The anti-war war hero

Space Battleship Yamato, The Eternal Zero, and Godzilla Minus One all feature a hero in battle who is reluctant to battle. Space Battleship Yamato is a live-action film based on the long-running anime series begun in the 1970s about the World War II battleship being resurrected in the year 2199 as an intergalactic spaceship to save the Earth from alien invaders. Its hero, Godai, has quit the force because Captain Okita decided to sacrifice another ship—the one Godai’s brother was on—to save the main fleet. When Godai reboards the ship to participate in a new mission, he is criticized by his former comrades but insists on condemning Okita for sacrificing human lives. Yet when Okita becomes bedridden and eventually dies, leaving Godai in command, Godai not only sacrifices one part of the spaceship—with men still on board—in order to protect the main ship, he eventually removes all the crew and rams the vessel into the enemy, destroying it and himself. While there is a calculus where sacrificing a few is justified to save the many, Godai’s decision is vindicated less through such numeric logic than through a melodrama of vision that celebrates special effects and spans time. As if providing the basic structure that will be elaborated in later films, the film’s denouement goes as follows: in the last seconds before he rams the enemy ship while simultaneously firing the Yamato’s Wave Motion Gun, Godai (Figure 1) sees first his dead male comrades—including some of the men he sacrificed to save the ship—standing on the bridge smiling (Figure 2), then after a few shots of Godai guiding the ship and starting the countdown, flashbacks of him and his brother as kids and then as adults, and finally of Yuki, the mother of his child (Figure 3). He utters her name in the split second before destroying himself and the ship. The romanticism of declaring love as he dies, presumably to save her and their child, is intermeshed with VFX visions of the dead inviting the living to join them—a common trope of kamikaze films—while spanning multiple temporalities. The melodrama of the past is melded with the future—later images of Yuki and her child frolicking on a now verdant Earth—to justify Godai’s kamikaze attack. The Yamato finally succeeds in its original mission from 1945.

Figure 1:

Godai’s gaze at the end of Space Battleship Yamato.

Figure 2:

Apparitions of his dead comrades.

Figure 3:

His memory of Yuki looking toward the camera.

The Eternal Zero features a similar hero and, as I will show later, further elaborates this complex mixture of vision, affect, and multiple temporalities. Miyabe, played by Okada Jun’ichi (who also stars in Fueled), is a Zero pilot in World War II who shares with Godai a dislike for military actions that needlessly waste human lives. When his grandson Kentarō initially learns about him in the present and begins researching Miyabe’s life by interviewing those who flew with him, the first ones uniformly condemn Miyabe as a coward. He didn’t keep secret his desire to return home alive and always survived air battles seemingly without a scratch. Subsequent witnesses, however, testify to the care he showed for family and his charges, even suffering severe beatings from superiors for defending those under his command. Yet like Godai, Miyabe opts for a kamikaze mission in the end, not just smashing his plane into an American carrier (or so we presume, since the film ends the instant before that), but deliberately changing planes with another pilot named Ōishi Ken’ichirō before takeoff, giving him a fighter he knows has mechanical problems so that only Miyabe would die in the kamikaze attack. Unlike the clear success of the kamikaze mission in Space Battleship Yamato, here and in Godzilla Minus One, there are potential problems with the motivation and logic for the kamikaze attack, which must be analyzed later.

Within Yamazaki’s cinema, Shikishima in Godzilla Minus One is thus neither a new nor an original hero, but rather a variation of Godai and Miyabe. There are differences, of course. Godai never exhibits the sort of cowardice Shikishima does, and while comrades die as a direct result of his decisions, Godai does not suffer Shikishima’s PTSD. Miyabe is also called a coward, but the film’s presentation of the past shows he clearly is not, even if he exhibits his own mental anguish after seeing so many of his charges at a kamikaze training base flying off to die. Obviously the clearest difference is that while both Godai and Miyabe die as kamikaze, Shikishima does not. Is Godzilla Minus One then a change of heart for Yamazaki, the conclusion of a long series of kamikaze-related films that ultimately comes to reject self-destruction for the nation in the name of living for loved ones? I would argue that while the distinctions between these three films are significant, they must be considered in conjunction with certain emotional and temporal logics that have not changed in Yamazaki’s cinema.

The multiplicity of The Eternal Zero

Let us consider more deeply the connections between The Eternal Zero and Godzilla Minus One, connections so significant that I have on previous occasions termed Godzilla Minus One a “sequel” to The Eternal Zero (Gerow Reference Gerow2024). I will closely analyze The Eternal Zero before going on to consider the issues of the gaze and temporality before carefully taking apart Godzilla Minus One. The Eternal Zero is based on a best-selling novel by Hyakuta Naoki and was a major success at the box office, becoming the top earner of 2014 in Japan, ultimately making nearly 10 billion yen more than Godzilla Minus One did domestically. It is quite controversial, first because Hyakuta is a prominent leader of the right-wing in Japan, founding the Conservative Party of Japan that is historically revisionist, advocates for revising the Constitution, rejects LGBTQ rights, and opposes immigration. The film itself could be aligned with other recent kamikaze movies such as The Winds of God (dir. Narahashi Yōko, 1995), Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill (Ano hana ga saku oka de, kimi to mata deaetara, dir. Narita Yōichi, 2023; a sequel was released in August 2026), or Kamikaze Time Travel (Kesenai yakusoku, dir. Ōkubo Kazumichi, 2024) that utilize a timeslip narrative to make young Japanese today encounter their World War II counterparts who have volunteered for the kamikaze corps, and learn of their bravery. In such films, the central concern is less what happened in the past than the present need to overcome what is seen as postwar suppression of uplifting tales of Japan’s war; historicity is effectively elided by privileging personal encounters over the time gap between generations. At the most basic level, films like The Eternal Zero are historical revisionist in that they make their own act of retelling history central to changing the mindset of contemporary Japan. The question is the nature of that history and how it is being told.

The Eternal Zero is, like many recent Japanese war films, one that presents war through distance. While it is famous for its thrilling scenes of air battles utilizing VFX, it shares with other works the tendency to offer stories centered on naval forces or air squadrons that mostly take place in Japan, far away from the front lines. Very few films in the last two decades, with Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s Fires on the Plain (2014) or the animated Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise (dir. Kuji Gorō, 2025) being notable exceptions, depict ground forces engaged in brutal battles on the front. Kamikaze films, which are mostly centered on air bases in Japan, or in the air, are thus a convenient means of avoiding the horrors of war. The Eternal Zero has, like Godzilla Minus One, been accused of failing to depict Japan’s war atrocities, instead opting for an ending in which Miyabe’s grandson Kentarō tearfully but also with pride views his grandfather as he, in a fantastic melding of times, flies over him on his kamikaze mission. As is evident in the scene where he castigates his classmates for equating kamikaze with terrorist suicide bombers, Kentarō could be seen as becoming the exemplar of right-wing views of history, ones in the film that, as Takahashi Seiichirō (Reference Takahashi2016) has argued, are not far from those of such ultra-right organizations as the Nippon Kaigi (for more on Nippon Kaigi, see, for instance, McNeill Reference McNeill2015). The story of the kamikaze has also enabled Kentarō to remain distant as he only learns one slice of wartime history.

Yet like Godzilla Minus One, it is possible to argue that The Eternal Zero enjoyed stupendous success because it had its own ambiguities and contradictions, presenting itself as pro-war or anti-war to different audiences. Takahashi (Reference Takahashi2016), for instance, noted his surprise at the number of scenes in the novel critical of the wartime military brass and its strategies, a lot of which remain in the film. The official pamphlet of the movie tried at several points to present the movie as anti-war, even including a “special message” from Yoko Ono calling for everyone to “realize world peace” (Eien no zero 2013). Interestingly, the film scholar Nakamura Hideaki (Reference Hidaka2017: 256), in an extensive and critical analysis of postwar kamikaze films, argues that the movie differs from the novel by presenting Miyabe in the final sequences not as a hero who is worn out yet fiery, but rather as one who is worn out and depressed. The last image, where Miyabe reveals a grin on his lips as he dives his plane (Figure 4), is read by Nakamura as disturbing, indicating to him that the film ultimately becomes the self-destruction of the postwar image of the kamikaze as a figure who ritualistically ascends to a transcendent sphere. To him, it turns Miyabe into a manic depressive who dies more from exhaustion than in a blaze of glory.

Figure 4:

The last image of Miyabe in The Eternal Zero.

It may be typical of Yamazaki’s cinema that other, more right-leaning commentators have read the final scene in a different way. Ogawa Eitarō, a journalist who was an active supporter of former prime minister Abe Shinzō, wrote in his book on the film that he was originally disappointed in The Eternal Zero until he rethought the ending, ultimately seeing it as Yamazaki’s “homage” to Hyakuta Naoki (Ogawa Reference Ogawa2013: 189).

Ogawa echoes many other right-wingers in complaining of the “poison of the GHQ press code” (190)—which supposedly continues to suppress the “real figure of the kamikaze and the kamikaze strategy” (191)—and then claims a non-verbal understanding between readers and viewers of The Eternal Zero. Describing a Miyabe who dies to join his wife, and who must die because others died for him, Ogawa asserts that the ultimate reason for Miyabe choosing death “is not unclear. The reason is in the final expression on Miyabe’s face played by Okada” (Ogawa Reference Ogawa2013: 17). This communal understanding, one that is both non-verbal and sublime, is supposed to counter the malaise identified by Hyakuta and many on the right, where the ignorance of the war by today’s Japanese—especially of the kamikaze and their dedication to family and nation—is a manifestation of Japanese warped by individualistic Western culture (Gerow Reference Gerow1998; Okano Reference Okano2018), and who presumably cannot understand Miyabe’s true feelings. The collective apprehension of the conclusion’s meaning is itself supposedly a step towards defeating individualism.

The certainty Ogawa claims to have about why Miyabe volunteered for the kamikaze corps stands in an intriguing contrast with the obsessive pursuit of that answer in other commentators—and perhaps even in the film itself. Most writing about The Eternal Zero devotes considerable energy to solving the puzzle of why someone so dedicated to staying alive opted to die. In addition to Nakamura’s claim of melancholic mental instability, other explanations include Miyabe’s guilt over losing many of his men, his desire to engineer Ōishi’s survival, or a pure expression of his love for family and duty to nation (Ogawa Reference Ogawa2013; Nakamura Reference Nakamura2017; Watabe Reference Watabe2022). Most of these interpretations revolve around psychologizing Miyabe, treating him as a flesh-and-blood individual and not a construction of cinematic form. Nakamura does urge us to focus on the cinematic representation of Miyabe, but ultimately uses that as a hermeneutics for discerning Miyabe’s mental instability. Perhaps instead of writing explanations of Miyabe’s psychology, we need to accept at least part of Ogawa’s contention that the film is aiming for a non-verbal solution. Knowing that Yamazaki comes from the world of visual special effects, shouldn’t we seek the explanation for Miyabe’s act in the cinematic effects themselves? I argue that this will help us understand not only The Eternal Zero, but other Yamazaki films such as Godzilla Minus One.

Melodrama and technological solutions

Consider the concluding scenes of The Eternal Zero. As with much of the film, the story of Miyabe’s departure is related by someone in the present, this time by Ōishi Ken’ichirō, after Kentarō has discovered that it was Ōishi who was given the damaged plane by Miyabe so that he could survive the war. Relating the tale to Kiyoko, Miyabe’s daughter, and her children Kentarō and his sister Keiko, Ōishi speaks of his final days with Miyabe as well as of his efforts to help Miyabe’s wife Matsuno after the war, eventually marrying her. It is he who voices the statement that Miyabe’s reason for volunteering for a kamikaze attack cannot be expressed in words. Crucial are the following scenes, ones that offer a variation on the template we first noticed with Space Battleship Yamato. After leaving his grandfather’s house, Kentarō walks across a pedestrian bridge with his mother and sister. A point-of-view structure shows him looking at families with young children and a couple on a date.Footnote ⁴ Upon returning to a close-up of Kentarō, the camera begins to circle around him (Figure 5) as the surrounding sound dies out and we begin to see past scenes of Miyabe declaring the desire to live, appearing and disappearing in double exposure (Figure 6). Eventually, Kentarō’s image fades, and we view shots of the men Miyabe interacted with, from one trying to follow Miyabe on his suicidal mission but failing (Figure 7), to another of Ōishi landing his plane after suffering mechanical problems, and finding a message from Miyabe. All are moments of male emotion intermixed and out of chronological order, as the film shows Ōishi, for instance, looking at the message after the failed attack only to cut to Miyabe turning his head to look at Ōishi before he took off. This section ends with a camera movement up to Miyabe in his cockpit, looking toward the camera. That is followed by a sequence of shots, each with a dolly up to a character looking at the camera, starting with the witnesses we’ve seen in the film and then shifting to Matsuno just after the war, each repeating a line we’ve heard and concluding with his wife declaring Miyabe really did return to his family (Figure 8). The camera returns to Kentarō in the present about to cry, but he turns his head as he hears a plane engine. The film cuts to him in the fore as Miyabe flies by in his Zero in today’s Japan (Figure 9), and then to a shot of Miyabe looking toward the camera as he salutes (Figure 10). We return to Kentarō in close-up, the camera moving around him, but now in slow motion as he returns his grandfather’s gaze. There is a cut as he rushes to the bridge railing and stares off, his face breaking up as he begins to cry. It is after a long shot of Kentarō crying at the railing that the final sequence of Miyabe’s kamikaze attack begins, intercut with panicked Americans on the ship and the radio yelling about this amazing but terrifying plane. The narrative ends with a slow camera movement up on a close-up of Miyabe as he is about to plunge into the deck of the carrier. As with the final sequence in Space Battleship Yamato, this film’s conclusion is centered on a gaze, shows flashbacks out of temporal order, and even presents the apparition of the dead in the present. The Eternal Zero reconfirms the connections between Yamazaki’s films.

Figure 5:

Kentarō looking on the bridge in The Eternal Zero.

Figure 6:

Double exposure with scenes of Miyabe.

Figure 7:

Emotional moments of Miyabe’s male comrades.

Figure 8:

Noriko, facing the camera, declares Miyabe kept his promise.

Figure 9:

Miyabe’s Zero encounters Kentarō in present-day Japan.

Figure 10:

Miyabe’s salute to his grandson.

Regarding the look on Miyabe’s face at the end, the official pamphlet reveals that Okada was asked by Yamazaki to create an “expression where multiple emotions proceed simultaneously” (Eien no zero 2013: 36). The same could be said of the entire sequence, which mixes not only various emotions—from tears to the thrills of mechanical speed—and narratives, but even multiple temporalities. One could say it also embodies what Tsutsui found in Godzilla Minus One: a multiplicity of perspectives that both lament Miyabe’s death and celebrate his skill and bravery, condemning the kamikaze strategy while rendering the kamikaze the epitome of Japanese manhood. But instead of just ending with that conclusion, it is important we take apart how this sequence works.

First, it functions through a focus on subjective perspective. At the start, it is Kentarō’s, who so becomes the focal point that his mother and sister, just steps away, are ignored. Other individuals and sounds are also erased, making this experience of national history personal. The scenes of Miyabe and others in the past are the product of the testimonies of others, but the sequence of the witnesses gazing at the camera returns the focus to Kentarō, as if we are seeing them through his eyes when he interviewed them. Yet the last and crucial shot of Matsuno was not witnessed by Kentarō, who was not even born then. Either we are now looking through Ōishi’s eyes, somehow transferred to Kentarō’s subjectivity, or the film is generalizing the personal, aligning the spectator with Kentarō and rendering these statements equally an appeal directed at the audience. This intersubjectivity is rendered national by urging the viewers to make these other views their own, rendering the personal communal. That these are kamikaze tales aligns the film with the project of not just narrating the “truth” of these men directly to the ignorant, but making the national narrative simultaneously personal. The sequence of shots we see through Kentarō is presented as the memory of war that must be preserved when those who experienced the conflict, like the elderly Ōishi, eventually die off. It is significant that this sequence includes shots from scenes we experienced previously in the film. The fact that the movie sparks audience memories of the film itself as a virtual equivalent of remembering the war underlines how much this is not just the past of Japanese modern history but also a past heavily mediated through cinema. It is homologous to Yamazaki’s own films, encouraging viewers to recall the past of his own cinema.Footnote ⁵ The Eternal Zero urges audiences to personally witness the true story of the kamikaze by offering itself as a circular and complete version of that tale, containing both the past and the contemporary process of remembering that past. Such a closed-circuit does not demand any outside text or even verification to operate.

That is in part because verification is not the intended function of the film. Kentarō does not confirm Miyabe’s motives, which have already been declared to be beyond language, but rather cries. Such tears are both personal and transpersonal, shared in the images of other emotional men in the flashback. They underline how much The Eternal Zero is a male melodrama, where women function little except as the object of male bravery, over whom men confirm masculinity by crying over their male comrades. Their homosociality revolves around affective responses to each other. Just as with the face of Miyabe in the last shot, the emotions are not singular: Kentarō could be crying over the tragedy of kamikaze deaths or over meeting his grandfather at the peak of his bravery. Sadness is mixed with love, pride, envy, regret, and—especially for a special effects film like this—the thrill of speed and the sublime of technological war. What is crucial is less a particular emotion than the overwhelming mixture, one hammered home in the above sequence by the insistently repetitive music score in crescendo. Coming right after Ōishi’s statement about the ineffability of Miyabe’s reasons, and itself rehearsing the contradictions by showing Miyabe both reiterating his dedication to living and determinedly flying to his death, the sequence ultimately solves the conundrum of Miyabe’s decision not through reasoning or even psychologizing, but through the emotions of Miyabe and those witnessing him. This is classic melodrama. If the Hollywood melodrama could sometimes deftly expose the contradictions faced by women in a patriarchal society, asked to love but constrained by women’s social roles, only to displace those problems through a tearful ending, so The Eternal Zero substitutes a questioning of kamikaze with its own melodramatic logic. It matters less what the reasons were for the kamikaze policy than that it produced men of profound emotional effect who were dedicated to family and their comrades.Footnote ⁶ Questions of history, veracity, and, of course, responsibility are elided in the power of affect.

This structure within Yamazaki’s cinema is necessarily tied to the spectacle of technology. Kentarō does not merely recall the past of Miyabe and his bravery, but also sees Miyabe and his plane in the present. Past and present are melded as special effects and real backgrounds are seamlessly joined. The past becomes a present phenomenon—literally living in our time—through technical processes that are not only touted as historically accurate (the pamphlet and other writing on the film detailed how faithful the reproductions of the Zero were), but also astonishing in themselves. We of course know the Zero is not real but the product of CGI, so its impact comes not only from the reunion of grandson and dead grandfather, but also the appreciation of technological mastery. The emotional effect of the last sequence does not emerge solely from the diegesis, but also from the operations of cinema itself, most prominently the special effects and the orchestration of gazes (those directed at the camera themselves being a rarity in classical cinema).

The gaze over time

Returning to Kentarō on the bridge in The Eternal Zero, one can add this magical futurity to the mix of excess effect and technology that operate to fix the aporia of kamikaze logic, and further underline how it is embodied in the gaze. Kentarō doesn’t say anything. He remembers (we presume) and he looks. In diegetic space, he gazes at the present (examples of other families) but also the past (Miyabe flying by). Yet the camera movement around him as he “sees” images from the past implies his gaze transcends physical space to enter mental space and, because he was not present for Matsuno’s comment, transcends time. Spanning past and present, the present and the absent, thought and reality, Kentarō’s gaze is multiple, viewing several registers at once. Narratively, it becomes the vehicle for bonding with the dead (Miyabe) and presumably inheriting its spirit. Note that there is one scene that occurs between when Kentarō leaves Ōnishi’s house and he begins walking over the bridge. In it, Ōnishi recalls Matsuno confessing that she was almost forced into prostitution after the war but was saved by a mysterious man. Ōnishi then wonders aloud who that might have been, but his subsequent gaze at the photo of Matsuno and Kiyoko that Miyabe left him, and the next scene’s flashback of Matsuno declaring that Miyabe kept his promise to return to her, suggests to most viewers that the mysterious figure is Miyabe. This has led at least one commentator to label the film “occult” (Watabe Reference Watabe2022: 107), but it also aligns with Miyabe’s magical futurity. As Watabe notes, for Miyabe’s sacrifice to make sense, he must possess a “gaze of God,” being certain both of the course of the war (that Matsuno would not die in an air raid) and Ōnishi’s survival (even though, in reality, those with engine trouble often had to just join the next kamikaze attack) (Watabe Reference Watabe2022: 103–4). He seemingly has control over the situation that one with knowledge of the future would have, while also being able to transport himself after death into the future to fulfill his promise. That makes his flight past Kentarō on the bridge as much an “objective” magical apparition as it is Kentarō’s subjective vision—perhaps more “real” than the ghosts Godai sees—and his final smile that of someone who knows what will happen after his demise.

The gaze in Yamazaki’s cinema often sutures these registers of excess emotion, technology, and magical futurity, becoming a microcosm of the structure woven into his oeuvre. In film after film, we see a character or set of characters, for instance, looking off-screen with faces expressing amazement or full of another emotion, followed by a cut or a camera movement to what they are looking at. We see this in Godzilla Minus One, for example, when Shikishima enters the hangar and shows a look of wonder (Figure 12), after which there is a pan to the Shinden plane (Figure 13). These can be moments of technological revelation, introducing not only important technology in the diegesis, but also the results of technology used in the filmmaking. They are also often emotional, such as at the end of Ballad, when Shin’ichi visits the site of the castle in the present—a castle he had just visited in his time travel to the Warring States Period—and his gaze, again shown first before what he sees, falls upon a stone stela with “Thank you” written upon it by Princess Ren, whom Shin’ichi helped in the past. His gaze joins multiple times, both for the characters and the audience. Such modes of delaying information are not unique to Yamazaki. They are, in fact, a common means of creating suspense and sparking audience involvement. One could argue that Yamazaki makes this a general strategy throughout his films, either not showing us crucial moments such as Tachibana explaining the ejection seat to Shikishima in Godzilla Minus One until after we’ve seen him use it, or showing so much as to make us eager for explanation, for instance by beginning both Space Battleship Yamato and The Great War of Archimedes in the midst of full-blown battles. At its core, this combination of seer and seen encapsulates the melding of vision and magical futurity in Yamazaki, while also narrating revelation.

Figure 12:

The structure of Yamazaki’s gaze: from Shikishima looking in Godzilla Minus One.

Figure 13:

To the magical future he looks at.

Figure 13: Long description

Panel A: A man stands in a hangar, looking off to the side with an expression of amazement. Panel B: The view shifts to reveal a large aircraft, the Shinden plane, which the man is looking at.

We should note that this structure of magical futurity imbues even the Always series, which is usually described as devoted to an idyllic past. The end of the first Always film is similarly structured through a gaze divided among multiple characters, spaces, and objects. As the Suzukis speed in their three-wheel pickup and wave goodbye to Mutsuko, who is on a train going home for the first time since coming to Tokyo, Tomoe and her son Ippei point screen left and yell out (Figure 14). Mutsuko, in close-up in the light of the setting sun, reacts and turns right and smiles, saying “It’s finally done!” (Figure 15). But instead of showing what she is looking at, Yamazaki shifts to a series of moving camera shots divided by dissolves of the Third Street neighbors, such as Ryūnosuke and Junnosuke (Figure 16) and even Hiromi in a completely different space (Figure 17), looking off-screen in multiple directions. These gazes culminate in the film’s last shot showing the Suzukis, now stopped on top of an embankment and looking left, remarking on the beauty of what they see. The camera movement continues to finally reveal, after multiple delays, both the setting sun and Tokyo Tower, shown for the first time in the film in its completed form (Figure 18).

Figure 14:

The gaze at the end of Always: Sunset on Third Street: From the Suzuki’s pointing to Tokyo Tower.

Figure 15:

To Mutsuko looking to where they pointed.

Figure 16:

Ryūnosuke and Junnosuke also look off-screen.

Figure 17:

Hiromi looks at her hand and what is beyond.

Figure 18:

The delayed revelation: the Suzukis with Tokyo Tower and the sunset.

Katsuyuki Hidaka (Reference Hidaka2017) correctly emphasizes the issue of temporality in his analysis of the Always films, particularly the issue of delay. Postponing showing Tokyo Tower in this scene is just an instance of a strategy throughout the films of delaying revelation of the completion of the Tower, presumably because that would signal the end of an era when Japanese, according to Osawa Masachi, still dreamed of the future. Hidaka argues that the theme of “incompletion” (Hidaka Reference Hidaka2017: 66) is also a delay for the characters, few of whom truly achieve their dreams. Expanding this analysis onto the formal level, we could note how there are not only multiple gazes, aimed at different screen directions, but also multiple objects, as the object of the gaze, at least as stated in the dialogue, shifts, or multiplies without notice between the Tower and the sunset. Made a symbol of national reconstruction and technological advancement, Tokyo Tower here is additionally tied to the sun that often denotes Japan. The temporality is also complex. There is a supposed simultaneity, joining the characters in different spaces as they view the same sight at the same moment, but the fact some look at the Tower and some at the sunset—or both—suggests their perceptions of time might also differ, with some seeing the end of the day, some the end of construction, some the imagining of an “open and optimistic future” (Hidaka Reference Hidaka2017: 63). These multiple temporalities are unified by the delay that promises a future revelation, just as the gazes are again personal made communal, united by nationalized objects, and fulfilled by a subsequent shot. Yamazaki’s temporal construction of the gaze is a formal means of embodying futurity, of suggesting a time to come that will fulfill at least the promise of the desire to look.

The gaze is what helps us align the Always films, even within their benign nostalgia, with the same structures of affect, technology, nation, and futurity evident in Yamazaki’s war or science fiction films. The view of the past always involves the future, and vice versa. Here the gaze emphasizes how much technologized visuality, elevated to the level of the emotional sublime, operates to solve narrative, if not also historical, contradictions. We can discuss other aspects of Yamazaki’s cinema, particularly its focus on nostalgia, masculinity, and science or speculative fiction, but that cinema is best represented by—or even manifests—this structural combination of sight, affect, and temporality. Ultimately, it is the kamikaze narrative that comes to best embody this structure. Let us see how it operates in Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One

Let us begin with the kamikaze narrative. As noted above, it is possible to argue that the film rejects the kamikaze ethos, if not war itself. As we have also seen, this is a claim that, even if it could be made of Godzilla Minus One, could not be made of Yamazaki’s cinema, which has repeatedly depended on acts of self-sacrifice and suicide for narrative and emotional effect. Perhaps Yamazaki has evolved toward an anti-war position over time—a claim I will investigate later—but that is complicated by the similarities between Godzilla Minus One and The Eternal Zero. Beyond the general narrative resemblance—the Zero pilot who is called a coward but proves his masculinity for a family composed of a “wife” and “daughter” through piloting a plane again—the two films share key elements in their approach to affect, technology, and time.

In both films, the key question is the relation between the hero and the kamikaze act. Because Miyabe’s narrative is told in flashback, the focus is less on what will happen, than why it happened. With Shikishima, however, suspense is created over what he will do in the narrative future. Both men are debilitated—Miyabe by torment over the death of his charges; Miyabe by guilt over failing to act—and are expected to overcome that. Even if Nakamura can suggest Miyabe is a manic depressive, which clouds his kamikaze act, he is never castrated in the way Shikishima is, whose weaknesses become so persistent some commentators found him annoying (Kelts Reference Kelts2024). He is the castrated male, so tormented he is unable to act, incapable of consummating a (sexual) relationship with Noriko, or becoming a father to Akiko (Griffiths Reference Griffiths2025). Miyabe is then an example of the kamikaze masculinity that Yamazaki has depicted in Space Battleship Yamato or Fueled, while Shikishima represents its absence. Godzilla Minus One is then less a story of finding and narrating preexisting Japanese masculinity in the war, than of trying to create one in the postwar era.

Despite this temporal difference, both films rely on the kamikaze act as proof of masculinity. While Shikishima’s survival at the end is important to Godzilla Minus One’s promise of fighting war without weapons, it also aligns with other examples of Yamazaki’s magical futurity. What proves his masculinity is less his survival than his decision to redo his failed kamikaze mission by flying the Shinden, and to protect others by killing the Godzilla he did not shoot on Odo Island. As Nagasaka Toshihisa states, “he attacks by truly utilizing his kamikaze spirit and the fruits of his training” (Nagasaka Reference Nagasaka2024: 88)—that is, by finally realizing his self as a kamikaze. It is Tachibana, not Shikishima, who contrives the ejection seat, and he only reveals its existence the day before the battle, well after Shikishima had made his decision. The fact that his determination to die comes well before his possible survival is crucial in representing his masculinity. As for the audience, Shikishima’s act would read quite differently if we knew of the ejection seat before the attack. Of course there is narrative suspense here, as the audience—along with others in the diegesis like Akitsu, the minesweeper captain—worries that Shikishima might indeed finally complete his suicidal mission. The viewer likely has conflicted feelings, ranging from hopes he survives to sadness over his possible death, from admiration at his determination to stop a threat to Japan to overlapping him with Godai and Miyabe and other kamikaze heroes in Yamazaki films.

Obstructing the viewer’s gaze (or castrating it by cutting away from the explanation of the ejection seat) enables another drama of vision in the final attack, one that again partially replicates the template seen in Space Battleship Yamato and The Eternal Zero. The kamikaze attack is intercut with images of the past, as a close-up of Shikishima in the Shinden (Figure 19) is followed by a shot of a photo of Noriko in the cockpit (Figure 20, echoing the cockpit photo in The Eternal Zero), and then by an image of her hanging the laundry looking back at the camera (Figure 21, a gaze that repeats Space Battleship Yamato and The Eternal Zero). Technology intervenes when, after a return close-up of Shikishima putting on his goggles, there is a very brief shot of him pulling a lever, and then a short shot of the plane ramming into Godzilla’s mouth. Only those paying close attention—or watching it later in slow motion—can catch a human figure emerging from the cockpit. The montage confirms the lever is for the ejection seat. Shikishima’s gaze is important in the scene, though it, like the gazes at Tokyo Tower/the sun in Always, is not singular: narratively he is looking at Godzilla, but the editing stipulates he is looking at Noriko, both through the photo and in his mind (his eyes, however, do not look down at the photo).

Figure 19:

Shikishima’s gaze during the final battle in Godzilla Minus One.

Figure 20:

Noriko’s photo in the cockpit.

Figure 21:

A memory of Noriko also looking at the camera.

More important to the scene is the gaze of the audience in the diegesis: that of the men on the various boats, including Akitsu, Noda, and Mizushima (Akitsu’s young shipmate). They function in part to guide the movie viewer’s reading, helping delay the realization Shikishima has ejected (their mistake becomes ours), but also envelop the entire scene in male emotionality. The fact one crucial audience member is listening on the radio—Tachibana—means the mediated presence of observers is as important as the unmediated gaze. While these figures share much with Kentarō in The Eternal Zero, Kentarō does not directly witness the attack. They do, but they witness less a naked act than a technical trick (one in both the diegesis and the filmmaking). Temporality is factored in first by the slow-motion shot of Noriko, which is read as from the past but is not what we have seen before, and by a flashback that comes after Tachibana hears that Shikishima ejected, showing him explaining the ejection mechanism and urging Shikishima to live (the pilot’s surprise again underlines he was steeled to die as a kamikaze). The narrative present constructs the past and the past explains its own magical future, fulfilling what was made absent and making the audience’s gaze total. The final gaze is then of these observers saluting toward what they see off-screen (Figure 22). Most observers declare the salute is for Godzilla, though Yamasaki’s repeated doubling of the object of a gaze, including in this very scene, suggests it can equally be for Shikishima, who is physically proximate. The narrative of military masculinity respecting its enemy (and its heroes) again sutures the scene’s contradictions.

Figure 22:

The collective salute toward what is off-screen.

It is possible to argue that the central narrative contradiction in The Eternal Zero—why Miyabe the pacifist decided to become a kamikaze—is transferred in Godzilla Minus One from the hero (clearly Shikishima does not bear contradiction to the degree Miyabe does) to the audience, who are torn between wanting Shikishima to live and desiring he kill Godzilla.Footnote ⁸ The contradiction is also mirrored in a film that not only wishes to be pacifist but also hopes to show both a successful kamikaze attack and a Japan victorious at war. What solves this contradiction is first, the male melodrama that has been escalating throughout the film, creating an emotional crescendo culminating in the explosion of the Shinden; and second, the magical futurity of the gaze and technology (exemplified by the ejection seat). Of course, the narrative conceit of the ejection seat is as fantastic as the magical beasts in Yamazaki’s Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura.Footnote ⁹ It is also incredible narratively, because it allows the film to essentially have its cake and eat it too, letting Shikishima prove his kamikaze bravery while also allowing him to live. The futurity here is different from that of Space Battleship Yamato, where Godai’s death enables the rebirth of the Earth, symbolized in part by the birth of his child, but still burdens that future with its grim cause. The seat enables the failed kamikaze past to be fulfilled while erasing it clean for the future. While Shikishima’s bravery likely facilitates an end to his torment, and supposedly the end of the war to him, it is the ejection seat that fantastically makes it possible for him to be both a kamikaze and survive, to fulfill his past role while also living into the future. It also enables the audience to enjoy the masculine glory of the kamikaze act without the burden of witnessing death. The device solves their emotional turmoil and, at the same time, the emotional turmoil makes the seat more acceptable as a solution. Shikishima’s melodrama and its emotional peak in a moment doubling life and death enable Godzilla Minus One to feel like an anti-war film even as it makes the kamikaze act narratively necessary.

Technology similarly enables the film to be both pro- and anti-war. One of the major selling points for the film in Japan was the representation of military technology, with the official theater pamphlet or magazines such as a December 2023 issue of Mono magajin, devoting many pages to detailed explanations of the ships and planes reproduced in the movie. Yamazaki himself could at times sound like the weapons otaku, suggesting in some interviews that the desire to reproduce famous historical ships was integral to his decision to set the story in the immediate postwar before the Allies destroyed them (Gojira -1.0 official pamphlet; Totsui Reference Totsui2024). The visual spectacle of military hardware itself, detached from narrative, is one of the key pleasures offered by the film (Tsutsui Reference Tsutsui2024; Griffiths Reference Griffiths2025), but technological weapons play important narrative roles as well. Core is the Shinden, a unique fighter plane actually built near the end of World War II but never put into mass production. While the film never explicitly claims the fighter is a transformative weapon, the very fact that Yamazaki chooses it to deliver Godzilla a deadly blow over some other fast plane suggests the film is aligning itself with a long line of narratives imagining a “what if” scenario of Japanese technology from the war: a magical alternative future where these weapons could have made a difference for Japan. Tanikawa Kenji (Reference Tanikawa2024) has noted that Shikishima is also the name of the scientist who developed Tetsujin 28-go (known as Gigantor in English versions) in the eponymous manga and anime, a huge robot developed during World War II that appears later to help the human race. The original Space Battleship Yamato anime from 1974 is another example, imagining a future where the remnants of the Imperial Navy battleship Yamato are revived to save the Earth. This naval angle was not new, as Honda Ishirō, the director of many of the early Godzilla films, made the film Atragon (Kaitei gunkan) in 1963, which, in a precursor to Godzilla Minus One, sported a narrative of postwar Japan having to request help from members of the Imperial Navy—here manning a futuristically retrofitted submarine—to rescue the planet. It is possible to argue that the Toho special effects films from Godzilla to Atragon to Godzilla Minus One, far from being anti-war, were a key channel for imagining Japanese fighting—and sometimes winning—wars despite a pacifist Constitution and during a time when the industry itself repressed representations of World War II that celebrated Japanese militarism (Tsutsui Reference Tsutsui2004). I have written about how twenty-first-century SF war films such as Lorelei (dir. Higuchi Shinji, 2005) have carried on this tradition (Gerow Reference Gerow2006).

Godzilla Minus One does not make an issue of this technology in the way the original Godzilla did. One of the contradictions of the first film is that it rejects the Oxygen Destroyer as weaponry that, like the atomic bomb, threatens humanity itself, but still relies on it as a solution. The suicidal deployment of the Destroyer by its creator Dr. Serizawa could be considered a precursor to Yamazaki’s tactic of using kamikaze logic to solve core contradictions. But in the original that logic remains deeply scarred. Serizawa, with his eye-patch and a house reminiscent of the castle of a European mad scientist, bears the marks of the abuses of history,Footnote ¹⁰ and so his self-death does not just erase knowledge of how to build the Oxygen Destroyer; it also eliminates the likes of him and his dark past from the future. Although Yoshioka Hidetaka, who plays Noda—the character who is Serizawa’s equivalent in Godzilla Minus One—felt the scientist bore the guilt of creating weapons during the war (Gojira -1.0 official pamphlet), the film fails to visualize such scars (Noda bears more the markings of the befuddled Ryūnosuke that Yoshioka plays in the Always films). This may be one reason why his invention—the balloons used in the Wadatsumi plan—is less evil, a weapon that less destroys the ocean, eliminating oxygen from the sea like Serizawa’s creation, than utilizes the powers of the sea itself (Wadatsumi is the Japanese name for the sea god) to debilitate Godzilla. It is an eco-friendly weapon. This is not enough, however, and conventional war machines must be brought in at the end.

Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, far from critiquing technology, ultimately celebrates it both within the story and in its very construction. Technology, aided by the bravery of men, saves the day in the diegesis, but it is technology that also creates that diegesis. Again, the victory of the film’s VFX at the Oscars replicates the victory of technology in the film itself. Yamazaki frequently spoke of his desire to make a Godzilla film, but complained that VFX and computer technology were insufficient for him to construct the film he wanted. His previous effort to create Godzilla for film—a humorous pre-credits sequence in the second Always film—only underlined how much the technology was inadequate at the time. Shirogumi used Houdini and Maya (well-known 3D animation software) for design, and the software Nuke for digital compositing (Hellerman Reference Hellerman2024), but to Yamazaki, the key was astounding improvements in computing power that made possible the complex animation of water, for instance (Yamazaki Reference Yamazaki2023c). Godzilla Minus One was thus created because of advancements in technology (Gojira -1.0 official pamphlet); the film itself in its very construction—its “movie magic”—embodies the evolutionary futurity of technology that inhabits much of Yamazaki’s cinema. Central to the evaluation of the special effects technology was the criterion of realism. The official theater pamphlet is peppered with terms such as “reality” and asserts a cinematic authenticity based in a homology between production and narrative, where filming in actual rough seas or in meticulously recreated military hardware ensures realism on screen. A repeated refrain was that the film had achieved a seamless merger of live-action footage and computer-generated imagery, to the point that the CGI seemed as real as the flesh and blood actors in the foreground (Totsui Reference Totsui2024). Perhaps a vision of this media technology future was offered in the first Always film when a television arrives at the Suzuki home: the frame on the small set expands to overwhelm the space, as if showing an audience immersing itself in the image (Figure 23). While Ryūnosuke promptly mangles the antennae, this representation of visual technology overcoming and melding with reality could be considered Yamazaki’s telos of the evolution of VFX technology. This future was embedded in Yamazaki’s efforts throughout his career, one that would ostensibly render the magical realistic and the realistic magical precisely through technological prestidigitation—and by shunting the human blunders of Ryūnosuke to the side.Footnote ¹¹

Figure 23:

The audience immersed in the TV world in Always: Sunset on Third Street.

Figure 23: Long description

A large crowd of people watching a wrestling match in a stadium. The audience is seated and facing towards the wrestling ring. They are in color but the ring and the rest of the stadium in the back are in black and white. The scene is captured from behind the crowd, focusing on the backs of the spectators’ heads. The wrestling ring is visible in the background with two wrestlers engaged in a match.