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Fall 8-31-2018

Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature,Film, and Transnational PoliticsYuko Shibata

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Recommended CitationShibata, Yuko, "Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics" (2018). UH Press Book Previews. 7.https://kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu/uhpbr/7

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PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

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PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics

Yuko Shibata

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS HONOLULU

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© 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.

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For Atsushi

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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 131

Index 155

vii

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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 litera­ture 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

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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 formida­ble 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 sup­port 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 sin­cere 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.

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PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

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 move­ment 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 produc­tion 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, how­ever, 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 the­aters 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 repu­tation, and the power to mobilize viewers who were gradually overcoming the

1

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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 can­celed 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 imme­diately 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 experi­ence 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 demon­strate 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 over­shadowed 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

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3 Introduction

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 alto­gether.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 under­standing 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 docu­mentary,” 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 theoreti­cal 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 criti­cizes 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 sup­plied 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 substan­tial 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 dis­ciplines and area studies.19 Critics in many humanities fields in North America prefer to discuss texts produced in European languages. The limitations of

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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 liter­ary knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It explores canonical texts such as Hiroshima Mon Amour, which have been traditionally excluded from schol­arly 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 disciplin­ary 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 sug­gests 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 politi­cally 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

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5 Introduction

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 adver­tisements 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 nation­wide campaign against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. Some therefore sus­pected 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 motiva­tions of Daiei and Shōchiku. He pointed out that it seemed as though these two companies had implicitly wished the two movies would receive a lim­ited 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 fail­ure 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

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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 postoc­cupation Japan, because it was confiscated by the U.S. forces immediately after its production in 1946. In other words, this documentary was officially non­existent when Hiroshima Mon Amour came out. It was only in 1967 that the American government returned its poor-quality copy to the Japanese govern­ment 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 foot­age 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 foot­age, 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 con­fiscated everything, including unused footage. Subsequently, all visual testi­monies 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 offi­cially 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 men­tioned 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,

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7 Introduction

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 poli­tics 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 explo­sion 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 “phan­tom” 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 filmmak­ing 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

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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 contain­able 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 survey­ing 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 hiba­kusha’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 fragmen­tation 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 memo­ries 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

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9 Introduction

palimpsest intertextuality in the Genette sense.34 This palimpsest intertextual­ity 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 parame­ters. 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 Eisensteinian­informed 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 plau­sibility of martyrdom that Kamei ended up highlighting by depicting the hiba­kusha’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 defini­tive movie on Hiroshima when it thoroughly suppresses the victims’ voice?).37

The hibakusha’s predicament did not end decades later but continued through­out 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 vic­timhood 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

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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 priori­tized 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 signify­ing 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 journal­ist 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 descrip­tion of the calamity in Hiroshima. Hiroshima established a well-known narra­tive 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,

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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 origi­nal 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. occupa­tion. 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 experi­ence in Japan as well, although this “origin” was then forgotten.43 To demon­strate 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 bomb­ing 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, prevent­ing 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.

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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 mem­oirs, 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 high­lights 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 imagination 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).

­

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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 bom­bardment 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 explo­sion 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 signifies 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,

­

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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 immedi­ately 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 con­stantly 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 standard­ized “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 stud­ies 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 memo­ries 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 politi­cal 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 exter­nally produced knowledge of Japan has also affected knowledge production

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Introduction 15

processes within the country, and vice versa. Ran Zwigenberg’s recently pub­lished 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 research­ers 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 dif­ferent 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 interdis­ciplinary and transboundary. Considering the global significance of the atomic bombings and their aftermath, studies of these events should transgress paro­chially 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 lit­erature, world cinema, and transnational/transcultural studies51—an evolving project in contemporary humanities offerings around the world—by reach­ing 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

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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 scholar­ship 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.

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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

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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

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

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Index 157

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

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

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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,

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 Sino-Japanese 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

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Index 159

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

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

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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,

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,

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Index 161

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

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

6772_Book_CC.indd 162 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

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

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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.