14 atomic-bomb survivors remember, 62 years later

It’s hard to imagine HBO’s disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan appearing on an American TV network 10 or 20 years after the event. Filmmaker Steve Okazaki tried -- and failed -- to make it for the 50th anniversary.

There is apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow HBO’s premiere of “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” at 7:30 tonight, exactly 62 years after the United States detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.

Why is the time finally right?

“History is always worth recording, and if there is a moment in history that hasn’t been recorded and you’re in a place where you have the resources, you should do it,” said Sheila Nevins, head of HBO’s documentary unit.

The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and grotesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because -- unlike the well-recorded Holocaust -- this was something done by Americans, Nevins said.

HBO and Okazaki also felt the same urgency experienced by “The Greatest Generation” author Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns, maker of PBS’ epic series on World War II coming this fall. People who fought and survived World War II are dying quickly now, and soon there will be no more eyewitnesses.

The film is built on stories told by 14 survivors, with children’s pictures depicting the bombing and footage of the injured that were banned from the public for 25 years. The American-born Okazaki interviews crew members who dropped the bombs and wondered whether they would escape before their planes were engulfed in the mushroom cloud.

The project dated to the early 1980s, when Okazaki agreed to accompany his sister to a San Francisco-area meeting of bomb survivors for a school project she was doing.

Okazaki wanted to make a comprehensive documentary about the experience of living through the bombings and began doing it for PBS in the mid-1990s. But the project fell through. He instead made a more personal film, “The Mushroom Club,” and figured his dream was dead.

That’s when he heard from Nevins.

“I was shocked when they called and said they wanted to do this film, and when they described it, I realized it was the film I had wanted to do for 25 years,” he 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 feels about it.