Before reading this, I regarded Japanese apocalyptic movie as merely gimmicky, “pathetic claptrap”.
Yet now I am mesmerized by the myriad interpretations. Perhaps, for the past seventy years, that mushroom cloud has touched every Japanese’ hearts in unique and contradictory ways.
Japan was traumatized by two nuclear annihilations.
Why, as suggested in the reading, Japanese at times felt nostalgic to the wartime devastation?
“Once the new city is built, it will lose the strange vigor of the wasteland. The loss of a city creates a void. A void in which people move with a strange animation.”
To some, apocalyptic movie helped elicit those suppressed, elusive, wistful memories of the 1950s.
To some, it served as an “elegy to a lost Japan”. A disappearing identity. The death throes of the islands under globalisation and modernisation.
To some, it was simply a revel in the “aesthetics of destruction”. A millenarian vision.
Wong Tsz Kiu 3035941447
A concise summary of the points made by Tsutsui, although some parts can be improved in terms of clarity. How are you interpreting the quote “Once the new….strange animation”? Is the “aesthetics of destruction” related to “a millenarian vision”?