Atomic People (BBC2)
Curious to recall, at a time when the few remaining veterans of Dunkirk and D-Day are justly celebrated as national heroes, that it wasn’t always this way.
Half a century ago, war stories were generally seen as the mark of a bore. Middle-aged ex-servicemen kept their reminiscences for regimental get-togethers or nights at the British Legion club — and many of the old soldiers who had fought at the Somme and Ypres carried their memories to the grave, untold.
It took several more decades for the country to face up to what those men had endured. And this was not exclusively a British attitude, as proved by Atomic People — a collection of interviews with Japanese survivors of the only nuclear weapons ever used in wartime.
The hibakusha, those who lived through the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, were regarded by their countrymen with embarrassment and shame for many years. Now in their 80s and 90s, their sense of relief at being able to talk openly was palpable.
And what stories they had, though many of the details were almost unbearably distressing. Photographs of countless corpses in the aftermath of the A-bombs were truly horrific.
Atomic People features the voices of some of the only people left on earth to have survived a nuclear bomb (pictured: Hiroshi Shimizu and Keiko Shimizu)
Keiko Shimizu (who features in the documentary) as a baby with her family
On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
This 90-minute documentary began gently, with a man remembering the American hits he’d heard as a schoolboy. His favourite was You Are My Sunshine — and he did a pretty good Tarzan yodel, too.
His name was Seiichiro and as a child he loved John Wayne, he said — but he hated Americans. Seven of his relatives were among the 210,000 people who died in the bombings. . . and each of those killed had their own individual story, he reminded us.
The oldest of the survivors remembered idyllic pre-war childhoods, though memories of the war itself were more vivid. At school, they had to bow to high-ranking soldiers, and drilled with bamboo spears. Their English-language textbooks were burned.
Though American planes dropped leaflets, urging the people of Hiroshima to flee for their lives, the warnings were torn up, dismissed as mere propaganda by their teachers.
When the bomb exploded, said one man, ‘it felt like the sun had fallen’. Another talking of the sky ‘raining fire’. Nothing remained of many victims but scorchmarks on the ground. One man called Hideo, who was just a toddler at the time and who was somehow shielded from the blast by furniture, was astonished to discover newsreel footage of himself 50 years later. His head was bandaged and his older brother was carrying him through the ruins on his back.
After Japan’s surrender, talk of the bombing (and criticism of the Americans) was forbidden. Children were told by their teachers that defeat was their own fault: they had not worked hard enough at school to deserve victory.
Even knowing that a few of the hibakusha went on to have full lives did not make all this any easier to watch. But this is our last chance to hear these stories, and we must make ourselves listen.