Children of Hiroshima – 1952, Kaneto Shindo

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1952 97m) DVD6 (Hong Kong only)

Aka. Gembaku no ko

 The consolation of living

p  Kozaburo Yoshimura  d/w  Kaneto Shindo  ph  Takeo Ito  m  Akira Ifukibe  art  Takashi Marumo

Nobuko Otowa (Takako Ishikawa), Chikako Hosokawa (Setsu, her mother), Masao Shimizu (Toshiaki, her father), Osamu Takizawa (Iwakichi), Miwa Saito (Natsue Morikawa), Yuriko Hanabusa (Oine), Tanie Kitabayashi (Otoyo), Tsutomu Shimomoto (Natsue’s husband), Shinya Ofuji, Tsuneko Yamanaka, Takashi Ito, Eijiro Tono,

When one considers the cataclysmic effects of the dropping of the first atom bomb that fateful August morning in 1945 it’s perhaps surprising that so few notable Japanese films have sought to examine its effects and to perform the autopsy on the vanished society.  (Or maybe not so surprising, for Japan only rebuilt itself by not looking back).  Only Imamura’s Black Rain comes to mind in recent decades, but while an unforgettable film in its own right, it had the feel of reconstruction, of looking back on an event in Japan’s history.  In Children of Hiroshima, less than ten years have passed.  It feels more like current affairs, its effects still being felt and lived, its battered landscape partly rebuilt as they did in Dresden and indeed in London’s East End after the blitz. 

It stars, as usual for Shindo, his wife Nobuko Otowa, this time playing Takako, a schoolteacher who survived the Hiroshima bomb, but who lost her parents and brother in the calamity.  Brought up far away by an aunt and uncle, she decides after a few years it’s time she returned to Hiroshima to pay her respects at her parents’ grave.  After reassuring her aunt and uncle that she will return to what is now her home, she sets off.

While there she stays with her old colleague and friend Natsue, who it transpires has been left infertile by the effects of the bomb, but who accepts she was lucky to still be alive.  While wandering about the mixture of ruins and rebuilds around the city she comes across Iwakichi, a former employee of her father, who has gone nearly blind after the blast and is reduced to begging to survive.  She learns that Iwakichi has only a small grandson left from his family and he’s all he has to live for.  When Takako offers to take the boy with her to start a new better life, Iwakichi cannot bear to see the boy go.

He isn’t really one of the children of the title, however.  They are the three first graders who Natsue tells her are the only survivors from the bomb.  One she catches up with just in time to see his father pass away and sees enough to know that the horror is still current for that boy.  The second, a girl, we find in a convent school in her death bed, one of thousands who succumbed to radiation poisoning in the decade or so that followed.  (As Takako says, “the bomb brought on so many tragedies that spread like ripples.”)  As for the third, he’s well and leads Takako into another little family drama.

Sixty years on Hiroshima feels more and more as if influenced by the neo-realist aesthetic, but the use of actors and music mean it’s also suitably mainstream in its approach.  The images of desolation, after several years later, say more than any words could, and as we see Takako wander amidst the rubble, it feels like the end of the world is nigh.  Perhaps because of this the sentimental streak that forms the heart of the scenes between Iwakichi and his grandson seem a little forced and out of place, but it doesn’t affect the overall power of the piece.  Gorgeously but naturally shot by Takeo Ito, with prominent use of deep focus and camera angles bordering on expressionistic (notice how Takako is often shot from below waist height, to add psychological depth to her journey).  As for the fateful blast reconstruction montage, Shindo only lets us hear a ticking clock, before a sunflower wilts in the heat of the explosion.  Throw in scenes of young girls with their clothes blasted off and their bare breasts blackened, moving – if at all – like zombies (a level of nudity shocking at the time in Japan).  Otowa is as superb as ever, while the producer Yoshimura was Shindo’s mentor, the director he wrote scripts for both before and parallel to his own directorial career.  If it may be a little tattered around the fringes and its narrative too obviously resolved, it’s still incredibly moving.