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Fascinating exegesis by Peter Wynn Kirby on the meaning of "Godzilla" for Japan.
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The film was inspired by events that were very real and very controversial. In March 1954, a massive thermonuclear weapon tested by the United States near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, codenamed “Bravo,” detonated with about 2.5 times greater force than anticipated. The unexpectedly vast fallout from the bomb enveloped a distant Japanese tuna trawler named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in a blizzard of radioactive ash. Crew members returned to their home port of Yaizu bearing blackened and blistered skin, acute radiation sickness and a cargo of irradiated tuna. Newspapers reported on the radioactive traces left by the men’s bodies as they wandered the city, as well as “atomic tuna” found in fish markets in Osaka and later at Japan’s famed Tsukiji Market in Tokyo. The exalted Emperor Hirohito himself was said to have eliminated seafood from his diet.

In a nation fixated on purity, the revulsion against this second nuclear contamination of the homeland was visceral. In late September 1954, the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died. “Gojira” appeared in cinemas the following month, breaking the record for opening-day receipts in Tokyo and becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year. During the same month, there was an upsurge in anti-nuclear petitions in response to Kuboyama’s death, and the peace movement went national.

Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood. The great reptilian menace onscreen — actually a man in a 200-pound lizard suit stomping through miniaturized versions of Tokyo neighborhoods — illustrated both Japan’s avers

peter_wynn_kirby nyt godzilla japan socialtheory

Profile of architect Toyo Ito, who tries, in his work, to capture qualities that (it seems to me) relate to embodiment (“I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies" - Ito). Ouroussoff describes the following aspects, really resonant:
QUOTE
His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.

His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.
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toyo_ito architecture japan tokyo embodiment nicolai_ouroussoff nyt

This is beautiful, and incredible. Tomoko Sawada works, I guess, at the interstices of art and acting, a whole new calibre of performance art perhaps? It's incredible stuff, at any rate. "Who is she?" asks the article. Obviously so talented that it's easy enough to want to look, but tricky enough to make you think.

art avant_garde japan performance_art ping_mag tomoko_sawada

- description of re-purposed spaces (esp'y banks no longer in use) for creative space (Yokohama)

architecture creative_cities creative_spaces japan ping_mag redevelopment repurposing yok yokohama