Thoughts on Oppenheimer for the Los Angeles Times

Emily Zemler at the Los Angeles Times asked me to share my thoughts about Oppenheimer the movie. Her article, which was published on August 4, 2023, can be read here. She also talked to Naoko Wake (professor of history), Paul Ham (writer), Kathleen Burkinshaw (writer/second gen hibakusha), Ryo Morimoto (professor of anthropology), Carol Turner (co-chair of the London Region Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), Li Lai, (founder and editor in chief of Mediaversity Reviews), Jeff Bock (media analyst), Caitlin Stronell (Nuke Info Tokyo). Here are the questions she asked and the answers I gave, in their entirety:

Q: Why have you chosen not to see Oppenheimer? Have you spoken with others who have chosen to skip it for similar reasons? 

A: I care about hibakusha. If Oppenheimer, the movie, is inspiring people to care about hibakusha, then I’ll see it. If it isn’t, then I won’t. Because, in truth, the movie—specifically what it does and how—already exists. We’ve already seen and experienced it, in different forms, many times over. What we haven’t seen or experienced is a committed, collective acknowledgment and understanding of hibakusha, nor an honest reckoning with a world that produces them.

If not seeing Oppenheimer, at this point, is a form of protest, it is a physical protest—my body is protesting—because even just thinking about sitting through a movie where I would be forced, every second, to anticipate the impending horrors that the events of the movie are producing and to experience that anticipation through the subjectivity of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is throwing my body into upheaval. I am not uncommon in this. I have spoken to many people, especially in the Japanese American community, who have expressed tremendous discomfort in the mere idea of the movie, and grave uncertainty, at least, about whether or not they would put themselves through it, whether or not they would even be able to. In that way, the movie, even before it came out, was already doing the work of retraumatization. White audiences have not, for the most part, had to make these kinds of calculations. They instead have the luxury of being entertained.

Q: From what you know about the film, do you feel the Japanese perspective has been properly represented in the film? Do you have any concerns about that lack of representation? 

J. Robert Oppenheimer would be of far less interest and far less worthy of a Hollywood biopic were it not for the victims of the atomic bomb. The critique that Oppenheimer had no obligation to incorporate the perspective of the victims of the atomic bomb, is, for that reason, defensive and disingenuous. That doesn’t mean that I believe that Oppenheimer had an obligation to incorporate the perspective of the victims of the atomic bomb. I don’t. Because the movie is about the absence of that perspective. 

It is beyond the capacity and the scope—and beyond the souls of its makers—for Oppenheimer to have incorporated the perspective of the victims. This is important because Oppenheimer is an accurate representation of how the perspectives of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the atomic bomb, living or dead, Japanese or Korean or Marshallese, including communities who have been displaced and impacted by nuclear testing and contamination, are not a priority, at all, but must continue to exist, instead, in the shadows of this kind of sweeping dehistoricization, including the beleaguered genius and ingenuity of white men. 

But then, Oppenheimer is not the place to center the perspectives of the victims or the dead, nor should it be, because the perspective of the victims and the dead should not be incorporated into, and therefore cheapened by, what amounts to big-budget propaganda.

An enormous part of the deep, ongoing frustration is that the voices and perspectives of the victims and the dead are most often invoked, even through their absence, in relation to these kinds of obstructions of justice, the work of which is to reinforce white American hegemony. The victims and the dead should be liberated from this eternal, inequitable association. 

Q: Although the film is clearly from Oppenheimer’s perspective, why would it be important for a film of this scale to show what actually happened to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasak? 

It is doubtful that a film of this scale that accurately and unsparingly depicts what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will ever be made, at least not in the United States, because if was, it would shock audiences into a kind of radicalization that the US, as an unapologetically military-first nation, could not afford and would never allow. But also, what happened is so totally beyond depiction that any large-scale film that makes the attempt, would inevitably fail and would deliver to the American consciousness an endurable dramatization.

The scale, the monumentality, of Oppenheimer is important, because it will, for many US Americans, be their first, maybe only—and, at three hours, longest—exposure to the history and the reality of the atomic bomb. It will, in that way, create a limit, a ceiling, on public consciousness and concern. Oppenheimer reinforces, in the guise of false nuance, the tired and ultimately distracting debate of whether or not the mass murder, the incineration, of over one hundred thousand civilians in an instant, was justified. By reducing it to a debate, into the fray of which is predictably thrown the thoroughly documented falsehood that the atomic bomb saved lives, as well as slapdash references to crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, it reinforces disinterest and dismissal. Oppenheimer, like so many works of culture that are pitched primarily to a mainstream (i.e. white) audience, pretends to be opening and engaging a conversation, when it is, in fact, ending it.

Q: Do you feel that Oppenheimer is emblematic of a larger issue in Hollywood in terms of who tells stories and what stories are told?

Yes.

Q: If a viewer wants to seek out more information on the Japanese perspective or other perspective that are absent from the film where should they look?

There are innumerable books, films, works of art, etc. that not only center the perspective of the victims, but that tell a more complete, more honest story about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. I first learned about Hiroshima from a comic book that my parents gave me when I was ten: I Saw It, by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of the atomic bomb. That miserable yet revelatory gift was followed by a visit, that same year, to Hiroshima, and the Peace Memorial Museum. (My grandfather was born in Hiroshima Prefecture, my great-grandmother was born and raised there, and my great-great-grandfather was born, raised, and died there.) Among the most profound books that I have read on Hiroshima, in particular, are: Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, Kenzaburo Oe's Hiroshima Notes, Arata Osada's Children of Hiroshima (which was made into a film of the same name directed by Kaneto Shindo), Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima, and Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life. There is also at least one copy of John Hersey's Hiroshima in every used bookstore in the United States (which means that many people have read it, were forced to read it, and/or decided it was not worth keeping.) Most importantly, testimonies by hibakusha are also widely available, on the internet, in print, in documentary films. These do not, unlike Oppenheimer, take three hours to read or watch, and yet the story they tell is far more profound and their impact will be far more significant and lasting.