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BY the
time this piece comes out, it will be the day after the
bombing of Hiroshima some 67 years ago. The bomb was
called Little Boy, but its effect would see children
grow into old men and women in days. After three days,
the atom bomb was also dropped on Nagasaki. The world
was never the same again. The two cities, with a
significant concentration of Christians, would hold the
record of the only A-bombed cities in the world. It is a
reputation other cities and other places will never
aspire to have. It is also tempting to read into these
events the hands of someone more powerful. And yet
documents, when consulted, never yield information about
the bombers being concerned about making statements
regarding the link between faith and suffering. The two
cities were bombed because the planes carrying the
instrument of destruction had men who were after good
visibility. Clear skies. We see what’s down there. Let’s
drop the bomb.
It is
not easy thinking about the massive lessons of the
double catastrophe. It was war. Right here at home,
there was the same war. Civilians were being killed.
Women and children were at the endpoints of the Japanese
bayonet. The bomb was dropped and things stopped. Or so
it seemed. Or so it seems.
By 1956
the French director Alan Resnais finished a film (Hiroshima
Mon Amour) that, in its planning stage, was supposed
to be a documentary about the bomb. At the end, the
envisioned docu turned into an anthem about remembering
and forgetting. The film, of course, would be celebrated
for its use of flashbacks, a device that most
contemporary critics consider a burden of storytelling.
I do not know what the excitement was all about
regarding the film. Could it be because the bombing was
only a little bit more than 10 years old, and to talk
about it was to touch a topic that was still taboo? In
Cannes,
it was not included in the competition because, as some
quarters put, big nations would be offended.
Remembering and forgetting.
Emmanuelle Riva and Elji Okada in French director Alan
Resnais’ 1956 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Critics
were effusive about the film. It was considered almost a
sacred document, the case of the topic outplaying the
form. It did not matter that Hiroshima in the film was
really more of the amour than the
Hiroshima
the terror.
Pursued,
the theme is about the beauty of forgetting and
recalling. Like the love affair between the Japanese
architect and the French actress, the war is something
that will pass.
Interestingly—and I beg the indulgence of Japanologists
about this—there is an aesthetic principle in Japanese
arts called mono no aware: that which is fleeting is
beautiful, because it is not permanent, and therefore
cannot be held forever, and so on. If we stay on the
level of the romance in Resnais’ film, then the beauty
of the ephemeral holds. If, however, we consider the
parallel theme of Hiroshima, the scarred city, as the
site of two people’s creation of memory, then it is
cruel and perfectly demented to say that the
Hiroshima experience in the war is something about the beauty of the
ephemeral. Tell that to the children who grew up with
keloids on their bodies, the so-called hibakusha
(literally, those who had been affected by the heat or
the explosion) who bore generations of kins bearing the
mark of the bomb, the mark of death.
By 1991,
Kurosawa would present the war, still in the form of
memory, but this time in the form that we never thought
war films should be couched in: rhapsody. The ephemeral
would launch its attack and we, the audiences and fans
of this mad man, would be saved by the work. Or be
distressed by it.
Couched in rhapsody.
The
magnificent Akira Kurosawa revisits the bombing of
Hiroshima in the unweildy but haunting Rhapsody in
August in 1991.
When the
film was released in
Tokyo, I was one of the students who rushed to the Iwanami
Hall in Kanda, which, like the Bungeiza in Ikebukuro and
the Waseda Shochiku in Takadanobaba, near the
Waseda
University,
could well be the art film house without the usual
effete pretensions ascribed to such places. A few
minutes into the film, a noisy group walked out. This
was the late ’70s. Antiwar sentiments were as
fashionable as Levi’s jeans. There were accusatory
mumblings against Kurosawa for being pro-Japanese, for
upholding the emperor system using the art form that was
usually used to trounce the establishment.
I stayed
on. There were no art films then in the Philippines.
There were no pirated copies of the masters. In the
film, Kurosawa would employ the enchanting image of the
Kappa (the water imp), the moon, the snake, ants
crawling over the rose, and a film that ended with the
grandmother running into the rain, into the eye of The
Bomb. You could complain about Richard Gere’s portrayal
of a Japanese-American, but there was nothing you could
do with the enacted thunder of Kurosawa. As Pauline Kael
always reminded us, the film’s power is in the sensation
it brought out from us, and not whether the screenplay
is lucid or the camera works accomplished. It is the
sensation.
Each
year, when the schedule of my Japanese class can allow
it, I would push aside the Imamuras and the Kitanos and
the Iwais to present to the class Kurosawa’s imperfect
but entrancing work on peace and war and forgetting and
forgiving, some of the very essences that make us
humans.
It is my
way of recalling my own experience in Hiroshima as a
young exchange student some 37 years ago. In that small
house called the World Friendship Center, I got free
meals and the warmest bed in exchange for being the
caretaker of an old garden. I got to talk also to the
hibakushas who always impressed with their quiet ways.
On certain mornings, I would be pushing a cart at the
government hospital. Hon, ikagadesu ka (Books, anyone),
in my simple Japanese. I met a teacher in that hospital.
She was becoming blind. She sensed through my accent
that I was a gaikokujin (foreigner). She apologized
about the war and the atrocities committed by Japanese
soldiers in the
Philippines.
Months later, she died, a victim of radiation that was
relentless.
Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August is my own way of
sheltering a
Hiroshima,
a place in my heart. Most of my students do not like the
film. Most of them do not understand the eye that
appears in the sky. I believe I understand the eye. It’s
just that I remember the sixth of August when it is
already the 10th or the 20th of this anomalous month. |
