The article mentions that Japan’s cultural make-up and ideology are influenced by history and war. Japanese popular culture is filled with the darkness and pessimism of apocalyptic imagery, and people are obsessed with scenes of urban destruction and fantasies of rebuilding a peaceful landscape after that. Depictions of the apocalypse appear in many Japanese films, such as the movie Godzilla, spawned by the Japanese people’s fear of nuclear strike, which focuses the world’s conflict on a fantastical creature mutated by nuclear radiation, whose death symbolizes the demise of the threat and the establishment of a new order. The Tokyo city explodes multiple times in the film, and symbols of hope for survival are continually devastated, but the realization of self-rebuilding after destruction is in keeping with Japanese pop culture’s exhilarating fantasies of fictional imaginative spaces.
The death of fictional cities and complex civilizations is recurrent, optimistic, and even achieves self-reconstruction. This intertwining of nihilism and optimism accompanied the disturbing social, economic, and political status quo of Japan at the time, extending people’s hope for realistic life and providing space for venting the pressures of living. I believe that Japanese popular culture is rooted in doomsday fantasies because the war and post-war tensions created an extremely unstable domestic environment, which tends to create a desire for miracles and a better environment for people to live in. In contrast to landscapes that are close to reality, bubble-like fictional spaces are more likely to generate strong beliefs and consciousness. However, with Japan’s rapid economic development, the symbols in these movies, such as Gojira, have gradually lost their anti-nuclear metaphors and become mere visual symbols, with the war and cultural background behind them fading and shifting to commercial values. Therefore, I think the depiction of doom in Japanese pop culture has changed along with local development.
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