怪獣 Kaijū Forever Remain

“怪獣 Kaijū Forever Remain” appears here as a soundtrack and a video, but it is actually a first step towards future multiple sound/text/image creations based on a long term research project inter-relating:

1- Legendary and mythical fantastic figures with supranatural powers, mid-human/animal/monster/alien developing in Asia, Oceania and the Americas since very ancient times through vernacular practices (storytelling, drawings, paintings, sculptures…) and still perpetuated today in popular cultures (comics, animation/science-fiction/horror movies, video or on-line gaming, digital images produced in the metaverse) . These fantastic figures can be called “monsters”, “immortals”, “super-heroes”, “sub-humans” according to different beliefs, traditions, religions and ideologies. They share a common characteristic to belong neither to the human world neither to the meta world of deities, but to act always in/out of the natural world and the human hierarchical order of things. They exist to destroy or to heal the world according to their histories, genealogies, geographies, shapes and powers.

2- These fantastic figures are fascinating in the way that they can be seen as powerful allegories for expressing, representing and counteracting any human economical and geopolitical ideology/fantasy of leading and dominating the world as THE first global superpower, could they be American, Asian, European, Russian etc. They also reveal un/conscious, hidden, profitable structures of powers under the cover of so-called humanitarianism, charity business, global health-wealth care etc., while with the use of their supranatural powers, they undermine any human pretention to… power.        

The Japanese word kaijū (怪獣, litterally “strange beast”) originally refers to giant monsters and creatures from ancient Japanese legends, which are usually depicted attacking major cities and engaging the military, or other kaijū, in battle.
 

It earlier appeared in the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), a compilation of mythic geography and beasts. Versions of the text may have existed since as early as the 4th century BC, but the present form was not reached until the early Han dynasty a few centuries later. It is largely a fabulous geographical and cultural account of pre-Qin China as well as a collection of Chinese mythology .The book is divided into eighteen sections and describes over 550 mountains and 300 channels.

After sakoku had ended (鎖国, “closed country”, isolationist foreign policy from 1633 to 1853 banning any travelling in/out Japan) and the country was opened to foreign relations, the term kaijū came to be used to express concepts from paleontology and legendary creatures from around the world. For example, in 1908 it was suggested that the extinct Cratosarus was alive in Alaska, and this was referred to as kaijū.

However, there are no traditional depictions of kaiju or kaiju-like creatures in Japanese folklore.

The kaijū genre is a subgenre of tokusatu (特撮, “special filming”) entertainment.
 
The 1954 film Godzilla is commonly regarded as the first kaijū film. kaijū characters are metaphorical in nature. Godzilla, for example, serves as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, reflecting the fears of post-war Japan following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.