Images courtesy HBO and NHK, the Japanese Public Television Network.

Time Is Standing Still: White Light/Black Rain

[6 August 2007]

HBO's new Hiroshima and Nagasaki documentary is at once simple and infinitely complex. The atomic bombs were disasters both man-made and calculated.

By Cynthia Fuchs

PopMatters Film and TV Editor

Time Is Standing Still

Even as kids, we understood we were losing the war. Any fool could see it. We didn’t even have shoes: how could we win the war?
—Saoru Fukahori

It was a bright red circle of flame. A white cloud formed and kept expanding until it touched the ring and turned into a ball of fire.
—Dr. Shuntaro Hida

“For a very long time, I was afraid to talk about my experience.” Kiyoko Imori was just three blocks from ground zero when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She lost her family, and was, on that terrible day in August 1945, the only survivor out of some 620 elementary school students. The devastation, says Keiji Nakazawa, was complete. Only six years old then, he recalls, “It had such a huge impact on my life. I remember every detail.” He makes these details manifest in comic books and animated films, including Barefoot Gen. Sample images show burning buildings, dreadful shadows, screaming children.

cover art

White Light/Black Rain

(HBO; US: 6 Aug 2007)

Trailer

Official Site

As indelible as such images might seem, at the start of Steven Okazaki’s superb White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs now appear quite definitively pushed into the past. Historical newsreels make Japan seem monstrous: in 1931, “She fed on other people’s suffering,” in 1945, President Truman declared, “We shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.” Today, at Christmastime, “Jingle Bells” fills the air while street vendors wear Santa costumes and a punky girl band wears red blazers and face-paint, their rock music raucous on the sidewalk. This performance is intercut with interviews of young shoppers (“75% of Japan’s population was born after 1945,” reads a title), not one able to say what happened back then: “I’m bad at history,” sighs one girl.

And yet.

Courtesy HBO and NHK, the Japanese Public Television Network.

Courtesy HBO and NHK, the Japanese Public Television Network.

When the bombs dropped on 6 and 9 August 1945, some 210,000 people were vaporized instantly, with over 160,000 dying later, of cancer, infection, and radiation sickness. Premiering on the 62nd anniversary of the bombings, the film looks back and forward (the current world arsenal of atomic weapons could repeat what happened at Hiroshima 400,000 times over), with interviews from 14 survivors (Okazaki spoke with 500) as well as four U.S. participants, including weaponeer Morris Jeppson and scientific advisor Harold Agnew. Recalling that he “did what I was told to do,” Agnew says, “I guess I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate what it meant in the long run, for the future of the world.”

Not to mention the futures of individuals. Some memories are immediate and visceral (“I was buried underneath the house,” recalls one woman, and a man says, “I flew through the house”). Others sound like horror movies, almost beyond words: Katsuji Yoshida recalls seeing “people with no arms, no legs, their intestines spilling out, brains spilling out of their crushed skulls. And near ground zero, there were black, carbonized bodies, burned beyond recognition: people in unimaginable states.” “When I looked around,” says Shigeko Sasamori, “It was pitch black, then no sound. Then pretty soon, the blackness going away, like a fog goes away. Then you see sort of a gray, and moving people.”

Sasamori, 13 at the time, is physically scarred as well. One of the 25 “Hiroshima Maidens” brought to the U.S. for plastic surgery—“At no cost to them!” exults the host of This is Your Life, which celebrated Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, the leader of the project, in 1955. “I cried,” Sasamori says, when she saw Tanimoto shake hands with the copilot of the Enola Gay, because she could “see that [Robert Lewis] felt bad about it.” At the same time, the host announces, the “maidens” will remain obscured, just silhouettes for TV viewers, “to avoid causing them any embarrassment.”

It’s a stunning bit of collective memory, a mix of self-delusion and compassion, public commemoration and private pain. As much as the bombs are rationalized, repeatedly, as the “only way to end the war,” Sasamori puts it in another context. “If I didn’t get the bomb, what kind of life would I have?” She imagines she would have had a family or a career. “My fantasy,” she says quietly, her damaged hand gesturing, “goes different directions.”

Even the war’s welcome end “goes different directions,” as history and as experience. Okazaki’s film makes this case quietly, but effectively, by juxtaposition. Following footage of the U.S. post-surrender celebrations (“In New York City as throughout the nation and the world,” says the newsreel narrator, “It’s total victory”), Jeppson laments, “It had worked as designed, but it does what war does, it destroys people.” And here the scene cuts to “what war does,” namely, “The Aftermath,” official U.S.-made footage, much of it not previously released. Victims appear in bloody bandages, skin peeling off, eyes and limbs missing.

The survivors in White Light/Black Rain exemplify not only the physical effects but also the lingering emotional and political consequences of the bomb. “The bomb is still with me,” says Panyeon Kim, who had six miscarriages. Katsuji Yoshida’s ear-area remains covered by a black patch, Sumiteru Taniguchi’s chest and back masses of cavities and scar tissue. “You can see my heart beating between the ribs,” he observes. “My bones are so thin and brittle, they’ll break if I cough violently.”

Some victims, the documentary notes subtly, have also been subject to discrimination. In the months following the bomb, no one understood the results of radiation. Saoru Fukahori says, “‘Pika don’ was like a dirty word for the bomb. Pika don people became untouchables.” Slightly less perceptible was the overwhelming survivors’ guilt. Sakue Shimohira, 10 years old at the time, remembers the moment she and her younger sister discovered their dead mother, her body falling crumbling into ash when they touched her. When her sister later “jumped in front a train going at full speed,” Shimohira says she tried to do the same but couldn’t. “I realized,” she says, “There are two kinds of courage, the courage to die and the courage to live.”

The American interviewees show another kind of “courage,” one or two a little maddening in their ability to stick to the party line. But if they don’t apologize for what they did, they’re respectful and articulate potential lessons. Navigator Theodore Van Kirk saw the damage firsthand. When someone says, “Oh, we should drop a nuke on Iraq,” Van Kirk observes, “Stupid jerk doesn’t even know what a nuke is. If he did, he wouldn’t say that.”

White Light/Black Rain‘s argument is at once simple and infinitely complex. Whatever courage emerged in the face of such devastation, however admirable the survivors surely are, the bombs were disasters, man-made and calculated. And that’s the tragedy, at last, that any nation or group of individuals would be able to conjure and commit such brutality, for whatever reason.

 
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Cynthia Fuchs is director of Film & Media Studies, as well as Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, and Film & Video Studies, at George Mason University. She has published articles on Buffy and Dark Angel; Shakira; Jay-Z; Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise; Taxi Driver; hip-hop, Michael Jackson, Prince, Juvenile and Cash Money, “gangsta rap”, the Spice Girls, queer punks, alternative masculinities in rock, “bad” kids in Bully and George Washington, the war in Iraq, and Vietnam war movies. She edited Spike Lee: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press 2002), and co-edited Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary (University of Minnesota 1997). She is currently co-editing “Iraq War Cultures” and writing a book on Iraq war documentaries. 

Comments

“White Light/Black Rain‘s argument is at once simple and infinitely complex. Whatever courage emerged in the face of such devastation, however admirable the survivors surely are, the bombs were disasters, man-made and calculated. And that’s the tragedy, at last, that any nation or group of individuals would be able to conjure and commit such brutality, for whatever reason”

How dare you Cynthia. You dare to talk of brutality and yet you wholly ignore the repeated acts of brutality that Japan caused throughout it’s campaign in the Pacific. Let’s take a closer look at Japanese brutality, shall we?

Let’s take a look at Japan prior to the bombs.

They initiated a rabid invasion of lands all over the Southern Pacific. They used Chinese prisoners as test subjects for their chemical and biological as well as medical experimentations. Rape of Nan King and Unit 731 ring a bell?

In 2004 historians found documents that showed the Japanese had tested Cyanide gas on Australian and Dutch POW’s and according to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito authorized by specific orders the use of chemical weapons in China. For example, during the invasion of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions. Even Saddam didn’t use gas that much!

How about mass murders? Though they get far less press than Nazi war crimes the Japanese are said to have killed almost 10 million innocent civilians.

Deaths caused by the diversion of resources to the Japanese military in occupied countries are also regarded as war crimes by many people. Millions of civilians in southern Asia — especially Vietnam and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), both of which were major rice-growing countries — died during a preventable famine in 1944–45.

As if that weren’t bad enough there’s also the tiny matter of cannibalism. Many written reports and testimonies collected by the Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo tribunal, and investigated by prosecutor William Webb (the future Judge-in-Chief), indicate that Japanese personnel in many parts of Asia and the Pacific committed acts of cannibalism against Allied prisoners of war.

In many cases this was inspired by ever-increasing Allied attacks on Japanese supply lines, and the death and illness of Japanese personnel as a result of hunger. However, according to historian Yuki Tanaka: “cannibalism was often a systematic activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers”. This frequently involved murder for the purpose of securing bodies. For example, an Indian POW, Havildar Changdi Ram, testified that: “[on November 12, 1944] the Kempeitai beheaded [an Allied] pilot. I saw this from behind a tree and watched some of the Japanese cut flesh from his arms, legs, hips, buttocks and carry it off to their quarters… They cut it small pieces and fried it.”

Now, how did the Japanese treat female POW’s? In a word? BRUTALY!!! The terms “comfort women” or “military comfort women” are euphemisms for women in Japanese military brothels in occupied countries, many of whom were recruited by force or deception, and regard themselves as having been sexually assaulted and/or sex slaves.

Least of all, shall we not forget, is the fact that Japan attacked us.

I have no pity nor do I have any remorse for what happened to Japan. It was the result of their own actions that led to the weapons being used. When a brutal, thugish and vile monstrousity attacks you, the only option is to put them down and put them down hard. If the Japanese people, or the director of this farce of a documentary, wants’ to find an answer as to why the bombs were dropped perhaps they need to look into the depths of their own past and their own souls.

I very much doubt that they will like what they see there.

Comment by Keith from Queens, NY — August 6, 2007 @ 8:33 pm

Keith from Queens, NY, is right to seek to place the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a wider context, but it is impertinent and intemperate to ask Cynthia how she “dare” write what she wrote, namely an insightful review of Steven Okazaki’s gruelling documentary film in which VICTIMS of war are given a platform to speak.

Keith, I presume you believe in the values of liberal democracy - after all you seem keen to exercise your right to free speech, and I don’t propose to ask you how you dare to ask Cynthia how she dare express her opinions. 

Keith, in your justified outrage at the brutality of the Japanese forces before and all through World War II, you ought not to lose sight of the fact that many Japanese in Japan were also victims of the Japanese regime. Many others would have been too afraid to risk their lives or livelihoods to speak out. So it goes under every brutalizing regime.

I don’t know if you have seen the film, but if you have you will remember that one of the participants, a victim of the Hiroshima bombing, was a Korean woman, who, like most of the Japanese survivors who appeared in the documentary, was just a child at the time. Many of the victims of Nagasaki were “outsiders” from typical Japanese society: Catholics and untouchables.

Well, perhaps its okay to feel no pity for any of the adults killed or maimed by the bombings, women or men, young or old, regular Japanese or outsiders, but I presume that you would extend your pity to the children?

There is a difference between justifying the bombings and feeling no pity for the people affected. If you really and truly do extend no pity to the Japanese victims is unimaginative at best and at the worst plain contemptible.

Why is it a “farce” to allow the survivors of the only cases of nuclear warfare so far to tell us what it was like?

Why don’t you want to know about it?

It is not a zero-sum game in which if this film is made another film about, for example, the Nanking Massacre, cannot be made. Bring on all the testimonies we can get from every theatre of the war and from all sides and from all sorts of people.

Like you, I also think we should hear more about what Japanese militaristic aggression meant to the peoples of Asia and to the allied forces fighting them (especially here in Japan, and especially from the Japanese who, unlike their German wartime allies, have not undertaken a full and honest reckoning of their role in the war).

The ignorance of young Japanese people about their own history was one of the points that the documentary sought to make.

The allied response to Japanese aggression certainly had to be vigorous, as you say, but surely not everything the allies did can be justified by an uncritical “they attacked us first and so they had it coming” mentality can it?

If you did indeed see the film - you did see it, didn’t you?? - you would remember that much of it was critical of the Japanese post war government for its inhumane treatment of the A-bomb survivors.

Unlike your reaction to the film, the film itself is not a knee-jerk response to the atom-bombings.

It expressly was NOT an “in your face” attack on the decision to drop the bomb but a look into the consequences at the human level, and also allowed several of the American crew members to speak with equal freedom and respect for their perspectives.

The initial motivation for developing the atom bomb was fear that the Nazis would get there first. But the reasons why the bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities had less to do with “the dark past” of Japan or the state of the Japanese soul; they were reasons of “realpolitik” - whether they were to “end the war quickly and save lives” or to “warn the Soviets” or to “justify the expense of creating the bombs”.

There certainly was not universal agreement at the highest levels of government that dropping atom bombs was right, necessary, or morally justifiable.

Comment by David Hurley from Hiroshima, Japan — August 14, 2007 @ 10:47 am

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