Conversations: Steven Okazaki

Just to clarify that: What we see in that color film shot by the Americans, not long after the bombing, is two survivors who suffered gruesome injuries. And those turned out to be people you interviewed, people who are still alive in the 21st century. That's remarkable, to realize that this event is a living memory for a lot of people. About how many survivors did you meet in Japan?

I've followed the subject for about 25 years, and I've met about 500 survivors in that time. For this project we pre-interviewed about 100 of them. Some of them might be casual, just quick meetings at a coffee shop, or walking into a sort of community center with about 20 people. Actually, that was a bad idea because people started talking and you couldn't stop them. The people we talked to at the end got really mad and said, "I have a long story too, and why did they get so much time and you're cutting this short?" People have really held this story in. In many cases they haven't even talked to their children or husbands and wives about it, so, in some cases, their own children don't even know they're atomic bomb survivors,

That's amazing.

People still say that you can affect your marriage possibilities and your job opportunities, or your family's, so survivors are very wary about letting people know.

I've heard this before, that there's a stigma in Japanese society associated with being a survivor of the atomic bomb. Is that primarily about the health issues that may be involved, or is it shame? Or some mixture of the two?

I think it's a complicated thing. Japanese always say, "The nail that stands up gets beaten down," and just being different in Japanese culture is not a good thing. It's frowned upon, to flaunt your differences, and it's frowned upon to talk about yourself. Typically, Japanese parents, when they're talking about their children, do the opposite of American parents. They put their children down, and people are supposed to assume that this is exactly the opposite of the truth: They're not bad students; they're the best students.

People also tell stories about how closely, before marriage, the families check each other out. In some cases they hire detectives to do background checks. Many times survivors marry other survivors. When you have a survivor that's married a non-survivor, they brag about how brave an act of courage it is to marry a survivor.

I talked about this last night: There was a plaque at the hypo-center [the center of the blast] saying that one 8-year-old girl survived in this area, and everyone else perished. We tracked her down, and she said, "Please don't contact me again. My husband has a business and he feels business would be hurt. My children don't know I'm a survivor, and I don't want them to know."

Partly, this movie is about dealing with two different countries, two different cultures, that have both been silent about what happened. In Japan there is this complicated sense of shame that you've described. And in the United States, we sometimes argue about the morality or necessity of the act, but I don't think we've ever really talked about the consequences.

I think it was really putting a human face on the discussion. Certainly the most upsetting thing about doing this film is to see it become more and more timely over the last two years. I was watching "24" last weekend when they set off an atomic bomb. It tells you that people are now considering, "Yeah, that's really possible." I think the really remarkable thing for me in the film was that when we interviewed the scientists who designed the bomb and the veterans who dropped it, on one hand, they were all very adamant that they had no second thoughts and no regrets, and at the same time they were all adamant that the danger was real. The people who dropped the bomb think that the reality is really close; it's something we all have to consider seriously.

The other thing that frightened me was looking at the propaganda footage in the film. All you have to do is replace the word "Japanese" with "Islamic" and it was the same thing: These are people who don't care about life, because they're going to heaven. I was certainly thinking about that.

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