As I wrote in my blog post on Kuro ga Ita Natsu, artists have grappled for more than a century with the problem of presenting massive tragedies, such as the atomic bombings or the Holocaust, in ways that are neither overwhelming nor overly distancing. Usually, the stories focus on survivors, for who else is left to tell the tale? The 1988 TV special Natsufuku no Shoujo-tachi: Hiroshima, Shouwa 20-nen 8-gatsu Muika (Girls in Summer Clothes: Hiroshima, August 6, 1945) takes a different approach to the bombing of Hiroshima: it lets the dead speak for themselves, through their diaries and journals and through the memories of their surviving relatives. It packs a punch all outsized to its 35 minute runtime.
Natsufuku no Shoujo-tachi focuses on the first-year girls of Hiroshima Prefectural First Girls' High School. The second- and third-year girls had been drafted to work in factories, so only the 220 first-year girls were still attending school. They were out clearing rubble when the bomb detonated. All of them died, in the explosion or the radioactive aftermath. The show alternates anime segments, set in 1945, with "present-day" (1988) remembrances of the lost by surviving relatives.
The show focuses particularly on three girls: Morikawa Yoko, who lived in Miyajima and had to commute to school by boat and train;
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Oshita Nobuko, a serious girl who liked to study; and Okutsu Hitomi, a bright girl popular with her class. They walked to school together, in formation, as preparation against air raids. They endured air raids and privation together. They enjoyed the arrival of summer together, although shortage of fabric meant they had to make their summer dresses from old clothes, and white dresses were forbidden as too visible to airplanes.
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And they died together on August 6, 1945, Hitomi immediately, Nobuko and Yoko a few hours later.
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Okutsu Hitomi's mother, who was 93 when the film was made, remembers her daughter by a class photograph. Oshita Nobuko's parents, 84 and 80, treasure the summer clothes that their daughter was wearing when the bomb hit.
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(Eventually, they donated the fragile outfit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.) And Morikawa Yoko's brother, who was away at the time, reads excerpts from Yoko's diary, which survived. This short document (published in English as Yoko's Diary) illuminates the girls' lives in the spring and summer before the bombing.
The seiyuu in the show have no other anime credits. For example, the narrator, Sugiura Keiko, was an announcer in Hiroshima. The children were voiced by actors from the Japan Children's Theater Company, and their song was sung by the Hiroshima Broadcasting Children's Choir. The animated segments were directed by Hirata Toshio, an industry veteran who started at Toei and then worked at Mushi Pro. Hirata directed two Unico movies, Barefoot Gen 2, Hi no Tori: Yamata Chapter, and Grimm Douwa: Kin no Tori, an Orphan release.
One translation note. The song the girls sing to celebrate the completion of their summer clothes is Natsu wa Kinu, a traditional song written in literary Japanese.
I stumbled across an earlier release of this show on BakaBT and was disturbed by the admission that 20% of the show wasn't subbed. I found the ISO, got a colleague to encode it, and asked Perevodildo to do a new translation. ninjacloud retimed. I edited and typeset. Nemesis, Rezo, and Uchuu QCed. The editing and typesetting were routine, except for the content, which tore me to pieces. The encode is only minimally cropped. The borders vary from segment to segment, so many segments have narrow black lines on both sides.
Does anyone need to watch Natsufuku no Shoujo-tachi, particularly in the holiday season? Actually, everyone does. To quote a song from my youth,
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