[00:00:00] Karin Tanabe: We cared a lot about it when we started, but once we got in our first interview, we were like, okay, this has to be good. This has to get made, and this has to be something that everybody can care about. No matter what your political stripes are, how you regard the past, the fact that there’s thousands of atomic bombs out there now and that we could just completely blast away our whole world is something we should all need to care about.
[00:00:26] Voice Over: Welcome to the Tango Tango Podcast, real raw and unfiltered conversations with veterans and those who support them, tune in, be inspired, and walk away stronger.
[00:00:41] Lloyd Knight: Welcome to the Tango Tango podcast, real veterans real stories, unscripted and unedited raw stories. I’m your host, Lloyd Knight, and thank you as always to Amanda and Scott and the entire team at Supply Chain now for allowing me to do this wonderful podcast show. Got an amazing story to cover today. It’s so exciting. Many of you know I’m in the Bush Institute Veteran Leadership Program. It’s a five month program down in Dallas, Texas, and I have one of my amazing classmates, Victoria, joining us and her business partner. Karin, welcome to the both of you to the Tango Tango podcast.
[00:01:21] Karin Tanabe: Thanks, Lloyd. It’s great to see you again. Yeah, great to meet you, Lloyd. Thanks for having us.
[00:01:26] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, great to meet you. So we’re here largely to talk about an amazing film that the two of these ladies put together called Atomic Echoes, and it’s running on PBS. I’ve already put out some social media today on it, LinkedIn, so you’re seeing this podcast in the third week of September, but it’s out now. So take a look at it. I actually put the app, the PBS app on my TV just so I could watch this. It’s amazing. We had an amazing screening at the Bush Institute, so we’re definitely going to talk about the movie and the whole story behind the movie, but I really want to talk about the both of you First. Victoria, it’s been amazing to get to know you at the Bush Institute. Where’d you grow up at?
[00:02:11] Victoria Kelly: I grew up in New Jersey, which is not the first place you think of when you think military. I was not a military kid and had no connection growing up really to the military, so it was all new to me.
[00:02:24] Lloyd Knight: What part of a New Jersey?
[00:02:27] Victoria Kelly: Morristown?
[00:02:28] Lloyd Knight: Oh, I’ve been to Morristown.
[00:02:29] Victoria Kelly: So my dad worked in New York City and it was about an hour outside the city and he would commute in every day and yeah, one of those good nineties childhoods.
[00:02:38] Lloyd Knight: I was attached for flying out of McGuire, so I had to spend a fair amount of time in New Jersey and not a big fan except for the diners.
[00:02:48] Victoria Kelly: Oh yeah, you can’t get better than those. I mean, it never compares the diners and the malls and that’s it.
[00:02:55] Lloyd Knight: It just kills me. You go into a restaurant, they’re open 24 7, there’s 25 pages of food to choose from, and they do it all. Wonderful.
[00:03:06] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, it’s so true. I don’t get it. I don’t know how they do it.
[00:03:11] Lloyd Knight: So what did you like doing as a kid growing up in Morristown, New Jersey?
[00:03:15] Victoria Kelly: I loved going to the movies. The movies were a huge highlight. I mean, honestly, my favorite memory is we used to go pick fruit in the summers. There are lots of farms, surprisingly to Jersey, lots of farms, and we would go to these pick your own fruit farms every summer, and now it’s something that I do with my kids every summer. I make them go and do strawberries, raspberries, and I probably have a better time than them, but it’s my favorite.
[00:03:44] Lloyd Knight: I love that. And I know you are an amazing high school student because you ended up in Harvard.
[00:03:51] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, yeah. I
[00:03:52] Lloyd Knight: Have a Harvard graduate and a Vassar graduate on his podcast, which is incredible. So you made it to a Harvard you study at Harvard Victoria.
[00:04:01] Victoria Kelly: So I did English. I actually did minor in Latin American Studies and yeah, instead of doing the doctor lawyer investment banker route, I went off to be creative and ended up here. So
[00:04:16] Lloyd Knight: You ended up here and you became a military spouse along the way, right?
[00:04:21] Victoria Kelly: I did. I got married just I went to graduate school for creative writing, and then I ended up getting married right after that. I was pretty young. I was only 25, and that kind of started my whole trajectory into that space.
[00:04:38] Lloyd Knight: Awesome. And how long was the husband in the military?
[00:04:42] Victoria Kelly: We unfortunately were only married about 10 years. We got divorced when our kids were pretty little, but he was a Navy pilot. He was in for about 10 years. He actually is back in again. He went into the reserves and then got called back to active duty. So he’s actually still flying. But I ended up getting remarried several years later. My current husband was a Marine veteran who fought Iraq, so not purposefully ending up in another military marriage, but I actually love it. I love the community so much, so it’s something that we both have in common.
[00:05:23] Lloyd Knight: And Karin, where’d you grow up at?
[00:05:25] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, so I’m from the DC area. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, just like hops given a jump from the DC line, but I’m the first person, well, my brother and I are the first people in our family to be born here. So I say my parents immigrated on TWA, they came in the sixties. My dad is from Japan and my mom is from Belgium.
[00:05:48] Lloyd Knight: Your dad is just the sweetest in the video.
[00:05:54] Karin Tanabe: He kind became the movie star. He didn’t want to be in Atomic Echoes. He’s 83 and I was like, please, please, you won’t be in it very much. And then of course we made him travel all around Japan with us for two weeks. He
[00:06:11] Victoria Kelly: Secretly
[00:06:12] Karin Tanabe: Loved it. He did. He got really into it. Oh, he got really into it after a little while. Yeah.
[00:06:18] Lloyd Knight: That’s awesome. I’m quite the foodie. I love cooking and I was watching this, he’s like, I want to cook with your dad.
[00:06:26] Karin Tanabe: He’s the best cook. I don’t know how other people grew up, but my dad cooked me gourmet meals every day. And then when I went off to college, I was like, what is this? You call this food. I was very spoiled in childhood
[00:06:43] Lloyd Knight: But beside eating gourmet meals and childhood, what’d you like to do when you were growing up?
[00:06:49] Karin Tanabe: I was really into sports and really into creating things. So I did gymnastics and track when I was growing up, and then I wanted to be a writer when I was nine, so I wanted to write books immediately. As soon as I could write, I was like, this is for me. And then I just liked writing stories, just making stuff, creating stuff. And then, yeah, sports. I liked beating people on some sort of turf beating as in winning, not beating as in assaulting.
[00:07:23] Lloyd Knight: That’s awesome. And how did you find yourself going to Vassar College and what’d you study?
[00:07:29] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, I wanted to go to a liberal arts college. I wanted something where I was reading poetry amongst the fading leaves of fall. So bass was a good fit for me, very similar to Victoria. I did English, I did languages, I did French. Neither of us were really going for those big bucks. I think when we were college, we were just following our passion. And then I got my first book deal in my late twenties, so I was very focused. I was a journalist for a little bit. I worked for Politico,
[00:08:04] Lloyd Knight: But
[00:08:04] Karin Tanabe: I’m better at making stuff up, honestly.
[00:08:07] Lloyd Knight: And what was your first book?
[00:08:09] Karin Tanabe: My first book was called The List, LIST. It’s a very thinly veiled account of my time at Politico. So kind of Politico when it was very dog eat dog the early days.
[00:08:20] Victoria Kelly: So my first book was actually poetry collection. It was called When the Men Go Off To War, and it was about the experience of being a military spouse and going through deployments and what that was like.
[00:08:33] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, so Victoria’s poem, When the Men Go Off To War is one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read. It was in America’s Best Poetry that’s very competitive anthology to get into. She’s really bad at doing her own, but it is such an incredible read.
[00:08:49] Victoria Kelly: There was an organization called Motion Poems where they would match poets with and they would do seasons of animation. So actually that poem was, you can find it on YouTube, it’s animated in the most beautiful way. And that was one of the coolest experiences.
[00:09:09] Lloyd Knight: I’m going to have to check that out. I also wrote a book, I wrote the book really quickly. It was a God thing. It helped me with the loss of my late wife, but I really liked writing the book. I did not marketing and selling the book.
[00:09:24] Karin Tanabe: Oh boy. We need another hour to talk about that. Yeah, that’s hard. That’s the hardest part because I always say I love creating. I was never interested in the business of creating. I was only interested in the creating, but it’s sort of like if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it. Right. So you got to
[00:09:44] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, but you got to
[00:09:45] Karin Tanabe: Talk about it.
[00:09:46] Lloyd Knight: Absolutely. So how’d you guys meet? I know you both live in DC. Did you buck into each other at Starbucks?
[00:09:53] Victoria Kelly: After my poetry collection, I wrote a novel called Mrs. Houdini. It was a historical fiction book about Harry Houdini and his wife, and that was published by Simon and Schuster and Karin had the same editor’s mate. She was like, oh, you guys have to meet. I had just moved to DC This was I think like eight years ago, and I remember we just met at a cafe and yeah, we just hit it off right away. We’ve been friends ever since.
[00:10:21] Lloyd Knight: That’s awesome. Have you been in DC for the entire time? Victoria?
[00:10:24] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, I’ve been here for I think nine years now. So yeah, it’s been a while. I’m here for the long term.
[00:10:31] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, good.
[00:10:32] Victoria Kelly: She can’t
[00:10:32] Lloyd Knight: Leave.
[00:10:33] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, I’ve got three kids now and they’re all in school, so we just bought a new house, so I think we’re settled.
[00:10:44] Lloyd Knight: Got to love that. So turning over to the movie Atomic Echoes, now you can see it on PBS streaming. Whose idea was it? I know Victoria, your dad was impacted. If you see the movie, you hear the very personal story and you have the flag, and that was always a part of your family story. What moved you to start really digging in and seeing that story that was going to be there and then reaching out to Karin and knowing that Karin’s a Japanese heritage, she’s Japanese American, that her family’s amazing connections with the atomic bombs. When did you figure out there was a story there to be told?
[00:11:29] Victoria Kelly: So my mom’s grandfather was a medic in Nagasaki after the bomb, and he died when my mom was 13, my mom’s father. And so I never met him. And so I would as a kid ask about him, what was he like? And he had a pretty severe drinking problem. And so she would always kind of brush it off like, oh, well, he drank a lot. And I said, well, why did he drink so much? And she said, oh, he was in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb dropped. So he saw a lot, and that was kind of just always a story that was kind of there. And then when Oppenheimer, the movie came out in 2023, Karin and I were talking about it, and that’s when she realized that I also had this connection to Japan, which I had never brought up before because it was just a random piece of family history. And we just started talking about the atomic bomb and how it was portrayed in the film. And we ended up going to Japan to go to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. We took a trip together and tried to research our family’s histories there. That was before the film even became anything. It wasn’t even an idea at that point. We just wanted to know more. So
[00:12:46] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, it was really piece by piece. I’m in an organization called the United States Japan Foundation. I was one of their young leaders, young leaders, and they gave us some seed money. They gave us $5,000 to kind of research our family histories. And we thought about writing something being that we’re writers, and we went to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and were able to really meet incredible people who were willing to help us. So we then approached a production company in the US and we’re like, we might make a five minute educational film. And they were like, or an hour long PBS documentary, and we were like, or that also sounds good, but it was a tiny little, it was a conversation. It was truly just a conversation amongst friends. That became a realization that we had, my grandfather fought for the Japanese army, and Victoria’s grandfather fought for the Americans, and here we both are with the same job in the same city as friends, and maybe there’s something we can say about this. So yeah, we didn’t need exactly to make an hour long documentary at first, and we certainly didn’t set out to have to fundraise like half a million dollars. But these things came. All these things came.
[00:14:06] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, I keep saying it was our ancestors coordinating this because the things that had to come together to make this happen the whole time, I thought, okay, my grandfather is watching this. And I was just so sure. I was like, he is orchestrating some of this because every time we take a step forward, another door would open. And that’s kind of how this film unfolded
[00:14:32] Lloyd Knight: The movie. It’s complex, so there’s so much into it, including a faith-based element when the portions in Japan, and then to see how strong their faith was and how their faith got ‘em through some things. I was just touched, it’s a film on resiliency. It’s a film on nasty government bureaucracy and the red tape that goes on. I think there was a lot of complexities there. For the listeners and viewers, if you’re not familiar for the American side of the story, we had tens of thousands of marines that were sitting off ships and in islands in the Pacific getting ready to invade Japan. And then the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their roles reversed. So instead of invading, they went in not as really as an occupier force, but some of them provided humanitarian operations, others provided some security operations. And the final complexity was the interwoven of the stories that go on from a chef that was serving troops whose daughter and wife was killed to the older lady in the church who met the copilot for one of the atomic missions. I just thought it was brilliant that all the stories and the complexities that were told, and you did it in such a very respectful way and honoring everybody and not pointing the fingers or getting into the silly political discussions that happen sometimes when we talk about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So kudos to both of you. And I know while watching the video, you guys were just moved to tears, I’m sure on more occasions than we’re shown in that short our movie. Were you two boast just physically and mentally exhausted at times for doing this
[00:16:33] Karin Tanabe: The whole year? Honestly, I think we’re still recovering. I’m like the resident crier. I cried every other hour making this movie. Just the stories were so emotional, so powerful, but sometimes very difficult to hear. You just wish you could go in there and change people’s past their access to help, that kind of thing. So it was a real emotional journey making it, but we cared a lot about it when we started, but once we got in our first interview, we were like, okay, this has to be good. This has to get made and this has to be like you really poetically said something that everybody can care about, no matter what your political stripes are, how you regard the past, the fact that there’s thousands of atomic bombs out there now and that we could just completely blast away our whole world is something we should all need to care about.
[00:17:32] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, absolutely. So I have to tell you, Victoria leaving the theater at the Bush Institute, I was kidding around. And like, oh, the pollen is thick in here. My sinuses are acting up. I’m moved. I can be a crier at times too, Karin. I’m very direct at times and people think I have no emotions at time, but when I moved, I moved and the film definitely moves me. The stories and the way the two of you presented the stories was just touching in the moving Victoria. What a lot of people probably don’t realize is all the research that went into this thing. And I can imagine that for every minute on screen, there was probably 10, 50, a hundred hours of research that went into it. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:18:21] Victoria Kelly: It ended up being almost a full-time thing because when we started, it was originally, okay, well let’s tell this story about your families and how their past intersected. And it was really about our personal journey. But we said, well, let’s see if we can find other veterans who are still alive, who served in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which was not an easy challenge because the youngest, they would be would be 98, 80 years later, they would’ve been 18 at the youngest, maybe 17 if they squeezed in there at the end and went to war. But they don’t have email, they’re not on social media, they’re not out talking about this in the media. So what we had to do was scour the internet and every kind of local paper for any mention of anyone who had been in either of those cities, and the articles would usually be about so-and-so World War II veteran turns 90 or 95, they’d be like five, 10 years ago, and they would have one sentence and he was in Nagasaki after the bomb or something like that.
[00:19:33] Victoria Kelly: And so then we would track down their family members, maybe message them on Facebook, trying to figure out somebody who had the same last name and who might be related to them. And when we find the right one, could we talk to your parent, make sure they’re still alive and wanted to talk? It was really hard. And so we ended up, we have three in the film, and then we spoke to four others during our research and ended up using those three for different reasons. One, we had tickets to fly to Alabama to interview one veteran, and he had a stroke two days before, so he couldn’t do it. Just things like that, obviously with them being in their nineties or a hundred years old would happen. So we were really, really lucky to get the veterans that we did and also they just have wonderful families who were just really supportive of this project, which was so important because we had the families involved the whole time. They were who we were communicating with, and they were there during the whole filming and we talked to them every week still. So we were just really lucky. We found the most amazing veterans and families through this.
[00:20:45] Lloyd Knight: My mom’s German, so she grew up in World War II Germany, and oftentimes when you go to talk about the past, they just want to forget the past. So did you run into any roadblocks in the US and then Karin and Japan of people saying, don’t make this, just forget about it. Did you encounter anything like that?
[00:21:08] Karin Tanabe: Our families to start with? Let’s start at home. Yeah. I think for our family’s, Victoria’s mother had some negative memories of her dad because he was living with this PTSD. And so that was a hurdle to jump over and you want to do it in a way that’s respectful for your families. And my dad was like, oh, so long ago, I don’t know. And then you’d have these conversations, they would see how much we cared about this, and little things would start coming out and sometimes it was the same with the veterans. I think we kept hearing from the American veterans. Nobody ever asked me, nobody ever asked me my stories, nobody’s ever wanted to know. And that was very heartbreaking. But I think both in Japan, I approached people in Japan and Victoria approached the veterans. We could say like, Hey, we have these personal connections to this really matters to us. We’re going to do this in a very respectful way. But still, especially with the veterans, there were some that they just weren’t, they didn’t want to go back that far. They didn’t want to relive that. And we of course respected that.
[00:22:23] Victoria Kelly: And I think there’s something that happens too. They spent their whole lives forgetting about it, but then as they’ve been older, you want to make sure you pass these lessons along. So there was a lot of that where they wanted their stories to come out because they have these stories and they want people to know them. And I think they pushed them aside for so long that I think they were happy to be able to talk about it and also to be recognized for it. They’ve never before been recognized for that part of their service. I mean, they were honored for being in World War ii, but all those months after World War II that they spent in Japan were just completely brushed aside. They weren’t allowed to talk about it for many, many years, limited by the government. And I think it was just kind of refreshing that someone wanted to say to them like, Hey, you did something really meaningful.
[00:23:17] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, absolutely. Karin, I’ve got to ask, have you planted a tree yet since you said you’ve never planted a tree?
[00:23:25] Karin Tanabe: I haven’t. To this gold manicure Lloyd. See, not, these are not planting hands. I have not planted the tree yet, but it’s funny. You never know what’s going to go in the movie. We film hundreds, it felt like thousands of hours, and then I saw that and I was like, oh my gosh, I really want to. So I think one of the most interesting one, the beautiful stories that I learned about making this movie was that my relative, my grandmother’s favorite uncle who was the first president of Hiroshima University, there was nothing right in Hiroshima. He was rebuilding this university from dirt, and he wrote to universities all over the world in the UK and Germany in the US saying, can you please send us seeds? It’s such a simple ask. Can you send us seeds to replant our ground? And so a lot of universities did. The University of Idaho did a few others in the US and so you see those trees in the movie, you see them all over the campus. But now what’s something that’s very powerful in the US is to get seeds from trees that survived the bombs in hear oshima. So it’s like change directions.
[00:24:42] Lloyd Knight: He
[00:24:42] Karin Tanabe: Was asking for seeds to replant, and now the Americans and others want seeds from the trees that survived these survivor trees. So I am going to have to plant two. I think at this point I’m going to have to plant two trees.
[00:24:56] Lloyd Knight: I can’t wait to see the social media posts. Maybe it’s going to appear in Atomic Echoes 2
[00:25:03] Karin Tanabe: Or other pink gloves or something.
[00:25:07] Lloyd Knight: So you had so many amazing stories and characters, and I use the term characters larger than life characters, which I just loves the little short lady in the church. I just wanted to give her a big hug for each of you. We’ll start Victoria, who totally did you inspired from this journey? Who were you inspired by and why?
[00:25:30] Victoria Kelly: Micas who was our Minnesota veteran was the most impactful for me because of his emotion. He had the most severe case of PTSD among the veterans because of his job. He was 18 and he was in the Army and he was assigned to assist a small team of doctors of American doctors and Japanese doctors who went in after the bomb in Hiroshima and performed the autopsies on those who had died, and then also did medical exams on the survivors to document the damage that the bomb had done. And so he was just a witness to just so much, I mean, he literally has nightmares every night about it still. He is 98, and I think that was really moving. He actually became a minister after, I don’t know if that was made it into the film, but he spent a whole career in ministry just because he turned to faith after that whole experience. So that was really moving for me. I think that was definitely our most emotional day. We spent all day with him talking about it. So yeah, that was a memorable one
[00:26:47] Lloyd Knight: And it’s just a shame that he was not approved for V eight benefits based on his PTSD. You can talk to the guy, you can see it on his face. I just think it’s absolutely horrible. Yeah, just makes you angry. And I could see the motion from both of your face that you weren’t only sad about a story, you were angry. Karin, what about you? Who did you draw inspiration from during this process?
[00:27:12] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, so the woman you talked about KoKo Kondo. I had met her before. My first time ever going to Hiroshima was 2019, and she was my tour guide through the Peace Museum in Hiroshima. So there are thousands of Hibakusha. Those are the Japanese atomic bomb survivors left because they were younger. She was just a baby when the bomb drops. So they’re like my dad’s age, many. They’re in their eighties, but there’s so few who speak English, and she’s fluent in English. She went to American University here in dc. Her dad was a really prominent minister in Hiroshima, but because she speaks English so well her entire life, she has been called on to talk about what happened. She has spent her whole life ever since she could speak. So let’s go with 80 years telling these stories and working for peace and talking about forgiveness.
[00:28:09] Karin Tanabe: And I just like sitting there with her in church looking at this cross that her dad pulled from the rubble of his church that had been bombed, and how her father and her whole family just spent their lives spreading this message of peace and forgiveness. I was just like, and I say in the movie, I was like, I don’t know that I could have been a person you all were. I mean, she met the copilot of the Nola Gay when he was on TV with her father and saw him and forgave him in that moment. So she really made me want to be a better person. So not only will I be planting trees, I’m going to be just forgiving left and right now, she’s so inspirational. I mean, I can’t imagine living through something like that as a baby that you certainly didn’t ask for, and then this becomes your whole life. And she does it in a really heartfelt way
[00:29:07] Victoria Kelly: And you can’t tell from the film. But she had broken her back or had back surgery not very long before we filmed, and she still agreed to do that, and she did it with her whole self. She really put everything out there, and I was just in awe of her because she was definitely in some pain when we were filming. And yeah, it was pretty remarkable. Just her commitment to getting this message out there.
[00:29:31] Lloyd Knight: Wow.
[00:29:32] Karin Tanabe: Yeah. Then we all went to Denny’s and we ate an insane amount of food dine there, Denny’s in Japan, and we were just all so emotionally spent. We ate six courses.
[00:29:46] Lloyd Knight: That’s tremendous. So turning away from the story and turning into the logistics of making a movie, what did you learn from, we’ll start with Karin first and go to Victoria. What is one big takeaway that you learned from the process of making the movie?
[00:30:04] Karin Tanabe: I mean, we were really blessed by ignorance. Honestly, we did not know that the average documentary takes three to four years to make. So when they were like, you have 11 months from start to finish from idea to delivery, we were like, okay. So if we had known that this was crazy, that probably would’ve been a little scary. But I think we both learned, we have very similar work styles. We had just put our heads down and we just go. And I think we both have jobs that were very independent. We work alone a lot. We work together so well, and we had a lot of grit. I mean, when the door closed, we were like, how do we open the next one? That person said no to fundraising, let’s go here, let’s go here. Let’s send a hundred emails a day and let’s fight to make this film exactly what we intended it to be. So I would say neither of us are like Sharpe business ladies, and then after 11 months we’re ready for that boardroom. I think we became much more business savvy, much more daring, and just much closer as friends.
[00:31:13] Lloyd Knight: Very cool. What about you, Victoria?
[00:31:15] Victoria Kelly: Learning about the film industry as a storytelling platform was just such a great experience because we had been immersed in the writing world and novels and poetry and journalism and media and stuff like that. But to be able to learn about the film world was just really an amazing experience. We were really lucky to work with Blue Chalk Media, who is our production company, and just this great team of people. We have a female director, which is rare in the documentary world, Beatrice Becette, and then our director of photography. His name is Chris, and he is just so amazingly artistic with the way he approached this film and just getting the chance to watch how they worked and how they set up the shots and all of that. I felt like we did this crash course in film, and that was just really cool. We brought the story side of it, we brought the fundraising side of it, we brought all these connections, but they brought the art of it, and that was just really cool.
[00:32:23] Lloyd Knight: Very neat. So is there going to be a follow on this subject?
[00:32:28] Victoria Kelly: Not in 11 months
[00:32:30] Karin Tanabe: Not
[00:32:32] Victoria Kelly: I’ll say I’m up for another one. People at the Bush Institute have said to me, I should do another one. I said, well, I’ll try. There are more stories to be told for sure. It’s something we’ve been talking about over the past month or so. We are still really immersed in getting the word out about this film and just getting as much attention on these veterans who are in the film as possible and getting them the recognition that they deserve. So that’s a lot that we want to focus on right now. But I mean, we’re definitely thinking about the future too.
[00:33:08] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, there’s so many good stories to be told. I’m a big history buff and I was enlisted aviator for 20 years in the Air Force, and I got the fly to all the islands. You go Wake Island. I’ve been away, spent a lot of time Wake Island and the tragedy that went on there and all the stories that haven’t been properly told Tokyo, more people died in the firebombing in Tokyo.
[00:33:33] Karin Tanabe: Yeah, my father almost died at that bombing.
[00:33:37] Lloyd Knight: I encourage you guys, there’s so many stories out there. Anytime Hollywood tries to do it, they screw it up. So not percent of the time, but normally
[00:33:47] Karin Tanabe: They look, I think at Box Office first
[00:33:50] Karin Tanabe: And not at history first. So it’s funny, but I mean you saying that that’s what started our conversation, right? Was us watching a Hollywood movie and then criticizing it. So that was what got the whole conversation between us going, but I think there is so much nuclear power in the world right now. There is, I think, a real perspective shift that needs to happen. There are a lot of people that were affected by radiation well into the fifties and sixties. I think there’s a lot more to be told. So we would love to. We certainly want to work, keep working together.
[00:34:27] Lloyd Knight: Outside of your aspiring movie career, what are each of you up to these days? And we’ll start with you, Karin.
[00:34:34] Karin Tanabe: So I’ve written seven novels. I’m about to get started on my eighth. So I feel really lucky to still be able to publish books. My first book came out in 2013, so publishing’s changed a lot. You have to kind of adapt with the times, and it’s been fun for me. But it’s funny because after working with Victoria for the last year, thinking of sitting down alone and writing a novel, I’m like, but wait, where’s my friend? It’s so much more fun when you can talk to someone. So that’s one thing. And then we’re still going to keep working on Atomic Echoes. There’s so much to be written and we’re doing a lot of speaking with it, and I hope it’s a project that’ll really go the distance.
[00:35:20] Lloyd Knight: I think it will. And Victoria, other than being a presidential scholar, what are you up to these days?
[00:35:26] Victoria Kelly: So my last book came out last year. It was a short story collection called Home Front about the military experience. That was my last. I have an outline for another one that I will start eventually, but I think this year has been the year of film. So I’m just putting everything and being a mom, but I’m putting everything into this right now. We have screenings coming up. We have a lot going on. The film has only been out a couple weeks. So yeah, I mean, I think the next few months are going to be atomic bombs related prevention. Yes, atomic bombs prevention. Yes, Atomic Echoes and talking about nuclear war and just getting the word out about these stories that’ve been told. And then I think Karin and I, we also talked about writing our own film. We have a story in mind for that, so we’ll be working on that.
[00:36:30] Lloyd Knight: Love it. So thank you so much for both coming on this. Thank you for telling these stories and not only telling these stories, just doing it in a completely awesome way, not only to raise awareness, but to tell the stories. I think it was just exceptional. If you could leave our audience with just some words of wisdom from both of you, would love to hear that before we close it out, Victoria
[00:36:56] Victoria Kelly: I think if there’s one message we want to get across, it’s this message of hope, right? I mean, you hear the topic of the film and you think like, what a downer. How did Resident does that sound? But I mean, we really tried to bring this message of hope into the film and just inspire people to want to learn more and just realize that when we start talking about it, we can really impact what happens in the future. So I think that’s important. It’s not just a film about World War II, it’s a film about everything that’s happening right now. We don’t get into politics in it, but all the lessons from 80 years ago are still important today. So I just hope when people hear about Atomic Echoes, they’re going to walk away with some inspiration too.
[00:37:48] Lloyd Knight: Absolutely. I mean, it was not a Debbie Downer at all. And going into it, I was like, it’s a tough topic. And I came out and so great job. Karin?
[00:37:58] Karin Tanabe: One thing I’ve been saying a lot during press for this film is that this is a time where it really feels like, especially in America, we just can’t agree on very much, and we’ve learned that we can’t agree on much, but we can agree on this, that we should have a world free of nuclear war and just making something that we felt was important to every single person alive on this earth that really should be was like Victoria said, it made us hopeful because there’s so much we live in Washington, there’s so much chitter, chatter, bickering, et cetera, and to work on something that you feel that everybody can get behind, that made us feel hopeful.
[00:38:47] Lloyd Knight: Good. Well, you two deserved it. You did an amazing job. So thanks again and Victoria, we’ll see you here in a couple short weeks. In the meantime, I’ll close out my podcast as I always close it out. Everybody be safe, be kind, and be remarkable.
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