Hiroshima, mon amour: a new film coincides with the rebirth of the nuclear age

Cross Currents, Spring, 2004 by Carey Monserrate

[Original Child Bomb was made with the endorsement and fiscal management of the Thomas Merton Foundation in Louisville, Kentucky; additional support was provided by the Becker Family Foundation].

A note on the film's title: "original child bomb" is a coinage derived from the Japanese term for the atom bomb, genshi badukan. Genshi, which literally means "atom," consists of root characters in Japanese which, if rendered individually, could be taken to mean "original" and "child." Merton's poem opens with the claim (reiterated at the beginning of the film) that the Japanese called the weapon dropped on Hiroshima "original child bomb" because it was the first of its kind the world had ever seen. This rather arresting interpretation turns out to be an instance of extravagant poetic license. A native Japanese speaker would regard the translation of genshi into "original child" as an unnatural semantic contortion, and it is unlikely that any Japanese person ever embraced this construal--one which appears to have originated with John Hersey, who rendered genshi badukan thus in Hiroshima.

Nevertheless, "original child" serves as an effective conceit, and in Schonegevel's skilled hands, provides one of the film's central motifs: the strange, unmistakable, morally exigent relationship between children and the dawn of the nuclear age. From the very beginning, themes of birth, childhood, parentage, and domestic tranquility surrounded the bomb's development. President Truman's coded message relaying the news of the first successful atomic test to Winston Churchill in July of 1945 read, "Babies satisfactorily born." The flight crew assigned to carry out the run over Hiroshima gave the weapon that would ultimately kill 130,000 people the soubriquet "Little Boy" (perhaps because it was a lesser device of simpler design than "Fat Man," the bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later). The colonel in command of the fateful B-29 bomber that would deploy "Little Boy" quaintly christened his aircraft the Enola Gay after his mother back home in Iowa.

Schonegevel takes full advantage of this peculiar contrast, selectively disclosing these and other details in successive visual and narrative iterations to highlight the merciless, omni-directional destructive intensity of nuclear warfare--and its cruelly efficient, deadly assault on human innocence. A voice-over of Merton's incantatory opening lines ("In the year 1945 an Original Child was born....") accompanies period footage of everyday life in Japan as it appeared in 1945--children at play, men boarding the trains to work. Shots of army technicians preparing "Little Boy" for the strike and footage of the actual bombing runs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both drawn from US military archives, are followed by an animated portrayal of the impact on the ground (executed in anime, the at once sophisticated and juvenile cartoon style popular both in Japan and among cult aficionados here).

Images of children recur throughout Original Child Bomb: period footage of smiling Japanese children, taken from the McGovern Collection in Washington, DC, interspersed with filmed portraits of Hiroshima youth today; American schoolchildren in conversation; a child rehearsing her ABCs in terms related to nuclear warfare ("'A' is for atom; 'B' is for bomb; 'C' is for Cold War"). One sequence follows a contemporary Japanese boy dressed in American hip-hop attire and wearing head phones as he wanders through the streets of present-day Hiroshima and, in a proleptic interlude, steps into the past, meandering through the wreckage in the immediate aftermath of August 6th, 1945. (The spectral outline of a little girl trailing a white horse--the symbolic messenger of the gods in Shinto iconography--accompanies him).