but is really channeling much deeper feelings in Japanese society at the time.

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[00:08:06] Host: November of 1954, where we are nine years away from these horrific incidents that as Americans, we can't even fathom. You talk about, in your lecture, how Japan, that it was taboo or banned for them to talk about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that they were not able to explore that trauma in art and film. Yet this giant lizard movie is made.

[00:08:44] Dr. William Tsutsui: What's interesting is, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's defeat in 1945, the American military, working with the Allied Forces, occupied Japan for a span of seven years. Japan was under American occupation from 1945 to 1952. At the beginning of that occupation, the Americans were willing to have the Japanese talk about the atomic bombings because they really wanted the Japanese to understand how thoroughly they'd been defeated, how strong American science was, and really how horrifying the destruction of those two cities had been.

Pretty soon, the Americans realized that if most Japanese people really realized how horrifying these new weapons were, it might turn them against American occupation rather than impress them with American power. At that point, the Americans decided, "We're just going to censor all discussion of the atomic bombings in Japan." Essentially, Japanese newspapers, Japanese authors, Japanese films, Japanese music, could not address that really traumatic experience in 1945 directly. When it came to 1952, when the Americans went home and the Japanese took over, you would think that all of a sudden that meant the lid was lifted off the pot, and all of a sudden the Japanese could address this history, but really, it had been so repressed by that point. Japanese society is quite straight-laced in any case and doesn't really want to talk about it.

People don't want to talk publicly about controversial issues, that it became impossible in public discourse in Japan, at least, to really reflect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and certainly to express any kind of critique of the American decision to drop the bombs, or of American censorship of the bombs during the occupation. What's remarkable is that one of the most public ways in which the Japanese began to address this painful history was through the medium of film, and particularly through a science fiction movie about a dinosaur that is irradiated by American H-bomb testing, rises out of the sea and destroys Tokyo.

It's amazing that that narrative became so meaningful to people who were trying to work out a lot of complex feelings, a lot of ongoing anxiety about the atomic bombs and the Cold War that was taking place at that very moment, and could have a cathartic effect for society.

[00:11:41] Host: I know that there have been studies here in the States about the PTSD we as citizens experienced after 9/11. Even those of us that were nowhere near New York or Pennsylvania or DC, but just experiencing that, witnessing that, whether you're watching it on TV. Were there studies, or have there been studies about the post-traumatic stress of a nation losing tens of thousands of people instantly?

Never in history, other than maybe natural disasters, but not to that level, were tens of thousands of people are gone in an instant, and then hundreds of thousands more over time. That mourning, that rehabilitation, that psychological rehabilitation, has to be intense.

[00:12:38] Dr. William Tsutsui: The impacts on Japanese society were, needless to say, incredibly profound on so many different levels of that wartime experience, and especially of the two atomic attacks. To many commentators, they really reshaped Japanese society, and reshaped the national psychology after the war in meaningful ways. Most people would say one thing they did was promote a strong pacifist movement in Japan, that as a result of the defeat and the atomic bombings, Japanese people essentially said, "We don't want war anymore."

This was codified in the Japanese constitution, written in 1947 with a lot of American influence, but which captured the spirit of the Japanese people, which said, "We don't really want military force in our country. We don't want an army or navy or an air force, we want to be for the cause of peace." I think for many Japanese at the time and since, this has been a very sincere desire to get away from these big power politics and empire and war and so forth.

Needless to say, though, almost as soon as that constitution was written, the American government said, "Well, actually, we are fighting a Cold War, and we need the Japanese to build up some military capacity, against the Japan today, as self-defense forces." Clearly, one reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in defeat was this recoil from the military as a way of solving international problems, which I think is a very positive that happened, but there are many other ways in which this had a deep effect on Japanese society.

One, and this is common with the end of wars everywhere, there developed something of a crisis of masculinity in Japan because, of course, men were very closely associated with the war effort from Japan's leadership during the 1940s, which was not surprisingly entirely male to the members of the Japanese military who were portrayed in patriotic ways and propaganda and so forth, and did the fighting during the war, and then were defeated and came home as the vanquished rather than as the victors.

This has impacts on family life. This has impacts on the media. I think we can see it in the Godzilla films as well where Godzilla is this interesting figure. Is Godzilla a hero? Is he a villain? Is he a bit of both? I think that's something a lot of Japanese people had to deal with in the wake of the war, that they survived really a profound traumatic experience. On some level, they felt like they had endured in a positive way, and yet by being part of this war effort, they had done some things that they had come to regret. They were very ambivalent when they looked backwards.

[00:15:57] Host: It's interesting thinking about Godzilla, whether it's the original or any of the other iterations, but also just like this Kaiju, giant monster, it's one of the only things that could come in and decimate a city like a nuclear bomb could. In a lot of these movies, you're not focusing on the death, you focus on the destruction. You see the destruction, but the death toll is not something that is heavy-handed. Even in the most recent, the Godzilla vs. King Kong, this entire city is destroyed, and I'm watching and thinking like, man, hundreds of thousands of people must be dying and we're not talking about it at all because we care more about the monsters at this point.

[00:16:46] Dr. William Tsutsui: Susan Sontag wrote in a famous piece about The Imagination of Disaster in popular cinema. She was actually probably the first person to take Japanese movie monsters seriously back in the 1960s. She said monster pictures are important as an artifact of the Cold War age, really in two ways, and they work on two levels. One is they distract us from the horror all around us on a daily basis.

When we're thinking about the idea of nuclear holocaust potentially raining down from the sky at any moment, boy, it's fun to watch a big lizard running around on a movie screen, and for an hour and a half, just forget about the existential threat that superpower politics plays in our lives. The movies distract us.

The second way, though, is she says, the movies essentially anesthetize us to the horror that is all around us. By seeing these scenes of mass destruction, by seeing giant monsters walk through and destroy cities, in some ways, we are preparing ourselves for what might be the reality of mass thermonuclear catastrophe somewhere down the road. Both of these are dangerous, because in both of these ways, they're getting us to internalize that mass destruction could happen.

[00:18:18] Host: We've been sitting with that knowledge since 1945, that there's this fear that will always be present. I grew up in the '80s, and it was everywhere, whether it was a Superman movie or Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd in Spies Like Us, that at any moment, the bombs will drop and everything will be wiped out. Do you think it desensitized them to a point when the attack happened on the Twin Towers in 9/11-- I know here on the West Coast, we were prepared for the worst and expecting, oh, this is it. This is when all of the silos open up and all the lights on the map are lit, and you're watching little digital bombs.

I was in my early 20s at the time and fairly naive, but I thought we're about to witness the end or mass catastrophe.

[00:19:22] Dr. William Tsutsui: Yes. What I think is really interesting is the way in which monster movies actually have something of an educational function, or even a training function. Let me tell you a story. On March 11th, 2011, I happened to be in Tokyo. I was traveling with a group of Japanese Americans. We were on a bus in the early afternoon. We just had our lunch, and we were headed to a meeting with a Japanese business group at a big hotel at a skyscraper in Tokyo. The bus pulls up out in front of the hotel. It stops, and just at that moment, it begins to shake. I think for all of us, we thought, "Oh, the bus is malfunctioning", but then the shaking gets stronger, and it keeps going. Honestly, seems like it's going forever. The Great Tōhoku Earthquake was happening while I was sitting on that bus. Looking outside, all the skyscrapers around us were swaying as the earth shook, and after a minute, from all those buildings, hoards of Japanese people dressed in suits and ties and formal clothing, skirts and heels, came running out of the buildings in fear of what was happening. As soon as the shaking stopped, the guy on the bus next to me turned, and he knew about my passion for the Godzilla movies, and he said, "Bill, didn't that remind you of a Godzilla movie?" Of course, now we know it was so totally inappropriate, with the tsunami at that point, even beginning to bear down on the coast with what would happen at the Fukushima Power Plant and so forth. In retrospect, it was just in terrible taste, and yet the reality was, "Yes, it did remind me of a Godzilla movie." The city looking like it was going to collapse, people running in fear.

At that moment, I began to realize, "Wow, the Japanese people are prepared for this. They have seen this moment a thousand times on TV, in movie theaters, in comic books," and that came home to me that evening after the earthquake struck. Tokyo, as you may remember, essentially shut down after the earthquake. The trains in Japan are set that when there's a big earthquake, they just shut down because every inch of track has to be checked to make sure it's safe, all the signaling, and so forth.

Public transit was not running. Because it was during the business day, there were all these workers in the city who had no way of getting home for the night. A lot of spouses started then to drive into Tokyo to pick up their wives or husbands, which meant the streets were just gridlock. You could not move anywhere in Tokyo for 12 hours after that earthquake.

What was amazing to me, as a number of observers noted at the time, was how dignified and disciplined the Japanese people were after this really unthinkable natural disaster. Outside every payphone and every ATM machine, people were lined up in these very orderly, very Japanese lines. At restaurants, I witnessed it with my own eyes, somebody coming out and saying, "We don't have enough food to let everybody have what they want, but I'm going to tell you what, we'll take everyone in line and we'll divide what we have that many ways so everyone can have something." Then what amazed me the most, in a city that was in traffic gridlock for half a day, I only heard people blow their horns three times.

[00:23:20] Host: Wow.

[00:23:21] Dr. William Tsutsui: Can you imagine what New York would sound like after a natural disaster? It was incredible. People said, "Oh, that's Japanese culture, that meant that people were so kind towards each other at that moment." Other people said, "Oh, the Japanese state has got them so policed and so brainwashed that they have to behave that way."

I thought to myself, you know actually, those might have an impact, but it's also watching all these monster movies over the years meant that Japanese people were prepared. They were not so surprised, and they had a model for how to behave in the midst of a crisis that the whole world could stand to learn something from.

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[00:24:03] Host: In your lecture, you said that Godzilla is, I'm paraphrasing you here, "Functions as the cinematic conscience for viewers in Japan and globally." I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how this beast has done that throughout the decades following its original in 1954.

[00:24:25] Dr. William Tsutsui: Yes, so that original 1954 movie, of course, was a very, very political movie. It essentially sent the message that nuclear testing, proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to end up destroying this world. Godzilla was really this representation of this dark future that awaited mankind if we could not manage to discipline ourselves and to turn our back on a force that was too big for us to control.

I think really that movie did that masterfully, that it made us realize that, "Wow, we don't know what can happen to this radiation, and maybe mother nature knows better than we do. Maybe our comeuppance is coming for going too far with science, going too far with nuclear weaponry and nuclear power, maybe we should think about it."

The same thing characterizes a number of movies in the series. People, when they think about the Godzillamovies, tend to remember those titles from the '60s and '70s, the goofy Godzilla in the very bright technicolor where Godzilla is battling Mothra, a giant moth, or King Ghidora, a three-headed dragon monster. You can tell there's people in rubber suits wrestling with each other on a sound stage. They don't think that those films too addressed significant issues in Japanese and world society, but they did. Perhaps one of the most famous one is the way in which the films talked about the pollution crisis in Japan, and environmental concerns, which became acute in the 1970s. Japan was the world's most polluted place in the early 1970s, sort of like what we think of China today.

Perpetually hazy from the smog, the waters poisoned and devoid of life because of industrialization, and the Godzilla movies addressed those in a wonderful film called Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, which hypothesizes that all of the polluted slime at the bottom of Tokyo Bay at some point becomes so toxic that it takes form as a giant monster which fights Godzilla. It sounds a little bit silly when I describe it like this, but it, like that 1954 movie, is remarkably effective, I think, in making audiences step back and say, yes, we're doing some stupid things in this world, maybe we need to think about that a little bit deeper.

[00:27:16] Host: You'd also talked about, I'm going to paraphrase you again, you say, "Godzilla gives a name, face, and form to fears that are often abstract and invisible, like radiation and viruses, and Godzilla domesticates, controls, overcomes, and therefore, disempowers those things that threatened us." We're still in the middle of this pandemic, and what you say here makes so much sense because how can we be afraid of something that we can't see? It's one of the problems with the disinformation and misinformation that is going around, is if we don't see it, how do we know it's real? If there isn't a giant monster destroying the city, how do we know that this tiny thing is killing this many people?

[00:28:16] Dr. William Tsutsui: I think it's a really, really great point that you raised. Modern society is characterized by anxiety. It goes with modern life, and we are constantly afraid of something we don't know about. Science is like this kind of Pandora's box. It opens up all these wonderful possibilities for society in doing things we've never done before, and yet it also raises all these questions about forces that we can't control. Godzilla tapped into that profoundly, I think.

We were aware, after August of 1945, just how powerful nuclear energy could be, and yet, thank goodness, most people around the world had never witnessed a nuclear attack. How do you make sense of that if you can't see this object of your anxieties? One of the most powerful things about cinema is it can bring shape and form to those things that are amorphous or invisible.

Godzilla did that with genius, I believe, and in the process, allowed people to feel their greatest anxiety, so have this cathartic sense of, "Gosh, I'm got all this tension built up, there's a monster walking through the city. How horrible is that?" Yet, then, when the monster is finally controlled and defeated, when the world is saved, as it were at the end of the films, people could breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Gosh, maybe it will be okay in the end," and that's profoundly valuable, I think, in terms of dealing with uncertainty in a world that is getting more uncertain by the day. That's been true, I think, for the past 70 years. One of the other things I think is really interesting is the way in which there's an element of nostalgia in the Godzilla movies for a period in which people could come together and fight a common foe. I see it in this country as well, some of the nostalgia for the World War 2 period, which I think most people would probably say was the last consensus good war in American history where we were all fighting enemies that we recognized were identifiably evil, whether the Nazis or the imperialists in Japan. We did a good thing for the world in that war, but in Japan, as in the United States, there haven't been a lot of easy answers since 1945. Things are complicated, politics is complicated. People have opinions even about things that one shouldn't think would necessarily be that controversial. Consequently, people have a yearning for a situation where there's a clear bad guy and a clear good guy.

I think we see that in the Marvel Universe films today. We all want to be able to identify with a hero, we all want to know who's wearing the black hat, and we want to see the good guy win in the end. Godzilla gave people that in post-war Japan.

I think one of the most valuable things about the Godzilla series is finding meaning in places where you least expect there to be meaning. I think we've all come a long way in recognizing that popular culture can teach us something. I remember when I started showing Godzilla movies in my classes, that's over 20 years ago that I first used it in my undergraduate lecture classes, my colleagues thought I was crazy, my colleagues thought I was dumbing down my teaching for students. I was pandering somehow to it. I invited them, "Come to class, watch the movie, and listen to the discussions, and you see if you think it's pandering."

None of them ever did. They just had this built-in stereotype that, of course, popular culture had to be lightweight and harebrained, especially science fiction on some level.

We've come a long way in recognizing what we can learn from popular movies, from comic books, from animation, but I think there is still so much that we can do in that regard. I just want to encourage people, if you have a passion, if you have something that you think is maybe not that important, keep thinking about it. Keep thinking about the ways it relates to some of the real existential issues of our day. I think you'll be surprised that even passions that seemed most personal and most irrelevant to the headlines of the times can teach us a lot about where we're at and what we need as people and as a society.

[00:33:19] Host: If you would like to continue this conversation, visit billtsutsui.com to learn more, or chapman.edu/wilkinson to hear his full lecture. For more socially conscious content, visit us at publicpodcasting.org, or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.