Mitchie Takeuchi answering questions from the audience at Central Cinema on August 7.  Wolf Naegeli/Hellbender Press

Screening of the feature-length documentary with Mitchie Takeuchi at Knoxville’s Central Cinema

Knoxville — As part of its Bearing Witness program to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombings, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) organized a viewing of The Vow from Hiroshima and conversation with its co-producer/writer Mitchie Takeuchi. Takeuchi is a second generation ‘hibakusha,’ the Japanese word for atom bomb survivors. Her father, Dr. Ken Takeuchi, was a military surgeon and founding president of Hiroshima’s Red Cross Hospital from 1937 to 1947. He was at the hospital and badly wounded, but survived. 

The film follows the story of Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 when she barely managed to crawl out from the rubble of her school before it was overwhelmed by the fire that burned most of her schoolmates alive. Setsuko became the foremost international proponent for the abolition of nuclear weapons. She was part of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ delegation that received the 2017 Nobel Peace Price in Oslo. In her acceptance speech, she said: