ABSTRACT
The possibility of Japan wielding “soft power” from the globalization of media exports is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the period since the 1950s, when Japanese monster movies began to find international markets, Japan’s mass entertainment products were commonly perceived by the world’s consumers as inherently inferior in their production values and creative sophistication. This was especially the case with Japanese science fiction films, with their less than state-of-the-art special effects, formulaic plots, and exaggerated dialogue and acting, which quickly gained a US reputation as the ultimate “B movies” and were dismissed as “campy” and “cheesy.” This chapter explores the aesthetics, mechanics, and political implications of America’s parodic “cheesy” sensibility, examining how Japan came to be perceived in postwar America as the home of the world's finest cinematic cheese (rivaled only perhaps by Italy’s “spaghetti Westerns” and Hong Kong’s martial arts films) and what it was about monster movies, especially the Godzilla franchise, that made them so appealingly deplorable. Specifically, this chapter considers how extensive editing and voice dubbing by Hollywood distributors, eager to “improve” Godzilla films for American release, accentuated, even fabricated, their cheesiness, creating politically sanitized self-parodies that affirmed America’s global superiority and underlined Japanese cultural and racial difference.
