The rejection of Isamu Noguchi's Hiroshima cenotaph: a Japanese American artist in occupied Japan

Though the proposed monument was striking for the strong unity of the design, a broad range of allusions were absorbed into its form. Noguchi had submitted an unsuccessful proposal to a competition for the Jefferson Memorial Park in St. Louis, and the famous arch of Eero Saarinen's winning proposal is a conspicuous precedent for his Hiroshima arch.(5) But while Saarinen's metal arch seems to fly through the air, Noguchi configured the modern engineering aesthetic of parabolic form to a weighty semisubterranean granite structure. He imagined the thrust of this bulky hull toward the sky in tension with the "ominous weight" of the "mass of black granite" giving the impression of a great "concentration of energies."(6) Alignment with the Nuclear Dome would have ensured that it would call to mind the destructive potential of nuclear science. But the same monument that would have addressed the horror of nuclear death would also have provided an allegory of hope and regeneration. The sanctum sanctorum enshrining the names of the dead was to be "a cave beneath the earth (to which we all return), it was to be the place of solace to the bereaved--suggestive still further of the womb of generations who would in time replace the dead."(7) Rebirth was to be figured by placing the dead in a womb.

If the chamber below was to signify a womb, the massive legs of the arch that enclosed this space would be maternal thighs. This implication is made explicit by a group of small figurines that Noguchi constructed the following year. He fashioned short coils of clay into loops or miniature arches. Some were titled Mother Goddess; a single loop of clay served as both the torso and legs while the head, breasts, arms, and vagina were indicated by tiny bits of appended clay. These impish caricatures of such prehistoric fertility deities as the Jomon figurines found in Japan expose the more solemn manifestation of the mother goddess theme in the Hiroshima arch. Continuing his experimentation with the clay loop, Noguchi metamorphosed the arch of the goddess into various permutations of beads--or the beads may have come first--some of which seem to wiggle against one another like primitive animals in intercourse. This investigation into the beginning of life associates Noguchi's project with such Surrealist models as imagery in Wassily Kandinsky's paintings of the 1930s, which resembles microscopic organisms. Yet here, as is often the case with Noguchi, we find his modernist theme overlaid with a parallel dredged from the Japanese past. His beads tend to have curled tails like tadpoles, and this feature suggests comparison to magatama, comma-shaped fertility beads from prehistoric Japan. The sequence of clay studies of 1952 demonstrates rather plainly the idea of a metamorphosis from the bead to the arched thighs of the mother goddess. Thus, the magatama may well have been a kind of germ cell from which the ponderous arch developed in Noguchi's hands.

Noguchi himself claimed that the symbolism of his cenotaph design derived from haniwa, the pottery models from prehistoric Japanese tombs.(8) The haniwa type, which comes closest to the form of Noguchi's Hiroshima design, has a roof contour roughly paralleling that of Noguchi's parabolic arch. But more interesting than this vague formal resemblance is a certain poetic link between haniwa and Noguchi's project. Haniwa were representations of whatever the deceased elite might find useful in the afterlife--warriors, shamanesses, horses, shields, as well as architectural models. They were objects of this world transmuted into a metaphysical state of utility for the next; thus, the ancient Japanese allegorical architecture of immortality is invoked as a way to reconstrue the dead of Hiroshima into a symbol of hope. When Noguchi startled some reporters in 1951 with the comment "Hiroshima is probably the most modern city in the world," he implied that destruction had made way for a tabula rasa, clearing the blinders of convention to enable a bold modernity founded on primitive universals.(9)