Akira and the traumatic spectre of nuclear war | Little White Lies

Long Read

Aki­ra and the trau­mat­ic spec­tre of nuclear war

04 Aug 2016

Words by Joe Marczynski

Surreal landscape with jagged, rocky formations in the foreground against a dark, cloudy sky with a bright, spherical object overhead.
Surreal landscape with jagged, rocky formations in the foreground against a dark, cloudy sky with a bright, spherical object overhead.
Kat­suhi­ro Ôtomo’s icon­ic ani­mé mir­rors the atroc­i­ties wit­nessed by Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki 70 years ago.

On 6 August, 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japan­ese city of Hiroshi­ma, instant­ly wip­ing out 40,000 human lives. Three days lat­er, a sec­ond bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasa­ki, killing hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple over the ensu­ing years.

In the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion that fol­lowed Japan’s sur­ren­der, all neg­a­tive dis­cus­sion of the bomb­ings was pro­hib­it­ed. Instead crit­i­cism of the attacks found oth­er cul­tur­al out­lets, notably in Japan­ese art, lit­er­a­ture and cin­e­ma, in par­tic­u­lar the Godzil­la (or Goji­ra) films. These icon­ic mon­ster movies are steeped in skep­ti­cism towards sci­ence, crit­i­cism of the mil­i­tary and dis­trust of the gov­ern­ment – the exact same motifs found in Kat­suhi­ro Ôtomo’s clas­sic ani­mé, Aki­ra.

In the years lead­ing up to World War Two, the total­i­tar­i­an Shōwa régime sought to crush oppo­si­tion with exe­cu­tions and polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tions across the Japan. Con­trol was seized from polit­i­cal par­ties and dis­trib­uted among admi­rals and mil­i­tary lead­ers, intro­duc­ing a peri­od of hyper nation­al­ism. This polit­i­cal cli­mate ulti­mate­ly paved the way for Japan’s involve­ment in the War.

Mil­i­tary fail­ures and gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion are rife in Aki­ra. Before the rise of Tet­suo, Neo Tokyo is a fas­cist state – pro­test­ers are vio­lent­ly sup­pressed by the mil­i­taris­tic police force in the open­ing scenes. This inep­ti­tude of Colonel Shikishima’s mil­i­tary aggra­vates the tumul­tuous sit­u­a­tion dur­ing Tetsuo’s rise to pow­er, with a mil­i­tary coup ulti­mate­ly hand­ing con­trol of the cap­i­tal to Tetsuo’s gang of reli­gious zealots.

In the after­math of the bomb­ings, hun­dreds of Japan­ese orphans were relo­cat­ed to Chi­na – essen­tial­ly aban­doned by the incom­pe­tent Japan­ese gov­ern­ment. The con­cept of a lost’ gen­er­a­tion is appar­ent in the hid­den world of Takashi, Masaru and Kiyoko – a child­hood grotesque­ly destroyed by the exper­i­men­ta­tion of the gov­ern­ment. The chil­dren of the Aki­ra’ pro­gram are pre­ma­ture­ly aged in appear­ance – forced to grow up much faster than their peers due to the poli­cies of a self-inter­est­ed and rep­re­hen­si­ble government.

The atom­ic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshi­ma was nick­named Lit­tle Boy’ – a stun­ning par­al­lel to the Aki­ra char­ac­ter; a mute lit­tle boy and even­tu­al har­bin­ger of the destruc­tion of Neo Tokyo. Just as Dr Man­hat­tan typ­i­fies the oth­er­world­ly sci­ence behind nuclear tech­nol­o­gy in Watch­men, so Aki­ra appears to rep­re­sent the absolute pow­er of the atom.

Anoth­er inter­pre­ta­tion is that the con­cept (rather than char­ac­ter) of Aki­ra’ rep­re­sents the atom itself. Kei explains in a con­ver­sa­tion with Kane­da that – like atoms – Aki­ra is present in all things. In this scene Kei makes direct ref­er­ence to nuclear war, argu­ing that while amoe­bas con­tain the pow­er of Aki­ra, Amoe­bas don’t make motor­cy­cles and atom­ic bombs!” Her expla­na­tion as to the ori­gins of Aki­ra’ draw sim­i­lar­i­ties to the sci­ence of the Man­hat­tan project: before there were these men that tried to har­ness such ener­gy… they failed and the destruc­tion of Tokyo was inevitable.”

Fol­low­ing his expo­sure to Aki­ra’, Tet­suo begins to embody many of the phys­i­cal and men­tal traits that afflict­ed radi­a­tion suf­fer­ers. The tablets he chokes down in a vain attempt to con­trol the rapid­ly evolv­ing pow­er inside him are rem­i­nis­cent of the use­less vit­a­min tablets admin­is­tered to sur­vivors in the wake of the Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki bomb­ings. This treat­ment was pow­er­less to pre­vent the fatal sec­ondary dis­eases and radi­a­tion that killed hun­dreds of thou­sands of sur­vivors in the fol­low­ing years.

As Tetsuo’s pow­er grows, his body explodes with extreme, hideous muta­tions – an exag­ger­at­ed ver­sion of the thick, incur­able keloids that devel­oped on many sur­vivors of the nuclear blasts. These rub­bery, tumour-like lesions grew uncon­trol­lably across the skin, becom­ing instant sig­ni­fiers of the hibakusha, a stig­ma­tised group who were per­ceived to have been cor­rupt­ed by radi­a­tion. Fear and sus­pi­cion of the hibakusha led the suf­fer­ers of these muta­tions to be ostracised from the rest of Japan­ese soci­ety. This link between iso­la­tion and muta­tion is mir­rored in Tetsuo’s descent into mad­ness; his phys­i­cal dis­fig­ure­ments wors­en as his rela­tion­ship with Kane­da and Kei breaks down, and the uncon­trol­lable pow­er with­in him takes hold.

Tetsuo’s igno­rance of the destruc­tive pow­er he wields could be viewed as an alle­go­ry of the Man­hat­tan Project as a whole. When they signed up, many of the sci­en­tists of the project were unaware that they were work­ing towards the cre­ation of a nuclear weapon. When the true mean­ing of their work was revealed, most con­tin­ued on the project under the dubi­ous belief their work was for the greater good.

Jerome F Shapiro explores the idea that nuclear war in movies can be seen to bring about pos­i­tive soci­etal change in his 2001 work Atom­ic Bomb Cin­e­ma: The Apoc­a­lyp­tic Imag­i­na­tion on Film’. The Apoc­a­lypse does not bring around the end of the world, but a cri­sis-like peri­od of intense suf­fer­ing that cleans­es the world of evil.” The cat­a­clysmic destruc­tion of Neo Tokyo in the final scenes adheres to this ide­ol­o­gy. It strips away the total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment, crim­i­nal under­world, anti-gov­ern­ment ter­ror­ism and reli­gious fanati­cism, leav­ing behind a blank can­vas in which to begin again. The film ends in dis­as­ter, admit­ted­ly, but also in hope.

In real­i­ty, the drop­ping of the two atom­ic bombs brought only more hard­ship and hor­ror to the peo­ple of Japan. In 1982, when Kat­suhi­ro Ôto­mo released the first of the icon­ic man­ga comics which Aki­ra is adapt­ed from, he was writ­ing in a cli­mate gripped by the ten­drils of the cold war. As the dooms­day clock crept clos­er to obliv­ion each day, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that his epic depicts a dystopi­an land­scape of fear. Fear of the mil­i­tary, fear of cor­rupt politi­cians and the ulti­mate fear of apoc­a­lyp­tic nuclear destruc­tion. Ôtomo’s Neo Tokyo is haunt­ed by the ghosts of one of the dark­est chap­ters in sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery, where the only imag­ined future is a repeat of the unmit­i­gat­ed hor­ror wit­nessed by Hiroshi­ma and Nagasaki.

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