Time Machine: Godzilla and Donald Trump

This story originally appeared in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2016.

TOKYO — The first movie I ever saw that had Japan or Japanese people in it, was Godzilla in 1957. I was 14 years old and I saw it at the Eureka Theater, a local cinema in the small town of Eureka, a coastal fishing and logging town of 29,000 people in  Northern California. It was a science fiction horror movie — which is what attracted me in the first place — but what I remember of it today, aside from the horrible dubbing in English and the destruction of Tokyo, was the frank depiction of the horrors of the Atomic Bomb.  

A number of Godzilla sequels followed, most of which I saw, as Godzilla evolved from a fearsome creature to a less destructive, sympathetic one, a victim of nuclear apocalypse that became part of the cultural landscape in the United States as well as in Japan. The original film was ranked as one of the “10 Best Monster Movies of All-Time” by Variety Magazine. The series went on to become the longest continuously running franchise in movie history, recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, and a part of the cultural landscape, not only in Japan but in America as well.