Oppenheimer’s first visit to Japan. In the movie, US President Harry Truman asks Oppenheimer, rhetorically: “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb?” Contemporary Japanese interest in the answer to that question may determine whether the film enjoys the same critical and financial success in Japan that it has in the rest of the world.
Japanese audiences were clearly interested in 1960, when Oppenheimer visited Japan as an honored guest of the Japan Committee for Intellectual Interchange.
The moment he arrived, Oppenheimer was greeted like a movie star with a barrage of lights and cameras. He spoke to packed public halls in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka about the relationships between scientists, government, and civil society. But the Japanese organizers, fearing controversy, kept him away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven decades later, the distributors of the film in Japan seem to be adopting a similar approach in their marketing strategy: Images of the bomb have been stripped from the posters outside movie theaters and the trailers playing inside.
A Japanese reporter did manage to ask Oppenheimer in 1960 if he felt responsible for the suffering his work enabled. The enigmatic physicist answered that troubling question the same way Nolan does in his film. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he said. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.”
Oppenheimer’s response seemed to help his hosts skirt the moral controversy inherent to inviting him to Japan. Maybe Nolan and the film distributors will be just as lucky in their apparent effort to keep uncomfortable discussions about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from undermining Japanese interest in the film.
During his visit, Oppenheimer was eager to impart some lessons he learned from directing the US atomic project. He told an elite gathering of Japanese scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, and officials organized by the International House in Tokyo that scientific discoveries, for good or ill, are inherently irreversible:
“There is a lot of talk about getting rid of atomic bombs. I like that talk; but we must not fool ourselves. The world is not going to be the same, no matter what we do with atomic bombs, because the knowledge of how to make them cannot be exorcized. It is there; and all our arrangements for living in a new age must bear in mind its omnipresent virtual presence, and the fact that one cannot change that.”
