TOUCHING A MATTER OF TABOOS (AUTUMN 2025)

A great anti-war film,’ was one of the comments made after the recent showing of the 2024 film Touch at the community cinema club in Budleigh Salterton.

Not everyone agreed. After all, many people had come to the cinema club expecting to enjoy a romantic drama, and not an anti-war film.

 

As the cinema club leaflet explained, ‘Kristófer, an old man in Iceland remembers a Japanese girl called Miko, the love of his youth from some fifty years ago, so he sets out to look for her, first in London, then in Japan. It was a love he couldn’t leave behind.’

And yet when Miko explains how their relationship had ended it’s clear that Touch depicts the lasting, personal damage that can be inflicted by war, influencing characters' lives and relationships long after the fighting has ended.

Miko’s family had fled Hiroshima for London after the 1945 atomic bombing because of the discrimination that they had faced back home as 'Hibakusha', a Japanese term which refers to survivors of the bombing, a term which has become a taboo word. 'Hibakusha' and their children were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination when it comes to prospects of marriage or work due to public ignorance about the consequences of radiation sick-ness, with much of the public believing it to be hereditary or even contagious.

Learning the meaning of the word will remind some readers of an East Budleigh resident’s experience of being imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two. ‘Even though the concentration camp years had a deep and damaging effect on us, as a family we simply did not talk about it, as it was a taboo issue when we returned to Holland,’ wrote Hanneke Coates in her book The Breaking of the Shell. ‘The Dutch had endured occupation by the Germans and suffered severe cold winters and hunger too, and therefore they did not want to know about our suffering,’ she explained.

Hanneke had been one of the guides who welcomed an American visitor, Jeff Conant, back in November 2016. A direct descendant of Roger Conant, Jeff had made the long journey from California to East Budleigh in a quest for traces of his ancestor. She had shared her wartime experience with him and he had described being struck by her account as they walked together.

Above: Jeff Conant contemplates the ancient millstone which may have come from an East Budleigh mill associated with his ancestor.

Jeff’s father had served with the U.S. Marines in the Pacific in 1945. ‘Somehow it was as if the Mobius strip of time had entwined my fate with that of Hanneke Coates, as we strolled the cobbled lanes of little Budleigh,’ Jeff had written, reflecting on how the war had damaged his relationship with his father. ‘No doubt he was gravely wounded by his war experiences and by returning to a culture unable to engage in the healing that such wounds demand.’

It was as if the ‘victors’ of World War Two had found themselves as victimized as any of the Japanese 'Hibakusha', ‘screwed up’ by the taboo experience of warfare, as indeed many ex-service people of all nationalities had been.

Vermiglio, made in 2024, will be yet another presentation by Budeigh’s community cinema club next April: yet another ‘not explicitly anti-war film’ which nonetheless explores the impact of the war on a small community and a family in Italy. ‘In Vermiglio, war is not on the screen, but its shadow pervades every scene, showing how it overshadows and destroys human lives,’ writes reviewer Polina Grechanikova.

You can read Jeff Conant’s powerfully written account of his 2016 visit to East Budleigh via the link below:

https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/11/coming-home-to-budleigh-jeff-conants_24.html