The Vow from Hiroshima DVD cover
The blast from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is estimated to have killed at least 70,000 people immediately and another 20,000–80,000 from injuries and radiation poisoning afterward. Yet there were survivors in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki, where a second bomb was dropped three days later; they have come to be called hibakusha, or “those affected by the bomb.” Susan Strickler’s documentary focuses on one of them, Setsuko Thurlow (née Nakamura), an octogenarian who, at age thirteen, was the only one of twenty-eight students in her class rescued from the rubble of the girls’ school she was attending in Hiroshima when the bomb fell.
Nine years later she received a scholarship to study in the United States, where she was almost immediately asked about a recent test of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific that had killed a Japanese fisherman. She replied that she was angry, a response that led to threats that convinced her to move to Canada with her husband, a history professor who supported her decision to become involved in the movement to abolish nuclear weapons.
Setsuko began to give presentations about what she had experienced in Hiroshima to groups in schools, at conferences, and wherever she might be invited to share her memories, in which she spoke graphically but in measured tones about the horrors she had witnessed. She also encouraged other hibakusha to tell their stories, founded an organization to mobilize activists to speak to the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and spoke out against the employment of nuclear power for peaceful uses because of the dangers it posed.
One of the people impacted by her work was Mitchie Takeuchi, who attended the rebuilt school in Hiroshima whose destruction Thurlow had survived but confessed that she knew little about her own family’s experience of the bombing because of their reluctance to discuss it. Thurlow encouraged her to do research on her parents and grandparents, and the stunning results of Takeuchi's investigations are juxtaposed with Thurlow’s story, providing an excellent counterpoint while confirming the influence of Thurlow’s efforts; Takeuchi, along with Strickler, produced The Vow from Hiroshima.
The film culminates with Thurlow’s service as a founding member of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and her traveling to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the organization in 2017. She was also active in the successful campaign for the passage of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by the United Nations in the same year, a triumph diluted by the boycotting of the vote by all the nuclear-weapon states, including the U.S. That decision, however, seems only to have reenergized the determined, feisty woman so ably portrayed by this inspiring documentary about responding to tragedy and making a difference. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P.