SEOUL, South Korea — Japanese people woke up Monday to celebratory reports that two domestic films had bagged Oscars the night before in Hollywood, but the 96th Academy Awards’ biggest winner remains unseen in their country.
As the only nation ever to suffer atomic bombing, there has been disquiet in Japan about “Oppenheimer,” the biopic about nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer which took home seven Oscars including the awards for best picture, best actor (Cillian Murphy), best director (Christopher Nolan) and best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.).
“Oppenheimer” was greeted with unease in Japan, with critics saying that the effects of the titular character’s role in the production of the first nuclear bomb are not shown in the movie, where the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered over 300,000 dead from the bombs and their aftermath.
Ironically, the distant thunder of World War II can be heard, however, in the two Japanese films which won Oscars: “Godzilla Minus One,” which won for best visual effects, and “The Boy and the Heron,” named the year’s best animated feature film.
These differing receptions raise the question of whether Japan — frequently accused in South Korea of glossing over its wartime atrocities — is more focused on its own victimhood than the suffering it caused.
When “Oppenheimer” was released, it found itself competing with the lighthearted fantasy “Barbie.” That situation generated jocular social media commentary about a “Barbenheimer” effect, which was picked up by “Oppenheimer’s” marketing team. In Japan, however, the humor rang hollow, leading the film’s producers to issue an apology.
“Fundamentally, what Chris Nolan did was art, but I believe it is irresponsible to make art without context,” said Keiko Hagihara Bang, a Japanese-American who heads the film consulting/production company Bang Singapore. “You can’t just say [the film] is just a focus on the journey of this man. Can we talk about the journey of Adolf Hitler and not talk about the Holocaust?”
“Oppenheimer” remains unreleased in Japan. Both Japan’s Oscar winners, though, have Pacific War links.
The monster Godzilla is widely seen as embodying the destructive power of atomic weapons, while the entry point to “The Boy and the Heron” is an evacuation generated by World War II.
“Godzilla Minus One” has been compared to “Top Gun: Maverick” and called the best of all 37 Godzilla movies made since the original kaiju (“strange beast”) debuted in 1954. Its visual effects are a far cry from the franchise’s early films, which featured actors in rubber suits trampling models of Tokyo.
The 2023 version, set in postwar Japan, sees a traumatized wartime pilot being forced to draw on his kamikaze skills as he battles Godzilla, a giant sea monster shown being mutated and empowered by U.S. atomic tests at Bikini Atoll.
The wartime connection of “The Boy and the Heron,” produced by famed anime collective Studio Ghibli, is more tenuous.
Exploring themes of loss and redemption, a young boy ventures into a fantastical and dangerous parallel world while exploring a mysterious tower in a forest. He is in the unfamiliar countryside as an evacuee from a city facing U.S. bombing.
That trauma was recreated in tragic detail in Ghibli’s darkest movie, 1988’s “Grave of the Fireflies,” which covers the fates of an orphaned boy and his tiny sister fleeing an incinerated city. The devastating anime has been compared to “Schindler’s List” and film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “It belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.”
Writer Paul De Vries a long-term Japanese resident, said culture may explain the focus on domestic suffering from World War II rather than, say, Japan’s own wartime biological warfare research or the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
“A lot of Japanese do not see the war as good and evil as most Westerners do, and when they say ’This should not happen again,” that is not a value judgment, it is ’Mankind should not do this,’ rather than, ’We messed up,’” he said. “Christianity’s heaven and hell do not exist in Japan, and Japanese genuinely see the war as a tragedy that should not be repeated.”
“Oppenheimer” is slated to finally open in Japan later this month. That is good timing: War remembrances, said Mr. De Vries, generally run from August (recalling the 1945 atom bombings) to December (recalling Pearl Harbor in 1941).
It may get Japanese competition.
Speaking to Hollywood Reporter backstage at the Oscars, Mr. Yamazaki said he flew to Taiwan specifically to watch the U.S. film. “As a person of Japanese ancestry and descent, my response to ’Oppenheimer’ [is that] I would like to dedicate a different film … when that day comes,” he said.
“Oppenheimer” will not be distributed by Toho Studios, which produced the latest Godzilla epic and which customarily distributes Universal Pictures’ films, Hollywood Reporter noted. Instead, independent distributor Bitters End will release it, after “months of thoughtful dialogue associated with the subject and acknowledging the particular sensitivity for us Japanese.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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