Hiroshima (1953)

In Hiroshima, seven years after the war, a teacher, Mr. Kitagawa, and his students listen in class to a radio documentary depicting the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of the Enola Gay’s pilot. Michiko Oba, a female student, cries out for the broadcast to be stopped, then collapses with a nosebleed caused by leukemia. Kitagawa, who came to Hiroshima after the war, asks, “Is anyone here an atomic-bomb survivor?” A third of the class raises their hands; they are suffering from leukemia, known as “atomic-bomb disease.” Kitagawa notices the students passing around a book collecting letters written by young people in East and West Germany. Later, at Michiko’s bedside, he finds students reading a book claiming that Japanese people had been used as “guinea pigs” in nuclear-bomb tests because they were a nonwhite race. It is explained that one of the students, Yukio Endo, has stopped coming to school and is working at a pachinko parlor and a cabaret. To the strains of “Gunkan March,” the film moves into Michiko Oba’s memories, depicting Hiroshima before and after the atomic bombing in 1945. Mine Oba spends a night in an air-raid shelter with her children, Machiko, Michiko, and Akio. As Mr. Yonehara looks up at the sky with a female student, the atomic bomb explodes, transforming the city into a hellish landscape. Mine discovers that Akio is dead. Hideo Endo is unable to rescue his wife, Yoshiko, who is trapped beneath the rubble, and she dies in the fire. Mr. Senda tries to care for students trapped under debris, but their desperate situation remains unresolved. Mr. Yonehara collapses from exhaustion and drowns in a river. At a shelter, Mine Oba dies in front of her daughter, Michiko. Searching for his son Ichiro, Hideo Endo finds a body and carries it away. At a meeting of military officers in Hiroshima, they conclude that rumors about the atomic bomb must be rigorously suppressed and morale kept high. At a separate meeting with scientists, the officers acknowledge the bomb’s existence but refuse to consider any negotiations, deciding instead to fight a decisive battle on the mainland. Yukio Endo and his younger sister Yoko return to Hiroshima from their evacuation destination and find their home destroyed. The war ends following the Potsdam Declaration. At the hospital, patients are told that radiation prevents grass from growing, which makes them anxious. But they rejoice when a radish they planted in the garden sprouts. Their neighbor, Hide Miyoshi, tells them that their mother, Yoshiko Endo, and brother, Ichiro, have died, and takes them to see their father, Hideo, in the hospital. He is already unable to speak. Terrified, Yukio’s sister Yoko runs away and later disappears. Yukio joins a group of war orphans begging American soldiers for food. Seven years later, Yukio leaves the juvenile reformatory and is taken in by his uncle. To earn his living expenses, he starts working at the same factory as his uncle. Meanwhile, Michiko Oba dies of leukemia. Yukio encounters a group of war orphans trying to sell tourists souvenirs scorched in the bombing and tells them where to find souvenirs they can sell to foreign soldiers. He takes the children to dig up the remains of atomic-bomb victims buried in an air-raid shelter, and is arrested as a result. Pressed by Mr. Kitagawa, Yukio admits that he quit the factory because, after it switched to manufacturing artillery shells, he feared that if war broke out again he would be sent to the front and another atomic attack would follow. In the end, tens of thousands of Hiroshima citizens who wish for peace gather at the Atomic Bomb Dome to pray for peace.