Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics 0824867777, 9780824867775

Citation preview

PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

6772_Book_CC.indd 1

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 2

6/12/18 6:57 PM

PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics Yuko Shibata

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS HONOLULU

6772_Book_CC.indd 3

6/12/18 6:57 PM

© 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 23

22

21

20

19

18

6

5

4

3

2

1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shibata, Yuko, author. Title: Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki : literature, film, and transnational politics / Yuko Shibata. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017058503 | ISBN 9780824867775 (cloth alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Atomic bomb victims in motion pictures. | Atomic bomb victims in literature. | Hiroshima mon amour (Motion picture) | Duras, Marguerite.

Hiroshima mon amour. | Nagai, Takashi, 1908–1951. Nagasaki no kane. |

Hersey, John, 1914–1993. Hiroshima. | Kamei, Fumio, 1908–1987—Criticism

and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W3 S55 2018 | DDC 809/.9335840542521954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058503

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) © 2014 by Takashi Arai. Courtesy of PGI, URANO.

6772_Book_CC.indd 4

6/12/18 6:57 PM

For Atsushi

6772_Book_CC.indd 5

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 6

6/12/18 6:57 PM

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction. Knowledge Production on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki: The Politics of Representation and a Critique of

Canonization 1

1. Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour: Franco-Japanese Collaboration

in the American Shadow 17

2. Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment: Kamei

Fumio and the Early Days of Japanese Cinema on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki 38

3. “You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”: Performing Atomic Bomb

Victimhood and the Visibility of the Hibakusha 64

4. Entangled Discourses: John Hersey and Nagai Takashi 82

Afterword 99

Notes

105

Selected Bibliography Index

131

155

vii

6772_Book_CC.indd 7

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 8

6/12/18 6:57 PM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I cannot express enough my enormous debt to many people for their liberal support. Naoki Sakai’s pioneering work has always greatly inspired me. Brett de Bary has given me the best advice possible with wisdom and goodness. Dominick LaCapra taught me how to consider the relationships between litera­ ture and history through his own example. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Jeremy Tambling, Ackbar Abbas, Takashi Shogimen, Ishihara Shun, and Charles Green, who have deeply inspired me. I am also grateful for the professional and warm support from Fujiki Hideaki, Fujiki Masami, Lawrence Marceau, Mariko Marceau, Noboru Tomonari, Uchida Masato, Nakai Yoshinori, and my former colleagues at the Asahi Shimbun and my friends in the Japanese media. My senpai at Midwest Japan Seminar showed me how to be research-active while wonderfully supporting campus and local community life. I owe a special debt of thanks to Shirley Samuels, Park Yuha, Narita Ryūichi, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Kobayashi Fukuko, Noriko Reider, Katsuya Hirano, Pedro Erber, Tomiko Yoda, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Victor Koschmann, Michael Bourdaghs, Robin McNeal, Keith Taylor, Daniel McKee, Jonathan Culler, Shelley Wong, Natalie Melas, Mitchell Greenberg, Tracy McNulty, Susan Buck-Morss, Tsuboi Hideto, Satō Izumi, Takahara Takao, Kawano Noriyuki, Seirai Yūichi, Kim Soon-gil, Hirano Nobuto, Nosaka Akio, Shinjō Ikuo, Inaga Shigemi, Nanyan Guo, Iwasaki Minoru, Yoshimi Shunya, Yamaguchi Jirō, Toba Kōji, Oshikawa Jun, Yasuko Claremont, Vera Mackie, Shigesawa Atsuko, Karen Erickson, Lisa Ohm, Sarah Pruett, Mary Niedenfuer, Dave Bennetts, Richard Ice, Roy Starrs, Simon Ryan, Rogelio Guedea, Vijay Devadas, Sin Wen Lau, Kevin Clements, Brian Moloughney, Nana Oishi, and Rob Binnie. The scholars that I engaged with in the School of Criticism and Theory seminars at Cornell also gave me an energetic impetus for my research. They include Etienne Balibar, Srinivas Aravamundan, Rnjana Khanna, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Warner, Wai Chee Dimock, Satya P. Mohanty, Martha Nussbaum, Mieke Bal, Mary Jacobus, and Maryse Condé. Two anonymous readers offered me invaluable feedback that I found immensely helpful and encouraging. Pamela Kelly, the executive editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, has enthusiastically supported this project with ix

6772_Book_CC.indd 9

6/12/18 6:57 PM

x

Acknowledgments

efficiency and care. Debra Tang, Steven Hirashima, and Cheryl Loe also gave me their firm support and competent guidance. My heartfelt thanks go to Gail Sakai, who has checked my drafts since my graduate student days. In Hiroshima, I had the opportunity to meet memorable people: Harada Yoshihiro, a doctor and son of the well-known surgeon Harada Tōmin, who tackled the formida­ ble challenge of the keloid scars with his heart and soul; and Yoshiyama Yukio, who served as Alain Resnais’ translator when he came to Hiroshima to shoot Hiroshima Mon Amour. This book would not have been possible without broad institutional sup­ port by the University of Melbourne, the University of Otago, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, and the Japan Foundation, as well as the Department of Asian Studies, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. My sin­ cere gratitude also goes out to the Fukuoka City Public Library Film Archive, the Chōfu City Library, the Waseda University Library, the Hiroshima City Library, the Nagasaki City Library, the National Diet Library, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, the Cornell University Library, the CSB/SJU Libraries, and the University of Otago Library. On a personal level, I wish to thank my parents, Masumi and Matsuko Miura, for their affection, care, and patience for all these years. I dedicate this book to my spouse, Atsushi Shibata. His confidence in me has sustained my spirits in the most challenging times. I cannot thank him sufficiently for the genuine and long-standing commitment he has generously shown to me. It is obvious that I could not ever have reached this stage of my life without him.

6772_Book_CC.indd 10

6/12/18 6:57 PM

PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

6772_Book_CC.indd 11

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 12

6/12/18 6:57 PM

INTRODUCTION

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI The Politics of Representation and a Critique of Canonization

Since its release in 1959, the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour has attracted considerable attention as an object of study among North American academics working in fields such as literature, film studies, psychoanalysis, history, and trauma studies.1 This intellectual ferment is partly due to the fact that the film is regarded as an avant-garde masterpiece of the French New Wave, a move­ ment heralded by the film’s director, Alain Resnais. It is also because Marguerite Duras—an icon of French literature and women’s writing, and a significant point of reference for Lacanian psychoanalysis—wrote the screenplay. Since the 1990s, these critics’ vibrant debates on memory, forgetting, and trauma have also shed new light on this seemingly ever-mesmerizing film in many areas of the humanities.2 However, these attempts to decipher the film have created a virtually autonomous space bound to Eurocentric contexts, one that does not reflect the fruits of research in Japanese studies. Although Hiroshima Mon Amour is ostensibly a Franco-Japanese produc­ tion and involved participation by both countries, humanities critics in the West have taken for granted its uniform acknowledgement around the world, while paying no attention to the Japanese reception of the film. In Japan, how­ ever, Hiroshima Mon Amour was a box-office failure; screenings in Tokyo were canceled after less than a week. The film was released in mid-June 1959 at the­ aters owned by Daiei (whose president, Nagata Masaichi, was the producer of Hiroshima Mon Amour), a major Japanese movie company internationally known for its production of Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon and Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu. In the postwar reconstruction period in Japan, moviegoing was the most popular affordable recreational activity, drawing one billion viewers a year, and bringing in forty billion Japanese yen in annual profits for movie distributions (after subtracting entrance fees from box-office profits).3 The 1950s was a golden age of Japanese cinema in terms of the breadth of genres, its international repu­ tation, and the power to mobilize viewers who were gradually overcoming the 1

6772_Book_CC.indd 1

6/12/18 6:57 PM

2

Introduction

miseries of early postwar life. Nevertheless, according to statistics in Shūkan eiga puresu (Weekly Movie Press) on June 20, 1959, the screening of Hiroshima Mon Amour at Daiei’s flagship theater in Tokyo filled only 6 percent to 34 percent of the seats, even on the day of its release.4 Although it was customary practice to run a movie for at least a week, as a result Hiroshima Mon Amour was can­ celed in the middle of its opening week. Indeed, as Resnais himself conceded in an interview, “[The film was a success] everywhere but Japan,”5 the very place where movie popularity was at its peak.6 Hiroshima Mon Amour was unfavorably received by Japanese critics, owing to the “imbalance” between its depictions of Hiroshima and Nevers, France. One of the harshest reviews came from the playwright Shirasaka Yoshio imme­ diately after the film’s release. He contends that Resnais and Duras, two poets from overseas, produced a work of “masturbation” (or self-satisfaction) not only by neglecting to treat Hiroshima with the same degree of reality as Nevers but also by treating Hiroshima as one of Japan’s “oriental specialties,” on par with geisha and Fujiyama.7 Other critics also question why the narrative of Hiroshima Mon Amour focuses so heavily on the episode in Nevers: aside from a fifteen-minute opening sequence, which captures the atomic bombing and its aftermath, the film’s action is dominated by the French woman’s narrative of her experience in Nevers. While the Japanese man who meets her in Hiroshima accompanies her throughout the film, he never has the opportunity to tell his story and merely serves as her listener. The film critic Okada Susumu argues that Resnais has synthesized broken-up spaces of the past through the French female character’s mediation of the present. But this approach allows her alone to experi­ ence the past by dissolving reality into her unconscious, making Hiroshima and the other characters mere tools to assure her of her existence.8 Even the movie magazine contributor Kawaguchi Sumiko complains, “I cannot tolerate the gradual change of the male protagonist into a comical character. For the female protagonist, the sublation of terror and love constitutes drama; yet for the man, the banal development of their love merely diluted their twenty-four hours.”9 The novelist Endō Shūsaku, in spite of his overall sympathetic attitude, notes that the lengthy scenes and banal images in the second half of the film demon­ strate that Resnais has run out of material with which to describe Hiroshima.10 These negative views of Hiroshima Mon Amour decreased, to some extent, toward the end of the year, after its international reputation had grown. When Kinema junpō (Motion Picture Times), an influential magazine in the Japanese film industry, announced the ten best foreign movies of the year, Hiroshima Mon Amour ranked seventh. In this sense, the film was not a dismal failure in Japan, as Resnais also claimed in the interview: “I believe it was well-received, at least in intellectual circles.”11 But Hiroshima Mon Amour was clearly over­ shadowed by other French films released in Japan to feverish receptions that same year: Claude Chabrol’s The Cousins (Les cousins) and Louis Malle’s The Lovers (Les amants). In the Kinema junpō ranking, as well as others announced

6772_Book_CC.indd 2

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

3

by a number of movie magazines, press clubs, and a broadcasting company, The Cousins and The Lovers consistently appeared near the top, while Hiroshima Mon Amour was either among the lowest three or was excluded from the top ten alto­ gether.12 The year 1959 marked the emergence of the French New Wave, and Japanese film critics passionately debated its impact on Japanese filmmaking. Yet they focused mostly on Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom caused a veritable sensation in Japan. In later years, Hiroshima Mon Amour began to receive more positive appraisals.13 Still, it is notable that the film’s low profile has continued to the present day in both Japanese scholarship and Japanese society at large. THE GEOGRAPHICAL ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE The Japanese reaction to Hiroshima Mon Amour tells us that over the years, people on either side of the Pacific have developed alternative ways of under­ standing Hiroshima. This is all the more the case because Japanese films about Hiroshima and Nagasaki seldom acquire an international audience, except for those made by well-known directors such as Kurosawa and Imamura Shōhei. We can say the same about examples of Japanese literature and popular culture that thematize Hiroshima and Nagasaki.14 In her synopsis of the screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Duras contends that the movie would not be “just one more made-to-order picture, of no more interest than any fictionalized docu­ mentary,” but would instead “probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any other made-to-order documentary,”15 insinuating that previous Japanese movies are such “made-to-order” documentaries. Duras’ comments reduces Japanese films to representations of superficial factuality unworthy of theoreti­ cal analyses. She also introduces a hierarchy in avant-garde and documentary films, and uncritically applies this to another implicit hierarchy in Western and non-Western cinema, a hierarchy that normalizes the geographical, racial, and cultural differences between the two as a fait accompli.16 Rey Chow criti­ cizes this approach, stating, “Duras’s avant-garde text fully depends on mass culture—the ‘made-to-order’ documentary that it consciously disdains—in order to be what it is. Only thus does her avant-garde text achieve its puritanist revolutionariness.”17 Expressed another way, Duras’ concept of the avant-garde functions as no more than an empty signifier that must have its content sup­ plied retroactively, with its “significant” variance from previous Japanese films.18 However, scholars who have discussed Hiroshima Mon Amour have never examined whether or not Duras’ claim about other Japanese movies is substan­ tial by looking closely at the content of Japanese movies and their relationship with Hiroshima Mon Amour. This reflects a widespread phenomenon in which scholarly knowledge has been organized and institutionalized according to dis­ ciplines and area studies.19 Critics in many humanities fields in North America prefer to discuss texts produced in European languages. The limitations of

6772_Book_CC.indd 3

6/12/18 6:57 PM

4

Introduction

scholarly expertize in non-European languages and cultures make these critics hesitant to refer to Japanese sources, even though they are available as English translations. In this way, certain texts in European languages become canonized and widely circulated in the interpretative community.20 Similarly, Hiroshima Mon Amour has been overlooked in Japanese studies in North America because it is not a Japanese-language product and thus sits outside its own discipline. How to bridge this disciplinary divide is a question I have long pondered, and this book is the result. This book thus considers what has been overlooked and neglected because of this scholarly lacuna regarding the visual and liter­ ary knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It explores canonical texts such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, which have been traditionally excluded from schol­ arly examinations in my field (Japanese literature and cinema), and discusses their relationship with Japanese texts and Japanese historical contexts. In other words, I purposely make use of the text that has sat outside of my disciplin­ ary range as a bridge to cross disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, this book approaches the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the experience of the hibakusha (atomic bomb victim) from innovative perspectives that yield insights into neglected fields.21 Chapter 1 offers a different interpretation of Hiroshima Mon Amour. It sug­ gests that the Hiroshima of the film is not inextricably connected to the atomic bombing but instead is reconfigured at the intersection between Japanese and French colonial legacies and the postwar international world order heralded by the United States. In this chapter I excavate neglected historical contexts of Hiroshima in prewar times, as well as the similarly undermined relationship between the Japanese and French empires in French Indochina, where Duras lived in her youth. Then I redefine the whole signification of Hiroshima in Hiroshima Mon Amour by illuminating the imbricated histories of occupation and colonialism in Hiroshima that are superimposed onto past incidents in Nevers under the occupation of Nazi Germany. In short, Hiroshima becomes a site of encrypted colonial fantasy and colonial mimicry, and the Japanese man and the French woman both act out this colonial memory and reality through their allegorical love relationship. Indeed, the above anecdote about Hiroshima Mon Amour’s screening in Japan also demonstrates how the politics of representation was at work in the Japanese film industry at the time, reflecting that industry’s concerns not about the issue of Hiroshima itself but rather about its postwar relationship with the United States. The film’s unpopularity when it was first released was politi­ cally staged via an unusual screening arrangement. First of all, Daiei removed the word “Hiroshima” from the film’s title. The substitute, Nijū-yojikan no jōji, indicates an affair that takes place over twenty-four hours, making the film sound like a cheap melodrama.22 Furthermore, in advertisements for the film in a newspaper and a movie magazine, the picture of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (which never appears in the film) was shown as the backdrop to a couple

6772_Book_CC.indd 4

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

5

embracing, with tawdry captions: “Blonde hair in disarray, rosy skin burns! A French girl collapsed in the arms of a Japanese young man in agony!”23 While promoting highly sexualized and Orientalist imagery, the advertisements clearly evaded the politically charged term “Hiroshima.” As a publicity strategy, Daiei featured the interracial affair that takes place in the film, without mentioning the historical dimension of the atomic bombing.24 For Daiei, the flashy adver­ tisements suggesting the sexual “conquest” of a white woman by a Japanese man were meant to appeal to Japanese audiences (in terms of turnout, this plainly failed). But this kind of promotional strategy exposes an assimilation of colonial dynamics rather than presenting a challenge to it. It mimics the classical desire of the colonizer: “his” woman becomes an object of desire and the conquest of a colonized man in the Fanonian sense. In retrospect, Daiei’s decision suited the political need to divert society’s attention away from Hiroshima, thus preventing the stirring of anti-American sentiment at a time when public opposition to the military alliance between the United States and Japan was strong. Yet concerns about Daiei’s political opportunism belatedly arose among Japanese film critics when the screening of Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri, dir. Ōshima Nagisa, 1960) was again abruptly terminated within a week, a year after the release of Hiroshima Mon Amour. As is often the case with Ōshima’s works, Night and Fog in Japan poses another twisted challenge to controversies in Japanese society; it portrays Japanese student movements during the domestic turmoil caused by a nation­ wide campaign against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. Some therefore sus­ pected that political pressure had been placed on Shōchiku, the major Japanese film company that distributed Night and Fog in Japan, to halt the screening. Apprehensive about the consecutive cancelations of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog in Japan, the film critic Sasaki Kiichi questioned the motiva­ tions of Daiei and Shōchiku. He pointed out that it seemed as though these two companies had implicitly wished the two movies would receive a lim­ ited viewership.25 If we place these screening cancellations and the removal of “Hiroshima” from the film’s title in a broader political context, Hiroshima Mon Amour’s poor reception in Japan has different connotations: its box-office fail­ ure and obscure presence is seen as an indirect result of the political upheaval caused by the Japanese government’s attempt to solidify its alliance with the United States in the progression of the Cold War, followed by strong public resistance to this move. THREE JAPANESE FILMS IN HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR Chapter 2 delves into the content and context of the Japanese movies about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Duras despised. There are three movies from which Resnais borrowed footage to make the opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

6772_Book_CC.indd 5

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6

Introduction

(Hiroshima, Nagasaki niokeru genshi bakudan no kōka, 1946), 26 the fiction film Hiroshima (dir. Sekikawa Hideo, 1953), and Still It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokatta, dir. Kamei Fumio, 1956).27 Produced by Nihon Eigasha (Japan Film Company, or Nichiei), The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki provides the first detailed movie images illustrating the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were filmed approximately fifty days after the atomic bombings. It was also called the “phantom” (maboroshi) film in postoc­ cupation Japan, because it was confiscated by the U.S. forces immediately after its production in 1946. In other words, this documentary was officially non­ existent when Hiroshima Mon Amour came out. It was only in 1967 that the American government returned its poor-quality copy to the Japanese govern­ ment in the wake of continuous protests from the Japanese public in response to the confiscation. Sekikawa’s Hiroshima is a spectacular reproduction of the Hiroshima catastrophe, featuring numerous actors and extras. It also captures the hibakusha’s predicament in their later years. Still It’s Good to Live covers the hibakusha’s persistent suffering ten years after the bombings, and also uses foot­ age from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.28 The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a “ghost” movie during its making. In midproduction in Nagasaki in late October 1945, the camera crew was caught by U.S. forces. Nichiei staff managed to persuade the U.S. officers to allow them to complete filming and editing their foot­ age, as the outcome of this documentary would also serve U.S. interests. It was convenient for the U.S. side to use a Japanese crew familiar with the local geography. That and the American officers’ fear of residual radioactivity were probably underlying motivations for their approval of the Nichiei staff’s request. However, upon completion of the film in the spring of 1946, U.S. forces con­ fiscated everything, including unused footage. Subsequently, all visual testi­ monies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were thoroughly redlined during the U.S. occupation, with only a few exceptions close to the end. No one knew about the existence of this documentary, which was never released, until senior Nichiei members screened some of the copied footage that they had secretly hidden in a few theaters in Japan in May 1952, immediately after the end of the U.S. occupation. It was an achievement for Kamei and Resnais to use footage from this offi­ cially nonexistent “ghost” film to offer a vivid portrayal of the victims’ severe injuries and deaths, evidence of the hidden reality of human victimization. Their films also posed a newsworthy challenge to U.S. censorship of visual records of the atomic bombing. This was particularly true of Hiroshima Mon Amour, and was a groundbreaking aspect of the film, considering the power of its worldwide distribution. However, neither Resnais nor Duras ever men­ tioned this attribute, noting only that the footage of the hibakusha came from Japanese “newsreels” but not revealing the background or the titles. As a result,

6772_Book_CC.indd 6

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

7

this aspect of Hiroshima Mon Amour has escaped analyses in most humanities fields.29 Without appropriate acknowledgement of this radical use of footage from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we cannot fully understand the larger question raised by Hiroshima Mon Amour about the poli­ tics of representation. The film casts serious doubt on the “official” narrative by closely incorporating visuals from this “phantom” documentary in its opening. While this sequence unfolds, the French woman’s voice-over reveals that she saw the newsreel showing Hiroshima not only on the day of the bomb explo­ sion but also the next day and even two days later. Obviously, her words do not match what the audience sees on the screen; these images from the “phan­ tom” documentary were taken fifty days after the bomb explosion. Thus, the woman’s claims deceive the audience, purposely jeopardizing the truthfulness of the film’s narrative. In addition, her statements give the false idea that these images are accessible to everyone (since she, an ordinary museum visitor, has seen them). This interplay between the “ghost” documentary footage and the French woman’s claims effectively subverts the relationship between the referent and its representation in both the theoretical and the political realms.30 In this way, in Hiroshima Mon Amour, referential and avant-garde modes coexist in a circular loop unendingly supplementing one another. This is the movie in which both documentary and avant-garde predispositions are intricately intertwined. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR AS PALIMPSEST OF STILL IT’S GOOD TO LIVE Exploring Hiroshima Mon Amour’s relationship with Kamei’s film Still It’s Good to Live is important in considering processes of producing visual knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this end, chapter 2 highlights Kamei’s filmmak­ ing and Still It’s Good to Live, the source of almost all the shots of the hibakusha in Resnais’ film, including the overlapping of the footage from The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Initially, Resnais planned to make a short documentary on Hiroshima, not the feature-length film we have today. A documentary made more sense, since he had just earned a stellar reputation for his documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1955). Hiroshima Mon Amour took its avant-garde form only after Resnais invited Duras to be its screenwriter (it is therefore not surprising that she claimed that her involvement was the reason for the film’s success). Resnais changed his plan after seeing Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live. He revealed that to Kamei when he met him in person during his visit to Japan in 1958 to promote Hiroshima Mon Amour. There, Resnais told Kamei that he originally had four ideas for a documentary on Hiroshima. The first was to produce a Hiroshima version of Night and Fog; the second was an encyclopedic

6772_Book_CC.indd 7

6/12/18 6:57 PM

8

Introduction

display of knowledge about the atomic and hydrogen bombs; and the third was exactly what Still It’s Good to Live encapsulated. Resnais’ fourth idea was to make a symbolic allegory in which one verbal articulation always carried dual meanings. According to Resnais, he discarded the first idea, since he felt it lacked sincerity, and the second, due to a lack of budget. As a consequence, it was an enormous disappointment for Resnais to discover Kamei’s documentary, in which everything in his third idea had already been realized. His fourth idea did not work out well.31 Many critics in humanities fields have depended on James Monaco’s book published in 1979 to explain this shift in form from documentary to feature film. According to Monaco, Resnais did not want to repeat himself by making another Night and Fog, insofar as Hiroshima and the European Holocaust share similar themes, such as memory, suffering, pain, and death.32 This reasoning has been unquestioningly recycled for a long time, but it leaves many questions unanswered. For example, is the magnitude of the nuclear massacre contain­ able within the range of mass murders in European concentration camps, and vice versa? Why is it not important to make another documentary that features Hiroshima? How should we consider the singularity of the enormous impact of these events? Laure Adler’s book published after Duras’ death in 2000 shed new light on the reason for his genre change. Resnais spent six months survey­ ing dozens of films on Hiroshima and other related themes, in collaboration with another French documentary filmmaker, Chris Marker. Then he said to Argos Films, a production company of Hiroshima Mon Amour, “If you want to make a film on Hiroshima, buy the rights from the Japanese; neither Marker nor I could do better.”33 Here Resnais not only acknowledged the prior Japanese films but also praised their accomplishments. Even though Resnais relinquished his plan to make a documentary, he ended up depending heavily on Kamei’s work in the opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais borrowed most of the footage that depicts hiba­ kusha’s lives and present-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Still It’s Good to Live. The only, but crucial, difference between Resnais’ and Kamei’s films is Resnais’ random arrangement of these shots, which accelerates the fragmen­ tation of the hibakusha images. Otherwise, both film narratives proceed in a like manner. Both start with ominous music and the juxtaposition of past and present. Both contrast visuals showing a fading human shadow burnt onto the stone steps at the moment of explosion to the current bustling streets of Hiroshima, where young female pedestrians breeze along wearing the latest fashions. Furthermore, both narrations make similar statements about memo­ ries of the catastrophe now sinking into oblivion. Both identically signal a temporal distance from, and a hazy memory of, the catastrophe in current Hiroshima. I propose that Hiroshima Mon Amour is a remaking of Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live, done in such a way that the relationship between the two constitutes a

6772_Book_CC.indd 8

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

9

palimpsest intertextuality in the Genette sense.34 This palimpsest intertextual­ ity requires a “relational reading” to excavate multilayered contexts and their significance, as Genette maintains.35 Following Duras’ rigid schematization, many critics in traditional European studies have measured Hiroshima Mon Amour’s indebtedness to Japanese films as insignificant. However, on a textual level, Resnais’ and Kamei’s films engage in an open dialogue with each other in various forms of refutation, divergence, and affirmation. Thus this book undertakes a radically relational reading that traverses genres and disciplines to discuss the simultaneous coexistence of manifold modes and approaches in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Still It’s Good to Live. To explore these two movies in tandem also allows for exploration of how Resnais and Kamei, two outstanding “documentary” directors, grappled with representing the unprecedented experience of the atomic bombing. Kamei is by no means a traditional realist filmmaker creating “superficial fact providers,” as Duras contended, but rather a pioneer who made “surrealist war documentaries” as early as the 1930s.36 To better understand the signification of Still It’s Good to Live, chapter 2 considers Kamei’s documentary production from the war to postwar periods, and then locates Still It’s Good to Live within these parame­ ters. It first examines his style in his prewar masterpiece, Shanghai: A Logistical Record of the Sino-Japanese War (Shanghai: Shina jihen kōhō kiroku, 1938), along with the surreal ethnography of the French writer Michel Leiris. Next, it considers the contradictory effects of the “time-image” that Deleuze found in Ozu Yasujirō’s works, which Kamei also incorporated in his Eisensteinian­ informed dialectic in Still It’s Good to Live. After that, it situates the film within a 1950s Japanese historical context, as well as a genealogy of Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early postwar period. The aim is to explore how Kamei’s film has helped forge the dominant discourse on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the end of censorship under U.S. occupation. The chapter goes on to contend that Resnais supplemented Kamei’s film by subverting the plau­ sibility of martyrdom that Kamei ended up highlighting by depicting the hiba­ kusha’s victimhood. Then it discusses other prominent film directors’ works on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that have received international attention and criticism: Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku, 1991) and Imamura’s Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1989). Chapter 3 introduces the voice of the hibakusha that is eliminated in Hiroshima Mon Amour (how can one claim Hiroshima Mon Amour as the defini­ tive movie on Hiroshima when it thoroughly suppresses the victims’ voice?).37 The hibakusha’s predicament did not end decades later but continued through­ out their lives. Without understanding this, it is hard to grasp what Hiroshima ultimately means to us. As a catalyst for the examination of the history and vic­ timhood of the hibakusha, this chapter follows the provocative life of Kikkawa Kiyoshi in the period immediately after the atomic bombing.38 Kikkawa is one of the few hibakusha that Resnais directly approached when shooting

6772_Book_CC.indd 9

6/12/18 6:57 PM

10

Introduction

Hiroshima Mon Amour. He is also the first “kataribe of Hiroshima,” the citizen volunteers who have shared their experience of the atomic bombing. Owing to the extensive keloid scars on his back, Kikkawa was known by the nickname “Hiroshima Number One” (Genbaku Ichigō). Tracing his activities, the chapter delineates the arduous history of the hibakusha, who were abandoned—with no health care or welfare support—under the U.S. occupation. At that time, local Japanese authorities were afraid of offending the U.S. forces, and thus priori­ tized the city’s rehabilitation projects rather than offering relief to the suffering hibakusha. The chapter also considers where to locate atomic bomb victimhood in light of visibility, subjectivity, and objectification. Referring to Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of the “modern skin” as the convergence of modernism and colonial fetish, a discussion of Kikkawa’s damaged skin represents a skewed example of the intersection between colonialism and modernity. Furthermore, this chapter maintains that Resnais’ avant-garde strategy to whitewash signify­ ing practices by fragmenting the hibakusha’s stories in his film is not free from political connotations. Yet his “blank meaning” approach also allows for dual interpretations of the hibakusha’s visibility, in both avant-garde and realist ways. THE “CONNECTED DIVIDE” My discussion of Hiroshima Mon Amour exemplifies what I call the “connected divide,” or the state of being ostensibly divided but also mutually embedded at the level of texts and contexts. Indeed, what is divided is our recognition, not these texts. It is important to recognize that these divides are far more complicated than they appear, since they are also connected and attached to one another in many different ways. The discourses, representations, signifying practices, texts, and contexts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are entangled and disentangled beyond disciplinary divides. As a result of these entanglements and disentanglements, the approaches to configuring knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been diverse and complicated. Because of this, chapter 4 explores another text: the best-selling Hiroshima, by the American journal­ ist John Hersey. Since its sensational appearance in the New Yorker in 1946, Hersey’s Hiroshima has been mass circulated not only in the United States but also around the world, as one of the first English texts to offer a detailed descrip­ tion of the calamity in Hiroshima. Hiroshima established a well-known narra­ tive pattern that focuses on the event of the morning of August 6, 1945. Over decades, this exemplary work has greatly influenced popular imagery of the atomic bombing experience. During his visit to Hiroshima in 2016, president Barack Obama gave a speech that repeatedly incorporated the narrative pattern that Hersey had initiated.39 In addition to being a source of popular narratives, Hiroshima has also served as a major reference for philosophical, artistic, and scholarly works on the atomic bombing outside the United States. For instance,

6772_Book_CC.indd 10

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

11

the French intellectual Georges Bataille wrote a lengthy essay in response to Hiroshima.40 And Duras crafted the French woman’s lines in Hiroshima Mon Amour using parts of Hiroshima.41 Interestingly, however, Hersey’s Hiroshima remains obscure in today’s Japan, just as Hiroshima Mon Amour does. Due to censorship, the book’s Japanese translation was published in 1949, four years after the English origi­ nal was published. When the Japanese translation appeared, it also received considerable attention.42 However, its presence was gradually overshadowed by a number of Japanese narratives published around the end of the U.S. occupa­ tion. In Japan today, it is believed that the hibakusha narrative originated from Japan, since most hibakusha were Japanese. But I argue that Hersey’s Hiroshima formed the basis for the normative narrative pattern of the hibakusha’s experi­ ence in Japan as well, although this “origin” was then forgotten.43 To demon­ strate Hiroshima’s influence, I explore the well-known Japanese text The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, 1949) by Nagai Takashi, and compare it with Hersey’s text. The Bells of Nagasaki, published after a two-year delay due to censorship, aspired to be as influential as Hersey’s Hiroshima (this is stated in its preface).44 The Bells of Nagasaki also became a rare exception that enjoyed celebrated status as a bestseller even under censorship (although it has become controversial since the 1970s, due to its contention that the U.S. atomic bomb­ ing was an act of divine providence). Hiroshima and The Bells of Nagasaki, two bestsellers published in the United States and Japan in the late 1940s during the U.S. occupation period, respectively portray the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But no one has ever compared these two works because Hersey’s work is situated within the fields of American literature and history, whereas Nagai’s is the object of study in Japanese literature and history. Through my relational reading, I show how both texts share parallels in their narratological strategies, such as historical emplotment, compartmentalized knowledge, and the valorization of the atomic bomb’s power. These effects create a psychological deterrent for readers, prevent­ ing them from confronting political and ethical issues. I also argue that Nagai’s narrative conveniently obscures the existence of non-Japanese hibakusha and the responsibility for Japanese colonialism by including Christian faith at the end. Overall, Hiroshima and The Bells of Nagasaki embody their “connected divide” in a more substantial manner than Hiroshima Mon Amour and Still It’s Good to Live, since together these two texts have forged the normative narrative of the hibakusha experience that is widely accepted in the United States and Japan. Their connections also mirror the power dynamic between the two countries. Yet this has gone unremarked because these texts and their contexts belong to the separate discursive spheres of the United States and Japan. The ignorance of this knowledge divide has simultaneously produced and sustained a structure of indifference on both sides of the Pacific.

6772_Book_CC.indd 11

6/12/18 6:57 PM

12

Introduction

8:15 IS NOT HIROSHIMA TIME Another factor that originated with Hersey’s Hiroshima in Japan and helped normalize the narrative of the hibakusha experience there is the timing of the atomic bombing. In Hiroshima, for many decades, 8:15 a.m. on August 6 has been the official time for mourning the dead of the atomic bombing. It has become a ritual to offer a silent prayer at exactly this moment during the annual peace memorial ceremony. Nothing is more symbolically apt than this 8:15 a.m. ritual prayer to demonstrate the legitimization of records on Hiroshima created by Hersey’s Hiroshima. I demonstrate it here by referring to the challenge posed by hibakusha journalist Chūjō Kazuo in the 1980s and 1990s to the veracity of this half-sanctified 8:15 timing.45 Chūjō’s key question is this: why has 8:15 a.m. become the officially acknowledged time of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima, in spite of the fact that many records—not only in news reports, personal mem­ oirs, diaries, and on clocks found in the ruins but also the official records of the Japanese military and meteorological agencies—demonstrate otherwise? Indeed, in these records, the moment of the explosion ranges from 7:50 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Tracing back to the original sources of these various records, Chūjō concludes that 8:15 a.m. should primarily be attributed to Hersey’s Hiroshima. The opening of Hiroshima is as follows: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”46 This dramatization of the moment of impact effectively high­ lights the kaleidoscopic fate of the people in Hiroshima at that instant. Hersey’s narrative is also different from other Japanese narratives, such as those written by Ōta Yoko and Hara Tamiki around that same time, that did not show any particular interest in highlighting the sharp contrast between before and after the bombing. Chūjō goes on to note that Hersey ignored the time lag between the instant the atomic bomb was dropped from approximately thirty thousand feet above the ground and the bomb’s explosion at around two thousand feet. There should be a forty-three- to fifty-one-second gap between these two moments. This time difference is accounted for in other American texts examined by Chūjō, even though some succumbed to hyperbolic dramatization and even wild imagina­ tion when describing the event. Chūjō finds that among these, three patterns emerge in relation to the time of the bomb’s explosion: (1) 8:15 a.m. and 17 seconds as the dropping time, and 8:16 a.m. and 20 seconds as the explosion time (4 sources); (2) 8:15 a.m. and 30 seconds as the dropping time, and 8:16 a.m. as the explosion time (2 sources); and (3) 8:15 a.m. as the dropping time, and 8:15 a.m. and 43 seconds as the explosion time (1 source).

6772_Book_CC.indd 12

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

13

Chūjō’s conjecture is that these uneven numbers are due to the existence of more than one air book for the Enola Gay. Apparently at least three air books exist, written by three different crew members. Chūjō also suspects that in these aviation logs, the distinction between scheduled plans and real actions were conflated. The logs quoted in later books on the Enola Gay do not exclude the possibility that it was a mere copy of the existing “plan.”47 For Chūjō, all these ambiguities ultimately stem from the crew’s limited concern about recording their actions with absolute accuracy. First and foremost, their main focus was to complete a successful mission: releasing the atomic bomb onto their bom­ bardment target at a planned height. It was less important for them to keep perfect records of each procedure. It is also unrealistic to expect that the crew could have timed their actions accurately when no automatic computing system existed, unless they measured what they did with a stopwatch. The American narratives that Chūjō studied also give variations in flight time of between six and seven hours for the Enola Gay’s journey to Hiroshima from Tinian in the Mariana Islands. As Chūjō points out, after such a long trip, it is unlikely that the Enola Gay arrived exactly at the planned spot in the skies over Hiroshima without any deviation in the flight schedule. To elicit clear answers, Chūjō contacted Paul Tibbets, captain of the Enola Gay, to ask what time they actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. According to Chūjō, Tibbets’ reply was exactly that of a typical veteran loyal to his mission. Tibbets answered that he “believed” that they had accurately followed the predetermined schedule, although it is no longer possible to prove that. For Tibbets, the bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. and 17 seconds, and therefore should have exploded at precisely 8:16 a.m., according to the flying altitude calculation. Chūjō also contacted Hersey to ask how he had determined the bomb explosion time as 8:15 a.m. Hersey was surprised by this question but said that he had simply followed what he had read in newspaper articles (which, according to Chūjō’s subsequent search, was a single short article in the New York Times on August 8, 1945). Hersey also quickly admitted that he had neglected the time gap between the dropping of the bomb and its explosion. After a while, Hersey informed Chūjō that he was going to change the explo­ sion time in Hiroshima to 8:16 a.m. He did so, but the revised time appeared only in the special leather-bound edition of Hiroshima published in 1983. Only 1,500 copies of this edition were printed. There have been no changes made in the other mass-circulated editions, where the explosion time remains 8:15 a.m. There is a reason for Chūjō’s persistent questioning of this 8:15 time. It sig­ nifies his attempt to retrieve his own and each hibakusha’s specific time for the bomb’s explosion. 8:15 a.m. is not the time that each individual hibakusha came to experience the bombing in his or her memory or personal records. After all, 8:15 a.m. is the Hersey time, the Tibbets time, or, more precisely, the American military’s time. For Chūjō and other hibakusha, the explosion time is crucial,

6772_Book_CC.indd 13

6/12/18 6:57 PM

14

Introduction

since it is the time that drew a clear line between the living and the dead. Chūjō lost his parents, who happened to be outside with no protective cover. But he luckily survived, since the bomb went off at the instant he went under a truck at an auto repair factory to examine it. Everything outside the truck immedi­ ately collapsed and became buried. He would have died or been severely injured but for his position at that moment. The difference in minutes or even seconds was a decisive factor for each individual’s destiny. This time difference has con­ stantly given Chūjō the painful thought that his parents could have survived if the dropping time had slightly shifted. The extent of these invested feelings about the dead in Chūjō’s mind indicates what “hibakusha time” or “Hiroshima time” has been like. These thoughts cannot be encompassed by the standard­ ized “Hersey time” of 8:15 a.m. TRANSNATIONAL HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI STUDIES The scope of this book diverges considerably from that of existing research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese studies. Clearly, the field of Japanese stud­ ies has produced significant research on various dimensions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (1999) explores the monumentalization of Hiroshima, with a focus on the intervention of public/national discourses into individual/ethnic memo­ ries in the spheres of tourism, city planning, and commemoration sites. John Whittier Treat’s Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (1995) is one of the first studies in English to undertake an extensive survey of genbaku (atomic bomb) literature, with detailed accounts of challenges faced by Japanese writers and poets.48 Mick Broderick’s edited anthology Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996) is also a pioneering work in English that specifically thematizes Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Abé Mark Nornes’ Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (2003) and Ann Sherif ’s Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (2009) synchronize with my book to the extent that they also historicize Japanese documentary films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by textualizing their positions within the Japanese political framework. However, the aim and focus of these works are fundamentally different from mine. As works firmly grounded within Japanese studies, they explore various aspects of prewar and postwar Japanese culture and society through the examination of literature, cinema, political events, and social activities in Japan. But in this book I take these cultural products and social and politi­ cal contexts away from traditional disciplinary realms, and instead adopt a transboundary and cross-cultural standpoint that goes beyond the province of national literature and cinema. In doing this, I aim to explore how exter­ nally produced knowledge of Japan has also affected knowledge production

6772_Book_CC.indd 14

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Introduction

15

processes within the country, and vice versa. Ran Zwigenberg’s recently pub­ lished Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (2014) takes a similar cross-cultural and transboundary approach. However, while he intervenes in the field of history to examine how political actors and psychiatry research­ ers are involved in constructing the mainstream discourses of Hiroshima and the European Holocaust, this book offers a literary and filmic analysis of the discourses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a focus on how specific texts and individuals come to terms with heterogeneous and diverse contexts in Japan and the world in the early postwar period. Over the last few decades, powerful and critical arguments have been made against the containment of area studies within its own domain by critics of postcolonial studies such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy; by scholars of Japanese studies such as Naoki Sakai, Harry D. Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi; and by comparative literature scholars such as Rey Chow and Vicente L. Rafael.49 There are also arguments about the flow of knowledge and information that run parallel to the flow of intellectual authority and power; altogether the flow of these two create an uneven world knowledge diffusion system in academia and beyond.50 My theoretical base is indebted to these critics’ accomplishments, but I have also adopted a slightly dif­ ferent strategy: namely, to venture into different fields in my exploration of the issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to “encounter” the texts of other humanities fields. This is because the study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be interdis­ ciplinary and transboundary. Considering the global significance of the atomic bombings and their aftermath, studies of these events should transgress paro­ chially produced disciplinary knowledge within academia. This is all the more necessary since Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies have close links to wider fields such as trauma studies, disaster studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, genocide studies, and Cold War studies. This book also takes comparative and cross-cultural approaches to films, literature, and historical contexts in Japan, the United States, Europe, and Asia; it thus intersects multiple fields, such as area studies, film studies, comparative literature, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. My hope is that this book contributes to shaping the idea of world lit­ erature, world cinema, and transnational/transcultural studies51—an evolving project in contemporary humanities offerings around the world—by reach­ ing across disciplinary divides in light of the production of knowledge on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My project responds to Spivak’s call for a joining of forces between comparative literature and “comparative” area studies. Spivak criticizes the imbalanced formation of these two disciplines, since comparative literature comprises Western European “nations,” whereas area studies informs the study of foreign “areas.” She suggests that the supplemental relationship between comparative literature and comparative area studies can lead us “to

6772_Book_CC.indd 15

6/12/18 6:57 PM

16

Introduction

rethink mere national-origin collectivities.”52 I hope that my intervention in other fields in which idiosyncratic knowledge has been produced through the reading of varied texts assists with the further inclusion of Asian studies scholar­ ship in other humanities fields. The research outcomes of Asian studies scholars should no longer be contained within the current disciplinary spectrum. Rather, Asian studies should expand to meet the age of world literature to reflect social, cultural, and political changes taking place in the world.

6772_Book_CC.indd 16

6/12/18 6:57 PM

CHAPTER 1

POSTCOLONIAL HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR Franco-Japanese Collaboration in the American Shadow

In my view, the historical locale of Hiroshima in Hiroshima Mon Amour is far from self-evident. The locus of Hiroshima is radically confused and destabi­ lized, holding at its core a puzzling enigma: its parallel position with Nevers in France. Why does this film associate everyday life in Hiroshima fourteen years after the atomic bombing with wartime Nevers? Why does it also superimpose a seemingly commonplace middle-aged Japanese engineer/architect onto a young soldier and a member of the occupation army of Nazi Germany? These odd asso­ ciations between Hiroshima and Nevers, as well as between the Japanese and German male protagonists, come into view through the gradual revelation of the French woman’s past. Her memory connects both places through her tragic relationship with the German man in her hometown Nevers and her ongoing affair with the Japanese man in Hiroshima—where she stays as a short-term visitor to play a part in a movie on Hiroshima. But then, what exactly does her memory mediate between Hiroshima and Nevers, two sites seemingly farremoved from each other? Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier presents a lucid explanatory frame of reference for the linkage between Hiroshima and Nevers. She states that the French woman’s act of telling transforms a traumatic past and a fragmented memory into an intelligible account. The film shows a process of reaching out to the unrepresentable event of Hiroshima by taking a temporal and spatial detour through the more comprehensible story of Nevers. Thus, the disclosure of the French woman’s past is not only a working through of her memory but also of the atomic catastrophe. Although Ropars-Wuilleumier’s interpretation has been influential in “Euro-American” studies in North America, it is based on the unilateral relationship between Hiroshima and Nevers, insofar as the therapeutic operation is undertaken only on the French woman’s side, while subordinating Hiroshima to her personal endeavor. Let us further consider how Ropars-Wuilleumier relates Hiroshima to Nevers: 17

6772_Book_CC.indd 17

6/12/18 6:57 PM

18

Chapter 1

Once the story has been told, all there remains for Nevers is the cantata of oblivion, where the subject . . . expels the Nevers memory and exchanges it for views of modern Hiroshima. That is the ultimate goal of the transfer­ ence. Such as it is generated by the prologue, the explosion at Hiroshima eludes both the subject and the object, both the word and direct figu­ ration, only a trace remains. Projected on to the streets of Nevers, and linked to a narration which takes its place, the scar of Hiroshima enters in turn into the domain of oblivion whose exclusive memorableness the film guarantees.1

Here presumably Hiroshima and Nevers have equal standings, since at the end of the film they both find themselves equivalently at the same place, a locus of forgetfulness. But compared to Nevers, whose story is forgotten only after being narrated, Hiroshima is being forgotten even before its story is told. What is left untold about Hiroshima that is passing into oblivion? In this short excerpt, Ropars-Wuilleumier addresses Hiroshima a few times—as “modern Hiroshima,” “the explosion at Hiroshima,” and “the scar of Hiroshima”—with­ out clarifying what each Hiroshima stands for. Are these Hiroshimas correlated in an empirical, cause-effect formula, in that “the explosion caused a scar to modern Hiroshima”? THE JAPANESE MAN’S COLONIAL UNCONSCIOUSNESS The historicities of Hiroshima betray such a single-minded focus on the atomic bombing. The Japanese man, for instance, cannot be a pure mediator of the atomic calamity. As the testimonies of the hibakusha often suggest, their trau­ matic experience is not easily translatable, even by family members. While the Japanese man’s family was in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, he him­ self, he says, was “off fighting the war.”2 It is rather pertinent to observe that the Japanese man’s identity is marked by this profile—his wartime engagement as a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, as well as his postwar profession as both an architect/engineer and a local politician in a newly rebuilt Hiroshima.3 His past as a soldier uncannily overlaps with the figure of the German man whom the French woman has primarily seen in him in her flashback. Rather than play­ ing a therapeutic role in her working through, the Japanese man has carried her back to the time of her initial connection with her German lover. What signifies this affair is an allegorical coalition of the aggressor and the so-called horizontal collaborator, the classical figure of “betrayer” sleeping with the enemy. Clearly, this has nothing to do with a Hiroshima victimized by the atomic bombing. Thus, in order to explore the complicated significations of Hiroshima tied to the historical memories and trauma of the city in this film, it is nec­ essary to examine what lies behind the past and the present of the Japanese man. Another critic in “Euro-American” studies, Nancy Wood, discusses the

6772_Book_CC.indd 18

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

19

reciprocal relationship between the French woman and the Japanese man. For her, the French woman mediates the man’s traumatic memories through his “bitterly ironic recollection of world reaction to his city’s mass destruction.”4 He asks her what Hiroshima means to her. She tersely replies that it signifies the end of the war. Then, in an ironic tone, he comments, “The whole world was happy. You were happy with the whole world.”5 But in this conversation, a rhetorical displacement of Hiroshima with World War II unobtrusively takes place. While it is true that the end of the war for France indicates the final victory of the Allies as well as the recovery of its sovereignty from German occupation, the equation of France with the whole world should undoubtedly fall short in the eyes of the nations colonized by the French empire. In contrast to France, where Japan’s defeat amplified a sense of liberation, in the French colonies they must have been wary in anticipation of the return of the old power to their lands. The Vietnamese obviously did not welcome this French return, and therefore battled for independence against the French Army between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, followed by another long war against the U.S. invasion between the 1960s and the mid-1970s. For them, rather than the end of the war, Japan’s defeat constituted a new threat in the switch from one colonial power to another. Given this perception gap about the signification of the end of the war and the lack of awareness of the postwar decolonization processes, the Japanese man’s response is in fact indicative of his identity. He is verbalizing a colonial unconscious through the exposition of his ignorance of how differently the colonized can view World War II. In this sense, his trauma concerns not the destruction of Hiroshima but rather the defeat of Japan and the subsequent loss of the colonies. This is also a point of convergence of his postwar trauma and the prewar history of Hiroshima. WAR VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL VIOLENCE Let us look more closely at Hiroshima’s modern prewar history. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Hiroshima developed as a center for the military, the economy, and education in the southwest of Japan. The imperial endeavors of the Japanese nation became part of the prosperity of Hiroshima before the war, as Kosakai Yoshiteru explains in the Hiroshima Peace Reader published by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Foundation, which runs the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum today. Although this historical account is a bit lengthy, it is worth quoting: The Meiji Restoration provided the opportunity for the castle town of Hiroshima to be reborn as an economic and cultural city. However, as the Meiji government pursued its policy of strengthening the military, it soon became apparent that Hiroshima, at the center of the Chūgoku district with a good harbor, was ideally situated for military purposes.

6772_Book_CC.indd 19

6/12/18 6:57 PM

20

Chapter 1

After the abolition of clans and the establishment of prefectures, the First Detached Garrison of Western Japan was set up in Hiroshima Castle. In 1873, the Hiroshima Garrison of the Fifth Military District, one of six garrisons in the entire nation, was established with Hiroshima and nine other prefectures under its administration. . . . In 1886, the Hiroshima Garrison was renamed the Fifth Division. New military installations were built one after another not only in the castle but also outside the castle, steadily strengthening Hiroshima as an army base. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in August 1894, the Fifth Division was the first to be sent to the front. They were followed by soldiers from all over Japan, leaving Ujima Harbor daily for active service overseas. . . . On September 15, Emperor Meiji moved the Imperial Headquarters to the Hiroshima Castle where he planned strategy. An extraordinary session of the Imperial Diet was held in the provisional Diet building built in a corner of the west drill ground (around the site of the Hiroshima Castle) with civil and military officials accompanying the emperor. Hiroshima looked as if it were the national capital. Until the emperor left Hiroshima on April 27, 1895, the city was unprecedentedly prosperous and busy, with high government officials coming and going, soldiers leaving for the front, wounded soldiers returning, and tradespeople and workers coming from all over Japan. The war brought more people to Hiroshima and resulted in the expansion of military installations. Thus Hiroshima made rapid progress as one of the important military cities of Japan. In 1904, as the Russo-Japanese War broke out, Hiroshima was again brought to the fore as a large-scale army base of operations. Through these wars, the industrial economy of Hiroshima grew rapidly and the establishment of stock exchanges, banks, and industries was promoted. Hiroshima became an economic city as well as a military city. It also had the appearance of an educational city equipped with a number of educational facilities. Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, grew and prospered as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taishō periods. Therefore, Hiroshima was little influenced by the cutback in armaments during the 1920s. Along with its expansion of its role as a military city, Hiroshima became a modern city. After the “Manchurian Incident,” the “Shanghai Incident,” and the outbreak of the full-scale war between Japan and China, the Japanese Army and navy launched an attack on the north­ ern Malay Peninsula and a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 8, 1941 (Japan time). Japan rushed into the Pacific War. In Hiroshima, a center of military affairs since the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese wars [sic], military installations were expanded and vari­ ous heavy industries developed rapidly. In 1942, a Marine headquarters (under the command of Lieutenant General Fumio Saeki) was set up in Ujima, and related units were placed on the coast around Hiroshima City.

6772_Book_CC.indd 20

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

21

Later, when the atomic bomb was dropped, these units, located about 4 kilometers away from the city, escaped destruction. They sent out relief squads and took a very active part in aiding the wounded, clearing the dead bodies, and cleaning the streets. After the outbreak of the war, the air defense setup of the city was rapidly strengthened and was much stronger than in other cities. . . . The army hurriedly prepared for a decisive battle on the mainland. With these preparations Hiroshima was to take on a new role. Japan was divided into two parts; the First General Headquarters was placed in Tokyo, and the Second General Headquarters (under the com­ mand of Marshal Shunroku Hata) in Hiroshima, where the headquar­ ters of the Chūgoku District Governor-General (led by Isei Ōtsuka), the highest administrative body commissioned by the central government, was also established.6

This account pictures Hiroshima as a significant military hub whose devel­ opment moved hand in hand with Japan’s territorial expansion. With the his­ torical background of Hiroshima in mind, the hibakusha poet Kurihara Sadako wrote a self-reflective poem titled “When We Say Hiroshima” in the 1970s. In it, she contends that without thinking of the massacres in Nanjing and Manila or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, it is unthinkable to talk about Hiroshima.7 Kurihara also pointed out that in Hiroshima in the 1990s, there still existed well-preserved monuments that commemorated its participation in Japan’s “sacred” wars, not only as a sign of its military past but also as an indication of a lack of serious thought about its entangled victim/victimizer history.8 Critiques on the entangled histories of violence similar to Kurihara’s are also found in Aimé Césaire’s view, although he contends with incidents in a different context. Césaire argues how a Eurocentric viewpoint has obscured the connection between colonial massacres and the European Holocaust. He maintains that Christian and bourgeois Europe had been tolerant of violence against Africans, Arabs, and Asians until a racialized mass killing was imposed on white Europeans themselves in the European Holocaust that encapsulated “all the daily barbarisms” observed in colonial violence.9 Tom Engelhardt also mentions that the Pearl Harbor attack immediately evoked the American imag­ ery of its history of wars against the “Indians” or nonwhite “savages.”10 In this way, the sense of victimization at Pearl Harbor can obscure the history of mas­ sacring these “savages” in America. These violent acts—Japanese war atrocities, the European Holocaust, and the U.S. atomic bomb attacks—intersect with the colonial violence exercised by imperial/colonial powers. In this sense, the atomic bombing is locatable in an extension of these intertangled acts, as both colonial and war violence. The same can be said of the wars and colonial dominance that Imperial Japan under­ took, in which Hiroshima was actively involved as an important military hub. Hence it is hard to separate the identity of the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon

6772_Book_CC.indd 21

6/12/18 6:57 PM

22

Chapter 1

Amour, a member of the Japanese military, from these layered historical con­ texts. In present-day Hiroshima, as a local politician and architect/engineer, the Japanese man is also closely involved in the city’s rehabilitation projects, which showcase the reconstruction of the whole nation. In other words, he stands at the intersection in which prewar, wartime, and postwar Hiroshimas are intricately intertwined. The nexus between Hiroshima and Nevers should be positioned within this complicated constellation. FORGOTTEN FRANCO-JAPANESE COLLABORATION IN INDOCHINA There are other layers that need to be investigated regarding the link between Hiroshima and Nevers. The study of Vichy France has registered an exclusive emphasis on its relationship with Nazi Germany, with little attention given to its relationship with the French territories in Asia.11 Yet a historical parallel existed between Europe and Asia in Vichy France’s cooperation with the Axis powers. When the northern zone of France was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, French Indochina was also subordinated to the Japanese empire between 1940 and 1945. After the French government concluded an armistice with Germany in June 1940 and established the Pétain regime, the Japanese Army was stationed in the northern part of French Indochina in September 1940. Tachikawa Kyōichi argues that France discontinued fighting against Germany by moving its headquarters to its colony in North Africa. For him, France desired not only to keep the nation intact and free from the devasta­ tion of battle but also to advance itself to the second-strongest position after Germany in the new European order. Therefore, France attempted to keep its naval power undamaged, as well as to continuously secure its colonies as a symbol of its imperial power.12 Robert O. Paxton also considers that one of Philippe Pétain’s initial intents was to build a partnership with Hitler that could work in France’s interest as it competed with Britain and could help expand its imperial power overseas.13 According to Tachikawa, Japan accepted France’s intention to retain its colonial territories, since its main purpose was to interrupt the supply route to China via French Indochina to gain an advantage in the Sino-Japanese War. For economy of labor, it was more convenient to let the French colonial gov­ ernment continue to run the colony than to undertake a military conquest of French Indochina.14 This Japanese policy resembled Hitler’s initial plan for the treatment of France. As Paxton analyzes it, to let the French govern themselves would release the Germans from the responsibility of administrating the occu­ pied territory.15 Tachikawa states that even after the outbreak of the Japan-U.S. War in 1941, the collaboration between the French and the Japanese continued in French Indochina until Japan finally subverted the French colonial order in March 1945 out of fear that the French colonial government would abdicate to

6772_Book_CC.indd 22

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

23

the United States after its successive defeats in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In this downfall, called the Meigō campaign (Meigō sakusen), Japan had its Vietnamese puppet regime declare independence from French colonial rule.16 But until this final overthrow, Japan had adhered to preserving a coopera­ tive relationship with the French colonial government. According to Tachikawa, the Japanese military neither trained the local people nor propagandized for independence as a public policy in French Indochina. Its strategy in French Indochina differed from that in Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia, all of which Japan also occupied. The occupation policy in French Indochina—in sharp contradiction to its official slogan of liberating Asian peoples and Pacific islanders from Western colonial powers—disappointed local independence activists and therefore promoted anti-Japanese and anti-French movements in French Indochina.17 However, all in all, the collaboration between these two imperial powers, France and Japan, succeeded most of the time. Given this historical background, allegorically speaking, the French woman and the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon Amour have already met and collabo­ rated in French Indochina before Hiroshima, just as she and the German man did in occupied Nevers. This scenario allows us to interpret a puzzling dialogue close to the end of the film. When the French woman says, “Probably we’ll die without ever seeing each other again,” the Japanese man responds, “Yes, prob­ ably. Unless, perhaps, someday, a war.” She then reiterates, “(ironically): Yes, a war.”18 This elliptic, repetitive conversation suggests that the linearity of time is already confused, and the past and future can easily be overturned; thus “some­ day” can simultaneously intimate someday beforehand, or a past “someday.” In other words, they are talking about not only a future possibility but also a past memory already conjured up in a subverted temporality. Their memory is not necessarily anchored in their affair in Hiroshima, nor in the past event in Nevers, but rather in another concealed relationship during the war in French Indochina. Yet after the war, this memory of colonial collaboration is unwelcome on both sides. The French are inclined to obfuscate their ill-fated imperial trajec­ tory (at the time of the release of Hiroshima Mon Amour, they had already lost Indochina and saw the loss of Algeria on the horizon). Judging from their racial­ ized colonial policy (discussed in the next section in relation to Duras’ involve­ ment with the French colonial enterprise), it is also convenient to ignore the fact that the territories of the “white man” were taken by the “nonwhite man,” a fact that impairs the sense of white pride and prestige rampant under European imperialism. Now as a pacifist nation in the postwar period, Japan also prefers to avoid referring to its past military endeavors in French Indochina. However, neglecting these realities leads to three consequences: a coverup of the imperial histories of France and Japan, a separation of the impe­ rial metropolis from the colony, and, finally, the upholding of the dichotomy between the West and the non-West. If we approach Hiroshima Mon Amour

6772_Book_CC.indd 23

6/12/18 6:57 PM

24

Chapter 1

from such a postcolonial perspective, we find how the French and the Japanese match one another as partners of transference: the ex-empires that collaborated to maintain their colonial order but lost colonies as well as prewar international status and ended up with subordinated positions in the new world order estab­ lished by the United States—a super nuclear power in the Cold War era. DURAS’ COMMITMENT TO THE FRENCH EMPIRE Let us consider another aspect regarding the colonial collaboration between the Japanese and French empires. According to Laure Adler, Duras worked for the Colonial Office in Paris, a division of the French government whose important agenda was to campaign for the greatness of the French empire and the white race. In her lifetime, Duras never disclosed this, since this fact would tarnish her liberal image as a Resistance fighter.19 She attained her position at the Colonial Office under the Vichy regime in June 1938, immediately after graduating from college with a major in political science. One of her classmates told Adler how excited Duras had been about this job, regardless of her limited responsibilities. In the beginning, she was required only to write technical reports on colonial plantation products such as bananas and tea, but soon she was appointed to a more significant assignment closely connected to the Colonial Office’s mission. Adler explains how this happened: On 16 September 1938 came Marguerite’s first promotion: assistant to the committee responsible for publicizing French bananas, formed in June 1938. She left bananas to work with tea before returning to the interco­ lonial department of information on 1 March 1939. Her task was clearly defined. In collaboration with her superior Philippe Roques and helped by a close aide of the minister, Pierre Lafue, a historian and writer (who the following year published a novel entitled La Plongée with Gallimard), she had to produce a book outlining the virtues and greatness of the colonial empire. It was a commission. The minister explained there was no time to lose, the book had to appear as soon as possible. Marguerite—as we have seen—had already been noticed for her ability to synthesize, her capac­ ity for work, her aptitude for writing and her knowledge of the history of Indo-China. She got on with the job and scribbled away night and day, producing pages and pages of writing that Roques revised and corrected.20

Here we should inquire about the content of this propaganda book, which became Duras’ de facto first publication. In Adler’s explication, L’Empire français came out on 25 April 1940, with an initial print run of 6300 copies. The 240-page book, written in an academic and technical

6772_Book_CC.indd 24

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

25

style, had but one aim, which was quite clearly set out in the first few lines: to inform the French that they had extensive territories overseas, an empire that every Frenchman and every Frenchwoman should know about. The book did not attempt to hide the fact that its aim was militant. France had to know about its “colonizing abilities” so that it could be proud of them. “And that is the task of this book. The understanding the reader will gain from this book is: the Empire is made. The war helped complete it.” The book’s vocabulary reveals the authors’ mindset: people born in the colo­ nies are “natives” who love their homeland, who have “a child-like faith” in “sweet France.” To the two authors the white race was by nature the conquering race, and although the book pays homage to the courage and pride of the “native,” it is teeming with clichés that point to a human hier­ archy. At the top of the ladder of the inhabitants of the colonies we find the Annamese—was this Marguerite favouring her native land?—and at the bottom the black African: “The Negro is the victim of the forces of nature. Undeveloped, sickly and suspicious, he hides in the shadows of the forest and is incapable of dispelling the mysteries that surround him. The Negro penetrates deeper into the forest as the European moves in and makes way for more robust indigenous races.”21

Positioning the French at the top, the narrative allocates different develop­ mental stages to the Annamese and black people. This racial hierarchy replicates Gobineau’s notorious schematization that draws a close linkage between physi­ cal appearance and the evolutionary process of civilization—the problematic view known for its adaptation by Hitler.22 The book’s tone demonstrates how a racism rooted in colonialism can also facilely feed into Nazism. This entangle­ ment between colonialism and Nazism sheds further light on Duras’ contacts with the Nazi agent under the Vichy regime. Adler maintains that Duras had an affair with the Gestapo agent Charles Delval, an affair analogous to the one the French woman had with the German man in Nevers in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Delval was the very person who sent Duras’ husband and a communist Resistance fighter, Robert Antelme, to a con­ centration camp.23 Delval was executed for this conduct after the collapse of the Nazis regime. Although Duras initially approached Delval to obtain informa­ tion on the whereabouts of Antelme, her close contact with him developed into an intimate relationship.24 At that time she was also closely associated with her neighbor and Nazi collaborator, Betty Fernandez, whose salon attracted many intellectuals in Paris.25 After the fall of Nazi Germany, Fernandez was also arrested and forced to parade through the streets with her head shaved, just as the French woman does in Nevers in Hiroshima Mon Amour.26 According to Adler, Duras underwent an emotional shock when watching the filming of this head-shaving scene:

6772_Book_CC.indd 25

6/12/18 6:57 PM

26

Chapter 1

Marguerite Duras, who watched as they filmed in Nevers, found this scene unbearable. She screamed and fainted. It’s difficult, on seeing these images once again and on rereading the pages describing the events in Nevers, not to think of her wartime experiences with Delval. Until the end of her life Marguerite was convinced, though she had no proof, that Delval was a German passing himself off as a Frenchman so that he could work as a spy. . . . And the head-shaving episode, wasn’t it very reminiscent of what hap­ pened to her friend and neighbour Betty Fernandez after the Liberation? In Hiroshima, Nevers has to be seen in the light of Marguerite’s need to clarify certain episodes in her own past, and Resnais was able to turn into [sic] her imagination and to integrate it brilliantly into the story.27

Adler interprets this head-shaving scene as Duras’ appeal for her innocence and youthful naïveté. From a feminist standpoint, we can take this as Duras’ denouncement of the gendered violence against the woman whose body becomes a projected site of national purity. But here our interest lies in the big discrepancy in the degree to which she articulates her own complicity with Nazism versus French colonialism. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, while highlighting the episodes of collaboration under the German occupation of mainland France, she mutes the parallel situations in French Indochina, the collaboration with imperial Japan. This silence is where her colonial unconsciousness manifests itself. Does the occupation experience under Nazi Germany offer a site for romanticizing a collaborative relationship for her? Does not the experience under Japanese occupation construe such an occasion, since the racial status quo as described in L’empire français is completely subverted there? DURAS’ ALIENATION OF JAPAN In Duras’ famous trilogy modeled after her girlhood in French Indochina—The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique), The Lover (L’amant) and The North China Lover (L’amant de la Chine du Nord)—she vividly describes the life of the poor white single-parent family as bordering on the lives of the local Vietnamese. In these autobiographical novels, her whiteness is incessantly at stake, demon­ strating a clear contradiction in the ideological construct of a colonial racial hierarchy in L’empire français.28 Also of importance is her ambiguous position in the French colony that constantly jeopardizes her membership in the “supreme” French nation. In this respect, Duras’ persistent belief that Delval is a German passing as a Frenchman signals her strong attachment to the fantasy about the French nation and being a part of it. However, in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Duras tries her best to alienate the idea of Japan from that of France. In 1960, she published the scenario of the film supplemented with a synopsis and lengthy appendices.29 There she emphasizes how different from each other the French woman and the Japanese man are:

6772_Book_CC.indd 26

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

27

“Two people as dissimilar geographically, philosophically, historically, economi­ cally, racially, etc. as it is possible to be.”30 Simultaneously, she preempts any guesses about how their connection ever became possible: “How they met will not be revealed in the picture. For that is not what really matters”;31 “If the audi­ ence never forgets that this is the story of a Japanese man and a French woman, the profound implications of the film are lost.”32 She even goes out of her way to say, “This Franco-Japanese film should never seem Franco-Japanese, but anti­ Franco-Japanese. That would be a victory.”33 It is as if she insinuates her repul­ sion toward the collaborative relationship between the two empires in French Indochina, one that she must have been fully aware of as a former employee of the Colonial Office. Since Hiroshima Mon Amour is a visual representation, it is neither an exact reification nor a loyal translation of the written scenario. Nevertheless, Duras intervenes in the film’s signifying process not only through the scenario but also through its summarized translations—the synopsis and even the appendices. Duras writes in her synopsis her famous phrase, “All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.”34 Her remarks have also provided critics in “Euro-American” studies in North America with an excuse to neglect both Hiroshima’s historical contexts and the identity formation of the Japanese man. In this way, Duras’ strong desire to control the contexts of the film has exerted a considerable influence on the reception of Hiroshima Mon Amour in many humanities fields. But the degree to which the author dominates the text’s interpretation and its consequences in the domain of knowledge production should be sharply called into question.35 THE OTHERING OF THE JAPANESE MAN Since the 1990s, many critics in “Euro-American” studies in North America have honored the framework set up by Duras in defining the Japanese man as the intrinsic Other to the French woman. They have analyzed Hiroshima Mon Amour through reading Duras’ other works in lieu of those of Resnais. As a result, Durasian themes often predominantly capture their attention in inter­ preting this film. For example, Lynn A. Higgins situates this film in conjunc­ tion with Moderato Cantabile, a Duras novel published one year before the film’s release. Higgins presumes that “the film [Hiroshima Mon Amour] ‘remembers’ and repeats the novel [Moderato Cantabile],”36 and discusses the equivalence between the two plots: “Each has a framing story in which a man helps a woman in her quest to understand and assimilate a violent death she has witnessed.”37 For Higgins, the Japanese man is not only analogous to the man who appears in Moderato Cantabile and the German lover in Hiroshima Mon Amour but also a surrogate of the maternal figure, one of Duras’ familiar subjects. The difference is that although Moderato Cantabile displays the mother’s obsession with her child, in Hiroshima Mon Amour the French woman becomes a child

6772_Book_CC.indd 27

6/12/18 6:57 PM

28

Chapter 1

herself, one who has suffered from the loss of the maternal embrace. From this, Higgins argues, “The traumatic losses of wartime and the preverbal loss of the mother come to represent each other, through the typically Durasian emphasis on silence and madness.”38 In this manner, the figure of the Japanese man is fully absorbed and consumed by the Durasian plot, being reduced to a foil to support the psychological journey of the French woman. Higgin’s interpreta­ tion demonstrates the way in which the Durasian literary world dominates the critiques of the Hiroshima Mon Amour filmic world. Yet we should remember that Hiroshima Mon Amour is not merely Duras’ work but rather an amalgama­ tion of Duras and Resnais. More precisely, it is a Durasian work transforming itself into a different product through Resnais’ cinematographic intervention. The focus on Duras in the critiques of Hiroshima Mon Amour reflects the rise of scholarly attention in the fields of women’s writing, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies in the 1990s and the 2000s. In this environment, it is natural that Duras’ texts become a crucial point of reference in these fields. However, in the 1960s, not long after the film’s release, critics in “Euro-American” stud­ ies were rather inclined to view Hiroshima Mon Amour as Resnais’ work, and commented on both the French woman and the Japanese man equally, without privileging her only. For instance, Wolfgang A. Luchting argues about both pro­ tagonists, paying the same degree of attention to the Japanese man; “For him the memories are, primarily, concentric, that is to say: revolve around the complex of what Hiroshima as a historical fact means today, what the city’s moment of destruction was like. Secondarily, his memories are excentric, in so far as they participate in her memories. For her, the memories of le temps psychologique are, primarily, concentric around her experience in Nevers. Secondarily, they are excentric in so far as they participate in his memories of Hiroshima.”39 From Luchting’s perspective, the Japanese man plays an indispensable role in articulating Resnais’ position regarding time, in conjunction with the Proustian idea of ephemeralness. For Luchting, “The difference between him [Resnais] and Proust is that the latter accentuates in his novel the ephemeral­ ness . . . , whereas the former, Resnais, puts rather more emphasis on the very necessity of this ephemeralness in order that there be a continuity.”40 Thus, in the scene in which the Japanese man slaps the French woman, Luchting considers that “the Japanese lover becomes the executor of Resnais’ ultimate statement about time and man. The empirical order of things—i.e., the past belongs to the past and the present to the present—is established, must be established, else we become unfit for life—mad.”41 John Ward also maintains that the Japanese man represents a normativity in the way one should react to a traumatic event in the past. Ward further states, “Hiroshima would be reduced to a rather trivial story whose theme was that a normal man and a psychotic woman are unlikely to develop a lasting love relationship,” since she keeps fragmenting her experi­ ence and making it traumatic of her own volition.42

6772_Book_CC.indd 28

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

29

Overall, these readings contour the Japanese man and the French woman according to their gender difference, if not their gender bias: the rational and the hysterical, or the normal and the deviant. It is understandable that critics since the 1990s have therefore needed to subvert these male-centered critiques as seen in Luchting and Ward. But it is also ironic that this subversion of gen­ dered images accompanied the racialization of the Japanese man through his total subordination to the French female character—yet critics in the 1960s had paid scarce attention to racial features. Nancy Lane’s argument embodies such an othering/racializing of the Japanese man since the 1990s: “Her self-under­ standing must come via triangulation, refraction through the otherness of the Japanese lover, whose skin color is both like and unlike hers, whose language is at once like and unlike hers (grammatically impeccable, it is quite heavily accented). It is his desire—his gaze and his listening ear—that have elicited her story and constituted her as an object and a subject in the field of the Other. By placing herself there, she comes to understand and thus reintegrate herself as seen and as seer.”43 Lane’s interpretation implements the rhetoric of the colonial Other, the rhetoric of what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “almost the same, but not quite” pat­ tern of colonial mimicry.44 It is also overshadowed by the Fanonian formulation of the sexuality of the white woman that heavily relies on her imagining of the colonial man’s desire for her; through this desire of the Other, she establishes her identity as the white woman.45 Moreover, Lane superimposes the racial feature of the Japanese man onto his linguistic proficiency. To put it another way, her argument promotes the idea that it is possible to establish racial authenticity in the realm of language. This problematic equation of race/ethnicity with language also appears in Cathy Caruth’s discussion of the Japanese man. Caruth is interested in the fact that in reality the actor Okada Eiji, who plays the role of the Japanese man, knew no French but only produced the French sounds for the sake of acting. For her, this deserves applause, since he stays “loyal” to his own language (supposedly Japanese). Caruth claims, “For the voice of the Japanese actor bears witness to his resistant, irreducible singularity, and opens as a future possibility the telling of another history.”46 Beneath this statement looms another problematic notion that one can speak only in one’s native language, and that to speak in foreign languages invites the loss of the self. Amy Hungerford questions this idea of the conflation of language with one’s identity. Hungerford maintains, Here, cultural integrity appears to entail the decision only to speak—or more accurately, only to intend meaning—in one’s own language. . . . The language of the other is preserved as incomprehensible by the operation of memorization as opposed to learning. But in a sense, we can see that it has become not the language of the other, but the language in which one is

6772_Book_CC.indd 29

6/12/18 6:57 PM

30

Chapter 1

most oneself. For on this model, language is not representation but ontol­ ogy; not the vehicle for knowledge but the medium in which one “voices his difference quite literally,” in which one simply is oneself.47

As Etienne Balibar puts it, a linguistic community cannot create its own ethnicity, insofar as language fundamentally possesses a plasticity that natural­ izes new acquisitions. We are able to speak multiple languages, even though we cannot choose our first language.48 While Caruth astutely points out the pres­ ence of the United States in the diegesis of Hiroshima Mon Amour (to be dis­ cussed later), she does not open up her interpretation to the broader transpacific and transatlantic contexts. Instead, she endorses the containment of her critique within the rigidly structured national language communities. Earl Jackson Jr. takes a different stance on the function of the French woman in the film narrative. For him, a white male is the “hegemonic specta­ tor” of this film, whereas a white female occupies the position of a pseudocolo­ nizer. Hiroshima Mon Amour deliberately uses the French woman as a surrogate for this “hegemonic male spectator” in order to neutralize the greater threat from the non-Western masculine subject, who challenges Western authority by deny­ ing the Western vision through his reiteration of “you saw nothing.” To make the Japanese man an object of erotic desire mitigates his menacing presence. But in order not to confuse this desire as homoerotic, it is necessary to present a heterosexual relationship between him and the French woman by making their bodies into fetish objects. Jackson Jr. concludes that “in these interlocking con­ tradictory positions, the doubled fetish not only serves to quell the castration threat of the sexual and the racial/cultural Other but even ‘saves the fetishist from being a homosexual.’”  49 My position is close to Jackson Jr.’s, in the sense that Hiroshima Mon Amour cannot be comprehended without considering the presence of a “hegemonic spectator” deeply anchored in this film narrative. For Jackson Jr., this “hege­ monic spectator” is the white male at large, the racialized colonizer in a symbolic sense. But for me, this “hegemonic spectator” implies the American white male, suggestive of the masculinized U.S. nation that comes to the fore as a nuclear superpower after the dual collapse of Japanese and European imperialisms. CHIMERA OF COLONIALISM—THE JAPANESE/FRENCH COUPLE In contrast to many critics in “Euro-American” studies in North America who have examined Hiroshima Mon Amour only through the experience of the French woman, I explore this film by analyzing the psyche of the Japanese man. I consider the Japanese man as a chimera of colonialism, both the ex-colonizer before the defeat and the “colonized” in the postwar world order initiated by U.S. preeminence. He is an ex-imperialist who supported the construction of

6772_Book_CC.indd 30

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

31

the hegemony of Japan in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the racial Other of white Western imperialists. He allegorizes a mainstream postwar Japan that has experienced both imperial history and colonial subordination under U.S. rule—a historical path of modern Japan. However, given Japan’s prewar his­ tory as a non-Western imperial power, he is not the historical Other to Western imperialism.50 Therefore, his character resists fitting into the simple binary of the colonizer/colonized. This historical undertone complicates his relationship with the French woman. The othering of the Japanese man ends up with the othering of the French woman when the synchronization of these two operations take place. The French woman is also a chimerical figure, both the ex-colonizer as part of the white French empire and the colonized as a gendered figure also in a subor­ dinate position under postwar U.S. hegemony. Hiroshima Mon Amour provides the process by which the colonial fantasies of both the Japanese man and the French woman become bankrupt, and their performance becomes indistin­ guishable not only from colonial mimicry, but also from mimicry for its own sake. The implosion of the difference between colonial fantasy and colonial mimicry takes place through multiple significations of mimicry. Mimicry stops being simply a means for the subject to imitate the model and instead mimetic movements for mimicry become a driving force producing a desire in the sub­ ject for the model. According to Rey Chow, “Mimesis . . . is no longer simply a derivative or instrumental act in response to a situation in which those who are underprivileged, envious, or malcontent find themselves obligated to copy whatever preexists them as ‘normal’ and ‘superior.’ With desire detached from all predetermined objects, the mimetic process is here allowed to stand as a power dynamic, one that engineers, to return to Foucault’s term, the biopolitics of intersubjective relations.”51 As Chow outlines, it is not the desire that activates mimetic acts in the replication of the colonizer by the colonized. Rather, mimicry itself becomes “what gives desire its direction and trajectory as well as its objects.”52 During this process of mimicry, Hiroshima Mon Amour reveals the obscurity of the bor­ ders between the Japanese man and the French woman. In so doing, the film narrative foregrounds the historical underpinnings of the film—the wartime collaboration in French Indochina between the two imperial powers. It also indicates the postwar loss of colonies for both, and their relegated positions as subordinates to the United States. The film first posits the French woman as the female colonizer or the occi­ dental tourist visiting Hiroshima, where local residents should be “dissimilar geographically, philosophically, historically, economically, racially,” and so on, as in Duras’ original intention.53 The French woman behaves as a projector of the spectator’s desire to experience the exotic lives of the colonial Other. Thus she wears a yukata instead of a bathrobe, and pours coffee from a Japanese teapot.

6772_Book_CC.indd 31

6/12/18 6:57 PM

32

Chapter 1

Then she goes out to the balcony of the hotel room and looks down on the city in a happy mood, as if enjoying not the view but rather her status in a command­ ing position on higher ground. As a colonial native, the Japanese man has a heavy accent that emphasizes the “impossibility” of his becoming the colonizer, despite his effort to mimic the colonizer’s language. The reason he speaks French also attests to his subor­ dinate position. He explains that he learned French “to read about the French Revolution.”54 This line hints at figures such as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and José Rizal in the Philippines, leaders of independent movements in Southeast Asia, who are also known to have studied abroad in prewar Paris. Here the Japanese man overlaps with the Chinese man in Duras’ The Lover, who has studied in Paris and returned to Indochina, where his wealthy family owns real estate businesses for local Vietnamese. According to Jackson Jr., “The Chinese man in The Lover speaks French, which was not unusual at this time in Frenchcolonized Indochina. The fact that the Japanese man in Hiroshima, Mon Amour speaks French, however, is nearly as remarkable as the woman’s ability to take his fluency for granted; she does not even remark on his command of the language until he himself mentions it. The expectation of facility in French in the ‘native’ is a superimposition of former colonial expectations onto an Asian nation that had never been a European colony.”55 In The Lover, the French girl’s admira­ tion for the Chinese man’s body in the scene of their lovemaking (“The skin is sumptuously soft”56) also appears in the comments of the French woman after intercourse with the Japanese man (“It’s extraordinary how beautiful your skin is”57). Here, to play out her colonial fantasy, Duras abstracts the historical refer­ ence by making use of the racial feature of the Japanese man. Yet the reference to the French Revolution also connotes another significa­ tion. As Fredric Jameson maintains, historically speaking, the French Revolution induced the secularization of society enforced by capitalist development and the expansion of the market system in the course of the breaking down of class structure, the heredity system, and the traditional community.58 While this social reform had already been in full swing in Japan since the Meiji Restoration, the transfer of land ownership from landlords to tenant farmers and the sub­ sequent reorganization of social classes in local communities under the U.S. occupation brought this modernization project to near completion. The Japanese man’s remarks suggesting the need to learn about the French Revolution implies his active participation as a local politician in this reform project of reconstruct­ ing Hiroshima. He represents a Hiroshima that has accepted defeat and is work­ ing for rehabilitation under U.S. legislative command. The dynamism between the French woman and the Japanese man under­ goes a change the moment she sees the hand of the Japanese man who is asleep in the bed. She finds in him the figure of the German man or the ex-occupier of Vichy France, as well as the encrypted partner of the past collaborative rela­ tionship in French Indochina. Although a visit to Hiroshima and an affair with

6772_Book_CC.indd 32

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

33

him in a land of nonwhite people are initially meant to devise the occasion to stabilize her identity as a member of white French society, this encounter with past memory plunges her psyche into an identity crisis and promotes a sense of uneasiness inside her. With this return of the repressed, she gradually realizes that the longer she is with him, the more she will become aware of this disqui­ eting reality. After the return of her traumatic memory, she once more goes to his house, his private sphere. Filled with exotic Japanese architectural details, this mise­ en-scène demonstrates that her sense of being on the side of the colonizer has not yet disappeared. But after intercourse, again he urges her to talk about her affair with her German lover; this makes his house into a menacing place, where she can no longer afford to safely share intimacy with him. Thus her constant movement afterward—from the hotel room to the streets, his house, the café, the train station, the bar, and finally back to her hotel room—informs her dif­ ficulty to stay within her presupposed identity when she is with him. COLONIAL FANTASY AND COLONIAL MIMICRY The French woman’s loitering in nonterritorial spaces speaks to the fact that colonial fantasy resembles an imaginary onanism; it also elicits pleasure from fantasizing about a sexual affair with the colonial Other, and pleasure in pro­ longing this daydreaming. The scene in which she imagines the Japanese man approaching her on the street substantiates this entranced state. She imagines, “He’s going to come toward me, he’s going to take me by the shoulders, he’s­ going-to-kiss-me. . . . He’ll kiss me . . . and I’ll be lost.” Duras adds instructions about this scene: “The word ‘ lost’ is said almost ecstatically.”59 Although in actu­ ality he is following her at a careful distance, she is possessed by this fantasy in which the colonial male almost automatically woos the woman belonging to the colonizer. This fantasy leads to a state of exultant jouissance that is facilitated precisely because it is unreal. There has been a criticism that the second half of the film is too long and tedious; but the lengthy wandering scenes precisely demonstrate that a focal theme of Hiroshima Mon Amour is such an absorption in colonial fantasy. The disclosure of traumatic memory in Nevers and the expe­ rience of the atomic bombing are less important than this. Putting aside the French woman’s acting out of fantasy, the Japanese man pursues his own colonial fantasy stimulated by his past memory as the colonizer. His acting out reaches a crescendo in the scene in the café where he slaps her across the face. This action embodies a familiar colonial discourse: gendered colonial violence that pretends to be a lovers’ quarrel.60 Nevertheless, the slap­ ping has a placatory effect on the French woman, who had been in a delirious state. After being beaten, she actually smiles at him and resumes talking in a steadier manner. This reaction gives the impression that his action not only provides her with more sense but also strengthens their bond. He plays the role

6772_Book_CC.indd 33

6/12/18 6:57 PM

34

Chapter 1

of “reason and rationality” (embodied by the male) to properly handle the dis­ tracted (epitomized by the female), as Luchting has described it. The point here is that not only does this normalizing power entail a resort to force but that the use of this masculine violence is justified and even implicitly recommended. Through the metaphor of gender, colonial violence is deftly naturalized in this manner. This slapping scene reminds us of prewar propaganda in a Japanese block­ buster film produced in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War. China Nights (Shina no yoru, dir. Fushimi Osamu, 1940) depicts a romance between a Japanese man and a Chinese woman who meet accidentally in Japan-occupied Shanghai. They fall in love after a number of haphazard incidents. When she gradually realizes his sincerity through his actions, even including his slapping her face, her antagonistic attitude toward him becomes modified. This film carries the message of glamorizing Japanese imperialism and coercing the Chinese into an acceptance of Japanese rule. According to Yamaguchi Yoshiko, who starred as the rebellious Chinese woman, Ri Kōran (Li Xianlan in the Chinese pronuncia­ tion), China Nights had the opposite effect of stirring anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese.61 But in Hiroshima Mon Amour, in her “colonial romance” with a Japanese man, the French woman assumes not only the role of the Chinese woman in Shanghai under occupation but also the “French woman” in French Indochina subjected by Japan.62 She symbolizes a subordinate position that has accepted a collaborative relationship with the Japanese military. Yet, ironically enough, the Japanese man’s reenactment of past imperial fantasy only verifies his cur­ rent powerlessness, and demonstrates that he can merely imitate his past self. Here colonial fantasy and colonial mimicry are intricately conjured up in his act. In this way, he is also a postmodern chimera in which the copy takes over the original, but the original has already become void, and his mimicking acts continue in futile repetition. What is more, the Japanese man is also mimicking his new commander/ colonizer in postwar Japan. By slapping the French woman’s face twice in quick succession, he covertly emulates the series of atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki delivered by the United States.63 This act renders accountable the rhetoric of rehabilitation in which the destruction of Hiroshima paves the way for its rebirth as a peace city—a problematic rhetoric in which the use of the atomic bomb leads to Japan becoming a pacifist nation. All in all, the Japanese man’s mimicry implicitly endorses the American use of the atomic bomb, which also overlaps with the use of gendered colonial violence. LOCAL COMMUNITY’S POLICING But this slapping of the French woman by the Japanese man creates an unex­ pected outcome. When the double slap happens, almost all the people in the

6772_Book_CC.indd 34

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

35

café, both employees and customers, turn around and stare reproachfully at the couple. On this “Hiroshima night” (not China night), the couple has inadver­ tently wakened the local community, which views their behavior as an excessive challenge to its postwar politics. The local community expects its members to keep a low profile and not to provoke others so that the community can concen­ trate on the city’s reconstruction projects. Such a guiding principle is a “rational” choice for community members to come to terms with the new postwar political environment after the defeat. In this sense, the prewar ideology that advocated the virility and vigor of the society has not changed to the extent that its recon­ struction projects can also help maintain the same virility and vigor of the city. From the local community’s perspective, the Japanese man clearly oversteps the boundary of the laws of nature, by so overtly acting out his traumatic, impe­ rial past. Facing the community’s disapproval, the couple has lost their place within the community, and have no choice but to keep wandering the open streets. However, in her anxiety about her identity, which simultaneously fuels the acceleration of her colonial fantasy, the French woman turns a blind eye to this irrevocable change in circumstances. After the slapping, she gladly exclaims, “Doesn’t anything ever stop at night, in Hiroshima?” Then she continues, “I love that . . . cities where there are always people awake, day or night.”64 Yet as soon as she expresses her joy, the waitress in the café cleans their table to signal that it is time for them to leave. After this, community members do not hesitate to blatantly intervene in the couple’s relationship. Even when the couple is sitting in the waiting room in the train station, a space that should accept anybody from anywhere, they are susceptible to interrogation by the local community. A senior female citizen intrudes on them and unilaterally questions the Japanese man about his rela­ tionship with the French woman. Ostensibly this senior woman looks like an unthreatening figure, but her behavior is no different from that of the police. AMERICA MON AMOUR AT THE BAR CASABLANCA Finding themselves at a dead end, they come back to the bar named Casablanca, where they first met the day before: the point of origin as well as the point of return. This fact suggests that their affair is destined to go around in circles and that their encounter cannot be a departure for any other place. Casablanca alludes to the presence of the ultimate power that rules this dead-end world— the American hegemonic power in the postwar reconstructed world. Referring to the famous American movie, Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942), the notion of Casablanca in Hiroshima Mon Amour alluded to American dominance in Europe and around the world. According to Caruth, the movie Casablanca deci­ sively influenced the American government’s wartime policy on Europe during World War II: “When the film was made in 1942, Roosevelt, against Churchill’s advice, was still reluctant to withdraw support from the Vichy government in

6772_Book_CC.indd 35

6/12/18 6:57 PM

36

Chapter 1

France. It has been suggested that Casablanca was in fact used as propaganda aimed at enlisting his support for de Gaulle, in which task it was successful (the film was shown at the White House on New Year’s Eve, 1942–1943).”65 In brief, the film Casablanca marks a memorable conversion of U.S. dip­ lomatic and military policies that brought about the victory of the Allies in the end, just as the American male Rick, the owner of the bar Americain in Casablanca, helped the Resistance members fight against the Vichy regime. This conversion also heralded the beginning of American hegemony in postwar European politics. Moreover, the scenes in the bar Casablanca in Hiroshima attest to how deeply the U.S. influence is felt in postwar Japan. When the French woman enters the bar, another Japanese man flirts with her in English, despite the fact that he knows she is from France. Here the dominant use of the English language indiscriminately subordinates not only the Japanese but also the French. Because of this, even though she thoroughly understands him, she never verbally answers (in English), but only shakes her head. Her refusal to speak English suggests her dislike of the postwar world order, as well as her resistance to her relegated status on par with nonwhite Japanese subjects. While in the film Casablanca, Vichy France and the Nazi occupation forces are the opponents of the French Resistance movement, in Hiroshima Mon Amour the invisible American “hegemonic” presence is the object of the resistance for the French woman. Furthermore, this Japanese womanizer at the bar intimates the encrypted figure that never appears in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the figure whose depiction was thoroughly censored during the U.S. occupation period in Japan. What many critics in “Euro-American” studies in North America have overlooked in their analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour is the extent to which this film, borrow­ ing most of its footage in the opening sequence from the Japanese films, renders a sarcastic mimicking in this womanizing incident in the bar Casablanca. It implies what was widely seen in U.S.-occupied Japan—the horizontal relation­ ship between American males in the occupation army and Japanese females who do not hesitate to cling to their new victorious commanders. One of the most sensitive matters under the press code after the arrival of the American forces in Japan was not necessarily the representation of the hibakusha’s victim­ ization but rather the portrayal of American soldiers, even if they were depicted in a friendly manner. In particular, the flirtation between American males and Japanese females was often suppressed in order to avoid the disparagement of American males.66 In other words, this Japanese womanizer’s dalliance with the French woman in the bar Casablanca is a parody of American men picking up Japanese women at bars and elsewhere during the U.S. occupation period, a feature analogous to the liaison between German male occupiers and local French women in Vichy France. The textbook English that the flirtatious Japanese man speaks also insinuates the mimetic speech of the Japanese women’s halting English in

6772_Book_CC.indd 36

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour

37

their conversations with Americans. It should be noted that the language used on such occasions reflects a clear power dynamic that is also gendered. To put it succinctly, this bar episode signifies a parody of America Mon Amour. In this bar scene, what is in the mind of the Japanese man who is having an affair with the French woman? In actuality, he can do nothing but to watch the conversation between her and the Japanese fellow. After the local com­ munity’s rejection and this final return to their original meeting place, the bar Casablanca, where American hegemonic power is most strongly felt, all that is left for him is to follow the protocol already established in this dead-end world of Casablanca: conform to the Americans. Just as in the film Casablanca, Rick has returned his beloved Ilsa, whom he met in Paris, to her husband and the Resistance leader, Laszlo (although neither Isla nor Laszlo is French in the film setting), the Japanese man should also send the French woman back to her hus­ band in this filmic world of Hiroshima Mon Amour. This is the “rational” choice that also matches the local community’s opinion. Thus his duty is to carefully watch her like a guard at a distance, and to make sure that this arrangement of her return will be completed without a hitch. While she still wants to circle around the loop of colonial fantasy and colonial mimicry, he has realized that it is time for him to bring this colonial affair to an end. This is the ultimate impasse reached by their horizontal collaboration in reference to the world of Casablanca. However, this impasse also has a connection to the international busi­ ness order controlled mostly by American capitalist power in the early postwar period. From this standpoint, the French woman is handed over as a national commodity, as part of a commercial transaction, a vital part of capitalist devel­ opment in contemporary economics. This finale replicates the establishment of the homosocial relationship between men in the Sedgwick sense. Yet here, the French woman is not exchanged but rather temporally rented. It is pertinent to say that what happens in this film is the inscription or the naming of the body in the process of transaction, as it appears in the last scene in which the French woman and the Japanese man call themselves Nevers and Hiroshima. As Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari perceive it, the idea of exchange is premised upon the existence of closed entities, but in actuality such closedness is not sustainable under the global market system.67 In conclusion, Hiroshima Mon Amour informs the parable and parody of international commercial transactions developed in the early postwar Western world, as well as the switching of hegemonic powers from old-style Japanese and European imperialisms to the more globalized and penetrating neoimperialism of the United States in the Cold War era.68

6772_Book_CC.indd 37

6/12/18 6:57 PM

CHAPTER 2

VALIDATING AND INVALIDATING THE NATIONAL SENTIMENT Kamei Fumio and the Early Days of Japanese Cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

If in Hiroshima Mon Amour, “the ‘primitive’ modes of representation have not exactly disappeared; they are simply displaced” as Rey Chow puts it,1 then we should also be able to find similarly manifold modes beyond the simple realist approach within Kamei Fumio’s film Still It’s Good to Live, a palimp­ sest of Hiroshima Mon Amour. The breadth and complexity of Kamei’s film­ making is striking, since his wartime documentaries incorporate surrealistic expression, a technique frequently used in feature-length Japanese films of the 1930s, as in the works of Ozu Yasujirō. But what encapsulates Kamei’s life as a film director most is his unparalleled career path that hit a nerve with both the pre- and postwar regimes—regardless of their supposedly different stances on democracy and freedom of speech. Both of Kamei’s most famous films, Fighting Soldiers (Tatakau heitai, 1939) and A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 1946), were banned due to censorship in place under wartime Japanese rule and postwar American occupation.2 Fighting Soldiers criticizes Japan’s invasion of China, while A Japanese Tragedy focuses on the war responsibilities of both the Japanese military and Emperor Shōwa. Consequently, Kamei is often regarded as openly rebellious and politically active. Indeed, he was the only film direc­ tor imprisoned and deprived of his directorship in the prewar period.3 In early postwar Japan, he also became one of the first targets of the red purge in the wave of the reverse course of the U.S. occupation. Abé Mark Nornes maintains that Kamei’s Marxist-inspired critique triggered the ban and confiscation of A Japanese Tragedy by the U.S. occupation forces.4 But for Kamei, filmmaking is commensurate with his social commentary on a wider world, a personal essay charged with subjective feelings about the object, theme, or agenda. He maintains that while we tend to believe that a documentary liberates us from our subjective feelings, thus taking us into the realm of objectivity, the making of a documentary is really a tool to articulate emotional responses, such as laughter and anger, to what the camera can capture 38

6772_Book_CC.indd 38

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

39

through the art of storytelling.5 For him, what the documentary provides is not a fact but a perspective, not the truth but feeling; likewise its representation is not universalistic but artistic, not realist but artificial. Kamei’s remarks coincide with what the French surrealist writer and eth­ nologist Michel Leiris pursues in his ethnographic writing as the literature of confession. In his L’Afrique fantôme (1934), an experimental and surrealistic field journal on his journey across the African continent, Leiris’ concern revolves around how his subjecthood is constructed through this voyage. He states, “What always interested me was lyrical poetry, the ‘I,’ the state of the soul, the state of the conscience of the poet himself which is the theme of poetry.”6 For Leiris, “L’Afrique Fantôme is a diary, the book of personal moods, par excellence. All the same, this journey gave me a perspective—I wouldn’t dare say a knowl­ edge.” 7 Although Leiris’ attitude toward ethnography—ethnography as auto­ biography—changed after the completion of L’Afrique fantôme, James Clifford characterizes Leiris’ view in this way: “Leiris sharply questioned certain scientific distinctions between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ practices. Why, he wondered, are my own reactions (my dreams, bodily responses, and so on) not impor­ tant parts of the “data” produced by fieldwork? In the Collège de Sociologie he glimpsed the possibility of a kind of ethnography, analytically rigorous and poetic, focused not on the other but on the self, its peculiar system of symbols, rituals, and social topographies.”8 Leiris presents surrealistic ethnography as a subjective construction, potentially a note on the identity of the observer rather than on the observed. It is also a glimpse into the social system to which the researcher, and not necessarily the informant, belongs. WORLD AS NIGHTMARE, DOCUMENTARY AS FICTION Although Kamei’s genre is different, his contention that a documentary is his address to society in the form of an emotional outlet corresponds to Leiris’ conceptualization of ethnography as an exhibition of a subjective perspec­ tive. Kamei, who was trained in Eisensteinian montage in Leningrad, where he studied filmmaking in his early twenties, believes that the audience’s per­ ceptions come to completion not through a synthesis of the images on the screen but instead through the synthesis that takes place in the audience’s mind. For him, the audience subjectively recognizes and understands montage scenes as his or her psychological effect. Kamei’s groundbreaking documentary Shanghai: A Logistical Record of the Sino-Japanese War (1937) exemplifies this idea.9 It was created by the film company Tōhō to commemorate the Japanese victory in the Battle of Shanghai against the Chinese three months earlier. It aimed to appeal to the audience of imperial Japan through its detailed accounts of that conflict. Yet Kamei, who was critical of Japan’s invasion of China, betrays this agenda by conjuring up obscure and ambivalent images through his surrealistic technique.

6772_Book_CC.indd 39

6/12/18 6:57 PM

40

Chapter 2

Kamei’s Shanghai displays the juxtaposition of the footage of Japanese sol­ diers occupying the city, now in a relaxed mood after the battles—talking cheer­ fully with each other, playing music, and interacting with Japanese children in the Japanese concession—with the footage of trees, creeks, and tombs in the countryside and the ruins of the empty city center. The narration informs the audience that these creeks, roadside trees, and tombs were effectively used as devices for the Chinese attacks: the creeks as obstacles, the tombs as trenches, and the roadside trees as convenient places to hide machine guns in a row by hollowing out the base of the trunks. Showing how formidable and diligent the enemy was suggests how gruesome their battles were. The camera persistently follows the meandering creeks and tangled streets that spread in innumera­ ble directions like a maze. This seemingly unceasing flow of creeks and streets divides not only the geographical battle sites but also these film montage scenes into isolated and vulnerable fragments. Initially the images within this flow are a naturalistic representation, but they eventually come to illustrate the possibility that nature and the city landscape, so familiar in everyday life, can simultane­ ously become a weapon with which to ambush unguarded adversaries. Accordingly, these images are transformed into a source of uncanniness and otherness, an embodiment analogous to the site of a dream, or, more pertinently, the site of a nightmare. These images symbolize the psychic world of the para­ noid, who, with the return of the repressed, shudder in fear of revenge. In this sense, the world in Kamei’s documentary is already an imaginary picture, not a loyal and objective copy of countryside. Such an estranging montage generates an uneasy atmosphere throughout the movie, and stirs doubts that the soldiers’ smiling faces signify a momentary lull before a turbulent storm to come. It also creates a suspicion about whether the amicable interactions between soldiers, children, and local Chinese people are prescripted or not. Kamei’s documentary presents itself as both a fictive and a nonfictive construction that uses its images to evoke subjective feelings in the audience. Furthermore, when the film shows extensive damage caused by a battle in downtown Shanghai, what is highlighted are the Chinese defense strategies, not the Japanese military operations. Even though filmmakers were not free to depict the details of the Japanese action due to the military command to keep them secret, the considerable emphasis on the Chinese side creates a provocative effect and leads the viewer to question whose perspective the film ultimately rep­ resents. This ambiguity is dramatically accentuated when the camera captures the hostile expressions on the faces of the Chinese pedestrians who are watching a victory parade of Japanese soldiers on the main street in Shanghai. An unusu­ ally prolonged tracking shot illuminates that the gaze of these onlookers is being directed at the camera. Although these Chinese pedestrians avoid physical con­ frontation, they are intentionally returning the enemy’s gaze. The official narra­ tive of the celebration of the Japanese military campaign is furtively subverted

6772_Book_CC.indd 40

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

41

here, without engendering a prowar sentiment. The border between friend and foe, or between “us” and “them,” is effectively blurred. KAMEI’S SURREALISM AND THE TIME-IMAGE Kamei’s montage also demonstrates a surrealistic endeavor to make the famil­ iar strange. According to Clifford, to approach the representation of the object through juxtaposition and collage is a common way for ethnographic surrealism to question the presupposed order of culture by means of defamiliarization.10 In this regard, Kamei not only renders nature and urban settings unfamiliar and uncanny but also destabilizes the audience’s feelings about them. In other words, he builds a feeling of distance in the audience’s mind. Walter Benjamin once commented on how the work of the well-known surrealist photographer Eugène Atget conveys a sense of distance: Atget almost always passed by the “great sights and so-called landmarks.” What he did not pass by was a long row of boot lasts; or the Paris court­ yards, where from night to morning the handcarts stand in serried ranks; . . . Remarkably, however, almost all these pictures are empty. . . . They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant. It is in these achievements that Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings.11

The creeks and the row of trees persistently captured in Kamei’s documentary is a description of the particulars in fine detail, with an unsettling sense of empti­ ness, just as Atget’s objects in city life. From the outset, Shanghai was produced in a highly imaginary and visionary manner. Without visiting Shanghai or its suburban battlefield, Kamei made his documentary by combining rushes sent to Tokyo by the well-established cameraperson Miki Shigeru. Before Miki’s departure for Shanghai, Kamei outlined brief ideas about suitable shots. But these ideas were as banal and clichéd as a shot of the sunset in Manchuria— and thus were also somewhat empty. Such a sense of aloofness was already in Kamei’s mind, even before shooting specific sites and producing the montage with these rushes. One of the best examples for such distanciation is the portrayal of the most ferocious battlefields, where a whole Japanese unit was annihilated at midnight. Kamei reorganizes these battlefield images by creating the montage between the shots that explicate the enemy’s impregnable encampment positions, and those of the wreckage left by the Japanese troops, such as abandoned items and numer­ ous grave-posts of dead soldiers. To synthesize these two types of shots—the traces of the enemy’s encampment and the wreckage of the fellow soldiers—he

6772_Book_CC.indd 41

6/12/18 6:57 PM

42

Chapter 2

then places a third shot of a butterfly hovering over flowers and the bare earth of the once-hard-fought field. This serene butterfly shot absorbs the death of these soldiers into the eternity of the natural landscape, and converts it into an instan­ tiation of the countless battles from time immemorial. This loss of the historical specificity of the battle site transforms the mode of temporality in this scene. If there is an element of a defamiliarizing force in this idiosyncratically formed dialectic (Kamei calls it a haiku-teki/a haiku-like montage), it is this alteration of cinematic time in representing the battle; time itself is showcased, not the battle. The story of the soldiers becomes merely a backdrop to the whole scene. The abrupt confrontation with this gap between immortality and the battle, or between the magnitude of time and the insignificance of human indi­ viduality, gives the audience a feeling of disquiet. Kamei recalled that when this documentary was previewed in the Tōhō studio, the theater was filled with profound silence, apart from some faint sobbing. The wife of the drafted actor Tomoda Kyōsuke was invited to this preview and cried while viewing the depic­ tion of the battlefield, where Tomoda lost his life. In those days, to obtain any hint of the whereabouts of their husbands and sons at the front, Japanese family members often desperately sought any possible clue in the war newsreels.12 Here, empty and aloof shots had a complex psychological impact on the “politically educated eyes” of the audience. Adept at reading much into the scarcity of infor­ mation, these family members resurrected their historicity through their own subjective viewing. The film critic Satō Tadao comments that the haiku-like montage exem­ plified by this butterfly synthesization results from Kamei’s incorporation into the documentary of a fiction film technique characteristic in 1930s Japanese feature films—particularly in the works of Ozu Yasujirō, Yamanaka Sadao, and Shimizu Hiroshi.13 According to Deleuze, in Ozu’s cinematography, the images of empty spaces with no movement, such as unoccupied indoor scenes, abandoned outdoors areas, and natural landscapes, acquire their own autonomy and come to endure the genuine and unmediated images of time. Deleuze calls this the “time-image,” a mode radically different from the “movement-image” developed earlier. For Deleuze, in the “movement-image,” time is no more than a means of measurement to illustrate movement, while the “time-image” makes time be “the full, that is the unalterable form filled by change.”14 As a result, cinematic images function “to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible.”15 In Shanghai, this use of the “time-image” in the butterfly dia­ lectics, which thematizes time rather than the event, successfully produces an unbearable aloofness. But what is it like when Kamei applies this technique to the production of his postwar documentary, Still It’s Good to Live, approximately twenty years later? The main purpose of Still It’s Good to Live was to depict the hibakusha who were still suffering from the atomic bomb disease (genbakushō) or radiation

6772_Book_CC.indd 42

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

43

illness/sickness ten years after the atomic bombings. But another purpose was to solicit global preemptive actions against nuclear weaponry. The film narra­ tive is penetrated by the Eisensteinian dialectic, based on a three-layered devel­ opmental structure. The first thesis section, “It Is Painful to Die” (Shinukoto wa kurushii), consists of a number of episodes on the deaths of the hibakusha from leukemia and other diseases. The subsequent anti-thesis section, “It Is Also Distressing to Live” (Ikirukoto mo kurushii), comprises stories about the hibakusha in a state of destitution resulting from their poor health and dire poverty. The final climax section, “But It Is Good to Be Alive” (Demo ikiteite yokkata), focuses on the hibakusha participating in the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs held in Hiroshima in 1955 to appeal for the renunciation of nuclear weaponry in the hope of no future human suffer­ ing from nuclear wars. This last part of the trilogy indicates that the hibakusha’s lobbying for a political change promotes the sublimation of their victimhood as well as the redemption of their souls. However, moments of contradiction surface in the middle of the film narrative in Still It’s Good to Live. One such moment is a picnic scene on a sunny day that portrays blind orphans who not only lost their parents but also became disabled from the atomic blast. Kamei starts this episode with a shot of a plum tree partially in bloom. This plum tree shot sets the tone of the picnic scene as festive and heartwarming, and thereby puts the film’s narrative force into gear. Yet the insertion of this “time-image” at the outset simultane­ ously disrupts the succeeding montage development into the moment of subla­ tion, since it also freezes the narrative in the temporality of this specific plum tree mise-en-scène. This method of juxtaposing atomic bomb victimhood with nature/“time-image” is in conflict with the Eisensteinian montage, causing a loss of momentum in reaching the apex of the triangular development of the narrative. In addition, if the children’s suffering is so easily reconciled by the absorption of time, this outcome will make the successive development of the redemptive narrative superfluous. Concurrently, harmonizing atomic bomb victimhood with nature is quintessentially excessive, insofar as its effect is to reverse defamiliarization—making the unfamiliar familiar. In short, Still It’s Good to Live demonstrates an incomplete syncretism by subscribing to two oppositional modes: an emphasis on a historical development and political activism, and the very negation of this framework through the incorporation of the “time-image.” The most striking rupture manifests itself when Still It’s Good to Live uses the “time-image” in a radical way to highlight a young hibakusha woman who has lost the use of both legs in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This episode begins by describing the woman’s current life: she has made a living by doing piecework while confined to her house for the last ten years. Then her words are introduced: “I was born and grew up in Nagasaki, but I know nothing about

6772_Book_CC.indd 43

6/12/18 6:57 PM

44

Chapter 2

the present Nagasaki.” The voice-over explains that her remarks have prompted the film crew to take her out for the first time since the bombing. They decide to take her to the places that she has long yearned to revisit, such as the site where she encountered the atomic bombing, and the place where her brother was instantly crushed to death under a wall that collapsed in the explosion. After that, the crew takes the woman to a hilltop from which she has a pan­ oramic view of the entire city. This is the moment when Kamei literally steps inside the screen and becomes a protagonist in the diegesis. On the hill, Kamei holds the woman in his arms and looks in the same direction as she does, toward the restored city of Nagasaki. In this scene, the woman, with a faint smile on her face, casually points to the seafront area of the city while cheerfully talk­ ing to Kamei. Ironically, it is Kamei who wears an almost “unendurable” yet “enraptured” look on his face, with his eyes riveted on the city and the ocean glistening in the sunlight in the form of the “time image.” Then there is the jux­ taposition between these two and a distant view of the city. Through this scene Kamei both personally and cinematographically approaches something unen­ durable and insufferable in the everyday life of the hibakusha: the prospect of never being able to divorce themselves from staggering loss, whether physical or psychological. This loss is not locatable within the realm of the sublime but is instead in line with what is found in the ordinary lives expressed through this juxtaposed “time-image.” Here Kamei experiences a state of transference vis-à-vis this hibakusha woman. His emotional connection with her has made him literally enter into his film without hesitation. Later he commented that in that instant he was so preoccupied with helping the woman that even filming had become secondary to him.16 The extent to which he detaches himself from camera consciousness also levels with the collapse of the distinction between the camera gaze and the camera object. Kamei was taken by the desire to create a momentary imme­ diacy with the hibakusha. Lisa Yoneyama labels this “moments of sympathy” with the victim. She maintains that “the critical nature of the testimonial prac­ tices simultaneously generates a sobering warning that this sensation of iden­ tification, fullness, and unity can only take place in fleeting and fragmentary instances.”17 Kamei’s desire also lies in conserving this very fleeting moment in which he and the hibakusha woman are looking at the shining city of Nagasaki together, the moment that enables him to imagine an emotional oneness with her. In this way, the “time-image” becomes a way to enter the screen and fix himself in it as an object of the camera gaze. Inside this space, Kamei can float eternally, being both ecstatic and unbearable. By splitting himself into these two paradoxical positionalities (both the subject and the object of the camera gaze), he allows Still It’s Good to Live to exhibit the making of a documentary about Kamei himself—through his subjective responses to the female hibakusha. In this light, this film is Kamei’s own ethnographic journey, insofar as “the camera

6772_Book_CC.indd 44

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

45

makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own,” as Susan Sontag says.18 JAPANESE FILMS ON THE ATOMIC BOMBING AND THE U.S. OCCUPATION Examining Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live in conjunction with his surrealist filmmaking, which incorporates the Deleuzian “time-image,” shows how his films should be interpreted beyond the conventional idea of documentary films. Situating Still It’s Good to Live within a genealogy of Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as within the 1950s historical context of Japan, this film becomes part of the filmic knowledge on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first important point about this historical context is that the cinematographic representation of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the hibakusha arrived belat­ edly, compared to the literary representation, due to much tighter restrictions imposed on visual media under the U.S. occupation.19 Thus, in the seven years immediately after the war, no documentaries or realist reconstructions were available to the public, except for a few fiction movies released in the early 1950s. But those movies referred to the atomic bombing only as a backdrop to melodramatic plots, and included no actual depiction of it. One early example, The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, dir. Ōba Hideo, 1950), is a dramatiza­ tion of the best-selling memoir by the radiologist Nagai Takashi, a victim of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki (chapter 4 discusses him and his text). Nagai is known as a Catholic devotee who claims that the United States’ second nuclear attack was divine providence. The movie portrays him as a hero calmly embrac­ ing his approaching death (although his days were already numbered before the bombing, due to an excessive exposure to radiation as a result of his profession). The atomic explosion is viewed in the middle of the film only through its mush­ room clouds beyond the distant mountains. This impressionistic depiction and pietistic tone completely obscure how the bombing came about. Another fiction film produced under the U.S. occupation, I’ ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no uta wa wasureji, dir. Tasaka Tomotaka, 1952), is like a melodramatic colonial cliché, often found in Japanese wartime propa­ ganda films to justify Japan’s military expansion in Asia.20 Released a month before the end of the U.S. occupation, the film’s narrative revolves around a vaguely sexual relationship between a warm-hearted American male visitor and a blind Japanese hibakusha widow. The American male comes a long way to com­ plete an unfinished song for the widow’s late husband, whom he met at a U.S. POW camp. His sincerity gradually relaxes the widow’s stone-faced attitude and allows her to accept the consequence of the atomic bombing. Satō argues that the widow is an allegory for the Japanese government’s attitude; she represents a Japan that asks the United States to love her more in exchange for relinquishing

6772_Book_CC.indd 45

6/12/18 6:57 PM

46

Chapter 2

her grudge against the atomic bombing.21 The film also contains dialogue equat­ ing the Pearl Harbor attack with the atomic bombing, and American military casualties with Japanese civilian counterparts. The director Tasaka was also a hibakusha who had a successful career in the production of war propaganda in prewar Japan.22 Satō conjectures that Tasaka could have been lacking energy when he made this film, since it came imme­ diately after his battle with the atomic bomb disease. However, this film also exemplifies the consequence of the humanistic approach that Tasaka took in making war propaganda films. It demonstrates how, without a critical perspec­ tive, such an approach degenerates into spineless submissiveness to destiny.23 Tasaka embodies the transformation of militarist regime followers into occu­ pation conformists, a commonly seen pattern at that time.24 In this sense, he overlaps with the Japanese male protagonist in Hiroshima Mon Amour discussed in chapter 1. Putting this reality aside, Satō also maintains that the lack of criti­ cism of the United States in Japanese cinema during this period is not neces­ sarily attributable to censorship. In his observation, the atmosphere of the time favored not criticizing the United States. People were aware that Japan had also committed war atrocities, and was also responsible for the war. There were also those who perceived warfare as intrinsically cruel.25 Criticism of the American atomic bombing surfaced after the end of the U.S. occupation, when directors were able to posit the atomic calamity as the central theme. The first example came in a fiction movie titled Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, dir. Shindō Kaneto, 1952). Shindō, who had been raised in a town near the city of Hiroshima, had long awaited the end of the U.S. occupation so that he could make a film on Hiroshima without restric­ tions. He managed to release the film in time for the seventh anniversary of the bombing. His movie was based on the well-known book Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shōnen shōjo no uttae), edited by Osada Arata, a collection of approximately one hun­ dred testimonies of hibakusha children in Hiroshima. The film gives a detailed account of the tragic aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima over sev­ eral years. It includes stories of a young survivor still unable to build graves for annihilated family members; a senior citizen with keloid injuries supporting himself as a beggar; an orphaned child losing her life years later owing to the atomic bomb disease; and a young wife no longer able to reproduce. To present these realities constitutes a strong protest against the atomic bombing, if not against those responsible for it. But the film’s effusive portrayal of the hibaku­ sha’s suffering, coupled with the sketchy images of the atomic explosion—such as withered flowers, birds burned to death, naked bodies dyed with blood, and a screaming baby clinging to its dead mother—did not satisfy the Japan Teachers Union, which had commissioned the film. The union criticized Shindō’s film as lacking sufficient power to convey the brutality of the bomb.26 It also thought

6772_Book_CC.indd 46

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

47

that Shindō underplayed the political climate of the early 1950s, when there had been a fair chance of the United Stated undertaking another atomic bomb attack in the throes of the Korean War. Propelled by a sense of emergency, the union proceeded to make another film based on the same source. In the wake of these variances, Sekikawa’s Hiroshima was made in 1953, in the hope of creating a preemptive measure against nuclear war. However, it turned out to be a shocking, graphic recon­ struction of the disaster in which masses of people were suddenly thrown into a hellish calamity and died one after another. It was probably this Sekikawa film about which Duras made a caustic comment in her synopsis of Hiroshima Mon Amour, referring to it as “the description of horror by horror.”27 Indeed, the orchestrated spectacle provided in Sekikawa’s film is not only sensational but also “obscene.” However, it is ethically questionable if a film on Hiroshima and Nagasaki results in numbing its audience to the extraordinary pain and suffer­ ing of the victims. The other important characteristic of Sekikawa’s movie is its vocal denunciation of the United States’ atomic bombing through the quotation of the famous phrase from Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947): “One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.” This quote pays homage to Chaplin, who suffered harsh attack in the McCarthy era and ended up in exile in Europe in 1952. Yet the production of these films did not immediately increase public aware­ ness about the devastating victimization in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.28 Instead, what captured national attention was the Lucky Dragon Incident. During the U.S. testing of a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in March 1954, the crew of the Lucky Dragon Five (Daigo Fukuryūmaru), a tuna fishing boat, was acciden­ tally exposed to nuclear fallout. Since the boat belonged to the Yaizu fishing port in Shizuoka Prefecture, a provider of seafood to Tokyo, Osaka, and other urban populations, the incident stirred up nationwide apprehension about food security vis-à-vis nuclear contamination. It also led to antinuclear movements initiated by homemakers in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. It was only after this antinuclear outcry that the victimization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gradually came to the fore in the Japanese public consciousness. This retroactive acknowl­ edgement of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also demonstrates how the process of knowledge production among the general public often develops in Japan; an event remains esoteric if not caught by the radar of a media network with a major stake in metropolitan Tokyo, the seat of political and administrative deci­ sion making. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, being located in the western periphery of the Japanese archipelago, did not easily penetrate the consciousness of most people in the nation, even though the Japanese people heard of these events. In brief, the knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inside Japan transpired only belatedly, since it was first suppressed by U.S. occupation censorship, and later neglected due to the cities’ geopolitical distance from metropolitan Tokyo.29

6772_Book_CC.indd 47

6/12/18 6:57 PM

48

Chapter 2

KAMEI’S COMPROMISE AND THE MARTYRDOM NARRATIVE Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live appeared after Children of Hiroshima and Hiroshima, two antipodal films built on the same literary source. Still It’s Good to Live provided the now precious record of an intimate portrayal of the hiba­ kusha’s realities ten years after the bombings. According to Kamei, this film received an unexpectedly fervent public response that paved the way for its nationwide distribution. However, in spite of the fact that it was released after Sekikawa’s film, and that both Sekikawa and Kamei were leftists, Still It’s Good to Live did not carry the censorious tenor of Sekikawa’s. Rather, it followed Shindō’s approach in attracting sympathy for the hibakusha. This striking dif­ ference between Kamei’s and Sekikawa’s direction is surprising, given Kamei’s uncompromising attitude in his checkered life as a film director. Kamei was an exceptional director whose works were suppressed both during and after the war, as mentioned. But after the war his banned film A Japanese Tragedy—which excoriated Japanese politicians, Zaibatsu compa­ nies, intellectuals, and Emperor Shōwa for their responsibility for the war— was initially developed with the encouragement of the chief officer at the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) of the occupation government, David Conde. CI&E was one of the twin censorship organizations specifically designed to reeducate the Japanese. After A Japanese Tragedy passed CI&E inspection and became available to the public, the other censorship institution, the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), recensored it and decided to ban it. Furthermore, CCD confiscated all of the footage. This footage was nothing new; it was a recycling of wartime propaganda footage but was used for the exact opposite purpose. According to the film critic and producer Iwasaki Akira, the film’s montage scene in which the emperor transforms his identity by changing his clothing from a military uniform to a businessman-style frockcoat infuri­ ated the then prime minister Yoshida Shigeru.30 John W. Dower notes that “the suppression of the documentary essentially marked the moment when serious debate concerning imperial war responsibility disappeared.”31 After this inci­ dent, which in retrospect informed the start of the “reverse course” in the film policy of the U.S. occupation regime, Conde resigned from CI&E. Kamei also left Nichiei, with whom he had made this controversial film. Then Kamei returned to Tōhō, where he had directed Fighting Soldiers in the prewar period. At Tōhō, he produced the fiction movie War and Peace (Sensō to heiwa, 1947) as a joint project with the director Yamamoto Satsuo. But again he received an order from the occupation government to eliminate many parts of the film.32 In 1948, Kamei participated in a labor dispute that took place at the Kinuta Tōhō studio. The dispute between the union members and the com­ pany developed into a forceful confrontation across the barricades. Ultimately the U.S. Army intervened and besieged the union members with tanks, armored vehicles, and airplanes. Although this incident was thoroughly censored in the

6772_Book_CC.indd 48

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

49

news media, the satirical comment made by Kamei about the U.S. military mobilization—“the only weapon not deployed was a battleship” (konakatta no wa gunkan dake)—was broadly circulated through the grapevine.33 Viewed as an instigator of union activities, Kamei departed Tōhō again. Next he founded an independent production company to make feature films but failed owing to the difficulty of distributing works in competition with major film produc­ tion companies. In 1953, he returned to the documentary field, which allowed him to work alone on a slim budget. Between 1953 and 1956, he made a few documentaries on the campaign against the expansion of U.S. military bases in Sunagawa, in the suburbs of Tokyo. Clearly Kamei’s background history was at odds with his silence about U.S. involvement in the atomic bombings in Still It’s Good to Live. But his ini­ tial plan for this documentary film drastically differed from its final version.34 He originally intended to begin with an ironic opening scene in which a teen­ age boy with a big keloid scar on his head was shooting down doves with an air gun at the Atomic Bomb Dome. The birds were released into the sky during anniversary ceremonies every August as a symbol of peace, but this hibakusha boy was killing them just for fun. The crew accidentally encountered this aston­ ishing scene and shot it. Additionally, the news of a robbery on the new Peace Memorial Bridge in Hiroshima took Kamei by surprise. The bridge, designed by the internationally acclaimed artist Isamu Noguchi, was elegant in style, a symbol of a rehabilitated Hiroshima. Yet a trusted senior janitor at a local bank, with a forty-year reputation for diligent service, ambushed one of his bank’s transport cars to commit a robbery on the bridge. Kamei felt that the beauty of the bridge, which looked as white as bleached bones, held a sinister power to precipitate a crime in this man’s mind, in the very place where numerous human bones were still uncovered anytime digging took place. Overall, Kamei’s impres­ sion of Hiroshima was of a dry, callous, and bleak place. Despite his dismal impression of Hiroshima, Kamei removed all of these disquieting episodes. Instead, he filled the film with stories of courageous and tragic hibakusha. This change in focus derived from the intention of the Gensuikyō (Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs) that had commissioned him to make the film. The film’s main purpose was not necessar­ ily to portray the current Hiroshima but instead to commemorate the council’s first international assembly held in Hiroshima in 1955. As Michiba Chikanobu maintains, the primary concern of the antinuclear movements was not relief for the hibakusha, who were still suffering the aftereffects of the atomic explo­ sion, but rather the development of antinuclear movements to prevent nuclear aggression in the future.35 Unlike Shindō, who had a strong attachment to Hiroshima, both Sekikawa and Kamei made their films to enlighten society, with a focus on the objectives of antinuclear movements. Indeed, these move­ ments did empower the marginalized hibakusha who under the U.S. occupation had had no forum in which to speak out publicly about their experiences. Yet

6772_Book_CC.indd 49

6/12/18 6:57 PM

50

Chapter 2

it is also undeniable that the depiction of the hibakusha in these films was tai­ lored to fit into the overarching thrust of the antinuclear movements. Kamei was also emphatically supportive of the Gensuikyō striving to inaugurate the first organized international antinuclear convention by sensitizing the disinterested public. He remembered the Gensuikyō’s small and untidy office at the begin­ ning stages as well as its struggle to wage signature-collecting campaigns even in Hiroshima. These circumstances finally led Kamei to opt for a conventional humanism rather than a focus on the heterogeneity of the hibakusha psyche of which he was sharply aware. Kamei also articulated that the “limitation of the times” influenced his decision.36 Still It’s Good to Live was released the same year the Japanese govern­ ment declared in its annual economic white paper that “Japan is no longer post­ war” (mohaya sengo dewa nai). By that time, the Japanese economy had recovered to its prewar levels, completely leaving behind the chaotic and devastated state it had suffered after the defeat. This economic recovery was facilitated by U.S. aid that aimed to prevent Japan’s communization in the Cold War, and also by an economic boom triggered by the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. The mid-1950s was a starting point for Japan’s rapid economic growth, in which the development of industries and international trade worked in tandem until the onset of the 1973 oil crisis. Japan’s membership in both the International mon­ etary Fund (IMF) from 1952 and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) from 1955 paved the way for the expansion of its export-oriented econ­ omy. The mid-1950s was also a time of political shake-up; the internal coalitions in both the conservative and left-leaning groups together formed the so-called 1955 system.37 The 1955 system functioned as a political device to promote economic growth by tying Japan closely to the Western economic bloc. The balance of power within the 1955 system adroitly cushioned domestic conflicts by settling objections from the opposition parties within the regime led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).38 In this political milieu, the hibakusha faced difficulty in making their voices heard. By the mid-1950s, a significant psychological and economic gap had already developed between the hibakusha and others. During the U.S. occupa­ tion, the hibakusha were abandoned, with no government welfare and medical support, due to the self-imposed inhibitions of the national and local govern­ ments in the presence of the U.S. occupation forces. The censorship policy also prohibited the circulation of information on the health condition of the hibaku­ sha, even from the medical perspective. The suppression of accurate information about the atomic bomb disease in this period bred a hotbed of discrimination and prejudice against the hibakusha in later years. Only after the Lucky Dragon Incident gripped national attention did the retroactive awareness of the hibaku­ sha’s predicament grow. In these circumstances, antinuclear movements’ objec­ tive of mobilizing national sympathy for the hibakusha coincided well with their political needs. The conservative side also tolerated antinuclear movements, to

6772_Book_CC.indd 50

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

51

the extent that activists and supporters did not significantly disrupt the coun­ try’s path to economic prosperity and the military alliance with the United States. Furthermore, inside the Gensuikyō, concerns arose about intervening in Soviet nuclear policies in the midst of its nuclear armaments race with the United States.39 By and large, Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live intersected with the strategic choice over how best to position antinuclear movements in the current political climate—a choice crafted so as not to trigger serious domestic or international disputes. However, Kamei’s silence about the U.S. role also contributed to silence about the violence of the Japanese military prior to the atomic bomb­ ings. This not only rendered the hibakusha nearly indistinguishable from other victims of natural disasters but also precluded any mention of Japanese mili­ tary expansion in the Asian and Pacific regions.40 This avoidance of historical context also downplayed the prewar prosperity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their development as military cities that absorbed many colonial subjects. Many colonial subjects resided in downtown residential areas targeted by the United States. In Hiroshima in particular, Koreans comprised a large number of the hibakusha.41 However, these Koreans appeared neither in Still It’s Good to Live nor in Kamei’s retrospection on the shooting of the film, in which he said that he had interviewed three hundred hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.42 HIBAKUSHA AS EPIC CHARACTER The lack of colonial context in the narrative of Still It’s Good to Live helped create a closed space of national martyrdom. The construction of this space promoted the formation of an introverted interior to the postwar Japanese psyche. Still It’s Good to Live captures the traces of sadness and frailty in the hibakusha—a blind teenage girl with a disfigured hand still training hard in music; a blind orphaned boy staying near his music box and listening to its melody all day long; and a hos­ pitalized father with no hope of recovery from the atomic bomb disease consid­ ering a family suicide attempt. In this closed space of martyrdom, the hibakusha is transformed into an epic character in the Bakhtin sense. This epic character originates in his or her circumstances or fate, with no sense of an existence that is more than destiny. Such a character is regulated by a single-minded, prescribed, and incontestable worldview, unlike the novelistic character whose personhood never completely fits the incarnation of preexisting social categories. In addition, the epic character represents “the exclusive beauty, wholeness, crystal clarity and artistic completedness of this image of man” as defined by Bakhtin.43 It resides in the absolute past or in a space isolated from contemporaneity. In this regard, the films of both Shindō and Kamei confine the hibakusha to the space of martyrdom, whether they appear in a fictional or documentary context. Moreover, they also present the hibakusha as good-willed humanists

6772_Book_CC.indd 51

6/12/18 6:57 PM

52

Chapter 2

that compassionate audiences can easily sympathize with, without the slightest fear of their own reality being threatened. The dove and robbery episodes that Kamei removed from his documentary could have destabilized and confused this narrative of martyrdom, just like Bakhtin’s allegorical roles of the villain, clown, or fool that can parody epic authority.44 After making Still It’s Good to Live, Kamei promptly produced another nuclear film, The World Is Terrified: The Reality of the “Ash of Death” (Sekai wa kyōfu suru: “Shi no hai” no shōtai, 1957), that cautions the audience about radiation’s danger to the environment. Although the physicist Taketani Mitsuo questioned the scientific accuracy of some of the film’s claims, it forcefully and unsentimentally conveyed serious concerns about radiation contamination through the use of an overwhelming amount of footage and scientific data.45 Two additional films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared in the 1950s: The Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu, co-dir. Aoyama Michiharu, 1953) and A Story of Pure Love (Jun’ai monogatari, 1957), both produced by Imai Tadashi. The first film is a short documentary that features the famous panels of the hibakusha’s experiences drawn by the painter-partnership of Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi. The second is a feature film on a tragic love relationship between a delinquent young couple struggling to escape from poverty and solitude. In A Story of Pure Love, Imai problematized social conflicts within postwar Japanese society by shedding light on the disadvantageous status of adult war orphans and hibakusha. Although the protagonists are not typical epic characters, the heroine endures the atomic bomb disease and loses her life in the end. Utilizing the martyrdom narrative in conjunction with the figure of a tragic heroine, Imai’s film set a precedent for the ensuing prominence of ill-fated and ephemeral female protagonists in the popular TV dramas of the 1970s and 1980s; these heroines often contract diseases suggestive of radiation illness, as in The Diary of Yumechiyo (Yumechiyo nikki), starring the national icon Yoshinaga Sayuri, and Yamaguchi Momoe’s “Red” series. In contrast to his predecessors Shindō, Sekikawa, and Kamei, who created their works with independent production companies, Imai was known as a skilled hit movie maker; he released his A Story of Pure Love with Tōei, one of the major Japanese film companies. This film’s success paved the way for the hibakusha story to enter the entertainment industry mainstream. Although many other representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already appeared in literature, photography, and journalistic reports, these early films also claimed an important position, insofar as they established a sense of the plausibility of atomic bomb victimhood in the visual world. Christian Metz maintains that the establishment of this plausibility constitutes a problematic mode of ideological censorship. For him, two types of censorship exist: one based on political incentives, and the other on commercial ones. For instance, political regulations, moral standards, and commercial requirements belong to these two types, which he recapitulates as institutional censorship. Kamei’s two

6772_Book_CC.indd 52

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

53

banned films, Fighting Soldiers and A Japanese Tragedy, illustrate this institution­ alized political censorship. Still It’s Good to Live also falls into this censorship category, although the film’s producer is not as forceful as the governmental agent. Yet Metz also adds another type of censorship: the censorship of the plau­ sible that dictates a genre. According to him, “The arts of representation—and the cinema is one of them, which, whether ‘realistic’ or ‘fantastic,’ is always figu­ rative and almost always fictional—do not represent all that is possible—all the possibles—but only the plausible possibles . . . from its inception, the Plausible is a reduction of the possible; it is an arbitrary and cultural restriction of real pos­ sibles; it is, in fact, censorship: Among all the possibilities of figurative fiction, only those authorized by previous discourse will be ‘chosen.’”  46 In other words, the plausible is established in such a way that initially-dis­ persed discourses cluster together, organize a sequence, and comprise a corpus of common opinions that start to repeat themselves. To take the atomic bomb vic­ timhood discourse, in the representation of the hibakusha there is a substantial difference between Shindō’s Children of Hiroshima and Sekikawa’s Hiroshima. Whereas the ideology of martyrdom penetrates Shindō’s narrative, this is less true in the Sekikawa’s case, where the film is primarily produced as a critique by Shindō; Sekikawa’s film encompasses twisted figures, such as orphaned delin­ quent boys defacing a burial site and selling the skulls of atomic bomb victims to American tourists. After these two different films, Kamei and Imai then “chose” to follow Shindō’s approach. These subsequent movies thus “authorized” the pattern of martyrdom, and contributed to the formation of a new film genre. Accordingly, movies such as Sekikawa’s, with its polyphony of hibakusha voices, became less plausible. The consequence of this censorship, as Satō sees it, is that the narrative of martyrdom allows the audience to believe that the atomic bombing can damage human nature only superficially, no matter how brutally it can change an individual’s fate.47 This humanist belief promotes a false sense of assurance that the victim’s hardship and trauma are solvable only if this kind of material and emotional type of support is provided. RESNAIS’ TRANSGRESSION FROM THE CHRISTIAN FRAMEWORK In Still It’s Good to Live, Kamei appeals not only to a national but also to an international viewership. The opening sequence combines a number of Christian images, such as the collapsed Urakami Cathedral near ground zero in the Nagasaki bombing and the Virgin Mary statue at its gates.48 The Virgin Mary’s scorched face, penetrated by heat rays at the time of the explosion, makes her look as if she is shedding tears. Still It’s Good to Live also includes an episode of a hibakusha child in bed wearing a cross and praying to Mary. In the final part, the film focuses on a widowed mother who is a devout Christian. Her face was burned in the atomic bombing, just as the statue of Mary was. Nevertheless, except at the height of the catastrophe the mother keeps her faith.

6772_Book_CC.indd 53

6/12/18 6:57 PM

54

Chapter 2

While suffering from the atomic bomb disease herself, the widowed mother has become a day laborer to support her daughter, who has also been severely disabled by the atomic blast. Despite the objections of her relatives, the mother uncompromisingly provided the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum with a waxmodeled sample of her daughter’s hand, which had been deformed by the intense heat of the explosion. Her aim is to demonstrate the cruelty of the bombing’s having targeted human beings. What follows this episode is the scene in which the displayed wax copy of her daughter’s hand deeply affects a white female museum visitor. In this way, Still It’s Good to Live addresses the Christian imperative to love one’s neighbor. Being a Catholic himself, Kamei enacts this all-encompassing tendency within Christian (and Marxist) thinking. Kamei mentions later in an anecdote that filming the hibakusha made him hope to grant all their wishes, like Christ.49 It is Resnais who played the role of Bakhtin’s clown to Kamei’s Christian philanthropy through his making of Hiroshima Mon Amour. As mentioned in the introduction, Resnais was thoroughly familiar with the content of Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live. Thus, the French female character in Hiroshima Mon Amour is considered to be an avatar of the sympathetic female museum visitor in Still It’s Good to Live. Yet in Resnais’ version, after her visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, rather than contemplating the magnitude of the tragedy, she treats herself to a one-night stand. This well-known montage in the opening sequence, which superimposes bodies making love over corpses covered by nuclear fallout—perhaps an expression of blasphemy of the land of martyrdom—demonstrates a mode of banality in the convergence of pain and pleasure.50 This transformation of the female avatar increases the possibility that audiences neither love their neighbors nor mind this lack of love, even though it eventually leads to the absence of love toward themselves. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais also purposely eliminated the Christian images of the burned faces of both Mary and the hibakusha mother from the footage he had borrowed from Still It’s Good to Live. Instead, he used only the close-up shot of the daughter’s deformed hand without providing any back­ ground information, as if he wished to prevent affective reactions from emerg­ ing in the audience by blocking his or her easy sympathy or identification with the hibakusha. In so doing, Hiroshima Mon Amour constitutes the palimpsest of Still It’s Good to Live, like the “fool” that cries out for the need to subvert the hermeneutics of the epic world within it. KUROSAWA AND HIS NUCLEAR FILMS Outside Japan, Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki received occasional appreciation in artistic and intellectual circles and won minor international film awards.51 Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live was one of those movies. But a few films

6772_Book_CC.indd 54

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

55

received open criticism beyond national borders: Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (1991) and Imamura’s Black Rain (1989). Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August gained renown because it is by one of the most influential film directors in the world, and because the film’s reference to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki caused stri­ dent reactions in the United States after its release. Kurosawa held a persistent interest in nuclear issues throughout his career. His first nuclear film, Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955), portrays the ways in which fear of nuclear wars brings an ordinary man called Nakajima to the verge of insanity, and isolates him from his bewildered family. Dreams (Yume, 1990), released one year before Rhapsody in August, also devotes one omnibus episode to a mon­ strously transformed human existence after a nuclear plant’s meltdown. But a direct reference to the U.S. atomic bombing is first made in Rhapsody in August, in response to the negative reactions caused by Record of a Living Being decades earlier. According to the film critic Donald Richie, the claim of this 1955 film that the nuclear crisis is common property to be shared worldwide infuriated some of Japanese critics, since it also indirectly absolves the United States of any blame.52 Indeed, the story of Record of a Living Being could be staged anywhere in the world, not necessarily in Japan. In this sense, this film offers a stark contrast to the works of Sekikawa and Kamei that were released in the same period; their films address issues specifically relevant to the Japanese context after imposed silence under censorship in the U.S. occupation. As in Rashomon, the message of Record of a Living Being lies in its self-referential structure, which destabilizes the positionality of the viewer indifferent to a nuclear threat that can poten­ tially jeopardize the world. Yet the film fails to problematize the agents respon­ sible for this threat. A lack of specific reference to the parties directly involved in the nuclear confrontation is also evident in the 1950s American film On the Beach (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959). While illustrating the desperate situation in which all creatures in the northern hemisphere are annihilated by nuclear wars, the film never mentions who initiated the first nuclear attacks. It only vaguely implies that nuclear wars started somewhere far from Australia, where the pro­ tagonists were lucky to escape instant death. Though they anticipate facing waves of fatal radiation soon, no one displays strong resentment toward the nuclear aggressor.53 Yet Kurosawa’s spatial and temporal grasp of nuclear issues intersects with a different interest. As the film critic Satō argues in Record of a Living Being, Kurosawa radically questions the family and the nation—the two institutions that can not only usurp our freedom but also thrust us into war.54 Rhapsody in August offers a twisted extension of this familial and national saga. But it sparked criticism in the United States because of the scene in which the Japanese American character, Clark, played by Richard Gere, apologizes to his Japanese grandmother, Kane, for his lack of knowledge about the cause of her husband’s

6772_Book_CC.indd 55

6/12/18 6:57 PM

56

Chapter 2

death, namely the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. As some critics have pointed out, this scene was misinterpreted as Clark’s apologizing for the U.S. atomic bombing.55 Vincent Canby, a reviewer for the New York Times, promptly retorted, “If Clark can apologize for bombing Nagasaki, why can’t Granny apologize for the raid on Pearl Harbor? . . . I suspect that he [Kurosawa] would admit that he doesn’t know how Americans feel about the war.”56 A number of scholars also complained that Kurosawa’s film promoted a sense of Japanese victimiza­ tion, without any mention of Japan’s wartime aggression.57 It is undeniable that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inseparable from the war aggression initiated by Japan. The U.S. atomic bombing is locatable within a chain of atrocities in World War II also perpetrated by the Japanese military. Yet as Akira Lippit insinuates, in the contention of Canby and others, there is a recycling of “the rhetoric of apologists for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”58 Another problem is that Canby’s vindication prompts a call for the formation of the monolithic American subject along with a seamless national narrative, which conveniently disregards the ruptures that are not readily bridgeable in American history. This is to say that the establishment of this national subject and national narrative precisely demonstrates how important a role Hiroshima and Nagasaki have played in shaping the postwar American national identity. To place the relationship of Clark and Kane within the simple dichotomy of Americans versus Japanese misses historical complexities embedded in the characters in Rhapsody in August. Clark is from a Japanese American family in Hawaii. This already suggests his complex positionality vis-à-vis the two coun­ tries. As Sally Engle Merry maintains, Hawaii can be deemed a territory colo­ nized by the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.59 Decades later Hawaii was attacked by Japan as its first target in the Asia-Pacific War. At that time Japanese Americans in Hawaii already comprised too large an immigrant population to be interned; thus their destiny was unlike that of their kin on the West Coast. But both groups became battered figures with little choice but to “go for broke” in the American military to demonstrate their loyalty to the U.S. nation. To unhesitatingly include Clark under the rubric of “we Americans” neglects this historical dissonance between mainstream Americans and Japanese immigrants.60 The same thing should apply to the relationship between the mainland and Hawaii, when considering the unique history of Hawaii as an independent kingdom before its annexation to the mainland. Therefore, the subjugation of Clark as the simple victimizer of the atomic bombing does not make sense, nor do his words constitute an apology from the victimizer to the victimized. Most importantly, the conversations between Clark and Kane take place between family members, not between representatives of both nations. From this standpoint, an entirely new form of relationship emerges between the two: a transpacific familial relationship that does not necessar­ ily require mediation by national narratives. Kurosawa designs this innovative

6772_Book_CC.indd 56

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

57

family structure, with the capacity to embrace pain, trauma, and conflicts, as a solution to the “prison house” of the family and the nation that he has prob­ lematized in Record of a Living Being. This new transpacific relationship also provides a forum in which these family members can acquire a different type of knowledge, as seen in the figure of the active and future-oriented Clark, a postwar generation with no direct experience of trauma. Kurosawa also assigns an important position to Kane’s house as a site of travel for all the protagonists. For Clark, her house represents one important origin of his immigrant family. For her grandchildren living in the urban envi­ ronment in Japan, it is the theme-park-like countryside filled with fearful folk­ lore. And for their parents, it is an indispensable link to financial benefits from successful relatives overseas. The rural village in Nagasaki is directly connected to the profitable farm owned by Clark’s family across the Pacific in Hawaii, dis­ playing the capacity to encompass various global impacts. Kane’s house inter­ sects such a transnational dynamism, including her ultimate “migration” to past memories. Everyone has to travel to her house to share a coeval relation­ ship, while Kane, soon after their arrival, has left for a place within her memory that is unreachable to all. In this way, the film creates this ironic contradiction of the spatial arrangement of her house. This spatial contradiction, along with the temporal fusion, is a radical inquiry into the signification of the local, the global, and the transnational. As James Clifford asks, “‘Local’ in whose terms?   How is significant difference politically articulated, and challenged? Who deter­ mines where (and when) a community draws its lines, names its insiders and outsiders?”61 In contrast with a conventional East-West binary, Rhapsody in August does not present Clark’s visit as an ethnographic field trip to Japan. Rather, it empha­ sizes a sense of foreignness shared by the grandchildren visiting Kane from urban areas inside Japan during their summer vacation.62 While underscoring a generation gap and a temporal difference more than national, racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, the film situates the memory of the atomic bombing at the core of the family’s cross-referenced meeting place. As seen in the final scene, the memory of the bomb ultimately arises as a black hole that everyone seeks while wandering in a rainstorm and losing a sense of time. This space of the rainstorm is also the space ruled by insanity prompted by the sudden mental disorders of Kane. Therefore it is also the space in which a frenzied Kane and demented Nakajima from Record of a Living Being can finally meet each other. Kurosawa’s repeated attempts to represent nuclear issues should also be understood in conjunction with a history of American and Japanese authori­ ties’ fostering of amnesia about the atomic bombing in Japan. Kurosawa once stated, “The people who survived Nagasaki don’t want to remember their expe­ rience because the majority of them, in order to survive, had to abandon their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. They still can’t stop feeling guilty. Afterwards, the U.S. forces that occupied the country for six years [sic]

6772_Book_CC.indd 57

6/12/18 6:57 PM

58

Chapter 2

influenced by various means the acceleration of forgetfulness, and the Japanese government collaborated with them.”63 To this day few Japanese films have focused on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Nor (with a handful of exceptions) have they included criticism of the United States. The Japanese authorities also habit­ ually disrupted the distribution of films on the atomic bombing for the con­ venience of the United States. In the early 1960s, Richie made the following observation about why there were not many films on Hiroshima or Nagasaki: Though there have been some unequivocally non-political films on the A-bomb . . . there have been such a number of politically oriented pic­ tures, that the result has been a disinclination on the part of many film­ makers to deal with the theme because to do so involves committing themselves to the political left, at least in the eyes of their audiences. . . . And, though leftist views are still fashionable, the governmental attitude is such that Communist directors find it difficult to distribute their films. Governmental authorities “talk” to the big distributing companies and the film is either not released at all or else (and this was the case of the apolitical Hiroshima Mon Amour) is released in such a manner—shown in suburban theaters, shown without publicity—that few people see it.64

Here Richie also attributes the lack of interest in Hiroshima Mon Amour to political intervention. But this scarcity of Japanese films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki stands in distinct contrast to other visual culture genres, such as kaijū eiga (monster films), TV dramas, manga, and anime, in which battle scenes are haunted by ruined sites in a nuclear apocalypse. Yet these images rely on abstract and unspecified nuclear wars in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only remotely evoked.65 In the midst of the Cold War, Derrida contended that nuclear war is a fable, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are merely at the end of the spectrum of conventional warfare.66 A large part of Japanese visual culture, at least on the surface, shares this rhetorical separation between “unlocalizable” nuclear wars and the American atomic bombings. While films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have continuously been created in Japan, as Richie wrote more than a half cen­ tury ago, “the thing [the atomic bomb] itself has become the very epitome of chaos unleashed.”67 We should be reminded that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 took place on the foundation of this chaotic and political history of the representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. BLACK RAIN MADE BY IMAMURA AND IBUSE Another film that drew attention from international film audiences is Imamura’s Black Rain. Produced two years before Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August, this film also received mixed reviews from international film critics. Black Rain is the film

6772_Book_CC.indd 58

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

59

adaptation of the novel of the same name written in 1966 by the well-known Japanese writer Ibuse Masuji. Since Ibuse was not a hibakusha, he dramatized a number of testimonies and memoirs written by hibakusha, such as the diary of Shigematsu Shizuma. The use of Shigematsu’s diary later backfired because of controversies over whether Ibuse’s novel was an acceptable use of others’ work or plagiarism. Imamura was a renowned Japanese film director and also one of only a handful of directors worldwide to have won the Palme d’Or twice at the Cannes Film Festival. Black Rain was made several years after Imamura earned his first Palme d’Or for The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushi kō) in 1983 (and his second for The Eel, or Unagi, in 1997). The late 1970s and the early 1980s also saw antinuclear movements rising to a fever pitch throughout Europe, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere in the midst of the Cold War. Yet neither this worldwide antinuclear trend nor Imamura’s fame could summon favorable reviews for Black Rain abroad. Satō depicts the negative responses given to Black Rain at this international venue as follows: “When Imamura’s Black Rain was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was criticized as lacking a critical exami­ nation of Japanese militarism. From the time of Japan’s defeat in World War II until the present, Japanese directors have made a great many films criticizing Japan’s aggressive military behavior and the spirit of militarism in that coun­ try. For Japanese this has become common knowledge; but non-Japanese don’t know this.”68 Actually, the Japanese directors who made films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had also eagerly produced antiwar films; Kamei and Sekikawa are typical of these leftist directors. In postwar Japan, antiwar sentiment and pacifist tendencies were dominant especially between the 1970s and 1990s. But in many parts of the world, the sense of alarm about Japan was more immanent due to the surge of its strong economy at that time. In addition, most Japanese films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including Imamura’s Black Rain, do not really rise above the martyrdom narrative depicting Japanese as war victims. In particular, Imamura’s Black Rain incurred criticism overseas since it contains an ambiguity that derives from its conflation of the victim and the victimizer. Black Rain foregrounds a union between the female hibakusha Yasuko and the shell-shocked Japanese veteran Yūichi. Combined with the film’s lack of ref­ erence to wartime mobilization in Japanese society, this coupling was seen as a reinforcement of the sentiment of victimization among all Japanese people. For instance, Carol Cavanaugh problematizes the scene that highlights the faces of the statues of jizō (Buddhist saviors of the helpless) carved by Yūichi: When Yuichi restages the horror of combat for Yasuko, his memories illuminate and emphasize the distortions of the stone faces of the Jizo he has carved. Are these the anguished expressions of Yuichi’s comrades? Or the disfigured victims of the atomic bomb? Is this Hiroshima? Or a

6772_Book_CC.indd 59

6/12/18 6:57 PM

60

Chapter 2

battlefield in the Philippines? The film persuades us that there really is no difference between battle and bomb. In the iconographic use of Jizo, Black Rain successfully reconstructs innocent suffering as equally shared in Japan by men and women, soldiers and civilians, children and adults, and so fulfils the national desire to visualize the war in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone.69

As Cavanaugh points out, Black Rain offers a sympathetic depiction of both Yasuko and Yūichi as tragic figures of national martyrdom, as part of the victimization narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, her reading narrowly nationalizes and ethicizes the jizō statues as saviors of only helpless Japanese. Actually, the use of jizō statues in this scene also suggests the diffi­ culty of confining the excesses of the statues’ symbolization to a national frame­ work. There is a possibility that even Filipino civilians and American soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Philippines (places referred to in Cavanaugh’s analysis) can be included among the receivers of the jizō’s redemptive power. With this use of jizō statues, Black Rain steps into the appropriation of reli­ gious power that is supposed to transcend not only national boundaries but also the distinctions between the victim and the victimizer. The distinctive feature of Black Rain’s narrative lies in its disturbingly flexible potentiality to make the hibakusha and their suffering that easily accessible, comparable, and relatable to other, different kinds of “victims” and their traumatic experiences. Furthermore, Black Rain skillfully combines other popular narrative devices by elevating the young female figure Yasuko to an innocent and tragic virgin, while representing Yūichi as a good citizen victimized by the war. Therein, Yūichi, once a member of the Japanese military, takes on the victim status with ease. However, it is also possible to decipher Black Rain as the thematization of postwar social ostracism, with a focus on discrimination against the hibakusha as well as against the defeated army’s returnees. Although he does not mention Black Rain, Donald E. Pease considers that the hibakusha embodies psychologi­ cal isolation within the society. He equates the hibakusha to American Vietnam War veterans, using Robert Jay Lifton’s theorization on trauma:70 “Neither the experiences of hibakusha nor the veterans Lifton examined could be represented in the image repertories of their respective national narratives. As psychic mate­ rials in excess of any narrative’s power to derive significance, these profoundly disturbing experiences remained unforgettable and unrepresentable somatic symptoms and returned hibakusha and Lifton’s Vietnam veterans alike to the respective scenes of their traumas.”71 In terms of the assessment of the relationship between the hibakusha and the Japanese national symbolic order, Pease’s view counters Cavanaugh’s. For him, the hibakusha are not the medium to create the unified sense of Japanese

6772_Book_CC.indd 60

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

61

victimhood but rather the object of social abjection in Japanese society. Nevertheless, his view is akin to Cavanaugh’s, in light of connecting the hiba­ kusha to other groups of people with different backgrounds and different experi­ ences. He is well aware that Vietnam War veterans can hardly be seen as victims, given all the Vietnamese killed and injured by the rampant use of toxic defoli­ ants and napalm bombs in the American campaigns. Still, he points out that an astonishing number of Vietnam War returnees identify themselves with the hibakusha. For Pease, the hibakusha victimized by the American military belong to the same group of victims as Vietnam War returnees who were once agents of the American military even though they fought in a different war. Pease’s idea is based on Lifton’s well-known research on the hibakusha’s psychology under­ taken in the 1960s. However, in retrospect, there is no absolute necessity to equate the hibakusha to Vietnam War veterans as an example of social discrimi­ nation. Rather, the hibakusha have become the transnational and transpacific magnet of other psychic traumas. This type of translation, which renders the hibakusha’s experience acces­ sible to other forms of trauma, took place in the initial narrative of Black Rain, when Ibuse first wrote his novel. For this reason, Ibuse’s text was celebrated within Japanese literary circles as a new achievement that surpassed the works of Hara Tamiki and Ōta Yoko, writers with experience of the atomic bombing. As Kawaguchi Takayuki describes it, many Japanese critics welcomed Black Rain as the advent of a national literature that represents the “common” experience of the Japanese people. Ibuse’s work was particularly valued as retaining the ordinariness of everyday life in its portrait of the unquestionably extraordinary experience of the atomic bombing. Such acclaim for Black Rain by Japanese crit­ ics led to the dismissal of earlier genbaku literature by the hibakusha writers.72 According to Linda C. Ehrlich, Imamura held a similar view. He complained that the previous films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were too heavy, lacking a human sense. For him, Black Rain was simply a human comedy “about human peculiarities and pathos,” not necessarily genbaku cinema.73 Following Ibuse, Imamura made a point of translating the singularity of the hibakusha’s experi­ ence into the “common” experience of people elsewhere. Translation is unavoidable in signifying practices, and ultimately nothing is original in this sense. But Ibuse’s success made the hibakusha feel reduced to native informants, and rendered their writing a mere source of facts. The primary accusation that Ibuse’s Black Rain was plagiarism was lodged by the local Hiroshima poet and hibakusha Toyota Seishi, and counterclaims appeared among literary critics of genbaku literature such as Kuroko Kazuo.74 What lies behind this controversy is also the long-running tension between the hibakusha and others in Japan, a veiled hostility among the hibakusha against those making use of their experience for whatever reason. The controversy over intellectual property continues today.

6772_Book_CC.indd 61

6/12/18 6:57 PM

62

Chapter 2

THE UNBRIDGEABLE CHASM BETWEEN THE HIBAKUSHA AND OTHERS What needs to be clearly recognized in postwar Hiroshima is that the city was soon dominated by people who had come from outside after the bombing. The annihilation of people who had been at the center of the city meant that the survivors lost all of their possessions—their family members and friends, prop­ erty, jobs, belongings, and health. Consequently, most could not stay where they had lived before the bombing: their lives were completely destroyed. Then large reconstruction projects began in Hiroshima under the U.S. occupation. Many destitute Japanese, often victims of conventional U.S. bombings and facing star­ vation in other areas across the country, flocked to Hiroshima to take advantage of these job opportunities. This situation caused a drastic shift in the demo­ graphic composition of Hiroshima. Ōta wrote that she was shocked by the real­ ity of Hiroshima during her visit several years after the bombing, because most people that she met were not hibakusha; instead, they were military returnees, repatriates from former colonies, and newcomers from Kansai, Kyushu, and even Hokkaido. This drastic change in population made her shudder in realiza­ tion of how massive the number of people killed in Hiroshima had been. The chasm between the hibakusha and others—their physical, psychologi­ cal, and material states—was unbridgeable due to the difference in their postwar experience. Hibakusha life in the early postwar period suffered from radiation illness and continuous destitution. For them, it was not just a one-time experi­ ence of the catastrophe caused by the bomb’s explosion. Ignorance about the hibakusha’s dire situation also invited further discrimination against them. Even ten years after the bombing, traumatized hibakusha were being brought to the edge of despair, and some committed suicide. However, by then the postwar chaos had been forgotten in other areas in the wake of the rapid economic growth. Even after Japan became one of the biggest economies in the world, where from the 1960s onward its people were able to enjoy affluent lives, the trauma that resided in the hibakusha’s psyche was not easily reconciled. For instance, the NHK television producer Sakurai Hitoshi wrote about how he learned of a glaring gap between the hibakusha and others. A man whom he interviewed in the 1970s had encountered the atomic explosion in Hiroshima at the age of fif­ teen. This male hibakusha, the owner of a curry restaurant in Matsuyama City in western Japan, had for a long time been visiting institutions for physically handicapped children to photograph them. When Sakurai asked why, the man answered that it was because his two children had been born with cerebral palsy, and one of them had died at the age of two. However, when his third child was born with no disabilities, a distinctively different attitude toward the hibaku­ sha experience became evident between him and his non-hibakusha wife. His wife implored him to forget about the atomic bombing, but he only repeatedly

6772_Book_CC.indd 62

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment

63

told her that he could never separate himself from the “side of the dead.” They divorced immediately after the third child’s birth.75 As in this man’s case, the hibakusha’s psychological trauma cannot be easily understood even by family members.76 To what extent the “human sense” made accessible by Imamura, and the sense of a “common experience” in Ibuse’s novel, can adequately voice the hibakusha’s unbearable agony and plight is a significant question. The narrato­ logical devices provided in Black Rain in both literary and filmic forms efface or conceal these voices. As we see in the next chapter, the inner life of the hibakusha refuses easy access and a commonsense approach.

6772_Book_CC.indd 63

6/12/18 6:57 PM

CHAPTER 3

“YOU SAW NOTHING IN HIROSHIMA” Performing Atomic Bomb Victimhood and the Visibility of the Hibakusha

Discussion of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour has revolved around its riddle-like opening dialogue. The Japanese man proclaims in a voice-over, “You saw noth­ ing in Hiroshima.” The French woman refutes this by saying, “I saw everything. The hospital, for instance.” Throughout the opening sequence, this dialogue is repeated. What is at stake here is the obscure relationship between what the protagonists have and have not seen, and between what the film has and has not captured. What do we see and not see in this film regarding the hibakusha? This question of visual representation is all the more formidable to investigate because cinema is always already the media of inversion between photographic positives and negatives, where what is seeable is presented only in reverse. To disentangle the questions of visibility and recognition presented in Hiroshima Mon Amour, let us consider the figure of Kikkawa Kiyoshi,1 one of the few hibakusha that Resnais came into direct contact with in shooting the hospital scene that the French woman refers to in the voice-over above. Hiroshima Mon Amour spends the first fifteen minutes showcasing the disastrous aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the human damage. This is the only part of the film that directly represents the hiba­ kusha, since the remainder is devoted to the convoluted relationship between the French woman and the Japanese man. Furthermore, the majority of the images used in this opening sequence are borrowed from the footage of three previous Japanese films: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), Hiroshima (1953), and Still It’s Good to Live (1955). In the opening sequence, the hospital scene indicated by the French woman’s remarks is one of a few segments containing Resnais’ own shots as portraits of the hibakusha. This hospital scene provides more than a visual correspondence to the French woman’s words—it also bespeaks an irreducible gap between images and words, a gap that encapsulates the question of the visibility of the hibaku­ sha or the visual possibility (of the hospital scene) that goes beyond the verbal 64

6772_Book_CC.indd 64

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

65

statement (“I saw everything. The hospital, for instance.”).2 Kikkawa momen­ tarily appears in this hospital scene as one of the patients suffering from the atomic bomb disease more than ten years later. Let us explore Kikkawa’s activi­ ties and performance as a victim, along with the arduous history of many hiba­ kusha in postwar Hiroshima, and how Resnais comes to terms with hibakusha such as Kikkawa while twisting their representation to allow dual interpretations as a parallel to reversing photographic positives and negatives. NAMING “HIROSHIMA NUMBER ONE” In the early postwar period, Kikkawa was one of the most familiar faces among the hibakusha in Hiroshima. This is because at that time he willingly revealed his large keloid scars to the public, skin that had been thickened and discolored by the intense heat and radiation of the atomic explosion. Compared to other internal (therefore less visible) atomic bomb diseases that appeared in the first twenty years, such as cataracts, anemia, leukemia, and other cancers, the more conspicuous keloids easily became the epitome of hibakusha injuries from atomic bombings.3 While many hibakusha were reluctant to publicly exhibit their keloid scars, Kikkawa volunteered to expose his scar to anybody—tourists, journalists, scientists, film directors, and students who came to Hiroshima. Consequently, Kikkawa was heralded by the media as a popular referent for atomic victimization. He appeared not only in newspaper feature stories but also in films such as Children of Hiroshima (1952) and Hiroshima (1953), the first two films produced after the U.S. occupation. He was also the model for the protagonists—Ishikawa Kiyoshi and Yoshii Kiyoshi (although given slightly different names from his own)—in Ōta Yoko’s nonfiction novel City of the Evening Lull and People There: Actual Conditions in 1953 (Yūnagi no machi to hito to: 1953 nen no jittsutai, 1955). Kikkawa’s involvement with the media later morphed into his own fundraising for the production of another film on the hibakusha, Hiroshima 1966 (dir. Shirai Kōsei, 1966).4 Kikkawa remained a huge “media attraction” in the first few decades of postwar Hiroshima. Given his accessibility and availability as a well-known hibakusha, it is no wonder that Resnais also approached him when shooting Hiroshima Mon Amour. Kikkawa was not only ostentatious but also controversial. To make a living, he ran a small souvenir shop beside the Atomic Bomb Dome near ground zero. There he not only sold postcards of Hiroshima and roof tiles that had been severely misshapen by the atomic blast but also showed his keloid skin as a draw for tourists. He even linked up with a local bus company to include his shop in its tourist itinerary of the sightseeing spots in Hiroshima. In the sphere of tourism, one of the most thriving modern industries in the age of specta­ cle, the trace of the unprecedented disaster was transformed into an object of commodification, and thus also into an object of eroticization, as Marx terms it. But Kikkawa’s promotion of his keloid wounds also constituted a prelude

6772_Book_CC.indd 65

6/12/18 6:57 PM

66

Chapter 3

to presenting testimonial accounts of the damage that the atomic bomb had inflicted upon the human body. Such visual representation had long been sup­ pressed under the U.S. occupation. Four decades later, the poet and local activ­ ist in Hiroshima, Masuoka Toshikazu, reminisced about Kikkawa as the first of the “kataribe of Hiroshima,” the citizen volunteers who spoke to visitors of Hiroshima about their bomb experiences.5 In the 1950s, Kikkawa’s act was striking enough to provoke a wide spec­ trum of emotional reactions. For instance, a big signboard carrying exceedingly abusive language against him in both Japanese and English stood outside his shop. It had been built by a right-wing activist, the owner of a souvenir shop next door. When Kamei Fumio visited Hiroshima to make his documentary Still It’s Good to Live, he filmed this “spectacle of excess.” Although he deleted this shot from the film’s final version per the producer’s preference, Kamei later commented in his essay about how overwhelming the sight had been—it looked like a wrestling match where open hostility was brazenly displayed in the very place where the enormous tragedy had occurred.6 Kamei also referred to a rumor that he had heard during his filming in Hiroshima: that Kikkawa was displaying his scars for profit.7 But Kamei was sympathetic to Kikkawa, since he was aware that in the early postwar period, many hibakusha had been left to struggle after losing everything in the bombing. In 1963 Kikkawa’s souvenir shop was pulled down as an illegal construc­ tion. Kikkawa then opened a bar in downtown Hiroshima called Genshirin (Primeval Forest), which became a saloon where many intellectuals, journalists, artists, teachers, and union workers gathered. But until then, Kikkawa’s show­ ing off his keloid scars left an unforgettable impression on spectators’ minds. An American Fulbright professor assigned to Hiroshima University, Hugh M. Gloster, recollected that “the most unforgettable example of atomic disfigure­ ment that we saw was the totally seared back of Kiyoshi Kikkawa, better known in Hiroshima as ‘A-Bomb Victim No. 1’. . . . the first and also the worst atomic skin burn which I saw during my two years in Japan.”8 In sum, Kikkawa was a seducer, agitator, and provoker of the emotions of those who viewed his injuries. The first time Kikkawa exposed his body to the camera, it was an accident. Debilitated by radiation injuries for six years after the bombing, Kikkawa had been hospitalized in the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital. Compared to many others who had to be self-reliant to survive in such a destitute state, Kikkawa was rather fortunate to be able to stay in the hospital. But this good fortune did not come without a price. In April 1947, the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, the main medical facility for atomic bomb diseases, received a visit from high-rank­ ing American military officials who were touring Hiroshima. The vice-director of the hospital, Shigetō Fumio, singled out Kikkawa to give interviews to the American media accompanying these military officials, including United Press International, the Associated Press, Life, Time, and a number of newspapers.

6772_Book_CC.indd 66

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

67

Kikkawa at first refused the hospital’s request, since he could not tolerate the idea of being a spectacle. But he soon changed his mind when he realized that this was rather a good opportunity to directly demonstrate the cruelty of the atomic bombing to the American eye. Later in his book, Kikkawa described the complex emotions he felt when he exposed his body to the gaze of the American reporters; caught in a mixture of mounting rage and sheer delight, he yelled loudly inside his mind, “Look at me! How can I endure my life unless I vindicate myself as a testament to survival from the atomic catastrophe?”9 Yet, when an article appeared in Life in September 1947, Kikkawa words were more docile, with only a tinge of sarcasm: “Something good must come of this. I now want to be sent to the U.S. so doctors can experiment with my body. It does not matter if I die as long as I can be of some use to a world at peace.”10 The mise-en-scène for the accompanying photo was set outdoors, on the sunny roof of the hospital building, to highlight Kikkawa’s keloid scars. Due to Life’s hesitation about showing the massive extent of Kikkawa’s wounds, the camera angle was oblique so that his scars were only partially visible. This static com­ position did not convey Kikkawa’s overwhelming emotions or his intention to “make a scene.” This was when the American press dubbed him “Hiroshima Number One” (Genbaku Ichogō). Afterward Kikkawa began using this “title” when introducing himself to the Japanese media. He chose to do so precisely because it was a name given to him by the Americans whose nation had exercised the first nuclear attack. After this initial episode, Kikkawa showed his keloid scars to more than one thou­ sand visitors to the hospital over a period of years until the hospital pressured him to leave in April 1951 by cutting off his social welfare assistance without his consent. According to Kikkawa, the hospital decided to force him out after he began organizing a group of patients to request to improve the hygiene of their meals. Departing from the hospital with his wife, who had been hospitalized with him, in order to survive Kikkawa opened the small souvenir shop near the Atomic Bomb Dome with the help of other hibakusha. ABANDONING THE HIBAKUSHA UNDER U.S. OCCUPATION While written representations of the hibakusha sporadically appeared even under the censorship of that time, visual representation was suppressed for the entirety of the U.S. occupation, except for a few events near the end.11 Yet hibakusha’s public exposure outside of Japan was continuously hindered for a much longer time. In the fall of 2002, the United Nations headquarters in New York canceled a scheduled photographic exhibition of the destroyed city landscapes and the injured hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was supposed to be shown in the entrance lobby. After long negotiations, the exhibition was finally held in 2005. The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations

6772_Book_CC.indd 67

6/12/18 6:57 PM

68

Chapter 3

(Nihon Gensuibaku Higaisha Dantai Kyōgikai) speculated that the force of these brutal visual images caused the initial cancellation. In other words, avoiding the psychological impact of the visual outweighed the importance of obtaining the visual knowledge of the extreme degree of violence inflicted on the hibakusha. When issues of visibility, knowledge, and censorship become intertwined, as in this case, it is all the more significant to understand what Kikkawa’s interventionist use of his body as both a visual object and a visual tes­ timony suggests to us. Before discussing Kikkawa’s performance of victimhood further, let us turn to the hibakusha’s social situation after the war, in order to realize what he has challenged. During the U.S. occupation, visible markers of victimization, such as keloid scars, remained largely invisible to wider society due to a lack of proper public education. From November 1945 onward, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) had forbidden Japanese scientists to investigate the out­ comes of the atomic bombing, including any medical analyses. This policy met strong resistance from Japanese doctors who were desperately tackling the hiba­ kusha’s unprecedented medical problems. Their ardent appeals to undertake clinical examinations in order to find an effective remedy led to permission to share their studies orally, but publication of their studies was strictly prohibited until the end of the U.S. occupation. This ban caused the loss of many hibakusha who could have been saved if information on effective treatment had been more freely circulated.12 This initial seven-year gap also made it difficult to nurture social awareness of the atomic bomb disease and to openly educate people about it. After the end of the U.S. occupation, there were several journalistic and cin­ ematic attempts to give a visual explanation of the magnitude of the hibakusha’s victimization, but the general public remained mostly uninterested. As discussed in chapter 2, the surge of national interest in radiation illness finally occurred when the metropolitan media extensively covered the Lucky Dragon Incident in 1954. This incident grabbed the public’s attention, especially after people learned that radioactively contaminated fish had been sold whole­ sale in major fish markets. While this incident prompted antinuclear move­ ments on a national scale, people were basically concerned about food security in their everyday life. They were not interested in the continuing predicament of the hibakusha, who were mostly residents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cover-up of the hibakusha victimization during the U.S. occupation and the lack of understanding of their hardship in subsequent times created a specific social environment. The hibakusha confronted indifference and discrimination in both subtle and blatant forms, especially when they moved to remote places such as Tokyo and Hokkaido.13 It was not only the prohibition of coverage of their predicament that made the hibakusha invisible to Japanese society, but also administrative operations in Hiroshima. In a land totally leveled by the atomic bomb, the first municipal project undertaken was not a relief effort for the ravaged hibakusha but a physical

6772_Book_CC.indd 68

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

69

rehabilitation of the city. From December 1945 onward, advisory councils and a municipal bureau were formed in quick succession to promote reconstruc­ tion projects in Hiroshima. In February 1946, as early as six months after the bombing, a new city planning scheme was announced that would accommo­ date a future population of 350,000, and the go-ahead was given to construct a 1.32-million-square-meter green space and one-hundred-meter-wide roads.14 After the U.S. atomic bombing, the population of the city of Hiroshima had plunged from about 310,000 to 83,000. Yet it had already climbed back to 169,000 in February 1946, and to 185,000 in July 1946 because of an influx of discharged soldiers and returnees from former Asian colonies after the dis­ solution of the Japanese empire. A half of Hiroshima City’s general population lived within three kilometers of ground zero, and another half lived in a con­ gested area three kilometers outside ground zero, where there was a lack of food and housing.15 Nevertheless, the local government prioritized rehabilitation projects in sectors of industry—big business and communal facilities. The statistics from August 1947 indicate that the percentage of buildings and facilities restored visà-vis those prior to the bombing were 130 to 143 percent for factories, restau­ rants, schools, governmental offices, banks, and companies; 104 to 114 percent for unions, inns, and recreation centers; but only 64 percent for housing; and 55 percent for stores.16 Furthermore, a special law concerning Hiroshima’s recon­ struction was enacted in 1949 to facilitate more construction projects for public facilities such as the Peace Memorial Park. Since all legislation required SCAP’s approval, so as not to provoke the office, the city of Hiroshima formulated this law’s objective as the promotion of Hiroshima’s pursuit for permanent peace. These policies reflected the local administration’s intent to avoid any conflicts with the American authorities; such a compromise also prompted newcomers to favor city development. As a result, these rehabilitation projects received consid­ erable financing, despite the limited resources of the postwar era. ABCC AND THE HIBAKUSHA While city rehabilitation projects received financing, the hibakusha were left without sufficient public assistance. Hibakusha relief ended in early October 1945, just two months after the U.S. atomic bombing. Prewar Japanese leg­ islation stipulated two months as the requisite length of time for rescue from wartime destruction. After this, no new laws, no new organizations, and no new hospitals were established for relief under the U.S. occupation. Upon the closure of the temporary aid stations, the hibakusha’s treatment principally came at their own expense at available hospitals—in spite of the fact that most hospitals and clinics were heavily damaged in the atomic bombing. Although many hibakusha had lost the family members, properties, jobs, and good health that they could otherwise have depended on, no health care or welfare support

6772_Book_CC.indd 69

6/12/18 6:57 PM

70

Chapter 3

system was introduced for them. The only new institution launched for the hibakusha was the American academic organization the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission (ABCC). ABCC was founded in March 1947 following president Harry Truman’s direction to examine the human damage caused by the atomic bomb. But it was equipped only with inspection instruments, not those for care or treatment. Many hibakusha who visited ABCC in compliance with its demand for routine checkups complained about the examination process, since they neither received treatment during the examination nor the inspection results afterward. Oftentimes these checkups made the hibakusha’s conditions worse, because they were forced to subject their already weakened bodies to the burden of blood tests and other inspection measures. Hibakusha were also psychologically traumatized by insensitive and at times inhumane treatment. Moreover, the checkups at ABCC were so time consuming that the hibakusha suffered financially; many of them worked day by day, due to the loss of their prewar workplaces. To undergo long checkups, they had to take time off with no compensation. When the hiba­ kusha refused to have medical examinations, ABCC threatened to subject them to trial by court-martial. In addition, as soon as hibakusha passed away, ABCC came to their homes to retrieve their bodies for postmortem examinations. The internal organs from as many as 1,500 bodies were sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC, without consent.17 These desperate situations began to change in the last year of the U.S. occupation. In January 1952, the local government finally started its survey of the current medical condition of the hibakusha. After Japan recovered its sover­ eignty in April 1952, Hiroshima citizens’ volunteer activities also began. In June 1952, various NPOs started to provide support for patients with keloid scars. In July of the same year, a group of surgeons gave free treatment to people suf­ fering from radiation disabilities. In January 1953, both public and semipublic organizations and NPOs in Hiroshima launched a new joint council to assist the hibakusha with medical treatment. Then in 1956, in the midst of the ground­ swell of antinuclear sentiment that arose after the Lucky Dragon Incident, the Japanese Red Cross built a new hospital in Hiroshima exclusively for hibakusha treatment. A new law that helped finance medical treatment for hibakusha was also established in 1957.18 Yet all these services were offered only belatedly. In her book Crimes of the Atomic Bombings: Why Were the Hibakusha Abandoned? (Genbaku hanzai: Hibakusha wa naze hōchi saretaka), the lawyer Shiina Masae criticizes both the American occupation forces and the Japanese government not only for inhu­ mane treatment of the hibakusha who were in a state of shock from this unprec­ edented catastrophe but also for forcing them to survive without any official support.19 In the United States, American ethical responsibility for the atomic bombings of the densely populated urban districts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

6772_Book_CC.indd 70

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

71

has been a matter for debate; however, the SCAP’s responsibility for abandoning these helpless hibakusha even after the conclusion of the war—as well as allow­ ing the deaths of many—has rarely been aired as a subject for ethical inquiry. According to Shiina, a false announcement made by general Thomas Farrell on September 6, 1945, set the tone for SCAP’s policy thereafter. Farrell declared that there were no longer patients in need of medical support in Hiroshima a month after the atomic bombing, since “all of them” had already died. Farrell also emphatically denied any lingering effects of radiation from the atomic bomb. For Shiina, the cover-up of the hibakusha’s victimization during the U.S. occupation reflected the American government’s policy, not merely SCAP’s; the aim was to eschew domestic and international criticism for the United States’ use of a cruel weapon that produced the long-term suffering of the hibakusha even after the war.20 In short, in postwar Hiroshima, two contrasting pictures coexisted like a photographic positive and negative: advanced reconstruction projects in prog­ ress in the urban areas, and the hibakusha deserted without official support. This was the social situation of postwar Hiroshima that Kikkawa had to face. Unable to stay at the hospital any longer, Kikkawa first visited the Hiroshima City municipal office for help. He beseeched mayor Hamai Shōzō in person to aid the hibakusha whose social status was relegated to the bottom rung of the society. He explained to Hamai how destitute they were, and asked if the local government had any rescue plans for them. Hamai answered only that to seek extra funds for the hibakusha was financially difficult, since the city was still in the middle of reconstruction.21 After that, Kikkawa began visiting the hibakusha living in solitude one by one, to share their health, job, and housing concerns and discuss how to mobi­ lize themselves for action. However, contrary to his anticipation of “complete” democracy in the postwar period, their gatherings were hampered by the police, who suspected that their activities were communist-related. Kikkawa used the warehouse that he had borrowed for his home as their meeting place, but the landlord, frightened by frequent visits from the police, soon evicted him. Being stumped by this turn of the events, Kikkawa sought out the pastor Tanimoto Kiyoshi, whose experience was depicted in John Hersey’s best-selling Hiroshima.22 He asked Tanimoto to let them use his church to avoid police interference. TANIMOTO AND THE HIROSHIMA MAIDENS Thereafter Tanimoto started to take the lead in the group’s activities. He arranged a tour of Tokyo for a group of the hibakusha but basically limited it to young women with keloid injuries, except for Kikkawa. This tour sensational­ ized the existence of the keloid scars in the public’s eyes. These injured young women, known as the Hiroshima Maidens (Genbaku Otome), faced camera

6772_Book_CC.indd 71

6/12/18 6:57 PM

72

Chapter 3

flashes everywhere they went on the tour due to Tanimoto’s preplanning of media coverage. The contrast between their youthful femininity and their brutal scars made them look pitiful as well as innocent, which ignited sympathy among the public. Tanimoto even staged a meeting between these women and impris­ oned war criminals at Sugamo Prison, as if it were a sentimental reconciliation between the ex-national leaders responsible for war and the hibakusha who had been abandoned by the nation for so long. Tanimoto attracted further American media attention in 1955 by taking these young women to the United States to receive plastic surgery from American doctors. This tour again presented the Hiroshima Maidens as tragic heroines as well as a media spectacle. But the American media coverage was devoid of any mention of how SCAP had prevented the hibakusha from receiving medi­ cal treatment and other support during the U.S. occupation; instead, the focus was on tales of discrimination “intrinsic” to Japanese culture that had driven the women into a dark corner of society. An implicit celebration of their cur­ rent luck at being in the “free and open” American nation emerged from this type of narrative. Naturally, the Hiroshima Maidens were put in a position to show their gratitude for the kindness of Americans, the very perpetrators of their predicament. In Hiroshima, local doctors who had tackled the problem of the keloid scars for years were disturbed by these events. After three-quarters of Hiroshima’s doctors were killed by the atomic bomb, it was these surviving local doctors and returnees from abroad who treated the hibakusha. Due to their own severe inju­ ries sustained in the bombing, some of the local doctors were themselves on the verge of death. Nevertheless, in this dire situation during the U.S. occupation they had continuously worked hard for their patients with unknown symptoms. They lacked not only medical facilities (which had been destroyed by the bomb) but also medical information under censorship. Thus it was upsetting to them that the media reported that the hibakusha could receive proper treatment only in big cities such as Tokyo or in the United States.23 Tanimoto’s strategy of using female hibakusha and making them a tragic spectacle to publicize the hibakusha’s hardship caused Kikkawa to eventually split from him. Kikkawa started another hibakusha organization by teaming up with the local hibakusha poet and activist Tōge Sankichi.24 He also added to his organization the director Shindō, who had filmed his keloid scars for his Children of Hiroshima. The actress Otowa Nobuko, who played the leading role in that film, also joined the group. Along with them came the painters Maruki Iri and Toshi, who produced famous murals of Hiroshima that illustrated the catastrophic sights a few days after the atomic bombing, and Ōta, who as a hiba­ kusha writer wrote extensively of her experience.25 To counter the celebrity status of Tamimoto and the Hiroshima Maidens, Kikkawa needed to include these intellectuals, or so-called bunka-jin, who had their own voices and independent channels for delivering their message to society through the media.

6772_Book_CC.indd 72

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

73

PERFORMING ATOMIC BOMB VICTIMHOOD Kikkawa himself seemed to have aspired to become a public figure by using his keloid wounds. But there was a reason for this. Even in a report in 1955, ABCC denied that the keloid scars were the result of the atomic explosion. Kikkawa’s appearance in the media thus constituted not only empirical proof of the impact of the bombing but also his political protest against ABCC’s continuous denial. His use of the title “Hiroshima Number One” also attests to the fact that his wounds resulted from the atomic bomb, as the American media had acknowl­ edged. By making his keloid scars a must-see on the tourist circuit and in the media, Kikkawa became a commercialized information-object, since he knew that no matter how perverse his performance looked, it was a magnetically cogent way to publicly disseminate knowledge about the damage done to the hibakusha. Yet Kikkawa was clearly different from the Hiroshima Maidens, who pre­ sented a gendered image of purity and innocence that craved protection and compassion. Instead, Kikkawa resisted the establishment of a “civil religion” that elevated Hiroshima victimization to a transcendental signifier. Hiraoka Takashi, an ex-Hiroshima mayor, says that he dislikes those who call Hiroshima a sacred city of world peace without having their consciences pricked.26 Hiroshima sur­ vivors were suddenly flung into a catastrophic condition in which they had no choice but to do whatever it took to survive, both in the midst of the calamity as well as in the years that followed. The harsh environment that the hibaku­ sha confronted cannot easily be sublimated or reconciled. Kikkawa’s “extreme” performance also reflected the “extreme” dimensions of experiencing the atomic bombing that in essence denied and despised humanity. Moreover, Kikkawa’s activity exposed not only the visibility of the hibaku­ sha but also that of their viewers. His performance—posing for the audience’s gaze—encompassed a sense of theatricality that created a subversion between the viewer and the viewed. Over the years Kikkawa must have become aware of what his performance could generate in the audience’s mind, like a veteran actor who plays the same role over and over again. His “stage” enmeshes specta­ tors through his face-to-face encounters with them. It carries the premise that spectators are always already a constituent of his “show” in such a way that the display of his disfigured body inevitably exhibits the hypocrisy and thus the obscenity of the spectators. Whether the motivation of the spectators stemmed from sympathy, curiosity, or physiological concerns, their viewing of Kikkawa’s scars concurrently caricatured their own presence at the scene. The structure of Kikkawa’s performance implicated the transformation of spectators into the “seen”—not only in the eyes of people outside of this mise-en-scène but also of Kikkawa himself, who is originally the “seen” in this staging. This subversion is radically different from film spectatorship in which viewers can enjoy an omni­ presence in the dark without ever experiencing the returning gaze of the actor.

6772_Book_CC.indd 73

6/12/18 6:57 PM

74

Chapter 3

Ōta’s narrative, City of the Evening Lull and People There, exemplifies this subversion of viewership. Kikkawa, given the name Yoshii Kiyoshi in this text, is portrayed as the man who voluntarily shows his keloid scars to a group of international theoretical physicists visiting Hiroshima from the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. In this episode, an American male scholar tells Yoshii that the hibakusha’s experience is not especially cruel compared with that of other war victims, such as the American soldiers still hospitalized with injuries from the Pearl Harbor attack and the civilians stripped of their limbs in the air raids on Tokyo and Osaka. His remarks provoke Yoshii to display his wounds to them on the spot. In this scene of exposure, Ōta keeps the description of Yoshii’s scars to a minimum and instead provides the detailed description of the spectators’ reac­ tions—a female American scholar promptly averts her eyes; the male scholar who provoked Yoshii’s anger bends toward him with his mouth slightly open and curiously studies his wounds; another male American scholar gazes at the scars while tightening his rosy cheeks and blinking his eyes like a child. Clearly, not only does the focus here shift from the “seen” (Kikkawa) to the “seer” (the visiting scientists) but also the “seer” becomes a spectacle. Ōta’s narrative cap­ tures their transformation into the object of the gaze, with the slight irony of their bearing witness to their own mutation process of becoming the “seen.” This subversion of positionalities between the “seer” and the “seen” comes into play precisely because both sides cannot refuse their coevalness in this theatri­ cal space. In such a situation, the body of Kikkawa does not serve as a universaliz­ ing point of reference to spectators. Rather, a basic premise of the organization of this space is that every time Kikkawa displays his body, he is “becoming” a hibakusha, or the figure fulfilling the position of a hibakusha in concert with the damage imposed on his body. What evokes his victimhood through this perfor­ mance is the spectators’ gaze on his body, or, to put it another way, his being­ seenness. By seeing his body, the spectators wish to demarcate their identity as not like his—not having deformed skin, or not having experienced radiation injuries. Yet at this point, another anxiety readily enters their minds: whether the skin, this extremely thin fabric, can be entirely reliable and sustainable as the border that separates the self from the other. This frailty of boundaries evoked by the skin leads them to question the clear-cut difference between the hibakusha and others. The spectators sense how precarious it is to contour dif­ ference in identity, in particular when positionality can easily be switched from the “seer” to the “seen.” THE “MODERN SKIN” AND COLONIAL FETISH Modernity’s obsession with gaze and visibility also plays out here, alongside its preoccupation with the construction of subjecthood and objecthood. But

6772_Book_CC.indd 74

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

75

subjecthood is not founded on a secure footing. As in the interactions between Kikkawa and his audience, the skin constitutes a threshold at which this diver­ gence/implosion takes place. According to Didier Anzieu, the skin is where the self is established, threatened, and traversed. He calls this space the “skin ego” and assigns it three functions: envelope/sac, barrier/screen, and filter/sieve. In brief, the skin ego manifests itself “as a containing, unifying envelope for the Self; as a protective barrier for the psyche; and as a filter of exchanges and a sur­ face of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible.”27 While Anzieu defines these functions in spatial terms, Anne Anlin Cheng incorporates the temporal disparity and differentiation in her discussion on the “modern skin.” She maintains that the body is “one that produces not only containment but also latency and immanence and one that turns pres­ ence into promise and a haunting.”28 For her, the “modern skin” also comes into being according to its connection with the past (a haunting) or the future (latency). It is not only the haunting of the past but also the potential or future prospect, or latency, that gives an idiosyncratic shape to the “modern skin.” This temporal dimension of the “modern skin” allows us to characterize Kikkawa’s performance of becoming a hibakusha in relation to its innate tem­ poral dynamics. His performance inaugurates a theatrical space organized not only by coevalness and contemporaneity with his audience but also by his own singular temporality: a prospect that he will have to live as a hibakusha, insofar as the radiation injuries—both the visible and invisible damage—will reside within him until death (and possibly into future generations). This particular lived/living temporality constructs his singular history while signifying the fun­ damental change that has taken place in his everyday life since the atomic bomb­ ing. Thus the temporality that Kikkawa lives through is fundamentally at odds with that of the spectators. In this sense, Kikkawa’s performance also reflects a discharge of his resentment about this transformed temporality of circularity that presents no escape from it. Cheng further argues that “the problem of the modern surface—that is, the heuristic and critical problem of distinguishing decoration as surplus from what is ‘proper’ to the thing—will hold profound implications for both the theoriza­ tion of modern buildings and of modern, raced bodies.”29 Under this scheme, she examines a mutual connection between the “fathers” of modern architec­ ture, such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, and the performance of Josephine Baker, a black female entertainer who swept through 1920s Paris. While allud­ ing to architecture as “an enactment of skin-upon-the-skin,”30 Cheng ques­ tions the conceptual configuration of abstraction and purity usually seen as the utmost aesthetic values of modernist representations. For Cheng, the seemingly blank expression of modernism is rather a dis­ avowal, and thus an announcement, of its attachment to a racial fetish in the guise of its frequent adherence to primitivism. Modernist representations are thus intricately intertwined with “the terrain of fetishism in both the anthropological

6772_Book_CC.indd 75

6/12/18 6:57 PM

76

Chapter 3

and psychological registers.”31 She also states, “Modern architecture may in fact be quite naked, though not in the senses of purity or transparency as is tradi­ tionally claimed, but rather in the very material sense of embodying a profound nostalgia for, if not a downright imitation of, the lost, originary, naked skin.”32 Her argument theorizes “the imbricated conjunction of colonialism, modernity, and psychoanalysis,”33 and how this conjunction has shaped the representation of the “modern human body.” Kikkawa’s skin is a skewed example of such an intersection of colonialism, modernity, and psychoanalysis that was initially established under the gaze of the American military, the new “colonizer” in occupied Japan. His performance is also interpreted within the dyad of this dominant/subordinate entanglement. Along this line of thought, apart from testimonial significance and public edu­ cation, it is not difficult to detect in the gaze at Kikkawa’s performance/skin in the American media an attachment to a “primitive” domain of Hiroshima, a site of the Other as the object of fetishistic desire. Kikkawa’s performance in front of domestic and international tourists caters to this desire, insomuch as a colonial desire is also deeply imbricated in the commodification culture. What is important here is that for Resnais, the abstraction of the hibakusha also indi­ cates ambivalent and antithetical functions of affect—both an indifference to and a strong interest in the “colonial” Other. NEW TYPE OF HUMAN BEINGS AND BLANK MEANING What does Resnais’ avant-garde and modernist approach in the opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour suggest as to the hibakusha’s experience of the atomic explosion? Kikkawa’s body is irreparably transmuted by nuclear power—the ultimate phase of modern technological development that easily obliterates the human body. In his Summer Flowers (Natsu no hana, 1947), Hara Tamiki portrays the catastrophic scene at the site of destruction as something akin to a “naked” world where everything is momentarily stripped away, while leaving no trace of anything human—or of anything personal or particular: In the expanse of silvery emptiness stretching out under the glaring hot sun, there were roads, there were rivers, there were bridges. And corpses, flesh swollen and raw, lay here and there. This was without doubt a new hell, brought to pass by precision craftsmanship. Here everything human had been obliterated—for example, the expressions on the faces of the corpses had been replaced by something model-like, automaton-like. The limbs had a sort of bewitching rhythm, as if rigor mortis had frozen them even as they thrashed about in agony. With the electric wires, jumbled and fallen, and the countless splinters and fragments, one sensed a spastic design amid the nothingness. But seeing the streetcars, overturned and

6772_Book_CC.indd 76

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

77

burned apparently in an instant, and the horses with enormous swollen bellies lying on their sides, one might have thought one was in the world of surrealistic paintings. Even the tall camphor trees of Kokutaiji had been torn up, roots and all; the gravestones too had been scattered. The Asano Library, of which only the outer shell remained, had become a morgue. The road still gave off smoke here and there and was filled with the stench of death. Each time we crossed a river, we marveled that the bridge hadn’t fallen. Somehow I can capture my impressions of this area better in capital letters. So here I set down the following stanza: BROKEN PIECES, GLITTERING AND GRAY-WHITE CINDERS, A VAST PANORAMA— THE STRANGE RHYTHM OF HUMAN CORPSES BURNED RED. WAS ALL THIS REAL? COULD IT BE REAL? THE UNIVERSE HENCEFORTH, STRIPPED IN A FLASH OF EVERYTHING. THE WHEELS OF OVERTURNED STREETCARS, THE BELLIES OF HORSES, DISTENDED, THE SMELL OF ELECTRIC WIRES, SMOLDERING AND SIZZLING34

For Hara, this new hell that abruptly emerged on the earth transfigures human beings into “something model-like, automaton-like,”35 and paralyzes them in accordance with “a sort of bewitching rhythm, as if rigor mortis had frozen them even as they thrashed about in agony.”36 In the opening sequence in Hiroshima Mon Amour, there is a long tracking shot of a museum scene in Hiroshima. What is on display in this museum scene overlaps with this new perception of a human being left in the ruins after the atomic bomb attack. On exhibit in the museum, the faceless mannequins take on a twisted posture, with their limbs oddly positioned, as if they were performing a strange dance. The style of the mannequin display coincides with the bodies that Hara witnessed in the destroyed downtown area of Hiroshima. These automation-like human beings in the museum, along with the bodies deformed by the bombing at the site of the catastrophe, no longer possess any history or identity of their own. All the personalized contexts are stripped away, and only the surface remains as a spectacle. Both the bodies and the faceless mannequins are converted into a muted sign too puzzling to decipher. In the hospital scene, Kikkawa is drastically transformed from an exhibi­ tionist activist into an impassive object.37 Although it was already seven years since he left the hospital, Resnais sent him back there to reprise the role of

6772_Book_CC.indd 77

6/12/18 6:57 PM

78

Chapter 3

patient. Lying in bed half-naked and showing his injured back to the camera, Kikkawa is captured in the moment when he turns his head away from the camera. His posture and the soft focus of the camera make his keloid scars less conspicuous, which resembles the way Kamei documented the hibakusha in Still It’s Good to Live. Yet the transfer of Kikkawa from the site of sensation in his real life to the cleansed, sanitary, and insular hospital bed whitewashes his identity and history. The complete passivity reified by his figure in this scene also sur­ rounds other female patients who look at the camera with a glazed stare. They are all a quiet and muted reminder of the new type of human being represented in Hara’s Summer Flowers. Here Resnais follows Barthes’ écriture blanche in a visual form. For Barthes, écriture blanche intends “to create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language.”38 This blanking out of meaning challenges language, or histories and contexts within the signifying practice, to the utmost limit. Barthes published Writing Degree Zero, in which he discussed écriture blanche, in 1953. He then promptly embraced the New Novel that emerged a few years later, while championing writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, who partnered with Resnais to produce in Last Year at Marienbad (1961) immedi­ ately after Hiroshima Mon Amour. Robbe-Grillet challenged the conventional­ ity of literature that pursues interiority and continuity, and instead embraced a fragmentality through the removal of depth from narrative. In short, écriture blanche arrived as an intrinsically transgenre avant-garde movement. Barthes was originally interested in theater, especially the avant­ garde theater developed by Bertolt Brecht. Jonathan Culler observes that in the 1950s Brecht provided Barthes with the new theoretical perspective he had been seeking. As Culler sees it, Brecht has achieved three important aims. First, he rejects naturalized performance that fakes itself as real. Second, he incorporates the concept of Verfremdung, or alienation/distancing, to uncover the fundamen­ tally artificial nature of theater. Third, although he does not negate the produc­ tion of meaning, he repudiates the plenitude of meaning.39 Like Brecht and Robbe-Grillet, Resnais also refuses to naturalize the hiba­ kusha’s existence by transforming them into an empty signifier, fragmenting their stories, and hollowing out their being. All these methods—alienation, distantiation, and fragmentation—make the object exist only on the surface level, depriving it of its history and identity. Yet this avant-garde success can also be interpreted in a different light, if we reverse photographic “negatives” to their “positives.” Even though Resnais aims to represent a blank meaning, it is unlikely to circumvent the creation of a performative meaning, insomuch as nothing can exist in the vacuum of power in the signifying practice.40 When it comes to representation of the hibakusha, what is also at stake is the politi­ cal implication of this radical modification of their images. Resnais’ approach renders as invisible the hibakusha’s personal histories and the contexts of their victimization.

6772_Book_CC.indd 78

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

79

On the one hand, the fragmentation of the hibakusha formulates a resis­ tance to the force that would victimize them by integrating their indescribable experience into a mechanical and rational intelligibility. On the other, this hol­ lowing out of the history and identity of the hibakusha signifies Resnais’ second massacre of them, since the abstraction of the hibakusha also echoes the frag­ menting, abstracting, and exterminating power of the atomic bomb. Resnais’ blanking out of the hibakusha conveys the absolute terror of the annihilating power of the atomic bomb, and this valorization of nuclear power erases the factual existence of survivors and witnesses to this catastrophe, such as Ōta and Hara. In this way, Resnais engrosses us in the moment of atomic explosion while preventing any ramifications. VISIBILITY, CENSORSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN VOICE Resnais clearly took a different stance when he created Night and Fog prior to Hiroshima Mon Amour. In this short documentary on Nazi death camps, the image of the European Holocaust victims also induces alienation, but the treat­ ment of the survivors takes a different tack. Resnais lets a camp inmate, Jean Cayrol, take charge of both the script and the narration. As James Monaco explains it, “Resnais was adamant about Cayrol’s participation since he felt no one who had not experienced the camps had the moral authority to speak about them.”41 Resnais also inserts Cayrol’s voice-over, which interrogates the respon­ sibility of Nazi officials for the mass killing in a restrained but powerful tone, while juxtaposing the court scene of Nazi officials’ denials of their responsibility with images of victimized inmates. The incorporation of Cayrol’s voice creates a coeval space between the audience and the survivor, which frees the victims from the register of the past. Resnais is aware of France’s historical commitment to the European Holocaust. According to Monaco, Night and Fog was censored by the French authorities because it attested to the French involvement in the operation of Nazi camps: “Nuit et Brouillard” was withdrawn from the Cannes Festival of 1956. The ostensible reason was that the French government did not want to offend another participating government. Yet what really disturbed the censors was the challenge the film presented to the French to recognize their own complicity in the extraordinary crimes of the death camps. They glossed over, for the most part, the inferences of the narrative to seize on one particular image, a shot of about five seconds which showed the Pithiviers assembly camp. In the control tower a French gendarme was clearly visible. This visual evidence of collaboration was intolerable to the authorities. After two months of negotiations, the producers of the film agreed to alter the image (and the evidence of history) by covering the gendarme’s uniform.42

6772_Book_CC.indd 79

6/12/18 6:57 PM

80

Chapter 3

Here again there is a tension between censorship and visibility in the pro­ duction of the film. When it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this tension has continued to be a sensitive issue in the United States. In commenting on Hiroshima Mon Amour, Bert Cardullo once stated, “A Resnais film documenting the devastation and suffering caused by the bomb would have been incomplete and unacceptable to a Western audience. Even a film fictionalizing both the devastation and suffering caused by the bomb and the pressing reasons for its dropping would seem inevitably to be creating more sympathy for the victims than for the victors.”43 What is at stake here is how to consider both the voices of the victims and the victors. From the start, the discourse on Hiroshima was initiated by the United States and was presented as part of an American victory narrative of the Asia-Pacific War and World War II. This narrative was introduced in President Truman’s announcement issued only sixteen hours after bombing Hiroshima. As such, the occurrence of the atomic bombing was never denied by the vic­ timizer, unlike other atrocious events, such as the European Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre, which occasionally encounter problematic denials. As we see in the next chapter, the discourse on Hiroshima circulated around the world (including in Japan) is basically mediated by this American voice of victory. The erasure of the hibakusha’s voice in Hiroshima Mon Amour implicates the presence of this American voice on and off the screen. This means that Resnais’ avant-garde film cannot stand in the void of meaning or in the vacuum of power. Ultimately it is framed by Resnais’ subjective choice about how to represent the event in the political realm. Hence, the idea of whitewashing meaning or a mod­ ernist challenge to language, enunciation, and representation is also susceptible to political arbitrariness. “YOU SAW NOTHING IN HIROSHIMA” Returning to the discussion at the start of this chapter, why in the film’s open­ ing sequence does Resnais make the Japanese man keep repeating, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima”? On the surface, it is no longer easy for the visitor to find the reminder of the hibakusha’s hardship in the beautifully restored city. Using Kikkawa as a catalyst, we have delved into the hibakusha’s history in the initial period after the atomic bombing—the historical context “blanked” out in the opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour. We have also discussed two ways to interpret this avant-garde approach adopted by Resnais. However, if we limit Resnais’ filmmaking to just being a bearer of the French New Wave, and reduce Hiroshima Mon Amour merely to a modernist, avant-garde film, we will miss something important within it. In other words, can we also decipher this film in light of documentary filmmaking to open up its propensity to keep switching in kaleidoscopic fashion between photographical positives and nega­ tives? When we see Hiroshima Mon Amour as a twisted “realist” movie, we will notice interesting clues placed on the screen by Resnais.

6772_Book_CC.indd 80

6/12/18 6:57 PM

“You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”

81

The opening sequence contains shots of the souvenir shops near the Atomic Bomb Dome as well as shots of a tour bus in Hiroshima. These shots concur­ rently demonstrate the presence of the English language, the language of the con­ queror—on the posters in the shops, on the body of the bus (which says “Atomic Tour”), and in the graffiti on the walls of the Atomic Bomb Dome. In brief, the presence of the English language also suggests the presence of American tourists in Hiroshima. But in these shots, places are almost devoid of human presence. It is as if these are marked as crime scenes that need to be isolated and preserved so that no one can trespass. However, Sekikawa’s Hiroshima, from whose footage Resnais borrowed to create the opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour, con­ tains a shocking episode at a souvenir shop in which a group of street children importunately follow white tourists to sell them the skeletons of dead hibakusha. At that time, there were a great number of orphaned children in the streets of Hiroshima. They were desperate to earn money to survive after losing their parents in the atomic bombing, and would dig up hibakusha bones to sell to their good customers, namely American tourists (called “Hello” in Sekikawa’s film). Sekikawa pictured this harsh reality in postwar Hiroshima that otherwise could not be portrayed under the censorship of the U.S. occupation. Resnais must have found this scene in Sekikawa’s film when he researched Japanese films on Hiroshima. Yet when creating his own version, he used the souvenir shops as a setting but entirely eliminated the existence of white customers and impov­ erished local children—a pair suggestive of the classical colonial dichotomy. Furthermore, Resnais included the sign of a souvenir shop that indicates that its owner is blind (as well as a blind female clerk quietly standing across the counter like a part of furniture).44 What is the significance of this blindness? Let us remember that one of Resnais’ initial plans for a film on Hiroshima was to create an allegory that always contains double meanings. For one thing, the erasure of white tourists follows censorship practices enforced by the U.S. forces in Japan. Under the U.S. occupation, it was prohibited to depict Americans even in favorable terms, since this could eventually lead to the disparagement of Americans and thus their loss of authority. This erasure in Resnais’ film also makes it possible for American spectators not to see themselves on the screen; it prevents them from experiencing a returning gaze from the hibakusha, as seen in Kikkawa’s performance. However, the erasure of American tourists can create precisely the opposite effect. The mimicking of the censorship practices exercised in a realist manner constitutes self-mocking as a form of pastiche or blank parody—which Barthes also loved. This mimicking offers resistance to the power that controls discursive practices.45 Thus, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima”: both the hibakusha’s gaze and the existence of white tourists are “blanked.” This ultimate blankness that Resnais offers in both avant-garde and realist styles eloquently presents his dual strategies for the politics of representa­ tion in Hiroshima Mon Amour.

6772_Book_CC.indd 81

6/12/18 6:57 PM

CHAPTER 4

ENTANGLED DISCOURSES John Hersey and Nagai Takashi

The knowledge production of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan has been devel­ oped in tandem with the United States in the postwar period. Since its appear­ ance in the New Yorker on August 31, 1946, John Hersey’s Hiroshima has been known as the “first” account of the human experience of atomic bombing. However, this is not accurate. A year earlier, on August 30, 1945, a first-hand experience had already appeared in Japanese in the Asahi Newspaper (Asahi shimbun). This was a short essay written by Ōta Yoko, a writer and native of Hiroshima. The essay, “Light as if at the Bottom of the Sea” (Kaitei no yōna hikari), describes how the explosion of the atomic bomb was seen from within the mushroom clouds. Ōta’s essay became available to the public during the vacuum in Japan’s sovereignty between the emperor’s acceptance of defeat on August 15 and the official surrender to the Allied forces on September 2, 1945. These eighteen days were a period when, as Monica Braw puts it, “nobody in Japan, including the government and the military, really knew what was going to happen next.”1 While other Ally reporters went to the surrender ceremony held onboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, single-handedly headed for Hiroshima and reported on the hibaku­ sha’s continuous suffering in the wake of the atomic bombing in the British newspaper the Daily Express, on September 5. Burchett’s article was one of the first reports in English that focused on the lingering human damage caused by radiation emissions from the atomic bomb. The detailed account of human victimization had been ignored since president Harry Truman’s victorious announcement issued shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima that celebrated the American technological progress that had enabled such an immense power of destruction by the development of the atomic bomb. Although both Ōta’s and Burchett’s works were short, Ōta completed her book City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi), a depiction of her experience of the atomic bombing and its aftermath, as early as November 1945. Another Hiroshima writer, Hara Tamiki, also finished documenting his experience of the 82

6772_Book_CC.indd 82

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

83

atomic explosion in Summer Flowers (Natsu no hana) by the fall of 1945.2 Both writers rushed to complete their memoirs for fear that they would not survive the atomic bomb disease, seeing that many others were dying of acute sickness. However, their works were shelved for years because of censorship imposed by the U.S. occupation forces. Hara submitted his work with the original title The Atomic Bomb (Genshi bakudan) as early as the end of 1945 to a major literary journal, Modern Literature (Kindai bungaku).3 But it was only in June 1947 that his work finally appeared in a more obscure journal, Mita Literature, with a lim­ ited circulation of two to three thousand copies within a small literary circle. The title of Hara’s work was also changed from the palpable The Atomic Bomb to the more ambiguous Summer Flowers. The publication of Ōta’s City of Corpses was delayed even longer. Only in November 1948 three thousand copies were printed, but these had substantial deletions of the original text. In the winter of 1947, prior to publication, Ōta received an abrupt visit from a U.S. intelligence officer in the small mountain village in the outskirts of Hiroshima where she had evacuated after the bomb­ ing. Her short story, “On the Mountains” (Sanjō), published in 1953 after the end of U.S. occupation, gave a detailed description of this officer’s interroga­ tion about her attempt to publish her manuscript. The U.S. officer’s concern centered not on Ōta’s writing about the atomic bomb per se, but rather on the possibility that her testimony could become available to an international reader­ ship beyond national borders. The officer’s attitude toward the representation of the atomic bombing epitomized the fundamental policy of U.S. censorship; as Braw summarizes it, its “aim was to draw a ring around Japan through which no unauthorized information slipped, either to or from Japan. Seen from this angle, Japan was a territory separated from most of the world, including to a large extent the allies of the United States. It was to be remade in the image of the Americans. It was also to be separated from its own past, and from develop­ ments of the world, until the transformation was accomplished.”4 THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESS OF HERSEY’S HIROSHIMA Today in Japan, Hara’s Summer Flowers and Ōta’s City of Corpses are considered as the representatives in prose of first-hand atomic bomb experience, but there was a striking difference in the international reception to their narratives and to Hersey’s. In contrast to the works of Hara and Ōta, the publication of Hersey’s Hiroshima was a worldwide event from the outset. According to David Sander, “The reception of Hiroshima was unusual by any standards.”5 From September 1945 on, Hersey was in China to report for Life and the New Yorker but went to Hiroshima to write this piece in the late spring of 1946. Judging from both English and Japanese sources, he seems to have interviewed approximately thirty hibakusha in Hiroshima over three weeks around April and May.6 Hersey did not submit his manuscript to the U.S. government to pass censorship restrictions

6772_Book_CC.indd 83

6/12/18 6:57 PM

84

Chapter 4

before its release.7 The New Yorker’s decision to publish Hiroshima all at once— Hersey expected them to serialize it over a few issues—derived from the editors’ concern about losing reader interest in the middle.8 But they must also have feared the reaction of American authorities after the publication of the first installment if the work were serialized. When Hiroshima went public, it became an immediate commercial suc­ cess—300,000 copies were instantly sold,9 and the August 31 issue of the New Yorker soon became a collector’s item.10 Prominent names such as Albert Einstein and Barnard Baruch were reported to have ordered many copies for themselves (Einstein a thousand, Baruch five hundred).11 The Book of the Month Club dis­ tributed 850,000 free copies to its members.12 The ABC radio network canceled all commercials to broadcast the entire narrative in four sequential episodes.13 Hersey’s Hiroshima received critical acclaim, even from European intellectuals such as Georges Bataille.14 While there is a long list of examples that illustrate the phenomenal reac­ tion to Hersey’s Hiroshima, what is striking is that this initial difference in the reception between Hersey’s text and the Hiroshima writers’ at the time of their public appearance has continued up to the present day. This does not mean that no Japanese texts on the atomic bombing have ever been introduced into the English-speaking world. From the early 1950s onward, after the end of censor­ ship during the American occupation era, various types of narratives have been translated into English, following their initial inception and acclaim in Japan.15 Nevertheless, these Japanese works have hardly enjoyed the same kind of wide popularity as Hersey’s. In the United States, Hersey’s Hiroshima has long been used in high school and university English classes as a “remarkable nonfiction text” in the young adult literature genre.16 Here the story’s significance is not necessarily tied to the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but rather to a peda­ gogical interest in how to teach literature and history in U.S. schools. In scholarly articulations outside the field of Japanese literature, Hersey’s text also remains central in North America to learning about the victimization of the hibakusha. Caruth’s well-known work on Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour in the field of trauma studies discusses the hibakusha experience using their depiction in Hersey’s text.17 This is because Duras only referred to Hersey’s text in her film scenario to indicate the hibakusha experience. This referential web woven since the publication of Hiroshima has played a big role in endorsing it as an authoritative and canonical voice of knowledge on the hibakusha experience. People keep referring to Hiroshima precisely because its familiarity and canon­ ization established it in their discursive realm. This is also why, in the United States, Hersey’s Hiroshima remains “still the first book, and often the only book, that people read about Hiroshima,” as Peter Schwenger maintains.18 Hiroshima’s influence is persistent, as seen in president Barack Obama’s speech on his visit to Hiroshima in 2016. His description of the event of Hiroshima is clearly in line with Hersey’s narrative. But if people learn from the hibakusha experience only

6772_Book_CC.indd 84

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

85

through Hersey’s work, their understanding of Hiroshima is susceptible to the effects of the narrative form adopted by Hersey’s text.19 AHISTORICAL EMPLOTMENT AND NARRATIVE FORM In terms of knowledge production on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this canoniza­ tion of Hersey’s Hiroshima entails what I term the “compartmentalization of knowledge.” The compartmentalization of knowledge takes place primarily in the nationally demarcated discursive spheres, and more broadly in the forma­ tion of the narrative structure that presents itself as plausible on how “truth­ fully” historical events are represented. While the text is radically open to plural interpretations, my concern is the ways in which the canonical text establishes its own epistemological authority through its narrative form. This established authority registers new texts in “anonymous structures within which individual works are inscribed,” as Paul Ricoeur puts it.20 These anonymous structures not only endorse new texts but also are being created by preceding texts, as both the cause and effect of signifying practices within interpretive communities. Hersey’s Hiroshima is a typical product of historical emplotment in which a story is a form of plotted figuration. Hayden White refers to Berel Lang’s argu­ ment in his description of the mode of emplotment and the figuration of nar­ ratives on historical events: Any figurative expression, he [Lang] argues, adds to the representation of the object to which it refers. First, it adds itself (that is, the specific figure used) and the decision it presupposes (that is, the choice to use one figure rather than another). Figuration produces stylization, which directs atten­ tion to the author and his or her creative talent. Next, figuration produces a “perspective” on the referent of the utterance, but in featuring one partic­ ular perspective it necessarily closes off others. Thus it reduces or obscures certain aspects of events. Third, the kind of figuration needed to transform what would otherwise be only a chronicle of real events into a story at once personalizes (humanizes) and generalizes the agents and agencies involved in those events. Such figuration personalizes by transforming those agents into the kind of intending, feeling, and thinking subjects with whom the reader can identify and emphasize, in the way one does with characters in fictional stories. It generalizes them by representing them as instantiations of the types of agents, agencies, events, and so on met with in the genres of literature and myth.21

Attention to both narrative style and the author, the closure (or compart­ mentalization) of perspectives, the personalization/humanization of charac­ ters, the identification of the reader with characters, the shaping of protagonists into archetypes—all of these effects that result from the figuration of stories

6772_Book_CC.indd 85

6/12/18 6:57 PM

86

Chapter 4

and protagonists are found in Hersey’s Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, the reader’s attention is focused not only on the story of destruction in Hiroshima but also on Hersey himself (an American journalist) and on how this storytelling became possible (his journey to Hiroshima to interview those who experienced the calamity). In addition to the author and the circumstances around him, its publication (a sensational event) is also an integral part of the value and signifi­ cance of the text. As for emplotment, Hersey modeled Hiroshima after Thornton Wilder’s award-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). Before head­ ing to Hiroshima to interview hibakusha, Hersey had already decided to plot his narrative following Wilder’s story. He read Wilder’s work on board a U.S. destroyer on his trip from North China to Shanghai, when he was confined to bed with the flu.22 Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey describes the lives of five victims in a fic­ tional accident in colonial Peru in the eighteenth century. These five are thrown to their deaths when the suspension bridge that they were crossing suddenly collapses. The story starts with the victims’ funeral, followed by the recollec­ tions of the Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, who happened to bear witness to the collapse of the bridge. Brother Juniper conjectures that the misfortune that had suddenly befallen these victims was not an accident but “a sheer Act of God,”23 and resolves to research the victims’ identities to contemplate why this misfortune has happened to them. The narrative carries a fatalistic tone, as seen at the end of the opening chapter: “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”24 The rest of the story reveals the backgrounds of these victims and their interrelationships. In brief, the narrative suggests the presence of a divine design behind the event, as shown by the pro­ gression of the chapter titles—from “Perhaps an Accident” in the first chapter to “Perhaps an Intention” in the last. Hiroshima, like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, focuses on six victims: four males and two females; five Japanese and one German; two priests, two doctors, one seamstress, and one clerk at a tin factory. These six are also loosely connected to one another as acquaintances. The opening passage captures the moment of the atomic explosion, and how each character encounters it in the midst of his or her everyday activities. Unlike Wilder’s story, these six characters ultimately survive in spite of the hardships they undergo after the blast. But the narrative probes whether their suffering is incidental or by design: “She [Miss Sasaki] asked bluntly, ‘If your God is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like this?’ . . . Father Kleinsorge said, ‘Man is not now in the condition God intended. He has fallen from grace through sin.’”  25 Here we are reminded of the claims made by Frank Kermode and Northrop Frye that the conventional narrative is a displacement of the biblical one, whose

6772_Book_CC.indd 86

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

87

aim is to create a redemptive end.26 The overt reference to hermeneutics that moves in tandem with the narration in Hersey’s texts underscores this biblical structure within it, as well as the narrator’s transcendental position embedded in this structure. From the beginning, the omnipresent voice of the narrator in Hiroshima already knows what will happen to these six protagonists, who, ironi­ cally enough, know nothing about their destiny. The role of the narrative, then, is to fill the gap between the cause (the bombing) and the effect (its aftermath) by gradually revealing the details. The narrative also gives the reader a bird’s eye view to accommodate their desire to see from a safe position what actually happened inside the mushroom clouds. THE EMPOWERMENT OF THE ATOMIC BOMB There are three registers of “the present” overlayering one another in the narra­ tive at large—the present of the diegesis, the present of narrating, and the pres­ ent of reading. In Hiroshima, the present of diegesis is subsumed by the latter two, which establish themselves by marking against the first present. Through this structural subordination and compartmentalization of the present of the diegesis, Hiroshima provides the reader with an intelligible form of the experi­ ence of the atomic bombing that can be grasped from an advantageous position. This narrative device leads to the rejection of the coevalness between the gaze (the narrator/reader) and the object of the gaze (the protagonists/hibakusha). The result is that “Hiroshima’s best-seller success and marked influence on highminded antimilitarist readers (chiefly clergymen, educators, and some scientists) did not translate into large-scale protests or political proposals,” as Albert E. Stone explains.27 This is not surprising, given that the narrative of Hiroshima is fundamentally formulated to give relief and reassurance to the reader in respect of his or her present positionality, and not to lend impetus to the transformation of the reader’s present. This is to say that it also compartmentalizes the reader’s present by confining the reader to where he or she is. Ōta’s City of Corpses adopts a different strategy to reduce the distance between the present of diegesis and the present of narrating. Rather than dra­ matizing the moment of the explosion as in Hiroshima, the book begins by depicting the author’s state of mind at the time of writing in September 1945, already a few weeks after the bombing: The days come, the days go, and chaos and nightmare seem to wall me in. . . . Yesterday I was told that the person I saw at the doctor’s three or four days earlier had begun to vomit up pitch-black blood; today, that the pretty girl I bumped into a few days ago on the street has lost all her hair, is covered with purple spots, and lies at the point of death. Nor do I know when death will come to me. . . . Terrified of the spots that may appear

6772_Book_CC.indd 87

6/12/18 6:57 PM

88

Chapter 4

suddenly, at any moment, I examine the skin of my arms and legs dozens of times, squinting with the effort. . . . For those suffering from it, atomic bomb sickness represents the discovery of a new hell.28

Here the confluence of the present in the diegesis with the present of nar­ rating in part signifies Ōta’s attachment to the traumatic event. As is often the case, it is difficult to distinguish the working through of traumatic memories from the acting out of traumatic symptoms. But Ōta’s text powerfully pulls us into the temporal space that she psychologically inhabits. For her, “a new hell” is narratable not only in the present tense but also in the future tense. This is because what the hibakusha suffer from is also an anticipation of their traumatic experience in the future in the wake of radiation illness; these aftereffects are latent at this moment but can possibly manifest themselves in the foreseeable future. Conversely, Hersey’s account in Hiroshima promotes opposite notions of the hibakusha experience by bringing closure to their temporalities. Hiroshima begins as if it were a live report on six different scenes put together with a con­ venient summary of the outcome at the end: At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima. . . . [The whereabouts of the other four protagonists are then described in another few sentences.] A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. . . . And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.29

Hersey’s narrative position is clearly different from Ōta’s. The omnipo­ tent narrator tells the story of the six hibakusha from above, with no interest in retrieving their voices. As Stone observes, Hiroshima contains surprisingly few direct quotations of the six protagonists.30 My question is: how does this clear divide in the narrative positions between Ōta’s and Hersey’s texts translate into the American reader’s preference for Hersey’s—a preference for the controlling power of the narrator, rather than an engagement with the hibakusha’s voice?31 White states that narrativity in the representation of real events is a value that stems from “a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness,

6772_Book_CC.indd 88

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

89

and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.”32 White’s idea also corresponds to what Fredric Jameson defines as a function of a realist narrative: wish fulfillment and fantasy investment in the realm of imaginary.33 As seen before, the opening passage of Hiroshima gives a coherent summary of random individual experiences. This rhetorical technique makes the unprec­ edented event readily accessible to American readers who are already filled with various emotions—such as admiration, surprise, uneasiness, and horror—with regard to the American use of the atomic bomb.34 As if responding to these mixed feelings, the opening passage in Hersey’s text is organized to the extent that it upholds another value and significance: the empowerment of the atomic bomb. To focus on the moment of the explo­ sion dramatizes its destructive power. And the portrayal of this power, including the volume of human loss, does not necessarily diminish its power but instead heightens it. Behind this mechanism, there is an implicit fascination with the unparalleled and unrivalled power of the atomic bomb that the United States succeeded in producing for the first time in history. In the realm of the imagi­ nary as well as that of politics, the atomic bomb has symbolized the origin of postwar American hegemony—its transformation into a nuclear superpower, as well as its military dominance in international politics. This situation began to change after nuclear proliferation escalated in the 1950s. The Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 broke the American monopoly in nuclear weaponry as well as its global predominance in science and technology. In this regard, the narrative structure of Hiroshima that pursues coherence, fullness, and closure is appealing to American readers in the realm of the imagi­ nary, both as a source of nostalgia and a psychological respite. If the thrust of Hiroshima is not primarily for knowledge about the bombing of Hiroshima but rather for fantasy investment—an apparatus of psychological deterrent, then it is understandable why this text, not the hibakusha’s accounts, has maintained its popularity in the United States up to now. This persistent readership correlates with the desire to control the representation of the atomic bomb and the hiba­ kusha experience. The transcendental position of a narrative voice, as well as the unparalleled power of the bomb (and of the United States) can compensate for the lost self in the imaginary. Precisely because of this relatablity to the omnipotent narrator, and pre­ cisely because of the clear distinction between the present of diegesis and the present of narrating and reading, the six protagonists become the object of “compassionate identification” for the reader.35 While there are differences in their gender, class, age, professions, and nationalities, these protagonists are all decent citizens and laudable heroes who do their best in a challenging situa­ tion without surrendering to despair. This enshrinement of the hibakusha again reminds us of Satō’s comments on the compassionate depiction of hibakusha discussed in chapter 2. As Satō points out, in such a narrative structure, the audience can sympathize with the victims without feeling threatened, due to

6772_Book_CC.indd 89

6/12/18 6:57 PM

90

Chapter 4

the clearly divided roles between them—the wretched that deserve compassion (hibakusha) and their benevolent consoler (the audience).36 THE CREATION OF COMFORT Schwenger argues that Hersey’s work personalizes the event of Hiroshima by focusing on the human interest facet—so familiar in evening news reports— that “convinces us that political action is simply a matter of people understand­ ing each other on a one-to-one basis. A kind action to one person can be put in the balance with one hundred thousand dead.”37 He also maintains that Hersey turns the atomic disaster into a spectacle and thereby distances the reader from its reality. For Schwenger, this Disneyfication of Hiroshima as a spectacle is a way to remove the reader’s political responsibility; it is also a representa­ tional strategy to dispel the ghost that haunts the American psyche in light of Hiroshima. Schwenger states that the unconscious of America “is trying to com­ prehend . . . the terrifying reality of Hiroshima and the even more terrifying fact of its own moral involvement with this event, in its past history and perhaps in its future one.”38 This psychological process makes Hiroshima bigger than its historical fact, and turns the hibakusha into an archetype of the ordeal. Hence Schwenger claims that “their larger-than-life size provides a kind of comfort.”39 This again separates American readers from reality and historicity. Hersey’s Hiroshima also creates a new image of the Japanese for American readers. Hiroshima transforms an American wartime perception of the Japanese as subhuman into ordinary people who are no different from Americans.40 To provide a friendly depiction of the former enemy so soon after the war invited the angry accusation at the time of publication of it being propaganda. Some readers consider that Hiroshima not only confuses the American public but also preempts the future use of atomic bombs.41 Yet the sympathetic depic­ tion of the Japanese also belittles the protagonists at times. As Alan Nadel and Schwenger observe, a female protagonist talks about the mechanism of the atomic explosions “in more primitive, childish terms,” and a schoolboy’s “child­ ishly inadequate” account concludes the entire narrative.42 A familiar rhetoric that articulates the colonizer/colonized relationship in terms of parent/child or teacher/student is evident here. In this sense, Hiroshima also successfully estab­ lishes the image of a merciful American parent/teacher alongside the pitiful Japanese child/student. In so doing, it again provides the American reader with comfort and self-assurance. PARALLELS BETWEEN NAGAI AND HERSEY The same characteristics found in the narrative strategy of Hersey’s Hiroshima— the transcendental position of a narrative voice, historical emplotment, closure of perspectives, the valorization of the power of the atomic bomb, compassionate

6772_Book_CC.indd 90

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

91

identification, the personalization of Hiroshima, and the transformation of pro­ tagonists into archetypes—are also found in the best-selling book on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, 1949) by Nagai Takashi, a professor of radiology at Nagasaki Medical College.43 And the way in which Nagai won prominence with his publication was as atypical as the way Hersey did with Hiroshima. Soon after the publication of The Bells of Nagasaki, a popular song was created using motifs from the story. Coupled with the great voice of Fujiyama Ichirō, a popular singer of the time, the beautiful melody immediately became popular across the nation. Then a film of the same name incorporating this hit song as a signature tune was released in the next year and became a box-office success. Yet neither the hit song nor the hit movie provided any substantial description of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This craze for The Bells of Nagasaki in a popular culture genre propelled Nagai to stardom, and made him a national celebrity. As a result, he not only received visits from eminent figures such as Helen Keller, Emperor Shōwa, and a special papal emissary, but also was honored with a commendation from the Japanese National Diet, together with the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner and physicist Yukawa Hideki, a representative heroic figure in a defeated Japan. These successes and the wide circulation of the text itself were a rare exception to the censorship of atomic victimization under the U.S. occupation. Recollecting his childhood memories at a Catholic orphanage nearly four decades later, the playwright Inoue Hisashi described Nagai’s book series as “the kind that adults praised me when I bought one, since Nagai was being taken as a saint at that time.”44 As Inoue suggests, The Bells of Nagasaki earned its reputation not necessarily because of its content but rather because of the aura bestowed on the author. During the war, Nagai had been already informed that he had only a few years to live due to leukemia brought on by his severe working conditions in doing roentgenological examinations. Then he encountered the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, lost his wife, and was left with two small children. On his sickbed, Nagai wrote numerous essays and a number of books that are full of sentiment, many of which became blockbusters. One of the best known, Leaving This Child Behind (Konoko o nokoshite, 1949), bemoans the plight of his children, who are destined to become orphans. Nagai remained prolific until his death in 1951. Upon closer look, The Bells of Nagasaki is an intriguing combination of first- and third-person narratives. Despite the fact that this text is primarily an account of his personal experience, Nagai often narrates in a transcenden­ tal voice by erasing his existence from scenes and depicting other people. For instance, the opening passages portray his college, which is about to be hit by the bomb, but without his presence. Instead, his narrative dwells on the conversa­ tions between students who are evacuated to an air raid shelter. Then the narra­ tive suddenly jumps to several spots within the city of Nagasaki, and randomly focuses on five people (who never appear again, except for one described later

6772_Book_CC.indd 91

6/12/18 6:57 PM

92

Chapter 4

in a vague, cursory manner), and illustrates their actions immediately before and after the bomb’s moment of impact. Such a narrative framework is exactly the same as in Hersey’s Hiroshima, with the narrator assuming a transcendental position akin to a vision of the bomber in the sky that signifies “the power of the bombsight to objectify, determine, and name everything that survived beneath it,” as Lisa Yoneyama puts it.45 It is odd that Nagai voluntarily submits himself to this bomber’s vision while avoiding placing himself in his precise position in reality—the bomber’s target—through the description of his own experience.46 This narrative pattern, which emphasizes the moment of the atomic explo­ sion, started to emerge in many hibakusha accounts published in 1949, around the time when censorship was loosened.47 Among them Osada Arata’s edition of Children of the A-Bomb (1951) became a strong seller for decades afterward.48 Osada’s volume appeared a few months before the end of the U.S. occupa­ tion, and played the vital role in normalizing this specific type of narrative. It is a collection of approximately one hundred testimonies of schoolchildren in Hiroshima. Most student writers follow a similar emplotment pattern by cata­ loguing their experiences through the contrast between before and after. This narrative pattern also confirms the power of the atomic bomb, while unwittingly replicating the colonial dynamic between the masculine power of the bomb and the emasculated hibakusha. The identity formation of the hiba­ kusha as such was further bolstered by later legal enforcement, when the local governments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki issued hibakusha health books accord­ ing to their distance from the hypocenter at the time the bomb exploded. This register system plots each hibakusha in the framework of the bombsight; in so doing it again valorizes the extraordinary power of the atomic bomb. This is the way in which the narrative of the atomic bombing has become standardized, following Nagai’s and Hersey’s approach, even though there were other ways to represent the hibakusha’s experience, as evidenced in the writings of Ōta and Hayashi Kyōko (who experienced the atomic bombing of Nagasaki).49 As for Nagai’s Bells of Nagasaki, not only do its opening passages dis­ play close parallels with Hersey’s Hiroshima but so does the plot.50 Just like Hiroshima, The Bells of Nagasaki limits detailed coverage to the first few days. Episodes thereafter appear only as isolated incidents in chronicle form. This is already a bizarre feature in Hiroshima, which was published a year after the bombing, but all the more so in The Bells of Nagasaki, which could have given a more comprehensive picture of the human suffering. While Hiroshima is a story of escape from a catastrophe, The Bells of Nagasaki is one of rescue through medical treatment. Indeed, Nagai includes in it his professional accounts of the mechanism of nuclear explosions, as well as the cause of the damage and a path­ ological analysis of medical symptoms. But even though he bore witness to the atomic bomb diseases caused by radiation, he concluded that there was no seri­ ous long-lasting damage. This attitude also resembles the way Hersey described the medical conditions of the main protagonists in Hiroshima; though they were

6772_Book_CC.indd 92

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

93

hospitalized or became seriously sick for a while, they eventually recovered from their symptoms and returned to their normal lives. NAGAI’S REDEMPTIVE NARRATIVE Yet there is a striking similarity between these two texts in that Nagai’s narra­ tive articulates—even more clearly than Hersey’s—that the Nagasaki bombing is not “an Accident,” but “an Intention.” Close to the end of the story, the fol­ lowing remarks appear as Nagai’s own: “The atomic bomb falling on Nagasaki was a great act of Divine Providence. It was a grace from God. Nagasaki must give thanks to God.”51 Accompanying these words is Nagai’s funeral address for a service held at Urakami Cathedral near ground zero: Is there not a profound relationship between the destruction of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Nagasaki, the only holy place in all Japan—was it not chosen as a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War? . . . Before this moment there were many opportunities to end the war. Not a few cities were totally destroyed. But these were not suitable sacrifices; nor did God accept them. Only when Nagasaki was destroyed did God accept the sacrifice.52

This redemptive narrative, which not only endorses but also embraces the atomic bombing, reflects the Christian principle that long-suffering is a virtue. In this address, Nagai also states that compared to the deceased, the survi­ vors were “so deeply rooted in sin that they were not worthy to be offered to God.”53 John Whittier Treat comments on Nagai’s text as “a work that ear­ nestly strives to discern in the bombing a good thing, a thing belonging to all us and which comes from the same God who, in delivering upon his promises for our salvation, sacrificed his own Son.”54 But this good thing is precisely what Dominick LaCapra critiques as negative sublimity or displaced sacralization, which becomes a source for “founding traumas—traumas that paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity.”55 For LaCapra, “such a trauma is typical of myths of origin and may perhaps be located in the more or less mythologized history of every people. But one may both recognize the need for and question the function of the founding trauma that typically plays a tendentious ideological role, for example, in terms of the concept of a chosen people or a belief in one’s privileged status as victim.”56 Nagai’s way of defining Nagasaki as the chosen sacrifice is demonstrative of the valorized self-affirmation in which he has a superior ethical sensitivity and a profound understanding of the human condition. In this sense, his lament­ ing gesture is less repentance than a proclamation of moral superiority. Equally

6772_Book_CC.indd 93

6/12/18 6:57 PM

94

Chapter 4

problematic is the idea of the sublime that he forcefully promotes as a way to bracket or even deliberately conceal the whole constellation of this matter— the referents of a perpetrator, a victim, and historical background. In this way, the founding trauma blurs all the distinctions among them, and transfers the issues of social, historical, political, and moral responsibility to the realm of the ahistorical. This is probably one of the reasons why Nagai’s narratives were warmly received and shared widely across Japan at that time. Nagai’s writings are often seen as hyperbole filled with prolix, vague, and saccharine language. This precise sentimental tone, just like Fujiyama’s nostalgic melody of The Bells of Nagasaki, is what the vanquished Japanese needed to be fed. In 1949, Nagai’s books— Leaving This Child Behind (which sold 220,000 copies), The Bells of Nagasaki (which sold 100,000 copies), and A Rosary Chain (Rozario no kusari; which sold 65,000 copies)—dominated the top ranks of the best-seller list, despite the fact that paper supplies and publication distribution were seriously restricted.57 Nagai’s narratives became not only a magnet for heterogeneous feelings in the need for emotional outpouring after the defeat but also a vehicle to dissolve them within the hollowness of the signifier. John W. Dower describes the stardom of Nagai and the political climate of those days as follows: “His emotional prose, his melodramatic martyr’s descent into death, and the belated emergence of such writings on the nuclear-bomb experience gave substance to a growing sense of victimization at the very moment the victor’s war-crimes trials were bringing judgment against the Japanese for crimes against peace and humanity. In this milieu, war itself became the greatest ‘victimizer,’ while the Japanese—per­ sonified by the saintly father/doctor/scientist dying in a nuclear-bombed city— emerged as the most exemplary victims of modern war.”58 In this current of the times, The Bells of Nagasaki also functioned as a psychological deterrent for the Japanese not to grapple head-on with responsibility for the war and the real­ ity after the defeat, in a somewhat similar way as Hersey’s Hiroshima did for American readers in escaping the gravity of targeting the densely populated areas with the most powerful weapon. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE The Bells of Nagasaki has another ramification: the dissolution of the Japanese empire. Nagai often compares his medical team’s aid station to a battlefield or base of military operations, and uses the metaphor of a soldier in a hyperbolic and comical tone to describe the actions of his colleagues and himself: “The whole scene was like a picture from the Russo-Japanese War”; “We were the heroic soldiers of the era of Showa. . . . Thus our Nagasaki School of Medicine lost the battle and was reduced to ashes”; and “We were a defeated army in retreat, but even so we were still the faculty of a university.”59

6772_Book_CC.indd 94

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

95

Moreover, Nagai’s description at times confuses the contemporary cha­ otic situation in Nagasaki with that of the military campaigns against China that he participated in as an army doctor. In the middle of the narrative, Nagai quotes his tanka poem composed on a Chinese battlefield: “Today again I have survived; / I contemplate and relish / The precious jewel of life.”60 Nagai did extensive military service in the Japanese Imperial Army—first from 1933 to 1934 after the Manchurian Incident, and then from 1937 to 1940 during the Sino-Japanese War. In the second stint, he participated in battles a total of seventy-two times.61 As is clear in this quote, he is thinking of his memories of the war front in China. In the midst of that calamity, Nagai lost the distinction between the Japanese invasion and the U.S. atomic bombing, and also between the attacker and the attacked. This addled mindset partly explains why he could readily adopt the viewpoint of the U.S. bomber in framing his opening passages. Colonial realities also enter into this muddled picture. In the second-in­ command position to Nagai in his ambulance corps is his Taiwanese colleague Shi Kunshan.62 Shi’s presence marks Japan’s imperial history, which Nagai cannot hide, insofar as he claims that this narrative is a documentary. Shi is depicted as one of the most devoted and reliable colleagues in the midst of crisis, and is always by Nagai’s side to help him. By administering emergency care, Shi rescued Nagai from profuse bleeding in the neck from an injury incurred at the time of the explosion. He also tried to prescribe the best treatment by scouring the city when Nagai sank into a critical condition: “From morning till evening he [Shi] had been running around trying to get the information and the medi­ cine that would help me.”63 But in the entire story, Nagai never directly quotes Shi’s words, providing no opportunity for the reader to identify with him (and corresponding with the scarcity of direct quotes from the hibakusha in Hersey’s Hiroshima). Toward the end, in which Nagai presents his idea of the bombing of Nagasaki as providen­ tial, Shi and his colleagues conveniently disappear from the scenes. Then, as a devout Christian, Nagai proclaims that everything should be interpreted within the sphere of divinity. Considering Nagai’s logic of sacrifice, should Shi (a sur­ vived hibakusha) also be included among the sinners, the ones “not worthy to be offered to God”? At the Nagasaki Medical College close to ground zero, almost all of the students, faculty, and staff—a total of 899—lost their lives. Among them, eighteen were from Taiwan: one associate professor, three research assis­ tants, and fourteen students.64 As both an example and an exception, Shi represents the complex posi­ tionalities of the colonized, who is appropriated by an exclusive inclusion (the example) and an inclusive exclusion (the exception).65 On the one hand, he is excluded from the whole group, because the role of an example is to show the range of applicable cases through its own exclusion from the normal case. On the other, since the exception precisely defines the range of applicable cases by

6772_Book_CC.indd 95

6/12/18 6:57 PM

96

Chapter 4

drawing a line, in this way he is included in the whole. The formation of a group needs to be supplemented by this exemplary but excluded Other. In addition, the existence of this Other creates the desire to formulate a pure identity within a group, a community, or a nation. According to Komagome Takeshi’s analysis, the history of Japanese impe­ rialism incessantly struggles with two different ideologies that coexist within it, nationalism and universalism, in the face of the multi-national/ethnic/racial/ cultural empire.66 The defeat in the Asia-Pacific War is a good opportunity to abandon this imperative for encompassing the colonized in both ideological and substantial realms. Nagai’s pursuit of radical transcendence in his narrative should also be interpreted in this light. Omitting Shi in the climax corresponds to the process of a collapsing imperialism. Now the defeated Japanese can be concerned solely with Japanese themselves and rebuilding of their nation, with­ out coming terms with the ex-colonized. The figure of the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon Amour discussed in chap­ ter 1 personifies the development of this political stance some ten years later— surrendering imperial endeavors, neglecting colonial responsibility, and shifting the national objective to the pursuit of economic growth. The fundamental condition of this positioning is the postwar Japanese alliance with the United States. And this political and military alliance, suggestive of the neocolonial relationship in which there is no equality but rather a hierarchy, has snugly slot­ ted into the Cold War environment. There is an affinity between Nagai and the film director Tasaka Tomotaka, discussed in chapter 2, to the extent that Tasaka informs the transformation of militarist regime followers into occupation con­ formists. During wartime, Nagai was known as an avid follower of Emperor Shōwa, although this was not uncommon among many Japanese at that time. Both literary and filmic works by Tasaka and Nagai exemplify an outcome of ex-imperialist humanism in this way. CRITICISM AND SUPPORT FOR NAGAI’S NARRATIVE Nagai’s statement that the U.S. bombing was a religious test of Nagasaki pro­ voked intense debate later in Japan. Inoue criticized Nagai as not only making others’ deaths a wasteful sacrifice but also assigning no responsibility for American or Japanese military actions.67 Kamata Sadao made a similar claim, pointing out that Nagai’s discourse in particular relieves Emperor Shōwa of his responsibility for the war by converting the atomic bombing into something akin to a natural disaster.68 However, such criticism emerged only a few decades after the publication of The Bells of Nagasaki. Overt criticism against Nagai was taboo for a long time, especially in Nagasaki, because he was considered to be a prominent figure of national and international acclaim. Takahashi Shinji maintained that Akizuki Tatsuichirō, a hibakusha and a doctor at a hospital in the epicenter of Urakami, was the first to break the local

6772_Book_CC.indd 96

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Entangled Discourses

97

silence of twenty years with his publication of The Record of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki: Testimonies of a Hibakusha Doctor (Nagasaki genbakuki: Hibaku ishi no shōgen, 1966). In this book, Akizuki articulated his disagreement with Nagai, his ex-mentor at Nagasaki Medical College.69 Yamada Kan, also a hibakusha, a Protestant, and a poet, had been a severe critic of Nagai since the 1970s. He argued that Nagai’s idea of divine design had not only suppressed the open dis­ cussions necessary for the hibakusha to face up to their hardship but had also initiated a false image of Nagasaki, as with Blossoming Hills (Hanasaku oka), the title of another of Nagai’s books published in 1949. For Yamada, such a prob­ lematic image of Nagasaki as a utopia has reduced the suffering of the hibakusha to a backdrop for a tourist attraction.70 Some in Nagasaki refuted the criticism of Nagai. Kataoka Chizuko, presi­ dent of Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University, contended that Nagai’s remarks genuinely sided with the followers of Urakami Cathedral. On the day of the atomic bombing, 8,500 believers out of 12,000 had been killed, and the cathe­ dral, a source of their spiritual authority, was also significantly damaged. The cathedral had originally been constructed by devotees who survived the so-called yonban kuzure Incident, or the suppression of Christians by the local govern­ ment at the beginning of the Meiji era. Kataoka claimed that Nagai’s intention was to promote the reconstruction of the cathedral in order to offer hearty sup­ port to the believers who had historically suffered discrimination.71 Motoshima Hitoshi, an ex-mayor of Nagasaki City and a Catholic, also defended Nagai. Echoing Kataoka’s vindication, Motoshima advocated for the need to forgive the United States for the atomic bomb attack, as well as to seek the forgiveness of Asian countries victimized by Japanese invasion—although he also believed that both the United States and Japan should atone for their sin, regardless of whether or not they could obtain forgiveness.72 There were counterarguments to Nagai’s supporters as well. Nishimura Akira posited that Nagai’s true intention for reconstruction was to renovate the city of Nagasaki beyond the Urakami area, as signaled by his donation of the royalties from Blossoming Hills to the city. In the postwar period, the city of Nagasaki planned to transform itself from a prewar military factory site to a tourist destination in order to shed its war legacies. Nishimura considered that in this regard, Nagai’s books, which were full of Christian vocabulary, had pro­ moted Nagasaki’s exoticism among other Japanese. He also pointed out that Nagai’s support of reconstruction did not stop at a local level but was closely tied to a national development as well.73 What has been argued most commonly is the connection between the U.S. occupation policy and Nagai’s contention that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki was divine providence. Takahashi noted that it was exceptional for Nagai to have been able to publish his works in such frequent succession at the time when censorship of the representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still active. With the recent disclosure of old documents and records, it is now known that

6772_Book_CC.indd 97

6/12/18 6:57 PM

98

Chapter 4

sharply divided opinions existed inside SCAP about permission for the publica­ tion of The Bells of Nagasaki. While one side insisted on the book’s suspension for fear of elevating grudges against the U.S. military among the Japanese, the other side asserted that the book should pass censorship, since they were confi­ dent about its textual inclusion of the appreciation of God’s choosing Urakami to be offered up in the holocaust.74 In January 1949 The Bells of Nagasaki finally gained SCAP’s approval, on condition that Tragedy of Manila (Manila no higeki), a collection of testimonies about the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army in Manila, would be bound together with it in print.75 Although the publisher Hibiya shuppan had initially intended to publish The Bells of Nagasaki at the end of 1946, they had to wait three years. Later SCAP offered to provide a large quantity of paper specifically for the printing of 30,000 copies of The Bells of Nagasaki.76 In due course, this substantial support from SCAP paved the way for the book to become a bestseller. It also demonstrates the spectrum of censorship—a censorship consti­ tuted not only by the suppression of knowledge but also by the active production of influential knowledge, as evidenced in The Bells of Nagasaki. In sum, Hersey’s Hiroshima and Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki parallel each other across the Pacific, while promoting a standardization of the narrative on the atomic bomb victimization. Despite the unprecedentedness of events, both books rather arbitrarily followed a path to reducing possibilities without challenging the limits of representation. This outcome has also led to the com­ partmentalization of the ways of representing the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the discursive spheres of the United States and Japan. Yet, while there is a clear connection between them, these compartmentalized knowledge bases exist separately and function in their own discursive spheres. This real­ ity demonstrates that there is a certain structure of indifference to one another across the Pacific that serves precisely to sustain each knowledge system. This is also the way the “connected divide” in knowledge production on Hiroshima and Nagasaki operates not only between Japanese studies and “EuroAmerican” studies in North America but also between the United States and Japan at large. These paralleled discursive spheres across the Pacific do not stand as equals. Rather, they form a core/peripheral dichotomy within a hierarchically organized epistemological web. The dominant customs of representation and narrative on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been woven through this relational­ ity that involves such an intellectual division of labor. This relationship should be called colonial.

6772_Book_CC.indd 98

6/12/18 6:57 PM

AFTERWORD

This book has looked to both the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour and the Japanese films cited within it, such as Kamei Fumio’s Still It’s Good to Live and the “phantom” documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reading of the heterogeneous texts also requires consideration of the historical contexts of Japanese and French colonialisms, Japanese military expansion in Asia, and the postwar U.S. occupation of Japan. The cross-refer­ encing of these texts and contexts should pose a more complicated picture of the production of knowledge on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early postwar period. Previous research in “Euro-American” studies in North America often highlights the uncertainty of seeing and knowing provoked by Hiroshima Mon Amour. But a lack of close engagement in the palimpsest relationships between Hiroshima Mon Amour and these Japanese documentaries has prevented an accounting of the multifold significations of seeing and knowing imbricately embedded within these texts and contexts. Nor can we fathom what the direc­ tor Alain Resnais, who is not only a pillar of the French New Wave but also an outstanding documentary filmmaker fighting against the forces of censorship in his career, grappled with in terms of making this film. In short, the issues of seeing and knowing should not be contained within the realm of textual analy­ ses only but should also be placed in the broader framework of the politics of representation. This book has also challenged the rigidly established binaries between the West and the non-West, as well as between avant-garde films and the documen­ taries that Marguerite Duras arbitrarily demarcated in the synopsis of Hiroshima Mon Amour. This dichotomy should come under critical scrutiny, since the relationship between these two “binaries” is apparently too complex for such a simplistic division. The disconnection between Hiroshima Mon Amour and the Japanese documentaries in current critiques in both “Euro-American” and Japanese studies in North America reveals an exclusiveness of each discursive space in North American academia. Yet this mutual exclusion actually substan­ tiates a state of interdependence created precisely by lack of attention to each other. Previous interpretations of Hiroshima Mon Amour have been part of this process of formulating disconnected knowledge in which negligence of and 99

6772_Book_CC.indd 99

6/12/18 6:57 PM

100

Afterword

indifference to each other have sustained the “status quo” of the French avant­ garde film and the Japanese documentaries. This system of confining each to its “own” place also wittingly or unwittingly reflects the Cold War containment policies of that time, with its ideological creed of categorizing identities and the balance of power between the West, the Communist camp, and the Third World. Japan as a chimera of colonialism does not neatly fall into these catego­ ries, just as many others in modern history do not. Only with a close exploration of historical and textual complexities can we recognize how the flows of power have affected our knowledge production. H STORY AND THE CROSSOVER OF MEMORY AND FORGETTING Before this book comes to an end, let us discuss one more Japanese film that has profoundly confused the binary relationship between French and Japanese films, and between avant-garde films and mimetic realism, with regard to what Duras asserted for Hiroshima Mon Amour. This is an avant-garde documentary film titled H story (2001) directed by Nobuhiro Suwa, who is originally from Hiroshima. The film title is intentionally ambiguous to allow multiple inter­ pretations of “H” as “His,” “Her,” “History,” “Hiroshima,” “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” and the like. In H story, Suwa aims to reproduce Hiroshima Mon Amour precisely as it was made four decades earlier, but with contemporary actors: the French actress Beatrice Dalle and the Japanese actor Hiroaki Umano, a fluent speaker of French. The first scene is staged in a hotel room in Hiroshima, just like the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour. Yet it soon becomes clear that H story has actually reversed the basic premise of the original. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the French woman appears as an actress participating in a Japanese film being produced in Hiroshima. Although the shooting of this film takes place within the nar­ rative of Hiroshima Mon Amour, her personal story stays firmly outside of the film production process. Conversely, in H story, the challenge for Dalle is how to mimic the acting of the French woman in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and this struggle dominates the whole diegesis. In other words, Hiroshima Mon Amour slips inside the box-within-a-box or film-within-a-film structure of H story and exerts a decisive influence from within. This situation stands in stark contrast to Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which the Japanese film being made within the film remains a mere backdrop to the film narrative. In this way, H story dismantles the rigid manner in which Hiroshima Mon Amour has delineated its relationship with the Japanese film being produced within it. However, what H story ultimately brings to this venture is an unequivo­ cal failure in its own project to reproduce the same film in a different context. Bearing witness to this failure as the audience, we are reminded of the impos­ sibility of precise mimicry. In the process of the remaking, Dalle gradually develops a discontent and distress, and finally, in the middle of the filming,

6772_Book_CC.indd 100

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Afterword

101

refuses to act; the consequence is the cancellation of the whole filmmaking project. This cancellation exemplifies the impasse of the mechanical repetition or genuine mimesis of past events in the face of the inevitable inclusion of the present situation in the performance. Yet, interestingly, it is hard to tell whether this abandonment of the plan for the original shooting is accidental or part of the acting that has been anticipated or even predetermined. We also wonder if the result should be considered genuinely documentary in style or a fictional part of the film. H story intentionally leaves these questions unanswered at the conjunction of natural occurrence, the acting within the plot, and the actor’s performance beyond the plot. H story makes another inroad into the relationship between memory and forgetting. It describes the main reason for the discontinuation of shooting as Dalle’s inability to understand the fear that the French woman in Hiroshima Mon Amour feels about her forgetting of memory. This episode punctuates an unbridgeable gap between the past and the present, and casts doubt on the pos­ sibility of the inheritance of past memory in any way. However, while affirm­ ing that it is impossible to retrieve the past as it was, H story simultaneously calls forth an abrupt return of the past in an unexpected way. Immediately after the remaking of Hiroshima Mon Amour is abandoned in the storyline, slightly faded color footage portraying a destroyed Hiroshima fills the screen for a moment. This footage is part of the records produced by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946, in the name of evaluating the effects of the bombing of Japanese cities. On view here are passersby and traffic in the ruined city, the picture boards recording the dates and the shooting locations, and the names of the director and the camera crew. The name of Harry Mimura, a well-known cameraperson active in both Hollywood and Japanese filmmaking, is seen. The momentary appearance of this footage suggests the presence of the U.S. forces in Hiroshima as well as the collaboration between Americans and Japanese promoted in the wake of their uneven partnership. The unanticipated appearance of these shots from the past Hiroshima gives the feel that another shooting is surreptitiously going on beneath the narrative of H story. The ghostly appearance of these shots also intimates that the emergence of this palimpsest shooting in Hiroshima in the past is bound to the rupture created by the collapse of the shooting plan of H story in the present. This rupture creates a pivotal lens through which to glimpse our relationship with memory and forgetting—after all, we can neither remember past events well, nor forget them completely. H story’s noncommittal attitude toward memory and forgetting also makes reference to the context of the making of Hiroshima Mon Amour. When H story remakes Hiroshima Mon Amour, it purposely omits the opening sequence of a montage of footage of the hibakusha captured in The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Still It’s Good to Live, and Hiroshima. One of the reasons that the remaking does not make sense to Dalle derives from this erasure

6772_Book_CC.indd 101

6/12/18 6:57 PM

102

Afterword

of the opening sequence. She complains to Suwa that she does not know what to do unless H story uses this footage in the beginning. Through this episode, Suwa proves that Hiroshima Mon Amour registers its foundational mode more in the illustration of the destruction and victimization of Hiroshima in the docu­ mentary style than in the enigmatic exchanges between the protagonists that develop afterward. This effect again attests to the dual features of Hiroshima Mon Amour as both a documentary and an avant-garde film. The erasure of footage in H story also insinuates a historical context con­ cerning the cinematic representation of Hiroshima: the long-term practice of censoring visual representations of the hibakusha in Japan and around the world. As we have seen, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was called a “phantom” film for some time, due to its confiscation by the American forces and subsequent disappearance from public view for decades. Although this historical context has been neglected in the critique of Hiroshima Mon Amour, if we are to face the issues of memory and forgetting in this film, we cannot simply sidestep this fact lying behind what we “see” on the screen. In conclusion, H story embodies the epitome of mimicry through its own filmmak­ ing process: not only a genuine mimicry of the past but also a mimicry of the erasure of the past is destined to fail. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI AND FUKUSHIMA Lastly, let us briefly explore a few differences between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Fukushima in terms of the nature of the events and the historical cir­ cumstances. In order to consider the nuclear disaster that took place in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011, we need to exam­ ine an entirely different set of texts and contexts of the history of the devel­ opment of nuclear power plants in Japan and across the world. Although the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have close connections with this historical development, the task of examining this history that led to Fukushima exceeds the scope of this book. Yet here I touch on some basic differences between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Fukushima that we should take into account when drawing a comparison between the two. First, contrary to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which have a clear point of beginning as to when the bombs were dropped and exploded, Fukushima does not have an equivalent; it is hard to tell which incidents should be regarded as the starting point, since the radiation leaks and the explosion of plants took place in succession. In other words, it is difficult to find the original point of disaster in the case of Fukushima. Although I have criticized the ritualiza­ tion and the monumentalization of “8.15 a.m.” in current Hiroshima, from the outset the nature of the Fukushima nuclear disaster does not have such a com­ memorating moment.

6772_Book_CC.indd 102

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Afterword

103

Second, the degree of the collapse of existing communities and the social standing and backgrounds of the affected areas is markedly different between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Fukushima. In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reconstruction of the destroyed cities accompanied a quick recovery for the populations. This recovery also moved in tandem with nationwide rehabilita­ tion projects of numerous cities and towns bombed by the United States. The baby boom that followed the war and the rapid economic growth from the 1950s onward supported these rehabilitation processes. Also, Hiroshima City and Nagasaki City were local hubs in their regions. Therefore it was not difficult to facilitate migration and new investments, even though they were located in the western periphery of Japan. However, the devastated areas of Fukushima indicate a different circum­ stance. In the entry-prohibited or -restricted areas designated by the Japanese government, the infrastructure was not destroyed but was abandoned due to high radioactive contamination. Rather than reconstruction, massive-scale decontamination projects have been triggered in these immediate areas as well as in the surroundings. The residents were not killed but were forced to evacuate; thus, there are no newcomers or population recovery, although the government has planned to gradually lift the prohibition orders about entering or living in some of these areas in order to encourage residents to return. But these affected areas are rural and peripheral even within Fukushima Prefecture. A lack of vibrant industry and the depopulation and aging of these communities have been critical issues for a long time, and that is partly because nuclear power plants were invited to be built in these areas. The state of the cur­ rent Japanese economy is also different from that of the early postwar period. While the twenty-first-century Japanese economy is highly developed and sophisticated, it has been stagnant for a while. Japan as a whole also anticipates the progression of aging and depopulation on a national scale in both urban and rural areas. The challenges faced by Fukushima residents in the affected areas not only reflect but also highlight such drastic social, structural, and historical shifts in Japanese society. Finally, there is a difference between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Fukushima as to how to come to terms with their tragic consequences. The risk and danger levels of the nuclear power plants had not seriously been discussed in postwar Japan until this 3/11 disaster took place. Criticism of both the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) and the Japanese government peaked immediately after this Fukushima disaster, since they had repeatedly assured the public of the safety of these plants for decades. Furthermore, one of the cru­ cial points of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is that this accident was a Japanese product and a Japanese result, not brought on by somebody else, which com­ pounds the difficulty for the parties involved, as well as the Japanese people at large, to thoroughly grapple with the consequences, since this time they cannot point a finger at anybody but themselves.

6772_Book_CC.indd 103

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 104

6/12/18 6:57 PM

NOTES

Introduction 1. This book explores traditional “Euro-American” studies and Japanese studies in North America, not their equivalents in Japan, France, or elsewhere, although I include dis­ cussions that took place in Japan to consider the Japanese context. I also put “Euro-American” studies in quotation marks, since normally it is not called as such but is often treated as being equivalent to the humanities. To use the term “Euro-American” studies suits the purpose of the book, since we radically question the divide between “Euro-American” studies and Asian studies. 2. Hiroshima Mon Amour has been an inexhaustible object of critical inquiries for decades. Essays written in the 1990s are especially well known. See Marie-Claire RoparsWuilleumier, “How History Begets Meaning: Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959),” in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1990), 173–185; Lynn A. Higgins, “Durasian (Pre) Occupation,” L’Esprit Créateur 30, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 47–57; Earl Jackson Jr., “Desire at Cross(-Cultural) Purposes: Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” positions 2, no. 1 (1994): 133– 174; Nancy Lane, “The Subject in/of History: Hiroshima Mon Amour,” in Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension: Selected Papers from Fifteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, ed. John D. Simons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 89–100; Cathy Caruth, “Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour),” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 25–56; and Nancy Wood, “Memory by Analogy: Hiroshima, mon amour,” in Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 185–196. For earlier critiques, see Wolfgang A. Luchting, “‘Hiroshima,   Mon Amour,’ Time, and Proust,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21, no. 3 (Spring 1963), 299–313; and John Ward, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” in Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 17–38. I discuss the above in chapter 1. In addi­ tion to these, John Francis Kreidl compares the film’s surreal aspect with that in Hitchcock’s Vertigo in his Alain Resnais (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 53–64. Bert Cardullo pro­ vides a politically conscious reading in “The Symbolism of Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” Film Criticism 8, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 39–44. Sharon Willis problematizes deferral, displacement, and repetition of a traumatic subject in “Hiroshima mon amour: Screen Memories,” in her Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 33–62. Caroline Mohsen considers the film in conjunction with the idea of man/time and woman/ space in “Place, Memory, and Subjectivity, in Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour,” Romanic Review 89, no. 4 (November 1998): 567–582. 3. Jiji tsūshinsha, Eiga nenkan, January 1, 1961, 43, 47. According to Kinema junpō, no. 270 (November 1960): 44, the number of Japanese films scheduled for production in 1961 was 624, which exceeded the total number of films made in Europe in the previous year, including France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and West Germany, as well as the number of 105

6772_Book_CC.indd 105

6/12/18 6:57 PM

106

Notes to Pages 2–3

films made in the United States. With an additional 210 foreign films, the number of films that were to appear in Japan in 1961 tallied 834. 4. According to Shūkan eiga puresu, no. 598 (June 20): 1959, 3, the number of viewers of Hiroshima Mon Amour at this Daiei theater, which had a seating capacity of 1,450 on its first day of release (June 17, 1959), was 87 at 11 a.m., 133 at 12 a.m., 195 at 1 p.m., 301 at 2 p.m., 402 at 3 p.m., and 496 at 4 p.m. This theater attracted audiences that favored Japanese movies. Thus, Shūkan eiga puresu commented that such low attendance would not have occurred had the film been screened at a theater specializing in foreign films. 5. Alain Resnais, “  ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’: A Composite Interview with Alain Resnais,” in Film: Book 2: Films of Peace and War, ed. Robert Hughes (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 60. In this interview, Resnais mentioned that the reception of Hiroshima Mon Amour was especially positive in Italy, South America, Belgium, and England. 6. Competition in the film industry, as the country’s premier entertainment business, was high until other forms of recreation began to chip away at its dominance. The new rivals of the Japanese film industry at that time were recreations such as sightseeing excur­ sions—which symbolized the postwar rehabilitation of the nationwide transportation system destroyed by American bombings—and the early 1960s spread of television, accelerated by the broadcast of the marriage between Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko (1959) and the Tokyo Olympic Games (1964). 7. Shirasaka Yoshio, “Genbaku to ningen no hōkai,” Kinema junpō, no. 236 (July 1959): 104–106. Shirasaka also stated, “The impressive part of this movie is not Resnais’ shots, but the stock shots from Sekikawa’s Hiroshima and Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live” (ibid., 106). 8. Okada Susumu, “Jikan to kūkan no sōgō ni tsuite: Furansu eiga nikansuru shiron,” Eiga hyōron 17, no. 1 (January 1960): 68–69. 9. Kawaguchi Sumiko, “ ‘Hiroshima, waga ai’ o meguttsute,” Eiga hyōron 17, no. 6 (June 1960): 56–57. 10. Endō Shūsaku, “Nihon no imāju to Furansu no imāju,” Kinema junpō, no. 236 (July 1959): 103. 11. Resnais, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” 60. 12. In the 1959 rankings by Kinema junpō, Claude Chabrol’s The Cousins was fourth, and Louis Malle’s The Lovers, fifth, while the first three places went to Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Outcry. 13. See, for instance, Ogawa Tōru, ed., Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei 6kan (Tokyo: Tōjusha, 1972), 295; and Kinema junpō, ed., Sekai no eiga sattsuka 5kan (Tokyo: Kinema junpō, 1970), 154, 225. 14. Works of genbaku (atomic bomb) literature were produced by writers and poets who themselves experienced the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among them the following are well known: Hara Tamiki, Ōta Yoko, Hayashi Kyōko, Tōge Sankichi, and Kurihara Sadako, along with the second-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb victim) writer Seirai Yūichi. Established writers in Japanese literary circles, such as Ibuse Masuji and Ōe Kenzaburō, also published notable works that center on the struggles of the hibakusha in their everyday lives. Hara, Ōta, and Hayashi’s collections are as follows: Hara Tamiki, Hara Tamiki sengo zen shōsetsu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2015), and Hara Tamiki zen shishū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2015); Ōta Yoko, Ōta Yoko shū, 1–4 kan (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1982); and Hayashi Kyōko, Hayashi Kyōko zenshū, 1–8 kan (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2005). “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei” shomeisha, ed., Nihon no genbaku

6772_Book_CC.indd 106

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Page 3

107

bungaku 1–15 kan (Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1983) contains the works of Tōge Sankichi, Kurihara Sadako, Sata Ineko, Takenishi Hiroko, Inoue Mitsuharu, Hotta Yoshie, Iida Momo, Ōe Kenzaburō, Oda Makoto, and Takeda Taijun, as well as the three above. This series also collects short stories, plays, poems, haiku, tanka, senryū, memoirs, reviews, and essays on Hiroshima and Nagasaki written by numerous people. Richard H. Minear, ed., Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) provides English transla­ tions of Hara’s Summer Flowers, Ōta’s City of Corpses, and Tōge’s poetry on the atomic bomb. Another English collection, The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by Kyoko Selden and Mark Selden (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), contains novels by Agawa Hiroyuki, Nakayama Shirō, Ōta, and Hayashi, a photo essay by Domon Ken, and poems, tanka, haiku, and memoirs written by the hibakusha, along with photographs and illustrations. The editor Kenzaburō Ōe’s The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (New York: Grove Press, 1985) includes English-translated works by Ibuse, Sata, Takenishi, Inoue, and Oda Katsuzō, as well as by Hara, Ōta, and Hayashi. For Seirai Yūichi’s works, see Bakushin (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2006); Ningen no shiwaza (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2015); and Kanashimi to mu no aida (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2015). An English translation of Seirai’s Bakushin is available as Ground Zero, Nagasaki, trans. Paul Warham (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). For Ibuse’s works, see Kuroi Ame in Ibuse Masuji zenshū 23 kan, 255–506 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1998); and its English translation, Black Rain, trans. John Bester (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985). For Ōe’s works, see Hiroshima nōto (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965); and its English translation, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York: Grove Press, 1996). 15. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 10. 16. However, Scott Nygren takes the refreshing view that the French New Wave is deeply indebted to Japanese films such as Kurosawa’s To Live (Ikiru, 1952). He argues that Hiroshima Mon Amour pays homage to Japan as a source of this new filmmaking style. He also briefly mentions French moral ambiguities of collaboration with Nazi Germany and colonialism in Indochina. See Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 186–188. Nygren’s book also trespasses disciplinary boundaries to explore cultural exchanges in world cinema by placing Japan at the center of its discussion. 17. Rey Chow, “When Whiteness Feminizes . . . : Some Consequences of a Supplement Logic,” in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 177. 18. Matt Matsuda discusses the perspectives of French intellectuals who see Japan as an alternative modernity, reflecting their views of Japonisme and their relationships with the United States in “East of No West: The Posthistoire of Postwar France and Japan,” in Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002), 15–33. These French intellectuals, however, implicitly regard “their” modernity as standard. 19. For discussions of disciplinary knowledge, see Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver eds., Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,

6772_Book_CC.indd 107

6/12/18 6:57 PM

108

Notes to Pages 4–6

2003); and David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 20. John Guillory states that what makes a specific work canonical derives not from its intrinsic property but from the institutional process of bestowing a canonical status upon it. John Guillory, “Canon,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 233–249. 21. It is not effective to simply contend that the Japanese texts produced by the hibakusha are the most significant. Such a claim invites essentialism and self-containment within the traditional disciplinary arena. Certainly, my analysis does not reflect other buried histori­ cal contexts in Hiroshima Mon Amour, due to its limited use of French sources. But it is no longer possible to offer an all-encompassing interpretation in one analytical work, as Lyotard maintains. My primary focus is to examine North American discursive spaces, not French/ Francophone ones. I am more interested in how discussions on Hiroshima Mon Amour have developed in North American scholarship conducted in English. 22. There were also critiques of the title change in the Japanese translation. See Endō Shūsaku, “Nihon no imāju to Furansu no imāju,” 103; and Sasaki Kiichi, “Hiroshima de hito o aisuru towa dōiukotoka?,” Eiga hyōron 16, no. 8 (August 1959): 20. 23. Shūkan eiga puresu, no. 595 (May 30, 1959): 8. A similar advertisement also appeared in Kinema junpō, no. 235 (June 1959): 46. 24. See Shirasaka, “Genbaku to ningen no hōkai,” 106. 25. Sasaki Kiichi, “‘Nihon no yoru to kiri’ ni seien o okuru,” Eiga hyōron 17, no. 12   (December 1960): 16–17. See also Kinema junpō, “‘Nihon no yoru to kiri’ no jōei chūshi,”   Kinema junpō, no. 271 (November 1960): 44. 26. For a detailed historical overview of The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Kyoko Hirano, “Depictions of the Atomic Bombings in Japanese Cinema during the U.S. Occupation Period,” 103–119; and Abé Mark Nornes, “The Body at the Center—The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 120–159; both in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, ed. Mick Broderick (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996); also see Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). The making of this documentary is vividly recounted in Kanō Ryūichi and Mizuno Hajime, Hiroshima nijū-nen (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1965); Iwasaki Akira, Senryō sareta sukurīn: Waga sengoshi (Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 1975); and Masukomi shimin 16 (June 1968): 1–78. Even after the U.S. government returned a copy of the documentary (altered to a 16 mm print from the original 35 mm) to the Japanese gov­ ernment, the Japanese government did not allow it to be lent out except for strictly academic purposes, despite sharp public protest and criticism. The reason for refusing its public use was to protect the privacy of the hibakusha in the footage. 27. For Still It’s Good to Live, see Kamei Fumio et al., “Kiroku eiga ‘Ikiteite yokatta’ no itoshita mono,” Bijutsu hihyō (August 1956): 76–78; Ogura Shinbi, “Ikiteite yokatta,” Eiga geijutsu (September 1956): 52–53; Tokizane Shōhei, “Kamei Fumio,” Eiga hyōron 13, no. 10 (October 1956): 71; Iijima Tadashi, “Ikiteite yokatta,” Eiga hyōron 13, no. 10 (October 1956): 104–105; and Kamei Fumio et al., “Dokyumento eiga no sekai,” Geijutsu shinchō 8, no. 2 (February 1957): 219–228. For his other documentary about radiation effects on the environ­ ment and creatures, The World Is Terrified: The Reality of the “Ash of Death” (Sekai wa kyōfu suru: “Shi no hai” no shōtai, 1957), see Kamei Fumio and Takagi Takeo, “Eiga de egaku shi no hai,” Shūkan Yomiuri (August 1957): 52–56; Kamei Fumio, “Aete ‘Hiroshima Nagasaki

6772_Book_CC.indd 108

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 6–9

109

no himitsu’ o hagu: ‘Sekai wa kyōfu suru’ satsuei urabanashi,” Chūō kōron (December 1957): 77–85; and Taketani Mitsuo, “‘Sekai wa kyōfu suru’ o mite,” Eiga hyōron 14, no. 12   (December 1957): 73–75. 28. Footage from this documentary was also used in the Swedish documentary The Face of War (Krigets vanvett, dir. Tore Sjöberg, 1963). 29. Abé Mark Nornes mentions the multiple uses of The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Kamei and Resnais but rather describes it negatively, calling it an act of cannibalism. Hiroshima Mon Amour is not the center of his argument, either. See Nornes, “Body at the Center,” 147. 30. There is more. The French woman’s “false” claims also prepare for the future possibili­ ties of discovering other “phantom” footage. Actually, there were two sets of “phantom” movie images shot by two Japanese camera people on the day after the bombing in Hiroshima. The first set was soon seized by the Japanese Army, sometime between August 6 (the bombing of Hiroshima) and August 15 (the emperor’s acceptance of defeat); their remaining negatives were also confiscated by the American forces immediately after their arrival in Japan. The second set disappeared without a trace during its delivery from Hiroshima to Tokyo. For these initial images, see Iwasaki Akira, Senryō sareta sukurīn, 113–117; Okamura Akihiko, “Kaku jidai no sensō hōdō shashin: Genbaku kiroku eiga kara uketsugubeki mono,” Masukomi shimin 16 (June 1968): 26–28; and Kanō and Mizuno, Hiroshima nijū-nen, 30–31. In Kanō and Mizuno’s book, an account of one of the camera people who took the earliest images differs considerably from the accounts given by Iwasaki and Okamura mentioned above. In addition to these movie images captured at the earliest stage, another newsreel existed that contained images shot two weeks after the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. For an account of this newsreel, see Kanō and Mizuno, Hiroshima nijū-nen, 30–32. Kyoko Hirano also states in her Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo (59) that another set of movie images of Hiroshima was taken by a local amateur cameraperson. In short, many movie images have vanished, while various photographs shot by both professional and ordinary photographers in the few days after the bombing do exist. It is unclear whether Resnais knew about the other “ghost” movie images when he created his opening sequence. But the point is that Hiroshima Mon Amour was made with such a capacity to encompass these real-life variants, including the future discovery of unknown movie images. 31. Alain Resnais and Kamei Fumio, “Watashi wa naze kiroku eiga o tsukuruka: Yoru to kiri kara pikadon e,” Geijutsu shinchō 9, no. 12 (December 1958): 258. 32. James Monaco, Alain Resnais (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34. 33. Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 218. 34. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 398–400. 35. Ibid., 399. 36. For Kamei’s overall works and life history, see Kamei Fumio, Tatakau eiga: Dokyumentarisuto no shōwashi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989); Tsuzuki Masaaki, Tori ni nattsuta ningen: Hankotsu no eiga kantoku Kamei Fumio no shōgai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992); Satō Tadao, Nihon eiga no kyoshō tachi II (Tokyo: Gakuyō shobō, 1996), 167–184; Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 37. If the film were about the European Holocaust or black slavery in the United States,

6772_Book_CC.indd 109

6/12/18 6:57 PM

110

Notes to Pages 9–13

it would be unthinkable to ignore the voices of the victims. But the study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as mediated by the voice of someone else (such as Resnais, Duras, or Hersey) is normalized. This inversion demonstrates a lack of sympathy with the hibakusha and more interest in the event (the atomic bombing) itself. 38. Kikkawa Kiyoshi appears in Lisa Yoneyama’s volume Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), too. Yoneyama provides a portrait of Kikkawa in his late years. At that time he was rather distrustful of the media and avoided media exposure. But I highlight his scandalous and provocative activities immediately after the war, in contrast to the reticent and resigned portrayal of his later life as presented by Yoneyama. 39. For instance, Obama said in his Hiroshima speech, “We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell,” “the memory of the morning of August 6th, 1945 must never fade,” and “we might think of people we love—the first smile from our children in the morning; the gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table; the comforting embrace of a parent—we can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here seventy-one years ago.” See White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan at Hiroshima Peace Memorial,” May 27, 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov. Like the examples above, to focus on the moment of the atomic bomb’s explosion as the dividing line of one’s destiny, and to epitomize the hibakusha’s experience by this momentary event, is character­ istic of Hersey’s narrative. 40. See Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 221–235. 41. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 19. 42. See the essays written by those such as Tsuru Shigeto, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Toshima Yoshio in Nihon no genbaku bungaku 15 hyōron/essei, ed. “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei” shomeisha (Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1981). 43. Also see Yuko Shibata, “Dissociative Entanglement: US-Japan Atomic Bomb Discourses by John Hersey and Nagai Takashi,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 122–137; and Yuko Shibata, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki” hibaku shinwa o kaitai­ suru: Inpei saretekita nichibei kyōhan kankei no genten (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2015). 44. Nagai Takashi, Nagasaki no kane, in Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2, ed. Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991), 11–12. 45. See Chūjō Kazuo, Genbaku wa hontō ni 8ji 15fun ni ochitanoka: Rekishi o wazukani nurikaeyō tosuru chikaratachi (Tokyo: Sangokan, 2001). 46. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Vintage, 1989), 1. 47. As an illustration, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (1967) by Stephane Groueff uses log records to describe the crew’s actions, but it makes no effort to account for the atmosphere inside the Enola Gay while these operations were unfolding. Compared with the previous section of the book, which elaborates extensively on the psychological state of Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project (anxiously awaiting the news about the success of the mission), the description of the crew’s actions, glimpsed only through this short log, is disproportionately terse and brief, as though trying to avoid uncertainty. See Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 359–362.

6772_Book_CC.indd 110

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 14–18

111

48. The Japanese translation, published in 2010, indicates a lack of corresponding evi­ dence in a number of Japanese sources that Treat refers to in his original. There are some similar cases apart from those raised by the translators. See John Whittier Treat, Guraundo zero o kaku: Nihon bungaku to genbaku, trans. Mizushima Hiromasa et al. (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 2010), 609–615. 49. See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 45–46; Paul Gilroy, “British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 229; Naoki Sakai, “Civilizational Difference and Criticism: On the Complicity of Globalization and Cultural Nationalism,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 188–205; Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 441–464; Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai, “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,” positions 7, no. 2 (1999): 593–647; Harry D. Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004); Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 283–297; Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. 50. Franco Moretti states that there is an orbit of “core” literatures, followed by those in the “semiperiphery” and the “periphery,” both of which organize the de facto world knowl­ edge system. According to Moretti, “Books from the core were incessantly exported into the semiperiphery and the periphery, where they were read, admired, imitated, turned into models,” in “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur,” in Studying Transcultural Literary History, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 115. Moretti gives an example of the “core” as France, the “semiperiphery” as Italy, and the “periphery” as Brazil, noting a layered difference even within countries where European languages are spoken. But many Italian critics, such as Gramsci, Agambem, Negri, and Vattimo, are hardly locatable outside the “core” theoretical terrain of North American academia. 51. For discussions of transnational studies, see, for instance, Lindberg-Wada, Studying Transcultural Literary History; Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, eds., The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 52. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 53.

Chapter One: Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour Parts of chapter 1 appeared in The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture, and Society, ed. Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012).

6772_Book_CC.indd 111

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 18–21

112

1. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “How History Begets Meaning,” 181; emphasis added. 2. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 28. 3. Ibid., 8, 34, 109. When the French woman asks the Japanese man’s vocation, he answers, “Architecture. And politics too” (ibid., 34). 4. Wood, “Memory by Analogy,” 192. 5. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 34. 6. Kosakai Yoshiteru, Hiroshima Peace Reader, trans. Akira Tashiro, Michiko Tashiro, Robert Ramseyer, and Alice Ruth Ramseyer (Hiroshima, Japan: Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, 1980), 12–14. 7. See Kurihara Sadako, When We Say “Hiroshima”: Selected Poems, trans. Richard H. Minear (Ann Arbor: Center of Japanese Studies / University of Michigan, 1999), 20–21. The poem goes as follows: When we say “Hiroshima,” do people answer, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima”? Say “Hiroshima,” and hear “Pearl Harbor.” Say “Hiroshima,” and hear “Rape of Nanking.” Say “Hiroshima,” and hear of woman and children in Manila thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Say “Hiroshima,” and hear echoes of blood and fire. [Omission] That we may say “Hiroshima” and hear in reply, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima,” we first must wash the blood off our own hands. (Ibid.) Lisa Yoneyama indicates that when hibakusha activists refer to Hiroshima’s participation in wars and its historical responsibility, their statements can readily be appropriated by the media and progressive educators/activists to substitute “the desire to demonstrate the Japanese conscience.” See her Hiroshima Traces, 121. Kawaguchi Takayuki also points out that this poem reduces Hiroshima to being only a Japanese experience, whereas there are many other non-Japanese hibakusha of whom Kurihara herself is aware. As a result, the poem draws a clear line among the hibakusha, between the Japanese hibakusha who should apologize to Asians, and the Korean hibakusha who belong to the side of Asians that should be apolo­ gized to. He considers that the establishment of these two binaries leads to the unification of Hiroshima as a Japanese national memory, and further silences those who do not fit into these binary categories. He also maintains that the logical structure of this poem resists nei­ ther the American justification of the atomic bombings, nor the simplification of World War II as a democracy-versus-fascism event. See Kawaguchi Takayuki, Genbaku bungaku toiu proburematīku (Fukuoka, Japan: Sōgensha, 2008), 43–46, 159–198. 8. Kurihara Sadako, Towareru Hiroshima (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1992), 273. 9. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), 36.

6772_Book_CC.indd 112

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages Pages 21–25

113

10. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 3–5. 11. Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), an epoch-making work that challenges the myth of the French Resistance, touches upon the connections between the French collaboration with Nazi Germany and its colonial policies, but does no further investigation into this issue, not to mention the situations of French Indochina. Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) also explores how postwar collective memory in France comes to terms with the Vichy period, yet pursues this issue basically within the “national” frame­ work, not taking into consideration the French colonial realm. For an early critique of the French collaboration with the German occupants, see Stanley Hoffmann, “Collaborationism in France during World War II,” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (September 1968): 375–395. For the discussion on Japanese policies on French Indochina, see Ralph B. Smith, “The Japanese Period in Indochina and the Coup of 9 March 1945,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (September 1978): 268–301; John E. Dreifort, “Japan’s Advance into Indochina, 1940: The French Response,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (September 1982): 279–295; and Kyoko Kurusu Nitz, “Japanese Military Policy towards French Indochina during the Second World War: The Road to the Meigo Sakusen (9 March 1945),” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (September 1983): 328–353. For the depiction of French Indochina in French films, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 12. Tachikawa Kyōichi, Dainiji sekai taisen to Furansuryō Indoshina: Nichifutsu kyōryoku no kenkyū (Tokyo: Keiryūsha, 2000), 48. 13. Paxton, Vichy France, 51–135. 14. Tachikawa, Dainiji sekai taisen, 239–240. 15. Paxton, Vichy France, xii. 16. Tachikawa, Dainiji sekai taisen, 141–160. 17. Ibid., 248–250. 18. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 70; emphasis in source. 19. In her best-selling autobiographical novel The Lover, Duras makes a peculiar correla­ tion between the Resistance, the Collaboration, and communist activities. She mentions her close association with Collaborators such as Ramon and Betty Fernandez and Marie-Claude Carpenter. But they are all clearly marked as non-French figures. 20. Adler, Marguerite Duras, 85. 21. Ibid., 88–89. 22. See Arthur Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967). For a discussion on sexuality, culture, and race in Gobineau, see Robert C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 99–117. 23. After being rescued from the camp, Robert Antelme wrote about the absolute Other, or alterity, in 1947. See Daniel Dobbels, ed., On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary, trans. Jeffrey Haight (Evanston, IL: Marlboro, 2003). Four decades later, Duras published the book The War: A Memoir, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New Press, 1986). This work depicts her suffering at Antelme’s deportation and his return after his release. It also describes her relationship with Charles Delval, who was referred to by another name, Pierre

6772_Book_CC.indd 113

6/12/18 6:57 PM

114

Notes to Pages 25–31

Rabier. In it, Duras contends that her meeting with Delval took place only at public spaces such as cafes and restaurants, in spite of their meeting each other every day. 24. Adler, Marguerite Duras, 120–138. 25. See Duras, The Lover (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 66–69; and Adler, Marguerite Duras, 94–96. 26. Adler, Marguerite Duras, 94–95, 106, 110, 347. 27. Ibid., 224. 28. See The Sea Wall (1952), The Lover (1985), and The North China Lover (1992). When Duras first wrote The Sea Wall, she did not reveal that the French girl’s lover was nonwhite. When she wrote The Lover decades later, she described the lover as a son of a wealthy Chinese family, but also as timid and emasculated. In The North China Lover, the last work using a setting similar to The Lover, she portrayed the lover as masculine and confident, very differ­ ent from the lover in The Lover. 29. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Ibid., 8. 32. Ibid., 109. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 9. 35. For a discussion on the author and the reader, see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142– 148; and Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–120. 36. Higgins, “Durasian (Pre) Occupations,” 50; emphasis in source. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. Ibid., 52. 39. Luchting, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” 301; emphasis in source. 40. Ibid., 306; emphasis in source. 41. Ibid., 310. 42. Ward, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” 35. 43. Lane, “Subject in/of History,” 94. 44. See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122. 45. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), especially chapter 6, “The Negro and Psychopathology.” 46. Caruth, “Literature and the Enactment of Memory,” 52. 47. Amy Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 85. In critiquing Caruths’ discussion of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Ruth Leys also ques­ tions the way Caruth talks about the enunciative positions of the narrator and the status of the addressee in conjunction with what national language he or she speaks. See her Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 266–297. 48. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 96–99. 49. Jackson Jr., “Desire at Cross(-Cultural) Purposes,” 155. 50. According to Adler, Resnais asked Duras a few times to rethink the image of the Japanese man and to modify his lines. See Adler, Marguerite Duras, 222–223. 51. Rey Chow, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay),” Representations, no. 94 (Spring 2006): 142.

6772_Book_CC.indd 114

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 31–37

115

52. Ibid., 143. 53. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 9. 54. Ibid., 34. 55. Jackson Jr., “Desire at Cross(-Cultural) Purposes,” 148; emphasis in source. 56. Duras, Lover, 38. 57. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 25. 58. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1989), 249. 59. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 76. 60. Naoki Sakai discusses how visual representations of interracial, national, cultural, and heterosexual relationships operate to forge a national community of sympathy among audiences in his Nihon, eizō, beikoku: Kyōkan no kyōdōtai to teikokuteki kokuminshugi (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007). 61. Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Kōran watakushi no hansei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1987), 138. After Japan’s defeat, Yamaguchi was arrested by the Chinese gov­ ernment and put on trial as a Chinese traitor. Although she was released after she proved her real nationality, she wrote later that her participation in this slapping scene in China Nights had become problematized in the trial. See also Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Sensō to heiwa to uta: Ri Kōran kokoro no michi (Tokyo: Tokyo shimbun shuppankyoku, 1993); and Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Jidai ni tsutaetai koto: Rekishi no kataribe Ri Kōran no hansei (Nara, Japan: Tenrikyō dōyūsha, 1997). For China Nights and Ri Kōran, see Yomota Inuhiko, Nihon no joyū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2000); and Yomota Inuhiko, ed., Ri Kōran to higashi ajia (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2001). 62. Silvia Kolbowski’s video After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2006) synchronizes with my points here. Kolbowski’s work traces the allegorical love relationship between the French woman and the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and exposes the fluid nature of both characters being easily interchangeable with any others of different background in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. This interchangeability of the characters again confirms that the coupling of the French woman and the Japanese man in Resnais’ film has nothing to do with Hiroshima (but rather with the gendered colonial relationship). Kolbowski also shares a similar interest to mine; just as I find an eclipsed American presence underlying Hiroshima Mon Amour, she states that her project is precipitated by postwar American politics, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the abandonment of New Orleans. See Silvia Kolbowski, “After Hiroshima Mon Amour,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 80–84. 63. In Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), Ronald T. Takaki argues that the reasons for president Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb derive from his longing to prove his manliness as a strong-willed leader and his aptitude as a successor of the charismatic Franklin Roosevelt, whom he was initially sup­ porting as his vice president. 64. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 70. 65. Caruth, “Literature and the Enactment of Memory,” 47. 66. See Horiba Kiyoko, Kinjirareta genbaku taiken (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 28–34; and Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo, 54–59. 67. See Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 184–186. 68. For postwar U.S. imperialism, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures

6772_Book_CC.indd 115

6/12/18 6:57 PM

116

Notes to Pages 38–39

of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Engelhardt, End of Victory Culture; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Bruce Cummings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001); Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realties and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

Chapter Two: Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment Parts of chapter 2 appeared in chapter 11 of When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, ed. Roy Starrs (Leiden: Brill/Global Oriental, 2014). 1. Chow, “When Whiteness Feminizes,” 175. 2. Fighting Soldiers held a premiere screening but was not allowed to be released to the public. A Japanese Tragedy was screened and attracted record-breaking audiences, but the screening was suspended a week after the release, and the film footage was confiscated by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). See Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 53–54, 116–117. 3. After the film code took effect in 1939 and until the end of the war, Japanese film directors were required to be licensed by the government. 4. Abé Mark Nornes, “Japan,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, vol. 2, ed. Ian Aitken (New York: Rutledge, 2006), 673. 5. Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 18, 61. 6. Madeleine Gobeil, Michel Leiris, and Carl R. Lovitt, “Interview with Michel Leiris,” Substance 4, nos. 11/12 (1975): 58. 7. Ibid., 54. 8. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 142; emphasis in source. 9. The success of the film Shanghai made Kamei an outstanding figure in the movie world. He then made another documentary, Peking, in 1938, in which he focused on the everyday life of city dwellers in Beijing rather than on the Japanese military campaign. On Kamei’s films during this period, such as Shanghai and Fighting Soldiers, see Hazumi Tsuneo, “Nihon no sensō eiga,” Kinema junpō, no. 637 (February 1938): 12; Shigeno Tatsuhiko, “‘Shanhai’ hihyō,” Kinema junpō, no. 637 (February 1938): 62–63; Iwasaki Akira, Noda   Shinkichi, and Satō Shigeomi, “Tokushū: Kamei Fumio no saihyōka,” Eiga hyōron 28, no. 12 (December 1971): 84–95; Kitagawa Tetsuo, “Tsuitō: Kamei Fumio no shisō to sakuhin,” Buraku (April 1987): 64–67; Tsuchimoto Noriaki, “Kamei Fumio: ‘Shanhai’ kara ‘Tatakau heitai’ made,” in Kōza Nihon eiga 5: Sengo eiga no tenkai, ed. Satō Tadao et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1987), 322–341; Tsuzuki Masaaki, “Ga o shite shinjitsu o kataraseru: Kamei Fumio no dokyumentarīron o megutte,” Eizōgaku 51 (November 1993): 52–61; Yoshida

6772_Book_CC.indd 116

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 41–46

117

Kazuhiko, “Media, aruiwa fashizumu: 3 dokyumentarisuto Kamie Fumio to sen’i kōyō eiga,” Hōsei riron 33, no. 1 (2000): 118–150; Fujii Jinshi, “Torarenakattsuta shotto to sono unmei: ‘Jihen’ to eiga, 1937–1941,” Eizōgaku 67 (November 2001): 23–40; Fujii Jinshi, “Shanhai, Nankin, Pekin: Tōhō bunkaeigabu tairiku toshi sanbusaku no chiseigaku,” in Eiga to “ daitōa kyōei-ken,” ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004), 101–127; and Satō Tadao, Kinema to hōsei: Nicchū eiga zenshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004), 225–259. For the comments made by Kamei himself on these films, see Kamei Fumio et al., “Jūgun kantoku kyameraman no zadankai,” Eiga hyōron 21 (March 1939): 50–63; Kamei Fumio, “‘Tatakau   heitai’ kara no keiken,” Kinema junpō, no. 676 (April 1939): 105; Kamei Fumio et al., “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kon’nichi o kataru zadankai,” Bunka eiga kenkyū 3, no. 2 (February 1940): 16–27; Kamei Fumio, “ ‘Tatakau heitai’: Sono junan to enshutsu hōhō o kataru,” Shine furonto, no. 12 (July 1977): 4–5; Kamei Fumio et al., “Kamei Fumio no kataru kiroku: Senchū sengo eigashi,” Eiga geijutsu (July–August 1976): 78–89; and Kamei Fumio and Tsuchimoto Noriaki, “Dokyumentarī no seishin,” in Satō Tadao et al., Kōza Nihon eiga 5: Sengo eiga no tenkai, 342–361. For critical discussion of Kamei’s filmmaking, also see Cazdyn, Flash of Capital; Abé Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Sherif, Japan’s Cold War. 10. Clifford, Predicament of Culture. See esp. part 2, “Displacements.” 11. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 519. 12. Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 32–34. 13. Satō Tadao, Nihon eiga rironshi (Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1977), 215–216. 14. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 17. 15. Ibid., 18. 16. Kamei Fumio et al., “Dokyumento eiga no sekai,” Geijutsu shinchō 8, no. 2 (February 1957): 226–227. 17. Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 146. For discussion of the community of sympathy, see Sakai, Nihon, eizō, beikoku. 18. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 57. This kind of “journey” is limited to one’s own personal and societal spheres, not the other’s, after all. In this regard, even though Kamei goes to the other side of the camera, the unbearable everyday life of the hibakusha would remain inaccessible to him. 19. For the censorship of cinema, see Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo; Tanikawa Takeshi, America eiga to senryō seisaku (Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai, 2002); and Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). For censorship practice at large, see Horiba, Kinjirareta genbaku taiken. 20. Well-known films that romanticized the love relationship between a Japanese man and a Chinese woman are Song of White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, dir. Watanabe Kunio, 1939), China Nights (Shina no yoru, dir. Fushimi Osamu, 1940), and An Oath of Hot Sand (Nessa no chikai, dir. Watanabe Kunio, 1940). All three star Ri Kōran. 21. Satō Tadao, Nihon eiga shisōshi (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970), 340; and Satō Tadao, “Gensuibaku to eiga,” Bungaku 28 (August 1960): 31.

6772_Book_CC.indd 117

6/12/18 6:57 PM

118

Notes to Pages 46–50

22. Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 339–340; and Satō, “Gensuibaku to eiga,” 31. 23. Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 329. 24. Nagai was also a loyal worshipper of Emperor Shōwa. See Kondō Hiroki, “Nagai Takashi: Mō hitotsu no genbakushō,” Osaka ika daigaku kiyō jinbun kenkyū 37 (March 2006): 82–83. 25. Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 328–329. 26. See Donald Richie, “‘Mono   no aware’: Hiroshima in Film,” in Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema, 23. According to Shindō, the Japan Teachers Union pressured him to stop shoot­ ing his film. See Shindō Kaneto, Shindō Kaneto: Genbaku o toru (Tokyo: Shin’nihon shup­ pansha, 2005), 14–15. 27. Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 9. 28. Immediately after the end of U.S. occupation, a few attempts were made to publicly share the visual representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other than the short documen­ tary released in August 1952 using footage of The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had been secretly held by the Nichiei staff, the photo magazine Asahi Graph also featured the same footage in its issue of August 6, 1952, the seventh anniver­ sary of Hiroshima. Using this same footage, a short film titled Nagasaki of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku no Nagasaki) was also produced. 29. A similar lack of national attention was observed at the time of the outbreak of Minamata disease in the early 1950s, a severe mercury poisoning that resulted from the wastewater of the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory in Kumamoto Prefecture. Although newspapers in the Kyushu area reported the pollution problem early, the Japanese govern­ ment responded to it only after the news was widely covered in Tokyo. As for the U.S. bomb­ ings of Japan during the war, other incidents also remained obscure on a national level, even though they took place in big cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. This is partly because censorship was enforced both in the wartime and postwar occupation periods, and partly because the victimization by incendiary bombs used in these bombings took place all over Japan, not only in big cities. 30. Iwasaki, Senryō sareta sukurīn, 79. 31. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 428. Nornes also gives a detailed analysis of A Japanese Tragedy; see his Japanese Documentary Film, 184–190. 32. For instance, the occupation government ordered the deletion of a scene in which yakuza members forcibly intervened in a strike at the factory. According to Kamei, such yakuza interventions in strikes in fact became normalized soon after this episode. See Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 123. 33. Ibid., 129–131. 34. Kamei et al., “Kiroku eiga ‘Ikiteite yokatta,’”  76–78. Also see Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 152–53; and Kamei, “Shinario: Ikiteite yokkata,” Fujin korōn (May 1956): 132–133.   35. See Michiba Chikanobu, “‘Kaku jidai’ no hansen heiwa: Taiwa to kōryū no tameno nōto 2,” Gendai shisō 31, no. 10 (August 2003): 158–166. 36. Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 153. 37. For the 1955 system, see Masumi Junnosuke, Gendai seiji: 1955 nen igo (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1985). The English version is Junnosuke Masumi, Contemporary Politics in Japan, trans. Lonny E. Carlile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For the change in Japanese society propelled by economic development and political turbulence

6772_Book_CC.indd 118

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 50–53

119

in the 1950s and 1960s, see Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 131–163. For the development of Japanese nationalism either as an anti-American or proAmerican movement, see Takabatake Michitoshi, “‘Rokujū-nen anpo’ no seishinshi,” 70–91;   and Sugiyama Mitsunobu, “Sengo nashonarizumuron no ichisokumen,” 189–209, both in Sengo Nihon no seishinshi: Sono saikentō, ed. Tetsuo Najita, Maeda Ai, and Kamishima Jirō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988). 38. In a reflection of the Cold War regime, the 1955 system was structured through a confrontation between the conservatives (Liberal Democratic Party) and the liberals (Socialist Party). The ratio of two to one in the House of Representatives mostly remained the same until this political system started to fall apart in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. 39. Controversies over the inclusion of U.S.S.R. nuclear testing in their protest later led to the establishment of a new institution, the Gensuikin (Japan Congress against A- & H-Bombs), which eventually split away from Gensuikyō. 40. For a debate on American and Japanese military violence and nationalisms, see Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); and Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). 41. For Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Hiraoka Takashi, Henken to sabetsu: Hiroshima soshite hibaku Chōsenjin (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1972); Ushio, “Kakurete ikiru hibakusha to jinshu sabetsu,” Ushio (July 1972): 89–200; Pak Subok et al., eds., Hibaku Kankokujin (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1975); Hiroshima Nagasaki shōgen no kai, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, sanjūnen no shōgen, jō-kan (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975), 119–129, 251–294; the film To the World: Records of Korean Hibakusha (Sekai no hito e: Chōsenjin hibakusha no kiroku, dir. Mori Zenkichi, 1981); Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai, ed., Genbaku to Chōsenjin: Nagasaki ken Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō, kyōsei rōdō jitsuttai chōsa hōkokusho 1–5 shū (Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai, 1982–1991); the film Another Hiroshima (Mōhitotsu no Hiroshima, dir. Pak Sunam, 1987); Hiraoka Takashi, Kibō no Hiroshima: Shichō wa uttaeru (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996), 141–146; Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 151–186; and Ōta Yasuo, Umino mukō no Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Kankoku hibakusha tachino saigetsu (Tokyo: Bakushūsha, 2005). 42. Resnais and Kamei, “Watashi wa naze,” 259. 43. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 35. 44. Ibid., 158–167. 45. Taketani, “‘Sekai wa kyōfu suru’ o mite,” 73–75. For instance, Taketani points out   that the film does not clearly differentiate between the damage caused by extensive irradia­ tion and that caused by low-level contamination. For a discussion of this film in conjunction with the Cold War narratives, see Sherif, Japan’s Cold War, 121–172. 46. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 238–239; emphasis in source. 47. Satō made this point in “Gensuibaku to eiga,” 33. 48. The wrecked Urakami Cathedral, including the burned statue of the Virgin Mary, was demolished in 1958. According to Takase Tsuyoshi, the then Nagasaki mayor Tagawa

6772_Book_CC.indd 119

6/12/18 6:57 PM

120

Notes to Pages 54–56

Tsutomu completely changed his policy after his visit to the United States in 1956, and insisted that it was unnecessary to preserve the Urakami Cathedral to establish peace in the world. Takase considers that if left undemolished, the wreckage of the Urakami Cathedral would have held a symbolic value equivalent to that of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. See Takase Tsuyoshi, Nagasaki: Kieta mō hitotsu no “genbaku dōmu” (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2013). 49. Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 152. 50. Jean-Luc Godard was critical of the entanglement of death and desire in this scene. See “Hiroshima, Notre Amour,” Cahires du Cinéma, no. 97 (July 1959): 11. 51. Shindō Kaneto’s Children of Hiroshima received awards at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Karlovy International Film Festival, the British Academy Film Awards, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and a few other festivals in Poland and France. Sekikawa’s Hiroshima also won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. 52. Richie, “Mono no aware,” 33. 53. In this film, Gregory Peck plays a member of an American nuclear submarine crew and is presented as a heroic victim. He and other survivors (all white) enjoy their upper-mid­ dle-class lifestyles in Australia, a bizarrely harmonized community of the last resort place left on earth until waves of radiation arrive. 54. Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970), 323. 55. See Matthew Bernstein and Mark Ravina, “Review of Rhapsody in August by Hisao Kurosawa; Akira Kurosawa,” American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1162. For a discussion of this criticism, see Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 364–371. 56. Vincent Canby, “Kurosawa, Small in Scale and Blunt,” New York Times, December 20, 1991. See also Tadao Sato, “Kurosawa’s ‘Rhapsody in August’: The Spirit of Compassion,” trans. Linda Ehrlich, Cineaste 19, no. 1 (1992): 48–49; and Linda C. Ehrlich, “The Extremes of Innocence: Kurosawa’s Dreams and Rhapsodies,” in Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema, 160. 57. Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun (Wiltshire, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1998), 43–44. Winston Davis also rejected Kurosawa’s approach to Japan’s military past, indicating that what is suggested in Rhapsody in August is after all that “war is to blame for war,” in “Review of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century’s End, by Norma Field,” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 148. 58. Akira Lippit, “Review of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun, by Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff,” Film Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 58. 59. See Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘ i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 60. See, for instance, Takashi Fujitani, “Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses,” in Perilous Memories: The AsiaPacific War(s), ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 239–266; Takashi Fujitani, “The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (September 2001): 379–402; and Takashi Fujitani, “Senka no jinshushugi: Dai’niji taisenki no ‘Chōsen shusshin Nihon kokumin’ to ‘nikkei Amerikajin,’ ” in Iwanami kōza, kindai Nihon no bunkashi 8 kan: Kanjō, kioku, sensō, ed. Komori Yōichi et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 235–280. Also see Naoki Sakai, “Henzai suru kokka: Futatsu no hitei; No-No Boy o yomu,” in Shizan sareru Nihongo, Nihonjin: “Nihon” no rekishi (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1996), 99–126; and Naoki

6772_Book_CC.indd 120

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 57–61

121

Sakai, “Two Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem,” Novel 37, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 229–257. 61. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19. 62. The film’s English version omitted many episodes that appear in the Japanese origi­ nal, such as the depiction of the perplexed feelings among the grandchildren living in the archaic grandmother’s house. As a result, the English version accentuated only the episodes directly related to the atomic bombing, losing the feel of Murata Kiyoko’s Akutagawa Prize– winning novel Inside a Pot (Nabe no naka) that Kurosawa incorporated into the film. 63. James Goodwin, “Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age,” in Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema, 197. 64. Richie, “Mono no aware,” 28. 65. Nakazawa Keiji’s manga comic Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no gen) is an exception. For Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a whole, see Satō, “Gensuibaku to eiga,” 28–34; Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi; David M. Desser, “Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, and an Ambivalent Cinema,” Swords and Ploughshares 9, nos. 3/4 (Spring–Summer 1995): 15–19; and Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema. 66. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 23. 67. Richie, “Mono no aware,” 37. 68. Sato, “Kurosawa’s ‘Rhapsody in August,’”  49. 69. Carole Cavanaugh, “A Working Ideology for Hiroshima: Imamura Shōhei’s Black Rain,” in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, ed. Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 266. 70. Robert Jay Lifton is known for his studies of the psychology of the hibakusha and Vietnam War veterans. See Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Lifton’s view is pre­ mised upon the categorization of the “survivor,” not the perpetrator or the victim. Following this theorization, he discusses Hiroshima, the European Holocaust, natural disaster, and the Vietnam War all together in his “Witnessing Survival,” Society 15, no. 3 (March/April 1978): 40–44. For Lifton, the experience of bearing witness to others’ death generates simi­ lar psychological symptoms, such as a death imprint, death anxiety, death guilt, and psychic numbing. However, using psychic reactions to atrocities as an umbrella concept disregards the historical singularity of the event, the difference between the victim and the perpetrator, and the political responsibilities of their social positions. The hibakusha poet Kurihara Sadako severely criticizes Lifton’s Death in Life, saying that it is another psychological research of the hibakusha written from a position similar to the medical research done by the notorious Atomic Bomb Causality Commission (ABCC), a position that regards literature, art, and cinema on the atomic bombing as ideological products. See Kurihara Sadako, Hiroshima no genfūkei o daite (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975), 91–95; Kurihara Sadako, Kaku, ten’nō, hibakusha (Tokyo: San’ihchi shobō, 1978), 160, 220–221; and Kurihara Sadako, Kakujidai ni ikiru: Hiroshima, shi no nakano sei (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1982), 49–52. 71. Donald E. Pease, “Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War: Post-National Spectacles,” in Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, 572. 72. Kawaguchi, Genbaku bungaku toiu proburematīku, 23–34.

6772_Book_CC.indd 121

6/12/18 6:57 PM

122

Notes to Pages 61–66

73. Ehrlich, “Extremes of Innocence,” 170. 74. See Toyota Seishi, “Kuroi ame” to “Shigamatsu nikki” (Nagoya, Japan: Fūbaisha, 1993); Shigematsu Shizuma, Shigematsu nikki (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2001); Inose Naoki, Pikaresuku: Dazai Osamu den (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2002); Kurihara Yūichirō, “Tōsaku” no bungakushi: Shijō, media, chosakuken (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2008); Takiguchi Akihiro, Ibuse Masuji to chiguhaguna “ kindai”: Hyōryūsuru akuchuaritī (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012); and Kuroko Kazuo, Ibuse Masuji to sensō: “Hana no machi” kara “ kuroi ame” made (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2014). 75. Sakurai Hitoshi, “Eizō wa hibakusha o dō egaitekitaka,” Sekai 692 (September 2001): 124–125. 76. M. Susan Lindee introduces the idea that the hibakusha consists of not only “those who were exposed to the bombs’ direct effects: blast, fire, debris, radiation,” but also “those who were not in the cities at the time but who lost family members and property in the blasts”; see M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5. However, mere family members are never regarded as hibakusha in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. People who can receive the hibakusha health book are those directly victimized by the atomic bombings in the designated areas; those who entered the designated areas in a certain period afterward; those who engaged in the disposal of bodies, relief activities, and the like; and those who were victimized before birth in the fetal stage. The hibukusha health book system is based on the so-called Hibakusha Engohō (Hibakusha Relief Law). The book holder can receive a medical allowance and other benefits. There have been many lawsuits against this definition of the entitlement of the health book holders. In addition to this legal definition of hibakusha, socially and politically speaking, in Japan the hibakusha are clearly distinguished from those who lost family members in the atomic bombings.

Chapter Three: “You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima” 1. Kikkawa also appears as one of the hibakusha movement’s leaders in Lifton’s Death in Life, 231–237, where Lifton gives his observant but also sarcastic view of Kikkawa. 2. My discussion of the visibility is indebted to Chow, “Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze’s Method,” in Chow, Entanglements, 151–168. 3. However, until 1954 ABCC acknowledged only four symptoms (leukemia, cataracts, microcephaly, and the malformation of tooth enamel) to be radiation sickness, and refused to include keloid scars in the list, even in the 1970s. 4. Kikkawa became acquainted with Shirai, who was assistant director of Hiroshima Mon Amour. In his memoir, Kikkawa recollected that Resnais and Shirai coaxed him to make an appearance in the film. 5. Watanabe Rikito, Tagawa Tokihiko, and Masuoka Toshikazu, eds., Senryōka no Hiroshima: Hankaku hibakusha undō sōsōki monogatari (Tokorozawa, Japan: Nichiyōsha, 1995), 224–225. 6. Kamei et al., “Kiroku eiga ‘Ikiteite yokatta,’”  76. 7. Throughout his life, Kikkawa received much criticism. The writer Kajikawa Toshiyuki, who grew up in colonial Seoul, was one of his severest critics. The weekly jour­ nal Shūkan bunshun also harshly censured Kikkawa for using his experience to benefit his “peace business” in “Heiwaya san nin otoko: Genbaku o urimono ni suruna,” August 24, 1959, 22–23.

6772_Book_CC.indd 122

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 66–71

123

8. Hugh M. Gloster, “Hiroshima in Retrospect,” Phylon 17, no. 3 (3rd qtr., 1956): 273. 9. Kikkawa Kiyoshi, “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1981), 48. Yoneyama observed the resentment and anger of the hibakusha surfacing at the time of their storytelling. See Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 130–133. 10. Life, September 1, 1947, 42. Contrary to the friendly portrayal of Kikkawa published in Life, the picture contained in his book “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete is drastically different, in spite of the fact that it was taken by Life on the same occasion. In that picture, Kikkawa looked like a criminal or a prisoner in a police identification photo. Clasping both hands behind his bent head, he was portrayed from behind from a high angle along with a black sign stating, “Kikkawa K Hiroshima April 20 1947.” 11. Responding to the threat of a third deployment of the atomic bomb by the United States in the Korean War, a group of students at Kyoto University held an exhibition of human victimization caused by the atomic bomb at a department store near Kyoto Station in July 1951. This was the first visual exhibition of the hibakusha widely accessible to the public under U.S. occupation, attracting a turnout of thirty thousand in ten days. The exhibition included photos of injured hibakusha and explanatory panels on radiation effects on the human body. One of the professors who collaborated on the exhibition was threatened with arrest by SCAP, since the human victimization from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deemed top secret by the U.S. forces. Nevertheless, the exhibition spread nationwide, to Osaka, Nagano, Yokohama, Tokyo, Gunma, and Hokkaido. But in these areas, host organizations often met with blatant interference by the Japanese police. See Chūgoku shimbunsha, ed., Kenshō Hiroshima, 1945–1995 (Hiroshima: Chūgoku shimbunsha, 1995), 274–279; and Obata Tetsuo, Senryōka no “genbakuten”: Heiwa o oimotometa seishun (Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan, 1995). 12. SCAP also confiscated all the medical data collected by Japanese doctors in the first month after the bombing. See Shiina Masae, Genbaku hanzai: Hibakusha wa naze hōchisaretaka (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1986), 49–60. 13. Chūgoku shimbunsha, ed., Hono’o no hi kara nijū-nen: Hiroshima no kiroku (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1966), 141. 14. Hiroshimashi, Nagasakishi genbaku saigai shi henshū iinkai, ed., Genbaku saigai: Hiroshima, Nagasaki (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985), 166–167. 15. Ibid., 161–162; and Chūgoku shimbunsha, Kenshō Hiroshima, 29. 16. Hiroshimashi, Nagasakishi genbaku saigai shi henshū iinkai, Genbaku saigai, 165. 17. Shiina, Genbaku hanzai, 39–41; Fukagawa Munetoshi, ed., Hibaku nisei: Sono kata­ rarenakatta hibi to ashita (Tokyo: Jiji tsūshinsha, 1972); and Kikkawa, “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete, 111–116. ABCC was often criticized for treating the hibakusha like guinea pigs, without care or respect. There were young girls who developed mental disorders as a result of having their naked bodies photographed at ABCC check-ups. 18. Hiroshimashi, Nagasakishi genbaku saigai shi henshū iinkai, Genbaku saigai, 168– 178; Hiroshima Heiwa Bunka Tosho Kankōkai, ed., Hiroshima no shōgen: Heiwa o kangaeru (Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha, 1969), 234–235. 19. Shiina, Genbaku hanzai, 133–135. 20. Ibid., 36–37, 61–117; and Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchel, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 50–57. As for the use of the atomic bombs, no lawsuits against the American government were ever brought in the United States. In the early 1950s, Japanese lawyers attempted to bring the case to the American court, in concert with the American juridical side. But this attempt failed due to the half-hearted

6772_Book_CC.indd 123

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 71–75

124

reactions of American lawyers who saw this case as legally groundless as well as harmful to the United States’ relationship with Japan. Some of the American lawyers agreed to coop­ erate but also requested enormous fees. As a result, the Japanese lawyers raised a lawsuit in Japan instead. Yet they lost the case in 1963, since the court thought that the hibakusha lacked qualification as plaintiff. However, the court ruled that the use of the atomic bomb was a violation of international law. The Japanese government, the only plaintiff possible, relinquished any claims against the Allies for war compensation in the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951. The Japanese government publicly protested against the American use of the atomic bomb only once before the defeat, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. For details, see Matsui Yasuhiro, Genbaku saiban: Kakuheiki haizetsu to hibaku­ sha engo no hōri (Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 1986); and Shiina, Genbaku hanzai, 9–20. 21. Kikkawa, “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete, 72. 22. For Tanimoto’s activities in the United States, see Tanimoto Kiyoshi, Hiroshima no jūjika o daite (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1950); Tanimoto Kiyoshi, Hiroshima genbaku to Americajin: Aru bokushi no heiwa angya (Tokyo: Ninon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1976); and Chūjō Kazuo, Genbaku Otome (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1984). Hersey also documented Tanimoto’s further activities as well as censorious reactions that Tanimoto received from the local com­ munity, in the revised Japanese edition of Hiroshima, trans. Ishikawa Kin’ichi, Tanimoto Kiyoshi, and Aketagawa Tōru (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankai, 2003). 23. Chūgoku shimbunsha, Kenshō Hiroshima, 58–61; and Hiroshima Heiwa Bunka Tosho Kankōkai, Hiroshima no shōgen, 232–236. 24. Kikkawa, “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete, 164–165. Tōge published his Poetry of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū) at his own expense in 1951. He feared the possibility of the American use of the atomic bomb in the Korean War, after he heard in 1950 of President Truman’s intention to use it. He died of disease in 1953. “Prelude” (Ningen o kaese), one of his most famous poems, which appears in the opening of Poetry of the Atomic Bomb, goes as follows: Bring back the fathers! Bring back the mothers! Bring back the old people! Bring back the children! Bring me back! Bring back the human beings I had contact with! For as long as there are human beings, a world of human beings, bring back peace, unbroken peace. (Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 305) This poem was criticized in the 1980s and 1990s for not only neglecting the history of the Japanese invasion but also universalizing the victimhood of Hiroshima. But it should also be noted that this poem was written for a specific political and military situation. 25. The politician and journalist Kamichika Ichiko and the actor Takizawa Osamu were also listed. 26. Tetsuno Isaac, “Shirīzu Hiraoka Takashi intabyū: Hiraoka Takashi to Hiroshima no shisō,” last modified August 18, 2010, http://www.inaco.co.jp. 27. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 98. 28. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31.

6772_Book_CC.indd 124

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 75–82

125

29. Ibid., 32–33. 30. Ibid., 33. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 31. 34. Hara Tamiki, Summer Flowers, in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 57–58. 35. Ibid., 58. 36. Ibid. 37. Nancy Lane also describes the following: “As the camera moves into the wards prob­ ing the faces and bodies of the patients there, their faces are serene and expressionless. The camera’s gaze slides off without being able to penetrate and find any kind of meaning. Their suffering is indecipherable; it offers no opening or foothold for the camera”; Lane, “Subject in/of History,” 97. 38. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 76–78. 39. Jonathan Culler, Barthes (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), 50–58. 40. Culler also makes a similar point as to the interpretation of Robbe-Grillet’s works: “But as Robbe-Grillet’s novels grew more familiar, it became evident that readers could recuperate them as literature and make sense of them, particularly by imagining a narrator. The most mechanical descriptions, the most confusing repetitions or lacunae, make sense if they are taken as the thoughts of a disturbed narrator. . . . Instead of ‘objective literature’ we have then a literature of subjectivity, taking place entirely within the mind of a deranged narrator”; ibid., 56–57. 41. Monaco, Alain Resnais, 21–22. In his “Desire at Cross(-Cultural) Purposes,” Jackson Jr. refers to Monaco’s account and points out the incongruity between Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour in terms of their ethical underpinnings. 42. Ibid., 22. 43. Cardullo, “Symbolism of Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” 39. 44. According to Adler, when Resnais came to Hiroshima to make Hiroshima Mon Amour, he participated in a bus tour. On board, he accidentally heard a sentence that combined the words of a tour guide with a love song from a speaker: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” See Adler, Marguerite Duras, 226. 45. Resnais has made politically engaged films that have also required him to keep nego­ tiating with various forms of political pressure. The documentary Statues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi, 1953), which Resnais directed with Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, was banned by the French government because of its criticism of French colonialism. As men­ tioned, Resnais had to withdraw Night and Fog from the Cannes Film Festival. He had to withdraw from Cannes again when he made The War Is Over (La guerre est finie, 1966), which depicts the life of Spanish leftist activists under the Franco regime and received an objec­ tion from the Spanish government. Although Hiroshima Mon Amour won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, it was withdrawn from the main competition in order not to offend the American government.

Chapter Four: Entangled Discourses Parts of chapter 4 appeared in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 122–137. 1. Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 20.

6772_Book_CC.indd 125

6/12/18 6:57 PM

126

Notes to Pages 83–86

2. See Hara Tamiki, Natsu no hana, in Nihon no genbaku bungaku 1, 12–69. 3. Founded in January 1946, Kindai bungaku became a major platform for Japanese writers of a new generation called sengoha (postwar group), such as Noma Hiroshi, Umezaki Haruo, Shiina Rinzō, Ōoka Shōhei, and Takeda Taijun. 4. Braw, Atomic Bomb Suppressed, 145. 5. David Sanders, John Hersey (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967), 49. 6. Ibid., 39–41; David Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 12–15; and Hersey, Hiroshima (2003), 209, 227. 7. Michael Yavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience,” in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Laurence Lifschultz (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 292. 8. Ibid. 9. Hersey, Hiroshima (2003), 228. 10. Yavenditti, “John Hersey,” 290, 300. 11. Sanders, John Hersey Revisited, 19. 12. Sanders, John Hersey, 49; Sanders, John Hersey Revisited, 19; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 204. 13. Sanders, John Hersey, 49; Yavenditti, “John Hersey,” 290; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 204. 14. See Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts,” 221–235. 15. In the early period, a few memoirs written by the hibakusha were translated into English: Nagai Takashi, ed., We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland (1951); Hachiya Michihiko, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August 6– September 30, 1945 (1955); and Osada Arata, ed., Children of the A-Bomb (1963). Novels, comics, essays, and picture books were also introduced later: Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain (1969); Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen (1978); Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes (1981); and Maruki Toshi’s Hiroshima no Pika (1987). 16. See, for instance, Robert Frank, “Hiroshima: Moral or Military?,” English Journal 36, no. 4 (1947): 183–188; Dale Brown and Harold McFarlin, “Situating Creativity in a Large-enrollment History Class,” History Teacher 13, no. 2 (1980): 187–197; Daniel Zins, “Teaching English in a Nuclear Age,” College English 47, no. 4 (1985): 387–406; Richard Jenseth, “Understanding Hiroshima: An Assignment Sequence for Freshman English,” College Composition and Communication 40, no. 2 (1989): 215–219; and Chris Crowe, “Young Adult Literature: Peace-keeping Forces: YA War books,” English Journal 89, no. 5 (2000): 159–163. 17. Caruth, “Literature and the Enactment of Memory,” 52–56. 18. Peter Schwenger and John Whittier Treat, “America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America,” boundary 2, 21, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 239. 19. Of course there are always ways for the audience to interpret the text differently, to read against the grain. 20. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3:218. 21. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 44–45. 22. Sanders, John Hersey Revisited, 15.

6772_Book_CC.indd 126

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 86–92

127

23. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels, 1926–1948 (New York: Library of America, 2009), 115. 24. Ibid., 116. 25. Hersey, Hiroshima (1989), 83. 26. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 153–162. 27. Albert E. Stone, Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 13–14. 28. Ōta Yoko, City of Corpses, in Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 153. 29. Hersey, Hiroshima (1989), 1–2. 30. Stone, Literary Aftershocks, 9. 31. As for an “authorial authority” in Hersey’s Hiroshima, Alan Nadel finds an (inevita­ ble) breakdown of the controlling power of a narrative voice in this text. For him, Hiroshima is a postmodern text that illustrates a failure in containing incongruence, dysfunction, and inse­ curity within itself, since Hersey is unable to control the production of meanings, such as the difference between a parody and its referent. Nadel also points out that Hiroshima contains contradictory accounts of the hibakusha experience. Toward the end, Hersey inserts a letter written by Tanimoto Kiyoshi, who testifies to a heightened national sentiment shared by the injured. But such descriptions are incongruent with those given by the narrative voice. Nadel’s argument evidences the impossibility of a seamless narrative. But the collapse of the meaning created by a narrative voice does not necessarily compensate for the lack of engagement with the hibakusha’s voice in the text. See Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 53–67. 32. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 23. 33. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 151–184. 34. In early polls before the publication of Hersey’s Hiroshima, more than 80 percent of Americans approved of the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 183. It was Roman Catholic spokesmen and Protestant clergymen in the United States that expressed an open criticism of the use of the atomic bomb, while the majority applauded it. See Yavenditti, “John Hersey,” 288. 35. Stone also argues that Hiroshima’s aim is to provide the reader with compassionate identification. See Stone, Literary Aftershocks, 13. 36. Satō, “Gensuibaku to eiga,” 31–32. 37. Schwenger, “America’s Hiroshima,” 238. 38. Ibid., 243. 39. Ibid., 245. 40. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 208. 41. Yavenditti, “John Hersey,” 295. 42. See Nadel, Containment Culture, 64; Schwenger, “America’s Hiroshima,” 240. 43. See Nagai Takashi, Nagasaki no kane, and Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, trans. William Johnston (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984). 44. Inoue Hisashi, “Besutoserā no sengoshi 5: Nagai Takashi ‘Kono ko o nokoshite,’”  Bungei shunjū (June 1987): 365. 45. Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 113. 46. Simultaneously, Nagai makes negative remarks about the annihilating power of the atomic bomb. See Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki, 103–104.

6772_Book_CC.indd 127

6/12/18 6:57 PM

128

Notes to Pages 92–95

47. For instance, the following publications in 1949 show a narrative pattern similar to Nagai’s (and Hersey’s): Ishida Masako, Masako taorezu: Nagasaki genshi bakudanki, in Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2, ed. Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo, 433–501 (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991); Mitsubishi jūkōgyō kabushiki gaisha Nagasaki seiki sei­ sakujo, ed., Nagasaki seiki genshibakudanki, in Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2, 205–432; and Nagai Takashi, ed., Genshiun no shita ni ikite: Nagasaki no kodomora no shuki, in Nihon no genbaku bungaku 14: Shuki/kiroki. CCD, one of the censorship institutions established at the beginning of U.S. occupation, was disbanded in October 1949. 48. Both Osada’s and Nagai’s works refer to Hersey’s Hiroshima in their prefaces as their comparisons, demonstrating their desire to become as influential and reputed as Hersey. 49. See Hayashi, Hayashi Kyōko zenshū, 1–8 kan; and Ōta, Ōta Yoko shū, 1–4 kan. Hayashi started to publish her works thirty years after she experienced the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at the age of fourteen. Her stories also include other events in her life, such as her childhood in colonial Shanghai and her broken marriage. In her texts, the temporal range of the diegesis is open, elusive, and sometimes fragmented. 50. There is another parallel between Hersey and Nagai. Just as Nagai had already become a best-selling writer with his Leaving This Child Behind before writing The Bells of Nagasaki, Hersey was also already a best-selling novelist and winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his fictional A Bell for Adano (1944) before writing Hiroshima. The ending of The Bells of Nagasaki also resonates with that of A Bell for Adano. Both stories close with the depiction of the restored bells ringing in the territories of the Axis powers occupied by the American forces. A Bell for Adano concerns a heroic Italian American officer who retrieves a historic bell in the Italian town of Adano, and receives respect from the townspeople. Previously the bell had been taken away by the ex-fascist regime to transform it into weapons. When the officer leaves the town in the end, the beautiful sound of the bell reverberates. Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki also ends with the depiction of the reechoing of the restored bells of the Urakami Cathedral, which fell at the time of the atomic explosion. 51. Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki, 106. 52. Ibid., 107–108. 53. Ibid., 109. 54. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 328. 55. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 23. 56. Ibid., 81. 57. Tadokoro Tarō, “Sengo besutoserā monogatari 8: Nagai Takashi, ‘Konoko o noko­ shite,’”  Asahi Journal 5 (December 1965): 43. 58. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 198. 59. Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki, 35, 43, 73. 60. Ibid., 69. 61. Nagai Takashi, Nagai Takashi zenshū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971), 991–992. 62. In English translation, Shi Kunshan’s name is changed to Dr. Fuse. 63. Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki, 85. 64. Nagasaki ika daigaku genbaku kirokushū henshū iinkai, Nagasaki ika daigaku gen­ baku kirokushū 3 kan (Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki daigaku igakubu genbaku fukkō 50shū nen igaku dōsō kinen jigyō, 1996), 193. These Taiwanese victims at Nagasaki Medical College were enshrined in Yasukuni Shrine as “Japanese” war dead in 1972. See ibid. The Nagasaki

6772_Book_CC.indd 128

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Notes to Pages 95–98

129

Medical College was absorbed into the Nagasaki University School of Medicine in the post­ war period. 65. For a discussion of the exceptions, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 21–22. 66. Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998), 3–8. 67. Inoue, “Besutoserā no sengoshi 5,” 367–369. 68. Kamata Sadao, “Nagasaki no ikari to inori,” in Nihon no genbaku bungaku 15, 412. 69. Takahashi Shinji, “Nagasaki genbaku no shisōka o megutte: Nagai Takashi kara Akizuki Tatsuichirō e,” Shakai shisōshi kenkyū 10 (1986): 40–41. See also Akizuki Tatsuichirō, Nagasaki genbakuki: Hibaku ishi no shōgen (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1966). 70. Yamada Kan, Nagasaki genbaku ronshū (Miyazaki, Japan: Honda kikaku, 2001), 28–30. 71. Kataoka Chizuko and Kataoka Rumiko eds., Hibakuchi Nagasaki no saiken (Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University Museum, 1996). 72. Motoshima Hitoshi, “Nagasaki genbaku no kirisutoteki hyōka,” Kirisuto kyō shakai fukushigaku kenkyū 29 (1996): 42–43. In 1990, Motoshima was shot and injured by a right­ winger after he stated in the local assembly that Emperor Shōwa was responsible for the war. 73. Nishimura Akira, “Inori no Nagasaki: Nagai Takashi to genbaku shisha,” Tokyo daigaku shūkyōgaku nenpō 19 (2001): 54. 74. Takahashi Shinji, “Inori no Nagasaki hihan: ‘Rettō hibaku toshi’ kara ‘heiwa no inori’ e,” Sekai 692 (2001): 79; Baba Shūichirō, “Nagai Takashi karano tegami: Hibaku 59 nenme no natsu ni,” Nishinippon shimbun, August 4–6, 2004. 75. Since a Japanese translation of Hersey’s Hiroshima was not allowed to be published until April 1949, this delay was criticized as censorship by foreign correspondents based in Japan. 76. Takahashi, “Inori no Nagasaki hihan,” 79. See also Rengōgun sōshireibu chōhōka, Manira no higeki, in Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2, 103–203.

6772_Book_CC.indd 129

6/12/18 6:57 PM

6772_Book_CC.indd 130

6/12/18 6:57 PM

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Japanese, Chinese, and Korean names have been written with family names first, followed by given names. However, this order has been reversed for those who have published primarily or extensively in English. Abbott, Andrew. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Aitken, Ian, ed. Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York: Rutledge, 2006. Akizuki, Tatsuichirō. Nagasaki genbakuki: Hibaku ishi no shōgen [The Record of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki: Testimonies of a Hibakusha Doctor]. Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1966. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Anderson, Joseph I., and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Antelme, Robert. On Robert Antelme’s ‘The Human Race’: Essays and Commentary. Edited by Daniel Dobbels. Translated by Jeffrey Haight. Evanston, IL: Marlboro Press, 2003. Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego. Translated by Chris Turner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Appadurai, Arjun. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postcolonial Geography.” In The Geography of Identity, edited by Patricia Yaeger, 40–58. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Ariyama, Teruo. Senryōki mediashi kenkyū: Jiyū to tōsei, 1945nen [A Study of Media History during the Occupation: Freedom and Control, 1945]. Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 1996. Armes, Roy. The Cinema of Alain Resnais. London: A. Zwemmer, 1968. Baba, Shūichirō. “Nagai Takashi karano tegami: Hibaku 59nenme no natsu ni” [Letters from Nagai Takashi: The 59th Summer after the Atomic Bombing]. Nishinippon shimbun [Nishinippon Newspaper], August 4–6, 2004. Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire: The Realties and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Bal, Mieke, Jonathon Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1999. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991. 131

6772_Book_CC.indd 131

6/12/18 6:57 PM

132

Selected Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ———. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. Baskett, Michael. The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Bataille, Georges. “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 221–235. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 2, 1927–1934. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Translated by Rodney Livingstone et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Bernstein, Matthew, and Mark Ravina. “Review of Rhapsody in August by Hisao Kurosawa; Akira Kurosawa.” American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1161–1163. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. ———, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bird, Kai, and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. Hiroshima’s Shadow. Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988. Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1964. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Braw, Monica. The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991. Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. Brown, Dale, and Harold McFarlin. “Situating Creativity in a Large-enrollment History Class.” History Teacher 13, no. 2 (1980): 187–197. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Buruma, Ian. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Canby, Vincent. “Kurosawa, Small in Scale and Blunt.” New York Times, December 20, 1991. Cardullo, Bert. “The Symbolism of Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” Film Criticism 8, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 39–44. Caruth, Cathy. “Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour).” In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 25–56. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ———, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

6772_Book_CC.indd 132

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

133

———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cavanaugh, Carole. “A Working Ideology for Hiroshima: Imamura Shōhei’s Black Rain.” In Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, edited by Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh, 250–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cazdyn, Eric. The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ching, Leo. “‘Give me Japan and Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 763–788. Chow, Rey. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. “Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze’s Method.” In Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, 151–168. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ———. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———. “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay).” Representations, no. 94 (Spring 2006): 131–149. ———. “When Whiteness Feminizes . . . : Some Consequences of a Supplement Logic.” In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 153–182. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Chūgoku shimbunsha [Chūgoku Newspaper], ed. Hiroshima no kiroku: Nenpyō shiryō hen [The Record of Hiroshima: Chronology and Data]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1966. ———, ed. Hono’o no hi kara nijū-nen: Hiroshima no kiroku [Twenty Years after the Day of Flames: Records of Hiroshima]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1966. ———, ed. Kenshō Hiroshima, 1945–1995 [Probing Hiroshima, 1945–1995]. Hiroshima, Japan: Chūgoku shimbunsha [Chūgoku Newspaper], 1995. Chūjō, Kazuo. Genbaku Otome [Hiroshima Maidens]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1984. ———. Genbaku wa hontō ni 8ji 15fun ni ochitanoka: Rekishi o wazukani nurikaeyō tosuru chikaratachi [Was the Atomic Bomb Really Dropped at 8:15? The Power That Tries to Slightly Rewrite History]. Tokyo: Sangokan, 2001. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

6772_Book_CC.indd 133

6/12/18 6:57 PM

134

Selected Bibliography

———. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Conan, Eric, and Henry Rousso. Vichy: An Ever-Present Past. Translated by Nathan Bracher. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. Crowe, Chris. “Young Adult Literature: Peace-keeping Forces; YA War books.” English Journal 89, no. 5 (2000): 159–163. Culler, Jonathan. Barthes. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983. Cummings, Bruce. Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Damrosch, David. “Where Is World Literature?” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, edited by Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, 211–220. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Davis, Winston. “Review of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century’s End, by Norma Field.” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 147–151. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Fèlix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 20–31. Desser, David M. “Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, an Ambivalent Cinema.” Swords and Ploughshares 9, nos. 3/4 (Spring–Summer 1995): 15–19. Doak, Kevin M. “Hiroshima Rages, Nagasaki Prays: Nagai Takashi’s Catholic Response to the Atomic Bombing.” In When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs, 249–271. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 33–50. Dobbels, Daniel, ed. On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary. Translated by Jeffrey Haight. Evanston, IL: Marlboro, 2003. Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. ———. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Dreifort, John E. “Japan’s Advance into Indochina, 1940: The French Response.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (September 1982): 279–295. Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour. Translated by Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1961. ———. The Lover. Translated by Barbara Bary. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. ———. The North China Lover. Translated by Leigh Hafrey. New York: New Press, 1992. ———. The Sea Wall. Translated by Herma Briffualt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952.

6772_Book_CC.indd 134

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

135

———. The War: A Memoir. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: New Press, 1986. Ehrlich, Linda C. “The Extremes of Innocence: Kurosawa’s Dreams and Rhapsodies.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, 160–177. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. Endō, Shūsaku. “Nihon no imāju to Furansu no imāju” [Japanese Image and French Image]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 236 (July 1959): 103–104. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Etō, Jun. “The Censorship Operation in Occupied Japan.” In Press Control around the World, edited by Jane Leftwich Curry and Joan N. Dassin, 235–253. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982. ———. Tozasareta gengo kūkan: Senryōgun no ken’etsu to sengo Nihon [The Closed Discursive Space: Occupation Army Censorship and Postwar Japan]. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1989. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Farquhar, Judith B., and James L. Hevia. “Culture and Postwar American Historiography of China.” positions 1 (1993): 486–525. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Ferguson, Frances. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 4–10. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Edited by George Armstrong Kelly. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1978. ———. Power. Vol. 3, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Edited by James D. Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. New York: New Press, 2000. ———. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–120. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Frank, Robert. “Hiroshima: Moral or Military?” English Journal 36, no. 4 (1947): 183– 188. Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Fujii, Jinshi. “Shanhai, Nankin, Pekin: Tōhō bunkaeigabu tairiku toshi sanbusaku no chi­ seigaku” [Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing: Geopolitics of a Trilogy of Continental Chinese Cities by Cultural Films Branch of Tōhō]. In Eiga to “ daitōa kyōei-ken” [Cinema and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere], edited by Iwamoto Kenji, 101–127. Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004. ———. “Torarenakattsuta shotto to sono unmei: ‘Jihen’ to eiga, 1937–1941” [Untaken Shots and Their Destiny: “Sino-Japanese War” and Cinema, 1937–1941]. Eizōgaku [Visual Studies] 67 (November 2001): 23–40. Fujitani, Takashi. “Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses.” In Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), edited

6772_Book_CC.indd 135

6/12/18 6:57 PM

136

Selected Bibliography

by Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, 239–266. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. ———. “The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers.” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (September 2001): 379–402. ———. “Senka no jinshushugi: Dainiji taisenki no ‘Chōsen shusshin Nihon kokumin’ to ‘nikkei Amerikajin’” [Racism during the War: “Korean Japanese” and “Japanese Americans” in WWII]. In Iwanami kōza, kindai Nihon no bunkashi 8 kan: Kanjō, kioku, sensō [Iwanami Lectures, the Cultural History of Modern Japan, Vol. 8: Sentiment, Memory, War], edited by Komori Yōichi et al., 235–280. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002. Fujitani, Takashi, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. Perilous Memories: The AsiaPacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Fukagawa, Munetoshi, ed. Hibaku nisei: Sono katararenakatta hibi to ashita [Second Generation Hibakusha: Their Untold Days and Tomorrow]. Tokyo: Jiji tsūshinsha [Jiji Press], 1972. Fukushima, Yukio, and Abé Mark Nornes, eds. Nichibei eigasen [Media Wars: Then and Now]. Tokyo: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 1991. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Gerson, Joseph. Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World. London: Pluto Press, 2007. Gibbons, Luke. “Guests of the Nation: Ireland, Immigration, and Post-Colonial Solidarity.” Traces 2 (2001): 79–102. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity.” In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, 223–239. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Glassman, Deborah N. Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. London:

Associated University Presses, 1991. Gloster, Hugh M. “Hiroshima in Retrospect.” Phylon 17, no. 3 (3rd qtr., 1956): 271–278. Gobeil, Madeleine, Michel Leiris, and Carl R. Lovitt. “Interview with Michel Leiris.” Substance 4, nos. 11/12 (1975): 44–66. Gobineau, Arthur. The Inequality of Human Races. Translated by Adrian Collins. New York: Howard Fertig, 1967. Goodwin, James. “Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, 178–202. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. Gordon, Bertram M. Collaborationism in France during the Second World War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Groueff, Stephane. Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967. Guillory, John. “Canon.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 233–249. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

6772_Book_CC.indd 136

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

137

Hachiya, Michihiko. Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6– September 30, 1945. Edited and translated by Warner Wells. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hara, Tamiki. Hara Tamiki sengo zen shōsetsu [All the Postwar Novels of Hara Tamiki]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2015. ———. Hara Tamiki zen shishū [The Complete Collection of the Poems of Hara Tamiki]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2015. ———. Natsu no hana [Summer Flowers]. In Nihon no genbaku bungaku [Japanese Atomic Bomb Literature] 1: Hara Tamiki, edited by “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungaku­ sha no seimei” shomeisha [Writers Who Signed the “Statement about the Nuclear War Crisis”], 12–69. Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1983. ———. Summer Flowers [Natsu no hana]. In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and trans­ lated by Richard H. Minear, 19–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Harada, Tōmin. Hiroshima no gekai no kaisō: Hiroshima kara betonamu e [A Memoir of a Surgeon in Hiroshima: From Hiroshima to Vietnam]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1977. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harootunian, Harry D. The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004. Harootunian, Harry, and Naoki Sakai. “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies.” positions 7, no. 2 (1999): 593–647. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hasumi, Shigehiko. Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō [Director Ozu Yasujirō]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1983. Haver, William. The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Hayashi, Kyōko. Hayashi Kyōko zenshū, 1–8 kan [Complete Works of Hayashi Kyōko, Vols. 1–8]. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2005. Hazumi, Tsuneo. “Nihon no sensō eiga” [Japanese War Cinema]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 637 (February 1938): 12. Hein, Laura, and Mark Selden, eds. Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Hersey, John. A Bell for Adano. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. ———. Hiroshima. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. Hiroshima. Translated by Ishikawa Kin’ichi, Tanimoto Kiyoshi, and Aketagawa Tōru. Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku [Hōsei University Press], 2003. Higgins, Lynn A. “Durasian (Pre) Occupation.” L’Esprit Créateur 30, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 47–57. Hirano, Kyoko. “Depictions of the Atomic Bombings in Japanese Cinema during the U.S. Occupation Period.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, 103–119. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996.

6772_Book_CC.indd 137

6/12/18 6:57 PM

138

Selected Bibliography

———. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945– 1952. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Hiraoka, Takashi. Henken to sabetsu: Hiroshima soshite hibaku Chōsenjin [Prejudice and

Discrimination: Hiroshima and the Korean Hibakusha]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1972.

———. Kibō no Hiroshima: Shichō wa uttaeru [Hiroshima of Hope: Mayor’s Appeal]. Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 1996. Hiroshima heiwa bunka tosho kankōkai [The Hiroshima Peace Culture Book Publication Association], ed. Hiroshima no shōgen: Heiwa o kangaeru [Testimonies on Hiroshima: Considering Peace]. Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha, 1969. Hiroshima ken [Hiroshima Prefecture], ed. Hiroshima sensaishi [A History of War Damage in Hiroshima]. Tokyo: Daiichi hōki shuppan, 1988. Hiroshima Nagasaki shōgen no kai [The Association of Testimonies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki], ed. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, sanjūnen no shōgen: Jō ge–kan [Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Thirty-years of Testimonies, Vols. 1–2]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975–1976. Hiroshimashi, Nagasakishi genbaku saigai shi henshū iinkai [The Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Journal of the Atomic Bomb Disaster Editorial Committee], ed. Genbaku saigai: Hiroshima, Nagasaki [The Atomic Bomb Disaster: Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985. Hirsch, Joshua. After Image: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hoffmann, Stanley. “Collaborationism in France during World War II.” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (September 1968): 375–395. Horiba, Kiyoko. Genbaku: Hyōgen to ken’etsu; Nihonjin wa dō taiō shitaka [The Atomic Bombing: Representation and Censorship; How Did the Japanese React?]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1995. ———. Kinjirareta genbaku taiken [The Suppressed Experiences of the Atomic Bomb Victimization]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995. Hughes, Robert, ed. Film: Book 2: Films of Peace and War. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Hungerford, Amy. “Memorizing Memory.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 67–92. Ibuse, Masuji. Black Rain. Translated by John Bester. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985. ———. Kuroi Ame [Black Rain]. In Ibuse Masuji zenshū 23 kan [Complete Works of Ibuse Masuji, Vol. 23], 255–506. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1998. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945– 1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Iijima, Tadashi. “Ikiteite yokatta” [Still It’s Good to Live]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 13, no. 10 (October 1956): 104–105. Inose, Naoki. Pikaresuku: Dazai Osamu den [Picaresque: The Life of Dazai Osaku]. Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2002. Inoue, Hisashi. “Besutoserā no sengoshi 5: Nagai Takashi ‘Kono ko o nokoshite’” [Postwar History of Best-selling Books 5: Nagai Takashi’s “Leaving This Child Behind”]. Bungei shunjū (June 1987): 364–369. Ishida, Masako. Masako taorezu: Nagasaki genshi bakudanki [Masako Does Not Fall: The Record of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki]. In Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2 [The Record of the Atomic Bombing in Japan 2], edited by Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo, 433–501. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991.

6772_Book_CC.indd 138

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

139

Itō, Akihiko. Mirai karano yuigon: Aru hibakusha taiken no denki [Last Wish from the Future: The Life Story of a Hibakusha]. Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1980. Iwamoto, Kenji, ed. Eiga to “ daitōa kyōei-ken” [Cinema and the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere]. Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2004. Iwasaki, Akira. Senryō sareta sukurīn: Waga sengoshi [The Occupied Screen: My Postwar History]. Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 1975. Iwasaki, Akira, Noda Shinkichi, and Satō Shigemori. “Tokushū: Kamei Fumio no saihyōka” [A Special Feature: The Reevaluation of Kamei Fumio]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 28, no. 12 (December 1971): 84–95. Iyotani, Toshio, Naoki Sakai, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds. Gurōbaraizeishon no nakano ajia: Karuchurarusutadīzu no genzai [Globalization and Asia: Current Cultural Studies]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1998. Jackson Earl, Jr. “Desire at Cross(-Cultural) Purposes: Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” positions 2, no. 1 (1994): 133–174. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Rutledge, 1989. Jenseth, Richard. “Understanding Hiroshima: An Assignment Sequence for Freshman English.” College Composition and Communication 40, no. 2 (1989): 215–219. Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Julien, Eileen. “Arguments and Further Conjectures on World Literature.” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, edited by Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, 122–132. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei” shomeisha [Writers Who Signed the “Statement about the Nuclear War Crisis”], ed. Nihon no genbaku bungaku 1–15 kan [Japanese Atomic Bomb Literature, vols. 1–15]. Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1983. Kamata, Sadao. “Nagasaki no ikari to inori” [Prayer and Rage in Nagasaki]. In Nihon no genbaku bungaku 15 hyōron/essei [Japanese Atomic Bomb Literature 15: Reviews and Essays], edited by “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei” shomeisha [Writers Who Signed the “Statement about the Nuclear War Crisis”]. Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1981. Kamei, Fumio. “Aete ‘Hiroshima Nagasaki no himitsu’ o hagu: ‘Sekai wa kyōfu suru’ satsuei urabanashi” [I Dare to Disclose the Secrets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: An Unknown Story of Shooting “The World Is Terrified”]. Chūō kōron [Chūō Opinion] (December 1957): 77–85. ———. “Shinario: Ikiteite yokkata” [Scenario: “Still It’s Good to Live”]. Fujin korōn [Women’s Opinion] (May 1956): 132–145. ———. Tatakau eiga: Dokyumentarisuto no shōwashi [Fighting Cinema: A History of Shōwa for a Documentarian]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989. ———. “‘Tatakau heitai’ kara no keiken” [My Experiences in “Fighting Soldiers”]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 676 (April 1939): 105. ———. “‘Tatakau heitai’: Sono junan to enshutsu hōhō o kataru” [“Fighting Soldiers”: Ordeals and Production]. Shine furonto [Cine Front], no. 12 (July 1977): 4–5. Kamei, Fumio, and Takagi Takeo. “Eiga de egaku shi no hai” [Deadly Fallout Portrayed by a Film]. Shūkan yomiuri [Weekly Yomiuri] (August 1957): 52–56. Kamei, Fumio, and Tsuchimoto Noriaki. “Dokyumentarī no seishin” [The Spirit of Documentaries]. In Kōza Nihon eiga 5: Sengo eiga no tenkai [Japanese Film Lectures 5:

6772_Book_CC.indd 139

6/12/18 6:57 PM

140

Selected Bibliography

The Development of Postwar Cinema], edited by Satō Tadao et al., 342–361. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1987. Kamei, Fumio, et al. “Dokyumento eiga no sekai” [The World of Documentary Films]. Geijutsu shinchō [Art shinchō] 8, no. 2 (February 1957): 219–228. ———, et al. “Jūgun kantoku kyameraman no zadankai” [Round Table by the Directors and Cameramen Following the Army]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 21 (March 1939): 50–63. ———, et al. “Kamei Fumio no kataru hiroku: Senchū sengo eigashi” [A Secret Memoir Recounted by Kamei Fumio: A History of Wartime and Postwar Cinema]. Eiga geijutsu [Cinema Art] (July–August 1976): 78–89. ———, et al. “Kiroku eiga ‘Ikiteite yokatta’ no itoshita mono” [What the Documentary “Still It’s Good to Live” Intended]. Bijutsu hihyō [Art Criticism] (August 1956): 76–78. ———, et al. “Nihon bunka eiga no shoki kara kon’nichi o kataru zadankai” [Round Table on Japanese Cultural Movies from the Initial Period until Today]. Bunka eiga kenkyū [Cultural Film Studies] 3, no. 2 (February 1940): 16–27. Kanō, Ryūichi, and Mizuno Hajime. Hiroshima nijū-nen [Hiroshima Twenty Years]. Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1965. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Kataoka, Chizuko, and Kataoka Rumiko, eds. Hibakuchi Nagasaki no saiken [Rebuilding of the Nagasaki Victimized by the Atomic Bomb]. Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University Museum, 1996. Katō, Norihiro. Amerika no kage [The Shadow of America]. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shin­ sha, 1985. Kawaguchi, Sumiko. “‘Hiroshima, waga ai’ o meguttsute” [On “Hiroshima Mon Amour”]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 17, no. 6 (June 1960): 56–57. Kawaguchi, Takayuki. Genbaku bungaku toiu proburematīku [The Problematics of Genbaku Literature]. Fukuoka, Japan: Sōgensha, 2008. Kawamura, Minato. “‘Tokatonton’ to pikadon: ‘Futtsukō’ no seishin to ‘senryō’ no kioku” [“Tokatonton” and Pikadon: A Spirit of “Reconstruction” and the Memory of “Occupation”]. In Iwanami kōza, kindai Nihon no bunkashi 8 kan: Kanjō, kioku, sensō [Iwanami Lectures, the Cultural History of Modern Japan, Vol. 8: Sentiment, Memory, War], edited by Komori Yōichi et al., 321–353. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002. Kedward, H. R., and Nancy Wood, eds. The Liberation of France: Image and Event. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995. Kennedy, Michael D. Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt, eds. The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. New York: Routledge, 2008. Kikkawa, Kiyoshi. “Genbaku Ichigō” to iwarete [Called “Atomic Bomb Victim No. 1”]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1981. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times]. “‘Nihon no yoru to kiri’ no jōei chūshi” [The Cancellation of the Release of “Night and Fog in Japan”]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 271 (November 1960): 44. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], ed. Sekai no eiga sattsuka 5kan [Film Directors of the World, vol. 5]. Tokyo: Kinema junpō, 1970.

6772_Book_CC.indd 140

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

141

Kitagawa, Tetsuo. “Tsuitō: Kamei Fumio no shisō to sakuhin” [Mourning: Thought and Works of Kamei Fumio]. Buraku [Area] (April 1987): 64–67. Kitamura, Hiroshi. Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Kitano, Keisuke. Nihon eiga wa America de dō miraretekitaka [How Has Japanese Cinema Been Seen in the U.S.?]. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005. Klee, Ernest, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Translated by Deborah Burnstone. New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1991. Kolbowski, Silvia. “After Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 80–84. Komagome, Takeshi. “Japanese Colonial Rule and Modernity: Successive Layers of Violence.” Traces 2 (2001): 207–258. ———. Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō [Cultural Configuration of the Japanese Empire]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998. Komori, Yōichi, et al., eds. Iwanami kōza, kindai nihon no bunkashi 8 kan: Kanjō, kioku, sensō [Iwanami Lectures, the Cultural History of Modern Japan, Vol. 8: Sentiment, Memory, War]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002. ———, et al., eds. Sōryokusenka no chi to seido [Knowledge and Institution under Total War]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002. Kondō, Hiroki. “Nagai Takashi: Mō hitotsu no genbakushō” [Nagai Takashi: Another Illness Caused by Atomic Bomb Radiation]. Osaka ika daigaku kiyō jinbun kenkyū [Journal of Osaka Medical College, Studies in the Humanities] 37 (March 2006): 82–83. Kosakai, Yoshiteru. Hiroshima Peace Reader. Translated by Akira Tashiro, Michiko Tashiro, Robert Ramseyer, and Alice Ruth Ramseyer. Hiroshima, Japan: Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, 1980. Koshiro, Yukiko. Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Kreidl, John Francis. “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” In Alain Resnais, 53–64. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Kumakura, Masaya. Genron tōseika no kisha [Journalists under Restrictions on Freedom of Speech]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1988. Kurasawa, Aiko, et al., eds. Naze ima ajia-taiheiyō sensō ka [Why the Asia-Pacific War Now?]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005. Kurihara, Sadako. Hiroshima no genfūkei o daite [Embracing an Indelible Image of Hiroshima]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975. ———. Kakujidai ni ikiru: Hiroshima, shi no nakano sei [Living in the Nuclear Era: Life within Death in Hiroshima]. Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1982. ———. Kaku, ten’nō, hibakusha [Nuclear Weapons, Emperor, Hibakusha]. Tokyo: San’ihchi shobō, 1978. ———. Towareru Hiroshima [Hiroshima Questioned]. Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1992. ———. When We Say “Hiroshima”: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor: Center of Japanese Studies / University of Michigan, 1999. Kurihara, Yūichirō. “Tōsaku” no bungakushi: Shijō, media, chosakuken [The Literary History of “Plagiarism”: Market, Media, Copyright]. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2008. Kuroko, Kazuo. Genbaku bungakuron: Kakujidai to sōzōryoku [Essays on Atomic Bomb Literature: The Nuclear Era and Imagination]. Tokyo: Keiryūsha, 1993.

6772_Book_CC.indd 141

6/12/18 6:57 PM

142

Selected Bibliography

———. Ibuse Masuji to sensō: “Hana no machi” kara “ kuroi ame” made [Ibuse Masuji and War: From “City of Flowers” to “Black Rain”]. Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2014. Kuznick, Peter J., and James Gilbert, eds. Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001. Kwon, Heok-tae. “Shūdan no kioku, kojin no kioku: Kankoku to Hiroshima ga otagaini toikakerumono” [Collective Memory, Personal Memory: What Korea and Hiroshima Question about Each Other]. Gendai shisō [Modern Thought] 31, no. 10 (August 2003): 209–215. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1998. ———. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1994. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lane, Nancy. “The Subject in/of History: Hiroshima Mon Amour.” In Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension: Selected Papers from Fifteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, edited by John D. Simons, 89–100. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1991. ———. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. ———. “Witnessing Survival.” Society 15, no. 3 (March/April 1978): 40–44. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1995. Lindberg-Wada, Gunilla, ed. Studying Transcultural Literary History. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Lindee, M. Susan. Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lindqvist, Sven. “Exterminate All the Brutes.” Translated by John Tate. New York: New Press, 1996. Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ———. “Review of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun, by Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff.” Film Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 58. Luchting, Wolfgang A. “‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour,’ Time, and Proust.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 299–313. Lumis, Douglas. A New Look at The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1982. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

6772_Book_CC.indd 142

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

143

Maclear, Kyo. Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Maeda, Hideki. Ozu Yasujirō no ie: Jizoku to shintō [Home of Ozu Yasujirō: Continuance and Permeation]. Tokyo: Shoshi Yamada, 1993. Marukawa, Tetsushi. Taiwan: Posutokoroniaru no shintai [Taiwan: A Postcolonial Body]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2000. Maruki, Toshi. Hiroshima no Pika [Hiroshima’s Flash]. New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books, 1987. Masukomi shimin [Mass Communication Citizen]. “Mada attsuta genbaku eiga: Moeteiru Hiroshima” [Another Film of the Atomic Bombing That Had Existed: Burning Hiroshima]. Masukomi shimin 16 (June 1968): 50. Masumi, Junnosuke. Contemporary Politics in Japan. Translated by Lonny E. Carlile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ———. Gendai seiji: 1955 nen igo [Modern Politics: In and after 1955]. Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai [Tokyo University Press], 1985. Matsuda, Matt. “East of No West: The Posthistoire of Postwar France and Japan.” In Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, edited by Douglas Slaymaker, 15–33. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002. Matsui, Yasuhiro. Genbaku saiban: Kakuheiki haizetsu to hibakusha engo no hōri [The Atomic Bomb Trial: Legal Principles of the Abolition of Nuclear Weaponry and the Relief of the Hibakusha]. Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 1986. Matsumoto, Tsuyoshi. Ryakudatsu shita bunka: Sensō to tosho [Pillaged Culture: War and Books]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993. Matsuura, Sōzō. Senchū senryōka no masukomi [Media in the Wartime and Occupation Periods]. Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1984. ———. Senryōka no genron dan’atsu [The Suppression of Speech under the Occupation]. Tokyo: Gendai jānarizumu shuppankai, 1974. ———. Taiken to shiryō: Senjika no genrontōsei [The Experience and Historical Archives: Wartime Control of Speech]. Tokyo: Shirakawa shoin, 1975. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Medhurst, Martin J. “Hiroshima, Mon Amour: From Iconography to Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 4 (November 1982): 345–370. Mercken-Spaas, Godelieve. “Destruction and Reconstruction in Hiroshima, mon amour.” Literature/Film Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1980): 244–249. Merry, Sally Engle. Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. ———. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. Michiba, Chikanobu. “‘Kaku jidai’ no hansen heiwa: Taiwa to kōryū no tameno nōto 2” [Antiwar and Peace in the “Nuclear Era”: Notes 2 for Dialogue Exchanges]. Gendai shisō [Modern Thought] 31, no. 10 (August 2003): 154–190. ———. Senryō to heiwa: “Sengo” toiu keiken [Occupation and Peace: An Experience of the “Postwar”]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2005.

6772_Book_CC.indd 143

6/12/18 6:57 PM

144

Selected Bibliography

Minear, Richard H., ed. Hiroshima: Three Witnesses. Translated by Richard H. Minear. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Mirsepassi, Ali, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, eds. Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Mitchell, Timothy. Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Mitsubishi jūkōgyō kabushiki gaisha Nagasaki seiki seisakujo [Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Inc. Nagasaki Machinery Works], ed. Nagasaki seiki genshibakudanki [The Records of the Atomic Bombing of the Nagasaki Machinery Works]. In Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2 [The Record of the Atomic Bombing in Japan 2], edited by Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo, 205–432. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991. Miyamoto, Yuki. Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. New York: Fordham University, 2012. Miyoshi, Masao. Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality.” Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 283–297. Miyoshi, Masao, and Harry Harootunian, eds. Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Mohsen, Caroline. “Place, Memory, and Subjectivity, in Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Romanic Review 89, no. 4 (November 1998): 567–582. Molasky, Michael S. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory. London: Routledge, 1999. Monaco, James. Alain Resnais. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Moretti, Franco. “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur.” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, edited by Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, 113–121. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Moses, John W. “Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Literature/ Film Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1987): 159–163. Mosse, George L. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Fertig, 1985. Motoshima, Hitoshi. “Nagasaki genbaku no kirisutoteki hyōka” [Christian Commentary on the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki]. Kirisuto kyō shakai fukushigaku kenkyū [Christian Social Welfare Science] 29 (1996): 39–50. Murayama, Michio. Daitōa kensetsuron [A View on the Construction of Greater East Asia]. Tokyo: Shoko gyōseigaku, 1943. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Nagai, Hideaki. Ten fīto eiga sekai o mawaru [The 10 Feet Movie Goes around the World]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1983. Nagai, Takashi. The Bells of Nagasaki. Translated by William Johnston. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984. ———, ed. Genshiun no shita ni ikite: Nagasaki no kodomora no shuki [Living under the Cloud of the Atomic Bomb: Memoirs of Children of Nagasaki]. In Nihon no genbaku bungaku 14: Shuki/kiroki [Japanese Atomic Bomb Literature 14: Memoirs and Records], edited by “Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei” shomeisha [Writers Who Signed the “Statement about the Nuclear War Crisis”], 256–267. Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1983.

6772_Book_CC.indd 144

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

145

———. Nagai Takashi zenshū [Complete Works of Nagai Takashi]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971. ———. Nagasaki no kane [The Bells of Nagasaki]. In Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2 [The Record of the Atomic Bombing in Japan 2], edited by Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo, 9–101. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991. ———, ed. We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland. Translated by Ichiro Shirato and Herbert B. L. Silverman. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1951. Nagaoka, Hiroyoshi. Genbaku bungakushi [A History of Atomic Bomb Literature]. Tokyo: Fūbaisha, 1973. ———. Genbaku minshūshi [A History of the Atomic Bomb and People]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1977. Nagasaki ika daigaku genbaku kirokushū henshū iinkai [Nagasaki Medical College Atomic Bomb Record Editorial Committee]. Nagasaki ika daigaku genbaku kirokushū 3 kan [The Record of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Medical College, Vol. 3]. Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki daigaku igakubu genbaku fukkō 50shū nen igaku dōsō kinen jigyō [Nagasaki University School of Medicine Alumni Association Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Recovery from the Bombing], 1996. Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai [The Association that Defends the Human Rights of Resident Koreans], ed. Genbaku to Chōsenjin: Nagasaki ken Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō, kyōsei rōdō jitsuttai chōsa hōkokusho 1–5 shū [The Atomic Bomb and Koreans: A Report on the Examination of Nagasaki Prefecture’s Conditions for Korean Forced Laborers, Vols. 1–5]. Nagasaki, Japan: Nagasaki zainichi Chōsenjin no jinken o mamoru kai, 1982–1991. Najita, Tetsuo, Maeda Ai, and Kamishima Jirō, eds. Sengo Nihon no seishinshi: Sono saikentō [A History of the Postwar Japanese Mentality: Its Re-examination]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001. Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen [Hadashi no gen]. Vols. 1–10. Translated by Project Gen. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2003–2016. ———. Hadashi no gen [Barefoot Gen]. Tokyo: Chōbunsha, 1975. ———. Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen. Translated by Richard H. Minear. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Naono, Akiko. “Genbaku no e” to deau: Komerareta omoi ni mimi o sumasete [An Encounter with Atomic Bomb Pictures: Attending to Innermost Thoughts]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004. Nelson, Keith L. “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy.” Journal of Modern History 42, no. 4 (December 1970): 606–627. Nishimura, Akira. “Inori no Nagasaki: Nagai Takashi to genbaku shisha” [Nagasaki, the Praying City: Nagai Takashi and the Dead of the Atomic Bomb]. Tokyo daigaku shūkyōgaku nenpō [Tokyo University Annual Review of Religious Studies] 19 (2001): 47–61. Nishitani, Osamu. “Bonyōka suru kaku” [Nuclear Weaponry that Becomes Banal]. Gendai shisō [Modern Thought] 31, no. 10 (August 2003): 66–67. Nitz, Kyoko Kurusu. “Japanese Military Policy towards French Indochina during the Second World War: The Road to the Meigo Sakusen (9 March 1945).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (September 1983): 328–353. Noda, Masaaki. Sensō to zaiseki [War and Responsibility for Crimes]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998.

6772_Book_CC.indd 145

6/12/18 6:57 PM

146

Selected Bibliography

Norindr, Panivong. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Nornes, Abé Mark. “The Body at the Center—The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, 120–159. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. ———. “Japan.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, vol. 2, edited by Ian Aitken, 671– 676. New York: Rutledge, 2006. ———. Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Nygren, Scott. Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Obata, Tetsuo. Senryōka no “genbakuten”: Heiwa o oimotometa seishun [The Exhibition on the Atomic Bomb under the Occupation: Young Days in Pursuit of Peace]. Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan, 1995 Ōe, Kenzaburō, ed. The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. New York: Grove Press, 1985. ———. Hiroshima Notes. Translated by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. New York: Grove Press, 1996. ———. Hiroshima nōto [Hiroshima Notes]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965. Ogawa, Tōru, ed. Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei 1–6 kan [A Survey of Modern Japanese Cinema, Vols. 1–6]. Tokyo: Tōjusha, 1971–1972. Ogura, Shinbi. “Ikiteite yokatta” [Still It’s Good to Live]. Eiga geijutsu [Cinema Art] (September 1956): 52–53. Okada, Susumu. “Jikan to kūkan no sōgō ni tsuite: Furansu eiga nikansuru shiron” [On the Synthesis between Time and Space: A Tentative Assumption about French Cinema]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 17, no. 1 (January 1960): 64–69. ———. Nihon eiga no rekishi: Sono kigyō, gijutsu, geijutsu [A History of Japanese Cinema: Its Enterprise, Technique, Art]. Tokyo: Dabiddosha, 1967. Okamura, Akihiko. “Kaku jidai no sensō hōdō shashin: Genbaku kiroku eiga kara uketsu­ gubeki mono” [War News Photographs in the Nuclear Era: What We Should Inherit from Documentaries on the Atomic Bomb]. Masukomi shimin [Mass Communication Citizen] 16 (June 1968): 26–28. Orr, James J. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001. Osada, Arata, ed. Children of the A-Bomb [Genbaku no ko]. New York: Putnam, 1963. ———, ed. Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shōnen shōjo no uttae [Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1951. Ōta, Yasuo. Umino mukō no Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Kankoku hibakusha tachino saigetsu [Hiroshima, Nagasaki across the Sea: Years of Korean Hibakusha]. Tokyo: Bakushūsha, 2005. Ōta, Yoko. City of Corpses [Shikabane no machi]. In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 115–273. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. Ōta Yoko shū, 1–4 kan [The Collected Writings of Ōta Yoko, Vols. 1–4]. Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1982.

6772_Book_CC.indd 146

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

147

Pak, Subok, et al., eds. Hibaku kankokujin [Korean Hibakusha]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1975. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Pease, Donald E. “Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War: PostNational Spectacles.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 557–580. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Rafael, Vicente L. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States.” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. Rengōgun sōshireibu chōhōka [General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Civil Intelligence Section]. Manira no higeki [Tragedy of Manila]. In Nihon no genbaku kiroku 2 [The Record of the Atomic Bombing in Japan 2], edited by Ienaga Saburō, Odagiri Hideo, and Kuroko Kazuo, 103–203. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1991. Resnais, Alain. “‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’: A Composite Interview with Alain Resnais.” In Film: Book 2: Films of Peace and War, edited by Robert Hughes, 49–64. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Resnais, Alain, and Kamei Fumio. “Watashi wa naze kiroku eiga o tsukuruka: Yoru to kiri kara pikadon e” [Why Do I Make Documentaries? From “Night and Fog” to “Pikadon”]. Geijutsu shinchō [Art shinchō] 9, no. 12 (December 1958): 254–260. Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001. ———. “‘Mono no aware’: Hiroshima in Film.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, 20–37. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. ———. Ozu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. “How History Begets Meaning: Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959).” In French Film: Texts and Contexts, edited by Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, 173–185. London: Routledge, 1990. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Roth, Michael S. “Hiroshima Mon Amour: You Must Remember This.” In Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone, 91–101. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Ruoff, Jeffrey, and Kenneth Ruoff. The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun. Wiltshire, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1998. Rutheford, Jonathan. Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. ———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

6772_Book_CC.indd 147

6/12/18 6:57 PM

148

Selected Bibliography

Sakai, Naoki. “Civilizational Difference and Criticism: On the Complicity of Globalization and Cultural Nationalism.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 188–205. ———. “Henzai suru kokka: Futatsu no hitei; No-No Boy o yomu” [The Ubiquity of the Nation State: Two Negativities; A Reading of “No-No Boy”]. In Shizan sareru Nihongo, Nihonjin: “Nihon” no rekishi; chiseiteki haichi [The Stillborn of the Japanese as Language and as Ethnos: “Japanese” History; Geopolitical Configuration], 99–126. Tokyo: Shin’yō sha, 1996. ———. Nihon, eizō, beikoku: Kyōkan no kyōdōtai to teikokuteki kokuminshugi [Japan, Images, the U.S.: A Community of Sympathy and Imperial Nationalism]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007. ———. Shizan sareru Nihongo, Nihonjin: “Nihon” no rekishi; chiseiteki haichi [The Stillborn of the Japanese as Language and as Ethnos: “Japanese” History; Geopolitical Configuration]. Tokyo: Shin’yō sha, 1996. ———. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 441–464. ———. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “Two Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem.” Novel 37, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 229–257. ———. Voices of the Past: The Status of Languages in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Sakai, Naoki, Brett de Bary, and Toshio Iyotani, eds. Nashonaritī no datsukōchiku [Deconstructing Nationality]. Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 1996. Sakamoto, Yoshikazu, ed. Kaku to ningen I: Kaku to taiketsu suru nijju seiki [Nuclear Weapons and Human Beings I: The Twentieth Century Confronting Nuclear Threat]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1999. ———, ed. Kaku to ningen II: Kaku o koeru sekai e [Nuclear Weapons and Human Beings II: Toward the World beyond Nuclear Threat]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1999. Sakurai, Hitoshi. “Eizō wa hibakusha o dō egaitekitaka” [What Images of the Hibakusha Have Appeared on the Screen?]. Sekai [World] 692 (September 2001): 124–135. Sanders, David. John Hersey. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967. ———. John Hersey Revisited. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Sasaki, Kiichi. “Hiroshima de hito o aisuru towa dōiu koto ka?” [What Does It Mean to Love Somebody in Hiroshima?]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 16, no. 8 (August 1959): 20–29. ———. “‘Nihon no yoru to kiri’ ni seien o okuru” [I Support “Night and Fog in Japan”]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 17, no. 12 (December 1960): 16–19. Sasamoto, Yukuo. Beigun senryōka no genbaku chōsa: Genbaku kagaikoku ni nattsuta Nihon [A Survey of the Atomic Bombings under the American Military Occupation: A Japan that Became a Perpetrator Country]. Tokyo: Shinkansha, 1995. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press, 1998. Satō, Tadao. Currents in Japanese Cinema. Translated by Gregory Barrett. New York: Kodansha International, 1982. ———. “Gensuibaku to eiga” [The Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and Cinema]. Bungaku [Literature] 28 (August 1960): 28–34.

6772_Book_CC.indd 148

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

149

———. Kinema to hōsei: Nicchū eiga zenshi [Cinema and the Roar of Cannons: A Pre-history of Sino-Japanese Movies]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004. ———. “Kurosawa’s ‘Rhapsody in August’: The Spirit of Compassion.” Translated by Linda Ehrlich. Cineaste 19, no. 1 (1992): 48–49. ———. Nihon eiga no kyoshō tachi II [Masters of Japanese Cinema II]. Tokyo: Gakuyō shobō, 1996. ———. Nihon eiga rironshi [History of Japanese Film Theory]. Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1977. ———. Nihon eiga shisōshi [History of Japanese Film Thought]. Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970. ———. Ozu Yasujirō no geijutsu [Art of Ozu Yasujirō]. Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha [Asahi Newspaper], 1978. Satō, Takumi. “Sōryokusen taisei to shisōsen no gensetsu kūkan” [The System of Total War and the Discursive Space of the War on Thought]. In Sōryokusen to gendaika [The Total War and Modernization], edited by Yamanouchi Yasushi, Victor Koschmann, and Narita Ryūichi, 315–336. Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 1995. ———. “The System of Total War and the Discursive Space of the War on Thought.” In Total War and ‘Modernization,’ edited by Yamanouchi Yasushi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Narita Ryūichi, 289–313. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program / Cornell University, 1998. Sawaragi, Noi. “Bakushinchi” no geijutsu [Art at “Ground Zero”]. Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2002. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Schwenger, Peter, and John Whittier Treat. “America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America.” boundary 2, 21, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 233–253. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Seirai, Yūichi. Bakushin [Ground Zero]. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2006. ———. Ground Zero, Nagasaki. Translated by Paul Warham. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ———. Kanashimi to mu no aida [Between Sadness and Nothing]. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2015. ———. Ningen no shiwaza [A Human Act]. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2015. Selden, Kyoko, and Mark Selden, eds. The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989. Sherif, Ann. Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Shibata, Yuko. “Belated Arrival in Political Transition: 1950s films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” In When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs, 231–248. Leiden: Brill/Global Oriental, 2014. ———. “Dissociative Entanglement: US-Japan Atomic Bomb Discourses by John Hersey and Nagai Takashi.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 122–137. ———. “Hiroshima, Nagasaki” hibaku shinwa o kaitaisuru: Inpei saretekita nichibei kyōhan kankei no genten [Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Debunking a Myth of the Hibakusha Narrative, the Origin of Hidden Complicity between Japan and the United States]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2015.

6772_Book_CC.indd 149

6/12/18 6:57 PM

150

Selected Bibliography

———. “Obama no Hiroshima enzetsu o rekishikasuru: Amerika no genbaku gensetsu wa kawattsutanoka” [Historicizing Obama’s Hiroshima Speech: Did American Atomic Bomb Discourses Change?], Gendai shisō [Modern Thought] 44, no. 15 (August 2016): 196–205. ———. “Postcolonial Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Franco-Japanese Collaboration in the American Shadow.” In The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society, edited by Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo, 215–251. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. Shigematsu, Shizuma. Shigematsu nikki [The Diary of Shigematsu]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2001. Shigeno, Tatsuhiko. “‘Shanhai’ hihyō” [A Review of “Shanghai”]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 637 (February 1938): 62–63. Shiina, Masae. Genbaku hanzai: Hibakusha wa naze hōchi saretaka [Crimes of the Atomic Bombings: Why Were the Hibakusha Abandoned?]. Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1985. Shindō, Kaneto. Shindō Kaneto: Genbaku o toru [Shindō Kaneto: Shooting the Atomic Bombing]. Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 2005. Shirasaka, Yoshio. “Genbaku to ningen no hōkai” [The Atomic Bomb and the Collapse of Human Beings]. Kinema junpō [Motion Picture Times], no. 236 (July 1959): 104–106. Shogimen, Takasahi. “Dialogue, Eurocentrism, and Comparative Political Theory: A View from Cross-Cultural Intellectual History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 2 (April 2016): 323–345. Shūkan bunshun. “Heiwaya san nin otoko: Genbaku o urimono ni suruna” [Three Peace Businessmen: Do Not Sell Atomic Bomb Victimhood]. Shūkan bunshun [Weekly Bunshun], August 24, 1959, 22–23. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Smith, Ralph B. “The Japanese Period in Indochina and the Coup of 9 March 1945.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (September 1978): 268–301. Sodei, Rinjirō. Senryō shitamono saretamono: Nichibei kankei no genten o kangaeru [The Occupier and the Occupied: Considering the Origin of the US-Japan Relationship]. Tokyo: Saimaru shuppankai, 1986. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. ———. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Standish, Isolde. A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. New York: Continuum, 2005. Stoler, Ann Luara. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Stone, Albert E. Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Sugiyama, Mitsunobu. “Sengo nashonarizumuron no ichisokumen” [An Aspect of the Discussion on Postwar Nationalism]. In Sengo Nihon no seishinshi: Sono saikentō [A History of the Postwar Japanese Mentality: A Re-examination], edited by Tetsuo Najita, Maeda Ai, and Kamishima Jirō, 189–209. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988.

6772_Book_CC.indd 150

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

151

Sweeney, Michael S. Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Szanton, David, ed. The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Tachikawa, Kyōichi. Dainiji sekai taisen to Furansuryō Indoshina: Nichifutsu kyōryoku no kenkyū [World War II and French Indochina: A Study on Franco-Japanese Collaboration]. Tokyo: Keiryūsha, 2000. Tadokoro, Tarō. “Sengo besutoserā monogatari 8: Nagai Takashi, ‘Konoko o nokoshite’” [Postwar Bestsellers 8: Nagai Takashi’s “Leaving This Child Behind”]. Asahi Journal 5 (December 1965): 42–46. Takabatake, Michitoshi. “‘Rokujū-nen anpo’ no seishinshi [An Ideological History of the 1960 Anti-Security Treaty Movement]. In Sengo nihon no seishinshi: Sono saikentō [A History of the Postwar Japanese Mentality: A Re-examination], edited by Tetsuo Najita, Maeda Ai, and Kamishima Jirō, 70–91. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988. Takahashi, Shinji. “Inori no Nagasaki hihan: ‘Rettō hibaku toshi’ kara ‘heiwa no inori’ e” [Criticizing the “Praying” Nagasaki: From “Inferior Bombed City” to “Peace Prayers”]. Sekai [World] 692 (2001): 75–82. ———. “Nagasaki genbaku no shisōka o megutte: Nagai Takashi kara Akizuki Tatsuichirō e” [On Theorization of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki: From Nagai Takashi to Akizuki Tatsuichirō]. Shakai shisōshi kenkyū [Annals of the Society for the History of Social Thought] 10 (1986): 33–43. Takahashi, Tetsuya. Shōgen no poritikusu [Politics of Witness]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 2004. Takaki, Ronald T. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Takase, Tsuyoshi. Nagasaki: Kieta mō hitotsu no “genbaku dōmu” [Nagasaki: Disappeared Another Atomic Dome]. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2013. Takemae, Eiji. Senryō sengoshi [A History of Postwar Occupation]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002. Taketani, Mitsuo. “‘Sekai wa kyōfu suru’ o mite” [Watching “The World Is Terrified”]. Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 14, no. 12 (December 1957): 73–75. Takiguchi, Akihiro. Ibuse Masuji to chiguhaguna “ kindai”: Hyōryūsuru akuchuaritī [Ibuse Masuji and Uneven “Modernity”: Floating Actuality]. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012. Tambling, Jeremy. Review of Trauma: Exploration in Memory, by ed. Cathy Caruth and The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History, by Michael S. Roth. Modern Language Review 94, no. 1 (January 1999): 299–301. Tanikawa, Takeshi. Amerika eiga to senryō seisaku [American Cinema and Occupation Policies]. Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai [Kyoto University Academic Press], 2002. Tanimoto, Kiyoshi. Hiroshima genbaku to Americajin: Aru bokushi no heiwa angya [Hiroshima Atomic Bomb and the Americans: A Peace Pilgrimage of a Pastor]. Tokyo: Ninon hōsō shuppan kyōkai [NHK], 1976. ———. Hiroshima no jūjika o daite [Holding the Cross of Hiroshima]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1950. Tetsuno, Isaac. “Shirīzu Hiraoka Takashi intabyū: Hiraoka Takashi to Hiroshima no shisō” [Hiraoka Takashi Interview Series: Hiraoka Takashi and Thought of Hiroshima]. Last modified August 18, 2010, http://www.inaco.co. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Translated by Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

6772_Book_CC.indd 151

6/12/18 6:57 PM

152

Selected Bibliography

The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan at Hiroshima Peace Memorial,” May 27, 2016. Accessed August 25, 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov. Tōge, Sankichi. Poems of the Atomic Bomb. In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and trans­ lated by Richard Minear, 275–369. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Tokizane, Shōhei. “Kamei Fumio.” Eiga hyōron [Film Criticism] 13, no. 10 (October 1956): 71. Tomiyama, Ichirō, ed. Kioku ga katarihajimeru [Memories Begin Narrating]. Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai [Tokyo University Press], 2006. ———. Senjō no kioku [Memory of Battlefields]. Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha, 1995. Toyota, Seishi. “Kuroi ame” to “Shigamatsu nikki” [“Black Rain” and “The Diary of Shigematsu”]. Nagoya, Japan: Fūbaisha, 1993. Treat, John Whittier. Guraundo zero o kaku: Nihon bungaku to genbaku [Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb]. Translated by Mizushima Hiromasa et al. Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku [Hōsei University Press], 2010. ———. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Tsuboi, Hideto. Sensō no kioku o sakanoboru [Retracing War Memories]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2005. Tsuchimoto, Noriaki. “Kamei Fumio: ‘Shanhai’ kara ‘Tatakau heitai’ made” [Kemei Fumio: From “Shanghai” to “Fighting Soldiers”]. In Kōza Nihon eiga 5: Sengo eiga no tenkai [Japanese Film Lectures 5: The Development of Postwar Cinema], edited by Satō Tadao et al., 322–341. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1987. Tsuzuki, Masaaki. “Ga o shite shinjitsu o kataraseru: Kamei Fumio no dokyumentarīron o megutte” [Let Pictures Tell the Truth: On Kamei Fumio’s Theory of Documentaries]. Eizōgaku [Visual Studies] 51 (November 1993): 52–61. ———. Tori ni nattsuta ningen: Hankotsu no eiga kantoku Kamei Fumio no shōgai [A Human Being Who Has Become a Bird: The Lifetime of Kamei Fumio, An Uncompromising Film Director]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992. Turner, Graeme. Film as Social Practice. London: Routledge, 1988. Ukai, Satoshi. Tsugunai no arukeorojī [An Archeology of Compensation]. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1997. Uno, Kuniichi. Eizō shintairon [A Discussion of Image and Body]. Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2008. Ushio. “Kakurete ikiru hibakusha to jinshu sabetsu” [Hibakusha Living in Hiding and Racial Discrimination]. Ushio [Tide] (July 1972): 89–200. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Ward, John. “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” In Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time, 17–38. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 1992. Washburn, Dennis, and Carole Cavanaugh, eds. Word and Image in Japanese Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Watanabe, Kazuyuki. Horokōsuto no Furansu: Rekishi to kioku [The Holocaust in France: History and Memory]. Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 1998. Watanabe, Rikito, Tagawa Tokihiko, and Masuoka Toshikazu, eds. Senryōka no Hiroshima: Hankaku hibakusha undō sōsōki monogatari [Hiroshima under the Occupation: A Story

6772_Book_CC.indd 152

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Selected Bibliography

153

of the Pioneer Days of the Anti-nuclear and Hibakusha Movement]. Tokorozawa, Japan: Nichiyōsha, 1995. White, Hayden. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, 37–53. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 1–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels, 1926–1948. New York: Library of America, 2009. Willis, Sharon. “Hiroshima mon amour: Screen Memories.” In Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, 33–62. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Winston, Jane Bradley. Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Wood, Nancy. “Memory by Analogy: Hiroshima, mon amour.” In Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe, 185–196. Oxford: Berg, 1999. Yamada, Kan. Nagasaki genbaku ronshū [Collected Critiques of the Atomic Bombing in Nagasaki]. Miyazaki, Japan: Honda kikaku, 2001. Yamaguchi, Yoshiko. Jidai ni tsutaetai koto: Rekishi no kataribe Ri Kōran no hansei [What I Want to Pass on to the Next Generation: An Account of the Past Half of Ri Kōran, Witness to History]. Nara, Japan: Tenrikyō dōyūsha, 1997. ———. Sensō to heiwa to uta: Ri Kōran kokoro no michi [War, Peace, and Song: Ri Kōran, the Path to Heart]. Tokyo: Tokyo shimbun shuppankyoku [Tokyo Newspaper Press], 1993. Yamaguchi, Yoshiko, and Sakuya Fujiwara. Ri Kōran watakushi no hansei [Ri Kōran, My Past Half Life]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1987. Yamamoto, Akihiro. Kaku to Nihonjin: Hiroshima, gojira, Fukushima [Nuclear Weaponry, Nuclear Power, and the Japanese People: Hiroshima, Godzilla, Fukushima]. Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2015. Yamamoto, Taketoshi. Senryōki media bunseki [An Analysis of Media during the Occupation Period]. Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku [Hōsei University Press], 1996. Yavenditti, Michael. “John Hersey and the American Conscience.” In Hiroshima’s Shadow, edited by Kai Bird and Laurence Lifschultz, 288–302. Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998. Yokote, Kazuhiko. Hisenryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū: Ronkōhen [A Basic Research on Literature under the Occupation: A Discussion]. Tokyo: Musashino shobō, 1996. Yomota, Inuhiko. Nihon eigashi hyakunen [A Hundred-year History of the Japanese Cinema]. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2000. ———. Nihon no joyū [Japanese Actresses]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2000. ———, ed. Ri Kōran to higashi ajia [Ri Kōran and East Asia]. Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shup­ pankai [Tokyo University Press], 2001. Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Yoshida, Kazuhiko. “Media, aruiwa fashizumu: 3 dokyumentarisuto Kamie Fumio to sen’i kōyō eiga” [Media or Fascism 3: The Documentarian Fumio Kamei and the Films to

6772_Book_CC.indd 153

6/12/18 6:57 PM

154

Selected Bibliography

Rally Fighting Spirit]. Hōsei riron [Theory of Laws and Politics] 33, no. 1 (2000): 118– 150. Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. “Re-gendering the Enemy: Orientalist Discourse and National Character Studies during World War II.” In Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture, edited by Nancy Lusignan Schultz, 167–188. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. “The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order.” boundary 2, 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 242–257. ———. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Yoshimoto, Takaaki. “Hankaku” Iron [An Objection to Anti-Nuclearism]. Tokyo: Shinya sōshosha, 1982. Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Young, Robert C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Zins, Daniel. “Teaching English in a Nuclear Age.” College English 47, no. 4 (1985): 387–406. Zwigenberg, Ran. Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2014.

6772_Book_CC.indd 154

6/12/18 6:57 PM

INDEX

activists, 23, 51, 66, 72, 77, 112n. 7. See

also Kikkawa Kiyoshi

Adler, Laure, 8, 24–26, 114n. 50,

125n. 44

Agamben, Giorgio, 129n. 65

aging, 103

Akizuki Tatsuichirō, 96–97, 129n. 69

Algeria, 23

alienation, 26–27, 78–79

Allies, 19, 36, 83, 124n. 20

American authorities, 69, 84

American empire. See under empire

American government, 6, 35, 71,

123n. 20

American media, 66, 72–73, 76;

Associated Press, 66; Life, 66–67,

83, 123n. 10; New Yorker, 10,

82–84; New York Times, 13,

56; Time, 66, United Press

International, 66

American military, 13, 46, 56, 61, 66,

76

American soldiers, 36, 60, 74, 120n. 60

Antelme, Robert, 25, 113n. 23

antinuclear movements, 47, 49–51, 59,

68, 70

Anzieu, Didier, 75

architect, 17–18, 22. See also Le

Corbusier; Loos, Adolf

architecture, 112n. 3; Japanese, 33;

modern, 75–76

area studies, 3, 15, 107–108n. 19,

111n. 49

Asahi Graph (magazine), 118n. 28

Asian studies, 16, 105n. 1

Asia-Pacific War, 20, 56, 80, 96

Atomic Bomb Causality Commission

(ABCC), 69–70, 73, 121n. 70,

122n. 3, 123n. 17

atomic bomb disease (genbakushō),

42–43, 65–66, 68, 83, 92;

depicted in films, 46, 51–52, 54;

suppression of, 50. See also under

radiation

Atomic Bomb Dome, 49, 65, 67, 81,

120n. 48

August 6 (Hiroshima bombing), 10,

12, 49, 88, 109n. 30, 110n. 39,

118n. 28

August 15 (Japan’s acceptance of defeat),

82, 109n. 30

author, 25, 27, 85–87, 91, 114n. 35,

127n. 31

avant-garde: ecriture blanche, 78, 80;

Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1, 3, 7, 10,

76, 81, 99–100, 102

Axis powers, 22, 128n. 50

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51–52, 54

Balibar, Etienne, 30

Barthes, Roland, 81, 114n. 35; Writing

Degree Zero (work), 78

Bataille, Georges, 11, 84

Benjamin, Walter, 41

bestseller, 11, 98

Bhabha, Homi K., 15, 29

Boyer, Paul, 126nn. 12–13, 127n. 34,

127n. 40

Braw, Monica, 82–83 Brecht, Bertolt, 78

Buddhism: jizō, 59–60 Burchett, Wilfred, 82

Burma, 23

Cannes Film Festival, 59, 79, 125n. 45

capitalism, 32, 37

Caruth, Cathy, 29–30, 35, 84, 114n. 47

Casablanca (film), 35–37

155

6772_Book_CC.indd 155

6/12/18 6:57 PM

156

Index

Cayrol, Jean, 79 Césaire, Aimé, 21 Chabrol, Claude, 2–3, 106n. 12 Chaplin, Charlie: Monsieur Verdoux (film), 47 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 10, 75 China, 20, 22, 35, 38–39, 83, 86, 95 Chinese, 32, 34, 39–40, 95, 114n. 28, 115n. 61, 117n. 20 Chow, Rey, 3, 15, 31, 38, 111n. 49, 122n. 2 Christianity, 11, 21, 53–54, 93, 95, 97; Catholic, 45, 54, 91, 97, 127n. 34; divine providence, 11, 45, 93, 97; Protestant, 97, 127n. 34; Virgin Mary, 53–54, 119n. 48 Chūjō Kazuo, 12–14 Churchill, Winston, 35 Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), 48, 128n. 47 Civil Information and Education Section (CI & E), 48 Clifford, James, 39, 41, 57 Cold War, 5, 24, 37, 50, 58–59, 96, 119n. 38, 119n. 45; containment policies, 100; studies of, 15 colonialism, 4, 10, 25, 76; French, 26, 99, 107n. 16, 125n. 45; Japanese, 11, 30, 99–100 Communism, 25, 58, 71, 100, 113n. 19 compassion, 52, 73, 89–90, 120n. 56, 127n. 35 complicity, 26, 79 Conde, David, 48 confession, 39 Culler, Jonathan, 78, 125n. 40 Daiei (film company), 1–2, 4–5, 106n. 4 defamiliarization, 41, 43 de Gaulle, Charles, 36 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 42, 122n. 2; and Fèlix Guattari, 37 Derrida, Jacques, 58 Diary of Yumechiyo, The (Yumechiyo nikki; TV program), 52 Dower, John W., 48, 94

6772_Book_CC.indd 156

Duras, Marguerite: about documentaries, 3, 5–6, 9, 47; as icon, 1; involvement with French empire, 23–27, 31; use of Hersey, 11; The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique; work), 26, 114n. 28; Moderato Cantabile (work), 27–28; Hiroshima Mon Amour (work and film), 2, 7–8, 33, 84, 99–100, 105n. 2, 110n. 37, 114n. 50; The Lover (L’amant; work), 26, 32, 113n. 19, 114n. 28; The War: A Memoir (work), 113–114n. 23; The North China Lover (L’amant de la Chine du Nord; work), 26, 114n. 28 écriture blanche (Barthes), 78 Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The (Hiroshima, Nagasaki niokeru genshi bakudan no kōka; film), 5–7, 64, 99, 101–102, 108n. 26, 109n. 29, 118n. 28 8:15 a.m. (Hiroshima bombing time), 12–14 Einstein, Albert, 84 Eisensteinian montage, 9, 39, 43, 53 Emperor Shōwa, 38, 48, 82, 91, 96, 109n. 30, 118n. 24, 120n. 57, 129n. 72 empire: American, 111n. 49, 116n. 68; French, 4, 19, 24–27, 31; Japanese, 22, 24, 69, 94, 96. See also imperialism emplotment (White), 11, 85–86, 90, 92 Endō Shūsaku, 2, 108n. 22 Engelhardt, Tom, 21, 119n. 40 English: language, 36, 66, 81, 84, 108n. 21, 126n. 16; translation, 4, 84, 121n. 62 Enola Gay, 13, 110n. 47, 119n. 40 epic character (Bakhtin), 51–52, 54 essentialism, 108n. 21 ethnography, 9, 39, 41, 44, 57 “Euro-American” studies, 9, 17–18, 27–28, 30, 36, 98–99, 105n. 1

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Index

Europe, 15, 21–22, 35–36, 47, 59, 84,

105n. 3; European languages

(and non-European languages),

3–4, 111n. 50. See also English;

Holocaust

European imperialism. See under imperialism family, 42, 46; of hibakusha, 18, 51,

62–63, 69, 122n. 76; in Duras’

works, 26, 32, 114n. 28; in

Kurosawa’s films, 55–57

Fanon, Frantz, 5, 29

Farrell, Thomas, 71

feminism, 26

Foucault, Michel, 31, 114n. 35

French colonialism. See under colonialism French empire. See under empire French imperialism. See under imperialism French Indochina, 4, 22–23, 26–27,

31–34, 113n. 11

French New Wave, 1, 3, 80, 99,

107n. 16

French Revolution, 32

Frye, Northrop, 86–87 Fujitani, Takashi, 120n. 60

Fujiyama Ichirō, 91, 94

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, 58, 102–103 Gallimard (publisher), 24

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

(GATT), 50

Genette, Gérard, 9

Gensuikin (Japan Congress against A-

& H-Bombs), 119n. 39

Gensuikyō (Japan Council against

Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs),

49–51, 119n. 39

Gere, Richard, 55

Gestapo, 25

Gilroy, Paul, 15, 111n. 49

Gobineau, Arthur de, 25, 113n. 22

Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 120n. 50

6772_Book_CC.indd 157

157

Groves, Leslie, 110n. 47

Guattari, Fèlix. See under Deleuze

Hachiya Michihiko, 126n. 15

Hamai Shōzō (Hiroshima mayer), 71

Hara Tamiki, 12, 61, 79, 82, 106–

107n. 14; Summer Flowers (Natsu

no hana; work), 76, 78, 83,

107n. 14

Harootunian, Harry D., 15

Hayashi Kyōko, 92, 106–107n. 14,

128n. 49

Hawaii, 20, 56–57 hegemony, 31, 36, 89

Hersey, John: 8:15 a.m., 12–14; A

Bell for Adano (work), 128n. 50;

Hiroshima (work), 10, 82–84,

86, 90–92, 110n. 37, 110n. 39,

124n. 22, 127n. 31, 127n. 34,

128nn. 47–48, 128n. 50

Hibakusha Engohō (Hibakusha Relief

Law), 122

hibakusha health book, 92, 122n. 76

Hirano, Kyoko, 108n. 26, 109n. 30,

117n. 19

Hiraoka Takashi (Hiroshima mayor),

73, 119n. 41, 124n. 26

Hiroshima Maidens (Genbaku Otome), 71–73 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum,

19, 54, 110n. 39

Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, 66

Hitler, 22, 25

Ho Chi Minh, 32

Holocaust, 8, 15, 21, 79–80, 98, 109–

110n. 37, 121n. 70

homosocial, 37

humanities, 1, 3, 7–8, 15–16, 27,

105n. 1

Ibuse Masuji, 59, 61, 63, 106–107n. 14,

122n. 74, 126n. 15

Imai Tadashi: The Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu; film) and A Story of Pure Love ( Jun’ai monogatari; film), 52–53

6/12/18 6:57 PM

158

Index

Imamura Shōhei, 3; The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushi kō; film) and The Eel (Unagi; film), 59; Black Rain (Kuroi ame; film), 9, 55, 58–63 imperialism: European, 23, 30–31, 37; Japanese, 18, 34, 95–96, 98; U. S. neoimperialism, 37, 115–116n. 68. See also colonialism; empire Indonesia, 23 Inoue Hisashi, 91, 96 insanity, 55, 57 International monetary Fund (IMF), 50 Ishida Masako, 128n. 47 Iwasaki Akira, 48, 108n. 26, 109n. 30, 116n. 9 Jameson, Fredric, 32, 89 Japan (location): Chūgoku, 19, 21; Hokkaido, 62, 68, 123n. 11; Kansai, 62; Kyoto, 123n. 11; Kyushu, 62, 118n. 29; Nagoya, 118n. 29; Osaka, 47, 74, 88, 118n. 29, 123n. 11; Tokyo, 1–2, 21, 41, 47, 49, 68, 71–72, 74, 82, 103, 106n. 6, 118n. 29; Yaizu/Shizuoka, 47 Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Gensuibaku Higaisha Dantai Kyōgikai), 67–68 Japanese American, 55–56, 120– 121n. 60 Japanese authorities, 10, 57–58 Japanese colonialism. See under colonialism Japanese empire. See under empire Japanese film industry, 2–4, 106n. 6 Japanese government, 5–6, 45, 50, 58, 70, 103, 108n. 26, 118n. 29, 124n. 20 Japanese imperialism. See under imperialism Japanese military, 12, 22, 38, 40, 51, 56, 60, 96, 99, 119n. 40; in Black Rain, 60; in China, 40,

6772_Book_CC.indd 158

116n. 9; Imperial Army, 18, 98; in Indochina, 23, 34, 113n. 11 Japanese soldiers, 40 Japanese studies, 1, 4, 14–15, 98–99, 105n. 1 Japan Teachers Union, 46, 118n. 26 Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, 5 jizō. See under Buddhism Kamei Fumio, 39, 41, 49, 109n. 36, 117n. 18, 118n. 32; Shanghai: A Logistical Record of the SinoJapanese War (Shanghai: Shina jihen kōhō kiroku; film), 9, 39–42, 116–117n. 9; Beijing (Peking; film), 116n. 9; Fighting Soldiers (Tatakau heitai; film), 38, 48, 53, 116n. 2, 116n. 9; A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no higeki; film), 38, 48, 53, 116n. 2, 118n. 31; War and Peace (Sensō to heiwa; film), 48; Still It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokatta; film), 6–7, 9, 43–45, 49–55, 59, 66, 78, 99, 106n. 7, 108n. 27, 109n. 29; The World Is Terrified: The Reality of the “Ash of Death” (Sekai wa kyōfu suru:“Shi no hai” no shōtai; film), 52, 108n. 27 kataribe (storyteller), 10, 66. See also activists Keller, Helen, 91 keloid scars/injuries, 10, 46, 49, 65–68, 70–74, 78, 122n. 3 Kermode, Frank, 86 Kikkawa Kiyoshi (Genbaku Ichigō; hibakusha), 9–10, 80, 110n. 38, 122n. 1, 122n. 4, 123nn. 9–10; activities of, 64–68; and Tanimoto, 71–72; performance of, 73–78, 81, 122n. 7 Kinema junpō (magazine), 2–3, 105n. 3, 108n. 23 Korean hibakusha, 51, 112, 119n. 41 Korean War, 47, 50, 123n. 11, 124n. 24

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Index

Kramer, Stanley: On the Beach (film),

55

Kurihara Sadako, 21, 106–107n. 14,

112n. 7, 121n. 70

Kurosawa Akira, 3, 121n. 63; Rashomon

(film), 1; To Live (Ikiru; film),

107n. 16; Record of a Living

Being (Ikimono no kiroku; film),

55, 57; Dreams (Yume; film), 55;

Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu

no kyōshikyoku; film), 9, 55–58,

121n. 62

LaCapra, Dominick, 93

Lang, Berel, 85

Le Corbusier, 75

Leiris, Michel, 9, 39

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 50,

119n. 38

Liberation, 19, 26

Lifton, Robert Jay, 60–61, 121n. 70,

122n. 1

Loos, Adolf, 75

Lucky Dragon Five (Daigo Fukuryūmaru;

fishing boat), 47, 50, 68, 70

Malle, Louis: The Lovers (Les amants;

film), 2–3, 106n. 12

Manchuria, 20, 41, 95

Manhattan Project, 110n. 47

Marker, Chris, 8, 125n. 45

martyrdom, 9, 51–54, 59–60, 94

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, 52, 72,

126n. 15

Marx, Karl, 65

Marxist, 38, 54

masculinity, 30, 34, 92, 114n. 28; and

manliness, 115n. 63

maternal figure, 27–28 Meigō campaign (Meigō sakusen), 23,

113n. 11

Meiji, 14, 19–20, 32, 97, 117n. 9

Meiji Restoration, 19, 32

Metz, Christian, 52–53 migration, 57, 103

Miki Shigeru, 41

6772_Book_CC.indd 159

159

mimicry, 81, 100, 102; colonial,

4–5, 29, 31–32, 34, 36–37; and

mimesis, 31, 36, 101

Mimura, Harry, 101

Minamata disease, 118n. 29

mise-en-scène, 43, 67, 73

Miyoshi, Masao, 15, 107n. 19, 111n. 49

Mizoguchi Kenji, 1

modernism, 10, 75–76, 80

modernity, 10, 74, 76, 107n. 18

Monaco, James, 8, 79, 125n. 41

Moretti, Franco, 111n. 50

Motoshima Hitoshi (Nagasaki mayor),

97, 129n. 72

Murata Kiyoko, 121n. 62

Nagai Takashi, 45, 90, 93, 95, 118n. 24,

126n. 15, 128n. 47; Leaving This

Child Behind (Konoko o nokoshite;

work), 91, 94, 128n. 50; The Bells of

Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane; work),

11, 82, 91–92, 94, 96, 127n. 46,

128n. 48, 128n. 50; A Rosary

Chain (Rozario no kusari; work),

94; Blossoming Hills (Hanasaku oka;

work), 97

Nagasaki Medical College, 91, 95, 97,

128–129n. 64

Nakazawa Keiji, 121n. 65, 126n. 15

Nanjing Massacre, 21, 80

Nazism, 4, 17, 22, 25–26, 36, 79,

107n. 16, 113n. 11

New Novel, 78

NHK, 62

Nihon Eigasha (Japan Film Company;

Nichiei), 6, 48, 118n. 28

1955 system, 50, 118–119n. 37, 119n.

38

Nobel Prize, 91

Noguchi, Isamu, 49

Nornes, Abé Mark, 14, 38, 108n. 26,

109n. 29, 117n. 9, 118n. 31

Ōba Hideo: The Bells of Nagasaki

(Nagasaki no kane; film), 45, 91

Obama, Barack, 10, 84, 110n. 39

6/12/18 6:57 PM

160

Index

occupation: German, 4, 17, 19, 26, 36; Japanese, 23, 34. See also U.S. occupation Ōe Kenzaburō, 106–107n. 14, 126n. 15 Okada Eiji, 29 Okada Susumu, 2 Osada Arata: Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shōnen shōjo no uttae; work), 46, 92, 126n. 15, 128n. 48 Ōshima Nagisa: Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri; film), 15 Ōta Yoko, 12, 61–62, 72, 79, 92, 106–107n. 14; “Light as if at the Bottom of the Sea” (Kaitei no yōna hikari; work), 82; City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi; work), 82–83, 87, 127n. 28; On the Mountains (Sanjō; work), 83; City of the Evening Lull and People There (Yūnagi no machi; work), 65, 74 Other, 27, 29–31, 33, 76, 96, 113n. 23; otherness, 29, 40 Ozu Yasujirō, 9, 38, 42 pacifism, 23, 34, 59 palimpsest, 9, 38, 54, 99, 101 Paxton, Robert O., 22, 113n. 11 Pearl Harbor, 20–21, 46, 56, 74, 112n. 7 Pétain regime, 22. See also Vichy France Philippines, 23, 32, 60 plagiarism, 59, 61 plausibility, 9, 52–53, 85 Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko, 106n. 6 psychoanalysis, 1, 28, 76; castration, 30; jouissance, 33; the paranoid, 40; shell-shock, 59; transference, 18, 24, 44 radiation, 45, 52, 55, 65, 71, 82, 102, 108n. 27, 119n. 45, 120n. 53, 122n. 76; illness/ sickness/ injuries, 42–43, 52, 62, 66, 68, 70, 74–75,

6772_Book_CC.indd 160

88, 92, 122n. 3, 123n. 11. See also atomic bomb disease; keloid scars/ injuries radioactivity, 6, 68, 103 Rafael, Vicente L., 15, 111n. 49 reader, 11, 25, 83–90, 94–95, 114n. 35, 125n. 40, 127n. 35. See also author realism, 9–10, 38–39, 81, 89, 100 reconstruction: of Hiroshima, 35, 62, 69, 71, 103; of Nagasaki, 97, 103; of nation, 1, 22, 117n. 19; realist, 45, 47 rehabilitation: of Hiroshima, 10, 22, 32, 34, 69; of nation, 103, 106n. 6 relief activities, 10, 21, 49, 68–69, 87, 122n. 76 Resistance, 24–25, 36–37, 113n. 11, 113n. 19 Resnais, Alain: and censorship, 79, 81, 99, 125n. 45; collaboration with Duras, 26–28; and Kikkawa, 64–65, 122n. 4; meeting Kamei, 7–8; modernist approach, 76–77; realist approach, 80–81; Night and Fog (film), 7–8, 79, 125n. 41, 125n. 45; Hiroshima Mon Amour (Nijū-yojikan no jōji; film), 1–2, 5–6, 9–10, 54, 105n. 2, 106n. 7, 109nn. 29–30, 110n. 37, 114n. 50, 115n. 62, 125n. 44; Last Year at Marienbad (film), 78 Richie, Donald, 55, 58 Ricoeur, Paul, 85 Rizal, José, 32 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 78, 125n. 40 Roosevelt, Franklin, 35, 115n. 63 Rousso, Henry, 113n. 11 Russo-Japanese War, 20, 94 Sakai, Naoki, 15, 111n. 49, 115n. 60, 120–121n. 60 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 124 Sasaki Kiichi, 5, 108n. 22, 108n. 25 Satō Tadao, 53, 89; on Imamura, 59; on Kamei, 42, 109n. 36,

6/12/18 6:57 PM

Index

116–117n. 9; on Kurosawa, 55; on Tasaka, 45–46 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 37 Seirai Yūichi, 106–107n. 14 Sekikawa Hideo: Hiroshima (film), 6, 47–49, 52–53, 55, 59, 81, 106n. 7, 120n. 51 Shanghai, 20, 34, 39–41, 86, 128n. 49 Shigematsu’s diary, 59, 122n. 74 Shindō Kaneto: Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko; film), 46–49, 51–53, 72, 118n. 26, 120n. 51 Shirasaka Yoshio, 2, 106n. 7 Shōchiku (film company), 5 Sino-Japanese War, 9, 20, 22, 34, 95 slavery, 109–110n. 37 Sontag, Susan. 45, 117n. 18 spectacle, 47, 65–67, 72, 74, 77, 90; and spectator, 30–31, 66, 73–75 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 15, 111n. 49, 111n. 52 Sputnik, 89 subjectivity, 10, 125n. 40 sublime, 44, 94; and sublimation, 43, 73; and sublimity, 93 Sunagawa (Tokyo), 49 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), 68–69, 71–72, 98, 116n. 2, 123nn. 11–12 surrealism, 9, 38–39, 41, 45, 77, 105n. 2 Suwa, Nobuhiro: H story (film), 100–102 Taishō period, 20 Taiwan, 95, 128n. 64 Tanimoto Kiyoshi, 71–72, 124n. 22, 127n. 31 Tasaka Tomotaka, 96; I’ ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no uta wa wasureji; film), 45–46 testimony, 18, 44, 46, 59, 66, 76, 83, 92, 97–98; visual, 6, 68 Tibbets, Paul, 13 Tōei (film company), 52 Tōge Sankichi, 72, 106–107n. 14, 124n. 24

6772_Book_CC.indd 161

161

Tōhō (film company), 39, 42, 48–49, 117n. 9 Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), 103 Tokyo Olympic Games, 106n. 6 tourism, 14, 31, 45, 53, 65, 73, 76, 81, 97, 125n. 44 Tragedy of Manila (Manila no higeki; work), 98 Treat, John Whittier, 14, 93, 111n. 48, 126n. 18, 128n. 54 Truffaut, François, 3 Truman, Harry, 70, 80, 82, 115n. 63, 124n. 24 United Nations, 67–68 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 101 Urakami Cathedral, 53, 93, 96–98, 119–120n. 48, 128n. 50 U.S. censorship, 6, 9, 11, 38, 46–48, 50, 55, 72, 117n. 19, 118n. 29, 128n. 47; of genbaku literature, 83–84, 91–92, 97–98, 129n. 75; and visibility, 80–81 U.S. government. See American government U.S. invasion of Iraq, 115n. 62 U.S. media. See American media U.S. military. See American military U.S. occupation, 10–11, 32, 36, 62, 96, 99, 118nn. 28–29, 123n. 11, 128n. 47; and Hara and Ōta, 83; and Hersey, 84; Hiroshima during and after, 4, 62, 65–72; and Japanese cinema, 6, 9, 38, 45–50, 55, 81, 118n. 32; and Nagai and Osada, 91–92, 97 U.S.S.R., 119nn. 38–39 Vichy France, 22, 24–25, 32, 35–36, 113n. 10 Vietnamese, 19, 23, 26, 32, 61 Vietnam War, 60–61, 121n. 70 visibility, 10, 64, 68, 73–74, 80–81, 122n. 2

6/12/18 6:57 PM

162

Index

war criminals, 72

war responsibility, 48

West, 1, 15, 30–31, 37, 50, 80, 100; and

non-West, 3, 23, 57, 99, 107n. 18

White, Hayden, 85, 88–89 White House, 36, 110n. 39

whiteness, 23–26, 29–31, 33, 120n. 53

Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge of San Luis

Rey (work), 86, 127n. 23

world cinema, 15, 107n. 16

world literature, 15–16 World War II, 19, 35, 56, 59, 80, 93,

112n. 7, 113n. 11

yakuza, 118n. 32

Yamada Kan, 97

6772_Book_CC.indd 162

Yamaguchi Momoe, 52

Yamaguchi Yoshiko (Ri Kōran): China

Nights (Shina no yoru; film), 34–35,

115n. 61, 117n. 20

Yasukuni Shrine, 128n. 64

Yavenditti, Michael, 126n. 7, 126n. 8,

126n. 10, 126n. 13, 127n. 34,

127n. 41

yonban kuzure Incident, 97

Yoneyama, Lisa, 14, 44, 92, 110n. 38,

112n. 7, 123n. 9

Yoshida Shigeru, 48

Yoshinaga Sayuri, 52

Yukawa Hideki, 91

Zaibatsu, 48

6/12/18 6:57 PM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yuko Shibata is a research fellow at the International Peace Research Institute at Meiij Gakuin University in Tokyo and the author of the Japanese book Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Debunking a Myth of the Hibakusha Narrative (2015). Her articles appear in both academic and popular journals in English and Japanese. She was a staff writer at Asahi Shimbun and published four team-authored books in Japanese. She holds a PhD in East Asian literature from Cornell University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. She has taught at universities in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

6772_Book_CC.indd 163

6/12/18 6:57 PM