In this episode of the Tango Tango podcast, host Lloyd Knight welcomes authors and filmmakers Karin Tanabe and Victoria Kelly to share the journey behind their PBS documentary Atomic Echoes. With family histories connected to both sides of World War II, Victoria’s grandfather served as a medic in Nagasaki and Karin’s grandfather was a Japanese soldier, the longtime friends uncover powerful stories of resilience, reconciliation, and hope.
They discuss how the project began, the challenges of interviewing veterans and survivors, and the intensive research required to capture voices long overlooked. From faith communities in Japan to American veterans who were never recognized for their post-war service, Atomic Echoes offers a respectful and human lens on history.
Karin and Victoria also reflect on the lessons they gained from the filmmaking process, from fundraising to finishing the project in just 11 months. More than a story about the past, their film underscores the urgent need for peace and the unifying power of storytelling today.
[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.
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[00:01:21] Karin Tanabe: Thanks, Lloyd. It’s great to see you again. Yeah, great to meet you, Lloyd. Thanks for having us.
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[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.
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[00:02:27] Victoria Kelly: Morristown?
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[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.
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[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.
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[00:03:06] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, it’s so true. I don’t get it. I don’t know how they do it.
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[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.
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[00:03:51] Victoria Kelly: Yeah, yeah. I
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[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
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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,
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[00:08:04] Karin Tanabe: I’m better at making stuff up, honestly.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[00:09:44] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, but you got to
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[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?
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[00:10:21] Lloyd Knight: That’s awesome. Have you been in DC for the entire time? Victoria?
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[00:10:31] Lloyd Knight: Yeah, good.
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[00:10:32] Lloyd Knight: Leave.
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[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?
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[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.
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[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
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[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?
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[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.
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[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.
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[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?
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[00:24:42] Lloyd Knight: He
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[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
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[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?
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[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?
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[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
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[00:29:31] Lloyd Knight: Wow.
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[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?
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[00:31:13] Lloyd Knight: Very cool. What about you, Victoria?
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[00:32:23] Lloyd Knight: Very neat. So is there going to be a follow on this subject?
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[00:32:30] Karin Tanabe: Not
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[00:39:04] Voice Over: The Tango Tango podcast is proudly sponsored by Supply Chain. Now join the Tango Tango community. For more inspiring stories. Follow us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the Tango Tango YouTube channel, and follow And listen to Tango Tango wherever you get your podcasts.
