Bearing Witness
By JOYCE TSE
RAFU STAFF WRITER
Saturday, March 10, 2007

New film tells the story of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings through personal accounts of those who were there.

Courtesy of Farallon Films
Survivor Etsuko Nagano holds a photo of herself as a young girl before the atomic bombing. She was the only member of her family to survive “Fat Man,” a 2-kiloton plutonium bomb that was dropped on the outskirts of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

His work, “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of and Na­gasaki,” blends old news reports, propa­ganda, historical film footage, survivor drawings, photographs and first-hand modern-day interviews with some of the Americans involved in the bomb­ings and survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to create an emotionally raw and relevant film that was first screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The film is set to air on HBO on Aug. 6.

“I’m very conscious about not getting pegged as a certain kind of documentary filmmaker or someone who does just JA or historical stuff. But somehow, Hiro­shima is something Ikeep coming back to, something I find is very important. For me there’s this huge hole that needs to be filled in terms of what happened there,” said Okazaki in a phone inter­view from Berkeley, Calif., where he lives with his wife and daughter.

And while the Sansei director has managed to delve into other topics such as heroin addiction, hula dancers, Nobel Prize winners and the assortment of food-on-a-stick options available at the Minnesota State Fair, Hiroshima is something he has been preoccupied with since 1980, when he produced a news segment about a Hiroshima survivor for PBS.

Two years later, Okazaki created a PBS documentary about survivors liv­ing in California. In 1994, he moved to to work on another Hiro­shima-focused documentary, but had to drop everything when his project lost funding.

“I gave up on doing a big film,” said Okazaki. “I couldn’t raise money or find anyone interested in it.”

In 2005, Okazaki made “The Mush­room Club,” a short film about the city and people of Hiroshima, which was nominated for a 2006 Academy Award in the “Best Short Documentary” cat­egory.

Then Okazaki received a call from HBO about making a film they were interested in. It was the same film Oka­zaki had been pursuing for years—one that would tell the story of the atomic bombings with just the words of those who were there to remember.

This is what makes “White Light/Black Rain” the historical documentary that it is. No other film has yet captured, in the same way, the very real horror of Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, where 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki (80 percent of all victims were civilians) were killed. Those not vaporized by temperatures that reached up to 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit near the hypocenters of the blasts continued suf­fering from burns, infections, radiation sickness and cancer, which has resulted in another 160,000 deaths since 1946.

“People in Japan were saying they didn’t think they could make this film in Japan because it’s too real,” said Oka­zaki. “It’s a realistic portrait of people that were there. It’s a painful thing to watch.”

Among the 14 survivors in the film are those who lost entire families and others who were mentally and physical­ly scarred by what they experienced and saw. Their emotional personal accounts take us into a dark and unimaginable place, and for many of them, this is the first time they’ve really spoken publicly about this part of their lives.

There are the stories of survivors like Sunao Tsuboi, who says men believed it was their destiny to go to war and die for their country. “To fall like petals from a flower, that was our destiny,” he said. Or there is Etsuko Nagano, who is still haunted by the fact that she convinced her family to move to Nagasaki weeks before the bombing, and was the only one to survive. Sumiteru Taniguchi, who was a 16-year-old mail carrier deliver­ing a letter when the bomb dropped de­scribes suffering extensive burns to his back that have today left him severely disfigured. At one point in the film, file footage of the delicate removal of gauze from his skinless back is shown before he then shows viewers his body today. “I’ve shown you my wounds because I want you to know this can’t happen again,” Taniguchi says.

Okazaki’s film is not easy to watch. Even Okazaki, who spent about a year on the project, was not immune to sud­den emotional breakdowns.

“Every five or six weeks, I’d just start sobbing in the editing room,” said Okazaki. “Not from one particular scene or story, but just from over-experience. It was just this accumulation of so much sadness.”

In total, Okazaki met more than 500 survivors, interviewing more than 100 of them before selecting the final 14 who appeared in the film. He also included interviews with four Americans, two of them military personnel, who were in­volved in dropping the bombs, and two scientists, who observed the bombings from airplanes.

For Okazaki, the film’s goal was not to lay blame or examine the “rights or wrongs of the decision to drop the bombs.” He just wanted to let the sur­vivors share their stories.

“When you bring up and Nagasaki, people bring up blame and come up with theories, true or not. But think people need to look at actual human tolls of it before arguing,” said Okazaki. “People avoid this because it’s a horrible thing to consider, so they don’t consider what the bomb really did. That’s the power of the film. It doesn’t judge and just lets people tell their story.”

Initially, Okazaki feared the nature of the stories and the images—including drawings of people with flesh hanging off their arms or photographs of charred bodies with vacant eye sockets—would turn viewers off of staying with the film. But a decision was made to tell the story as “directly, honestly and fully” as possible.

Okazaki said he was most uncertain of how the Asian American commu­nity would react to “White Light/Black Rain.”

“Many Asian Americans are focused on presenting themselves as American or as westernized as possible. think it’s a little disturbing others seem more interested in this subject than Asian Americans themselves,” said Okazaki, who also noted that in Japan, many of the survivors he met spoke of discrimi­nation and facing prejudice.

“Hiroshima is socially more oppres­sive, and survivors experience more prejudice. There’s still stigma attached to them and they face social discrimination so many of them don’t live in Hiroshima (today),” he said. “Japan is a country where everyone is wanted to be the same and not different. If you are a survivor and have outward scars, people treat you differently.”

But Okazaki said that things seemed more positive in Nagasaki.

“Maybe it was just my experience,” he said. “Nagasaki has been more ignored, so people were much more excited and enthusiastic about the film.”

The film met with overwhelming response when it screened at Sundance in January, according to Okazaki. All five screenings were sold out.

“It was perfect, electric, amazing...,” he said. “Very few people wanted to argue about the whys and reasons for the bomb. People just responded to the survivors in the film. It was really gratifying.”

Although survivor Sakue Shimohira says, “All this pain we carry in our hearts and in our bodies, it must end with us,” it is also important to Okazaki that people never forget the cost of nuclear war. But there’s an even more valuable and positive lesson to learn from the stories of the 14 survivors in “White Light/Black Rain.”

“It’s really inspiring to see people go through these things and survive, not just physically, but spiritually,” said Okazaki. “They love life and care about it. In that way, I hope the film is uplifting as an experience so others can see how people go through horrible moments of life and can still love life.”