Alt, who loved toys, robots and monsters, described the otaku as one “who consumes something that eventually consumes him,” but he defended the advent of the superfan. He saw in it a way to cope with a loss of agency in an increasingly complex world. Alt felt it was natural that people, when faced with different forms of heavily mediated reality, should want to retreat into fantasy spaces of their own making. Speaking about the ways Japan blurs lines between childhood and adulthood, the feminine and masculine, he used the word “infantilism,” which made his wife bristle. Playfulness, she protested, was not the prerogative of children. “Even a grandpa can play!” Yoda said. Alt withdrew the freighted word, acknowledging that it had an ugly history. In World War II, U.S. propaganda depicted the Japanese as subhuman. Evidence of atrocities — such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937-38, Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Bataan Death March of 1942 and the 1945 Battle of Manila — presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946-48, an international court modeled on Nuremberg, seemed to paint the Japanese as a race apart, even after the crimes of the Nazis were public knowledge. That dehumanization, which started with monstrous depictions of the Japanese during the war, had prepared the ground (many felt) for dropping the atomic bomb. The other side of demonization was infantilization. “Measured by the standards of modern civilization,” said General MacArthur in 1951, the Japanese “would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years [of age].”
Japan, in turn, seemed almost to have internalized its experience of caricature in the postwar years, speaking to the world beyond through an export of monsters, a set of nonhuman characters who were in effect supercaricatures. Godzilla was by far the fiercest, a beast of destruction and vengeance, but the creature culture he engendered eventually graded into the cloying cuteness of Hello Kitty in the 1970s. Many of these characters were as nuanced as any human character might have been, but each represented an unwillingness to reveal the human self, a kind of hiding in plain sight. After all, no society had known the corrosive power of an alien gaze as directly as Japan. How unsurprising, then, yet wonderful somehow that it should fall back on the imagination, always a kind of armor, as a way to prepare a mask to meet the hostile faces that one meets.
As the first non-Western nation to attain Western levels of industrialization, Japan had always been the Supreme Other, a mirror in which people saw reflections of themselves. I was no different. The spiritual culture of Japan was hardly exotic to me but, whereas spirituality in India was used to explain away the country’s failure to master the scientific world, in Japan I was confronted by a dazzling mastery of technology, industry and economy. Japan’s cities, its infrastructure and its systems were the envy of the world. Spirituality here was not the dirty cop-out it was in India, but did Japan’s progress come at a cost? Was something vague, unnamable yet quintessentially Asian lost somehow? Community, conviction, vigor? The question had to be asked, because it was against the ennui of this postindustrial landscape that its modern monsters arose. In these cities, rebuilt from the rubble of war, one felt a distinct hush, a melancholy, an overpowering sense of meals bought and consumed alone. Away from the crowds and stacked lights of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, lonely old people trudged home with their shopping. The country seemed to possess an urban sadness that anticipated late-industrial conditions everywhere, and it was what Godzilla, like the suppressed seed of a darker impulse, returned generation after generation to shatter, shake up and (perhaps) invigorate.
THE SHAPE-SHIFTERS
BEFORE MY PILGRIMAGE to Toho Studios, the home of Godzilla in Tokyo, I wanted to spend some time around an earlier folklore, without which it was impossible to imagine the kaiju of the present era. In Kyoto, at Toei Studio Park, amid film sets of Edo-period towns, there was a nocturnal parade of yokai every Sunday evening. Threading their way through ninja and samurai there walked yamamba, the mountain hag, and feline beauties with blue hair. There were three-eyed gorgons with tall black hats and a Cyclopean dorotabo (a muddy rice field man), whose drunkard son had sold the land he had tilled diligently all his life. Avenging the injustice, his restless spirit stalked paddies. These were characters of ancient folklore who lived within the collective imagination of Japan, and who could be summoned up at any time.
I went to the park with Junya Kohno, 42, a Kyoto-born university lecturer who had recently devoted himself entirely to this world of spectral beings.
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