Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 27

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 8)
Nukes and Niigata I


Still from Casting Blossoms to the Sky. © Nagaoka Film Commission / PSC.

August 6, 2012, 8.15am. At this time, exactly 67 years after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the center of Hiroshima City, I was in a hotel room in Nagaoka City, Niigata, vacantly staring at a TV screen on which unfolded scenes from the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Ceremony.

What was I doing here? Thinking about this made me feel strange. By around this time I should already have returned to my home in Tokyo.

I had arrived in Nagaoka on the afternoon of August 3. That evening, as if guided by events in the movie Casting Blossoms to the Sky, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, which I had seen at the Yurakucho Subaru-za in a manner that seemed almost predestined, I had attended the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival with my wife and son at the invitation of Obayashi and Nagaoka City. Soon after our arrival there was a welcome ceremony at the Nagaoka Grand Hotel in front of the station. As dusk approached we took a hasty dinner before boarding a minibus for the journey to the roof of a building near the riverbed of the Shinano River, the venue for the fireworks display.

Naturally, the fireworks were almost sublimely wonderful, and so beautiful they were like something from another world. The sense of scale of fireworks displays in Tokyo and those in Nagaoka is completely different. My hometown of Chichibu is also famous for its fireworks display, held in conjunction with the Chichibu Night Festival, which is staged annually in December in the middle of winter, but even compared to this, there was something quite indescribable about the collapsing wall of light known as the Phoenix, which stretches for as far as 3km along the riverbed and was first created to spur on the restoration effort in the wake of the Chuetsu earthquake that struck the region in 2004. What’s more, in the middle of the display, a special set piece named after Obayashi’s movie was launched to commemorate the movie. This was a most unexpected fireworks feast that overturned the conventional wisdom of all the fireworks displays I had witnessed up until then.


The eponymous firework sequence at the 2012 Nagaoka Fireworks Festival set to commemorate the movie Casting Blossoms to the Sky. Courtesy the City of Nagaoka.

The fireworks display at Nagaoka has a special meaning beyond that of an event held in the cool of the evening in summer. August 1, 1945, 10.30pm. The air raid on Nagaoka launched by US Army Air Forces bombers lasted until after midnight, and left 80 percent of the urban area destroyed by fires started by the masses of incendiary bombs dropped on the city. As many as 1,470 people died. Nagaoka City recognized August 1 as a special day, and as early as the following year, 1946, began holding a war-damage reconstruction festival (the forerunner of today’s Nagaoka Festival). And since 1947, a fireworks festival has been held on August 2 and 3 to honor the memory of the victims.

In fact, it was on seeing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky that I learned all this. As indicated by the Japanese subtitle, Nagaoka hanabi monogatari (The tale of the Nagaoka fireworks), the historical background to this movie takes as its cue the origins of the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival, and forms multiple layers, including the recovery from the series of natural disasters from the Chuetsu earthquake to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami as well as Japan’s modern history during the period before, during, and after the Pacific War. At the same time, the movie unfolds as a “wonderland” in which dream and reality are indistinguishable, with a child who died during the Nagaoka air raid coming back from the dead and riding a unicycle and writing and performing in a play with the mysterious title, Mada senso ni wa maniau (There’s still time to stop the war). But the thing that struck me more than anything was the historical fact that in the lead up to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, practice drops with “mock atomic bombs” were conducted over Japan by the US.

These mock atomic bombs were modeled on the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Due to their shape and the fact they were painted orange, they were named “pumpkin bombs.” Although they contained no nuclear material, they weighed 4.5 tons and were roughly the same shape as the Fat Man atomic bomb, meaning they could be used in practice drops by pilots to confirm the ballistic and other characteristics of the Fat Man. A total of 49 pumpkin bombs were dropped on 30 cities throughout Japan, including Fukushima and Yamaguchi, between July 20 and August 14, the day before the cessation of hostilities, resulting in over 400 people killed and 1,200 injured according to current estimates (the targets included Tokyo’s Chuo Ward, where one person was killed and 62 injured). (Later, as a result of Japan’s surrender, the US Army Air Forces dropped the remaining mock atomic bombs over the ocean.)

It was a long time after the end of the war, however, that this historical fact became a matter of common knowledge among the Japanese people. It was first revealed in 1991 when the Kasugai no Senso wo Kiroku Suru Kai (The Kasugai society for documenting the war, Aichi prefecture) conducted their own investigation of US Armed Forces documents. On July 20, 1945, before the big air raid of August 1, one of these mock atomic bombs, or pumpkin bombs, was dropped on Nagaoka City and landed near an embankment by the riverside in Sakon. The result was a tragic incident in which an entire family of four who were doing farm work nearby were killed. A monument now stands on the spot where this mock atomic bomb landed and features in an important scene in the movie, but until 2004 when this monument was built the hole created by the mock atomic bomb remained intact.


Still from Casting Blossoms to the Sky. © Nagaoka Film Commission / PSC.

It was on August 4, the day after the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival, that I stood beside this monument (I later found out that the last scene in the movie was also set on August 4, being the day the protagonist, played by Yasuko Matsuyuki, leaves Nagaoka vowing to contribute to its recovery). As I mentioned at the beginning, this was not something I planned. To tell the truth, in the middle of the fireworks display the previous evening, my five-year-old son, who was viewing the fireworks with me, developed a high fever and began to show signs of distress. He was immediately taken to hospital in an ambulance, and ended up being admitted.

I rushed to the hospital and was surprised to find my son on an IV drip and his body covered in red marks resembling burns. We were told it was hives, but never before had I seen such a bad case. Eventually, we decided that my wife would stay with my son while I would return to our hotel for the time being. But I found it difficult to get to sleep. This was because the excitement of the fireworks display and the sight of my wife holding our son against the backdrop of the night sky lit up by the fireworks while we waited nervously for the ambulance to arrive overlapped in my mind with the scene in the movie where Ririko Motoki rushes around in confusion in the Kaki River with her young baby, Hana, on her back while sparks rain down on them. So anxious was I that it even crossed my mind that the spirit of a young child that died in the Nagaoka air raid had possessed my son by riding on one of the fireworks.

The next day I checked out of the hotel and drove back to the hospital to find that my son seemed to be on the road to recovery, which was a great relief for the time being. But as the cause of his condition was still unknown, it was decided to keep him in hospital a few more days until his symptoms subsided. My wife stayed at the hospital while I arranged to extend our stay in Nagaoka, and thereafter we took turns staying by his bedside.

And so it was that through an unexpected turn of fate in the form of my son becoming ill I stayed on in Nagaoka, and early the next day I took a taxi from the hospital and travelled alone to the monument marking the site where the mock atomic bomb landed. If Nagaoka wasn’t going to let me return home for the time being, I thought, then I would use the time to see with my own eyes the places that appeared in that movie.


Still from Casting Blossoms to the Sky. © Nagaoka Film Commission / PSC.

At the start of the movie, there’s a scene in which Yasuko Matsuyuki stops her taxi on the embankment and the taxi driver gets out and tells her about the mock atomic bomb. When I realized it, I, too, was in front of the same monument deep in conversation with my driver who had gotten out of his taxi. When I looked up I saw a midsummer blue sky stretching as far as the eye could see, and for a moment it was almost as if I had strayed into a movie myself. Before I knew it, I had become a traveler in what Nobuhiko Obayashi referred to as “Nagaoka wonderland.” (To be continued)

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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