“In the sound of the bell of the Gion temple echoes the impermanence of all things.” — The Tale of the Heike, trans. Paul Varley.
Japanese anime, films, and television dramas often feature situations that Chinese viewers find hard to understand.
People being bullied for all sorts of bizarre reasons, for instance.
Or that staple of sports stories: a talented junior being made to play second fiddle to an incompetent senior simply because of their difference in age.
Although China and Japan belong to the same East Asian cultural sphere, Chinese viewers often struggle to understand such situations. They have even prompted considerable criticism of the stories in question. Today, I want to use Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla to talk about the differences between Chinese and Japanese society.
Released in 2017, Shin Godzilla took Japan by storm that year. It became the first live-action film since The Eternal Zero (2013) to gross more than 8 billion yen, drawing 5.51 million admissions. Nor was the excitement confined to ordinary Japanese viewers. Many politicians—including Yukio Edano, then leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, and Shigeru Ishiba, former director-general of the Japan Defense Agency—publicly shared their reactions, even debating the film’s content.1
In contrast to this fervor at home, Shin Godzilla seems to have made very few waves outside Japan.
The United States has the largest Godzilla fan base outside Japan. In Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, “Godzilla” even enjoyed a moment in the spotlight as the villain’s ultimate weapon, representing one of the icons of twentieth-century American popular culture. Yet Shin Godzilla ultimately took just 210 million yen at the North American box office. Its European takings were smaller still: only 910,000 yen. Clearly, not even “nostalgia” could make up for Western audiences’ disappointment with the film.
It was not just the Americans: Chinese viewers also seem to have had trouble accepting Shin Godzilla. Although it has yet to receive an official release in China, its score on the Chinese review platform Douban is just 6.5, far below the 8.5 earned by Your Name, another Japanese cinematic phenomenon of 2016. Neon Genesis Evangelion was officially brought to China, and its director, Hideaki Anno, holds something like godfather status among a generation of anime fans. Given that standing, I suspect quite a few of the five-star ratings—which account for a much smaller share than the two-star ratings—are inflated by blind worship.
Despite the ocean between them and their very different cultural worlds, Chinese and American viewers are remarkably alike in their negative responses to Shin Godzilla. Almost all their complaints concern its long, convoluted scenes of political dialogue and its “stupid” plot. I would argue that these two “flaws” are precisely why Shin Godzilla became so popular in Japan.
Why do viewers outside Japan find Shin Godzilla so utterly dull?
Because, at heart, it is a panorama of Japanese society dressed up as a monster-and-disaster movie. It may very well have been made exclusively for Japanese audiences from the outset.
As I have said, the features and workings of Japanese society portrayed in the film are difficult for foreigners unfamiliar with Japan to accept. Yet for a commercial film, Shin Godzilla offers an unusually penetrating understanding of Japanese society, and that is why it strikes a chord with Japanese viewers.
Where, then, does this difference lie? I will explain it through Japanese sociologist Chie Nakane’s theory of vertical society.
1. Frame-Based Groups and “Outsiders”
In her theory of vertical society, Chie Nakane begins with two concepts: “frame” and “attribute.”2 Nakane argues that “relationships between individuals, between individuals and groups, and between groups composed of individuals provide the foundation for the basic principles of social anthropology.” There are two principles by which groups are formed. One is “frame”: a place, with groups formed according to the space in which people live. The other is “attribute,” which Shang Huipeng3 explains as “an individual’s ‘social attributes,’ such as birth, sex, position, occupation, and so on.”
Nakane’s research identifies Japan as a typical example of a country where social groups are formed on the basis of place. At the opposite extreme are the Indians, whose caste system rests on distinctions of occupation and personal status. China falls between these two extremes.
Compared with the Chinese, the Japanese take the “frame-based group” much further. Their understanding of “family” makes this clear. Both China and Japan have been influenced by Chinese Confucian culture, and Chinese people have long thought of the Japanese as valuing family. Yet the two countries understand “family” in fundamentally different ways. Whereas Chinese people form families through “blood ties,” the Japanese principle of family formation is “place”—that is, “living together.” A son-in-law, for example, may matter more within a Japanese household than siblings who live elsewhere. In China, heirs have traditionally been adopted from within the same lineage. In Japan, by contrast, unrelated outsiders often succeed to the family enterprise—something Chinese people find hard to imagine.
It is precisely this feature that makes Japanese people so willing to blur the distinction between family and workplace: think of the frequent gatherings of employees’ families in Naoki Hanzawa. When speaking to outsiders, Japanese people also like to refer to their company or department as uchi (うち, “my home”).4 In short, blood ties make the Chinese family a distinct kind of group, whereas the Japanese conception of family lacks that distinctiveness: anyone living in the same space can count as “family.”
Because Japanese people regard the group they belong to as a family, Japan places great emphasis on the “exclusivity” of group membership. A “frame-based group” is a closed space in which blood ties are very weak. It relies on its members’ wholehearted emotional involvement, fostering a sense of oneness as they pull together through adversity and thereby making the group as a whole more effective. “Team spirit” and “loyalty to one group for life” are the watchwords of Japanese groups.
For a Japanese film, Shin Godzilla may at first seem a little too cold. It shows no warmth between family members and does not even have a romantic subplot. But once we understand the Japanese conception of groups and families, the film’s emotional thread becomes clear.
First, there are its protagonists: the Giant Unidentified Creature Special Disaster Response Headquarters, which finally deals with Godzilla.
This unit is made up of “lone wolves, oddballs, otaku, problem children, unpopular people, troublesome types, and academic heretics.” In other words, these are people who could not find a sense of oneness in their original departments—the places they belonged to—and were consequently excluded from the group.
As noted above, Japanese group membership is exclusive: “It is easy for a new member to join a group, but once they have joined, moving to another group is very difficult.” In Japanese films, television dramas, and literature, being “shut out” is a very serious matter. This social psychology is difficult for Chinese viewers, who “belong to several groups at once,” to understand. Nakane calls it “tragic exclusion from the group.”
The protagonist, Randō Yaguchi, brings these people’s exclusion to an end.
They come from different departments. Some are low-level government clerks, some are scholars, and some come from the military. In terms of occupation—their “attributes”—they have almost nothing in common. Yet within the space of the Giant Unidentified Creature Special Disaster Response Headquarters, they form a group, with one common superior: Yaguchi.
As the story unfolds, the members of the task force work without sleep or rest, researching ways to counter Godzilla. At first they are strangers, brought together only as temporary colleagues. Through working together, they gradually begin to care about how the others are doing. They encourage one another. The Japanese word ibasho (居場所) refers not only to a person’s actual place of residence but, on a deeper social level, to having a place in society. The “oddballs” who had lost their place now have a place again, and feel the warmth of home. For Japanese people, this is one way a family takes shape and family affection finds expression.
Seen in this light, the tragedy of Gorō Maki—the mad scientist and mastermind behind the creation of Godzilla—has two levels as well. The first is the most obvious one in the film: his wife died from radioactive contamination. This is also the direct reason he created Godzilla to “test humanity.” The second is his position as an “outcast” abandoned by society, as discussed above. The film specifically describes Maki as “a heretical old professor who transferred to an American research institution almost as though he had been driven out of Japan,” and says that “although he was a biologist, he belonged to an energy-related research institute.” For a Japanese man brought up in Japanese society, this despair may have pushed him still further into the abyss.
In the next installment, I will discuss the seniority system in Shin Godzilla and Japanese society.
References
- Chie Nakane. Japanese Society (《日本社会》). Chinese translation by Xu Zhen and Song Junling. Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 1982.
- Chie Nakane. 《适应的条件》 [Conditions of Adaptation]. Chinese edition. Hebei People’s Publishing House, 1989.
- Shang Huipeng. “A Brief Analysis of Chie Nakane’s Theory of ‘Vertical Society’” (《中根千枝的“纵式社会”理论浅析》). Japanese Research (《日本问题研究》), no. 1 (1997): 85–91.
- Liang Shuming. 《东西文化及其哲学》 [Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies]. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1999, p. 203.
Editor’s Note
Oh, and Issey Takahashi is in it too.