One Big Gray Area: The Paradox of Traumatic Memory in Black Rain (1989)

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Notes

1. Japanese names in this article appear in Japanese order, with the family name first, given name second. All translations from Japanese sources are mine unless otherwise noted.

2. Chira, “Japan's New Screen Image: Economic Toughie,” New York Times, 17.

3. One American review of Imamura's film, after referring to Scott's film, closed with the definitive comparative statement: “to see both movies is to understand the difference between the pop and the profound” (Ryan, “A Family's Horror of Survival in Aftermath of Hiroshima,” Philadelphia Inquirer, O4). Other reviews comparing Scott's film unfavorably with Imamura's include Andrews, “Arts: Barbarism Beyond Blitzes and Battlefields—Cinema,” Financial Times (London); Denby, “Paradise Lost,” New York Magazine, 58–59; Denerstein, “Suffering Uncovered in Japanese Film,” Rocky Mountain News; and Goddard, “Douglas and Japan Lift Thriller,” Toronto Star.

4. For Kilbourn, cinema is the “dominant narrative form in the twenty-first century; hence the importance and urgency of achieving a greater understanding of memory's determination, in a very meaningful sense, by cinema” (Kilbourn, Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, 9).

5. Kaplan's broader point is that “Individuals and cultures… perform forgetting as a way of protecting themselves from the horrors of what one (or the culture) has done or what has been done to oneself or others in one's society” (Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, 74).

6. The Black Rain script dated November 1987, by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, is available at several online sources. My reference is The Daily Script website at www.dailyscript.com/scripts/black_rain.html (accessed February 5, 2015).

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid. In the late 1980s, at least two American-produced films shot extensively in Tokyo: Kuzui Enterprises' Tokyo Pop (Dir. Fran Rubel Kazui, 1988) and Troma Inc.’s The Toxic Avenger, Part II (Dir. Lloyd Kaufman, 1989). Both productions were able to shoot in Tokyo because they had minimal crews and the cooperation of local media companies. See “Japanese and Yank Indie Pics Due For Trans-Pacific Debuts,” Variety, and Kaufman, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, 234–235. The Black Rain production unit had demanded much larger territory and complete independence.

9. Smith and Laroi, “Rough Weather in Japan: Movie ‘Black Rain’ Runs Afoul of Nation's Customs,” in Los Angeles Times.

10. Phone interview with author, October 24, 2012.

11. Bolotin and Lewis, Black Rain. Undated revised script, p. 60. Viewed at the Margaret Herrick Library Core Collection, Los Angeles, CA.

12. Ibid., 131.

13. Labov, William. The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative, 27.

14. Ibid., 28.

15. A sampling of reviews, articles, and scholarly works in English that assume Black Rain's “black rain” refers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not Osaka, includes Chase, “In ‘Black Rain,’ East Meets West With a Bang! Bang!” in New York Times, 20; Dollar, “Slick ‘Rain’—Thriller Emphasizes Atmosphere Over Story,” in Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution; Craft, “‘Rain’ Soaked With Clichés,” in Pantagraph; Barber, “Pillars of Fire,” in Sydney Morning Herald,; Morley and Robins, “Techno-Orientalism,” in Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries, 159; Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, 116–117; and Robb, Ridley Scott, 78.

16. See Nishiwaki, “Genun wo Oboeru Yōna Miwakutekina Imeeji” [Fascinating Images that Feel Dizzying], in Kinema Junpō, 40–41; Ogawa, “Kinejun Nyū Ueevu: ‘Burakku Rein’ to ‘Kuroi Ame’ no Genzai to Kako” [Movie Times New Wave: ‘Black Rain’ and 'Kuroi Ame's Present and Past], in Kinema Junpō 1023 (December 1989): 128–129; and Kakii, Hariuddo no Nihonjin: Eiga ni Arawareta Nichi-Bei Bunka Masatsu [Hollywood's Japanese: American-Japanese Cultural Tensions in Film], 236. A review in Asahi Shinbun also suggests, without quoting the speech, that Sugai is talking about Osaka. See “Eiga Ni Miru Bei no Tainichikan: Tokkōtai Omowaseru Yakuza” [“The View of Japan of Americans Who Watch this Movie, Yakuza Reminiscent of Kamikaze”], Asahi Shinbun, evening edition, 9.

17. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, 7.

18. Kilbourn, Cinema, Memory, Modernity, 42.

19. Quigg, “Jap Producer Asks for U.S. Company to Film ‘Hiroshima’,” Los Angeles Examiner. Part of the reason for Nagata's appeal was the imposition of censorship guidelines in postwar occupied Japan that greatly restricted dramatizations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. For example, the film version of The Bells of Nagasaki (Ōba Hideo), based on the autobiography of radiologist Nagai Takashi, was released by Shōchiku studio in September 1950 after prolonged negotiations with the censorship arm of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, which allowed only a few brief shots of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki to establish the dropping of the bomb. See Hiroshi, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan, 53–57.

20. 1989 did see the release of Fat Man and Little Boy (Dir. Roland Joffé), a docudrama about the Manhattan Project.

21. Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, 359–366. For an account of American censorship of atomic bomb journalism, see Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan.

22. Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb. Shapiro's criterion for inclusion of titles is similar to that of Joyce A. Evans in her book Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb. Shapiro chose films where the bomb is “explicit” in its depiction; mere mentions of the bomb in the dialogue were not enough to warrant inclusion.

23. Sugimoto, “The Temporal/Spatial Logic of Japanese Nationalism: The Narrative Structure of Film and Memory,” in Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema, 96.

24. Grainge, “Introduction: Memory and popular film,” in Memory and Popular Film, 1–12.

25. Kilbourn and Ty, “Developments in Memory Studies and Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature and Film,” in The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, 3–12.

26. Huyssen, “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” in Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics, 81–82.

27. Early influential works of transnational cinema studies are Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, 15–26, and Kinder, Blood Cinema.

28. Olson, “The Globalization of Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Reader, 527–528. Through the 1980s and 1990s Hollywood cinema became the product of what Miller et al. describe as a “New International Division of Cultural Labor,” in Global Hollywood 2, 111–172. Goldsmith and O'Regan suggest using a “film-services framework,” and not a “studio” framework, for analyzing the film industry's transnational structure (“The Policy Environment of the Contemporary Film Studio,” in Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting).

29. See Provencher, “Bizarre Beauty: 1950s Runaway Production in Japan,” in The Velvet Light Trap, for an analysis of postwar Hollywood filmmaking practices in Japan.

30. In an article for Kinema Junpō, screenwriter Warren Lewis described the film as a “story of personal transition” (hitobito no suii no monogatari). See Kisaragi, “Nibei no Toppu Staa ga Kunda Akushon Taisaku” [Japan-American Top Star Produced an Action Superproduction], Kinema Junpō, 42–44.

31. Handbook of Production Information. Press kit for Black Rain, Margaret Herrick Library, 5, 7.

32. Yamaguchi, “Ridorii Sukotto: Stairisshuna Kantoku no Eizō Tetsugaku” [Ridley Scott: A Stylish Director's Image Philosophy], Kinema Junpō, 111.

33. E. Ann Kaplan and Ben Wang, “From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity,” in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, edited by Kaplan and Wang, 5–6. The terms “acting out” and “working through” are borrowed from historian Dominick LaCapra.

34. Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 2.

35. There is historical precedent for the counterfeit plot—the Nazis' “Operation Bernhardt,” which was a plan to destabilize the British economy with counterfeit pound notes. In a remarkable coincidence, shortly after Black Rain's release in the U.S., in November–December 1989, the CBS undercover police drama Wiseguy (1987–1990) ran a mini-arc of four episodes about an American plot to upend the Japanese economy with counterfeit yen.

36. Sparing Satō was a late decision on the part of the filmmakers, but they scripted and shot two contradictory versions. The undated revised script contains both versions: first, Nick impales Satō on a stake “which pierces through his back side to the front side. Sato is dead.” On the very next page Nick and Matsumoto “drag Sato into the Headquarters” (Bolotin and Lewis, undated revised script, pp. 143–144). According to assistant director Cellin Gluck, the “Headquarters” scene was shot very early in production, on location, well before the decision had been made to insert it into the final cut (in-person author interview, October 24, 2012). The “Satō is dead” scene was shot later, in California. Images of this scene are available for viewing on the DVD version of the film released in Japan. See Burakku Rein (Black Rain, 1989).

37. Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust, 15–16.

38. Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 36.

39. Sinha and McSweeney, “Introduction,” in Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, 2.

40. Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film, 1–2.

41. Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema, 1–3.