Hiroshima Maiden (TV 1988) Movie

*Here is the link to the movie "Hiroshima Maiden" (TV 1988)

            After reading Peter Schwenger and John Treat’s essays “America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America”, I became very interested in the Hiroshima Maidens Schwenger mentioned in the essay. I was searching for some footage of the maidens Schwenger references when I came across this 1988 movie and took the time to watch it not knowing if it was really relevant for the purpose of this blog post or not. I was skeptical at first, but as I watched this film, set in the summer of 1955 (the same time the essay references the women coming to America), I began to draw similarities between the readings and the film that should be noted and discussed further. Before I begin delving deeper into comparing the two works, I will give some of the background summary of Hiroshima Maiden.

            The story is narrated by a young American boy named Johnny who has a gang of friends who are curious about what happened during the war and about the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It is decided by Johnny’s dad, a veteran of the war who visited and witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima after the bomb, to be a surrogate family for a young Japanese girl who is coming to America to get reconstructive surgery on her scars. When Miyeko arrives, all of Johnny’s friends think she is a “Jap spy” and try to convince Johnny to take pictures of her, take her letters and see if she glows in the dark in order to turn her into the FBI. Johnny at first folds under the peer pressure and is callous towards Miyeko in the beginning because he is afraid of “catching her radiation”, and being ostracized for fraternizing with the “enemy”. I don’t want to give much of the movie away if you decide to watch it but the most haunting aspects of the film, at least for me, was the way the children reacted to Miyeko as well as how Mr. Latimer, one of Johnny’s friend’s dad, reacts to her staying in the neighborhood.

            Jim Bennett, Johnny’s father, clearly suffers from a guilty consciousness due to his involvement in Hiroshima because he not only allowed Miyeko to stay in his house, but he also forces Johnny to befriend her as a means to pacify his own remorseful feelings. In Schwenger and Treat’s essay, Schwenger mentions how fear is easily transformed into guilt. “What had happened to Hiroshima could happen to us. But this formulation, and this fear, leads back to the question of what happened at Hiroshima; it may thus lead back to anther powerful emotion, that of guilt…A full year elapsed before the ‘whoopee spirit’ changed to weeping with the publication of Hersey’s Hiroshima; but the mourning was accompanied with shame when recalling the first reactions to the bombing. Mourning and memory are here at odds with one another; shame undercuts the very foundations of America’s idea of itself; the trauma remains unresolved”(Schwenger 250). It is through this guilty lens that Johnny begins to realize that Miyeko is not a spy at all but a victim and sticks up for her even though it costs him his spot in the secret gang of boys who are convinced that Miyeko is a spy.

            The most disturbing aspect of the film was the fact that Johnny’s gang was so out rightly racist towards Miyeko and exemplified views that were most likely prevalent throughout many suburban nuclear family neighborhoods pre/post World War II. Just as in “America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America”, Hiroshima Maiden also depicts the American feeling of guilt. Like we discussed in class, people often times feel guilty for something/some crime they committed and try to make it up to whoever they committed the crime against and that is exactly what Jim Bennett is attempting to do. Mr. Bennett is trying to clear his conscious by having Miyeko stay with them. America has a long history of destroying, defeating, and conquering people and then lifting them from the ashes because it is the American humanitarian thing to do. We cannot be branded as the nation that killed over 100,000 people on August 6, 1945, we must instead be remembered as the nation that brought twenty-five women over to have reconstructive surgery in order to go on living our lives and perpetuating our image as a philanthropic nation.