Godzilla rampaging through cities or grappling with other monsters is a hallmark of the Japanese monster film series. But there’s more to the reptilian creature than just mayhem. A new book edited by College of Arts and Sciences professor Rachel DiNitto explores Japanese cinema—including the Godzilla films—and environmentalism.

DiNitto, a Japanese literature professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in East Asian Languages & Literatures, has researched nuclear energy and Japanese literature for decades. Her latest book, Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema, was born out of a class she first taught at the University of Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I wanted to show students a wide variety of types of films and then think about the environmental messaging about industrial pollution or nuclear radiation,” DiNitto said. “The class was an interesting way to learn about Japan’s history of environmental issues.”

The five students in the graduate section of the Japanese Environmental Cinema wrote amazing papers, inspiring DiNitto to organize a panel at a regional Asian Studies conference so the students could present their research. After seeing the panel, an organizer of the conference reached out to the editor at The Association for Asian Studies, who encouraged DiNitto to turn this into a full volume of essays on environmentalism in a range of Japanese films.

“The book has this really wide range of contributors, and that was something I was also very excited about,” DiNitto said. “We have people from the US, people from Asia, people in Europe, and someone from Australia. It's a nice wide range of different views.”

The broad range of views was important for DiNitto. She wanted to discuss more than just documentary films and look at how films across genres have environmental messages that should not go unnoticed.

“Japan's really well known for animated films and Godzilla films, and I wanted to know what it would mean to read those kinds of films through an environmental lens. I think there are environmental messages there, but the films don't always get read in that way,” DiNitto said.

Asking questions about alternate messages and their impacts led to DiNitto receiving dozens of papers on environmental cinema in Japan. As editor of this volume, she organized the final 17 chapters into four themes and helped each author refine their chapter. Covering topics like “toxicscapes,” children in nuclear disasters, nuclear anxiety and apocalyptic landscapes, the volume explores the many ways environmental messaging is prevalent in Japanese cinema.

“The authors did all the original research, but I was trying to help them shape their chapters," she said. “Since I was the person that could see all the chapters, I was in a position to have a sense of how they work together, so I decided to group them thematically rather than chronologically.”

DiNitto hopes that the discussions of the films and TV shows presented in this volume reach wider audiences, compared to being targeted specifically for specialists. “I think it'd be great if people could use the book to teach. I would love to see the book or the research used in a broader field.”

“This particular book series is in the Asia Shorts series, meant to reach people who have a general interest in Japan but may not know a lot about environmental issues,” DiNitto said. “We're hoping to reach a wide audience. There's a lot of interest in Japanese cinema, but I don't know that it's taught environmentally in this way.”