When the cooling coagulant finally freezes Godzilla, suspending his monstrous body in

rearing horror, the victorious military do not celebrate his annihilation. Instead, they solemnly proclaim that Godzilla “has been completely silenced” (Shin Godzilla 1:48:44). This rendering to silence presupposes that Godzilla had been speaking prior to this moment, that his wake of colossal destruction represents a decipherable language. If so, what is Godzilla’s language? Given the historical context—Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla is noted as a response to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, and the resulting Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster—Godzilla embodies an allegorical articulation of government ineptitude. However, I will reframe this articulation along the East Asian practice of omenology. Supported by Rudolf Wagner’s “The Language of Heaven” and the function of the Nue monster explored in Elizabeth Oyler’s “The Nue and Other Monsters in Heike Monogatari,” I argue that this cinematic resurgence of Godzilla operates as an omen that not only retrospectively signifies

bureaucratic failure, but champions a reorganization of government centered around translation.

 

The film’s opening scene quickly locates Godzilla—“Tokyo Bay, Off the Coast of Yokohama”—which ties Godzilla’s omen purpose to place. He is not a monster spontaneously emerging but temporally and spatially situated with his significance elucidated from and dependent on the surrounding environment. Wagner’s “The Language of Heaven” explicates this feature of omens and the subsequent need for translators in discerning meaning. Between the mortal and celestial domains exists a language barrier; how heaven makes its will known operates outside the human tongue. According to Wagner, this linguistic schism can be described as “regularities as well as irregularities of ‘heaven’ [that] both qualify as ‘subtle words’ that need translation” (Wagner 107). The term “subtle” is important in comprehending the true intangibility of heaven’s language. Their true meaning cannot be captured by words. Therefore, attributing and condensing meaning into verbal, legible language transforms this subtly into “actionable and accessible speech” (109). In this sense, the translators of omens have the tall task of articulating both the meaning of and appropriate response to heaven’s will. At first glance, there’s nothing subtle about Godzilla. He tramples Japan, shoots concentrated nuclear rays from his back and mouth, and begs international attention. Godzilla demands to be seen. What confounds the bureaucratic officials is not what they see, but what they hear, the “subtle words” that Godzilla embodies. Experts from all governmental sectors try their hand at classification, but their only uncontested conclusion is that Godzilla “just moves” (Shin Godzilla 44:15). There is, however, a language to be found in this seemingly unmotivated movement: an agenda working through Godzilla. Thus, although Gozilla resists corporeal categorization, his mysterious nature betrays a complex interdependence between celestial will and government failure, and necessitates a systematic translation of this language.

 

Godzilla’s function as omen is supported by Japanese cultural and literary lineage that

places monsters in portentous roles. I will focus on the Nue in Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike) and Elizbeth Olyer’s omen schema, which determines monstrous sightings as

“appearances triggered by anxieties about hierarchical and cultural change” (Oyler 4). According to Oyler, an integral facet of a monster’s identity is its “status as something readable, a sign revealing a rupture” (4). Beings such as Godzilla and the Nue are words given form, intrinsically connected to the societies they textually and cinematically materialize in. Specifically, the nue taiji narrative within the Heike follows Yorimasa, an ambitious warrior seeking imperial recognition, and two accounts of him successfully killing the Nue. Olyer argues that the omen power of the Nue rests in transformation and “doubling,” in which Yorimasa’s bifurcated existence as poet and military leader and his unsuccessful attempts to land a court position highlights broader concerns about an emerging warrior class superseding traditional aristocratic authority (29). Thus, the Nue portends governmental change and a reshaping of structural power. Godzilla similarly ravages Tokyo at a liminal period of transition. The Japanese government struggles to assert an identity internationally and domestically: traditional or progressive, print-based or technological, passive or aggressive. It is apparent that the current bureaucracy no longer works, clearly demonstrated when Godzilla tramples and kills the Prime Minister (Shin Godzilla 1:06:17). Something needs to change, and something is changing: this duality, Godzilla both an agent and reflection of change, delineates his role as an omen. As the Japanese government grapples with archaic organization unsuited for modern society and further develops a global identity distinct from Western powers, Godzilla emerges, an embodiment of heaven’s language that asserts reorganization. If Godzilla can evolve, why can’t the government?

 

Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi’s esoteric team of scientist and specialists, the “lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, outcasts,” imbues the translators with omen power, referencing long-standing East Asian governmental formations based on divinatory scholars recording omens and imperial leaders responding to them (31:52). This reorganization might initially challenge Godzilla’s call for change. Why revert to an older form of government instead of something new? This question presumes two features of Shin Godzilla’s cinematic world and Japanese culture at large: first, that evolution constitutes a complete break from previous forms, and second, that omens are not continuous facets of Japanese spiritual and social life. Anno and Higuchi’s Godzilla in itself is an amalgamation of old and new, simultaneously an ancient reptilian species and nuclear reactor, whose evolution is aided by and constantly reflects its previous forms. Godzilla emerges from the sea with legs that later champion his metamorphosis into a land creature, and his nuclear expulsions harken back to the waste first consumed that created Godzilla. Here, evolution is inherently change and repetition. Omens have been historically ingrained in Japanese vocabularies, even cinematically, evidenced when Yaguchi chillingly declares that Godzilla is “anomalous” (2:49). Olyer’s overarching assessment of the Heike further reinforces the capacity for government change to be multifarious. While the Nue portentously signifies both in-text and contextual hierarchical reconfiguration, the “rest of the Heike enacts the crumbling of an old order that must be reconstructed—and reconstituted, from bits and pieces of the past and present—after the war” (Oyler 31). Thus, where the Japanese government fails to translate Godzilla, Yaguchi’s “outcasts” can by integrating traditional disciplines of omenology with modern systems of communication, sans antiquated bureaucratic barriers. In this respect, Godzilla and government, continuously evolving and resisting singular identity, are anomalous.

 

As an omen, Godzilla both portends bureaucratic negligence and emanates from

bureaucratic negligence, placing omen and government in positions of the originator. Wagner clarifies this paradox; although they articulate heaven’s language, omens are inherently “man-made, or, more precisely, government made” (Wagner 111). This line of reasoning introduces two interpretations: first, that government ineptitude creates omens, and second, that public opinion and translation work to identify omens retrospectively. The struggle comes from attempting to reconcile these seemingly contradictory functions within a single omen. I aim to resolve this issue by applying Oyler’s “doubling” feature to omens themselves. So far, my essay has focused on cinematic Godzilla, a film creation that works internally to impart external meaning. However, there is another dimension to omens, present in modern cinema and past literature, that explains a bifurcated function: the medium as omen. When the Japanese military leader announces that “Godzilla has been silenced,” he does so from his cinematic reality. Yet, while the film Godzilla might eventually decay and disappear due to his nuclear half-life, his external existence cemented by Shin Godzilla, the film, continues in perpetuity. Godzilla has not, in fact, been silenced. He can be revisited, reimagined, and reinterpreted to mirror the current social realities and problems. Omens then operate along two veins: as an in-text creature and text itself. Like the Nue, which continually reappears despite his recorded death, Godzilla resides at the boundary between life and death, character and medium. He is omen in this respect: straddling the boundary of his cinematic existence, waiting to reemerge from oceanic depths to speak.

Works Cited

 

Olyer, Elizabeth. “The Nue and Other Monsters in Heike Monogatari.”  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2008, pp. 1-32. 

 

Shin Godzilla. Directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, Toho Studios, 2016. 

 

Wagner, Rudolf. “The Language of Heaven.” Reading the Signs: Philology, History, Prognostication, edited by Iwo Amelung and Joachim Kurtz, Iudicium Verlag, 2018, pp. 97-125.