Black Rain (1989): Memory, Denial, and Hiroshima's Legacy

Collective Memory and Official Suppression of Hiroshima

War is always a collective historical event that survives in official government records and propaganda, as well as in mass media images and academic and popular writing. Not all individual experiences can be captured by collective memory, national consciousness, and official interpretations of events, and in some cases governments and established elites attempt to censor and repress those memories altogether. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective denial, cover-ups, and repression of public memory occurred for decades after the war, while many veterans who returned to Japan in 1945 were deeply dissatisfied by the official version of collective memory and sought to alter the national consciousness.

In Black Rain, the family patriarch would also like to repress and deny the events of the recent past, but his niece and her lover were so obviously victimized and damaged by the war that in the end he is simply unable to do so. During the Cold War, ruling elites in Germany, Japan, and the United States all attempted to repress and alter the collective memory of the Second World War, since they were now in an alliance against the Soviet Union. This effort was only partially successful, however, because too many personal and individual memories of profoundly damaging and disconcerting events still existed, both among soldiers and civilians.

Black Rain as Documentary Cinema and Cold War Context

Black Rain (1989) was a nuclear film about a family of survivors of Hiroshima suffering from radiation sickness and all doomed to eventual death. Filmed in a documentary and cinéma vérité style, it resembled the real documentaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were suppressed for decades after the war by the U.S. and Japanese governments as too graphic and upsetting for general audiences. Indeed, color footage of the aftermath of the bombings and the survivors sat in the vaults of the Pentagon, classified top secret, until a lawsuit forced its release.

In Hollywood, the actual bombings were not part of collective historical memory either, but were sublimated into film noir and science fiction, "where disintegration, invasion, violence, and secrecy are frequently associated with nuclear fear" (Cavanaugh 251). Japanese cinema also dealt with the subject obliquely and indirectly, in films like Godzilla and other creature pictures in the 1950s and 1960s, or in the postwar, post-apocalyptic Rashomon in 1951. Yet by the late 1980s, with the relaxation of Cold War tensions and renewed arms control discussions, Black Rain reflected a new confidence and openness about the hidden past in Japan, and became one of "the few films in Japan dealing with nuclear reality" (Cavanaugh 252). This had not been possible in 1966, when Ibuse Masuji published the original novel of the same name, at the height of the Cold War, when Japan was firmly positioned as a U.S. satellite.

Characters as Symbols of Denial and Trauma

Most of the film is set in 1950, with only brief flashbacks to life in Hiroshima before August 6, 1945, just before the atomic bomb was dropped. Shigematsu is attempting to arrange a marriage for his niece Yasuko, whose three previous engagements have failed because she is terminally ill with radiation sickness. He knows this but is simultaneously in denial about it, and almost until the end of the film — when she is clearly near death — he still imagines that she will be happily married and live on after him.

Unlike the novel, in the movie Yasuko meets Yuichi, a former soldier still suffering from combat psychosis, who uses sculpture and street theater as a form of therapy. By contrast, Yasuko conceals her illness out of shame, even though her hair is falling out and she must cover her lesions. Symbolically, she is a spiritually pure virgin whose "body is violated by radiation," while Yuichi has had "his mind violated by war" (Cavanaugh 262). Shigematsu received the same dose of radiation that she did — perhaps more — yet is never shown with any visible signs of the sickness. He seems to both remember and forget the events of the bombing, with denial and memory "continually recycling and replenishing the other" (Cavanaugh 257).

Yuichi, however, acts out his battle memories in public, and others join in to play parts in the drama. Later, his stone Jizo statues, with faces conveying "anguish, terror, pain," serve as his silent audience (Cavanaugh 265). Many survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly used art, sculpture, and writing to preserve memories of the bombing that were denied and covered up by official sources.