Reflecting on Godzilla and the Bomb

Read that a long time ago, not sure if I have it here, moved a few times since then including around the world so might have to rebuy it. Thanks for the reminder.

EDIT: in return have you read this one?

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No, but I’ve read “The Zimmerman Telegram” by Barbara W. Tuchman. I’ll have to see about that ^ one - thanks!

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Threads makes The Day After look like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

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That remix is awesome–thanks for that!.

The voice samples seem to me to be from Shimura (Yamane) and Hirata (Serizawa)…?

Ifukube’s theme is clear, but are the rest of the samples from the 1954 original as well…?

Tried finding the album this was from, ‘A Tribute to Godzilla’, but the only one’s I could find were way too expensive ($60USD!?!).

I even tried to find the individual songs from the album on Youtube, but to no avail (except the one you linked) :frowning:

I’d love to hear the rest of the album!

Blue Oyster Cult’s version is used in this fellow’s tribute video–fitting given it’s using ‘Godzilla King Of The Monsters’. It was pretty fun to watch though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65rW_SIzg0

I cant say I know all the samples used.

I know it from a compilation called DUB in JPN from 2004, meaning long out of print.

Amazon.com has it at various pricing here
https://www.amazon.com/Juuon-Dub-Jpn/dp/B0002T246W/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1494059707&sr=8-3&keywords=DUB+in+JPN

Amazon Japan has it cheaper used. Note that the Amazon Japan link includes track names but not the artists names for each track.

If you are at all interested in what Japan has done with dub, names to search on are:

  • Mute Beat Unexpectedly amazing sounds with a brass section right up front. Listen with bass capability!
  • Kazufumi Kodama (lead trumpet player of Mute Beat with some awesome solo work after that band’s demise) sometimes listed as Kodama & Dub Station
  • Dry & Heavy some really amazing work by these guys
  • Likkle Mai (female vocalist from Dry & Heavy, had some interesting solo work including with England’s RSD at the controls)
  • Audio Active - not always dub but worked lots with Adrian Sherwood and generally connected to the local dub/reggae scene here

Note that the above compilation will give you a taste of all of these artists. Note also that Dub Master X who worked with Hiroshi Fujiwara on the above Godzilla track was the mixer/dubmixer for Mute Beat and also has some solo work of varying quality.

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Thanks! I ordered the DUB in JPN used, so we’ll see how it arrives :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks also for the other links–much appreciated. I’ll check these out, too.

I’m assuming you’ve already seen/heard of this, but just in case: it’s an article about Erik Aadahl & Ethan Van der Ryn’s sound design and FX for the Gareth Edward’s Godzilla. I found it quite interesting comparing the thought and innovation that has gone into the Godzilla sound since its beginnings.

https://www.wheretowatch.com/2014/05/godzilla-sound-designers-erik-aadahl-ethan-van-der-ryn-on-creature-language/

Thanks again!

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Will check that link and glad to hear you ordered the CD. If you have any thoughts or questions about this sort of music in Japan, please contact me by PM and I’ll be glad to share my experience.

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Are you really claiming that there wasn’t racism aimed at the Japanese that might have figured into the decision to bomb Japan, even if there were other considerations at play? I mean, have you not seen the propaganda films put out by the US government? they are pretty fucking racist, not to mention Japanese-American internment. I mean, come on, really?

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You should see the Japanese propaganda films!

OTOH reading MacArthur might well dispel notions of racism being much of the calculus here.

I don’t doubt that racism wasn’t the primary motivation, but I don’t think that we can ignore it as a factor in the decision making process.

And yes, I’m sure the Japanese had pretty horrible propaganda films, no doubt.

[ETA] Actually, I think having students comparatively view Allied propaganda films against Axis propaganda films would be an interesting exercise! Hmmm… I know lots of American films are easy to find online, since they are public domain now and that Nazi-era German films propaganda films are easy to come by… I wonder about Japanese and Italian ones? Hmmm…

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This of course calls for the need to recommend the Man in the High Castle if you’d like to both explore propaganda films and imagine a USA where the axis powers were not defeated:

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Again, read MacArthur. Not only was he directly involved in fighting the war but was also an influential voice in policy. I’ll leave understanding his opinions and attitudes up to you.

Though many were destroyed by the Japanese and GHQ both, there are surviving copies of some. Of those I’ve seen, some are subtitled very poorly and those and the non subtitled ones are not the easiest to really understand due to the language shifts linguistic forms used. Its not just that people don’t talk like that these days but not even government/SDF people talk like that these days. This would make an A/B comparison class expertise rather flawed IMO.

I’d offer you some links but the place I stored them is unfortunately a now dead HDD.

The book was great - not PKDs best, by any stretch, but it came out pretty early in his career, I think, but certainly showed where he was headed with his work later. [quote=“Israel_B, post:52, topic:100332”]
Again, read MacArthur.
[/quote]

Sure, and I’ll add it to my backlog of books to read! But we can hardly understand MacArthur as an entirely disinterested objective party with regards to Japan, can we? He was a central architect of Japan’s postwar government and had a strong interest in spinning the story in a particular way, and I doubt that his own role would be central to that. That doesn’t mean his views are entirely to be rejected or ignored, because obviously, you can’t understand the Pacific Front and the postwar transformation of Japan without him. But I’d argue that they are to be paired with other views to get something of a clearer picture of what was happening, which is the same you’d do with, say, an oral history or an autobiography.

Yeah, but that’s going to be true no matter what, I’m afraid. It’s a pretty occupational hazard of the historian, in general. It’s something I’d tell all my students on anything like this - that we’re watching and reading this through our

Too bad! I’ll have to do some digging on my own. I’m sure I can find someone who knows some Japanese to help me navigate the pitfalls you mention.

Sure, there was lots of racism, but that wasn’t the deciding factor in using the atomic bomb. One of the big frustrations in bombing the Germans was that it was hard to get proper firestorms when the cities were made out of brick and stone rather than wood as in Japan. I think Dresden was one of the few. Read some contemporary accounts. I had a friend who flew in the Mighty Eighth Air Force over Germany, and he would have been glad to have dropped bigger and better bombs if he could have. Given what was going on there, I’m sorry he couldn’t have too.

The Allies would have gladly used the atomic bomb on the Nazis. It would even have had better political effect than in Japan, since the Soviets were already on the march in the east. Blasting Germany with a super weapon would have given the US, Britain & France a stronger hand negotiating the division of Europe with the Russians. The problem was that the atomic bomb wasn’t available until after V-E day.

World War II was as much about racism as it was about colonialism. Before the war people accepted much higher levels of racial stereotyping and discrimination than they do nowadays. In fact, this repudiation of racism was a result of the racism of the war. The fact that the Germans and Japanese had racial theories that entitled them to take racism to its most horrible limits in what was otherwise seen as a modern, rational society, fed the liberation movements afterwards.

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We can’t say it played no role in the decision making process, though. Decisions like this are always multi-faceted and complicated, and even driven by unconscious ideologies that are hard to discern. Ignoring that means ignoring human nature. It also makes them far harder to attribute to historical actors, because we have to really work to understand and comprehend it.

I totally agree with this point and I even bring that when I teach this era of history. But that knowledge is quickly fading from popular memory (as we can see in the language used by many on the right, which trades in the same sort of racism, but in a more coded language) and in some quarters, the embrace of race theories never went away. It just become unfashionable among politicians to actively indulge in and drove civil rights groups and anti-colonial, global anti-racists to be far more proactive in pushing for equality–the rights accrued by people historically brutalized and marginalized came about because of their own activism far more than because the elites were all of a sudden aware that racism was a bad thing to use to stay in power. But far too many people today are employing the language they used to advocate for anti-equality points of view.

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“Some” Japanese isnt going to cut it, you need a native level speaker, preferably someone old enough to have some familiarity with the period speech.

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I’ll have to agree that we cannot rule out racism. Still, if the bomb had been available earlier, it would have been used on Germany. After D-Day, most Americans assumed that the Germans would soon surrender and the boys would be coming home by Christmas. (There’s even a popular song about it, written after they realized that they weren’t coming home by Christmas.) The authorities even dropped rationing briefly. When the Germans kept on fighting, there was a sense of anger. That brief hope had been shattered, and Americans knew that the long bloody slog was far from over. If the bomb had detonated at Alamogordo in January, it would have been used on Germany in February. The war had entered the berserker stage. It had taken on a horrible momentum of its own. (For a good take on this, see http://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm)

I’ll also have to agree that we have been forgetting the lessons of the past. A big chunk of Trump’s election was all about getting to be a racist bastard without being called on it. It must be horrible being a nasty, crawly sh-t and not being able to do the things a nasty, crawly sh-it just has to do without someone pointing at that you are a nasty, crawly sh-t. Look at our border guards. That job always attracted goons, the way the priesthood attracted pedophiles, but now they’ve been given license. In the 1930s, George Orwell said that the old system had fallen but no new system had taken its place, so, as when a building is gutted for renovations, all the rats and vermin crawl out. I hope we’re seeing something like that, and we’ll get some drywall and some floorboards in before the place becomes unlivable.

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True, but this discussion is encouraging. Most Americans have no idea of their history, or world history. They can be successfully lied to about what happened the previous decade! Just look at the revisions of the Iraq War or the Crash of 08.

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