Introduction
War can kick us in the teeth and even show its ugly face without us knowing, we are forever bound in it in memory. The World War II has claimed millions of lives and devastated nations into smithereens. This is twice painful for Japan, where two atomic bombs ravaged their nations and they have to suffer its consequences even decades after it.
Lives lost and buildings downed into ashes are nothing compared to the heartbreaking memories that the people have kept in their minds. No medicine could cure thoughts and its consequences have eternally compelled the Japanese people its reminders. These men and women now were children during those times. They may have lost arms, legs or family member. Wounds may have healed but the pain of its memory is still palpable.
In the movie Graves of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka, 1988), we lay witnesses to the ugliness of the war in the perspective of the protagonists, who at their age, experienced the excruciating pains of survival behind the ghastly milieu.
During the closing weeks of World War II, 14 year-old Seita is left to care for his 4 year-old sister Setsuko, after their mother has been killed in an American firebombing raid. With their home destroyed, the pair moves in with an aunt, but relations with her soon falter, and the kids move into an abandoned hillside cave, attempting to fight another war on their own – which is their own survival.
As Isao Takahata’s powerful antiwar film, it negates the concept of usual Japanese anime, which superimposes on what is impossible and usually slants to end up in slapstick comedy. The film is all the more shocking because of its medium. By using animation, director Isao Takahata puts a spin on the familiar shots of war. Bomber jets seem to crawl across the sky.
Soldiers march to their deaths with fear in their eyes. This film jerks tears without trying. Also, this film has magical realism and drama combined, which faithfully addresses the distressing theme of the movie about World War II. Another thing that this film emphasizes is that animation could be used to flesh out a viable “serious” movie, which negates the stereotypical concept that “cartoons are just for children”.
Fireflies and Bullets
Based on the semi-autographical book “Hotaru no Haka” by Nosaka Akiyuki, the tale recounts the author’s travails during the aftermath of World War II, in which he lost his little sister to malnutrition, for which he blamed himself.
In Grave of the Fireflies, the opening scene becomes particularly haunting when we fully understand its meaning. A young boy calmly announces the date of his death as “September 25th, 1945”, and the spirit watches his body die in the aftermath of the war. Among the dead body’s possessions is a candy tin filled with ash, and a janitor throws the useless item into nearby bushes. Disturbed fireflies begin to illuminate a specter of a little girl, who remains close to her brother even in death. When he comes and stands by her spirit, the film initiates its journey back to the last days of their life together.
Then the plot warps us back to the events that transpired in World War II. Massive bullets are fired in an air raid and we see the children Seita and Setsuko are running for their lives. Unfortunately, they’ve lost their mother in the confusion, and soon discover that she has been burnt to death.
After Seita and his sister Setsuko lost their mother, they have no idea what to do. Their father is in the Navy and at sea, and hasn’t been heard from in a long while. The homeless pair can only hope that their conscripted father will stop the fire rain, and are yet to learn the war has made them orphans. When they go and live with an aunt who did not want looking after them, they attempted to survive on their own.
The second half of the film is spent following Seita braving radiation, sickness and starvation. As money becomes worthless, Seita’s people resort to bartering. Seita must then find things to trade for rice and he must keep care of his defenseless sister. His sister, Setsuko is a scared little girl who cannot support herself.
In a usual film, she would be played as a precocious child who could single-handedly win the war if not for her tiny stature. Here we see realism once again, and it becomes obvious children aren’t magically immune to hunger and disease. Setsuko dies and his brother barely survives until he succumbs to his own demise.
Amidst all that is dark and distressing milieu, the film surprisingly illuminates on the love between the two main characters. The animators illustrate the way they seek refuge in each other, and attempt to fortify what remains of their identity. By focusing on the mundane details of day-to-day survival, the film explores a mutual need and shifting roles.
Nothing gets lost in translation in a culturally specific account – we recognize their humanity through our own. The empathetic treatment transcends cultural and generic boundaries, drawing audiences into the world of two children forced to find their rightful place after the war.
Animated as if it might be a neo-realist film, Grave of the Fireflies is also imbued with a sense of magical realism: watching their faces light up as they play with fireflies or bubble with joy when playing in water. Particularly insightful is the way the film marks their inevitable burial plots. The tone and mood is a heart-wrenching piece set from the very first scene and you could not hold back tears without being sappy or melodramatic.
The movie Grave of the Fireflies withholds judgment of the governments engaged in the hostilities of war. As the film unfolds its grim conclusion, it lets the inhumanity of war speak for itself. When we return to see their spirits in modern times, it’s enough to know that they’re still looking after each other as they watch over a haunted Japan. Those children who survived the war might just have carried those unimaginable scenes of the war in their memories.
Memories of Post-War Japan
The DVD version of the movie appropriately features an additional video about personal accounts of World War II. In the 12-minute Historical Perspective, professors Theodore F. Cook and Haruko Taya Cook discuss WWII from the view of different countries, relating first-person accounts. “Often I wonder how two nations can think this way,” says Professor Cook.
Director Isao Takahata, in a 17-minute interview, remembers his own childhood in his war-torn country. “I used my own experience with this air raid in the film,” he says. “You never feel it’s real even when you’re being bombed with fire bombs.” In another interview, critic Roger Ebert delves into Japanese animation compared to that of the U.S. and his own feelings about Fireflies. “I was amazed when I first saw Grave of the Fireflies to find that I was actually moved to tears” (Ebert, 2000).
This brings us back to the moral ambiguity of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb in Japan. For all we know, the Japanese started the war. History lessons subconsciously draw biased – and sometimes simply incorrect – information supporting that decision. For example, we see the argument made that the Japanese would never have surrendered or that up to a million American soldiers would have been killed or wounded in an all-out invasion of Japan.
Only a handful of the texts question these still widely accepted assertions. For example, one junior high text observes, “Some of the scientists who had worked on the bomb disagreed. They believed that it should be publicly tested before being used…. A number of military officials supported the argument. They held that Japan was near collapse anyhow” (Graf & Bohannan 1978, p. 526).
In fact, recent scholarship has shown that the bombing was not only unnecessary but also known to be so at the time. In 1945 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, maintained that Japan was already defeated and that it “wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. . . .” And Adm. William Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff in 1945, argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender:
The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children (Alperovitz 1992, p. 13).
If the subject of history is the ideology of the present imposed on the past, then it is just right that teachers have to examine what ideology of World War II could change the impact it might have on the future mindsets of students who have learned the “biased” History lessons. It is important to realize that people must understand the effects of war on real children, women, and men. It is only through building such awareness and understanding that we can help future generations avoid the mistakes of our own. As Maxine Greene (1982) puts it:
We must begin early, I believe, in education to communicate the understanding that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and London and Pearl Harbor and Hanoi were in no way accidental, that they were the result of human decisions and human trade-offs. The young must be brought to see that these instances of destruction would not have happened if certain persons in the world were not deliberately transmuted into objects for other people’s ends.
Learning About War
Japanese films always portray that they are the real victims of war. Partly, they are right because their people bore the brunt of its iniquities. Through exploring literature and films, American children and young adults can best explore history by acting on it in some way, by connecting it to their own time and reality. There are different ways of stimulating this process. Here are some literary works that could help us undo previous notions about war in the concept of “who started it?” but realizing “how did they suffer from it?”.
Hiroshima No Pika (The Flash of Hiroshima), by Toshi Maruki (1980), is a graphic and disturbing picture book that gives the reader a sense of what it was like to be on the ground the day the bomb was dropped . We see the horrors, suffering, and death from the victims’ eyes. Maruki is the well-known Japanese artist who, along with her husband, has painted a powerful series of Hiroshima murals (Dower & Junkenman, 1985). Although Hiroshima No Pika is a picture book and less graphic than the series of murals on which it is based, it is not really for young children.
My Hiroshima, by Junko Morimoto (1987), is a picture book for children. Morimoto recounts her own life in Hiroshima both before and after the bombing. Students will be struck with how similar young Junko’s life is to their own; she goes to school, has a loving family, and so on. Moreover, she shows how Hiroshima has recovered and what it looks like today. Morimoto says she wrote the book in order to “teach children the importance of not repeating these mistakes and to give them the heart to care for and value all life on earth.” This is a great read-aloud book.
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, by Eleanor Coerr (1977), tells the true story of a girl who was 2 years old when the bomb was dropped. Ten years later, she develops leukaemia as a result of radiation poisoning and eventually dies. This is a moving story of one child’s struggle, and it makes the ultimate effects of the bombing personal for children. Sadako is a hero to the children of Japan, and there is a memorial to her in the Hiroshima Peace Park.
John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1985) is the best-known book on the bombing and its aftermath. In it he describes how the bomb affected six different people who were there on August 6, 1945. The immediacy of the book comes from their personal accounts; the voices and stories we hear are more powerful than any piece of fiction. The 1985 edition contains an afterword in which Hersey describes what became of the six individuals 40 years after the bombing.
Children of the A-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (Osada, 1963) presents firsthand accounts of elementary and secondary students who survived the blast. This book is out of print, but it can be found in public and college libraries. It is worth the effort to locate a copy because it presents the straightforward and guileless reactions of children:
For a while I was unconscious. A whole lot of lumber came piling around my hips and I wanted to protest, Stop, that hurts! I came to again with the pain. I quickly crawled outside. There were lots of people lying around there; the faces; of most of them were charred. I got out to the street and just as I heaved a sigh of relief my right hand suddenly began to hurt. When I looked closely at it I found that the skin of my right arm was peeled off from my elbow to my fingers and it was all red. I wanted to go home right away. . . .(Osada 1967, p. 112).
In the audiovisual setting, Hiroshima Maiden is a 58-minute color videotape that is part of the “Wonderworks Family Movie Series.” It is a fictional account of one of the Hiroshima “maidens” who was badly scarred in the bombing and subsequently came to the United States for surgery in 1955. Miyeko is placed with a family in Connecticut. Johnny, the older son, is afraid of Miyeko and rejects her; he reflects the ignorance and prejudice of his playmates toward this disfigured “enemy.”
After Johnny finally encounters Miyeko as a “Thou” and not an “It,” in Martin Buber’s terms, he begins to understand her fears, sufferings, and hopes. He is changed, becomes more human, and is better prepared to confront his own fears and prejudices, as well as the antagonism of his friends. This short film serves as a wonderful introduction to the complexities surrounding the Hiroshima bombing.
Isao Takahata’s film Graves of the Fireflies could be a great addition to this list of literature that not only speaks about history, but also unveils the pain of loss and uncertainty that the children could suffer in the face of war.
Conclusion
Incidentally, after World War II, many creators such as Tezuka Osamu (1926-1989), who were strongly influenced by movies, introduced three-dimensional space composition into their works and started creating dramatic stories by drawing pictures with a style that fits them. Subsequently, the art of dividing scenes into frames for effect advanced remarkably and all kinds of subjects were treated as manga and anime as we know them today. In the process, animated films were strongly influenced by manga, and all films that were built around manga-like picture sequences-even including those characters that did not move much – came to be referred to as anime.
Thus, the medium of the film speaks of its own history just as its theme is weaving the tale of the horrors of World War II. Much as the animation is beautiful and it demonstrates the Japanese reverence for nature, there is a faithful historical rendering of time and place. The subtext reclines as: what happens to the young boy is a metaphor for what happened to Japan.
Works Cited
- Alperovitz, Gar. To Drop the Atom Bomb, Christianity and Crisis, 3 February 1992, pp. 13-16.
- Coerr, Eleanor. Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (New York: Dell, 1977)
- Dower, John, W. & Junkerman, John (eds.). The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985).
- Ebert, Roger. Film Review: Grave of the Fireflies. Chicago Sun – Times. Chicago, Ill. 19 March 2000, p. 5.
- Graff, Henry F. & Bohannan, Paul. The Promise of Democracy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1978)
- Greene, Maxine. Education and Disarmament, Teachers College Record, vol. 84, 1982.
- Hersey, John. Hiroshima (1946; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1985).
- Morimoto, Junko. My Hiroshima (New York: Viking, 1987).
- Osada, Arata, Children of the A-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963).
- Toshi Maruki. Hiroshima No Pika (New York: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1980).
