Downplaying lackluster stateside box office earnings, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) has been touted for its international popularity, currently representing over seventy-five percent of the film’s worldwide gross. While its number one debut in China at the end of July registered as the sixth biggest ever for a Hollywood title, subsequent foreign openings were predicted as a measure of the likelihood (read “financial viability”) of a sequel. Surprisingly, however, box office returns from Japan’s August 13 release saw the giant monster/giant robot action film come in a disappointing sixth below international flop The Lone Ranger (2013), a Disney adaptation of the American radio drama widely regarded as promoting racist stereotypes of Native Americans. One of the year’s few aspiring summer blockbusters not directly linked to a remade or adapted studio property, Pacific Rim unabashedly embraces two distinct youth-oriented science fiction entertainment genres from Japan: the “kaiju” film genre of fighting monsters begun by Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954), as well as the “mecha” anime genre featuring human-piloted mechanical giants typified by Hideaki Anno’s sprawling Evangelion …