As it is, casual fans in the West of Japanese movies and television only know four franchises: Ultraman, Kamen/Masked Rider, Super Sentai/Power Rangers, and Godzilla. Maybe they know Gamera as a Godzilla alternative, but you have to be a die-hard Toku fan to even know more than a couple of Super Sentai shows. Meanwhile, Godzilla is so popular he has numerous American made productions and won an MTV Movie Award, appeared in commercials, and he even fought Charles Barkley in an advertisement.
So why does the reigning King Of The Monsters succeed where even these franchises, which is not even a full list of movie and TV franchises trying to make it out of the Land Of The Rising Sun past otaku and weeaboos, have failed to impact Western culture? Bounding Into Comics contributor J.B. Augustine has a theory to run past you.
Godzilla has served as Japan’s cultural ambassador to the U.S. since the 1950s. My question then is this: who or what is America’s cultural ambassador to Japan?
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