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The Mushroom Club is a filmmaker's journey to Hiroshima, 60 years after an atomic
bomb was dropped on the city (and, three days later, on
Nagasaki), effectively ending World War II. Academy Award®-
winning Steven Okazaki, who first visited the city in 1980, takes
a very personal look at Hiroshima - the place, the people, the
historical event, the idea. His 35-minute film is a compelling
collection of everyday images - a class photo, a spool of thread,
a handful of buttons - and the powerful stories that come with
them, as told by everyone from an old woman who was a 25-
year-old newlywed at the time, to three 60-year-olds who were
in their mothers' wombs when the bomb was dropped on
August 6, 1945.
On August 6, 1945, some 110,000 people were killed
instantly when the U.S. B-52 bomber Enola Gay dropped
an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a Japanese city located
some 550 miles south of Tokyo. Tens of thousands more
died of injuries and contamination in the years that
followed. Both a personal reflection and a portrait of the
city and people of Hiroshima, The Mushroom Club explores
the legacy of the bombing: from its myths and monuments
to its survivors, to the politics of pacifism and
militarization, which Japan still struggles with today. The
film's subjects include a 90-year-old who collects melted
glass and metal that still washes ashore; a comic-book
artist who cheated death when he bent down to pick up a
stone; and several members of "The Mushroom Club," a
support group for children born with defects caused by
nuclear contamination.
Steven Okazaki decided to make his film in 1995, when the
50th anniversary of the bombing came and went with
minimal media coverage. "In Hiroshima, there was a lot of
anticipation around the 50th anniversary," he recalls.
"People thought that the Hiroshima story would finally be
heard around the world. Then it came and nothing
happened....The people in Hiroshima, the peace movement
in Japan, went kind of numb after that and still hasn't
recovered." Okazaki adds that while the Enola Gay, the
plane that dropped the A-bomb, is on exhibit in the
Smithsonian, there is no mention of radiation or people
dying, "because it is still too controversial to admit to the
extraordinary human suffering caused by one bomb. It's a
lesson in how history gets written."
About the filmmaker: In 1985, three years after
completing his first feature documentary, Survivors,
Steven Okazaki received an Oscar® nomination for
Unfinished Business (Documentary Feature), about the WWII incarceration of
Japanese-Americans. In 1990, he won an Oscar® (Documentary Short Subject) and a
Peabody for Days of Waiting, the story of Estelle Ishigo,
one of the few Caucasians to be interned with Japanese-
Americans during WWII. In 2000, HBO premiered Okazaki's
Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street, an Emmy®-
nominated chronicle of five young heroin addicts. His most
recent HBO project was 2005's Rehab, a look into a California rehab clinic that won Okazaki the Nancy Dickerson
Whitehead Award, honoring journalists who have
"demonstrated the highest standards of reporting on drug
issues."
CREDITS: Executive Producers: Tomoko Watanabe and Peggy Orenstein;
Produced, Written, Directed, Filmed and Edited by Steven Okazaki;
Associate Producer: Yumi Nekomoto.
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