“The ultimate defeat is, in short, to forget; especially to forget those who kill us. It is to die without any suspicion, to the very end, of how perverse people are. There is no use in struggling when we already have one foot in the grave. And we must not forgive and forget. We must report, one by one, everything we have learned about the cruelty of man. Otherwise we cannot die. If we do this, then our lives will not have been wasted.”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Le Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (as quoted by Kenzaburo Oe in Hiroshima Notes (“On Human Dignity”))
Fumiyo Kouno’s famous work on the after effects and survivors of the Hiroshima bomb needs little by way of introduction. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms has won a Tezuka prize and has received near unanimous acclaim from American comic critics. This includes a book of the year citation from Dirk Deppey as well as high and consistent praise from the noted manga critic, David Welsh, who counts it among his very favorites.
The opening pages of Kouno’s narrative are intentionally filled with a sense of the ordinary: there is a period of communion over a recently finished dress; the protagonist’s, Minami’s, tranquil passage through the city of Hiroshima with its period detail; and her quiet austerity as she collects bamboo wrappers to make a pair of sandals. The gentle rhythms of life and conversation are interrupted only by Minami’s exclamations and flashbacks. Her past ordeals are inseparable from her present reality and triggered by the simplest of suggestions: in one instance, that she would make “a good wife” and, later, a combination of memory and the senses as the shadows, heat and steam of a bathhouse produce unwelcome reminiscences. Another flashback is triggered by the hint of romantic love which becomes mixed with descriptions of swollen bodies, melting shoes and of walking over the dead. Her friends and family remain at a distance, almost placid observers of her gradual descent into darkness. It is this tragic lyricism, the slow but measured pace conferring a sense of dignity, which seems to have earned Kouno’s story a place in so many readers’ hearts.
In her review of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, Shaenon K. Garrity suggests that Kouno’s book is about “the sad and lovely and aching city that grew up around that horror” and that “Kouno finds beauty and sweetness within that darkness”. Joe McCulloch is equally effusive in his praise proposing that “Kouno means it all to be as soothing and populist as she can make it, so the creeping hand of slow death can intermittently reach in and knock it all down”, finally labeling it “a deeply affirmative book, one eager to seat the reader on its final image of a train barreling toward the future”.
Another articulate proponent can be found in the person of Katherine Dacey. In explicating and defending a section of Kouno’s story where Minami wonders what pleasure “the people who dropped the bomb” would derive from her death, Dacey writes:
“Yet I think this passage invites a second reading as well, as a very human attempt to make sense of tragedy, to express the character’s understandable need to know why she — a civilian — was subjected to such unimaginable horror, rather than a denial of the suffering caused by the Japanese…”
This defense was partially written in response to Casey Brienza’s forthright comments on Kouno’s work which are worth quoting in a sizable chunk:
“An overly sentimental, nostalgic fantasy about two generations of a family of “ordinary” Japanese people whose lives were touched by the tragedy of nuclear war. In the tradition of certain works by Miyazaki Hayao and Tezuka Osamu, this manga pretends an apolitical, humane perspective on events of global import…when in fact the point of view is intensely partisan and potentially incendiary in an international context. Kouno’s abbreviated tale is just the latest in a wealth of domestic pop culture and literary pretensions portraying Japan as exclusive victim during World War II… These sorts of narcissistic meditations on domestic suffering on the part of “ordinary” citizens allow the Japanese to forget that they started the war…”
Amidst the unstinting praise for Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, these few simple sentences seem to me like a breath of fresh air
Brienza is familiar enough with the medium, material and subject matter not to give the work an ounce of wriggle room. She is certainly correct in pointing out a predilection towards a certain wartime myopia, if not outright blindness, among many Japanese artists.
There is a tendency among comic readers to look upon the products of the form in an almost insular fashion. This is perhaps a consequence of the role comics have come to play in societal dialogue which, for the most part, ranges from little to none. Seen discretely, Kouno’s work may not seem quite so egregious – it would appear to faithfully recount a universally relevant moment of misery and, perhaps, “evil”. Yet when viewed in the context of Japan’s lopsided social and cultural record on the subject of World War 2, it becomes altogether less satisfying and virtuous. The fact that Kouno is not a Hiroshima survivor but an artist in search of “truth” makes her take on the subject matter appear even more glib.
In her review, Dacey suggest that the:
“…honest vulnerability, in turn, makes it possible for readers from all walks of life to enter sympathetically into Kouno’s haunting yet life-affirming story, to look past the politics of suffering and representation to understand the price that civilians pay in every war.”
In the same vein, a comment by “Shelly” in response to Dacey’s article asserts that Brienza is:
“…complaining that the book wasn’t about what she wanted it to be about, rather than what is. The book tells of the aftermath of the bombings from the very personal points of view of a few survivors and their descendants. I’m quite sure they weren’t feeling a need for even-handed contemplation of the event after all they’d gone through, and so it would have been ridiculous to include such things.”
I have my doubts if Brienza was asking for a more even-handed contemplation of the events in Kouno’s book. Rather, I would suggest that her point is that the Japanese have been mining this vein of self-pity and putting a gloss on their history for so long, and to the approval of so many commentators that any further appeasement should not be tolerated.
Kouno has merely added her voice to a chorus of material on the same subject matter, much of which is more meaningful, forceful and effective, as is the case with Kenzaburo Oe’s collection of essays in Hiroshima Notes (1965).
Kouno’s manga is a gentle dramatization of the problems faced by the survivors of the atomic bomb and their descendants: the stigma of being a hibakusha, the fear of being related to a victim and the struggle between memory and forgetting. In this, it has many similarities to Oe’s work which is listed as one of Kouno’s main reference sources together with works like Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain (the most famous novel on the subject).
Indeed, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms owes a great deal to Oe’s seminal book, a compact work which wrestles magnificently with the dilemmas faced by the survivors of the atomic bomb. “Country of Cherry Blossoms” (the second and third chapters in Kouno’s manga) reflects, in part, the concerns of a Hiroshima survivor whose letter Oe reproduces in his book, which reads:
“Why are there no stories, for example, of families who endured hard times but recovered their health and now live as normal human beings? Must all surviving A-bomb victims eventually meet a tragic death caused by radiation after-effects? Is it not possible for the victims to overcome their illnesses, and their psychological anxiety and inferiority complexes, and thus die a natural death like other people?”
It should be noted, however, that Hiroshima Notes in itself would have provided no lessons for Kouno if she was searching for a new paradigm in the approach of the Japanese to this singular event. For even in Oe’s book we find little of the self-reproof we find in the works of writers such as W. G. Sebald. Oe recognized this himself and had the following to say in his 1995 introduction to Hiroshima Notes:
“At the time of writing the essays in the book I was sadly lacking in the attitude and ability needed to recast Hiroshima in an Asian perspective. In that respect I reflected the prevailing Japanese outlook on Hiroshima. In response to criticisms from Korea and the Philippines, however, I have since revised my views of Hiroshima. I have focused more on Japan’s wars of aggression against Asian peoples, on understanding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as one result of those wars, and on the special hardships suffered by the many Koreans who experienced the atomic bombings.”
Kouno’s manga is not a work of courage or insight but one of conformity. It should not be met with our acquiescence or blessings. It merely accedes to the norm in addressing the subject of Japan’s suffering and not its guilt. The danger here is of the single story which becomes at once cultural memory and history both for the Japanese and a world which so easily forgets. While many find it quite acceptable to view this work (and others of its ilk) in isolation, I am concerned by that quality of ignorance or self-centeredness which allows such pieces to be both produced and honored with a minimum of reservations.
It is possible to address the issue of war and misery without becoming blinkered and self-indulgent. It should be noted, however, that the effect as far as much Japanese war-related fiction is concerned is often piecemeal and rarely sustained, with only the vaguest hints of the dishonorable aspects of the war ever mentioned. As such, Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition is particularly notable for balancing the demands of an unsympathetic audience with that of an unflinching portrait of the savage indignities placed upon Chinese forced laborers in Manchuria. Similarly, Katsuichi Honda’s book on the Nanking Massacre is remarkable for its research, frankness and temerity.
The response of the Germans to their own suffering could not be more different from that of the Japanese. W. G. Sebald’s “Air War and Literature” is one of the most notable essays on this subject and concerns the silence of German writers on the destruction wrought on their nation over the course of World War 2, something which is glaringly at odds with the path taken by the Japanese people and their cultural gatekeepers.
In the opening paragraphs of his essay, Sebald writes:
“The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country.”
One might quite easily reverse this entire statement when it comes to the area of Japanese writing on the war, this despite that nation’s considerably more tepid response to its war crimes. The reader may also be astonished that so mild and measured an article as Sebald’s should have been received with such consternation in Germany and this as late as 1999.
The Japanese have been lucky in this respect and should thank the vagaries of American guilt, the nature and novelty of the destructive device used, the all too swift rehabilitation of their rulers, and the slip from conscious memory of the over 10 million Asians murdered by the Japanese during World War 2. In the case of much Japanese literature on the war, shame, contrition, and forgiveness have rarely been found to be needful or even necessary, especially when self-forgiveness has been sanctioned by the government, the populace, and the critics. Kouno’s book may be largely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but this does not make it any less culpable in this state of affairs.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms adds little to the literature extant on the subject. Its virtues lie in its format, accessibility and marriage of the gravitas associated with the subject of the hibakusha to the dreamy sentimentality so typical of Japanese mainstream movies. In short, it is the prefect recipe for short attention spans, a poem for indolent sensibilities.
I sometimes wonder if the atomic bomb, in particular, helped create and justify this attitude in a way that, say, massive firebombings (which weren’t actually all that much less destructive) could not have. Or maybe Japan just wouldn’t have done the kind of soul searching Germany did no matter what…I don’t know.
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Whoa… glib? Insular? I’m a historian by training (hence the opening citation of R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History), and make an effort to situate my reviews in historical and social context when appropriate. In both my review and in the comment thread that accompanies it, I speak to the issue of Japanese culpability. I’m well aware of the moral hazards of Kouno’s tactic, as it’s an issue that comes up frequently in German literature as well. (The recent debate over The Reader gives ample proof of how difficult it is to tell a story about “ordinary Germans” that doesn’t come across as an apologia for Nazism.) I make a specific argument about why Kouno focuses more on the victims’ suffering than the greater context of World War II — something that does not come across in the way you’ve juxtaposed (and decontextualized, I might add) my concluding sentence with a comment from a reader who was angry that I raised the issue of Japanese culpability at all.
Katherine: Just for the record, at no point in my review do I call you “glib”, that was directed at the manga. And you’re one of the few positive reviewers to address Hiroshima in the context of the greater war which is why you’re the only positive reviewer I quoted in depth. Does this make you “insular”? Of course not. But you bring up the debate surrounding “The Reader” – why don’t we have anything remotely close to that in relation to one of the most critically acclaimed translated manga from the last 2-3 years?
This is a smart, well-argued article; it’s a shame you link to it on the tcj page as “Ng Suat Tong Destroys “Town of Evening Calm…”, which suggests a violent, contrary for the sake of it reading that this article really isn’t about. Few points.
First, part of the problems you have with the effusive praise in the early reviews may have to do with comics blog state of the union; this book is so gracefully executed that an early review almost has to be positive, even if the reviewer is ambivalent about the politics. Hopefully it won’t be long before there are more critics willing to deal with a work months or years after it’s released; it seems like a more rounded critical approach will be impossible without that happening on a more regular basis.
Second, I really wish you could have supported your points with a few specific citations from the Fumiyo Kouno book. I wonder if you’ve read “Black Rain,” or seen the Shohei Imamura adaptation? It’s not that far off in terms of plot from “Town of Evening Calm…”, but the tone and presentation is so different from Kouno’s book that it would really help put your objections into perspective – I think the comparison would actually support many of your points.
You just provided that review, Ng! I’m not upset because you disagree with me; to the contrary, I think it’s essential to consider the book’s audience and reception history, and applaud you for doing so in such a powerful, eloquent fashion. I’m frustrated because you’ve suggested that other positive assessments of Town are willfully insular — many of the folks you’ve cited address issues that Casey barely touches on in her review, such as the artwork and the dramaturgy. Those have an important place in the critique of Town, just as Casey’s comments do.
As for The Reader, I mention it because there IS a moral hazard to portraying Japanese or German civilians as helpless victims of their own governments’ wartime crimes. At the same time, however, I don’t think the issues surrounding The Reader neatly parallel Town of Evening Calm. One of the main problems with Schlink’s book (and the subsequent movie adaptation) was that he portrayed his heroine as a victim, even though she knowingly and willingly participated in the murder of Jews. Her illiteracy is offered as a defense of her behavior — if only she’d read D.H. Lawrence, she might have known to resist the Nazis.
That’s not what’s going on in Town of Evening Calm, however. Kouno isn’t writing an apologia for what ordinary Japanese citizens did or believed in World War II, she’s portraying the way in which one terrible, devastating event shaped the everyday experience of its survivors. I wouldn’t expect Kouno’s characters to have perspective on why they were bombed; the sheer horror of what happened to them would blot that out.
Can I understand why Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and American readers might find Town of Evening Calm offensive? Yes, I can, as it never addresses the reason why the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, nor does it acknowledge the incredible, unimaginable suffering the Japanese caused throughout Southeast Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, it’s important for us to grasp the human cost of our military actions (even when they’re necessary). And that’s one of the things I think Town of Evening Calm does very well.
Very interesting, Suat. I think the “American guilt” issue is big element of our readings/views on Japan and the war.
I feel like I’ve seen a very few representations in re Japan and culpability (particularly in relation to China)… Tezuka somewhere? Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?
this is a good review, i looked at the oe book in the library the other day but now i think i’ll check out honda.
@nrh i really liked black rain, especially imamura’s movie, really affecting. i’m wondering now how it holds to the critical frame suat’s brought up here. in the context of imamura’s other films it’s somewhat softspoken. i think dr. akagi is pretty good, but it’s been a while.
any thoughts on barefoot gen? i’ve only read an excerpt.
nrh: I didn’t do the link the TCJ.com page.
I read “Black Rain” quite a number of years ago and skimmed it again prior to writing this review. I have not seen the adaptation. My feelings about it were/are somewhat similar to my current ones in relation to Kouno’s manga.
It’s a vastly superior book (technically speaking) in comparison to the manga. I think Ibuse’s novel can be seen in relation to the first part of Kouno’s work – in particular its framing narrative concerning the protagonist and his niece. I do believe it also restricts itself to the first generation of survivors and the general lack of concern for the “big” picture among the Japanese civilians fits in well in the context of the novel.
I certainly don’t begrudge the Japanese a few books on the horrors inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, by that time (the book is from the 60s but I read it much later) I had already consumed a reasonable amount of Japanese material related to the war and was discovering a rather uncomfortable slant to these undertakings.
Some of the best and most famous Japanese works on the war are just as “guilty” as “Town of Evening Calm…” in this regard. Shohei Ooka’s “Fires on the Plain” is about the dehumanizing effects of the war on Japanese soldiers and I feel that Kon Ichikawa’s film adaptation is even more powerful than the book in communicating this theme. The only hint that there’s something much more sinister about the campaign is the hatred of the native Filipinos directed at the Japanese soldiers.
A somewhat similar pictures emerges in Hikaru Okuizumi’s “The Stones Cry Out” (winner of an Akutagawa Prize). There’s also Isao Takahata’s “Graveyard of the Fireflies”, a short story by Kazuo Umezu (one which I admire) and Leiji Matsumoto’s “The Cockpit” (among others) just to name a few more prominent examples. There are assorted other popular manga/anime which roll out the Japanese World War 2 Flag with pride and nary a sense that they’re displaying the equivalent of a Nazi flag to their Asian neighbors.
This is not to say that the suffering of the Japanese people is unimportant but the overwhelming emphasis on personal suffering in Japanese war fiction is not something which I can admire without reservations. This would be like reading reams of American literature glorifying their actions during the war to the exclusion of all else – which simply is not the case as we all know.
Katherine: I agree that both the “artwork” and “dramaturgy” are important but I think it is absolutely essential to put a work like Kouno’s into historical and literary context.
I know this is bit much to ask from people doing reviews for free on blogs but even so. The real problem is there aren’t enough experts (and I’m not an expert in case this isn’t already clear) to do this in relation to comics. I can see a similar problem developing in relation to Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza” for example.
As stated in the review above, my problem with Kouno’s book is that it is exactly what I have come to expect from Japanese war literature. It’s probably even less excusable than Ibuse’s “Black Rain” because of its recent vintage and extension of the narrative into the present day – thus making its lack of interest in the broader picture even more obvious and damning.
It may in fact be a very accurate portrait of the Japanese attitude towards their wartime record. It’s not horrible manga but it adds nothing to my understanding or feelings about the event portrayed.
Derik: “I feel like I’ve seen very few representations re: Japan and culpability (particularly in relation to China)… Tezuka somewhere? Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?”
Which part of “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” are you talking about here? It doesn’t ring a bell at present.
ave: I think “Barefoot Gen” might be a bit of a disappointment after “Black Rain.
Barefoot Gen (it feels to me) blames the Japanese more than the West for the bombing. I only read the first volume, but it’s all about how Gen’s family is forced into war by nationalist propaganda. Definitely a very different view of the bombing, at least in vol. 1
Wind-Up Bird has several extended forays into the encounters between the Japanese and the Chinese in Mongolia. One scene involves a soldier skinning a prisoner alive, for instance. There is certainly some ambiguity/ambivalence to the portrayal of the Japanese in wartime—but little reference to Hiroshima (if memory serves).
nrh; just to be clear, I’m the one who writes the link on the main page and should be blamed — not Suat.
There has been a recent trend for sweet memories of the war & postwar… maybe because that generation’s winding down. There’s also been a right-wing swing for the last ten years or so, jingoism over Yasukuni etc. Institutionally it’s very hard for the government to admit guilt. Witness the flap over the flag design and compare another boneheaded Prime Minister’s statements about comfort women with the sugary-sweet view of postwar life in the manga/movie Always: Sunset over 3rd Street.
It’s kind of shocking to move from Oe (whose work I love dearly) and his principled documentary work to the recent stuff. That’s progress, I guess.
My main problem with TOECCOCB is that it feels so… educational. Kouno was born a generation after the war. I mean, Barefoot Gen’s educational too, but her generation watched slideshows. His piled up bodies.
Bill, “Always” definitely comes to mind when I read “Town of Evening Calm…”. I can swallow Yamazaki’s movie because it doesn’t have any “grand” messages and is really aimed at the level of “The Andy Griffith Show” (with some tears for good measure). Not so happy when the same technique is applied to a “serious” work about WWII.
And Oe is one of my favorite Japanese authors as well (though I don’t read him in the original Japanese like you do of course).
Derek, you might also want to look up The New Sun, a 1943 picture novel (i.e. full-page images, one with panels, and minimal text below) by Taro Yashima, an expat artist detailing the Japanese government’s abuses of domestic political dissidents; the University Press of Hawai’i just did a new edition in 2008, so it should be pretty easy to find. Not that this particularly addresses the issue of Japanese insularity, but it jumped to mind anyway as a semi-comic on the political abuses of the day, drawn almost contemporaneously.
Barefoot Gen is an odder duck, in that it’s VERY specifically a children’s comic, prone to promoting shonen virtues in a broadly humanistic Tezuka-like vein (and laying it all out with the pertinent hyperactive visual tropes). As such, its first volume relentlessly depicts Japan’s militaristic types of 1945 as abusive, repressive, murderous buffoons with evil pointy mustaches; its criticism of the nation’s international abuses limited to forced conscription of Koreans and images of military hangings, and age-appropriate mistreatment of American POWs. I suspect its target audience greatly limited its sophistication, though I haven’t read many later volumes; in any case, it’s not terribly sentimental or self-pitying — looking over vol. 1 again, it’s a damn spitting ANGRY comic for 200 pages before the bomb drops — if still largely focused on in-Japan abuses from what I’ve read.
AS FOR YOU, SUAT: no, I liked this piece. I think our difference boils down to my inclination to evaluate the work on the terms it has provided… “discreetly,” as you say. I will take issue with your characterization of the work’s praise as stemming from the opening chapter’s “tragic lyricism, the slow but measured pace conferring a sense of dignity” – I did like that, but I was more taken with how Kouno toys with the melodramatic tropes of her plot — the family’s history of sickness — to suggest the ‘logic’ behind the emotional travails of the final chapter, i.e. what’s the point of bothering with relationships when you might just linger for a while and die?
From this perspective, a crucial aspect of the opening chapter is the delay in death, less so the physicality of suffering (although that’s surely present) – lines like “I wonder if the people who dropped the bomb are pleased with themselves – ‘Yes! Got another one!'” and “I don’t want to see any more people I know die from the bomb” are pitying, but they’re steeped in despair over the lingering of death, not just the fact of it. Each of the three chapters skip forward in time — and regardless of the serialization of the work, it plainly functions as more of a single work-of-chapters rather than a story collection — concluding with the primary modern character, effectively in Kouno’s own generational position, realizing the necessity of repudiating the concern of lingering death, as her parents did, bringing the timeline around in a circle. This is all executed with soft steps and heavy doses of sentimental romance, but the message is functionally that Japan needs to STOP pitying itself so much.
And you’re right – this does absolutely nothing to address Japan’s culpability in its atrocities, and it’s indeed insular as all hell, but I have a hard time calling it glib, or castigating Kouno for accessing these themes as a young woman, in that her work is less exploitative of simple gravitas as interested in tracking said gravitas as it transitions into self-harm. This is the greater impact of the work for me, non-expert that I am, and I appreciated its adeptness with this inquiry.
You are more of an expert than me, though. I’m interested – is it your thorough exposure to specifically this sort of story a paramount factor in your reaction, or do you see wide in-work contextualization as vital to any story dealing with a situation of warfare and abuse? I’d like to hear your opinions on The Hurt Locker, for instance — even though I haven’t seen it yet, speaking of indolence — which apparently deals with bomb-defusing American soldiers in Iraq mainly on the ‘adrenaline junkie’ level, with apparently no direct acknowledgment of the broader politics behind the Iraq war…
Oh fuck, sorry I spelled your name wrong, Derik…
“…concluding with the primary modern character, effectively in Kouno’s own generational position, realizing the necessity of repudiating the concern of lingering death, as her parents did, bringing the timeline around in a circle. This is all executed with soft steps and heavy doses of sentimental romance, but the message is functionally that Japan needs to STOP pitying itself so much… her work is less exploitative of simple gravitas as interested in tracking said gravitas as it transitions into self-harm…”
Thanks for this, Joe.
Yes, I think you’re right in saying that my exposure to works like “Town of Evening Calm…” affects my judgement. I’m referring to the broad swathe of works by Japanese writer and filmmakers on WWII, not just Hiroshima. I would certainly have a different reaction if Kouno’s manga was an anomaly in Japanese publishing but it isn’t. I need more (a keener perspective, a broader view and a greater grasp of the subject matter etc.) from a work published over 40 years after the primary works in the genre.
It also feels second hand and the product of research rather than experience – I think that’s what Bill means when he calls it “educational” and judges it in a less favorable light than “Barefoot Gen”. This assessment is a bit more subjective than most but it’s possible to turn research into something living and breathing. I didn’t feel this was the case with “Town of Evening Calm…”.
Mainland Chinese authors, in particular, have written very powerful works on the subject of the Sino-Japanese war. The best of these works never descend into propaganda and strike firmly at the gut. At this moment, I’m particularly interested in seeing more balanced views of the Japanese from Chinese writers and filmmakers.
A 2009 film called “City of Life and Death” appears to have achieved something of this effect. I missed it at the cinema because I thought it was going be “just another Nanking film”, but I read later that it had a sympathetic portrayal of a Japanese soldier in it and that the director even received death threats because of this depiction. This is the equivalent of a Jew drawing a sympathetic/more weighted picture of the SS. I’ll probably catch it on DVD at a later date.
As for “wide in-work contextualization”, I don’t see this as vital to the success of a work – Oe’s “Hiroshima Notes” fails in this regard but still succeeds as a series of essays on the hibakusha. On the other hand, a work like “Town of Evening Calm…” may have benefited from it if only to make it more relevant to the world at large.
As for “The Hurt Locker”, I may find it less offensive because of the overwhelming effect of all the media I consume on the subject of Iraq which is generally negative on the American presence (the damage done to the country and people, and the illegitimacy of the war etc.).
In this light, a show depicting the travails of ordinary soldiers in Iraq is not altogether unwarranted since it is necessary to acknowledge *all* the evils perpetrated during this war as it was with Vietnam. It is a compelling movie though not a favorite of mine. The focus on bomb squads is also something reasonably novel in the area of serious war literature and film (the effect is not quite the same as watching multiple episodes of “24” and “Spooks”).
Another show starring Kevin Bacon, “Taking Chance”, is really much closer to “Town of Evening Calm…” in effect. It’s a quiet film more concerned with the sacrifices made by Americans as a result of the war and the impact this has had on small American communities. I imagine its very particular focus on the suffering of Americans would probably infuriate a number of Iraqis (or even Palestinians for that matter). The film’s focus on paying homage to the fallen certainly runs a high risk of descending into jingoism (cf. Saving Private Ryan).
Even so, it didn’t bother me as much if only because of the assiduousness with which the abuses of the American military have been brought to light in various other media. No one doubts that this is a “bad” war. This is much less certain when one considers various Japanese books and movies on the subject of WWII.
Have you read Ishiguro’s _Pale View of Hills_?–really a weird and wonderful novel about the dangerous attitudes of the Japanese before WWII and the aftermath of the dropping of the A-bombs. Ishiguro is Anglo-Japanese (Japanese parents, born in England–or moved there young, can’t remember)–so it’s not coming straight out of Japan, and its not comics, and it’s probably 20 years old now…but it’s worth a read. Very strange, impossible to completely unravel, plot. Some gothic genre tropes maybe–but mostly it’s literary fiction. Noah should probably stay away.
Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day is more famous and looks at the British side of the equation in WWII. I liked Pale View quite a bit better though.
He’s also got some more sci-fi type stuff. One novel about cloning for instance.
I’ve only ever read Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” and “An Artist of the Floating World” and remember very little about either. Didn’t even recall the title “A Pale View of Hills” until you mentioned it above. Sounds interesting and even atypical of what I’ve read of him.
I went back to check on the WWII sections of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and you (and Derik) are right. There’s one small section (Pg 143 of the hardcover edition with the Chris Ware cover) where Japanese war crimes and the fruitlessness of the war are mentioned in passing. The soldier being skinned is a Japanese one though and he’s being tortured by a Russian and Mongolian (I presume this is the scene you’re talking about in comment 11). There’s a very brief mention of Hiroshima as well.
One more book that might be read alongside Joe’s recommendation of “The New Sun” is Kappa Senoh’s “A Boy Called H”. Translated by John Bester who also handled “Black Rain”.
I thought I remembered a longer section in Wind Up Bird about the war, alas.
Jog: Thanks for the book suggestion, handily enough my library has a copy, I’ll read it on my train ride home.
I just saw The Hurt Locker this week and it does ignore the broader implications of the Iraqi invasion/occupation. It’s a markedly non-political contrast from something like the HBO miniseries Generation Kill (which I thought was overall much better, moving, intriguing).
This is a great review and discussion, and I much enjoyed lurking here reading it. I’m somewhere between the poles of admiring Evening Calm and dismissing it (the combo of being Chinese/American, ha), but reading this discussion reminds me of what upset me more than the work itself when I first read it–the fact it was produced in the last decade makes it feel like it would had to have willfully ignored the complexities of its view. Perhaps it was nonpolitical, but Hurt Locker didn’t feel like an endorsement either, through its focus on soldiers, whereas I can’t help but read things like Evening Calm a bit like I might read Gone with the Wind or something. And as Suat mentions, it doesn’t sit by itself as the only depiction of this war in Iraq. This English language release of Evening Calm didn’t land in territories as familiar with the topic, and most of the reviews reflect it. Though I haven’t read it yet, I’m more optimistic about Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, as not only does Sacco approached the trouble points of what he does simply by putting himself in and being a journalist, Footnotes is a product specifically created with coverage of Gaza (or lack thereof) in mind.
Did anyone here see Yasukuni documentary by Ying Li? It captures, if nothing else, the level of passion that the War still carries in Japan, let alone the rest of Asia.
I can’t tell if Kouno’s exclusions were the result of ignorance or choice. However, the book I mention above, “A Boy Called H”, goes in the opposite direction and is almost at pains to point out the malodorous aspects of the war (forced conscription, racism, fascism etc.), sometimes to the detriment of the work itself.
I would choose the latter problem give the choice though. A bit of leeway is obtained by making the protagonist in the book a Christian (something unusual even in Japan today). This makes many of his viewpoints different from those of his comrades (in relation to the Emperor for example).
As for “Footnotes in Gaza”, the “problem” for reviewers is that a large part of the book addresses a largely forgotten aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – one which is hardly more than a “footnote” in most of the basic texts on that war. It’s quite possible that Sacco is one of the more knowledgeable Westerners on this small but important section of the struggle. The other half of the book is more amenable to analysis since it deals with the present day conflict and its complexities. A historian like Katherine would probably be better able to address the methods by which Sacco collects his oral histories and presents his story. He’s not acting solely as a journalist in this latest comic.
I’ve never seen the Li Ying documentary but it sounds like it might be worth catching.
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It’s worth noting that Kouno’s editor gave her the idea for the book on finding out she was from Hiroshima. Until then she had basically avoided the topic her whole life.
@hc, I haven’t seen Yasukuni yet, though I followed the controversy around its screening with great interest. The director’s a Chinese citizen living in Japan, and it got funding from a Japanese gov’t agency. Then the right-wing groups went on a tear against it. A number of them are covers for yakuza, the main reason the movie theaters pulled out. (Look to Jake Adelstein’s memoir Tokyo Vice for a definitive look at the yakuza, I’ll have a review on my blog in a day or two)
@Suat, while looking for the name of a hibakusha writer I recommend (Hayashi Kyoko, “Ritual of Death”), I kept finding Christians in the literature. The big one’s Nagai Takashi, a Catholic who wrote “The Bells of Nagasaki,” that being home to 1/6 of Japan’s Christians. No larger point, just a curio. And while not hibakusha, Endo Shusaku’s “The Sea and Poison” rather unflinchingly looks at the vivisection of American soldiers in Fukuoka by the J-military… published in ’58, Catholic writer, grew up in Manchuria & Kobe.
@eric Ishiguro wrote the a story that became a Guy Maddin musical with beer legs. Still can’t get my head around that.
Thanks for the reading list, Bill. I’ve read a few books by Endo but never considered that one. Interesting about the number of Christians in the literature as well.
I have not read the manga but I can comment, briefly about Japan’s collective memory loss.
It has always been one of the most striking aspects of Japan’s culture. I remember teaching lessons in which Japanese suffered horribly from the atomic bombings, but there was rarely even a mention of the war. It was like, one day, everything was peaceful, and the next, boom, somebody decided to drop the big one on them.
The dropping of the atomic bomb on two successive civilian populations was wrong for many reasons. But what seems to be lost is that Fat Man and Little Boy were not dropped capriciously. The bombings followed a very long chain of events that go back further than even Pearl Harbor.
So, while I haven’t read “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms”, I have read many books/stories in the genre. They almost always, to one extent or another, bring to mind comedian, Robert Klein’s routine on former UN Director, Kurt Waldheim’s inability to remember just how much he might have collaborated with the Nazis in Austria during WWII. At one point during an extended skewering of Waldheim, he asked in a thick accent, “There was a war?”
It would be wrong to say that this comment encapsulates the collective memories of all Japanese. But it does encapsulate the outward appearance that “official” Japan wants to project.
I won’t get into the many factors that cause this, but they are, in part, tied into Japan’s traditionally inward-looking culture and their ancient beliefs in ancestor worship. (Yes, other countries do the same thing.)
I think one problem with the selective memories of the atomic bombings displayed in various forms of their media is that, for those who have no actual memory of the times, the War becomes trivial. It allows pseudo historians to claim the Nanking Massacre never occurred or that Japan was merely trying to free Asia for the occupying grip of Europeans. Time loves a hero, after all.
Klein, during that same routine, segued into his feelings of the old TV show, “Hogan’s Heroes”. Specifically, he thought that equating Nazis with the clownish buffoons like Col. Klink was dangerous to our collective memory of what the Nazis actually were.
I remember this because he reminded me of my dad, who refused to watch that show because, well, his mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant, and let’s just say he was sensitive to those issues. (This did not stop him from laughing at Mel Brook’s when he made fun of Hitler in several of his movies, but I think the difference for him was that Hogan’s Heroes took place in a concentration camp.) At the time, my sister and I just sort of looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders, but after listening to Klein, I began to understand dad’s point of view.
The problem for Japan is, there is no outward criticism of the Japanese armed forces before and during the war. Germans can have an argument about “The Reader” but there is no similar argument taking place in Japan.
Instead we simply get endless versions of “The Harp of Burma,” and “Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes.” Both of which, I’ll add, are moving stories, but they are not indicative of the whole, they are practically the whole of what is taught. If your review is indeed indicative of Kouno’s manga, than it is another in a long line of similar stories with few counterparts to balance the scales.
I don’t know if that fact lessons its merits as entertainment, however. Again, I am at a disadvantage to write about it, but, even if it is flawed by a lack of proper perspective, there may still be some merit to its content.
I can, however, talk about “Barefoot Gen”. Though it sounds similar in some ways, it did not let the war play as an afterthought and the author, Nakazawa Keiji, certainly let his feelings toward, the Japanese military, Japanese propaganda and, a bit more subtly, the Emperor be known. His feelings about the bombing of Hiroshima have a bit more heft to them in my opinion than many of the other works I’ve read.
That is my quick opinion. Make of it what you will. Oh, and as to one of the comments I did manage to read, the Tokyo fire bombings killed more people and did just as much structural damage as the atomics did. They, however, cause people to suffer from radiation-related problems for years afterward.
Anyone here seen “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” by Kazuo Hara? It’s a 1987 doc about this 60 year old war veteran, once imprisoned for hitting the Emperor with a sling shot, who goes around hectoring reluctant veterans about their war crimes. Seems like, in regards to Japan, it’s more or less in a class of its own.
Ah, GREAT movie! Okuzaki running around Japan beating the hell out of his former army commanders. I projected it from a paleolithic 16mm print at a Japanese film festival I worked for, in awe the whole time.
“In the tradition of certain works by Miyazaki Hayao and Tezuka Osamu, this manga pretends an apolitical, humane perspective on events of global import…”
I can’t take anyone who possesses such a poor misunderstanding of the work of Miyazaki and Tezuka seriously. The complex and complicated politics of both these creators can’t be so easily dismissed with such a glib, categorically incorrect statement. Perhaps it’s better to pay attention to actual nuanced consideration and scholarship such as this instead:
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7168/1/Feuillassier_Remi_2010.pdf
http://apjjf.org/-Matthew-Penney/4766/article.html
There is nothing apolitically humane about Tezuka and Miyazaki at all. Maybe this Casey Brienza would have been better off learning Japanese and reading the untranslated material surrounding Tezuka and Miyazaki before trotting out her own myopia.
Also, I’m Filipino and live in the Philippines and my generation (post-war) does not even care about what happened in World War 2. We studied it in school. We’re over it. It’s ancient history. We’re not constantly haunted by its specter. Martial Law is a far greater sin in our minds.
Why is Western liberal thinking always purporting to speak for us victims? We don’t need this sort of condescending and patronizing attitude. And obviously much Chinese and Korean grievance over World War 2 has an ulterior political motive in balancing the rise of Japan on the world stage. Politicians dwell on World War 2 not because they truly empathize with the victims but to benefit them when it comes to asking for financial compensation, playing international political PR, and whipping up ultranationalist fervor in their respective countries. The inability of China, Korea, and Japan to move on from World War 2 is sickening in all their narratives.