J-Horror: pop culture and a nation's history

Andrew O'Hehir claims that Japan's obsession with disaster (through its pop culture) seems to have been anticipating Apocalyptic events. If you are not too horrified by the main claim of this fascinating article, read on ....

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/index.html?story=/ent/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/15/japan_disaster&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%2520Newsletter%2520%2528Not%2520Premium%2529_7_30_110

Here is a taste from O'Hehir's article:

Japan's cinema of disaster, from Godzilla to J-horror
The island nation's great and strange pop culture has been preparing for apocalypse ever since Hiroshima

I don't imagine this offers much comfort to the Japanese people right now, but no culture in the world has been so shaped by disaster, or so obsessed with it. It is beyond words like "irony" or "coincidence" to express the fact that the only nation ever to suffer the effects of nuclear war now faces a nuclear catastrophe of unknown scope and unforeseeable consequences, following one of the biggest earthquakes in history and the resulting tsunami. Furthermore, I recognize that it borders on profanity to start talking about movies after thousands of people have died, and many thousands more face a dangerous and unstable situation. Culture cannot "heal" those kinds of wounds, and cannot make the dead live again. But it represents the collective means for the survivors, over time, to come to terms with what happened. One can argue that Japanese pop culture, in the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has become an extended course in post-traumatic psychology and disaster preparedness.

Sometimes the connection is obvious, as in the first "Godzilla" film of the mid-1950s, whose undisguised anger at nuclear-armed Yankee imperialism had to be concealed in a bastardized, American-friendly version. But it's striking that so many areas of Japanese pop culture that have nothing to do, at least officially, with World War II or the Bomb, are so concerned with violence, war, disaster and nightmarish transformation, from yakuza films to apocalyptic science fiction and gruesome horror flicks. All that becomes even stranger when you consider that postwar Japan may well be the least violent society in human history: While 21st-century America has averaged five or six murders a year per 100,000 population (which is fairly low by our standards), Japan averages much less than one murder per 100,000, with other violent crimes also barely registering.