By Dave Kim

THERE'S A DARK imprint on the steps that once led into Hiroshima's Sumitomo Bank, where a customer had been sitting Aug. 6, 1945, before being incinerated by an atomic blast. The steps are now preserved in the city's Peace Memorial Museum, but the spot fades a shade or two each year, gradually blending in with the muted grays of the stone. With it wanes the memory of its tragedy – even as we observe the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. For many of us born after World War II, the memorial ceremonies seem prescribed and irrelevant, the bombings themselves forever painted in black and white as horrifying but long-past pieces of eighth-grade history.

Commemorations are for survivors, those who were there or at least living when the hardships of note took place. But what do they mean to us twenty-, thirty-, and even fortysomethings unconnected to that distant past? What happens when the few remaining survivors die out or move on and people start to forget?

Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour was already addressing the vicissitudes of memory when it hit theaters in 1959, just 14 years after the United States deployed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" to win the war. At that point, remembering hurt like hell, while forgetting was therapeutic, even necessary. Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras avoid a head-on bout with the devastation itself, comparing the agonizing memory of tragedy to that of impossible romance – or, hell, I'll just say it, love. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has a two-day affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) while shooting a peace film in Hiroshima. After the first act, in which newsreel and documentary footage remind us of the horrors of nuclear warfare, Resnais's focus shifts away from the blast. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima," Okada tells the woman and the Western world she represents – so any attempts at empathy are promptly abandoned. The actress, finding a link to her past in this whirlwind romance, talks instead about her first catastrophic love in Nevers, France, and how it literally drove her crazy.

Intense romances are often haunted by past relationships. But in Hiroshima, the affair is interrupted constantly by the city and its looming history, best symbolized when the otherwise unnamed "Elle" and "Lui" are torn apart by a crowd of A-bomb protesters. Hiroshima at once allows and forbids the lovers to be together, just as tragedy will stain our memories even as it forces us to move on.

But 46 years later, forgetting is less a defense mechanism than a product of time and generational change. Debuting at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival March 15, Steven Okazaki's documentary The Mushroom Club opens with rock bands in Tokyo and bullet trains and skyscrapers in a sprawling modern-day Hiroshima, all drastic departures from the wasteland that was much of wartime Japan. The only memento left in Hiroshima now is the Peace Park, a small grass rectangle of memories frequently invaded by irreverent pranksters and J-Pop music. The number of visitors who leave flowers or paper cranes is shrinking, while the city's younger generations see commemorating the event as an unnecessary chore.

The Mushroom Club aptly addresses the struggle of remembering in its interviews with 10 A-bomb survivors. Comic book artist Keiji Nakazawa has devoted his life to telling the Hiroshima story through anime and his 2,000-page manga series, Barefoot Gen. Eighty-five-year-old Toshiko Saiki preserves the souls of the dead by collecting old buttons that wash up near the river, where scores of Japanese perished soon after the bombing. Best friends Narumi and Toshiko, in utero at the time of the blast, were born with microcephaly and have the mental capacity of eight-year-olds. Both are members of Kinoko Kai, the Mushroom Club, an organization formed by journalist Minoru Ohmuta for "children of the bomb." They are the nation's in-betweeners, those born at the border between prewar and postwar Japan, who've been permanently affected by the bomb without having experienced it themselves.

Today, as Ohmuta is quoted as saying at the end of The Mushroom Club, "Japan is at a turning point," and the few who do remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki are worried the events will soon slip away into a forgotten past. But as the situation in North Korea escalates, foreign classics like Hiroshima mon amour, even with its impossibly complex characters, poetry for dialogue, and lovely shots that feel about three seconds too long, are echoing modern sentiments on nuclear warfare.

"It's distressing, this process of remembering and how you have to keep doing it," Okazaki admits in a recent phone interview. The Mushroom Club, the second of a three-part spotlight on the Oscar-winning director at this year's festival, is a personal follow-up to his 1985 PBS doc, Survivors. "You think, 'Geez, do I really have to do this every time there's a new generation?' ... But yeah, you have to keep reminding people of what happened."

Resnais may have been right: we saw nothing in Hiroshima. But there are still some who won't let us forget. 'Hiroshima mon amour' screens Sat/12, 5 p.m., Castro. 'An Evening with Steven Okazaki' features the director in conversation with journalist Nguyen Qui Duc, preceded by a screening of The Mushroom Club, Tues/15, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki.