Amateur filmmaker Akito Kawamoto has made his wife, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 only to contract thyroid cancer later in life, the star of a personal documentary that has been selected for the Yamagata film festival.
"Tsuma no Kao" ("The Face of My Wife") documents the 33-year struggle of Kiyoko Kawamoto as she deals with the daily trauma of being a hibakusha.
Akito, 74, the chairman of a Hiroshima sake distillery, began his project on 8mm film and completed it on digital video. The two-hour documentary will be screened in October at an international documentary film festival in Yamagata.
As a young man, he fought with tuberculosis, which he caught after being drafted as a student recruit during the war.