This autumn, Godzilla turns seventy. In the original Japanese, the monster’s name was Gojira, a portmanteau of the words for ‘gorilla’ and ‘whale.’ The name fits perfectly the heavy, lumbering on-screen presence conjured up by Japanese special effects legend Tsuburaya Eiji. He made his name during the Second World War, helping to recreate the attack on Pearl Harbour for a Japanese film released in 1942. So realistic were the resulting scenes that after the war’s end officials working in the Allied Occupation mistook them for documentary footage.

Godzilla was a product of the war in many more ways besides. The director of Gojira (1954) was Honda Ishirō: an eyewitness to the aftermath of Hiroshima, who imagined Godzilla as nuclear disaster ‘made flesh.’ The monster is awakened from its sleep by American nuclear testing in the Pacific, a subject much on Japanese minds since the spring of 1954 when fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon 5 were irradiated by fallout from a US nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll.

Godzilla was intended as an allegory for nuclear power in general, rather than American (mis)use of the technology in particular. Still, few in Japan could have watched Godzilla stomping around and laying waste to Tokyo without thinking of the awesome damage done to the city by Allied air-raids less than a decade before. One air-raid alone, on 9 March 1945, led to the deaths of more than 100,000 people and destroyed a quarter of the city. Kawamoto Saburō, a Japanese film critic, has pointed out that Godzilla’s rampage through the Japanese capital leaves the Imperial Palace untouched: an echo of the American wartime decision not to target the Emperor, whom they expected would be essential to post-war peace, and a comment on the lasting psychological power for Japanese in the early post-war period of their old system of government featuring a divine emperor at its head.

As the Godzilla franchise grew across the 1960s, it became less visceral and political and more akin to a series of wrestling bouts between an expanding cast of monsters – Mothra, Rodan, and many more – aimed increasingly at children rather than adults. Where King Kong (1933) had been made using stop-motion animation, right from the first Godzilla film in 1954 Tsuburaya had preferred to dress someone up in a rubber monster suit and then slow down the footage to create that famous, ponderous stomp. The effect was helped along by the fact that the heavy rubber suit made an awkward, stumbling gait all but unavoidable.

Japan can hardly claim a monopoly on disaster films, or on the deployment of giant monsters to dramatic effect. Instead, what marks out much of its science fiction output since the Second World War is lived experience of the fact that sometimes the worst really does happen. Tokyoites travelled to see Gojira through a city that was still being rebuilt, and which stood a realistic chance of being targeted one day by Soviet nuclear weapons, thanks to a security treaty with the United States which Japan’s leaders had had little choice but to sign in 1951.

Mixed feelings of optimism and trepidation where science and technology are concerned, alongside a sometimes dark presentation of human nature that pits innocent or troubled children against malign adults, has driven a great deal of on-screen Japanese science fiction down to the present day. All the while, there has been a sense that whereas Japan’s leaders are sometimes faulted on the international stage for not coming to terms with the country’s wartime past, it has fallen to Japan’s creative industries to mull the implications of that period and to seek at turns to recall, confess, console and issue warnings about possible futures.

Men dressed in rubber monster suits were not the only way in which these aims were achieved. Western fans of Japanese science fiction in the early 1960s were gifted a boy-robot named ‘Astro Boy.’ He was the creation of Japan’s godfather of manga, Osama Tezuka, whose work bore the marks of his childhood love of American animation. Astro Boy had large Betty Boop-like eyes and his hair was a shiny, plasticky black. Clothed in black shorts and red boots, he had an atomic reactor in his chest, powering his computer brain, searchlight eyes and the jets that were built into his arms and feet.

Astro Boy hardly fits the bill for a dystopian figure: he was an adorable, peace-loving crime-fighter. But he was born out of Tezuka’s experience of the war in Osaka, where he saw charred bodies floating down the Yodogawa River. The Astro Boy manga and animated series was part of Tezuka’s efforts to introduce children to the imperfect adult world around them: full of fear, misunderstanding and discrimination, which combined to make it possible for pernicious political leaders to – as Tezuka once put it – ‘switch people’s concept of reality’ and drag them into war.

In seeking to address children in this relatively mature way, Astro Boy ran afoul of the expectations for children’s entertainment in America. A producer with the American network NBC, Fred Ladd, travelled to Tokyo in 1964 to meet with Tezuka and his team and explain those expectations. First and foremost, death, and even the threat of death, had no place in animated fare for children. For one episode, that meant replacing the dialogue in a scene where Astro Boy stands over a person lying in the street. ‘He’s dead!’ exclaims Astro Boy in the original. In the edited version, the person is declared merely unconscious. Astro Boy adds, for good measure: ‘Get him to a hospital!’ In another episode, a scene in which a criminal brandishes a gun was cut short just before he pointed it at someone’s head.

Tezuka had little choice but to comply with these demands, given the financial stakes involved. Animation paid notoriously poorly, and it was not unknown for illustrations created by Tezuka’s assistants to end up smeared with blood because they had been working their skin raw working seven-day weeks. Still, Tezuka remained critical of what he saw as a double-standard in the United States: at home, children’s programmes full of innocence; abroad, Cold War conflict – including, by this point, on Japan’s door-step in South-East Asia.

Plenty of people in Japan shared Tezuka’s views here, but plenty more experienced the 1960s as a time of economic growth, rising prosperity and real optimism for the future. One could find it on display at the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, a hugely-successful national re-brand for Japan. And for those inclined to use the Godzilla franchise as a barometer of the national mood, it was there in the shifting politics of everyone’s favourite amphibious monster.

Already in 1962’s King Kong vs Godzilla, Japan had been rescued by American cinema’s much-loved furry giant. Here was a sign of friendship, as long as you ignored the scene where Kong stands on Japan’s National Diet building clutching a lady-friend in his hand – suggesting domination rather than co-operation. Then, in 1964, Godzilla actually fought for Japan, teaming up with Mothra (a huge caterpillar) and Rodan (a huge dinosaur) to fight a three-headed invader from outer space named King Ghidrah. Three years later came what hardcore fans of the original Godzilla film must surely have regarded as the final straw: Godzilla had a cute baby son, Minilla, nicknamed ‘Baby Godzilla’ in the American version of the film (Son of Godzilla, 1967).

Film-goers in search of edgier fare gravitated towards New Wave film directors like Ōshima Nagisa, while across the 1960s and 1970s young Japanese began to question the price in political independence that their country was paying for its prosperity. The Vietnam War served as a flashpoint, not least because American military personnel based in Japan were involved. A second major concern was the environmental degradation wrought by the country’s race to restore its economic fortunes, seen most tragically in Minamata disease: severe neurological problems, birth defects and deaths caused by people consuming fish and shellfish contaminated with effluent from a chemicals plant finding its way into Minamata Bay.

Minamata became one of the inspirations for Miyazaki Hayao in creating Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, published as a manga from 1982 to 1994 and turned into an animated film in 1984. Sharing in common with Tezuka a desire to talk directly, and frankly, to children about the adult world, Miyazaki took as his theme the disasters that can befall a place when human beings fail to live in harmony with their natural environment. His eponymous hero is a young girl, whose task it becomes to restore some kind of rudimentary health to an environment rendered toxic by a cataclysmic war.

The imagery of that forlorn place is unforgettable. Nausicaä picks her way, masked for protection, through a forested landscape thick with nature gone wrong: spores, tendrils and sticky, poisonous sacs. Her own community survives only as a seaside enclave, protected by rocky walls on one side and nourished by an ocean breeze on the other. Even now, human nature being what it is, a military kingdom called Tolmekia persists in antagonising the natural world. Nausicaä must somehow thwart them, and bring about détente.

The theme of children being forced to make good a world gone bad looms large in Japanese on-screen science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. One of the best-known and most highly-acclaimed animated films of the 1980s was Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1988). It was set in the vast, dystopian city of ‘Neo-Tokyo’ in 2019, run by a corrupt military and political elite in the aftermath of World War Three. ‘Old Tokyo’ is little more than a giant crater.

Visually, Akira drew for inspiration on Tokyo’s neon-lit Shinjuku neighbourhood. For its themes, Ōtomo was inspired by the struggles of Japanese society in the 1980s: a suffocating conformity at work and at school, which contributed to worries about an aimless and potentially dangerous youth, exemplified in violent biker gangs known as bōsōzoku. The film’s two main characters, Kaneda Shōtarō and Tetsuo Shima, are part of just such a gang. One day, Tetsuo discovers that he possesses psychic powers similar to the mysterious Akira – setting up a confrontation with the authorities, who are all too willing to experiment on and even kill children to advance their cause.

The adult world comes off scarcely better in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-6). As with Akira, a devastating event has given rise to a new city: Tokyo-3. The enemy this time is a race of strange, towering beings known as Angels, against whom conventional forces appear completely useless. It falls to teenagers like Ikari Shinji to enter and fuse with giant bio-machines called Evangelions, stomping off to do battle with the Angels in a manner that Godzilla fans will have found more than a little familiar.

A major theme in Neon Genesis Evangelion is the young being put upon by the old, and struggling to work out how best to respond. Saving the world ought, in theory, to be uppermost in Shinji’s mind. But he finds there is also the matter of his young and attractive commanding officer Katsuragi Misato, not to mention the broader desire simply to live a normal life, free of the physical and mental exhaustion that comes with piloting an Evangelion. All this is made more potent by the fact that running the overall Evangelion project is none other than Shinji’s father, who abandoned him as a child but now turns out to need his help.

Beyond monsters and mecha, Japan’s taste for sci-fi dystopias has run, of late, to distinctly close-to-home concerns about the perils of the natural world, nuclear power and the country’s struggle to manage an ageing population. The television series Japan Sinks: People of Hope (2021), available on Netflix, is based on a novel published in 1973 about the threat of Japan’s partial or even total submersion into the ocean because of the activity of tectonic plates. The Days (2023), also on Netflix, recalls a real-life dystopia: the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in 2011, recreated in tense, moment-by-moment detail with one of Japan’s most celebrated actors, Yakusho Kōji, in the lead role.

Garnering more attention in the western media than either of these two dramas was the film Plan 75 (2022), which envisaged the creation of a government scheme in Japan via which people over the age of seventy-five would be offered voluntary euthanasia and a grant of $1,000 to spend on themselves or give to their families. Much in the film hangs on the meaning of ‘voluntary,’ when eligible men and women face a combination of government and familial pressure to end their lives. Once again, tensions between different generations in Japan are at the heart of the drama, made all the more powerful by real-life worries about elderly people, particularly in rural parts of the country, taking their own lives so as to be less of a financial burden on their children during difficult economic times.

Whether it is the lack, in Akira, of anyone morally attractive enough to root for or the grim premise of Plan 75, Japanese sci-fi isn’t necessarily where one goes for consolation. Thank goodness, then, for the latest Godzilla reboot. Godzilla Minus One (2023), the thirty-seventh film in the franchise, took it back to its postwar roots with a would-be kamikaze pilot returning to a bombed-out Tokyo to begin rebuilding his life. Where the first Godzilla film ended with the triumph of Japanese science – courtesy of an invention called an ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ – Godzilla Minus One homes in on human goodness and ingenuity, even in the toughest of times, as the source of Japan’s salvation against a fabulously-rendered Godzilla, who at times appears to be on fire inside.

Well-received abroad, including a first-ever Japanese Oscar win for visual effects, Godzilla Minus One met with a slightly more mixed response at home – a reminder, fittingly enough, of the trauma out of which the Godzilla franchise first emerged. Godzilla Minus One’s director, Yamazaki Takashi, is known both for blockbusters (Space Battleship Yamato, 2010) and sentimental takes on Japan’s past (Always: Sunset on Third Street, 2005). His most controversial film to date was The Eternal Zero (2013), which critics regarded as too sympathetic to the wartime narrative of kamikaze pilots as selfless, heroic young men doing their duty. Criticism of Godzilla Minus One was less widespread, but similar in tone: it remains dangerous and irresponsible, some argued, to offer a positive portrayal of a kamikaze pilot.

There is talk of a sequel to Godzilla Minus One. And why not? Anyone paying attention to East Asian relations in recent decades knows that those terrible years of war and suffering in the mid-twentieth century continue to possess an enormous political and psychological charge in Japan, China and South Korea. As long as Japan continues to grapple with its past and with its choices for the future – demographic and environmental challenges, the rise of China and uncertain American support – then puny humans wrestling a giant monster will no doubt prove to be a premise with plenty of life left in it yet.