William M. Tsutsui will discuss “Godzilla and Postwar Japanese Culture” in an Asian Studies Lecture Wednesday, March 12, at 2 p.m. in 238 Herald R. Clark Building at Brigham Young University.
Following the lecture, the first version of Godzilla, “Gojira” (1954), will be shown with time for a question-and-answer session afterward.
Tsutsui is the Department of History chair and executive director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas and specializes in the business, economic and cultural history of 20th-century Japan. He is currently researching the environmental history of modern Japan and how Japanese culture has globalized since World War II.
Several of his works have been published, including “In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage” (with Michiko Ito, 2006), and “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters” (2004). He is the recipient of several awards, including the William Rockhill Nelson Award for non-fiction (2005) and the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies (2000).
Tsutsui earned his degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Princeton.
This lecture will be archived online. For more information on David M. Kennedy Center events, see the calendar online at kennedy.byu
Writer: David Luker
