Before The Bomb
IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD I Sunao Katabuchi’s affecting anime paints the real Hiroshima…
Think of Hiroshima and you will no doubt think of the mushroom cloud
– the American nuclear bomb that, on 6 August 1945, destroyed the Japanese city and killed an estimated 100,000 people. But Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner Of The World is not interested in Hiroshima’s destruction. Instead, set in the years leading up to the attack, it’s a poignant picture of what was to be destroyed.
“I wanted to draw what was lost,” explains director Katabuchi, “I wanted to draw attention towards the daily, domestic life, and show that [ World War 2] Japan was not a world where nothing existed. They were very similar to the people of today. The war, however, forced them to live different lives.”
One such life is that of Suzu (Rena Nonen), a young, talented artist who lives in a port town just over the mountains. Her formative years are defined not by bombs, but the mundanity of survival, of working out how to feed three generations of a family on insufficient rations. “It was impossible to cook like usual during the war,” says Katabuchi. “So Suzu-san has to use wildflowers for cooking. I cooked her ‘radish and sorrel leaves marinated in aemono sauce’. I couldn’t imagine that sorrels were so tasteful!”
Much like the manga series that it’s based on, In This Corner Of The World portrays Suzu’s struggle through captivating, hand-drawn
animation. “What I wanted to express,” says Katabuchi, “was that this ordinary life could actually be fun and intriguing. But I thought that drawing the war as the ‘shadow’ in the background would help me portray it even brighter.”
Although Suzu’s story is fictional, Katabuchi was meticulous in bringing Hiroshima back to life. He studied aerial photographs, maps, phone books, and even visited the city in person to examine the width of the roads. But there is a noble purpose to the detail. “From the Western view point,” Katabuchi says, “war-time Japan’s way of thinking is deemed difficult to understand. However, they were not so different. It would be fantastic if you could widen your perspective to see a much bigger world, by looking through Suzu-san’s corner in this tiny world.”
ETA | 28 June / in This Corner Of The World opens late r this month. Read our review on page 50.