Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Tragedy and Culture, Godzilla and God

Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the tragic events in Japan this week, I stumbled across an intriguing article and photo essay on the website for Foreign Policy magazine. And that article, it turns out, prompted a whole series of reflections for me about the clashing realities of suffering and God’s character.

To begin, writer Britt Peterson noted that one of Japan’s unique and consistent responses to the many tragic events the country has suffered throughout its history is to channel grief and fear into a broad variety of cathartic cultural expressions.

In the 20th century alone, Japan was besieged by earthquake, typhoon, tsunami, fire, and volcano, not to mention nuclear attack and terrorism. Like Britain, another resolute island nation half a world away, Japan has always responded with stoic rebuilding. But unlike the British, or really anyone else in the world, the Japanese have refracted their historic misfortune through a unique cultural lens, producing monster movies, Zen poetry, modernist post-apocalyptic literature, and even pornographic manga. ... Why is Japan's cultural response to its history of disaster so fantastical—and where does it come from?

Petersen begins to answer those questions by focusing on an obscure writer who chronicled his response to a massive earthquake all the way back in the year 1185: “For centuries, Japanese authors, poets, and artists have mulled over the existential instability of their island life. The essayist Kamo no Chomei (1155-1216), in the Walden-esque Account of My Hut, wrote a long consideration of disaster and the importance of responding to the world’s ills through retreat and nonattachment. In one passage, he discusses the earthquake of 1185, which he saw as an opportunity for man to meditate on ‘the vanity and meaninglessness of the world’—an opportunity, he wrote, that few took advantage of.”

Fast-forwarding through nine centuries, Peterson reminds us that the now-iconic images of the radioactive reptile known as Godzilla (or Gojira, as he’s known in Japan) stomping through Tokyo were not intended merely as popcorn-munching fodder. Instead, they were a fantastical attempt to come to grips with the nuclear horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The Godzilla films are well-known for their vivid allegory of apocalyptic nuclear chaos engulfing Tokyo. But, as [Susan] Napier [a professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University] points out, they also illustrate what comes after the initial shock: the slow and sad process of rebuilding, as doctors begin helping radiation-poisoning victims at the hospital and scientists look toward preventing the next disaster. 'One of the things the Japanese are very good at is talking about the aftermath of the disaster—the poignancy, the mourning,' she says. 'Already in [the first Godzilla], the elegiac quality is being established.'

The balance of the Peterson’s essay focuses on several other less-well-known Japanese creatives who’ve also struggled to make sense of horrific events.

Even though I’d never heard of most of those folks, the article reminded me of how we humans are seemingly hardwired to try to make sense of inexplicable disaster. It’s virtually impossible not to ask the question Why?, even if the answers—at least from a human perspective—prove elusive.

As Christians, we make the choice, in faith, to trust that God is both sovereign and good, and that He’s somehow at work even in suffering that is beyond our comprehension or temporal explanation. And one verse that’s often quoted in situations like these is Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.'”

Sometimes, though, the context of that verse gets lost along the way. As hope-filled as it is, God was speaking to a people who were going through their own unspeakable tragedy: the loss of their national existence and deportation into a hostile, foreign land. Most of Israel had been carried away to Babylon, and most would not survive the 70 years of captivity that God said that they would endure: “This is what the LORD says: ‘When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place,'” we hear in verse 10. Still, God charges them to hang on to hope, believing that their children would see the redemptive outworking of His plan, even if they would not live to witness its ultimate fruition.

In the midst of temporary and temporal suffering, God calls His people to cling to Him in faith, to believe that His plans are, ultimately, bigger and better than the worst that the world can dish out. As the Apostle Paul so famously wrote in Romans 8, “What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or sword? … No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I don’t know how I would respond in the face of tragedies like the ones that have swept over much of Japan in the last week. But I hope that I could cling to Paul’s and Jeremiah’s promises, and strive to help others know that, despite all appearances, God is somehow—mysteriously, inexplicably—still at work even when the worst of the worst we might face seems to suggest otherwise.