The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were Japan's single greatest catastrophe of World War II. They loom so large in the popular imagination that the events of the previous decade and a half have paled -- or faded from view altogether. (Conveniently so, as Asians affected by those events have noted.)
In millions of words and images, eulogizing and otherwise, the bombings have been ritualized and abstracted in that same imagination, their horror endlessly referred to, but less and less clearly felt. Meanwhile, the victims have come to be seen more as park statuary, less as flawed human beings.
Filmmakers of the war generation have tried, in recent years, to reclaim that humanity, including Akira Kurosawa with "Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Rhapsody)" (1993) and Shohei Imamura with "Dr. Akagi (Kanzo Sensei)" (1998), but they have also found the memorializing urge hard to resist. Though recognizably -- even eccentrically -- human, their heroes glow with the nobility of wronged innocents.
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