More than 64 years have gone by since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, August 6 and 9, 1945. As Steven Okazaki’s 2007 documentary for HBO, White Light / Black Rain, shows, for many, younger Japanese, even in the affected cities, the dates bring up no connection to the horrific events. For others, who were ten and twelve and twenty at the time, the experience of being burned and mutilated, of watching their siblings and parents die, of years of radiation sickness have been with them every moment since the bombs went off.
Okazaki uses many of the black and white images we may have seen over the years, of the unimaginable destruction in both cities, of acres of blasted, seared ground where once there had been tall buildings, trees and streets. He shows some of the gruesome images taken within days of the bombing of the charred corpses, the indistinguishible faces, the separated limbs. But what he really brings are the remembrances of people who survived while their whole familes died. Survivor’s guilt is clear and spoken about. One woman’s sister stepped in front of a speeding train in such despair over the loss of her family. The speaker herself tried to do the same, and stepped out of the way at the last minute. She spoke about the courage to die, and the courage to live.
They spoke about the discrimination they faced in Japan because of their mutilations, or for showing the signs of radiation sickness which many thought to be contagious. And interestingly, none of them spoke with pointed anger at the United States for bringing the bomb. One man had been part of an activist group to make the Japanese government take responsibility for war victims, as the initiator of the war. A woman had been to the United States in the mid 1950s as one of Twenty Hiroshima Maidens brought for plastic surgery. She herself had had 30 operation in a year and a half. She remembered fondly the kindess of the Americans who helped her.
One of the men, after we have heard him talking and seen a relatively undamaged face for much of the film, takes off his shirt, on camera, to reveal such a map of wounds and traumatized flesh we can barely take it in. His ribs are literally showing, the pulse of the heart beating behind them, visible. And then he turns to show his back. He recalls how he cried out for death as the doctors repeatedly had to pull off old bandages and replace them with new. His wife still applies salve all across is back to ease the pain. 64 years later.
What they all spoke about, in common, was that such a horror not be allowed to happen again, that the pain and suffering they had had to carry should be taken as a warning and a plea to never use such weaponry again.
Though they, nor the film maker, didn’t carry a pure pacifist message, it’s hard to see how one could not extend the argument of their lives to those who were burned, maimed and rendered lifeless in the firebombing of Tokyo, done without nuclear weapons, or the Chinese hacked to death, raped, burned and drowned in Nankin at the hands of the Japanese, or those bombed and blackened in Dresden or London, or the savage treatment at the hands of Japanse soldiers in Indonesia, the Philippines, in Korea. From everywhere, survivors could be found to speak of the great sorrow and pain of their lives. Whether the storm of destruction took thirty seconds or three days matters little to them, nor should it to those of us who don’t need to have our eyes blown out to understand the tragedy.
White Light / Black Rain is a non-polemical, wrenching plea for peace, for dismantling the weapons of destruction — the most dangerous ones first.
It’s available at Netflix and other DVD distributors. It will trouble you to watch. Hearing the tears, and yes laughter, of the victims as they remember their losses and show their survival is a trouble that will bring rewards.
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