The Bomb in Popular Cinema
In the meantime, we can briefly trace the bomb's appearance in popular cinema and highlight at least two significant and timeless films which deal directly with the bomb and its larger implications. The two most important films are Kurosawa Akira's Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, sometimes called I Live in
Fear , 1955) and Imamura Shohei's Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1989). Kurosawa's Record of a Living Being does not deal directly with Hiroshima (or Nagasaki for that matter, as a later film of his would); instead, it focuses on nuclear anxiety in an age of increasing Cold War tension and atmospheric nuclear testing. Black Rain, alternately, overtly takes Hiroshima as its subject and theme. Imamura's film is thus probably the most direct, successful, and important cinematic rendering of the bomb and its aftermath. Before turning to Black Rain, however, I would like to make a few remarks about A-bomb films, A-bomb allegories, and Kurosawa's cinema.
The Occupation forbade public discourse on the bomb. There is a now famous (perhaps infamous) story of a Japanese documentary crew from Nippon eigasha who filmed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in September and October of 1945. Their work was seized by Occupation forces until it was judged to be of great importance for U.S. research interests. The filmmakers were permitted to return to the devastated cities, and they filmed again in January and February 1946. Although their footage was officially meant for U.S. authorities, the documentary crew hid and kept ten reels for themselves, footage not shown in Japan until 1952. Not coincidentally, 1952 marked the end of the Occupation.
The world of film saw the taboo on the subject of the bomb lifted by Shindo Kaneto's The Children of the Atom Bomb (1952), funded by the Japan Teachers' Union. It is a semidocumentary which uses actual orphans and A-bomb victims to tell a fictionalized story of a teacher who returns to Hiroshima to seek out her former pupils who were in the city when the bomb fell. The Teachers' Union ultimately rejected Shindo's film and instead put their support behind another film in 1952, Sekigawa's Hiroshima, a very harsh, revisionist text which sees the bombing as an act of American racism, the claim made in the film that Hiroshima was an experiment in which the Japanese were mere guinea pigs for U.S. atomic bomb testing.
A barely disguised allegory of the bomb gave the film world, perhaps to its everlasting shame, but then again perhaps not, a new genre in Japanese cinema with a motion picture released in 1954. The genre is called kaiju eiga and the film is called Godzilla
(Gojira in Japanese). More notorious than respected in the West, Godzilla was quite well received in Japan, with an important director (Honda Ishiro, former assistant to Kurosawa) and a fine cast, including Shimura Takashi, along with Mifune Toshiro, Kurosawa's favorite actor. The film makes many references, overt and covert, to nuclear destruction, not the least of which is that H-bomb testing accounts for Godzilla's resurrection from the primordial depths and that the monster (vaguely a dinosaur, of course) has radioactive breath. Sci-fi, or "monster movies" (the translation of kaiju eiga), would go on to be one of the most durable of the industry's genres for the next three decades on film and on television.

Kurosawa's Film Tradition
References to the A-bomb, to radiation sickness, may be found in other films throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, but no major director, or any major film, took up the effort to situate the bomb within Japanese history and culture outside of the works of Kurosawa and Imamura. And in the case of Kurosawa, he is not only the most important filmmaker to take the bomb and the nuclear age as his subject on more than one occasion, but he is, it seems, the
only filmmaker in Japan to be so preoccupied. One perceptive critic, James Goodwin, sees Kurosawa's immediate postwar films, from 1947 to 1952, as being exclusively concerned with "social issues rising out of Japan's defeat, reconstruction and . . . Occupation." Even the jidai-geki (period films) Rashomon (1950) and Kumososu-jo (Throne of Blood, 1957) may be profitably seen as thinly veiled responses to the destructiveness of the bombs (a destructiveness which, I would argue, extends to the cultural plain along with the physical terrain). Thus even before Record of a Living Being, one could make the case that Kurosawa dealt with the bomb, or at least its legacy, in allegorical form. Consider Rashomon, with its vision of a ruined gate at which sit three perplexed men. What, precisely, has brought Japan, or indeed mankind to its present, perilous state where nothing is certain? Physical ruin and metaphysical doubt, the major pictorial and thematic characteristics of the film, made Rashomon a timely allegory of Japan's ignominious defeat and a universal philosophical examination of the new world order wrought by the bomb.

Nuclear War: True Madness?
The paranoia and despair felt by two of the men at the ruined gate of Rashomon is extended in Record of a Living Being, where Kurosawa casts the by now heroic figure of Mifune Toshiro as a man almost frightened to death by the specter of nuclear attack. This 1955 film must be seen in its multiple contexts, however, to appreciate fully its intended impact. The most obvious of these, of course, is the disappearance of the Occupation some three years earlier, thereby allowing the Japanese to tackle whatever subjects the industry would bear, including the bomb. More directly, 1955 marks the tenth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, an event commemorated in Japan by the first World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and by the formation of Nihon gensuikyo (Japan Council Against the Bomb). From the end of the Occupation until Kurosawa began production on the film, numerous books on the bomb began appearing, and while public discussion was still fairly minor, events in the world outside also helped spur the subject to consciousness. Perhaps the greatest of these was the contamination of a Japanese fishing trawler offshore at Bikini atoll in March 1954 and the death due to radiation poisoning of one of its crew members in September 1954.
Kurosawa's Record of a Living Being poses the question of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war in an especially challenging way: What, the film asks, is true madness? Mifune portrays a man literally driven mad by his fear of impending nuclear doom. A court appoints a sympathetic dentist (Shimura) to assess Mifune's mental condition, to see if he is competent to continue to run his successful business. But the dentist, recognizing that Mifune is paralyzed by fear, also recognizes a core of sanity in his soul. Is it madness to fear destruction by weapons with a proven ability to destroy on an unprecedented scale or, rather, is it madness to pretend that the world is unchanged, that the nuclear presence in Japan (highlighted throughout the film by U.S. Air Force supersonic jets) portends nothing of any significance? In other words: Is it madness to pretend that nuclear weapons are merely a fact of life, or is it insane to continue to allow their proliferation?
It is possible to see nuclear allegories in some other Japanese filmsShindo's famous Onibaba (1964) with its horrific view of war comes to mind. But, again, Kurosawa's cinema provides the most cogent examples, even if less artistically compelling ones in recent years. The idea of demons (oni) relates to two sections of Kurosawa's Dreams (Yume, 1990). Again, Kurosawa does not deal directly with atomic warfare, but rather, in one section, with nuclear disaster, and in another, postnuclear horrors. Though the Japanese film has no titles for each dream section, the U.S. release does. "Mt. Fuji Is Red" finds that six nuclear reactors behind Mt. Fuji explode. Special effects predominate and the segment is preachy in the extreme. In "The Weeping Demon," the "I" who dreamed the dream (all the Japanese titles say this before each sequence) comes upon a man who sports a horn on his head, the result of radioactivity. "Stupid mankind did this" is the best Kurosawa can come up with to warn us of the powers of nuclear weapons and power plants. What saves the film from total disaster, at least intellectually, is the fact that a segment directly referring to the Pacific War precedes the two nuclear-themed episodes; Kurosawa at least remembers that the bombs did not happen arbitrarily, even if their existence is worse than regrettable. Rhapsody in August (1991) is Kurosawa's final, thus far, overt reflection on the nuclear age. The film focuses on a survivor of Nagasaki, which has its own mythic dimension in Japan, and is concerned with the subject of survivor guilt, the bomb's legacy, memory, and how to pass on the bomb's lessons to a new, Americanized generation. A hardening of Kurosawa's stylistic arteries mars the film's good intentions and powerful performances.

Japanese Tradition and the Bomb's Legacy
In recent years, outside of Kurosawa's cinema, the task of explicating the nuclear horror for the Japanese has fallen to Imamura's Black Rain, an artistically successful and intellectually compelling adaptation of Ibuse Masuji's hugely respected novel of the same title. (Through a thoughtless, or perhaps even "imperialist" move on the part of Hollywood, a film directed by Ridley Scott called Black Rain, but in no way concerned with the bombing of Hiroshima, was released almost simultaneously with Imamura's film.)
While sensitive to the reality of the survivor experience, Imamura is after what might be understood as a larger issue: the survivor's relationship to the past. A crucial component of Ibuse's novel is the main protagonist's knowledge of traditional Japanese culture exemplified by his following local customs and folk beliefs, not to mention the tradition of the patriarchal family structure and the arranged marriage. The protagonist of the film has his rational side emphasized at the expense of his, shall we say, "folk" or village side. In the film, the added character of a local shamaness, who clearly represents both the arational world of mysticism and the traditional folk beliefs of rural Japan, stands as a juxtaposition to Shigematsu, the protagonist, and his attempted dispassionate examination of the bomb experience. Ibuse's juxtaposition of traditionalism with the new world order imposed by the bomb makes very clear the tensions within survivors (hibakusha) of trying to reconcile the past with the present (and an uncertain future).
Imamura recognizes that all Japanese (if not perhaps the entire world) are survivors; that the postwar, postbomb universe requires a coming to terms with the past, requires a rethinking and reconceptualizing of one's relationship to tradition. This is manifested within Imamura's film by a narrative pattern and a cinematic strategy that bear a perhaps surprising relationship to the films of Ozu Yasujiro. This is to say that Imamura, through his deliberate referencing of Ozu, takes his stand toward Japanese tradition and thus toward his version of mastering the bomb experience.
While Ozu's relationship to traditional Japan (whatever that might mean) is not a simple one, it is equally true that he has come to stand as the avatar of an image of Japan. There is no doubt that he is the film director best loved by the Japanese themselves. And it is also true that, whether or not Ozu is correctly perceived as an exemplar of traditional Japan, there is such a thing as Japanese tradition, though this tradition is not static or unified. Imamura foregrounds the problem of Japanese tradition in the wake of the bomb in the film's opening scene where the heroine, Yasuko, attends a morning tea ceremony. Imamura cuts away from this essence of Japanese tradition to watch the parachuting A-bomb falling silently over the city. Tradition versus the new realities of the bomb is seen further by the attempt to cure radiation sickness with folk remedies, not to mention the prayers of the shamaness. Similarly, the traditional Buddhist rites for the dead, seen in the funeral of a hibakusha friend of Shigematsu, remind him of his own assumption of the role of priest as he chanted sutras over the makeshift funeral pyres of bomb victims seen in a flashback scene.
The most moving element of the film concerns Yasuko. And here Imamura's relationship to tradition is most interestingly complex, for one of the traditions he implicates via her character is his own. Imamura's heroines are drawn from Japan's traditional village life, and this is true of Yasuko. For Imamura women represent the Japan that persists despite modernization and are, above all else, survivors. But survive is precisely what Yasuko and her aunt Shigeko do not do. The image of women as possessing dynamic sexuality and strength in Imamura's earlier films gives way here to Yasuko's irradiation, which renders her sexually shy and insecure and which eventually kills her. Perhaps this element is seen most clearly as Yasuko bathes in a traditional tub, which her aunt heats for her with a wood fire. Her aunt becomes horrified and the audience pained at the sight of this attractive young woman at her bath, slowly pulling out hunks of hair from her heada sure sign of radiation sickness.
The best Imamura seems able to conclude, his own notion of mastery of the bomb experience, might be found in his strategy, a traditional one for the Japanese artist and one which Ibuse similarly uses: linking the concerns of people with images of nature. This is a strategy Imamura had employed in earlier films not for the aesthetic purposes of traditional art, but for his anthropological examinations of Japanese society. Invoking Ozu and the tradition of aestheticizing man's relationship to nature represents a return to tradition within the context of a monumental rift within it. Yasuko and her uncle sit together while he fishes in a small lake. Suddenly, fish begin jumping, signs of nature's glory, and Yasuko becomes excited at the sight. As she shakes her coat in an energetic frenzy, the material falling through the air reminds us of cherry blossoms, that essence of evanescence, that most traditional Japanese symbol of the transitoriness of all life. For all of the guilt and the responsibility still surrounding images of the bomb, perhaps a more fundamental question remains: Can Japanese tradition, which teaches the prizing of life and the savoring of dailiness, be reconciled with the legacy of World War II and the bomb, whose destructive powers seem to exceed even the ability of Japanese women to master and which exceeds even the power of nature?



David M. Desser is professor of cinema studies and speech communication and is a faculty associate of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security. He has authored or edited six books, four on Japanese cinema, including The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa, Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema, and his latest, Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, coedited with Linda C. Ehrlich.



Return to Cover Page
Go to Previous Article
Go to Next Article