WIT Life #156: 4th Annual Peace Festival
Events, Film, Translating/Interpreting, WIT Life, Writers 
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WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
Like most of you, I have spent the last couple of days glued to the coverage of the earthquake/tsunami/radioactive fallout news from Japan. I left Tokyo the day before the quake and was shocked to come home to the awful news. The feelings of helplessness and immense sadness can be overwhelming at times, so I was happy to be able to help out as a volunteer interpreter at the 4th Annual Peace Festival this weekend. It just felt like the right place to be in the midst of all that is happening.
On Saturday night I attended the world premiere of Twice Bombed: The Legacy of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, which told the amazing tale of
this first officially recognized double atomic bomb survivor (二重被爆者 or nijuu hibakusha) who passed away last year at the age of 93. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th respectively and was a truly inspiring figure, beginning his speaking out about his experience just five years before he died. Up until that point, his wife and daughter had encouraged him to stay silent as they were scared that nuclear proliferation advocates would use Yamaguchi as an example to say that due to his healthy appearance, the atomic bomb was not all that dangerous and could have been dropped multiple times without major consequences.
However, Yamaguchi’s impetus to come forth with his story was the death from cancer of his 59-year old son, who had been exposed to the a-bomb when he was just five months old. Yamaguchi expressed that his son should not have died before him, and took this as a sign that he should make the most of the rest of the time he had on this earth. He was not satisfied with only sharing his story domestically, and applied for his first passport at the ripe old age of 90. He traveled to the UN for the screening of this documentary in the summer of 2006, and while there he made an appeal for an end to war and elimination of nuclear weapons. Yamaguchi’s rally cry was “One for All, All for One.” He stressed our common humanity and bore no ill will toward the United States for what had been done.
Director Hidetaka Inazuka was on hand at the event to introduce his film and for a Q&A following. His background is as a television producer, but he was struck by Yamaguchi’s story when he encountered some of his essays in a book seven years ago. At that time, he wrote Yamaguchi a letter and began a friendship with him. Twice Bombed is his second documentary, his first having focused on not only Yamaguchi but seven other double survivors as well (There are said to have been as many as 165).
Inazuka is not the only director to
have been inspired by Yamaguchi. This footage from the film shows when James Cameron paid a visit to Yamaguchi just 10 days before he passed away (shown here with Last Train from Hiroshima author Charles Pellegrino). Cameron promised to make a movie out of Yamaguchi’s story, but due to commitments to other projects he is not expected to begin tackling this until at least 2015.
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