Abstract
Nowhere does historical memory have more relevance to the present than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writers as diverse as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe have commented that the dates of August 6 and 9, 1945, forever altered our understanding of what it means to be human. Humanity can now envisage its own, permanent obliteration along with that of most life forms on the planet. Even if all nuclear weapons were to be abolished, they cannot be un-invented—the contemporary, and perhaps last, phase of humanity is a nuclear one.1
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Notes
See, for instance, Gar Alperowitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Vintage Books, 1965)
John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995); and The Nuclear Century: Voices of the Hibakusha of the World (Japan Peace Museum/Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. Tōkyō: Heiwa no Atorie, 1997).
See M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 272 ff.
For a discussion of censorship in occupied Japan, see Yuko Shibata, “Dissociative Entanglement: US-Japan Atomic Bomb Discourse by John Hersey and Nagai Takashi,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2012): 122–137.
Walter Benjamin, “Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, no. 1, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 267.
Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 4–5. As Dr. Joseph Gerson pointed out to me, Chronicle of a Survivor came out in the same year as another film about atomic trauma—the monster sci-fi fantasy Gojira (Godzilla). Unlike Kurosawa’s film, which can be seen as a “working through” of survivor trauma, Gojira fixates on images of pure terror as the helpless population is pummeled by an immense and uncontrollable force.
Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), 464–467
Joan Mellen, The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan through Its Cinema (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 202–206.
Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 308.
Mitsuharo Inoue, “The House of Hands,” in Kenzaburō Ōe, ed., The Crazy Iris (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Tashi Yonezawa (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 75 and 35.
Thierry Jousse, “Entretien avec Akira Kurosawa,” trans. Catherine Cadou, Cahiers du Cinema, 445 (June 1991): 12
James Goodwin, “Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age,” in James Goodwin, ed., Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa (New York: G.K. Hall, 1974), 138.
David Elliott, Fukushima: Impacts and Implications (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 80–98.
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© 2015 Inez Kathleen Hedges
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Hedges, I. (2015). Amnesiac Memory: Hiroshima in Japanese Film. In: World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465122_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465122_3
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