Godzilla Minus One Talk with Bill Tsutsui

Please join us for a lively conversation featuring USJC Board Member William Tsutsui on the 2024 Oscar-winning Japanese film “Godzilla Minus One.” 

William Tsutsui is a specialist in the economic, environmental, and cultural history of modern Japan.  Educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton Universities, he has published widely on Japanese popular culture and globalization, Japan’s postwar “imagination of disaster,” and giant monster movies in Japan and the United States.  His 2004 book Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters was called a “cult classic” by the New York Times and a Japanese translation was published by Chūkō sōsho. 

He has received Fulbright and Marshall Fellowships, and was awarded the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000.  He currently serves as Chancellor and Professor of History at Ottawa University (a private comprehensive university with campuses in Kansas and Arizona), and previously taught at the University of Kansas, Southern Methodist University, and Hendrix College. In 2020-2021, he was the Edwin O. Reischauer Distinguished Visiting Professor at Harvard, where he taught the course “Japanese Monsters.”

He also serves on the USJC Board of Directors and has previously held a talk at the Japan Information Center in Chicago on yokai and Japanese mythology.

“Godzilla Minus One” is streaming on Netflix and Prime.