This is what it felt like for my house to be blown up. But I was absolutely humbled and surprised by how forthcoming they were, how uncensored they spoke, even though they were showing visible respect to their former adversaries, they really pulled no punches. There’s all sorts of customs, which I’m learning, and I’m still learning about Japanese culture. I’ll be honest, because if something went wrong, it’s all my fault because I’m the one who invited them to come here. KUNM: What was the conversation like for you watching it unfold. I was a nail biter, I’ll tell you, I’m like, ‘Am I crazy for even thinking of getting people of these generations to meet each other after such a hard history? What’s going to happen?’ I really didn’t know what was going to happen, and what they did was nothing short of inspiring. HUNTER: It all came together the last minute. KUNM: Was it difficult to arrange? Did they want to do it? Capturing that exclusive meeting between former enemies. And that’s what the film really centers on. We had two Pearl Harbor Visitor Center educators, who are also Pearl Harbor survivors. We had two atomic bomb survivors fly out from Hiroshima. There’s a meeting room there with the view of the USS Arizona. HUNTER: We met at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center. We need to sit them down face to face, let both of them tell their stories in front of their former enemies and really get to the heart of this.’ We needed to go deeper to see if we had forgiven each other. So after the 2016 commemoration, I said, ‘Well, we need to follow up on this. And during this time there was a meeting, informal meetings, but they weren’t the face-to-face meetings that I was looking for. And they visited both Hiroshima and the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor to commemorate the fallen. HUNTER: In 2016, there was a commemoration with the then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and former US President Obama. KUNM: Had any survivors of both Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs in Japan ever formally come together before this? And the reason that I did it is because I wanted to know how far had healing happened, you know we’re 75, 80 years from World War II, and I wanted to see how we forgiven each other. Hunter, the director of the film,“Sakura & Pearls: Healing From World War II,” says the title refers to cherry blossoms, or sakura, which represent the rebirth of Hiroshima, and the pearls represent the pearls of wisdom of Pearl Harbor. It brings together atomic bomb survivors from Japan with those who lived through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. PBS will premiere a new documentary Thursday, October 28 at 7 p.m. Stream PBS Sakura & Pearls: Healing from WWII