Whose roar is it, anyway? Localization and ideological communication with respect to the Toho Godzilla franchise

Since the mid-1980s, film critics and audiences have come to recognize Ishirō Honda’s original cutof Gojira/Godzilla (1954) to be a substantial meditation on the atomic bombing of Japan, ananalysis that had been initially obscured by the re-working of the film for distribution to Westernaudiences. This article elucidates how the story of the international distribution and localizationof Toho’s Godzilla films communicates the story of Japan’s relationship to the United States, whodropped those bombs and shaped Japan’s post-war constitution, through the analysis of afurther three key films from Toho’s Godzilla franchise: Koji Hashimoto’s Gojira/The Return ofGodzilla (1984), Takao Okawara’s Gojira Nisen: Mireniamu/Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999), andHideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Gojira/Shin Godzilla (2016). Each of these films re-set theseries’ continuity, and all but the last were radically re-cut for distribution abroad. Comparativeanalysis of the Japanese versions of the films with their American cuts demonstrates that theGodzilla franchise provides a unique transnational frame for charting the tensions concerningJapan’s re-emergence upon the world stage at key moments since the Second World War.