Kinder von Hiroshima

Nobuko Otowa lives on a small, beautiful island in the house of her uncle, but she grew up in Hiroshima and taught kindergarten there. She returns to her home town to lay flowers on the graves of her parents in the blasted cemetery and see the children she taught. She encounters Osamu Takizawa. Once he was her father's employee. Now, scarred and blinded by the A-Bomb, he ekes out a living, caring only about his parentless grandson.

Confronted with a movie about the consequences of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, my urge is to write about Operation Downfall, its US armed forces casualties estimated at between half a million and a million dead, and two to four million wounded; Japan's Operation Ketsugo, its propaganda campaign of "One Hundred Million Deaths For The Emperor!"; and other factors that made dropping the Bomb not just a political necessity, but an issue of saving lives.

However, Kaneto Shindô's film isn't about the big picture. It's about the tragedy of a small boy who refuses to leave his grandfather. The A-bomb isn't a racist plot by Americans to kill Japanese. It, like war, are monsters that kill people for no reason whatsoever. Blinded old men, fatherless children, women rendered sterile are the lucky ones.

Largely overlooked today, this was one of the first films made during the Allied occupation after WW2.

Very powerful in its content, it shows the devastation caused by the Atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

I last saw this film in 1976 and it is still vivid in my memory.

Kaneto Shindo's movie is without any doubt one of the best ever made. It deals head-on with one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind: the dropping for pure geopolitical reasons of a nuclear bomb on a city thereby killing thousands of innocents citizens in the twinkling of an eye and wreaking havoc for centuries to come on a country (and also very slightly on the whole living world) because the human genetic basic material has been damaged.

Kaneto Shindo's movie shows preeminently that the fate of the world and the human species depends solely on the responsible or irresponsible behavior of every single person on earth. In this movie, a teacher is looking for survivors among the children of her kindergarten class. There are only three. On her own initiative, she tries to secure a more hopeful future for one of those.

This impeccably played movie (also by the children) is simply unforgettable. A must see. For a geopolitical interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bomb I highly recommend the book 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb' by Gar Alperovitz.

As a narrative this film is not particularly strong, but its context is of course extraordinary. Made seven years after the war just after the American occupation had ended, it dramatizes, and more importantly humanizes, the horrible consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima. It has a kindergarten teacher returning to that city to see the three students of her old class who survived, and paying her respects to family members who perished. The scenes where she is standing in ruins, remembering bygone events of happier times, or looking up into the sky or down at the river, are particularly poignant. To see the city itself in 1952 is fascinating, to see the people (even dramatized by actors) heartbreaking. The film wisely steers clear of the complicated question of whether dropping the bomb was necessary, and I think that's how it ought to be viewed; it simply shows us that in war, innocent people suffer, and in the new atomic age, in unprecedented ways, far larger and more monstrous than ever before. It's stunning to me that this was not seen in America until 2011.

Takako Ishikawa stars as a woman from Hiroshima who left it shortly after the bombing to live with her aunt and uncle on a nearby island. She lost the rest of her family in the disaster. Four years afterward, she returns to check up on old acquaintances. Ishikawa is basically an audience surrogate, as we see how the people of Hiroshima are doing. The answer: not that well, as you might expect. The city is still devastated, people are dying of radiation poisoning, many are horribly injured. But life goes on, represented by the children of the city, many of them orphans, but they live their lives as carefree as they can. Ishikawa feels guilty for leaving the city and not being able to help her townspeople, but she finds hope in a young boy, the grandson of one of her father's employees. Osamu Takizawa is now a blind beggar, and can't really take care of the boy himself (he lives in an orphanage). Ishikawa offers to adopt the boy, but he is understandably reluctant to leave his grandfather behind. This is a touching film, but it is pretty two dimensional. It kept reminding me of the far superior Grave of the Fireflies, and the only tears I shed during it came about because I was thinking of the Isao Takahata anime (a rare film which I just cannot recall without tearing up). Takizawa gives a pretty good performance. Ishikawa went on to star in Shindo's three most famous films, Onibaba, The Naked Island and Kuroneko. The very unsubtle score is by Akira Ifukube, who would go on to score Gojira and tons of other kaiju eiga.