Hist 131 Response Paper #4

Rhapsody in August

Due April 5, 3-4 pages

Earlier in this course, we considered in some detail the decision to drop the first bomb on Hiroshima and how justified or unjustified it may have been.

Some feel that if you can magage to justify the first bomb it is much more difficult to justify the dropping of the second one on Nagasaki. Akira Kurosawa's elegiac film on families and Nagasaki is, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto suggests "about the possibility of talking about and remembering as much as the fact of the Americans' atomic destruction of Nagasaki." It does not include footage of all the destruction, but really focuses on how generations within a Japanese family reflect upon and talk about the experience. What do you think?

When thinking about history and the past, it is important that historians reflect upon how that past reconstructed in writings, films, and discourse. What do you think Kurosawa feels about how Japan has processed the experience of the atomic bombings? How does his film contribute to the discourse?

So, part of our task here is to consider what critics have said about this film and provide our own thoughts on how it operates as a discourse in the postwar years relating to questions of collective memory and how historical lessons are understood and transmitted.

 

 

 

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