Educational Media Reviews Online

The dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 looms large in discussions of 20th Century history, and both American and Japanese culture. However, this documentary, conceived by Shinpei Takeda, a filmmaker living in Mexico, and shot by both Takeda and an old high school friend he reunites with for a month to shoot this footage, is concerned with the effects of the atomic bomb on a much smaller, personal scale. The two friends travel by car from Vancouver, British Columbia to the U.S.-Mexico border and gather film of Japanese men and women, all children in one or the other of the cities where the bombs fell, who later emigrated to America or Canada. These survivors tell the story of what happened on those horrible days in August of 1945, and how their lives were forever changed.

Takeda, a first-time documentary filmmaker, has made a lean and straightforward film, wisely focusing on letting the survivors tell their own stories with a minimum of prompting or specific questions. What ties everything together, and also provides more context for viewers, is that Takeda turns the camera on himself and his friend, who struggle with how to deal with the emotional storms these interviews have freed within the survivors and within the two of them as well. Nothing is sugarcoated; at one point Takeda’s friend is angry for having agreed to come, for having been exposed to such heart-wrenching stories and people who, for some, haven’t spoken of the bombs for decades.

As the film continues, the two friends grow more exhausted as they feel the burden of these people’s stories, these people’s lives, being transferred to them, individually but also generationally. All the survivors are now elderly, and once they die, will anyone willingly remember the tragedy of August 1945 in anything but a removed, scholarly and historical way? Takeda has no answer for these questions, and doesn’t have the hubris to suggest this is why the film he’s making is useful or important. In the end, the interviews are concluded and the two friends part ways, but few answers seem available. Perhaps this is why many of the shots in this film are of the roadside, the fields, forests, and street scenes the friends drive through. Their physical wandering, to gather these highly charged memories, never resolves into a cohesive unit, never finds an emotional release. And so the emotional and philosophical wandering becomes a literal presence in the film, in the empty spaces of highway and briefly glimpsed people and buildings outside the windows.

In thinking about this film for classroom and library use, there are pros and cons. The film is not in any way visually graphic: the photographs used from 1945, and there are many, are of general chaos and destruction, or photographs from the survivors’ lives before the bombs. However, the stories themselves are very graphic, and as often as not, the survivors become highly emotional while telling them. A mature group of college-age students, or adults, would be encouraged as an appropriate audience. The film is deeply grounded in the personal experiences of its interviewees, and the combination of that with Takeda’s light-handed approach to conclusions drawn from their stories makes this a highly moving and contemplative piece on lives affected by the atomic bomb.