White Light/Black Rain

I went and saw White Light/Black Rain at the International Cinema, and it was certainly worth seeing, but it even more certainly was not the ideal movie for a date. I hate watching movies by myself, so I asked a nice girl from my linguistics class if she wanted to see it with me. Essentially, it was like taking a date to see Schindler’s List—you just don’t do that. You don’t want your date to have to cover her eyes with her hands out of some mixture of horror and disgust. In fact, you don’t want to have to likewise cover your own eyes, either. Fortunately, she had been to the International Cinema before and enjoyed going, so, while the movie wasn’t fun or enjoyable per se, she, as well as I, did in fact enjoy it, for lack of a better term. We determined that the planned consumption of ice cream was far more essential than we had before realized after watching a movie such as that one, but we also determined that, although it was a hard movie to watch, it was something that needed to be watched.

That is why the movie was so good. It did not make us smile or laugh, nor did it keep us on the edge of our seats or fill us with suspense. It instead opened our eyes and allowed us to better understand a piece of the past that has resulted in ongoing problems and is relevant to the events of our future.

I used to think it would be cool to write a story based in a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by nuclear war and the resulting civilizations and empires that would rise out of the ashes thereof. The world would have been devastated, and life would have been hard, in this book, but, after watching that movie, to consider so lightly such a topic—to utilize and warp it thus—now almost makes me sick. I saw how those two bombs absolutely and completely levelled those cities filled with people. I saw the scars and the burns and the disfigurements of its victims—the ones who lived. I saw the hurt in their eyes as the survivors explained how they had lost parents and siblings, friends and classmates. My imagined world did not contain a fraction of that, nor could it.

What I claim to have seen is an exaggeration, though. I saw only a sliver of the full pain and destruction in the eyes and stories of a handful of individuals. Yet it was still enough to make me realize more fully, in a jarring sort of way, how terrible the consequences of that event was. I had always know that many of the wounds were awful, but I did not and could not understand how awful until I saw them myself.

Beyond the severity and gravity of the injuries that I had thought I understood, the movie made clear several things I had never before realized.

The first is that the survivors of the atomic bombs are shunned and discriminated against. I had thought that they would be honored and revered as heroes. That is not the case. Though certainly not all view them as such, many view them simply as dead weight. They are ostracized and seen only for their cost on society; it is hard for them to get jobs, as the insurance cost of caring for them is immense. To learn this was almost as shocking, if not more so, than seeing those recent and raw wounds of the survivors. I would hope that, in a similar situation, should one ever arise, we would be  caring and respectful towards those who have suffered so much.

The second gives me a fascinating insight into Japan culture and thinking.  Many of the Japanese contemporaries of the bombings, including many who suffered as a result of it, were and are not necessarily angry at the U.S. for having dropped the bombs in the first place.  Many of them felt that since Japan had initiated the war with the U.S., it was their fault that they were bombed. As the first aggressors, many believed they should shoulder the responsibility and blame of the result of the aggression. In a way this is logical, but, at the same time, I find it hard to think that Americans would be able, in the face of such violent and traumatic destruction, to take responsibility for any of their own actions that lead to such a result. We might point fingers and blame other portions of our society and country, if not simply resorting to outsiders and enemies, but I don’t think we could ever, as a society, blame ourselves or even assume adequate responsibility. 

Though it was a hard movie to watch, White Light/Black Rain as one of the best—i.e., most eye-opening, informative, moving—movies I have ever seen, and I would wholly recommend it to others, provided they know to brace themselves before sitting down to watch it.