Eighty Years After Hiroshima, ‘The Mistake’ Comes to the United States

An Interview with Quaker Playwright Michael Mears and Actor Riko Nakazono

The Mistake, a play about an atomic bomb survivor searching for her parents in devastated Hiroshima, will make its U.S. debut with a tour of four states in April and May. Riko Nakazono, an actor from Japan, plays the lead role. Michael Mears, the playwright, portrays multiple roles including that of Leo Szilard, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb and tried to stop it from being deployed. Mears is an attender at Wandsworth Meeting in southwest London. He and Nakazono previously performed The Mistake for a two-month run in the UK in fall 2023.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, which killed more than 100,000 people by the end of the year, according to Encyclopædia Britannica. Three days later, on August 9, the United States dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing approximately 74,000 people by year’s end.

Friends Journal talked with Mears and Nakazono in advance of the play coming to Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. The interview has been lightly edited.

Sharlee DiMenichi: What initially led you to embrace pacifism?

Michael Mears: [laughs] Oh, wow. It’s interesting. It doesn’t run in my family. My grandfather fought in the First World War, as did my great-uncle. This is on my English side because I’ve got an Italian side as well. And my father fought in the Second World War.

I don’t know whether there’s a pacifist gene. The Second World War obviously is sort of a unique war in terms of history. From a very early age, I just couldn’t comprehend that war was a way to solve disputes, international disputes, whatever. I remember writing on my school pencil case, when I was a teenager, I wrote, “War is illogical.” [laughs] And I used to get a bit of flak for that, a bit of mockery from some of my fellow school-mates—particularly the boys, you know, suggesting I was a coward or whatever or not tough enough. So I’d try and defend my position.

In researching for my previous play, This Evil Thing, which was about British conscientious objectors in the First World War, I learned that some conscientious objectors would be in families of pacifists. But some would be in families which supported the war.

In my late teens or early 20s, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK and was very supportive of that and just had an instinctive reaction against the use of nuclear weapons. I hadn’t learned a lot about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I knew something.

As I got older, my belief that war is not the answer just became strengthened within me. I met a lot of like-minded people; we all strengthened each other’s beliefs in that area. And I still believe it. I think people should talk—you know, try and sort their differences out by getting round a table and talking. I don’t know where it came from, the pacifism, but there we go.

SD: How did you come to be a Quaker?

MM: Well, I started attending Quaker meetings about ten years ago. I’d been to a couple of Quaker meetings much earlier in my life and found it interesting, but didn’t continue going. Then it was around the time I was researching my last play about conscientious objectors . . . through my research, I realized the Quakers were very prominent in supporting conscientious objection in the First World War, and I learned about the Quakers’ peace testimony.

So I hooked up again with local Quakers, and they were very supportive. Then I wanted to set up a tour around the country of the play about conscientious objectors, and a lot of Quaker meetinghouses around the UK were very helpful and reached out. I performed it in a few of those, and I performed it in a few of the UK Quaker schools. There aren’t that many Quaker schools here, but there are a few, where subsequently Riko and I performed The Mistake.

I found the Quakers in Britain really supportive of what I wanted to do with this work in the theater and really helpful in spreading the word. I felt drawn to that community. So I go along whenever I can and sit in silence for an hour. It’s quite special.

SD: How would you describe the emotional impact of meeting [atomic bomb survivor] Toshiko Tanaka?

MM: Although I’d read and researched so much—I feel as if I’ve lived in Hiroshima for many years, but I’ve never been there yet. I’m planning to go there this year. So last year, at Friends House in Central London, was the first time I got to meet an actual atomic bomb survivor, rather than just reading their accounts or seeing them in documentaries. And that was rich.

Toshiko Tanaka, a very beautiful human being, 86 years old, was six when the atomic bomb went off in Hiroshima. She survived, but some of her family members didn’t, and school friends didn’t. She suffered burns and injuries and has had health issues for all her life, but she’s lived to 86 fortunately. Hearing her story at Friends House and then her taking questions, she was just so modest and humble, but at the same time so convinced that those bombs should never have been dropped, and they should never, ever be dropped again.

It was very inspiring in a very quiet way. She wasn’t pushy or preachy, just really quietly inspiring. I was due to perform a short piece from another Hiroshima play—I’ve got a Hiroshima monologue as well—and I was going to perform a short extract from that directly after she’d spoken. And I suddenly felt so nervous because I thought, This is a real atomic bomb survivor we’ve heard from. And now I’m going to just act a bit of an account?

But then I banished that idea and just got on with it. She was very moved by that. I mean, there was a translator there, so we made contact and exchanged cards, and we’ve been exchanging emails since, thanks to Google Translate, because she writes in Japanese. Sometimes I send it past Riko and say, what exactly is being said here? Toshiko still lives in Hiroshima, and she said, You must both come to Hiroshima, if you possibly can, come to my home later this year. So, we’re hoping to do that.

Meeting her made me even more convinced that I need to do this work, that I want to do this work, that it’s important. Because her message is that we must never forget. I want to help in my small way to share that message that we must never forget, and we must do what we can to make sure it never happens again.

Newspaper clippings of the article from The Guardian, August 6, 2002. Images courtesy of Michael Mears.

SD: What were some of the central questions that guided your research to develop the play?

MM: The film Oppenheimer is very admirable in many ways. One of the main criticisms of it is that it doesn’t reference the Japanese experience at all. I started working on this play slowly on and off many, many years ago, well before the Oppenheimer film. But I always wanted it to honor the Japanese experience, so it was very important for me to have a Japanese central character in it, and to share some of those accounts of survivors.

But I wasn’t sure how I was going to make the play work. Originally, I was focusing on a survivor, and I was also focusing on the pilot. My idea for doing the play started from reading a newspaper article in the UK 22 years ago, and I’ve still got it. It’s here. It’s slightly yellow.

But it’s Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane, holding a model of the plane—a big interview with him. Then on the other side is an interview with Fumiko Miura, who was a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing and became a poet. So there were these two interviews 22 years ago, and they clearly never met each other. Clearly the pilot had never met—had never gone back to Hiroshima, had never met any Japanese survivors.

So, I thought, how about writing a play where actually the pilot does get to meet survivors, and difficult questions are asked? So that’s where I started from. And then I thought, what about the science, you know, about the people who created the bomb?

A lot is known about Oppenheimer. But I came across another very important scientist on the Manhattan Project, called Leo Szilard, who was Hungarian Jewish and a brilliant nuclear physicist. He really interested me because he really did seem to feel terribly guilty about his role in creating the bomb, although initially he and many of the other European refugee scientists who came to America to work on the Manhattan Project—like them, his only intention was to build the bomb as a threat to Hitler.

When Nazi Germany was defeated, Szilard was horrified to learn that the bomb was now going to be used on the Japanese. So, he turned completely and said, No, you mustn’t drop it on Japan—and did all he could. I mean, he was up against the U.S. government and the U.S. military and all of that, you know, which was in the middle of a war. But he did what he could to try to persuade the powers that be to at least delay using the bomb or demonstrate using the bomb on neutral territory without actually dropping it on Japanese cities. Of course, he didn’t succeed.

So I was fascinated by him, and I thought, he’s got to be in my play somehow. The play has now become about three people predominantly: a young female survivor in Hiroshima who then goes through the city to search for her parents and family; Leo Szilard; and the pilot of the plane as an elderly man who’s shown no remorse—so this is another question I ask: how is it possible to cut off your emotions?

We know that part of military training is you just have to cut off your emotions and not view the enemy as human beings exactly the same as you are. Because if you had that kind of sympathy for them, you wouldn’t be able to kill them. I also think, how can you drop such a devastating bomb like that and not feel any remorse or regret? I try to probe that in the play as well, through the character of a modern Japanese woman who asks some very challenging questions to the pilot when he’s an elderly man.

And then the other character Leo Szilard, who I wanted to explore, what is it that drives scientists to explore and experiment and make new discoveries, but sometimes without thinking about the consequences, where those discoveries could lead? In Leo Szilard’s case, he has this sort of dark foreboding that what he’s working on, really, he shouldn’t be tampering with this, you know, with the powers of nature. And once you unlock them, you’ll never be able to put them back again.

I find his whole journey fascinating, from being very excited about creating nuclear reaction, chain reaction, a nuclear power, to then realizing it could create a bomb, which would hopefully stop Hitler in his tracks, to then thinking, no, we should never, ever use this bomb. Once the bomb was dropped, Szilard spent the rest of his life—well, not the whole of the rest of his life, but quite a lot of the rest of his life—working for international arms controls, trying to control the appalling bomb he helped to create—so I find him inspiring as well.

SD: Riko, how would you describe the emotional impact of hearing from a hibakusha [a Japanese word for “bombing survivor”] for the first time?

Riko Nakazono: I was born and raised in Japan. When I was a student in elementary school, older survivors were still young enough to travel all over Japan. Every July the school organized this peace month in which we invited all the hibakusha survivors, and they spoke to us and shared their accounts in front of our eyes. That was my first trauma in my life because I just imagined what they said and was horrified. I was seven or eight, and they did it every year up until I was 12. I was always scared around July going to school and meeting them. But it was a really fortunate experience; it sort of shaped my idea of war and bombs.

SD: How did you prepare to play the role of an atomic bomb survivor?

RN: [laughs] That memory of meeting them and hearing the story from them was just a really vivid memory of my childhood. I still remember all the feelings I felt in the classroom. When I read the script of The Mistake, written by amazing Michael, it just—all the memories of what I felt just came back to me.

I didn’t intentionally prepare for it. It’s a mission for me as well. There are not many people who have met survivors and had that feeling in their childhood, right? I just trusted what I felt at the moment, and my mission was to deliver that and convey it to the audience.

SD: What do you most want audiences in the United States to know about the bombing of Hiroshima?

RN: I want them to know what the survivors experienced. I studied in the U.S., and I had the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C., where they had a war memorial. There was an exhibition about World War II, and I still remember reading a signpost—it was written as a victory. I was really shocked. Because as a Japanese person, I only learned it from my side, from the Japanese side.

I didn’t really imagine that, okay, for Americans, yeah, that was a victory for them. I know that some people still believe that dropping the bomb was the only way. I don’t know what was the best thing. But, as a child learning, hearing the survivors’ stories, I just could not agree. I think people have different opinions about it, but at least I want them to know about the Japanese story.

SD: In addition to the visits by the atomic bomb survivors, what do Japanese schoolchildren typically learn about the bombing?

RN: I’m not sure what they teach at the moment is exactly the same as what I learned when I was in school. But we really focused on peace and the effects of the atomic bomb, and that it shouldn’t be repeated again. That history shouldn’t be repeated again.

SD: What were some of the most surprising things you discovered through your involvement with the play?

RN: I didn’t really know about creating the bomb because the history was heavily focused on the survivors’ side. I’d never heard of Leo Szilard until I read Michael’s script.

While I was researching, I learned that survivors were heavily discriminated against by even the Japanese government as well. Because, at that time, they didn’t understand exactly what was going on in their body after the bomb. They literally treated survivors as a virus. Everyone was just avoiding them. They didn’t get jobs because they didn’t have enough stamina to work the whole day. And everyone had weird spots on their skin.

They were really discriminated against, even in Japan. I learned that a lot of people who were helping them survive were actually American people. They didn’t receive any scheme or funding from the Japanese government at all until the later years. A lot of Americans who really sympathized with them were sending the money to them, so that was interesting.

SD: Michael, how did you acquire the verbatim testimonies of the atomic bomb survivors, scientists, and military members that you used?

MM: Mainly from a lot of reading and research. There’s a lot of verbatim in the play, but there’s also imagined dialogue. For example, Leo Szilard wants to see President Truman to tell him to stop, not to use the bomb, and Truman sends him to his secretary of state. We know that Szilard met the secretary of state and tried to persuade him not to use the bomb or at least to demonstrate the bomb [in an unpopulated area], but we don’t know exactly what was said in the room. But I’ve learned what their opinions were, so the short scene between them in the play I put together from other things they’ve said.

The answer to your question really is from a lot of reading. There are many accounts of atomic bomb survivors I was able to read. The central character in the play, Shigeko, who Riko plays, pretty much everything that happens to her in the play happened to different survivors. But I’ve made it one account. I’ve drawn from different accounts for the character that she plays in the play because I needed to do that dramatically—so that it was a story that had a trajectory. But pretty much everything that happens to her in the play I read about happening to somebody in the accounts of atomic bomb survivors.

For Leo Szilard’s character, there’s a very good biography about him, and there are interviews and documentaries about him on YouTube. And similarly for Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that I also play in the drama, there are interviews with him. Not only in the newspaper that I read all those years ago, but there are interviews with him online and in other journals and so on. He wrote a book as well, which I bought. I drew from all those different sources and then added a bit of imagination.

SD: How long did it take you to write the play?

MM: How long does it take to write a play? How long does it take to write a book? Well, we should say, I suppose, 23 years, beginning in 2002. I mean, on and off. I started writing some ideas and then carried on with my regular acting work, and then I’d come back to it. In fact, Leo Szilard as a character didn’t come along for me for quite a while. And once he came along in my mind, then things moved more quickly. The main work has been done in the last about three or four years, but on and off.

SD: In the play, do you play the two male characters, or is there another actor?

MM: No, it’s just myself and Riko. I play all the Western characters. I play the scientists, politicians, military, President Roosevelt at one point briefly. I play Albert Einstein. The good thing about writing a play is you can think to yourself, oh, I’d quite like to play Albert Einstein, even just briefly. So I’d write a scene for that. I didn’t get to be cast as Einstein in the Oppenheimer film, though! [laughs] But that’s fine. In the play, I also very briefly play Robert Oppenheimer. Everyone knows about Oppenheimer, and hardly anyone knows about Leo Szilard. In my play, I thought, Okay, it’s going to be all about Leo Szilard. We’ll have a tiny bit about Oppenheimer. So there. He’s had enough publicity. He’s had a major movie made about him.

I view the play, ultimately, as an act of healing and reconciliation. It’s an attempt to understand why these terrible things happen, but understanding them through—particularly in the case of Riko’s character, Shigeko, understanding through an individual story or experience.

I saw this great quote. It’s three words: “Statistics don’t bleed.” I’m not sure who said it. But the statistics around wars are very important, you know, how many people died, how many people were injured, and so on. The statistics around Hiroshima and Nagasaki are important, but it’s hard to take in 100,000 or 70,000. It’s hard to take in what that means.

But if you follow an individual story through a play, and their journey, and what happens to them, and the things they witness, and their search for their family, that has a much more powerful and emotional effect than just reading cold statistics. I really hope the play opens hearts and minds. I’m quite nervous about doing it in the U.S., though I’m sure a lot of our audience will be very sympathetic.

But I also hope there will be people in the audience who are pro nuclear deterrence and pro nuclear weapons—or even people who agree that the bombs should have been dropped on Japan. I’d love for them to see the play and be stopped and made to think and feel and think, Hmm, I wonder if my opinions are right? That would mean a lot to us. I hope it’s a means of opening more discussion and debate about these terrible weapons.

I’d love to perform the play at the White House [laughs] and in the Kremlin, but that’s never going to happen, is it? The two times I’ve performed in the States with my own—let’s call them antiwar plays—guess who was president? The same man. He was president in 2018 when I came to the States and performed my conscientious objectors play at some peace churches and colleges. Trump was president then. We performed in Washington, D.C., in a church not far from the Obamas. I think we put a letter through their letterbox! We invited them, but they didn’t show up. [laughs]

SD: What would you like to add?

MM: Well, just that this is the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is why I so much wanted to have the play performed in the U.S. and Japan. We’re going to Japan later in the year, in September.

You are probably aware that the other week the atomic scientists moved the Doomsday Clock even closer to midnight by one second. The world is in such a fragile state now. I feel the play is not history. The Mistake is not—I mean, it’s history in one sense, but it feels so relevant and important and urgent now. We want to keep making people aware and remind them of the terrible consequences of using these weapons.

What was extraordinary was that in the UK, even in some of the Quaker schools, it was clear that some of the students knew very little about Hiroshima—and, indeed, many adults as well. There’s that sense of what Toshiko Tanaka was doing, of we mustn’t forget. We mustn’t forget. Those are probably good words to finish on.

The 2025 U.S. tour of The Mistake includes performances in April and May at various theaters, universities, churches, and Quaker meetings in Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. Find a complete list of dates and locations on Michael Mears’s website.