Japan finally screens ‘Oppenheimer’, with trigger warnings, unease in Hiroshima

HIROSHIMA: Best picture winner “Oppenheimer” finally premiered in Japan on Friday, eight months after a controversial grassroots marketing push and concerns about how its nuclear theme would be received in the only country to suffer atomic bombing.

The biggest winner at this month’s Academy Awards, the film directed by Christopher Nolan about US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the race to develop the atomic bomb, has grossed nearly $1 billion globally.

But Japan had been left out of worldwide screenings until now, despite being a major market for Hollywood. Nuclear blasts devastated its western city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the south at the close of World War Two, killing more than 200,000.

“Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards,” said Hiroshima resident Kawai, 37, who gave only his family name.

“But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch.”

A big fan of Nolan’s films, Kawai, a public servant, went to see “Oppenheimer” on opening day at a theatre that is just a kilometre from the city’s Atomic Bomb Dome.