Japan has an Oppenheimer problem.
If you didn’t know, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was banned from Japanese theatres until March 29, 2024, eight months past its global release. Japanese audiences gave it mixed reviews, with some finding it a harrowing warning of nuclear might. Meanwhile, others demanded a stauncher anti-war film that “sufficiently depicted” the terror of nuclear warfare (Associated Press). Most people didn’t bother watching.
As a bilingual Japanese and American writer who lived in Tokyo for over five years, there are a few things that trouble me about both positive and negative reviews. Firstly, Oppenheimer isn’t about the Japanese but instead the exploitation of scientists by the government. Secondly, the atomic bomb represents more than victimhood but a complicated liberation of thousands of innocent Pan-Asian lives. Lastly, it disturbs me that the Japanese government continues to censor national fact, fiction, and storytelling to police public opinion as it has for centuries.
To make sense of this historic censorship, allow me to take you back with me to the 20th century. But first, I must reveal myself.
[…] allow me to take you back with me to the 20th century. But first, I must reveal myself.
I am a descendant of bushi, or samurai, lineage, with a Koda family crest to vouch for it. After the abolishment of the feudal system in the late Victorian era during the Meiji Restoration, the former bushi warrior class melted into a rapidly Westernizing society as merchants, government officials, and teachers. My family entered the latter profession, and during the war era, schools became synonymous with outposts of government censorship. It was at one of these outposts that my great-grandmother served as a high school teacher during the Second World War, forced to lie to the students that Japan was winning the war. She was even required to encourage male students to join the kamikaze tokkoutai, or the suicide bombers, to her regret. It wasn’t so much about national honor as it was a logistical issue. The Empire of the Rising Sun was out of fuel for round trips. As a last resort, they began crashing their aircrafts (and in some cases, torpedoes) into American warships. Manning these vehicles were the most expendable and impressionable demographic—children.
My grandmother remembers starving for most of the war. She grew up in a secluded agrarian village near Hiroshima. When the bomb was dropped, hoards of molten people, with their skin dripping off their bones like some morbid hybrid of candle wax and corned beef, stumbled into her village begging for water. Here, my grandmother would shrug and remark matter-of-factly that her village was instructed to refrain from giving water to bomb victims. Something about how ingesting liquid with severe internal burns would lead to sudden death.
“The government failed to cherish human life,” she’d say. “We were expendable. The bomb saved us.”
Although I can’t bring myself to concur with the sentiment, I’m also not the one who lived through the war. Instead, think of me as a mediator that provides for historical fact the lived human experiences that together inform us of the cycle of the human condition.
Most Japanese people will agree that Emperor Hirohito was inane for waging war with the United States, even if the Empire was suffering from an embarrassing scarcity of fuel required to continue colonizing. After centuries of annexing the surrounding Asian nations, including China, the Koreas, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines, all of which the Japanese viewed as primitive (this they won’t admit), they were out of fuel. The Empire was spread too thin. In order to manifest the Japanese destiny of conquering Asia as the English did the New World, it was imperative that their vision included threatening the U.S. to lift their oil embargo. The resulting maneuver was Pearl Harbor, only they weren’t remotely prepared to start another war, this time with an industrial giant with access to a seemingly endless stream of natural resources.
Instead, think of me as a mediator that provides for historical fact the lived human experiences that together inform us of the cycle of the human condition.
That was Japan’s mistake. Fortunately, the emperor, a self-proclaimed god, did not make mistakes.
In his stead, the people would have to pay.
It wasn’t long until the nation ran dry on essential resources from metal to leather to wood and, finally, to food. With food sources directly impacted by rationing, crop failures, and the U.S. Air Force’s Operation Starvation, 60% of soldiers (Soaper) and more than half of civilians starved to death.
The Japanese government itself played a direct hand in stimulating mass starvation through the freezing of produce prices, cracking down on the black market for food, and a faulty rationing system that decreased the national caloric intake from an average of 2,000 calories to approximately 1,600 calories. Subsisting on a diet of gruel made of barley, wheat, soybeans, potatoes, and other mushed carbohydrates, civilians and soldiers alike were so malnourished that they suffered from “dysentery, tuberculosis, beriberi, gastrointestinal disease, and typhoid fever” (Wright 67).
Growing up Japanese means that at some point in our childhoods, we are required to watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), the animated adaptation of a novel of the same name. I remember this film well, particularly because my mother deemed it appropriate to show it to me at the age of two, a questionable decision that has irrevocably molded my perception of Japan’s crimes against its own people. In the film, a young boy is left to care for his sister after he loses his house and his mother to an American firebomb raid. His father is missing in action. When the protagonist enters the care of his maternal aunt, they quickly find that she keeps food from them in order to feed her own children and, as a result, turn to stealing crops from farmers. In the end, the boy and his sister leave their aunt to live in a cave, where they both die of starvation. It was just like what my grandmother told me—how the war effort wrung the people dry and turned them against each other, spurring greed and selfishness in the mindless clamor for food.
The emperor was not willing to surrender under any circumstance. After all, if there was one resource the Empire never seemed to run out of, it was voluntary manpower.
After all, if there was one resource the Empire never seemed to run out of, it was voluntary manpower.
Thanks to the education system, most Japanese citizens were more than willing to offer their lives in battle, even when defeat was apparent. It is well known that a Japanese soldier was indoctrinated to “only think of defeating the enemy, or when that possibility did not exist, to throw himself into the sea for the sake of the Japanese race” (Wright 69). Turning to human life as a resource is a dangerous precipice for a nation to find itself in.
Unfortunately, this meant that animosity toward enemy forces were heightened and racialized. Japanese forces terrorized Korean, Chinese, and Southeast Asian civilians. When the Empire turned to Chinese-sourced pig leather as an alternative to cow hide for combat boots, they fitted them with metal spikes that clinked and clanked distinctively. To this day, survivors of Japanese occupation report the traumatizing sound of the studs.
Because a large portion of Asia was under occupation of the Empire of Japan, several colonized subjects had come to Japan to labor when the atomic bombs were dropped in the summer of 1945.
As a Japanese person, it feels obligatory that I share the way my people, to this day, view Koreans. This remains a touchy topic in Japan, as the culture maintains a vacillating stance between erasure and vindication.
Regarded as a subhuman race by the Empire of Japan, Koreans were forced to speak Japanese. Chosen-jin is the derogatory term used to refer to ethnic Koreans in Japan, coined from the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), and is still used by Japanese people today. During the war, tens of thousands of Koreans were forcibly conscripted for labor in Japan to work the mines. Women and girls were trafficked into slavery as comfort women for Japanese troops. As a result, over 40,000 Koreans died in the atomic bombings, while 50,000 in Hiroshima and 20,000 in Nagasaki were exposed to radiation (Hong). These facts are hidden from the Japanese population, who are taught a modified version of historical events. Those who do remember, like my grandmother, maintain that the Koreans had it coming for them–and that Japan has paid enough reparations not to warrant further discourse on this topic.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Korean victims of the atomic bombs were denied treatment on the basis that they were non-citizens. Meanwhile, Japanese survivors received federally funded lifelong medical treatment and livelihood support. It wasn’t until 2008 that non-citizens were eligible to apply for support (Hong). Ethnic Koreans, termed Zainichi Kankoku-jin, who have resided in Japan for generations, continue to live as second-class citizens.
Other Japanese war crimes include the Rape of Nanjing, chemical and biological warfare, cannibalism, rape, and torture.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Korean victims of the atomic bombs were denied treatment on the basis that they were non-citizens.
And when Emperor Hirohito finally did surrender to the Americans, his war criminals got away with a slap on the wrist, a comedic comparison to the Nazi crackdown. Japan provided the U.S. with the results of their human experimentation program, Unit 731 (the victims of which were Korean, Chinese, and Southeast Asian), in exchange for a pardon and strategic U.S. occupation disguised as defense against the enemies they made in Asia. Naturally, the Japanese did not want U.S. military bases scattered throughout the mainland, so they built 32 of the 120 bases in Okinawa, an annexed archipelago belonging to indigenous peoples called the Ryukyuans, who were also forced to speak Japanese and abandon their native cultures. To this day, Ryukyuans actively protest for the abolition of U.S. bases, where rape and violent crime is rife.
Today, Class A Japanese war criminals are honored at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, built in the Meiji/Victorian era to honor those who died in service for their country. It baffles me as a Japanese person why the Japanese are allowed this by the Geneva Convention, while the Germans have put in great effort to rectify their nationalism and eschew any semblance of portraying their war criminals in a positive light. Furthermore, to honor these criminals at Yasukuni Shrine is to spit in the faces of the tens of thousands of both Japanese and non-Japanese victims who died as fodder for colonial imperialism.
This is why it troubles me that Nolan’s Oppenheimer was censored from the public. As long as depictions of the human condition continue to mutilate historical fact from lived experiences, reconciliation remains implausible. The Japanese see themselves as the sole victims of their government and the atomic bomb, but rarely do they view themselves as perpetrators.
Revisionary history is rife in modern Japanese classrooms, with many of their war crimes glossed over or left out entirely, while extra attention is given to the atomic bomb. I tutored Japanese students for over five years, and during that time, most of my students were only vaguely familiar with Adolf Hitler—if at all. I even had a friend who hadn’t heard of the Rape of Nanjing. When I explained it to them, they continued to deny it, eventually bursting into tears because of the outrageous nature of my accusation. Later that night, they texted me after Googling it at home in shock that not only was everything I said true—but that they’d never learned it in school.
I believe Oppenheimer challenges Japanese audiences to view the atomic bomb outside of the context of their own people.
I believe Oppenheimer challenges Japanese audiences to view the atomic bomb outside of the context of their own people. By excluding Japanese voices from the film, it forces them to leave behind the narratives they’ve been taught in schools and to see the film for what it is—a story about the exploitation of human life. Furthermore, these two truths can exist simultaneously without nullifying the other: that the Japanese are victims of an abominable war crime and that they themselves perpetrated the greatest terror known to Asia.
This is not to say that I am in any way an atomic bomb sympathizer. My family is of the belief that the bomb was a necessary horror to end the suffering and lesson to the government to value human life.
It is my wish that my country will learn to unveil buried narratives and give our people a chance to sift their own answers from fact, fiction, and storytelling.
References
Associated Press, “‘Oppenheimer’ Finally Premieres in Japan to Mixed Reactions, High Emotions.” Voice of America, Voice of America (VOA News), 1 Apr. 2024, http://www.voanews.com/a/oppenheimer-finally-premieres-in-japan-to-mixed-reactions-high-emotions-/7548430.html.
Hong, Seock-Jae. “‘US, Japan Must Apologize’: Nobel Peace Prize Sparks Mixed Feelings for Oft-Forgotten Korean A-Bomb Victims.” Hankyoreh, 16 Oct. 2024, english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1162877.html.
Soaper, Iana. “Harm and Hunger: Operation Starvation.” Secure Scotland, Secure Scotland, 31 Mar. 2021, http://www.securescotland.scot/post/harm-and-hunger-operation-starvation#:~:text=Japan%20had%20already%20suffered%20some,million%20were%20due%20to%20starvation.
Wright, Michael. “In Search of ‘Silver Rice’: Starvation and Deprivation in World War II-era Japan.” Northern Illinois University Studies on Asia, I, no. 1, 2010, pp. 57–81. IV.
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