Steve Okazaki, Photo: Hidemi Shinoda
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When filmmaker Steven Okazaki took to the streets of Tokyo to ask people what important historical event had occurred on Aug. 6, almost no one knew the answer. This was startling, because what happened on Aug. 6, 1945 -- when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima -- permanently transformed the Japanese nation.
In the 62 years since the only two instances of nuclear warfare in history (the bombing of Nagasaki followed three days later), historians and political activists of all stripes have debated the morality behind the act. Did President Harry Truman's decision to use the bomb shorten the war and save lives, or was it a horrendous war crime that cost the lives of more than 350,000 civilians?
But these arguments, Okazaki believes, have diverted us from looking at the horror of what actually happened, which only increases the risk that it could happen again. His new film, "White Light Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (which premieres Monday on HBO), strives to strip the politics and ideology away from this central event of 20th-century history and explore it through the memories and testimonies of those who witnessed and survived it.
A Japanese-American whose father fought in the U.S. Army during World War II, Okazaki has been, as he puts it, preparing to make this film for 25 years. He has interviewed more than 500 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as well as numerous American scientists and soldiers.
In most respects "White Light Black Rain" is a graceful, elegiac treatment of one of history's most painful topics. But Okazaki has included some devastating film footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has hardly been seen outside military archives. Some was shot in black-and-white by Japanese news cameras a few weeks after the bombing, and some was shot on 35 mm color film by American occupation forces shortly after their arrival.
These images of the devastated cities and their devastated people may haunt your dreams. Seeing the disfigured bodies of people killed or maimed by radiation burns probably isn't anybody's idea of must-see TV. But when I spoke to Okazaki at the Sundance Film Festival in January, he told me that his producers at HBO told him to make the strongest film he could make, while many of the A-bomb survivors are still alive to pass their story along to the rest of us.
It seems like you made this film because younger people -- younger than you and I, certainly -- may know relatively little about the bombings. And the political or ideological controversies around the bombings may seem pretty remote to them. Your film does not focus on the question of morality, on whether it was right or wrong for America to drop the bomb. It's just about what happened, the people that were directly affected. Is that fair?
I think it's partially a form of denial, to not think about it, because it's so horrible to think about the reality of it. In some ways, people go immediately to the argument to avoid considering the horror. Everyone seems to have a theory, pro and con, and there's a lot of validity to the arguments. But they tend to just go and on as arguments and there's no real resolution. At the same time, people will just avoid the real subject, which is the use of nuclear weapons in war, and this is the only example of it.
There are some really upsetting images in this film, very difficult to watch. I've seen a lot of historical documentaries about the war that at least addressed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I've never seen a great deal of this material. You've got actual film, both color and black-and-white, showing what people who were killed and injured by the bombs actually looked like. Where did you get that material, and how did you decide what to use?
The first motion picture footage was black-and-white, shot by a Japanese crew that came down from Tokyo about three or four weeks after the bombing. There's a certain order to them, to what they're shooting. It's not the chaos of right after the bombing, but it's still really vivid footage -- shocking, really. Then the American occupation forces came in and stopped the Japanese from filming. They looked at the footage and said, "Wow, let's keep working, and you'll work under us and we'll direct you." And then American crews started working in 35 mm color film. All that color footage went back to Washington and was under wraps for 25 years.
We assumed that the black-and-white footage was also confiscated and also went back to Washington, but it looks like the Japanese company either made a dupe negative of it, or kept the original negative and gave the dupe negative to the Americans.
I think the first use of that footage was in "Hiroshima Mon Amour," which was made in 1959, so Alain Resnais accessed the Japanese footage as well. There's so much of it. It's not that it's been inaccessible; it's just that people have avoided looking at it. I frankly avoided the color footage for a long time, and my first cuts of this film, I would say, were poetic and gentle and used the black-and-white footage. I brought it back to HBO, and they said, "This is great, but where's the real stuff?"
I said, "I'm afraid people are going to turn off their TVs or walk out of the theater if they see the real stuff." They said, "You know this is the only opportunity to do this film, to do this story. Don't hold back. Just put it in. If they change the channel, they change the channel. But if you've taken a comprehensive look at it, and made the most honest film you can, we should not censor the material. It's already been censored."
HBO is really an amazing place that way. And so the next cut I made was more graphic, and they said, "Is there more?" And I said, yes, there's more. I pushed it further, and I discovered that in the old [color] footage there were two people who we had already interviewed for the film. There they were, in the old footage! That gave it a very different feeling, because even though it's difficult to watch, you have a sense, here are the people who are alive who can tell these stories.
Just to clarify that: What we see in that color film shot by the Americans, not long after the bombing, is two survivors who suffered gruesome injuries. And those turned out to be people you interviewed, people who are still alive in the 21st century. That's remarkable, to realize that this event is a living memory for a lot of people. About how many survivors did you meet in Japan?
I've followed the subject for about 25 years, and I've met about 500 survivors in that time. For this project we pre-interviewed about 100 of them. Some of them might be casual, just quick meetings at a coffee shop, or walking into a sort of community center with about 20 people. Actually, that was a bad idea because people started talking and you couldn't stop them. The people we talked to at the end got really mad and said, "I have a long story too, and why did they get so much time and you're cutting this short?" People have really held this story in. In many cases they haven't even talked to their children or husbands and wives about it, so, in some cases, their own children don't even know they're atomic bomb survivors,
That's amazing.
People still say that you can affect your marriage possibilities and your job opportunities, or your family's, so survivors are very wary about letting people know.
I've heard this before, that there's a stigma in Japanese society associated with being a survivor of the atomic bomb. Is that primarily about the health issues that may be involved, or is it shame? Or some mixture of the two?
I think it's a complicated thing. Japanese always say, "The nail that stands up gets beaten down," and just being different in Japanese culture is not a good thing. It's frowned upon, to flaunt your differences, and it's frowned upon to talk about yourself. Typically, Japanese parents, when they're talking about their children, do the opposite of American parents. They put their children down, and people are supposed to assume that this is exactly the opposite of the truth: They're not bad students; they're the best students.
People also tell stories about how closely, before marriage, the families check each other out. In some cases they hire detectives to do background checks. Many times survivors marry other survivors. When you have a survivor that's married a non-survivor, they brag about how brave an act of courage it is to marry a survivor.
I talked about this last night: There was a plaque at the hypo-center [the center of the blast] saying that one 8-year-old girl survived in this area, and everyone else perished. We tracked her down, and she said, "Please don't contact me again. My husband has a business and he feels business would be hurt. My children don't know I'm a survivor, and I don't want them to know."
Partly, this movie is about dealing with two different countries, two different cultures, that have both been silent about what happened. In Japan there is this complicated sense of shame that you've described. And in the United States, we sometimes argue about the morality or necessity of the act, but I don't think we've ever really talked about the consequences.
I think it was really putting a human face on the discussion. Certainly the most upsetting thing about doing this film is to see it become more and more timely over the last two years. I was watching "24" last weekend when they set off an atomic bomb. It tells you that people are now considering, "Yeah, that's really possible." I think the really remarkable thing for me in the film was that when we interviewed the scientists who designed the bomb and the veterans who dropped it, on one hand, they were all very adamant that they had no second thoughts and no regrets, and at the same time they were all adamant that the danger was real. The people who dropped the bomb think that the reality is really close; it's something we all have to consider seriously.
The other thing that frightened me was looking at the propaganda footage in the film. All you have to do is replace the word "Japanese" with "Islamic" and it was the same thing: These are people who don't care about life, because they're going to heaven. I was certainly thinking about that.
You also must have been thinking about the fact that the youngest survivors are now in their late 60s, and most are in their 70s or 80s. They won't be around forever, and if somebody tries to do this film in 10 or 15 years, there won't be many people left.
I really feel like this is the last opportunity to make this film. Within the next couple of years, most of these people, half of them anyway, will be gone. We have a guy who was a 25-year-old doctor and he's now 87, and he's a remarkable person with a remarkable memory. We also interviewed people at the other end of the spectrum, who were 3 or 4 at the time. They had clear memories, or fragments of memories, that I truly believe they held. But the things around those fragments were really shaky. Over the years they've assumed their parents' or their uncles' version of the story, and it's become their own.
Your main focus is on the Japanese survivors, but you also talk to American soldiers and scientists who were involved. Why was that important?
Just as a storyteller, you have all these people on the ground who were united by a moment, when they sensed or saw the bomb falling, saw the white flash. Then many of them blacked out. One of the people in the film told us he woke up 48 days later.
We wanted to fill in the blank spots. So there's a hole in the story, and we wanted to tell the story of the bomb. We don't ever present this as good guys and bad guys, victims and murderers. I think that's very disrespectful to both sides. I think meeting people on the American side opens the film up and gives you a different point of view. I thought it was important to meet the Americans who did it, without demonizing them. The scientists were plucked out of grad school. The servicemen were, like, 22 years old and given this mission to end the war. They were decent, good people who had to do this thing.
Just for their sanity, I think they've had to deal with what happened in their own ways, partly by not looking into it any further. They all had this 1950s view of radiation: "Hey, it's more dangerous to drive a car! You use a microwave every day!" They clearly have black holes in their knowledge.
I was thinking that if I had something like that to carry around, I might find a way not to think about it.
Sure, yeah.
Did they have any trepidation about talking to you?
I considered sending in one of the co-producers, who's not Asian, to do the interviews. But that felt like tricking them. On the other hand, I didn't want to have to explain myself, or make them feel safe with me. I didn't want to say, "Listen, my dad was in the 442 [the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans] and fought in Europe against the Nazis." I just went in and thought, we'll get what we get. I did feel with one of the guys that if someone else were there, he'd have been talking differently about the Japanese. He'd say, "The Japs -- anese..." [Laughter.]
Do you think people are finally ready, in both countries, to deal with this stuff?
That's the one incredibly encouraging thing. People seem to be open to hearing these stories and not just running away from the words "Hiroshima and Nagasaki." We've been doing that for 60 years.
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