Do you know why my Nihongo (Japanese) skills suck? It’s partially due to Godzilla.
I remember one time I went to a doctor due to an issue which I will not give details on (cuz I’m HIPAA’ng myself), and the doctor asked me which antibiotic I needed. In my head I was like, isn’t that something you should be telling me? This was a while back, prior to smartphones, so it’s not like I could have easily researched it as I looked blankly at the doctor. That is why I ended up with the wrong one and had to come back to request the other, which finally took care of it. It prolonged the torment, and I liken that incident to how my mom asked us kids if we wanted to take Japanese language classes on Saturdays or swim lessons on Sundays.
Godzilla Minus Zero hits theaters on:
Yes, I’m looking forward to watching it.
- Japan Release Date: November 3, 2026 (Toho)
- North America Release Date: November 6, 2026 (GKIDS)
Due to the power of the internet, I was able to research my old TV habits, and since we did not have cable in the late ’80s, I must’ve watched my movies on KWGN (2). They parked monster and sci-fi films directly into their Saturday and Sunday afternoon movie blocks, almost always in the 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM or 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM windows. These bridged the gap between morning cartoons and late-afternoon sports or syndicated reruns. Cartoons yes, sports no, so I dipped out after the movie. I will also let you know that I was not getting tutored or taking piano or polo lessons. Out of those two choices from my mom, us kids chose swim lessons to allow for optimum cartoonmaxxing, which I later found out was only spurred on because our uncle tossed us fully clothed into the deep end. Shockingly, that ineffectively didn’t teach us how to swim, so it was my parents’ decision to have us take actual swim lessons. What a novel solution.
Now that our schedules were maximized for optimum Godzilla watching, as a kid growing up in Colorado, being able to watch Japanese people fight a giant lizard stomping his way through Tokyo while taking on tanks, lasers, and the full Japanese Self-Defense Force (with the occasional salaryman in his path) was pure cinema. So, when I saw Godzilla Minus One in the theater, and that main tune from the classic Godzilla movies played out (dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun), it triggered maximum nostalgia. And I don’t mean the kind of nostalgia porn or pandering that Hollywood doles out solely for fan service. The “Godzilla Theme” from the classic Toho soundscape was brought into the modern MonsterVerse via Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), adapted by Bear McCreary. To me, it was so unmemorable that I was moved about as much as an OnlyFans model being told she’s beautiful by her top donor. Akira Ifukube’s original score for the 1954 film Godzilla (Gojira) is the real tune, the kind of music that acts as a temporal marker for us living in our linear timeline.
Can I travel to Japan and converse fluently with locals? No. However, I bet I can say I have watched the vast majority of the Showa-era films, 15 in total, produced by Toho between 1954 and 1975. Some may not know what an undertaking this was, because if you weren’t the family with a bougie encyclopedia set at that time, there was no way a kid would know how many films there were, the names of them all, or when you would be able to see them. Being glued to the TV was my lifeline, not only to Saturday morning cartoons and Godzilla, but to Japanese and Americanized anime from Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers) to Robotech, which I had to wake up at an eff’n early hour to watch. Also, for the record, every classic film and show from Planet of the Apes to Logan’s Run was part of my sophisticated cultural regimen.
As for Japanese culture, I was learning it solely through Japanese movies and anime. Even into adulthood, I still don’t know if certain tropes, like tilting my head and scratching the back of it in confusion with the occasional “eeehh?”, is something that most Japanese people actually do, or if it is just commonplace on screen. I do know most Japanese eyes don’t do a spiral motion, aka the uzumaki-me (if you know, you know), which ranges from the character being confused to knocked out.
By now, if this essay were a movie, this would not be efficient storytelling because I haven’t really set up where I am going. So, I will just come out and say it: this started after watching one YouTube movie reviewer mischaracterize the outrage by the Asian American community over Scarlett Johansson being cast as the lead in Ghost in the Shell. Mind you, I go way back to Appleseed, Black Magic, and Dominion Tank Police, and Ghost in the Shell was my favorite manga and anime (thank you Mile High Comics for making that all possible), and I was not bothered by her being cast. I was bothered by a billion other things that I wrote about, but the part that pissed me off was hearing this YouTuber downplay the controversy by bringing up a viral YouTube video interviewing people in Japan: “There’s a really great video on YouTube of someone showing the picture of Scarlett to Japanese people in Japan, and universally 100% of them are like, ‘She looks great, I’m excited to see it.'”
Yeah, so what? I already know this dude gets crapped on a lot (one reason I am not citing who he is), and I used to watch him because I love movies. However, seeing this video, he’s tone-deaf, and he said it with arrogance, yet he conflates Japanese nationals with the Asian American diaspora. The core flaw in using “people in Japan don’t mind” as a defense comes down to representation and context. It ignores the history of Mickey Rooney being cast as a Japanese dude in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or Long Duk Dong being a generic Asian stereotype, and it compares the U.S., with a 6% to 7% Asian population, to Japan, an overwhelmingly ethnically Japanese country where 97% of the population is Japanese.
What does this have to do with the upcoming Godzilla Minus Zero (which I will call Zero)? The vast majority of reviews on Zero will be by non-Asian or non-Japanese Americans with zero context of the culture. Well, surprise bi*****tch, I’m chiming in. And if you were paying attention, I also have very little firsthand understanding of Japanese culture because I am an American of Japanese heritage. If I said I know it all, I’d be lying, so why am I writing about it? Someone’s got to do it, and I elect myself. All who are a nay, raise your hands. All who are a yay? Okay, looks like Greg wins. Besides, the people this film comes from have no idea what’s being said about it over here, so someone has to translate, and a Nikkei who grew up on the originals is about as close to a bridge as it gets. So, what I plan on doing is carrying over as much of the Japanese take as I can, so the conversation doesn’t just focus on Godzilla’s screen time or how many action sequences are in the film.
First of all, for the trifecta of director Ishirō Honda, special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, the original film was a metaphor and intentionally left as an open wound to process Japan’s wartime devastation and atomic trauma. I think most Americans think World War II marked the last time we detonated a nuclear bomb on or near Japan. While it is true that was the last time we used one in war, it actually marked the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Aside from the tests conducted on the mainland in the U.S. (which possibly let every non-human intelligence know that we finally split the atom, the equivalent of us coming home to find apes in the kitchen throwing down a perfectly prepared Beef Wellington that Gordon Ramsay would approve of, using an oven with a faulty pilot light), it didn’t end for the Japanese with Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
As a Japanese American, having to read through the comment sections about Fukushima was a level of stupid that made Simple Jack look like a genius, because the United States detonated 106 nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Yeah, never go full retard. Out of those blasts, the big one was in March 1954. Just months before production on Godzilla began, the U.S. detonated the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll. The blast yielded 15 megatons (more than double what scientists expected), coating the Japanese tuna fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) in radioactive coral dust. The crew suffered acute radiation syndrome, chief radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died, and millions of pounds of contaminated tuna were pulled from Japanese markets, igniting severe national panic. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka conceived Godzilla directly out of this crisis: a living embodiment of thermonuclear tests turning the ocean into a source of death. I won’t even get into what the U.S. did to our own naval personnel, but you get the point.
To further illustrate the point, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster that happened on Friday, March 11, 2011, resulted in stored radioactive wastewater currently being released from storage tanks equal to 536 Olympic swimming pools. While the Fukushima disaster is the most severe civilian nuclear accident in recent history, it was triggered by a massive 9.0 to 9.1 Mw earthquake powerful enough to shift the planet on its axis. I think most people forget the earthquake and only remember the tsunami, which happened because the seabed off the coast of the Tōhoku region violently thrust upward by 30 to 40 meters (100 to 130 feet) and slipped sideways by as much as 50 meters (160 feet) along a 300-mile fault zone. It was this massive, instantaneous displacement of the ocean floor that displaced an equivalent volume of water, generating the catastrophic tsunami. Yet the U.S. Pacific nuclear tests actively injected roughly 11 to 15 times more long-term radioactive contamination into the global ecosystem than Fukushima did. Yeah, foo, I bet you didn’t know that, and now you know.
So, imagine being knocked back to pacifist roots, to the point that 29 years after the formal end of World War II, Hello Kitty was Japan’s persona. Meanwhile, in Japan and Southeast Asia’s backyard, the U.S. was dropping it like it’s hot on the Marshall Islands atolls (67 tests), the core testing ground that defined the early thermonuclear era between 1946 and 1958.
Then, there is the total number of U.S. nuclear tests overall (1,032): the United States detonated over 1,000 nuclear devices between 1945 and 1992. However, the vast majority, 928 tests, were conducted domestically at the Nevada Test Site (primarily underground after the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). Now you know why the MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) in Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla went to Vegas and the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. That is a real-world place located only about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The site was designated by the U.S. government in the 1980s to be the nation’s permanent, deep-geological storage facility for thousands of tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
On a slight tangent, the Denver metropolitan area where I grew up was heavily contaminated with radioactive materials, driven by two entirely separate industries: nuclear weapons manufacturing during the Cold War and radium refining in the early 20th century. Those gave us the Rocky Flats Plant (plutonium contamination), which is 35.6 miles away from my childhood home, and the Denver Radium Superfund Site (radium and uranium), which sat right in the middle of dense, highly populated urban neighborhoods adjacent to downtown. For the record, I don’t turn green and big when angry, and even with my fair share of run-ins with spiders, I cannot scale a wall.
This exposure is not limited to my proximity to my old hood. From smoke detectors, exit signs, and gun sights to a banana and antique dinnerware, we have all been in contact with radioactive elements. The difference is that Japan experienced the firebombings, two atomic bombs, and Pacific fallout all within a single decade. On top of that, the entire explosive yield of those original atomic bombs is now just the trigger inside modern nuclear weapons, which can be tens to hundreds of times more powerful. And those weapons are not history. Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and the countries around the Southeast Asia Sea are living next to a nuclear-armed power whose threat keeps growing.
So, no, my Japanese still sucks. I still can’t order dinner in Shinjuku without pointing, or try to explain that I need allergy medicine (kafunshō) without the pharmacist looking at me like I just asked for a kanchō (an enema). And I still don’t know if the head-scratching anime confusion trope is actual real-world behavior.
None of this history is ancient folklore or abstract trivia to me, either. During World War II, my great-aunt Rosie Nakata Yabe was stuck in Japan as an American citizen. Because she was married to a Japanese Army officer, Michio Yabe, she lived through the war and the bombings entirely from the Japanese side. Yet, after the war ended, she went on to serve in the U.S. military, and when she passed away, she made sure she was buried in American soil, in Brighton, Colorado. That split reality is baked directly into my DNA.
So when Godzilla Minus Zero hits the screen, I won’t need subtitles to understand what I’m looking at. The kid sitting on the floor in front of a Sony Trinitron in Denver watching Channel 2 thought he was just watching a giant lizard crush tanks between commercial breaks. The adult writing this knows he was watching a traumatized nation scream into the void about a firestorm the rest of the world was already trying to forget. When that original Akira Ifukube theme hits this time around, it won’t just be movie music. It will be the sound of an open wound that seventy years of pop culture still hasn’t managed to close, and with what’s looming over the region now, it isn’t closing anytime soon.
dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun
