Survivors recall horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

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Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, navigator of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, is among those who believe it was necessary to end the war.

He saw Okazaki’s film and didn’t seem overwhelmed.

“The story about the survivors of this has been told many, many times,” Van Kirk, 86, told The Associated Press. “It doesn’t change. And this is just another story about survivors. I don’t think there will be much reaction to it at all.”

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There were no advance protests. Nevins is curious about how it will be received after what she thought was a strangely dry-eyed reception at a Sundance Film Festival screening. “It was well-received intellectually but it wasn’t well-received emotionally,” she said.

Other than documenting the horror of war, the film carefully takes no sides on the morality of dropping the bomb. Okazaki even refuses, in an interview, to say how he personally feels about it.

“I do have strong opinions and feelings about it,” he said. “But I have a stronger motivation to get these stories out. There was this empty space on the shelves under ‘H.”’

That’s not entirely true. The 1970s film “Hiroshima Mon Amour” contained post-detonation footage. The 1989 Japanese film “Kuroi ame (Black Rain)” was about the aftermath. Reporter John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima” has received wide circulation.

Something Okazaki found mystifying, and a barrier to his research, was the lingering stigma faced by bomb survivors in Japan. Perhaps it’s because they remind Japanese of a time they’d rather forget; it was never fully explained to him. When he sought to interview the “Hiroshima Maidens,” girls who came to the United States in the 1950s for surgery on disfigurements, the only one who’d talk was a woman who now lives in the U.S.

Okazaki also found a plaque where the Nagasaki bomb detonated that said everyone within a one kilometer area was killed instantly — except an 8-year-old girl who had fallen asleep in a bomb shelter.

He tracked her down and she refused a meeting.

“Her husband only knew that she was a survivor and she felt that (being in the film) would hurt her husband’s business and her children’s job opportunities,” he said. “So the story will never be told.”

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