This tale was based on Nosaka’s own bitterly-regretful adolescent experiences when, after Kobe had been firebombed by the US airforce, he had tried and failed to keep his younger sister alive. It was adapted from a 1967 short story, of the same name, by the writer Akiyuki Nosaka. Beginning with a dying figure in Kobe’s Sannomiya Station, in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, it is a film innately and brutally wed to that conflict. Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), which is only now receiving its US theatrical release, refuses to take such an approach. History neatly brackets each conflict and moves on, even when people struggle to. They are there as mines in the earth and the sea, toxins in the rubble and air, wounds in bodies and grief in hearts. The brutality and trauma of war long outlive the armistice. Jewish civilians were murdered in a pogrom in Kielce by fellow Poles in 1946, having only recently survived the Holocaust. ![]() The Rape of Nanjing took place four years before the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War began. While the dates of wars are fixed by declarations and cessations, the boundaries of conflicts are much more porous for those involved.
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