Honoring witnesses to a nuclear nightmare
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
When Steven Okazaki was making "White Light/Black Rain," his terrific HBO documentary about the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he couldn't afford to think too deeply about the material. "I just took one deep breath," he remembers, "and continued through the whole film."
It was only later, after the Sundance Film Festival in January, that Okazaki, a 1991 Oscar winner for the documentary short "Days of Waiting," could take it all in: to absorb the reality of 210,000 deaths caused by atomic bomb attacks on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945; the 160,000 subsequent deaths from delayed radiation effects; the images of scorched bodies, flattened cityscapes and children discovering their parents' remains; the callous Japanese government that treated survivors as "untouchables," as one witness says.
"Around March," Okazaki says, "I suddenly started feeling it and thinking about the whole thing. I just wanted to stay in bed." He spent two months in "a delayed depression."
Okazaki, 55, shot the documentary in Japan with a Japanese crew, and interviewed more than 100 people before choosing the 14 hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) who appear in the film. Among them: Shigeko Sasamori, who was 13 when Hiroshima was bombed and became one of 25 "Hiroshima Maidens" flown to the United States for cosmetic surgery; Keiji Nakazawa, who was 6, and later illustrated the horrors of Hiroshima in his manga series "Barefoot Gen;" and Sakue Shimohira, who found her mother's charred body following the Nagasaki explosion, and watched it "turn to ash."
Unlike most films about the bombings, "White Light/Black Rain" includes wrenching footage of bombing victims, both the dead and the burned, disfigured survivors. Katsuji Yoshida, 13 at the time, remembers the scene, his eyes still registering the horror: "People with no arms, no legs, their intestines spilling out. Brains spilled out of crushed skulls. Black, carbonized bodies." In Japan, where it opened to rave reviews this month, "White Light/Black Rain" is a cause celebre. "If the story isn't told, foolish people will quickly forget," says Koji Yakusho, the Japanese star of "Shall We Dance?" and "Babel." "What we can do is to keep telling the story, over and over, until we have blisters on our eyes and ears."
Tadao Sato, Japan's top film critic, wrote: "Perhaps Okazaki is blessed with a personality that can so comfort anyone that they're compelled to lay bare their hearts, for every survivor on screen emits an aura of such beauty and gracefulness."
Okazaki illustrates the film with watercolors and drawings made by survivors following the destruction and, surprisingly, includes interviews he did with four veterans of the bombing missions of August 1945. Three of the men express a kind of wincing, barely articulated remorse. But Enola Gay navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk is emphatic - almost defiant - when he says, "Nope, never had a nightmare, never had a dream about this particular subject."
Okazaki, who lives in the Berkeley hills with his wife, journalist/author Peggy Orenstein, and 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, has received three Oscar nominations altogether. His subjects have ranged from heroin addiction to hula dancing but he'd never had a chance, despite several attempts, to make a comprehensive record of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki legacy.
"This project, really, was 25 years on my mind and in the making," Okazaki says in his office at the Saul Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley. Soft-spoken, confident but reserved, Okazaki is wearing a black polo shirt and jeans. His corona of salt-and-pepper hair is thick and and stylish and stands straight-up, like Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's.
In 1980, Okazaki says, he met a group of survivors in San Francisco's Japantown and, at their urging, directed a 10-minute short for KQED about a Hiroshima survivor. "Survivors," a 60-minute film about hibakusha living in California, followed. But he wasn't satisfied with either film.
"I think I was intimidated by the subject. I didn't ask the hard questions I should have asked. It just seemed awkward and impolite. I vowed at that point to try again."
Following his Oscar in 1991, a Japanese television group approached him and gave him carte blanche to make a film on the subject of his choice. He said "Hiroshima/Nagasaki," they said "Fine," but canceled the project because Okazaki's proposal criticized the Japanese government's neglect of the survivors.
That was 1994. Later that year, Okazaki tried salvaging the film on a smaller scale when the Smithsonian Institution launched a comprehensive exhibit around the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped "Little Boy," the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. That exhibit was also canceled, in reaction to protests from the American Legion and other veterans' groups. At that point, Okazaki says, "I was actually really angry. I felt like, 'So, this is how history is written.' I wanted to get away from the subject."
But in 2005, the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Okazaki directed "The Mushroom Club," a 35-minute short later nominated for an Oscar.
"I thought I was done with the subject," he says. Instead, "when I was in postproduction (on "The Mushroom Club") HBO called and said, 'We have this idea. We want to do this big historical film on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.' "
And so, it all finally came together. Okazaki had a long-standing relationship with HBO, which has funded and produced some of the best documentaries of the past decade, including Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." Accompanied by his co-producer and interpreter Taro Goto, Okazaki made several trips to Japan.
The material was so intense and so draining, he found that he couldn't do multiple interviews back-to-back. "I didn't want to get to the point where you say, 'OK, we have another one to do.' "
Among the survivors, Okazaki found a "sense of urgency. They would talk about it being their last chance to tell the story." In some cases, especially "professional survivors" who had told their stories frequently, Okazaki had to be more aggressive in his questioning - to get beyond a canned response to something raw and emotional.
Okazaki edited the film by himself and delivered a first cut to HBO last fall.
"I was really happy with it. I thought, 'It works really well.' " But when he showed it to Sheila Nevins, who heads documentary programming for the network, she told Okazaki to go deeper.
"I hadn't used all the documentary footage that Americans shot showing the damage of the bombing, the physical damage to the landscape and to people. I just thought, 'This will be too hard for people to watch.' And Sheila said, 'Where's the other footage?' I said 'If we put that stuff up there, people are going to turn the channel' and she said, 'Does that mean we start censoring ourselves? Just tell the story and tell it as fully as possible.' "
Okazaki took Nevins' advice, and his film is stronger, more substantial as a result. After "White Light/Black Rain" was finished, he says, and he went through his two months of "delayed depression," he realized something he couldn't understand when he was creating the film.
"I think what the film did for me as a person is to teach me that these people went through a horrible experience, but that they survived and came out of it with an enhanced appreciation for life. "The most meaningful statement in the film, to me, is when a woman says, 'I think about my brother and how he never got to taste chocolate.' She's thinking just how great life is. And how sad it is that these people missed those things."
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Honoring witnesses to a nuclear nightmare Steven Okazaki, a Berkeley filmmaker, documents the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in "White Light/Black Rain," to be broadcast on HBO. Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia
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Honoring witnesses to a nuclear nightmare The destruction of Hiroshima is captured in the documentary "White Light/Black Rain." Filmmaker Steven Okazaki interviews 14 hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) in the film. Photo courtesy of Farallon Films
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Honoring witnesses to a nuclear nightmare Etsuko Nagano, who survived the bombing of Nagasaki, holds a photo of herself as a young girl. Photo courtesy of Etsuko Nagano
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Honoring witnesses to a nuclear nightmare A painting by Akiko Takakura, "The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Image courtesy of Akiko Takakura
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