Group B - Post 4: 'A Tragic Recounting' Hiroshima and In This Corner of the World - Kenneth Butcher

In the wake of the Nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of the second wold war there have been many a stories across multiple mediums depicting the life of non active combatant military Japanese folk shortly preceding and in the aftermath of this catastrophic event. Over Spring Break I had the opportunity to experiences a fairly new iteration of one of these stories in the form of an animated film entitled, "In This Corner of the World" and I thought I'd takes this opportunity to compare and contrast the rhetorical and cinematic devices the film employs with those that the excerpt from the story "From Hiroshima" does, in order to see how the help us formulate empathy, as well as get a similar message across in two different ways.

The plot of 'In this corner of the world' follows the life of a woman named Suzu who lives in a seaside town called Eba in Hiroshima City. In 1944, 18-year-old Suzu, working for her grandmother's small family business of cultivating Nori (edible sea weed), is told by her parents that an unknown young man has come to propose marriage to her. The man, whose name is Shusaku, lives in Kure City, a large naval port city 15 miles away from Hiroshima City, as a navy civilian. He remembers that he and Suzu had first met during one of Suzu's childhood visits to the city. Suzu decides to marry him and moves to join Shusaku's family in Kure. As Suzu adjusts to her new life in Kure, the threat of the Pacific War slowly begins to encroach on the daily lives of the townspeople. Most of the first half is spent establishing Suzu as kind of a regular, lovable, artistic ditz to both endear us to her on a personal level and to later heighten the emotional impact of what we know is going to happen to her. It isn't really till the second half, after she goes to live with her husband and his family in Kure, that we start to see the realities of war start to encroach into her everyday life in the way of things like, the military police presence begin to grow in her town over time, certain food and resources progressively becoming more scarce to the point that the government has to give them out in extremely small rations, and randomly being forced to stop whatever it was they were doing at the time and go into an underground bomb shelter every time there was an air raid. All of this coming to an extremely emotional head when her sister in law is killed by a previously thought to be inactive bomb shell that had crashed on the beach after an air raid; and the explosion causes her to lose her right hand. This is where the characterization that the first part created comes into play because we see someone who we've spent the better part of 40 to 45 minutes getting to know and are for suffer at the hands of something preventable, with the intended purpose of wanting to create anger in the viewer particularly towards the situation and or the circumstances that led to it and sympathy and empaty for her loss. The significance in this scenario being (though she is a fictional character) Suzu is a stand in for all the Japanese folk who had to live in a similar situation or even bombed for a war they may not have been 100% behind; who we in the U.S would usually only get to hear about and see as statistics or a really high percentage rate.

From Hiroshima by John Hersey seeks to elicit the same feeling but It chooses to do so through the medium of written text and through the lens of the peoples lives in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Phrases like "Dr. Fuji lay in dreadful pain throughout the night on the floor of his family's roofless house on the edge of the city" and "Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happend beyond the windows and doors." (pgs 112 in The Art of Fact) are meant to put a face to what would otherwise be just another casualty of war. Thus making the realities of the destruction it causes more real and unavoidable to the reader.
I read and that sought to critical analyze another academics use of Numbers to attempt to explain the rational for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I found pretty interesting. Kimura choose to state, "Heartbreaking stories have been recorded,2 for example, as illustrated by the testimony of a sixteen-year-old boy, Akira Onogi: We found this small girl crying and she asked us to help her mother. Just beside the girl, her mother was trapped by a fallen beam…we had no choice but to leave her. She was conscious and we deeply bowed to her with clasped hands to apologies to her and then we left.3 " (Kimura pg 21) as a preface before diving into the factors at play he felt that didn't justify the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan twice. The reason I found this to be particularly interesting is because this piece was written in 2013 and I believe Kimura feeling the need to preface this article like this really encapsulates and generation shift in looking at the event. One that is in many ways far removed from the more detached and numerical/mathematical way of looking at war and it's effect that were very prevent in the past on a societal scale. And I also believe that ultimately looking at war through the lens of it's affects and not the short term of whatever the dispute is over is a good thing, if not a little idealistic, because of how things like the aforementioned retold accounts (fictional or otherwise) help us better empathize with our fellow man, and ideally not want to see them in such catastrophic situations.

Sources:

In This Corner of the World (film). (2018, April 02). Retrieved April 09, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_This_Corner_of_the_World_(film)

Applying Taurek’s ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ to (un)justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A combination of historiography and applied ethics by Tets Kimura
http://www.flinders.edu.au/sabs/sis-files/history/FJHP/Volume%2029/Tets%20Kimura%20vol%2029%202013.pdf