Throughout this book, we’ve been considering how the global–local nexus has had a determining effect on the composition of the kaijū film. The kaijū eiga is a form that both benefits from and originates from aspects of globalisation. The very first kaijū films all imagined border crossing, as giant monsters were transported across national thresholds, from primitive spaces to the perceived centres of civilisation. From The Lost World to King Kong to Gojira, the films revolved around binaries of nature and culture that invited chaos into the metropoles of the colonial and neocolonial world. Borders were as porous as the thresholds between civilisation and seemingly primitive cultures that worshipped the giant beasts. In their eventual form, kaijū were a modern phenomenon, born of atomic nightmares and growing ecological disaster. These core themes of the kaijū film were shared as the films transgressed national borders and found relevance in different cultures. Gojira set the precedent for how kaijū cinema would understand national trauma, often in the reflection of contemporary events that brought monsters with them. The kaijū film came to reflect what Aihwa Ong describes, in Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999), as a ‘condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space’ (4). Following its maturation in the 1950s, the kaijū film, like many generic movies, exhibited a high degree of mobility. The films travelled in different ways, either subtitled in their original forms, or exploited in vastly compromised ways. In memetic terms, the tropes and conventions of the kaijū film also demonstrated their own mobility, borrowed, reworked or grounded in different cultural contexts. The origins of kaijū also posed our cultural connectedness, in either the metaphors they evoked, the colonial relationships they reflected, or how such concepts were erased as films crossed from nation to nation. As I mentioned in the Introduction, this book has been all about the connections and flows at play globally in production, distribution, texts and reception that show globalisation in action.

Even though the kaijū film evidences the mobility and interconnectedness typical of transnational flows, its name remains inescapably Japanese. Kaijū eiga are essentialised time and again as quintessentially Japanese. Commentators regularly accuse western filmmakers of not ‘getting’ Godzilla or kaijū when they make giant monster movies or use the loanword.