Atomic Dome, Hiroshima

The Atomic Dome, the only structure in downtown Hiroshima still standing after the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.

I visited it a number of years ago on the day coincidentally it was declared a World Heritage Site by the UN. I was accosted by a Japanese tv news crew wanting a reaction, and the English-speaking reporter asked me if I was American. I said I was Australian. Oh, sorry, she responded with some disappointment. We fought you people, too, I said, trying to be helpful.

After Zhang Yimou’s Hero, one of my least favourite films is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. It is the story of the Bomb fed through a narcissistic adolescent militaristic fantasy. Akira ends with a symbolic Bomb and sets up a sci-fi allegory which folds a future over the past and the present. Structured around this moment, it rewrites Japan’s military imperial history through a narrative and characterizations which argue that Japan was destroyed not by military excess in WWII but by the corruption and weakness of bureaucrats and capitalists. By inference, it loops over the present to critique Japan’s contemporary circumstances as being similarly emasculated by consumptive excess, crime and bureaucratic corruption. In the ending of Akira is the horrifying conclusion that what Japan needs now is another Bomb, to cleanse it of its weakness and allow some imaginary Bushido essence to prevail. In its way, Akira is as repulsive an apologia for Japan’s form of fascism as Hero is for Communist authoritarianism.