At 70, Godzilla’s warning to humanity is still urgent

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations. Many of these witnesses have spent their lives warning of the dangers of nuclear war – but initially, much of the world didn’t want to hear it.

“The fates of those who survived the infernos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were long concealed and neglected,” the Nobel committee noted in its announcement. Local groups of nuclear survivors created Nihon Hidankyo in 1956 to fight back against this erasure.

Around the same time that Nihon Hidankyo was formed, Japan produced another warning: a towering monster who topples Tokyo with blasts of irradiated breath. The 1954 film “Godzilla” launched a franchise that has been warning viewers to take better care of the Earth for the past 70 years.

We study popular Japanese media and business ethics and sustainability, but we found a common interest in Godzilla after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In our view, these films convey a vital message about Earth’s creeping environmental catastrophe. Few survivors are left to warn humanity about the effects of nuclear weapons, but Godzilla remains eternal.

Into the atomic age

By 1954, Japan had survived almost a decade of nuclear exposure. In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese people were affected by a series of US nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.

When the US tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb in 1954, its devastation reached far outside the expected damage zone. Though far from the restricted zone, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 Japanese fishing vessel and its crew were doused with irradiated ash. All fell ill, and one fisherman died