Hiroshima successors
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When photographer Haruka Sakaguchi set out to Hiroshima to document atomic bomb survivors' stories, she discovered they were far more difficult to find than she expected. Stigmatisation and survivor’s guilt discourage many from disclosing their past, and with dwindling survivors left to tell their story, memories of the atomic bomb are fading.
But a new generation has developed an unusual method of keeping those memories alive. Denshosha are the designated guardians of survivors’ memories. They act as storytellers, working with survivors to record their story and pass it down to future generations, embodying the survivor in a deeply personal way, so they do not permanently disappear.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I was a year old, my mother passed away, and my aunt raised me like her own child. |
| 0:07.0 | We lived in the house on the hills with my 17-year-old cousin Chuso. |
| 0:12.0 | During the war, food was hard to get, but Chuso would sneak a snack |
| 0:17.2 | from his friend's house and take it home without eating it, to give it to me. So I was fond of him and I called him Chunysang. |
| 0:26.4 | Chunysang would leave the house each morning while it was still dark and the |
| 0:30.7 | family was still sleeping. I was always the only one who woke up and would wish him a good day. |
| 0:37.0 | He walked to the factory in Nagasaki, making a loud noise, |
| 0:41.0 | Garagoro, with his clogs. When he returned home he would often |
| 0:47.0 | sing the song, Waka-Washi noutta, a young eagle song. A Young Eagle Song. |
| 0:58.0 | My name is Haruka Sakaguchi. I was born in Japan many years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. |
| 1:07.0 | My family and I immigrated to the US when I was an infant. |
| 1:11.0 | At school, I was taught that the atomic bomb was a necessary evil to end the |
| 1:16.7 | bloodshed of World War II. We quickly moved on to the next chapter. I felt like something was missing. Now over a decade after that |
| 1:27.0 | history lesson, I live and work as a photographer in New York City. A few years ago I returned to Japan to find those |
| 1:36.7 | missing stories. Flying flying again today in Kasumigaura. |
| 1:44.0 | A huge crowd of hope is springing. |
| 1:47.0 | I heard it so many times I knew it off by heart. |
| 1:53.5 | On the morning of August 9th, Chunysan said he didn't want to go to work because he was |
| 1:59.4 | sleepy. |
| 2:01.5 | But soon he changed his mind and left the house as usual saying, |
| 2:05.0 | I'll be back. |
| 2:08.0 | This is one of those stories. |
... |
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