Eiji
Okada was from Chiba, but cineastes will be forgiven if they assumed he was from
Hiroshima. He worked with auteurs like Teshigahara and Naruse, but he is best
remembered for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. In Resnais’s film, he and Emmanuelle Riva were trying to forget
their pasts, but six years earlier, he played a crusading school teacher working
to keep the memory of the Atomic bombing fresh and vital in the Japanese public
consciousness. Fresh from a critical rediscovery, Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima screens this Friday at the
Japan Society.
Mr.
Kitagawa is new in town, so he is initially a bit insensitive to the ongoing struggles
of the hibakusha survivor students. However, when one of his students nearly
passes out from a nose bleed, he starts to get the picture. About one-third of
his class are hibakusha and the other two-thirds are insensitive Hellions. However,
he will slowly instill in the latter some empathy and historical perspective.
The story of a former classmate named Endo will be particularly instructive. He
and his little sister are two of the primary survivors Sekigawa follows in the extended
second act flashback to the pikadon flash-boom.
Hiroshima was bankrolled by
the Japanese Teacher’s Union, so its pedagogical excesses make some kind of
sense. It literally starts with a classroom lecture and features interludes of
students reading international “peace” manifestos (or anti-American tracts)
verbatim. It is a shame because the relationship between Kitagawa and his
students has real potency.
Of
course, the horrors of the bombing are the film’s reason for being. Each
characters’ tragedy is certainly heartrending, but the film never reaches the exquisite
poignancy of Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain,
probably because it lacks a relationship as well developed as the Yoshiko
Tanaka-Kazuo Kitamura father-daughter bond.
Okada
is very good as Kitagawa and many of the young cast-members are quite
extraordinary. Screenwriter Yasutaro Yagi earns a bit of credit for at least mentioning
the Bataan Death March and Pearl Harbor. However, the Rape of Nanjing, the
Alexandra Hospital Massacre, and the sexual enslavement of “Comfort Women”
would have been more to the point. Just how Japan would have been forced to
surrender without an Earth-shaking game-changer like the Atomic bomb is never addressed
in protest films like this. Nevertheless, we feel deeply for the innocent
children, who were just as much victims of their militant government’s
intransigence. Recommended as a human drama rather than a history lesson, Hiroshima screens this Friday (1/19), at
the Japan Society in Turtle Bay.