The Construction of the Innocent Victim:

The Asynchronous Voice of the Female Teacher and the Silence of the Leukemic Girl in Children of Hiroshima and Hiroshima

Abstract

This paper focuses on the narrative function of the asynchronous voice of the female teacher and the silence of the leukemic girl in Children of Hiroshima (1952) and Hiroshima (1953). In Children, a female teacher’s singing voice reminds a leukemic girl of her peaceful childhood and provides the continuity to bridge gaps of diegetic time in a flashback scene. Though Hiroshima uses the same characters, nostalgia is negated by replacing the nursery song with Kimigayo or Warship March. Through close analysis of film texts, I investigate two different ways in which both films construct the image of the innocent victims and the ideal postwar nationality.