UC San Diego

Sinfonia Gojira: Ifukube Akira’s Musical Narratives of Nationalism and Anti-Modernity in Godzilla Films discusses the Japanese composer Ifukube Akira (1914-2006) and explores how his philosophies of Japanese/Asian nationalism and anti-modernity are made manifest in his musical works, especially his original scores in daikaijū eiga, or Japanese giant monster films, such as Godzilla (1954) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). Through his daikaijū eiga music, Ifukube asserts himself beyond the role of a mere provider of passive “background music” and engages as a self-determined auteur, an active commentator who employs an array of carefully curated musical techniques and signs—an aesthetic practice I refer to as the primordial-folkloric—to articulate within his monster movie scores his philosophies of nationalism and anti-modernity.

In Ifukube’s auteurist musical narration of these films, what I designate as his practice of interventional narrative commentary, he links monsters like Godzilla to his conception of Japanese and Asian ethno-cultural purity and thus recharacterizes them from invasive, malevolent creatures to deity-like beings—protectors—that seek to halt Japan’s misguided march toward postwar modernity and the resultant erasure of indigenous cultural identity. The composer’s ultimate goal, therefore, is to employ his musical scores to provoke or indeed manipulate his audiences into viewing—or more precisely, hearing—daikaijū eiga in a nationalist context, to perceive the monsters as representative of national ethos. Through Ifukube’s interventional narrative commentary, daikaijū eiga consequently transform into cultural productions that advocate for Japanese nationalist and anti-modern ideals in the tumultuously transitional postwar/post-Occupation era.

By engaging with daikaijū eiga through a variety of academic frameworks such as film studies, musicology, and semiotics, Sinfonia Gojira argues that the cinematic composer must be situated as one of the many auteurs responsible for the production of a film. By emphasizing and examining the auteurism of a film’s composer, cinematic productions are consequently (re)positioned to be analyzed and interpreted using the musical score, imbued with the philosophical and political concerns of its composer, as a point of departure for novel hermeneutic praxes, thus revealing urgent and exciting new insights into how films may be conceptualized and read as truly audio-visual media.