The Martian Chronicles: An Allegorical Novel

Nancy Ann Watanabe

I. “Rocket Summer”: Mars and Wartime Japan

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) obliquely portrays Japan as Mars and the

post-Meiji kamikaze air force pilots and Japanese bombardiers as Martians. In this regard, it is

significant that Bradbury begins “Rocket Summer” with a seasonal designation; in doing so, he

follows a rule of traditional Japanese haiku poetry, which requires a direct or an indirect

reference to one of the four seasons. This rule for the proper writing of haiku is consistent with

Shintō, the national religion of Japan, where the emperor is believed to be a direct descendant of

Amaterasu, the sun goddess Amaterasu.

In The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury evokes two levels of allegorical patterning that

pertains to the cataclysmic air raid at Pearl Harbor in the context of the history of Japan. In the

historical perspective, the title of the first chapter in The Martian Chronicles, which is “Rocket

Summer,” suggests the ambitious plan of the Meiji oligarchy to modernize Japan by abolishing

feudalism and restoring the emperor to power as a constituent member of a reigning family

descended from their traditional sun goddess, Amaterasu.

In the title “Summer Rocket,” the word “Rocket” suggests a revolutionary movement

toward the heavens by a figurative “rock,” or imperial tower of strength. The word “Summer”

onomatopoeically suggests the word “Samurai,” which symbolically refers to Japanese warrior

clans ruling in a caste system under the daimyo landlords who reported to the Shogun. The

Shogun exerted hegemonic governance over serfs working the land during the Tokugawa

Hegemony.
 The sudden shift from winter to summer in “Rocket Summer” evokes this radical change

from the wintry frozen isolationism of the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867) to the westernization

and democratization of Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912). Although Emperor Meiji

disbanded the samurai clans, warriors who belonged to educated classes received training that

qualified them to assume positions of responsibility in the new government.

Bradbury could have chosen his birthplace, Waukegan, a small town in Illinois as the

setting for “Rocket Summer,” but instead he picked for the setting of the first chronicle in The

Martian Chronicles a mythical town located in the state of Ohio. The name “Ohio” may be

interpreted as a homonym for “Ohayo-gozaimasu,” a traditional Japanese polite form of greeting,

“Good morning.” However, “Ohayo” without the suffix “gozaimasu” is too casual to be

acceptable in most social situations. The Ohio setting in “Rocket Summer” is apt, not as a

realistic representation of an American state, but as a subtle quasi poetical allusion to Emperor

Meiji’s well-publicized attempt to modernize Japan, taking Western civilization as a

paradigmatic model. Let me explain: Japan is the youngest Asian country in the sense that Japan

was the last Asian nation to develop a national identity commensurate with the older civilizations

and cultures of India, China, and Korea. As a young, impressionable Asian nation, Japan was the

first Asian nation to take positive steps to engage in East-West commercial and cultural

exchanges in an attempt to bridge the gap between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western

Hemisphere.

In contradistinction to the imperially funded European transoceanic voyages of discovery

and conquest during the Renaissance, Japan was slowly transformed from a Western satellite into

an East Asian empire as a result of inadvertently hosting unexpected visitors from the West,

including Catholic missionaries from the Iberian Peninsula, Commodore Matthew Perry from the
United States, and scientists from Holland, England, and Germany.

Forewarned by the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico by Spanish conquistadors,

Japan determined to resist efforts made by would-be Anglo and European conquerors to

subjugate and colonize the indigenous inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago of four larger

islands and two hundred tiny islands.

While maintaining autonomy and independence as a sovereign Asian nation, Japan

nonetheless gradually assimilated Western culture, building a socioeconomic infrastructure based

on knowledge culled through diplomatic ties established with the United States, Great Britain,

France, Germany, and the Netherlands. These Western nations sent trading companies,

commercial convoys, missionaries, scientists, physicians, professors, and other educators to

Japan during the Tokugawa Period. The feudal system having been established, maintained, and

strengthened structurally by the socioeconomically stratified ruling samurai warrior classes,

Emperor Meiji’s administration retrained the various samurai echelons, reclassifying them

according to their new functions and duties in the hierarchical organization in which educated

samurai held important government positions in the newly configured democratic society of

Japan. Thus, the feudal order in Japan, like the “frost patterns on the windows” in Bradbury’s

“Rocket Summer,” was eliminated, and Japan, named land of the Rising Sun by ancient Chinese

explorers, was destined to experience its “snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town” turn

into a “hot rain before it touched the ground” (The Martian Chronicles 1).

Specific allusions to the air raid on the United States Naval Flotilla in Pearl Harbor may

be found in poetic metaphors used to describe the environmental impact upon the small Ohio

town at the moment when the rocket ship launches its maiden take-off. Bradbury develops an

extended metaphorical conceit in prose to describe the sudden shift from winter to summer. He
re-invents an essential element of Japanese haiku poetry, which is an indication of the season

during which a classical Japanese poet composes a poem. Bradbury, in “Rocket Summer,”

describes the intrusion of summer-like heat on a sleepy town in winter. Yet, it is not

summertime; indeed, we learn that it is a simulated summer, which is created as the rocket ship

hits the town with a blast of hot air: “And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A

flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed

among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors

flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives

shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people” (The Martian Chronicles 1)

Throughout “Rocket Summer” Bradbury conflates conventionally understood oppositions

between winter and summer, land and air, pastoral nature and mechanization, and homespun love

and wartime aggression and bestiality. Contrary to expectations, the “wave of warmth” is emitted

from a missile hurtling into the sky, neither from the summer sun nor from a house or bakery. In

my allegorical interpretation of “Rocket Summer,” the “flooding sea of hot air” is redolent of the

squadrons of imperial Japanese bombers sinking vessels at Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, the

subjunctive mood in “as if someone had left a bakery door open” is laced with acerbic irony in

metaphorical imagery that evokes the gas ovens into which Jewish prisoners of war were herded

during the worst genocidal rampage in human history.

In depicting the mythical town in “Rocket Summer,” Bradbury uses personification to

emphasize the brutal assault of the rocket deployed against homes, nature, and society’s

innocent, most vulnerable members. The rocket turns the village into a monstrous extension of

itself: “The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The string of images of
“cottages and bushes and children” mimics the movement of the heat produced during the rocket

engine thrusts on the pad during the launching of the brutish machine.

Water imagery in the form of “icicles” suggests bombardment of the townspeople hit by

shrapnel as the bomb shells shatter on contact. Heat radiating from the blast melts everything in

its path. A combination of personification and associative symbolism suggests aerial blitz

powerful enough to make doors and windows fly open to meet the barrage’s hostile action with

an equal and opposite reaction, as in Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The imagery of

children struggling to take off their wool clothes is consistent with Bradbury’s compassionate

attitude toward the U.S. navy men, each of whom is the child of parents. These mythical children

symbolize the victims of the surprise air attack who shrugged off their clothing damaged by fire

and water while they rushed to man anti-aircraft weaponry.

Comparably to the civilian women living in a town nearby to Pearl Harbor who were

suddenly divested of their nonmilitary status, the mythical women in “Rocket Summer” are

awakened with a jolt as their homes are invaded by the heat of explosive backfire of the rocket.

This mechanically produced false summer extends not only spatially from the military into the

surrounding civilian population but also temporally. The explosion melts temporal barriers and

exposes “last summer’s ancient green lawns.” Psychological symbolism indicates that the green

lawns are “ancient” because the ferocity of the rocket’s unleashed energy resets memory’s time

piece; in the midst of the onslaught, memory of genuine summertime peace and contentment is

obliterated. Mother nature herself is gravely affected by the rocket’s artificial summer.

Bradbury wrote most of the science fiction tales in The Martian Chronicles shortly before

his marriage in 1947 and he fulfilled the terms of his publishing agreement to finish a novel in

the summer of 1949. Similarly to the rapid writing in 1942 of “The Lake” by a disconsolate
young Bradbury in response to the historic attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which I

discuss earlier in the present study, the completion of The Martian Chronicles coincides with the

first U.S. military mission executed on August 6, 1945, to decimate Hiroshima, the primary

target, with an atomic bomb, and the second U.S. military mission on August 9, 1945, to hit the

seaport city of Nagasaki, the secondary target, because the primary target, the ancient castle

fortress town of Kokuraminami-ku, Japan, was totally overcast. Soon thereafter, on September 2,

1945, Japan surrendered. Each atomic bombing killed about 100,000 Japanese, the vast majority

of whom supported their government, headed by Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989), who reigned

during the Showa Period (1926-1989), and General Hideki Tojo of the Japanese Imperial Army,

a politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan during World War II.

The Ohio town portrayed in The Martian Chronicles is synthetic, artificial, and imitative

as a novelistic emblem of Hiroshima, Japan. Like most of the major urban cities in post-Meiji

Japan, Hiroshima was rapidly modernized because information about model Western cities for

the Japanese to emulate was readily accessible. Traditional Japanese civilization had thrived for

many centuries as a hermetically sealed, self-sufficient society comprised of peasants, farmers,

and merchants governed by a rigidly structured samurai military government based on the

Bushido warrior code of ethics and conduct.

According to my interpretation, the science fiction element actually veils war imagery

that extends beyond World War II. As my allegorical interpretation of “Rocket Summer”

indicates, Bradbury chose to set his mythical township in the state of Ohio because of its

associative link to the American Civil War, which resulted in a death toll of 700,000.

Bradbury wrote “Rocket Summer” while he was still in an intellectual and psychological

state of shock over the aerial attack at Pearl Harbor (death toll: 2,009 U.S. military; 129 Japanese
airmen) and the genocide at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Despite Ohio’s lack

of resemblance to the colonial culture of military conquest and imperialist oppression of African

and other racial and ethnic minority slave populations with no access to education and worker

compensation, the divisive American Civil War issue setting abolitionists against supporters of

slavery appears in “Rocket Summer” in Bradbury’s selection of Ohio as the geographic location.

Ohio was the state to which African slaves flocked with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Laws

of 1793 followed by armed civilian and military enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

until U.S. President Abraham Lincoln penned the historic Emancipation Proclamation, which

became statutory, codified law on September 22, 1862.

Thus, “Rocket Summer” is a multinational allegory in which the theme of war extends

from the air raid at Pearl Harbor, to the American civil war between the North and South (1861-

1865), and, conceivably, the American war of independence from the British Empire.

On an international level, Bradbury in “Rocket Summer,” creates a sinister atmosphere

and an ominous tone in depicting townspeople watching the “reddening sky,” a narratologically

calculated deployment of red planet Mars-inspired imagery that may be interpreted as a veiled

reference to the British Empire, which sent the “redcoats,” soldiers wearing royal red uniforms,

to quash colonial rebellion during the American Revolution (1765-1783).

This military trope and color symbolism may be seen to encompass the Chinese Empire,

which dispatched the Red Army of the Communist Party of China to subjugate periodic uprisings

and quash hot spots in the numerous provincial strongholds on mainland China (1928-1937). The

Red Army also fought against the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 before

finally being renamed the People’s Liberation Army.

In “Rocket Summer,” Bradbury demonstrates his ability as a literary artist to use science
fiction as a palimpsest that veils his humanitarian concerns from a socially scientific perspective.

This symbolical allegory is a harbinger of “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950), which evokes

radioactive fallout in the aftermath of the flight on August 6, 1945, of the Enola Gay over

Hiroshima, Japan, which was decimated by the newly invented atomic bomb.

In conclusion, “Rocket Summer” metaphorically defines The Martian Chronicles by

applying, in stories that under a mantle of science fiction nonetheless evocatively chronicle

recent cataclysmic events in world history, symbolical imagery inspired by the ancient Roman

scientists’ naming of a smaller and colder uninhabitable planet, namely Mars, which is,

significantly enough, planet Earth’s closest neighbor, in honor of Mars, the Roman god of war.

“Rocket Summer” constitutes science fiction that resonates with historical and cultural

significance. Knowledge of Japan’s traditional samurai milieu and Japan’s British, American,

and Chinese models of nationhood permeates Bradbury’s evocation of worldwide war.

“Rocket Summer” is a fictional representation of small-town America that foreshadows

“There Will Come Soft Rains,” in which the heightened atmosphere of peace reigns over a house

enshrouded in radioactive fallout reminiscent of Hiroshima, Japan. Legendary overtones in the

last independent clause in “Rocket Summer” (“and summer lay for a brief moment upon the

land”) evokes the central theme, which is the rocket-like rise and precipitous fall of imperial

Japan during the world war era, which was decisively ended in the Pacific theater of military

operations by the atomic bomb.