Conversations: Steven Okazaki

The filmmaker behind "White Light Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" shares the survivors' stories he explores in his devastating documentary. An interview and podcast.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Aug. 6, 2007 |

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.

Next page: Survivors, shame and silence