Sixty-two years ago today
Etsuko Nagano, who is featured in White Light/Black Rain, was 16 years old when she lost her brother and sister in the bombing of Nagasaki. 2007 HBO Documentary Films

Sixty-two years ago today

Steven Okazaki brings the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the present in his new documentary about survivors

By Angilee Shah
Contributing Writer

Friday, August 3, 2007

On the cover of the Aug. 1, 2005 issue of Time magazine is a portrait of Kinuyo Watanabe, a Hiroshima survivor who lost her entire family -- parents, husband, two children -- and, fifty years later, holds up a black and white image of the cloud created by the atomic bomb dropped on her town for a photographer. Filmmaker Steven Okazaki's staging of the survivors whom he highlights in his HBO documentary White Light/Black Rain is reminiscent of this, for all intents and purposes, very compelling cover image.

There are a few significant differences, however.

Time magazine very emphatically places its interview subjects in the past. Watanabe is shown in dim light, almost as though the image has been cast in sepia. The seven other survivors featured in the magazine are cast in much the same way, against brown backgrounds that make the images look archival. If the survivors were not elderly, a reader might make the mistake of thinking the photos were taken fifty years ago.

Okazaki takes a different approach. The survivors in White Light/Black Rain are also introduced holding photographs, but of themselves at about the age they were when the bombs fell. His version of the story begins in present-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vibrant cities bustling with youthful Japanese punk rock bands performing on the streets and Christmas-time consumers walking in and out of department stores.

And when he transitions into interviews with the survivors, the colors do not change. He very insistently places the survivors -- with their memories and scars and bomb-induced ailments -- in the Technicolor present. It's a subtle difference from Time's approach, but one that gives the issue a significant immediacy for the viewer.

It's the kind of immediacy journalist John Hersey achieved in his 1946 book Hiroshima, which was originally published as an entire issue of The New Yorker. Hersey, much like Okazaki, took a chronological look at the events of Aug. 6, 1945, focusing on six Hiroshima survivors' accounts of events in the days following the blast and then looking at their situations months later. Hersey weaves the stories of his subjects together in a most matter-of-fact way, which leaves space for the survivors' voices to come through.

Okazaki achieves a similar feat with his 14 survivors. His film is not dressed up in dramatic music, nor does it overtly try to shock the viewer. This is not to say that the film is not shocking. Like Hersey's deadpan delivery, White Light/Black Rain lets the survivors' voices, as well as their paintings and sketches, do the work. The film is a much-needed update on intensely personal narratives.

"I admired the John Hersey book. It was and is the main reference still," Okazaki said. It is, however, "disturbing that nothing else has come along -- that book was written right after the bombing."

Okazaki also cites psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's 1991 book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, a 594-page psychological analysis of the effects of the bomb on survivors. Lifton, however, is an open proponent of denuclearization, while Okazaki is particular about keeping his own political beliefs not just out of them film, but out of his discussion of the film.

When he first previewed the film in Japan, reporters seemed preoccupied with "the message," Okazaki said. "I didn't really want to make a message film, and they [reporters in Japan] would say 'Ok, so what is your message?'"

White Light/Black Rain debuted in Japan at a time when remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki is of vital importance. That week, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyuma was facing heavy criticism for his remarks on the bombings. In a speech he said, "I understand that the bombings ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped." Critics saw the comment as both insensitive to survivors and accepting of America's attack, and their criticism was virulent enough that Kyuma resigned on July 3 this year.

But even more pressing, and a topic addressed directly in the film, is Japan’s legislative efforts to revise its constitution, specifically Article 9, the clause in which Japan commits itself to pacifism and gives up its right to wage war. Though the Liberal Democratic Party's sound defeat in last weekend's parliamentary elections effectively ended Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's constitutional reform plans, the political debate over Japan's military policies, its relationship with the United States, and its role in Asia continues.

But Okazaki told AsiaMedia that the political debate leaves out one crucial element: "What disturbs me is that the conversation is never about people's lives, it's about strategy," he said. "As if war is just strategy and battles won or lost."

It is doubtful the film will make it to Japanese television because it is does not make the Japanese government look very good, Okazaki said. "The Americans may have dropped the bomb and killed the people, but the Japanese, in my opinion, really made lives really miserable. They basically ignored the survivors for as long as they possibly could."

White Light/Black Rain debuts on HBO on Aug. 6. Visit the HBO website for a complete schedule. The film will screen in Japan at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo and Theatre Umeda in Osaka. The full schedule of screenings at theaters in Japan is available via international distributor, Zazie Film's website.

For more information and to read a an edited transcript of AsiaMedia and Asia Pacific Art's interview with Stephen Okazaki, visit the Asia Pacific Arts website.

Date Posted: 8/3/2007