Hibakusha Cinema

Mick Broderick

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136883255
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Antropología

First Published in 1996. This collection of works is in response to American film scholar and long-term resident of Japan, Donald Richie, words: ' The Japanese failure to come to terms with Hiroshima is one which is shared by everybody in the world today, ' from over thirty years ago, when responding to the Japanese subgenre of cinema which had dealt with the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three decades on, the question lingers, does this appraisal remain valid? Hibakusha Cinema is an attempt - perhaps momentarily - to reorient critical focus upon a rarely discussed, yet important feature of Japanese cinema. The essays collected here represent a mix of Japanese and western (pan-Pacific) scholarship harnessing multidisciplinary methodologies, ranging from close textual analysis, archival and historical argument, anthropological assessment, literary and film comparative analyses to psychological and ideological hermeneutics.

1‘Mono no aware’: Hiroshima in Film

Donald Richie

In August, 1945, atom bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the former, some 240,000 were killed; in the latter, about 80,000. After the war those exposed to radiation continued to die; between 1951 and 1955, some 3,730. Now, sixteen years after the bombings, there are in Hiroshima alone more than 90,000 suffering from radiation illness. These people are dying at the rate of about 50 a year.

Thus memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are kept fresh: ruins, like those of the Oura Catholic Church, are visited by pilgrims; Hiroshima has become a tourist center, its Atomic Museum nearly always full; and until only recently newspapers always carried full details on the latest radiation death.

Yet it is not entirely the memory of the numbers killed nor the living death of those still existing which keeps the memory of Hiroshima alive. In the almost forgotten fire-bomb raids on Tokyo in the spring of 1945, though not so many died, the manner of their death was even more horrible. Rather, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become symbols for the Japanese, just as they to a lesser extent have become symbols for the entire world.

Their meaning is agreed upon, they epitomize; there is a community of associations surrounding them that is intelligible and meaningful to all; there is an emotional complex that the word ‘Hiroshima’ calls into being. Yet interpretations of symbols change, and the attitude toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki has changed considerably in the last sixteen years. The record of this change is seen in casual conversation, in political speeches, in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, over television, and in the films.

The initial response, quite different from that of today, is suggested in the staged holocausts of both Children of the Atom Bomb and the Hiroshima of 1953. It is one which the West has never understood. The bomb, like the war, like death itself, was something over which no one had any control; something which could not be helped; what we mean by an ‘act of God.’ The Japanese, in moments of stress if not habitually, regard life as the period of complete insecurity that it is; and the truth of this observation is graphically illustrated in a land yearly ravaged by typhoons, a country where the very earth quakes daily. The bomb, at first, was thought of as just another catastrophe in a land already overwhelmed with them.

The West was quick to identify the bomb-dropping as an atrocity. That the Japanese did not was due in part to the fact that it occurred in wartime, when anything might be expected; in part because, though the destruction had been more spectacular, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just two of the many totally destroyed Japanese cities; and also, in part, because the Japanese mind does not, unless so directed, tend to think in such terms.

Had the war continued, the Japanese themselves would have been told of the atrocity of the act and this would have made excellent propaganda, something which the bomb-droppers themselves feared. But the war ended and the bomb became an ‘act of God,’ one among many. Directly after the war, during the Occupation, it seemed that the occupying Americans and British felt much worse about Hiroshima and Nagasaki than did the Japanese themselves. And perhaps they did.

Japan was too busy digging itself out of the rains to bother about those already dead, to worry about assigning guilt. But the Occupation government, muddleheaded though it often was, comprised a number of humane and liberal individuals, all of whom believed that Japan was worth saving. And they tried to make it over into the model democracy. Their failure was complete, but their attitude toward Hiroshima showed the Japanese how they felt about it. They felt awful about it, and their completely deserved indications of guilt seemed to the Japanese indicative of the attitude of the Western world at large. It was the attitude of the Occupation officials which the Japanese made their own and which constituted the first reading of the Hiroshima symbol.

This was not the first nor last time that the Japanese had appropriated an attitude. Even more dramatic was the sudden about-face in the Meiji era when the West finally convinced Japan that its pre-Meiji culture was worth saving. The Japanese then stopped tearing down temples, and trying to melt down the Kamakura Buddha or even to sell the five-storey Nara pagoda as firewood.

Always, however, what the Japanese appropriate – whether atom bomb attitudes or rock-and-roll – is eventualy transformed into something entirely Japanese. The first films, made only after the end of the Occupation (1949), show this.¹ The American sense of outrage is missing; the sheer horror of the act is not touched upon. Instead, the Japanese substituted an elegiac regard which has remained as the single constant element in the changing interpretations of the Hiroshima symbol. From the first films on, Hiroshima was not an ‘atrocity’ but a ‘tragedy’

The 1950 Hiroshima, a documentary made up of newsreel clippings, is indicative of the elegiac attitude. It is an objective and literal account of the explosion, the disaster, and the partial reconstruction. Opening with American shots of the bomb exploding, it emphasizes not the horror and suffering, as do later films, but the tenacity of the inhabitants, their industry and bravery. It is (to borrow an American term) a ‘positive’ treatment of the subject. Technically it owes much to the American newsreel method; it has a kind of sobriety which one associates with The March of Time films, a basic assumption of objectivity, a tone that insists upon finality. It is the ‘official’ picture and (like the Luce ideal) it restrains emotion under the reportorial mask. As with American films of this type a basic insincerity is involved; the pose is frankly adopted; this is a ‘constructive’ film. Still it does manage to reflect a predominant attitude, something which the shrill emotionalism of later films does not.

The basic statement regarding the bomb as seen in Hiroshima and other documentaries of the period, Nagasaki after the Bomb (Gembaku no Nagasaki, 1952) and Pictures of the Atom Bomb (Gembaku no Zu, 1952), is, in effect: ‘This happened; it is all over and finished, but isn’t it too bad? Still, this world is a transient place and this too is sad; what we feel today we forget tomorrow; this is not as it perhaps should be, but it is as it is.’ This awareness of evanescence and the resulting lamentation has a term in Japanese: mono no aware. It indicates a feeling for the transience of all earthly things; it involves a near-Buddhistic insistence upon recognition of the eternal flux of life upon this earth. This is the authentic Japanese attitude toward death and disaster (once an interval has passed), and the earliest films as well as the latest, in part at least, insist upon it. The Hiroshima rallies shown in newsreels, the ‘peace processions’ shown in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the polemic-filled sequences in films by Fumio Kamei and Hideo Sekigawa are all essentially alien to it. In the face of mono no aware, which Tamako Niwa has translated as ‘sympathetic sadness,’ the slogan ‘No More Hiroshimas’ is no more meaningful than ‘Remember Pearl Harbor.’

The elegiac attitude is also seen in the first feature films on the bombed cities: Hideo Ohna’s The Bell of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no Kane, 1953) and Tomotaka Tasaka’s I’ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no Uta wa Wasureji, 1953). This latter film has an American trying to return some music, found on the battlefield, to the composer’s family in Nagasaki, then staying on after becoming interested in the sufferings of the bomb victims. It is not a particularly meaningful film. Tasaka, himself a victim, was still quite ill at the time, but the tone is one of sustained elegy and, rarer, one in which the American is respectfully permitted to join.

Much better both as film and as elegy is Children of Hiroshima (Horishima no Ko, 1953),² the work of a young director, Kaneto Shindo, who has since continued to interest himself in atom bomb films, his most recent being Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryu, 1958). The 1953 film, mono no aware par excellence and a very good reflection of a genuine Japanese attitude, has a history which was of the greatest bearing on later Hiroshima films.

Commissioned by the Japan Teachers Union, Shindo made an extremely faithful film version, showing the aftermath of the bomb in a serious and resigned manner. Upon seeing the film, however, the Union complained to the sponsoring company, the Kindai Eiga Kyokai, saying that it was not satisfied, that Shindo had turned the story into ‘a tear-jerker and had destroyed its political orientation.’ This talk of ‘political orientation’ was new to Hiroshima films; and it was the basis for the first of the new readings of the Hiroshima symbol.

The Occupation never understood the true attitude of the Japanese toward not only the bomb but the surrender as well; and even now some Americans find it unbelievable. Initially, the occupiers had expected resentment and were a bit disquieted to encounter none, not realizing that the Japanese thought of the surrender, once it was proclaimed, the bomb, once it was dropped, as inevitable. The too-often noted passivity of the Asian was less the cause than was the unique Japanese inability to cry over spilt milk; the knowledge that the Japanese would cooperate with the Occupation, or else; and the widespread ‘it can’t be helped’ philosophy through which the Japanese for centuries have attempted to make life endurable.

After the Occupation, however, the long-expected resentment did indeed appear. This feeling was natural, and even desirable; unchanneled it would have relieved a number of the tensions which with the greatest good will in the world the Occupation had occasioned. But it was not allowed to remain unchanneled long. A new attitude, somewhat less natural than those before, began to be defined by many newspaper writers, radio commentators, essayists, and filmmakers. They tried to force upon the pubic an attitude of resentment. In the main they failed to channel this sentiment, thus causing severe disappointment in those who had been so industrious in their efforts.

All of this industry came, at least officially, from the Communist Party which naturally took advantage of an anti-Occupation and hence anti-American feeling already existing. Yet, it would be good to remember that the Japanese Communist is still a rather special variety: he still believes in Marx, is still convinced that world revolution is necessary, still affirms that emotional identification with the Party is a prerequisite for membership, still says and apparently believes – that the Party is on the side of the weak and oppressed. He is, in other words, fully a quarter of a century behind the times; at least as far behind as his opposite number, the pro-American who talks New-Deal-liberalism. In Japan, the Party is still openly militant – still crusading, still idealistically believing in Party aims and methods, still taking active part in strikes and making propaganda films, still saying bad things about the bourgeoisie – and thus it manages to embarrass the Russian leaders time and time again.

Also, one should remember that in Japan radical politics and communism are historically thought to be one; further, the crudest kind of anarchism is also believed to be linked up to the current subtleties of the Communist Party. Thus any difference of opinion with the military government of the 1930s and ‘40s was labeled as communist not only by the government but also by the dissenters as well. Since dissent stood for freedom of speech, one of the many paradoxes which grace Japanese politics is that some of democracy’s strongest spokesmen have thought of themselves as communists. To be a ‘communist’ in this sense meant to be an individual, a dissenter.

This accounts for the intellectual chic when even now clings to communism in Japan. Any self-respecting young intellectual goes through a phase of it. Since Russians are communists, they too have a kind of eclat that shows itself mainly in communitysing coffee shops, a preference for the Bolshoi over all other ballets, and a liking for ‘new’ Russian literature, that is, Sholokhov and other figures from the 1930s. To be an intellectual in Japan presupposes at least a mild flirtation with what is fondly believed to be communism.

But Russia’s lead is not followed, at least not by non-Party members, no matter how left’ their opinions. They know very little of the Russian hierarchy, they know even less of the new bourgeoisie. Instead they dream of such constructive efforts as ‘building a new society’ and ‘giving to the poor.’ Idealists all, they are convinced they are fighting the good fight. Russia’s influence is seen only in the most vague and general of feelings: during the Korean War it was fashionable to dislike America; once Khrushchev began trotting all over the world it became quite the thing to find in America all sorts of new virtues.

The Party member in Japan is, to be sure, in a somewhat different position; and an important point concerning Japanese films about Hiroshima is that the vast majority of them have been made by Party members. When the Japan Teachers Union found itself dissatisfied with the sober and honest Children of Hiroshima, it called in a director who would ‘genuinely help in the fight to preserve peace’; the result was the 1953 Hiroshima, the director, Hideo Sekigawa, an accredited Party member.

Sekigawa, who has since specialized in anti-American films, found during the war that the demands upon him as a Party member could be made to coincide with those of the Japanese militarists; thus he made propaganda documentaries of an anti-Western, anti-Chinese-Nationalist persuasion. His 1953 Hiroshima follows the general outline of his wartime films.

It contains two interwoven and contrasting sections: first, a well-made, dramatically moving, documentary-like reconstruction of the explosion (parts of which turned up in Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour); second, a statically filmed, tedious, polemic-filled tract with scenes in which Americans, not shown, are reported to have said that the bomb was nothing more than a simple scientific experiment, and that the Japanese were nothing more than experimental animals; with dialogue suggesting that the bomb would not have been dropped if the people had been other than Japanese; and ending with scenes of American tourists busy buying souvenir bones of persons killed in the explosion.³

Along with Sekigawa is Fumio Kamei, a director responsible for perhaps more A-bomb pictures than any other. A graduate of the Leningrad Motion Picture Institute, he first made a name for himself with Shanghai (1938), a film which contrasts the lives of rich foreigners and poor Chinese, much to the detriment of the former. Kamei’s A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no Higeki, 1945) achieved the distinction of being banned by the Occupation for its out-and-out communist line at the very time when the Occupation was practically pro-communist.

Typical in both its excesses and excellences is his Still, It’s Good to be Alive (Ikite Ite Yokatta, 1956), made under the auspices of the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. In three parts, the first, ‘It’s Hard to Die,’ shows scenes from soon after the explosion and concerns those suffering from keloid burns and other disfigurations. The second, ‘It’s Also Hard to Live,’ is about those dying of leukemia as a result of exposure to radiation; also orphans, blind children, and the sailors of the unfortunate Daigo Fukuryu. The third section, ‘Still, It’s Good to be Alive,’ is about those sufferers who have somehow managed to make useful lives for themselves: girls disfigured by scars have become nurses devoted to helping those worse off; women completely bedridden knit for others. Though its political direction is implicit (there is, for example, no mention of the American-sponsored ‘Hiroshima Maidens,’ very much in the news during the making of this film⁴) it has many sequences which go far beyond partisan political intention.

One such is the second part. A girl, bedridden for ten years, is given her first automobile ride through Nagasaki, which she has not seen for a decade. The car stops at various places: the factory where she was injured, the section where her brother was killed. Her face mirrors the emotions she is experiencing: intense curiosity about the life she is no longer a part of and fear at seeing what she can remember only as places of horror and pain. Finally, unable to reconcile these two conflicting emotions, she bursts into tears.

His The World is Afraid (Sekai wa Kyofu Sum, 1957) is from any point of view much less successful. It is deliberately sensational, a scare-message film, using all sorts of rhetorical shock devices. Kamei cuts from a contaminated milk test to a baby sucking on a bottle; from healthy children playing to close-ups of the pathetic and monstrous embryos still-born in Hiroshima. Yet the shrill and hysterical attitude shown in this fi...