TOKYO -- Two Hiroshima television journalists have turned years of reporting on Japan's atomic bomb museum by a local broadcaster into a documentary film about preserving memories of the 1945 bombing.

Naoki Tachikawa, 48, one of the film's directors and its producer, spoke about the work during a recent interview with the Mainichi Shimbun. Tachikawa is head of the news department at Hiroshima Home Television Co.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where the film is set, opened in 1955, 10 years after the atomic bombing, as a municipal facility. It houses and displays no fewer than 20,000 items, including belongings of atomic bomb victims and everyday objects deformed by heat from the blast. In addition to exhibitions, A-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, sometimes give talks there.

The museum is one of the symbolic places where various thoughts intersect, such as "How should people come to terms with the catastrophe of atomic bombings that are engraved in human history?" and "How should people pass on what they have learned about the bombings?"

The number of visitors to the museum has seen record highs for three straight years, reaching about 2.6 million in fiscal 2025. Visitors include children on school trips from within and outside Hiroshima Prefecture as well as foreign dignitaries who come to Japan and make their way to the museum. As a symbol of Hiroshima, the atomic bombed city, and as a place that sends out a message aspiring for nuclear abolition, it has shown an immense presence.

The film is titled "Genbaku Shiryokan: Kataritsugu mono tachi," whose title roughly translates to "Atomic bomb museum: those who pass on the stories." At the center of the 101-minute film is unmistakably "people." It presents a chronological history of the museum, focusing on the thoughts of its successive directors, including its first director, Shogo Nagaoka, who collected materials by hand in the city soon after the atomic bombing. Nagaoka passed away in 1973 at age 71. There is no narration in the film. That instead highlights the strength of the voices of the people featured in it.

One symbolic scene shows Yoshitaka Kawamoto, who since 1983 served for 10 years as the museum's eighth director, speaking in 1990 about his role. "All that remains of those who were in my year are these three photographs," he says haltingly as he looks at the photos. He was exposed to the atomic bombing in a classroom at then Hiroshima First Middle School and was the only survivor in his class of 45.

"I think this museum is a human cry. I want people, as human beings, to feel the voiceless voices in their hearts. That is always my wish," he says. Kawamoto passed away in 2002 at age 69.

Tachikawa, who is from Yokohama, joined Hiroshima Home Television in 2001. His mother's family home was in Hiroshima. From 2005, he repeatedly visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as a reporter and became close to Akihiro Takahashi, who had served as the museum's seventh director. Takahashi suffered severe burns in the atomic bombing, and a deformed black nail came to grow on his right index finger. After Takahashi passed away in 2011 at age 80, Tachikawa's sense of mission to "pass on the story" grew stronger.

When Tachikawa and others reviewed more than 100 hours of footage that had been shot and left at the TV station, they found unedited source footage that had not been turned into news segments, including Kawamoto's testimony.

They wondered what they should do with the footage. If they were going to make a documentary, a film rather than a TV program would allow people to watch it more deliberately and also reach viewers outside Hiroshima Prefecture. With that in mind, they began preparations two years ago. They chose the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as the theme because Tachikawa is convinced that "it was precisely because the museum existed that the world learned about the atomic bombing."

Another scene from the film shows Minoru Hataguchi, the museum's 10th director, guiding Fidel Castro, then president of the Cuban Council of State, in 2003, while Hataguchi looks back on that time.

When Hataguchi spoke about the belongings of his father, who died in the atomic bombing, Castro asked questions such as, "Is your mother well?" and "What kind of lives are atomic bomb survivors living?" The episode also clearly illustrates the influence the museum has on those who visit.

Eighty-one years on since the end of World War II, atomic bomb reporting that is rooted in life in the bombed city and which communicates to the world the city's desire for nuclear abolition has long faced the "wall of time." There are even talks of disbanding the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, or Nihon Hidankyo.

"Hibakusha are dying, and there are very few people who were exposed to the bombing in their teens and can vividly describe what it was like at the time," Tachikawa says. "There are many difficulties, but it is our fate to not look away, to study and to convey it."

The film's other director, Toshiyuki Saito, 29, covers the Hiroshima Municipal Government as a reporter for Hiroshima Home Television. A native of Hiroshima, Saito was struck by the aforementioned source footage showing Kawamoto's testimony.

"For some reason, the full footage remained. It may have been a message from the senior colleagues who were reporting at the time, saying, 'Use this footage in the future,'" Saito says.

He says he also strongly feels the "wall of time." "Faced with the current situation in which war does not disappear, atomic bomb survivors are feeling, 'What will happen when we are gone?' As survivors age, I feel there are things we in the media can do," he says.

The film is being screened at Pole Pole Higashinakano in Tokyo's Nakano Ward and at other locations across Japan.

(Japanese original by Ken Nakazato, Opinion Editorial Department)