Black Rain over Hiroshima: The Politics of Atomic Bomb

Literature
There are words that speak of a ruined Hiroshima.
And there are words that a ruined Hiroshima makes us speak.
Takenishi Hiroko, Words that Hiroshima Makes Us Speak
135 days after
Roosevelt's death
analysis and justification
were detonated over
Hiroshima.
Brown Miller, Sweet Blossoms Snow

1. Introduction
The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and later on Nagasaki) marks a
dramatic turning point in human history that is on the one hand linked to the conception
of the end of the world as we used to know it and at the same time to the beginning of
a new, nuclear age. The atrocity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed humankind that
nuclear extinction is not as fantastic of an idea anymore. Indeed, in the postmodern
condition [n]uclear annihilation, much on the order of an earthquake, is a calamity we
intellectually regard as possible but emotionally refuse to believe in (Treat 2).
Correspondingly, the A-bomb is often considered to be the final theme of literature
'final' because it is a theme beyond which there are none, if only because there will
be no more readers (Treat 2). At the same time, it was suggested within Japanese
academia that 1945 be declared Year One of the Atomic Age (Treat 15), which
further stresses the radical and permanent disruption of civilization after Hiroshima.
As Treat argues, ever since the nuclear destruction of the two cities in 1945,
some of us have the memoryand the rest of us, our imagination of that memory
of how the world may end (1). Although the atomic bomb has so far only hit the East,
the universality of the topic is irrefutable: it is the power of imagination, the contradictory

state of 'remember[ing] the future (Treat 1) that makes an engagement with the
atomic bomb all the more relevant in contemporary literature. However, due to the fact
that nuclear literature is greatly historicized and generally led by prominent writers
with a social and political agenda, often questions concerning the literariness of such
texts are raised. Political intentions of writers are either cast off as unnecessary or
partial propaganda or criticized as having no aesthetic value. That being the case,
political commitment in such writing is often regarded as working against and the
expense of its literary and stylistic value.
In this paper I will firstly analyze the theoretical approaches of Sartre and Adorno
concerning the definition, role and functions of literature by comparing Sartre's concept
of committed writing to Adorno's emphasis on autonomous art, and present points
of compromise as well as of critique. I will then continue by applying these general
theoretical approaches to the atomic bomb literature of Japan, showing how the latter
emerged as a strong new movement in post-war Japan in spite of the hitherto
dominating Japanese understanding of literature as a pure and rather apolitical art
form. And lastly, I will explore one of the most prominent examples of Japanese atomic
bomb literature, namely Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain (1966), and hence illustrate how his
work a work that remains both critically acclaimed and commercially successful
manages to tie together important issues of ethical and political relevance while at the
same time retaining its literary and artistic value.

2. What is Literature? Between Ethical Writing and Political Pretense

Sartre's highly theoretical essay What is Literature? (1947), which engages with the
difficult relationship between writing and political commitment, and Adorno's by now
notorious albeit often decontextualized dictum To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric (1949, Flynn 31), both point to a general mood of disillusionment among
Western intellectuals and to a break with literary traditions in the aftermath of the World
War II. Thus, according to Sartre, [t]he 'engaged' writer knows that words are action.
He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to
change. He has given up the impossible dream of giving an impartial picture of Society
and the human condition (23). While Adorno rejects Sartre's pretense of committed
art for the reason that it ends up being neither aesthetic nor politically effective (Ungar
17), according to Adorno, officially committed works look like pantomime next to
Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays (qtd. in Ungar 17) at the same time he admits that
[t]his is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and
nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead (ibid.). The newly
discovered urgency of writers and thinkers to critically engage with social and political
issues hints at the changing role of literature and to the postwar artists' rejection of the
modernist l'art pour l'art creed.
Incidentally, the postwar debate around the question to what extent literature is
and to what extent it should be independent from politics can be also tied to some of
the main concerns of post-Marxist literary criticism. Raymond Williams, for instance,
seems to draw on Sartre's and Adorno's respective stances as he criticizes the
naivety of the general concept of literature. Thus, he argues, the representation of
literature as full, central, immediate human experience, which stands in direct
contrast to the essentially abstract concepts of 'society', 'politics' or 'ideology', has led
to the fact that the concept of 'literature' [became] actively ideological (Williams 1568).

Similarly, in his eponymously titled essay, Fredric Jameson stresses the signi ficance
of the political unconscious as he describes the close interrelationship between
literature and ideology:
[I]deology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the
aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to
be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary
or formal 'solution' to unresolvable social contradictions. (Jameson 1944)
Within the same context, Jameson's appeal to the reader to always historicize! (1937)
is an attempt to reveal the illusion or appearance of isolation or autonomy (1948),
which the printed text always pretends to stand for, and it is an attempt to reaffirm the
value of the act of interpretation itself.
Returning

to Adorno's famous declaration of post-Holocaust poetry as

barbaric, it is important to note that Adorno's statement is not a rejection of poetics

as such but instead it is a refusal to accept its hitherto practiced form and content as a
result of the disruptive force of the Holocaust disaster. Furthermore, Adorno raises
important questions concerning the common dichotomy between culture and
barbarism:
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more
paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme
consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism
finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric...Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this
challenge as long as it confines itself to self satisfied contemplation. (Adorno, 34)
Adorno here accentuates several important themes: Firstly, in line with his
aforementioned critique of Sartre's political pretense, he insists on the idea that
critical intelligence, which naturally includes all artistic expression, is neither a sufficient

nor a suitable way to challenge society as long as it is limited to self satisfied

contemplation. Further, his critique of total society highlights the binary antithesis
between society and the individual, for with the increasing development of society, the
human mind is increasingly reified, i.e. objectified. Lastly, from the context stated
above it is possible to infer that Adorno does not wish to negate representation; on
the contrary, he argues that the aesthetics of post-Holocaust poetry are of a particular
'barbaric' character (Rowland 58). Thus, Adorno's focus on the reification of the
human mind and his rejection of post-Auschwitz methods, which are used to criticize
society, lead us to the following conclusion:
Adorno is attempting to describe a new form of poetry which is stylistically and
thematically awkward. The language is necessarily unstable because it engages with
the embarrassing struggle which often ends in failure to forge a language adequate
to represent the horror of Holocaust. (Rowland 58)
A further aspect to dwell on here is the notion of 'culture' itself, with which Adorno also
seems to be preoccupied. In this sense, Rowland draws on Raymond Williams'
diachronic study of the development of the term; a study that demonstrated that by
1900, 'culture' was inextricably linked with new concepts originating from the inception
of modernity, such as 'industry', 'art' and 'democracy'. Out of these arises the modern
meanings of the term: spiritual development, a way of life for a group of people, and
intellectual products (Rowland 59). Thus, 'culture' can be located firmly in the realms
of civilization and at the same time it stands in opposition to barbarism, for [b]arbarism
is simply that which culture is not (Rowland 59).
It is important to note this Manichean opposition between culture and barbarism
as it denotes that culture and modernity traditionally stand for the idea of progress.
However, this is not only a very simplistic conception of culture, but it was also greatly
contested with the rise of postmodern studies. Only after the war, when the full impact

of the catastrophic disasters of the Holocaust and of the atomic bombings became
evident, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were added to the litany of sites illustrating
modern man's savage treatment of himself (Treat 9). In fact, as Kahler points out, the
transformation of modern violence presents us with the dissolution of coherence and
structure, a dissolution that shows that the problem is not inhumanity which has exited
all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but ahumanity, a
phenomenon of rather recent recent (Kahler xiv). As a result, Hiroshima and
Auschwitz both came to represent the mechanized dehumanization of civilization
(Treat 10). What is implied here is the fact that culture, modernity and/or progress are
not innately good per se. On the contrary, they can even accommodate atrocity. As
we have been told in the context of the Holocaust, reading Goethe in the morning did
not preclude barbarity in the afternoon (Treat 14). Similarly, modern rationality and
technological progress confronted mankind with a terror we all still face: the terror of
the modern state now armed with fantastic power, with awesome efficiency and
rational calculation (Treat 14).
The ahumanity Kahler refers to can be further seen as a continuation of
Adorno's theory of reification. In the case of Japan, it was Hiroshima which
permanently changed the relationship between science, ethics and literature.
Accordingly, Treat points out: Japan, so committed since the mid-nineteenth century
to an Enlightenment faith in science and its promised progress, found itself betrayed
by the use of nuclear weapons in a way that Western thinkers, already made cynical
by one world war, may not have been (4). It is within this framework that Sartre's
influence on postwar Japanese and atomic bomb literature becomes particularly selfevident. Thus, existentialism may have soon depleted in other parts of the world; in
Japan, however, many major writers still explicitly cited the precepts of French
existentialism as part of their own personal philosophical and political orientations

(Treat 429). Thus, in the preface to an anthology of atomic bomb short fiction,
Kenzaburo Oe, one of the main architects of the theory of post-Hiroshima literature,
defines the role of literature in the following way:
I have come to realize anew that the short stories included herein are not merely literary
expressions, composed by looking back at the past, of what happened at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. They are also highly significant vehicles for thinking about
the contemporary world over which hangs the awesome threat of vastly expanded nuclear
arsenals. They are, that is, a means for stirring our imaginative powers to consider the
fundamental conditions of human existence; they are relevant to the present and to our
movement toward all tomorrows (Oe 15-16).