Godzilla in Spring

The print sets Toho Studios' kaiju against a spring landscape of cherry blossoms or budding boughs—a deliberate collision between the postwar nuclear-anxiety monster and a codified subject of Japanese seasonal imagery. The juxtaposition mines the comic possibilities of scale: Godzilla's reptilian bulk dwarfing the delicate sakura that have organized Japanese poetic and pictorial production since the Heian period. As mokuhanga, the work demands careful color registration; the soft pinks of blossoms call for bokashi gradients on washi, while Godzilla's grey-green hide can be built up through layered impressions of the baren. The composition extends the meisho-e tradition of seasonal place imagery while substituting a fictional creature for the human strollers and viewing sites of Hiroshige. Within Kristensen's body of work, Godzilla recurs as a stand-in for contemporary Japan's mythological self-image; like his Tokyo Tower views, the kaiju serves as a modern motif worthy of the same compositional attention earlier artists lavished on Mount Fuji or the Tokaido road. The print belongs to a strand of contemporary mokuhanga that mines Showa-era popular iconography for woodblock subjects.