Comparative Textual Analysis Essay

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War is always a collective historical event that survives in official government records and propaganda as well as mass media images and academic and popular writing. Of course, not all individual experiences can be captured by the collective memory, national consciousness and official interpretations of events, and in some cases governments and established elites attempt to censor and repress collective memory. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective denial, cover ups and repression of public memories occurred for decades after the war, while many veterans who returned to Japan in 1945 were deeply dissatisfied by the official version of collective memory and sought to alter the national consciousness. In Black Rain, the family patriarch would also like to repress and deny the events of the recent past, but his niece and lover were so obviously victimized and damaged by the war that in the end he is simply unable to do so. During the Cold War, ruling elites in Germany, Japan and the U.S. all attempted to repress and alter the collective memory of the Second World War since they were now in an alliance against the Soviet Union, but this effort was only partially successful because too many personal and individual memories of profoundly damaging and disconcerting events still existed, both among soldiers and civilians.

Black Rain (1989) was a nuclear film about a family of survivors of Hiroshima suffering from radiation sickness and all doomed to eventual death. Filmed in a documentary and cinema verite style, it resembled the real documentaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were suppressed for decades after the war by the U.S. And Japanese governments as too graphic and upsetting for general audiences. Indeed, color footage of the aftermath of the bombings and the survivors sat in the faults of the Pentagon, classified top secret, until a lawsuit forced its release.

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In Hollywood, the actual bombings were not part of collective historical memory, either, but sublimated into film noir and science fiction, "where disintegration, invasion, violence, and secrecy are frequently associated with nuclear fear" (Cavanaugh 251). Japanese cinema also dealt with the subject obliquely and indirectly, such as films like Godzilla and other creature pictures in the 1950s and 1960s or in the postwar, post-apocalyptic Rashoman in 1951. Yet by the late-1980s, with the relaxation in Cold War tensions and renewed arms control discussions, Black Rain reflected a new confidence and openness about the hidden past in Japan, and became one of "the few films in Japan dealing with nuclear reality" (Cavanaugh 252). This had not been possible in 1966 when Ibuse Maiusi published the original novel by the same name in 1966, when the Cold War was at its height and Japan was firmly in place as a U.S. satellite.

Most of the film is set in 1950, with only brief flashbacks to life in Hiroshima to August 6, 1945, just before the atomic bomb was dropped. Shermayura Shigematsu is attempting to arrange a marriage for his niece Yasuko, whose three previous engagements have failed because she is terminally ill with radiation sickness. He knows this but is in denial about it at the same time, and almost to the end of the film, when she is clearly near death, he still imagines that she will be happily married and live on after him. Unlike the novel, in the movie Yasuko meets Yuichi, a former soldier still suffering from combat psychosis, and using his sculpture and street theater as a form of therapy. In contrast, Yasuko conceals her illness out of shame, even though her hair is falling out and she has to cover her lesions. Symbolically, she is a spiritually pure virgin but.....

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