On July 29, 2020, just a week prior to the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the Hiroshima District Court passed a landmark judgment. The court granted the plea of 84 elderly Japanese men and women that they also be recognised as hibakusha, or A-Bomb survivors, by virtue of their exposure to the ‘black rain’ that fell upon and around Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb.The debris and ash from the devastated and burning city were sucked into the terrifying mushroom cloud that heaved a staggering 60,000 feet up in the sky. This jumble of particulate matter – made highly toxic by the radiation released by the bomb – then coalesced with atmospheric moisture into thick, greasy, black-as-pitch raindrops that came down intermittently in the hours after the bombing, to slowly die out over the next several days.People exposed to the black rain subsequently developed mild to severe radiation sicknesses, from nausea and diarrhoea to persistent loss of hair to cancer. Like other hibakusha, those identified as victims of the black rain were also admitted to various government schemes of benefits in subsequent years.Faced with a very large number of claims for categorisation as black rain victims, however, the Japanese government in the mid-1970s laid down a strict – and, according to many observers, unreasonable – protocol for such identification. The terms of this protocol specified that only those living within a 19-kilometre-long, 11-kilometre-wide area mainly to the north-east of the explosion’s epicentre were deemed to have been significantly impacted by the radioactive rain and therefore eligible to be treated as hibakusha.Also Read: Japan Marks 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing, Low Turnout Amidst PandemicMany survivors contested this protocol as arbitrary because it clearly overlooked the fact that many of those who happened to have been outside the heavy rainfall zone suffered from a range of radiation sicknesses, possibly through drinking contaminated water. They cited numerous medical records which pointed to the fact that the incidence of the hibakusha ailments did not strictly correspond to the boundaries set by the government guidelines. The district court judgment of July 29 upheld the plea of 84 such plaintiffs, directing the government to extend the hibakusha benefits to this residual group of Hiroshima survivors. After their painfully long legal battle, these survivors – the youngest among whom is 79 years old and the oldest 96 – were ecstatic.Their joy was destined to be short-lived, however. The Shinzo Abe government has now decided to appeal the court verdict, in view supposedly of it exceeding the scope of the existing legal provisions. Some of the plaintiffs are now openly voicing their dismay over the government decision. They believe that the 75th anniversary of the nuclear holocaust was a good time for the government to finally treat the victims of black rain with empathy and dignity. This could very well be the government’s last chance to be magnanimous too – for how many among the litigants are likely to live long enough to see the final decision on the appeal coming through?Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) after the atomic bomb was dropped over them. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/George R. Caron, Public DomainBlack rain as an offshoot of the A-Bomb might have remained an almost entirely unknown entity outside the borders of Japan, but for the Shohei Imamura classic Black Rain (1989). The film derives its plot from Masuji Ibuse’s eponymous 1965 novel, though it departs significantly from that text in several ways. The story is pivoted on Yasuko, a young woman who finds herself trapped In Hiroshima on the day the first atomic bomb very nearly obliterated that bustling city from the face of the earth. With her uncle and aunt, she manages to reach the comparative safety of her uncle’s factory and later his estate, which is located safely away from Hiroshima, but not before black rain had fallen upon her in copious quantities as she crossed the wide bay that separated her village from Hiroshima on the ferry.Also Read: The Scars of Nagasaki, as Kurosawa Saw ThemFive years after the end of the war, as war-ravaged Japan limps towards some kind of normality, the search begins for a suitable husband for Yasuko, who is keen to start a family of her own. The story revolves around this search which proves to be increasingly futile, thanks to the societal stigma attached to A-Bomb survivors. Meanwhile, the scars of Hiroshima have also begun to fester and many of the uncle’s friends and acquaintances – broken in body and mind – fall victim one after another, till disease hits Yasuko and her family as well. First, the aunt dies, next the uncle shows symptoms of the same sickness and then Yasuko herself recognises telling signs in her body of creeping radiation poisoning. The film ends as the desperately ill Yasuko is removed to a hospital, helped by another bomb survivor.Black Rain contains graphic images of the bombing’s immediate aftermath, and some of these are deeply disquieting. Imamura captures a shot of the mushroom cloud spreading its sinister canopy over a leaden grey sky. The blinding flash of the bomb as it detonates is followed by visuals of a railroad car being literally blown apart by the force of the blast. Firestorms engulf houses and whole neighbourhoods and dazed victims who have lost an arm or both legs or have an eye or jaw bashed in hobble about in search of water to slake their thirst, their bodies burnt to a sickly white. Mothers cradle the charred remains of their babies and a raft of flayed corpses flows down a canal. In a sequence which it is impossible to shrug off your memory, a horribly burnt and disfigured child approaches a man who is his own elder brother, crying for help, but the older man turns away from the child in shock and revulsion and moves on.The film contains graphoc images of the aftermath of the bombing. Photo credit: Tohokushinsha Film CoThe onset of Yasuko’s illness is also presented through stark, unforgiving picture sequences, but as the disease progresses, Imamura works partly through aural and visual suggestions to point to its pitiless inexorability. The film was shot in black and white, in part so that it looks like a documentary, but perhaps also to obviate the likely visual impact of gory colour footage. But the black and white tints are skilfully layered and the different shades provide depth and variety of tone to scene compositions.But the black rain is both a physical reality and a metaphor here and that is precisely what makes this deceptively simple story a powerful commentary on a society that has been wrenched free from its moorings. This society has not been roused by its traumatic experience of war and ruin to protest or resist. Rather than being induced to action, it has internalised those terrible experiences and begun to see itself as essentially flawed, in some sense ‘deserving’ of the black rain that fell upon it on that fateful day in August.As one eligible bachelor after another turns Yasuko down, fearing that she might have been touched by the Hiroshima curse, she becomes an affront to the community her family lives in: for when a woman of ‘marriageable’ age remains unwed, society’s moral code is perceived to have been violated. Gradually, this societal disapproval seeps through to the family as well, eventually suffusing Yasuko herself and her sense of inadequacy is steadily exacerbated by a rising sense of guilt. She fights back spiritedly for a while, before her escalating sickness overpowers her completely. She gives in, perhaps convinced that she must somehow have been at fault herself.The three cental characters of Black Rain. Photo credit: Hayashibara Group Imamura ProductionImamura is deeply disappointed with how Japanese society was trying to come to terms with life after the carnage. The belief seemed to be that that as long as it was possible to restore society to the values and rhythms of traditional life, all would be well again, the wounds of war would heal completely and the scars would disappear without a trace. Imamura is angry that the ordinary Japanese could be so self-deluding: rather than looking outside, she was very nearly apologetic for her own terrible misfortune. This amounted essentially to denying the atomic holocaust, to pretending that it was business as usual once again. The black rain is thus an overarching theme: that of the malaise bedevilling Japanese society. It takes rare courage to essay such an unforgiving critique of one’s own country, especially as it was emerging from the ravages of war.However, Imamura’s narrative is not steeped in unredeemed blackness. In a marked departure from Ibuse’s novel, he introduces the character of Yuichi, who returned from the war suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition which sends him into hysterics the moment he hears the sound of a running automobile engine: he imagines it is a tank at battle, about to grind him to dust. Shunned by society, this poor and unfortunate man finds solace and empathy in the otherwise distraught Yasuko and comes to love her. When Yasuko’s own health worsens and she is rendered increasingly insecure, Yuichi gives her all the help and support he can muster. He even manages to live down the demons haunting him.Also Read: The Time Machine: The Survivors of HiroshimaIn a remarkable sequence towards the film’s end, Yuichi lifts Yasuko from her sickbed to take her to the ambulance that will carry her to the hospital. He then clambers into the ambulance himself to accompany the woman he loves on what will perhaps be her last journey. Now, for once, he has triumphed over his own horrible dread of the noisy car engine.In refusing to respect the district court judgment offering dignity and closure to the few remaining Hiroshima survivors, the Abe government once again demonstrates its unwillingness to learn from Japan’s past. The mulish obstinacy with which Abe has been seeking to alter the country’s constitution (so that Japan no longer abjures what is described as “the sovereign right of belligerency”); his open disregard of expectations that the Japanese state will expressly regret the mistakes of its militaristic past at war memorials; and now his intransigence in the face of a judicial order which he could have complied with gracefully with little cost to the exchequer – all these are unwholesome pointers that Japan will continue to be in denial. Sadly then, Imamura’s central message in Black Rain has yet to be heeded by the political establishment of his own country, a full 31 years after the film’s release.Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.