A Tale of Two Hiroshimas

U.S. military personnel make an appearance in the film, at first with “panpan girls,” taking pictures of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial along with supposedly American tourists, accompanying a student’s voiceover narration in which she expresses fear of Japan’s remilitarization. During the occupation, censors did their best to remove any direct mention of the American presence in Japan—an attempt to assert that the Japanese were taking control of their new democratic destiny without the influence of the Allied Powers—so including images of soldiers amidst the backdrop of devastated Hiroshima was a boldly pointed choice that not only confirmed the reality that Japanese had been living with since the end of the war, but also suggested culpability for Japan’s current misery in a highly ironic way.

 The Japanese imperial military are depicted as foolishly one-dimensional, short-sighted, and devoid of a moral compass. They are shown demanding undying loyalty to the emperor while shouting at rows of school children before the bomb is dropped, continuing to do the same even amidst the burning wreckage and carnage surrounding them after the explosion. In perhaps one of the film’s most representative scenes on the matter, imperial military leadership agree to deny informing the Japanese public that the bomb dropped on them was a nuclear weapon, asserting that it would be detrimental to the war effort while insisting upon absolute fealty to the emperor, among other jingoistic platitudes. Meanwhile, a Japanese scientist sadly looks upon a moth hopelessly fluttering against a windowpane.

Hiroshima points its finger in multiple directions, but more than assigning blame to any one cause or agent of war, the film offered a way for those affected by the bomb to show Japan—and the rest of the world—what they suffered. According to the film’s promotional material, up to 90,000 Hiroshima residents, some of whom were hibakusha, and local labor union members were used as extras in the film’s epic scenes of mass destruction. City officials and local businesses lent full support to the production, and the Hiroshima-born lead actress, Yumeji Tsukioka, appealed to the vice president of Shochiku, with whom she was under contract, to let her act in the film for free.According to researchers Mick Broderick and Junko Hatori, early reports about Hiroshima focused on its collaborative nature and repeatedly contrasted it to Shindo’s film. “The extras’ participation was the most enthusiastic ever seen in a Japanese film,” reported the Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s major newspapers. Hiroshima was expected to “bring about a commotion” to overseas markets, unlike Shindo’s movie, which the newspaper derided as a “sight-seeing film.”

Despite growing public anticipation, Hiroshima’s reception was mixed. Like Children of Hiroshima, the film had been due to premiere on an anniversary of the bombing. But after Shochiku allegedly insisted that the content was too “anti-American” and “cruel” and demanded that several scenes be cut, the release was stalled, and all five major studios reportedly ended up refusing to distribute it. The JTU decided to self-distribute rather than cater to studio demands, and while many praised the film for its realism, the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture considered it too “anti-American” to show to schoolchildren. Hiroshima was finally distributed in the U.S. two years later in an edited version, giving many American audiences their first opportunity to see images of the effects of the bomb. And in 1959, the film gained even more visibility in the West when Alain Resnais used selected scenes for his masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour, which starred Hiroshima’s lead actor, Eiji Okada.

Hiroshima may have initially been seen as a corrective to Children of Hiroshima, but today both can be appreciated as powerful reflections of the politically fraught context from which they emerged, each with its own provocative take on a tragedy that had been glaringly absent from the big screen up to that point. As the U.S. again finds itself in an escalating cold war, these long under-seen landmarks of Japanese cinema are essential viewing for those seeking to grapple with nuclear horror not as an abstract issue but as a possible reality.