Hibakusha Cinema : Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film

Hibakusha is a Japanese subgenre of cinema which dealt with the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This text provides an historical approach to this genre within its social context. The essays explore the metatextuality of Hiroshima and Nagaski via film and television readings.

First Published in 1996. This collection of works is in response to American film scholar and long-term resident of Japan, Donald Richie, words:’ The Japanese failure to come to terms with Hiroshima is one which is shared by everybody in the world today,’ from over thirty years ago, when responding to the Japanese subgenre of cinema which had dealt with the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three decades on, the question lingers, does this appraisal remain valid? Hibakusha Cinema is an attempt - perhaps momentarily - to reorient critical focus upon a rarely discussed, yet important feature of Japanese cinema. The essays collected here represent a mix of Japanese and western (pan-Pacific) scholarship harnessing multidisciplinary methodologies, ranging from close textual analysis, archival and historical argument, anthropological assessment, literary and film comparative analyses to psychological and ideological hermeneutics.