Well, folks, we’re back! I had to take a hiatus to plan a wedding, start a new job, and help run a curling club. One season ends, just in time for another to begin: baseball! Back in 1993, the Yomiuri Giants drafted a kid right out of out of high school. How good was this kid? Well, he originally batted right-handed, but was so good that his brother insisted he start batting left-handed or he’d stop playing with him altogether. So what did this kid do? Only learn how to bat left-handed and become one of the best left-handed hitters in both Japanese and US baseball, winning the Nippon Professional Baseball MVP in 2000, and the MLB MVP of the New York Yankees World Series winning team in 2009. That kid? None other than Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui himself. 2002 saw not only Matsui signing with the Yankees, but also some major advancements in neural engineering. Scientists were able to implant electrodes into a rat’s brain, and by stimulating the left and right whisker sensors, then hitting the pleasure-reward center, were able to control the rat via remote. This allows rescuers to send rats into collapsed rubble, searching for survivors and navigating tight spaces that humans or robots can’t access. It also laid the groundwork for other technologies, restoring brain function and muscle control, inhibiting the urges of addiction, and fighting dementia. This is all well and good, but what are the ethics behind this? Short-lived lab rats are one thing, but what about larger animals? Humans? Could this be applied to create a living weapon? And what happens when the technology inevitably fails on that weapon? These are the questions that 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla raises in the first of two entries in Toho’s “Kiryu Saga.”

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