The Japanese finally saw Oppenheimer. I was waiting for a shot of Hiroshima, says the witness

Toshiyuki Mimaki, who survived the Hiroshima explosion as a three-year-old, has already seen the historical biographical drama. The story of the atomic bomb designer Oppenheimer continues to fascinate him. “I can’t understand how the Japanese could attack Pearl Harbor and start a war they couldn’t win,” says an eighty-one-year-old Japanese man today.

Mimaki chairs the confederation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. He saw the film ahead of time at a special screening for invited guests. “The whole time I was waiting in the cinema for the shot with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima to finally come, but they didn’t put it there at all,” he wonders.

British director Christopher Nolan’s film focuses more on the fate of scientist Oppenheimer, whose weapon helped end World War II. It does not show the actual dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in August 1945 immediately killed around 100,000 people. By the end of the same year, the number of victims had risen to roughly 200,000. In the decades that followed, thousands more succumbed to illness from radiation exposure.

It is precisely the absence of scenes depicting the consequences that former Hiroshima mayor Takashi Hiraoka criticizes. “Regarding Hiroshima, the film unfortunately does not sufficiently capture the horror of nuclear weapons,” the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun quotes him as saying. “It was filmed to support the thesis that the atomic bomb helped save American lives,” states the ninety-six-year-old former politician, who was the mayor of the affected city from 1991 to 1999. According to him, the three-hour epic could have shown the ruins of the destroyed cities and the suffering of the inhabitants in at least a few seconds.

Empathize with the situation of others

The 80-year-old Masao Tomonaga, who survived the explosion in Nagasaki and just now saw Oppenheimer there, expresses himself similarly, as described by the AFP agency. “It’s a fact that I missed the shot of the survivor,” says the man, who was two years old at the time. He later studied medicine and became a professor specializing in leukemia, a malignant disease that often occurred in atomic bomb survivors. “On the other hand, in a lot of scenes you see how Oppenheimer was shaken by the use of the bomb, and that seems enough to me,” adds Masao Tomonaga.

Other Japanese understand why the director did not include the drastic scenes in the film. “It shows the brutality and tragedy of nuclear war in an indirect way, which is perhaps less attractive, but it hits people all the more emotionally,” says Takuja Mori, a sixty-seven-year-old Japanese documentary filmmaker from Hiroshima Prefecture.

It was Mori who attended a special screening of Oppenheimer in Hiroshima’s Naka area, which was also attended by more than a hundred local high school and university students. The documentary maker emphasized to them that they must be able to empathize with the situation of others.

“In World War II, Japan was the aggressor,” he reminded the students. “Being able to look at things from someone else’s point of view is key,” he added. He also said that while Japan is the only country against which atomic bombs have been used, it has not signed the international treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which was voted on by UN member states in 2017.

The students are happy to have seen the film. “By not showing the explosion directly, it forces you to engage your imagination. I hope that people will find out what happened after the explosion,” said Juta Sakata, a third-year student at Hiroshima Sótoku High School.

His classmate from the second year, Noa Jamaniši, describes that when the scene with the nuclear weapons test came up in the film, she preferred to cover her ears. “This passage was enough for me. Today we live in a world where there are an awful lot of such weapons. The film clearly says that we must do everything to prevent a nuclear war,” the student interprets.

According to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, the head of the confederation of survivors Toshiyuki Mimaki also came to a similar conclusion. “The film underlines that we must work towards nuclear disarmament and the prohibition of atomic weapons. There is no other path for humanity in the 21st century,” he summarizes.

The studio had to apologize

Oppenheimer’s launch in Japan was preceded by apprehension. Studio Universal Pictures has not officially given a reason why it did not send it to cinemas right away last summer like the rest of the world. According to the AFP agency, he might have hesitated because it is at the turn of July and August that the Japanese remember the victims of the dropping of the bombs.

“The film is shot very much from an American point of view. I’m not sure if the people of Hiroshima can watch it,” Kyoko Heja, president of the Hiroshima Film Festival, warned in advance. It wasn’t until a few months later that she changed her mind. Today, he also recommends the film to the residents of his city, where almost 1.2 million people live and where the bomb explosion not only reminds the museum but also the peace monument.

The atmosphere was further brightened by the social mood. Last year, Oppenheimer premiered at the same time as the light summer comedy about the Barbie doll, which is why users of social networks began to call the interplay of the two expected films Barbenheimer and create all kinds of memes, that is, funny pictures, on the topic.

One, where Barbie sits on Oppenheimer’s shoulder and an atomic bomb explodes in the background, particularly outraged the Japanese public. People started signing petitions, posting with the hashtag NoBarbenheimer , and Warner Bros. the man behind Barbie eventually apologized after his social media manager responded positively to the meme. “Warner Bros. regrets their recent insensitive behavior on the networks. We deeply apologize,” https://twitter.com/BarbieMovie_jp/status/1685944607539159040 firm.

Kazuhiro Maeshima, who lectures on American politics at Japan’s Catholic Sophia University, describes the Oppenheimer film as “a manifestation of the American conscience.” Still, he says, it proves that Hollywood is moving. “Several decades ago, there was an unequivocal consensus in American society on the legitimacy of using the atomic bomb. Back then, a film like this could not have been made,” he thinks.

Others say it’s time for the country to tell the story from its perspective, according to the AP. This is what Takashi Yamazaki, the director of the latest Japanese film about Godzilla, who won an Oscar for tricks at the beginning of the month and which also indirectly refers to the dropping of the atomic bomb, is asking for it directly. “I think someone should make a Japanese answer to Oppenheimer by now. I’d love to direct it,” he declared.

However, according to AFP, the distributor’s fears about Oppenheimer being released in Japanese cinemas did not come true. Nothing from the initial reactions suggests that the public will not tolerate the film or that heated reactions and further complaints will follow.

“They started playing it late, but better late than never. It would be unthinkable for a movie about the atomic bomb not to hit theaters right here,” says 65-year-old Tacuhisa Jue, who came to one of the first screenings at a multiplex in central Tokyo on Friday.

“The film is long, it takes three hours, but it has such a power that it has flown by,” praises another viewer, 51-year-old Masayuki Hayashi.

Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, had a budget of around $100 million. It grossed 960 million dollars worldwide, equivalent to 22.5 billion crowns. It won seven Oscars earlier this month, including a statuette for Best Picture.

Video: Trailer from the film Oppenheimer