"I've come to realize that the reason I'm alive is to tell people
what happened, so they'll understand," says Kiyoko Imori, the
only one of 620 students in her school to survive the Hiroshima
bombing. Steven Okazaki interviewed more than 100 survivors of
the bombing for his haunting film White Light/Black Rain,
which premieres Monday, August 6, on HBO. The film features clips
from interviews with thirteen of the survivors as well as four
Americans on the planes that dropped the bombs.
The two bombs dropped on Japan in August
1945 had a destructive force that stretches the limits of human
imagination. Creating temperatures of 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit
and winds of 1,000 miles per hour, they killed about 210,000
people immediately. Another 160,000 are estimated to have died
over the years from illnesses caused by the radioactive "black rain" that
followed. That adds up to about the population of Miami today.
Gone.
After the war, the survivors, one of
whom bitterly describes herself as a "guinea pig," were studied but denied treatment
by U.S. doctors, though a handful were brought to the United
States for free plastic surgery. Many worry that they have passed
on genetic mutations to subsequent generations. Sumiteru Taniguchi,
a teenage mail carrier on August 6, 1945, takes off his shirt
and matter-of-factly invites the viewer to look closely at the
burns on his arm and back, the ribs fused to skin, and bones
so brittle they break if he coughs too hard. As a child being
treated for burns, the pain was so awful that he begged the doctors
to kill him. "I've shown you my wounds because I want you to
know this can't happen again," he says.
Okazaki's film, made with a Japanese-U.S.
production team, evokes the atomic bombings and their aftermath
by interweaving such interview material with newsreel clips,
survivors' paintings of the firestorm, and long-suppressed
archival footage of the aftermath. There is no narrator, but
there is a moodily atmospheric soundtrack in the style of "This American Life." Some
of the images in the middle of the film are very hard to look
at, unless you're a pathologist, but it's important we not
look away from what was done in our name.
"I can't describe what I witnessed. I don't have the words.
It's like when you burn a fish on the grill. That's what they
looked like," a survivor recalls. One of the burned fish, a woman
now reconstructed by plastic surgery, describes her father peeling
her charred face away from her head with scissors. Another recalls
looking at a woman whose body had been burned beyond recognition
and realizing from the gold tooth that it was her mother. As
she and her sister reached out, their mother crumbled to ashes
before their eyes. "This happened 60 years ago, but I'll never
forget it," she says quietly.
Okazaki slips between such survivor accounts and the testimony
of four Americans on the planes that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese and Americans in the film--victims and executioners--are
irrevocably linked by the bombings, but their narratives of what
connects them are surreally divergent. The disconnection between
their perspectives is as unsettling as the images of dead and
disfigured bodies. While the survivors tell deeply personal and
cinematically vivid stories of indescribable destruction on the
ground with an arresting stillness, the Americans seem never
to have descended psychologically from the altitude at which
they overflew the cities they destroyed. (The one exception is
the Enola Gay copilot who tears up when he meets a Hiroshima
survivor in a 1950s TV show clip.)
Harold Agnew, who went on to become
director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the Bomb
was developed, laughs slightly as he says, "I wrote in my notebook, 'It went off. It really
did!'" Explaining that he simply wanted to win the war, he adds, "No
sympathy, no regrets." Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator, saying
he was proud "we dropped it on time, on target," tells the viewer
he "never had a nightmare, never had a dream on this particular
subject. Never had a nightmare, period." Such banal serenity
is disturbing.
White Light/Black Rain comes at an opportune
moment. Arms control experts are newly concerned that, at a time
when 400,000 Hiroshimas wait in storage in today's nuclear stockpiles,
a U.S. city will go the way of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed
by nuclear terrorists. Meanwhile the last Hiroshima veterans--both
those who dropped the Bomb and those who endured it--are passing
from this world, leaving behind only the archival shadow of their
experience. All this at a time when our ability to think about
Hiroshima feels stuck: In 1995, the last time the United States
tried to think seriously about Hiroshima, outraged veterans,
politicians, and pundits forced the cancellation of a Smithsonian
exhibit on the atomic bombings in Washington, D.C., rather than
allow the public to know what professional historians have to
say on this matter; and only last month, Japanese Defense Minister
Fumio Kyuma was forced to resign for speaking the unspeakable
in Japan--that the bombing of Hiroshima might have been justified.
White Light/Black Rain dramatizes the feeling
of being stuck through an inventive visual device: Many of the
survivors are shown standing immobile in a public place, clutching
a photo of themselves shortly before the Bomb split their life
in two, and the camera slowly zooms in on the juxtaposed images
of the person that was, now miniaturized, and the person that
is, while pedestrians stream by all around. This posed immobility
amidst the flow of life conveys as much as any verbal testimony
that, for the survivors, it is always August 1945.
In their own way, Americans are frozen in time with the survivors.
If the survivors are inexorably pulled back, as if by a force
of historical gravity, to that moment when the splitting of the
atom split history, Americans seem to be frozen by a refusal
to look afresh at what was done in their name. The 1995 Smithsonian
exhibit, timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings,
was scrapped because it included a Japanese schoolgirl's charred
lunch box, photographs of cooked and disfigured bodies, and a
window into the discussions of professional historians. Some
of these historians argue that it is not true that a million
U.S. soldiers would have died in a land invasion of Japan, as
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson later claimed; that the Japanese
would have surrendered soon without either invasion or the Bomb;
that the second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was gratuitous and
unnecessary; that the bombing was as much a message to the Soviets
to behave themselves as a way to end the war with Japan; or that
the architects of the Bomb pushed for careerist reasons to see
their invention used.
Critics have accused these historians
of "revisionism." This
is a curious accusation, since revisionism is the job description
of the historian. If revisionism were not allowed, what would
historians do? As new documents become available, and as the
distance of time enables new perspective, historians are supposed
to enrich our national conversation by asking new questions and
revising the past. Otherwise our memory of the past, and thus
our understanding of the present, is cryogenically frozen and
the heartbeat of national conversation falters.
Filmmakers, like historians, work to help us see anew. White
Light/Black Rain neither explains nor judges the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki, an American of
Japanese descent, simply asks us to look closely, unflinchingly
at what was done, and to accept the witness of the survivors
in the twilight of their lives. "All this pain we carry in
our hearts and in our bodies, it must end with us," says
Sakue Shimohira. Until we can look at the schoolgirl's charred
lunch box, until we can take in the suffering of the survivors,
our defense of Hiroshima--if we still want to make one--will
be dishonest. And until we look at what these weapons do
as unflinchingly as Okazaki's survivors look into his camera,
they will not be able to die in peace, knowing that their
message was heard. |
