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Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics Yuko Shibata

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Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics Yuko Shibata University of Hawai'i Manoa Kahualike UH Press Book Previews University of Hawai`i Press Fall 8-31-2018 Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics Yuko Shibata Follow this and additional works at: https://kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu/uhpbr Part of the Asian History Commons, and the Visual Studies Commons Recommended Citation Shibata, Yuko, "Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics" (2018). UH Press Book Previews. 7. https://kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu/uhpbr/7 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Hawai`i Press at Kahualike. It has been accepted for inclusion in UH Press Book Previews by an authorized administrator of Kahualike. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI 6772_Book_CC.indd 1 6/12/18 6:57 PM PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics Yuko Shibata UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS HONOLULU 6772_Book_CC.indd 3 6/12/18 6:57 PM © 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shibata, Yuko, author. Title: Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki : literature, film, and transnational politics / Yuko Shibata. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017058503 | ISBN 9780824867775 (cloth alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Atomic bomb victims in motion pictures. | Atomic bomb victims in literature. | Hiroshima mon amour (Motion picture) | Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour. | Nagai, Takashi, 1908–1951. Nagasaki no kane. | Hersey, John, 1914–1993. Hiroshima. | Kamei, Fumio, 1908–1987—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: CCL PN1995.9.W3 S55 2018 | DDC 809/.9335840542521954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058503 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) © 2014 by Takashi Arai. Courtesy of PGI, URANO. 6772_Book_CC.indd 4 6/12/18 6:57 PM For Atsushi 6772_Book_CC.indd 5 6/12/18 6:57 PM CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Knowledge Production on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Politics of Representation and a Critique of Canonization 1 1. Postcolonial Hiroshima Mon Amour: Franco-Japanese Collaboration in the American Shadow 17 2. Validating and Invalidating the National Sentiment: Kamei Fumio and the Early Days of Japanese Cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 38 3. “You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima”: Performing Atomic Bomb Victimhood and the Visibility of the Hibakusha 64 4. Entangled Discourses: John Hersey and Nagai Takashi 82 Afterword 99 Notes 105 Selected Bibliography 131 Index 155 vii 6772_Book_CC.indd 7 6/12/18 6:57 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I cannot express enough my enormous debt to many people for their liberal support. Naoki Sakai’s pioneering work has always greatly inspired me. Brett de Bary has given me the best advice possible with wisdom and goodness. Dominick LaCapra taught me how to consider the relationships between litera­ ture and history through his own example. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Jeremy Tambling, Ackbar Abbas, Takashi Shogimen, Ishihara Shun, and Charles Green, who have deeply inspired me. I am also grateful for the professional and warm support from Fujiki Hideaki, Fujiki Masami, Lawrence Marceau, Mariko Marceau, Noboru Tomonari, Uchida Masato, Nakai Yoshinori, and my former colleagues at the Asahi Shimbun and my friends in the Japanese media. My senpai at Midwest Japan Seminar showed me how to be research-active while wonderfully supporting campus and local community life. I owe a special debt of thanks to Shirley Samuels, Park Yuha, Narita Ryūichi, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Kobayashi Fukuko, Noriko Reider, Katsuya Hirano, Pedro Erber, Tomiko Yoda, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Victor Koschmann, Michael Bourdaghs, Robin McNeal, Keith Taylor, Daniel McKee, Jonathan Culler, Shelley Wong, Natalie Melas, Mitchell Greenberg, Tracy McNulty, Susan Buck-Morss, Tsuboi Hideto, Satō Izumi, Takahara Takao, Kawano Noriyuki, Seirai Yūichi, Kim Soon-gil, Hirano Nobuto, Nosaka Akio, Shinjō Ikuo, Inaga Shigemi, Nanyan Guo, Iwasaki Minoru, Yoshimi Shunya, Yamaguchi Jirō, Toba Kōji, Oshikawa Jun, Yasuko Claremont, Vera Mackie, Shigesawa Atsuko, Karen Erickson, Lisa Ohm, Sarah Pruett, Mary Niedenfuer, Dave Bennetts, Richard Ice, Roy Starrs, Simon Ryan, Rogelio Guedea, Vijay Devadas, Sin Wen Lau, Kevin Clements, Brian Moloughney, Nana Oishi, and Rob Binnie. The scholars that I engaged with in the School of Criticism and Theory seminars at Cornell also gave me an energetic impetus for my research. They include Etienne Balibar, Srinivas Aravamundan, Rnjana Khanna, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Warner, Wai Chee Dimock, Satya P. Mohanty, Martha Nussbaum, Mieke Bal, Mary Jacobus, and Maryse Condé. Two anonymous readers offered me invaluable feedback that I found immensely helpful and encouraging. Pamela Kelly, the executive editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, has enthusiastically supported this project with ix 6772_Book_CC.indd 9 6/12/18 6:57 PM x Acknowledgments efficiency and care. Debra Tang, Steven Hirashima, and Cheryl Loe also gave me their firm support and competent guidance. My heartfelt thanks go to Gail Sakai, who has checked my drafts since my graduate student days. In Hiroshima, I had the opportunity to meet memorable people: Harada Yoshihiro, a doctor and son of the well-known surgeon Harada Tōmin, who tackled the formida­ ble challenge of the keloid scars with his heart and soul; and Yoshiyama Yukio, who served as Alain Resnais’ translator when he came to Hiroshima to shoot Hiroshima Mon Amour. This book would not have been possible without broad institutional sup­ port by the University of Melbourne, the University of Otago, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, and the Japan Foundation, as well as the Department of Asian Studies, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. My sin­ cere gratitude also goes out to the Fukuoka City Public Library Film Archive, the Chōfu City Library, the Waseda University Library, the Hiroshima City Library, the Nagasaki City Library, the National Diet Library, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, the Cornell University Library, the CSB/SJU Libraries, and the University of Otago Library. On a personal level, I wish to thank my parents, Masumi and Matsuko Miura, for their affection, care, and patience for all these years. I dedicate this book to my spouse, Atsushi Shibata. His confidence in me has sustained my spirits in the most challenging times. I cannot thank him sufficiently for the genuine and long-standing commitment he has generously shown to me. It is obvious that I could not ever have reached this stage of my life without him. 6772_Book_CC.indd 10 6/12/18 6:57 PM PRODUCING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI 6772_Book_CC.indd 11 6/12/18 6:57 PM INTRODUCTION KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI The Politics of Representation and a Critique of Canonization Since its release in 1959, the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour has attracted considerable attention as an object of study among North American academics working in fields such as literature, film studies, psychoanalysis, history, and trauma studies.1 This intellectual ferment is partly due to the fact that the film is regarded as an avant-garde masterpiece of the French New Wave, a move­ ment heralded by the film’s director, Alain Resnais. It is also because Marguerite Duras—an icon of French literature and women’s writing, and a significant point of reference for Lacanian psychoanalysis—wrote the screenplay. Since the 1990s, these critics’ vibrant debates on memory, forgetting, and trauma have also shed new light on this seemingly ever-mesmerizing film in many areas of the humanities.2 However, these attempts to decipher the film have created a virtually autonomous space bound to Eurocentric contexts, one that does not reflect the fruits of research in Japanese studies. Although Hiroshima Mon Amour is ostensibly a Franco-Japanese produc­ tion and involved participation by both countries, humanities critics in the West have taken for granted its uniform acknowledgement around the world, while paying no attention to the Japanese reception of the film. In Japan, how­ ever, Hiroshima Mon Amour was a box-office failure; screenings in Tokyo were canceled after less than a week. The film was released in mid-June 1959 at the­ aters owned by Daiei (whose president, Nagata Masaichi, was the producer of Hiroshima Mon Amour), a major Japanese movie company internationally known for its production of Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon and Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu. In the postwar reconstruction period in Japan, moviegoing was the most popular affordable recreational activity, drawing one billion viewers a year, and bringing in forty billion Japanese yen in annual profits for movie distributions (after subtracting entrance fees from box-office profits).3 The 1950s was a golden age of Japanese cinema in terms of the breadth of genres, its international repu­ tation, and the power to mobilize viewers who were gradually overcoming the 1 6772_Book_CC.indd 1 6/12/18 6:57 PM 2 Introduction miseries of early postwar life. Nevertheless, according to statistics in Shūkan eiga puresu (Weekly Movie Press) on June 20, 1959, the screening of Hiroshima Mon Amour at Daiei’s flagship theater in Tokyo filled only 6 percent to 34 percent of the seats, even on the day of its release.4 Although it was customary practice to run a movie for at least a week, as a result Hiroshima Mon Amour was can­ celed in the middle of its opening week. Indeed, as Resnais himself conceded in an interview, “[The film was a success] everywhere but Japan,”5 the very place where movie popularity was at its peak.6 Hiroshima Mon Amour was unfavorably received by Japanese critics, owing to the “imbalance” between its depictions of Hiroshima and Nevers, France.
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