My interest for this week was actually about Gojira, or Godzilla as we know him in America. Gojira actually had a purpose in postwar Japan other than just being entertainment. Since America was still sensitive about World War II and created an agreement for Japan to be against emperor-power (in a way), Gojira was a 400-foot lizard-like monster with nuclear powers. It held the background of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also focused on the testing bomb around Bikini Atoll. I thought that America stopped with nuclear testing after the Japan bombings. I also thought that Gojira was more about the monster movie era that swept up America and Japan was just hopping on the bandwagon.

The connection that Anne Allison notes about technology and the shift to cyborgization is an interesting shift from postwar to something Japan is now known strongly for in today’s time. The term of cyborgization actually transfers into the next time frame spoke about, which relies on the human and machine relationship that turns into Astroboy and the continuing adaptations for it.

Another thing that I took interest in was “dialectical fairy scenes”. Allison notes that they are used to, “analyze their power to enchant, stimulate, and soothe the imaginations of players but to also dissect how such fantasies come embedded in- and help reproduce or alter- relations of capitalism, cultural geopolitics, and techno-communication. (pg. 29)” Today, we can see the affects of Japanese culture on our own American culture. We had a song released in 1983 (Mr. Roboto by Styx) that actually took the phrase of “domo arigato” and created a legacy of it. We can see cultural geopolitics everywhere in our melting pot of a culture.

The way I think of these “dialectical fairy scenes” is about how there is a sense of enchantment in certain cultures that maybe we as a majority still do not quite understand. Asian cultures are still that interesting piece that the European cultured background Americans are still trying to wrap their head around. Therefore it still holds that mysticism over us.