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Kids win award A group of five young reporters from Hawaii put together an award-winning documentary on the reconciliation of two war veterans on opposing sides of the Pearl Harbor attack, and learned a life lesson in the process.
for Pearl Harbor video
5 Pearl Ridge students earn
Showing at 'Sunset' event
a national honor for their
documentary about forgivenessBy Lisa Asato
lasato@starbulletin.com"I learned that just because you are enemies with someone doesn't mean you have to keep hating them," said video co-anchor Lauren Ige, a sixth-grader at Pearl Ridge Elementary School. "You can be friends with them, but that doesn't mean you have to forget what happened."
Sixth-grader Adrianna DeMello said the group tied the lessons learned from the Pearl Harbor attack to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack because the two were "very similar."
"Determination, courage and loyalty are qualities we need to help us cope with Sept. 11," co-anchor Kelli Miyahira says in the video. "But along with these qualities, we also need forgiveness and reconciliation to make sure peace will prevail on Earth."
On Monday, the Pearl Ridge Elementary School video was named best overall video at Panasonic's 12th annual Kid Witness News award ceremony in New York City, as well best in the sound and documentary categories. That recognition came on the heels of its showing at Signature Theatres in Dole Cannery last month as part of the third annual Hawaii Student Film Festival, which named it the best elementary school documentary.
"It was well-written; it was technically very good. You could also see just from the subject matter that this was a very poignant contemporary video," said Bill Pritchard, an assistant general manager with Panasonic, which sponsors the Kid Witness News program in about 225 schools nationwide.
When the 10-minute video was shown to Pearl Ridge schoolteachers and students, "some teachers cried," said Miyahira, a fifth-grader.
Reviews weren't all favorable, however. Sixth-grader Devin Schafer noted, "Some of our friends like it; some of them (said) 'Ooh, it's boring.'"
"Voices of the Past, Hope for the Future" tells how former enemies Richard Fiske, a crewman for the USS West Virginia, and Japanese Zero pilot Zenji Abe met in 1991 and embraced each other as friends a half century after the attack.
Fiske, who is interviewed in the piece, had endured years of hatred and nightmares of a Japanese pilot's face that he had seen Dec. 7, 1941.
The video shows Fiske placing two red roses at the Arizona Memorial and playing "Taps" on his bugle, as Abe had requested he do once a month.
Fiske explains his friend's request: "One rose for me and one rose for you. The reason I want this done, (Abe) said, that this was my simple way of saying, 'I am so sorry.'"
Kathy Nagaji, the school's Kid Witness News coordinator, said the students stumbled onto the story while at the 60th anniversary ceremony at Pearl Harbor, where they interviewed Dec. 7 survivors for their stories and their views on the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We stayed the whole day at Pearl Harbor interviewing survivors," she said. "But when they heard the story between Mr. Fiske and Mr. Abe, they realized there was a much bigger story to it."
Pearl Ridge Elementary has won seven times before in various categories, including once before for best video. But this was the first year the overall winner was kept secret until the award ceremony and the first year Panasonic awarded the winners a trip to Japan.
"I was so happy," Miyahira said. "(I was) screaming, my eyes were tearing."
Nagaji attributed past success to the students' ability to take constructive criticism.
"I've made suggestions before and they'll disagree with me," she said. "This group was like, 'OK, let's fix it.' ... They had that perseverance that made a tremendous difference."
Nagaji said the students spent about 100 hours producing the video, coming in "several weekends and every day after school for about four months."
The five students all had a hand in areas like editing, researching and interviewing, and agreed that the hardest part was writing the script.
"We wrote a draft, we took it to Ms. Nagaji, and she said, 'Nope,'" DeMello said. "We wrote it around 15 times. It was very hard and confusing."
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See 'Voices' at Sunset on the Beach
The "Voices of the Past, Hope for the Future" video can be seen at Sunset on the Beach at Blaisdell Park in Aiea next weekend. It will be shown on Sunday and Monday, Memorial Day, before the 7 p.m. showings of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Pearl Harbor," respectively.