1953 'Phantom' A-bomb film 'Hiroshima,' with 88,000 extras, screening in Tokyo | Hacker News Reader

1953 'Phantom' A-bomb film 'Hiroshima,' with 88,000 extras, screening in Tokyo

mainichi.jp

151 pointspologreen117 comments

In light of the release of Oppenheimer, people have been talking about, basically, the other side of the development of atomic weapons.

John Hersey's "Hiroshima" article from the August 23, 1946 edition of the New Yorker came up as the definitive piece on the immediate impact of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and it is a gripping read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

https://web.archive.org/web/20230130070028/https://www.newyo...

Yes, although they touched on the impact of the bomb on Japanese civilians a little, they didn't really do it justice, and it's a shame because I think it would have really provided an important insight on why Oppenheimer's views changed over time.

The movie lacked a cohesive story anyway, so that would have added some meaning.

The movie was about the man, not the bomb, which is why it focused primarily on a man, and not a bomb. The actual testing of the bomb was a small part of the movie and the real deployments of it were but a couple sentences. The movie Oppenheimer was never a movie about Hiroshima and while I think there needs to be more coverage in general about our impact on Japan by dropping those bombs, I think giving the movie Oppenheimer shit about it isn't reasonable just because the man worked on it. It covered everything from the his view point, and what he personally lived. He read about the bombs being used the same as everyone else, and it wouldn't have fit the movie to suddenly jump to Japan to show the impact of his work. It did however try to visualize the impact and eventual realization of what he had played a part in, in the visuals at the compound when he's giving the speech to the fanatical coworkers stomping their feet (which was very Aronofsky like imo)

It’s still true to say the movie lacked a cohesive story — it may have been “about the man” but it was an incoherent battery of spoken facts rather than a personal journey with growth and progression.

Would you prefer that we only get biopics about people who have storybook personal growth or would you prefer that more of the biopics we get are fictionalized? 'Cause that's the choice we have, if we act on your complaint.

People tell stories. They are not themselves stories. Most people, even really important, impactful people, were just doing something interesting, or putting one foot in front of another, or pursuing short-term goals.

My complaint is that it was boring, not that it wasn't storybook -- although come on the scenes with Einstein (and many others) were terribly storybook.

At some point I just closed my eyes and pretended I was listening to a radio drama, which is what it could've / should've been.

Some people don’t have personal growth just because time passes. Maybe that’s true for this person.

Ugh. Clearly the author was paid by the word.

That's painfully super stretched out writing. :(

Couldn't even make it a 10th of the way through that without losing all interest and moving on.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. For me this is one of the best pieces of reporting I’ve ever read.

I've certainly read pieces that were padded and tedious.

This one genuinely, truly is not. Take the first section: every vignette is tightly constructed; you get a sense of the person, the zeitgeist of fear they were living in, and the arbitrary moment that made All The Difference. This structure is repeated point-by-point for each of the survivors, deliberately, to hammer home each element.

Part II has its own structure, emphasizing the chaos. Each part flows well from one to the next. The entire article is an excellent example of writing. It's clear that the author himself is grappling with what to feel about it all. It's powerful stuff.

There are those articles which talk about a date, and in the process you get to know the whole extended families of the victims, together with a 30 years history of the families.

This is news writing in non-English plus translation. Translated text is always off-putting, especially beyond same language groups. I found the link to the original if anyone needs it, by the way.

1: https://mainichi.jp/articles/20230728/k00/00m/040/198000c

I’ve read this a few times and every time I’m left gobsmacked for at least a day. I recommend everyone read it.

That was a hard read. I also recommend Barefoot Gen, the comic series, by Keiji Nakazawa. The depth of the visuals added a lot to my understanding and empathy.

Barefoot Gen was also adapted as an anime movie and it's... rough. Another heart-wrenching anime related to the bombings is Grave of the Fireflies.

Grave of the Fireflies is about the Tokoyo firebombing raids btw.

*Kobe, not Tokyo. FWIW.

Post-war Japan has had some really good marketing. You'll never see films or comics depicting Nazi Germany under Allied bombing and the suffering of those on the homefront loyal to the Third Reich; anybody who who tried to create a "Barfuß Jens" or "Das Grab der Glühwürmchen" would be torn to shreds for being pro-fascist and few would consume anything so tasteless.

Yet ordinary Japanese people conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army committed the equivalent of the Holocaust across Asia, widespread atrocities terrible enough to revolt even Nazi observers. It's not like they would have treated Westerners any better either; look at what they did to Allied POWs. But whitewashing with articles and films, not even that many really, and today Westerners are expressing "understanding and empathy" to the wartime Japanese, loyal to their country and divine Emperor, receiving the consequences of a war they themselves started.

Understanding and empathy are good but let's not be uncritical about what their purpose is or unaware of the larger historical context.

The word "article" is used loosely, as it was later published as a (31,000-word, 160p) book:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)

That should be required reading for everyone everywhere.

According to a 2015 survey[1], 56% of US Americans say the bombings were justified, while 34% say they were not. This relatively positive (or non-negative) assessment of the A-bombs might have influenced their portrayal in "Oppenheimer", an American production. The Japanese re-screening of "Hiroshima" might be aimed at countering their depiction in "Oppenheimer".

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/08/04/70-years-...

Americans are often taught that the bombings resulted in less loss of life than a conventional land invasion of the home islands. So it's not quite a matter of "A-bomb good". Plenty of Americans alive today lived through the Cold War too, and spent years or decades in low-level fear of nuclear war. It's not quite as simple as "nukes good therefore no criticism of nukes in movie". Part of the interest in things like the Manhattan Project is the grim context of what happened next, and of the alluring eeriness of radiation and nuclear weapons in general.

> Americans are often taught that the bombings resulted in less loss of life than a conventional land invasion of the home islands.

Or, at least, less loss of American life. If The United Kingdom had not consented to the bombs and they were shelved, what are the chances the U.S. would've lost e.g. 50,000 and Japan 150,000 before surrender?

Do you really believe the consent of UK was a real gating decision? Lol. I chalk that one up purely to diplomatic nice-ness.

The war department was planning for 500,000 American deaths and millions of Japanese.

The Purple Hearts ordered for the invasion of Japan are still being given out today.

Imperial Japan was pretty much fanatically supportive of war. I’m not saying the bombings were justified but the war would have been a lot longer without it and would have almost certainly been a lot deadlier on both sides.

Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries, or at least from Japan. Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes, while this is uncommon in the US. This probably influenced how "Oppenheimer" handled the matter.

(A comparison would perhaps be the difference between a Russian and a Polish film about the Sowjet invasion of Poland. The history here is viewed very differently in the Russian/Polish public.)

Maybe because a lot of our grandfathers lived through the war because they didn’t have to invade the home islands of Japan. So the “lives saved” argument is a little more visceral when I wouldn’t even exist today if it weren’t for the atom bomb.

I detest how the event is always portrayed as "either nuke two cities, or launch a complete invasion of Japan." At no point are other options considers, such as nuking another target or a start of peace talks rather than only an acceptance of a vague "unconditional surrender."

It’s a complex event. Those were the high level options, which remove the political factors.

In the context of being in the middle of bombing campaigns of cities, the moral turpitude of mass killing of people was long pushed aside. Total war meant everyone was part of the war effort.

So you’re left with a couple of factors. The prospect of invasion, the likelihood of getting a peaceful settlement, and the prospect of Soviet involvement.

Bombing and starvation wasn’t working fast enough to cause the intransigent military junta to bend. I think the idea was that the shock of atomic bombing would empower the collapse of the government, and cow the Soviets.

At the end, they came to the table, and the US accepted a conditional surrender.

Personally, I think if folks are going to be intellectually honest about the atomic bombings, you have to have the same position and advocacy for scaled destruction of cities in general. The firestorms, created by napalm and phosphorus and inflicted on Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg among others were no less a horror. Decrying the tool allows people to explain away from the context. A more efficient killing machine doesn’t make the killing any more or less righteous. I think the Japanese perspective of this has been around embracing the pursuit of peace. A worthy goal that we’ve abandoned.

The US did not accept a conditional surrender.

The Japanese came to the table with a conditional surrender, the condition being that the institution of the Emperor remain in place. The US rejected it. The Japanese came back to the table and accepted an unconditional surrender. The US then kept the imperial system in place anyway.

Sounds like they got their conditions to me, with a fig leaf in front of it.

> Maybe because a lot of our grandfathers lived through the war because they didn’t have to invade the home islands of Japan

I'm sure the American leadership wasn't enthused at the thought of the USSR conquering Japan and establishing a socialist state. Towards the end, the fighting stopped being about WWII and more about what came afterwards.

Without looking at the internal rail network of the USSR in 1944 - I assume the soviets had a leg up (logistically) for an invasion of Japan vs the US; having to hop from island to island in the Pacific.

War crimes vs necessary evils appear to be in the eye of each beholder. Heh, consider the U.S.' War Between the States, a/k/a Civil War, a/k/a War of Northern Aggression. Even nearly 160 years after, there's plenty of cultural controversy over who was evil and who was in the right. Even recent government banning of old flag motifs, tearing down of statues, and renaming of domestic military bases hasn't taken the wind out of those old sails.

> Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries

I think you mean the current view of non-American generations which have never experienced or are third or four generation of an international conflict like the WWI and/or the WWII? A lot of people died in these conflicts. They were not broadcasted by TikTok, YouTube, and/or Instagram. They where not likes.

I mean, this is an unique event in history in the context of other very unique events at a huge scale. Thinking about a war crime is trying to bring a post rationality to many events that are far from that reductionism.

Here in Sweden I can't recall such discussions. Large casualties from battles in Leningrad and Berlin involved millions of civilian deaths, but it mostly the actions made afterward when citizens surrender that get classified as a war crime and not the battle itself. Even explicit bombing of citizens, like The Blitz, are usually not refereed as a war crime even if it should fit the definition.

However, when discussing wars occurring in modern time, aerial and artillery bombardment that hit civilian targets do get refereed as war crime. Anti-personnel mines has also been added, which is seen as a war crime by most countries except for those who continue to use them.

well the countries most affected by Japan's atrocities (including the second most populous country in the world) certainly don't see it as such.

if anything I would say that most of the world's population do not see it as much

Near as I can tell, the nukes were far less of a war crime than the fire bombings (which killed far more). And the fire bombings get far less press.

Nukes are far more sensational and abstract I guess, compared to the terrible reality of burning hundreds of thousands alive more slowly in their own homes.

Moral of the story I guess - don’t start shit.

> Moral of the story I guess - don’t start shit.

The real moral people are rightly taking away from it is "win your wars".

And I'd assume Chinese people get to look at it from the same lens: if shit ever hits the fan, they better win whatever the price is, nothing else will even remotely matter.

True I guess. If Japan had won, it wouldn't have mattered if they started it or not, they still wouldn't have been nuked ("ethical win"? except for all the really nasty shit they were doing to everyone) and we certainly wouldn't be having any ethical hand wringing about what happened during the war.

They still suppress most of it!

Folks from South East Asian countries (I'm from Singapore) that were occupied by the Japanese army and witnessed extreme brutality, cruelty and inhumane atrocities generally rejoiced when the bombs were detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Most folks that lived through that period actually wished for the US to also bomb Tokyo to annihilate the Japanese Imperial family, as they rightfully or wrongly attributed them to Japan's slide to a brutal colonizer nation.

Some examples of Japanese war crimes:

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128323588

> "Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes..."

Definitely not in any of the countries occupied by Japan before and during the war.

Yeah, how is it surprising that the country on the receiving end of the attack has a different viewpoint?

Given the lack of collective atonement for atrocities committed by the japanese, it feels like a form of whataboutism to me.

At the end of the day, both the allies and axis powers were constantly committing war crimes by targeting civilian pops. Hopefully this never happens again, but it’s not like it was unusual for any side at this time.

> Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes,

I'm from the UK and born in the 1960s and have not heard that as a mainstream view. I've seen a bit of chatter on the Web about it, but nothing substantial.

There is very little dispute that the nuclear bombings were horrible, but it was all out war. We'd had the destruction of much of Europe including the carpet bombings and resulting firestorms causing widespread deaths. Also many of our relatives are buried in what is modern day Thailand and Myanmar after fighting on the Pacific front. WW2 was brutal on many fronts and the bombing of military, industrial, and civilian areas was a part of that, but I don't recall it being called a war crime as a child nor in most modern discussion. It was a raw fight for survival which is hard to comprehend today.

Hitler was developing atomic weaponry, despite the other many technological advances they made luckily for the world he was further behind than the allies thought as I understand.

If the war hadn't finished there, the world would be a different place. The Russians would have advanced further and it's unlike there would be a South Korea for instance. There is also the issue of did those bombings show the world what a nuclear war would be like and thus drive the stalemate of the cold war. Had they not been used in anger, would America or Russia be more casual about attacking each other in the subsequent years once they were both full armed.

This is why history is selectively taught at schools. Here in the UK we werent taught anything about Hiroshima but whilst its portrayed as shortening the war, thats using an argument which is hard to prove.

It also means that once that step is taken, ie dropping the bomb, there is no going back, the US will have to remain the dominant power for the foreseeable future in order to prevent retaliation. This then underminds the US rhetoric and western/nato rhetoric when looking at developing countries and countries improving like we see with Russia and China and Chinese desires to bring Taiwan under their fold.

Last century, mid 80's I remember a conversation on what subjects to study for UK GCSE's. If we had to take a language, most could only study French, those in the top also studied German and could take that as an language exam subject.

This person same age, ie teenage said they were going to study Mandarin, and I asked why. Well his father worked in the City of London and they could see back in the mid 80's China was going to over take everything economically in the next few decades. Fast forward to now and thats what you are seeing along with the European bloc aka the EU being formed.

So it looks like economics is being used to drive the creation of trading blocks and these economic blocs appear to drive political blocs, but the local media spin things to divert peoples attention away from whats really going on.

Anyway this Hiroshima film is likely to placate the Japanese elders and remind them they are not forgotten as are the events that took place.

Me personally I detest violence, and I couldnt think of a worse job than being told to go kill someone based on someone elses orders, no matter how it is spun. I've heard about some of the things that went on in Japan, I dont know how true they are, like all of history I take it with a pinch of salt because of the saying, the victor writes the history books, but even now I cant believe so many people were willing to go fight for a side, its just an out and out bad situation whatever side you are on.

>because of the saying, the victor writes the history books,

Yeah, in all my history books, the bad guys always lost and the good guys always won 100% of the time. What are the odds of that? /s

I know, but its never really taught how much more complicated the situation is that leads to the start of a war. At best it documents events, but history at least in my case never went into the politics. History was more a case of just remembering facts, but teaching might have changed a bit since my time.

One example of some of the stuff I heard the imperialist forces were up to in Japan, again I dont know how much is true or not, I wasnt there, but I do also read conspiracy theories to broaden my horizons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita%27s_gold

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Japanese_Army_during_...

You get the gist of things in school and can later pursue further education either through more institutional learning or independently seeking out information on you're own. Which you've seemingly have done.

Schools couldn't possibly teach the entirety of human history from every perspective.

> Schools couldn't possibly teach the entirety of human history from every perspective.

Schools could at least start by explaining there is always two sides to every argument though, instead of being forced stealth propaganda down the throats of impressionable minds.

Were you referring to the bible, the koran, the talmud and other religious texts?

> I cant believe so many people were willing to go fight for a side

The price of freedom is always blood.

Don't take your freedoms as a given - many have died for them.

Freedom is death, dont big up the slavery now. Thats why euthanasia is not legal in so many countries.

... and the British (and everyone in the 'enlightened West') are taught that savage destruction of Asia (incl. India/China) by European powers was for their own benefit and that they ought to be grateful for having had their ancestors murdered, subject to famine, and sometimes outright genocide (not to mention having their cultures completely destroyed to the point of total alienation).

They even do this with the so-called 'enlightened Islamic invaders' in India. The West has pathological hatred for the 'inferior pagans' and it shows very clearly; and indeed there's very clear evidence for this in white-supremacist fields like Indology[1], where half their time is spent bad-mouthing India, and the other half appropriating her.

[1]. The Nay Science - A history of German Indology (OUP).

I'm British and don't recognise most of your points.

Can someone parse the title for me?

I feel like there might be a couple of garden paths in there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

"1953 'Phantom' A-bomb film 'Hiroshima,' with 88,000 extras, screening in Tokyo" > The 1953 movie "Hiroshima", about the atom bomb, will be screening in Tokyo. The movie had 88,000 extras. (The word 'Phantom' is confusing. According the article, the movie is called a "phantom" movie because it was produced in Japan but was not released in Japan due to a dispute between the publisher and the filmmakers.)

For context: "the phantom of ___(幻の___)" is a common clickbait phrase in Japanese media, used in similar manners to "legendary", "forbidden" or "hidden" in English. I would guess "A Forgotten 1953 Film 'Hiroshima'" would be a less accurate but more understandable translation.

Oh that is helpful thank you!

Thank you!

There is also an excellent documentary called The Day After Trinity. It is IMO well balanced and has interviews with a lot of the physicists who actually worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, and a few who went to Japan after the blasts to document the aftermath.

It is on the Archive: https://archive.org/details/thedayaftertrinity/thedayaftertr...

Also worth mentioning is the BBC podcast The Bomb:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08llv8n/episodes/downloads

Also on Criterion Collection / Channel - https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-day-after-trinity/video...

“ The story portrays the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.' Aug. 6, 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with some 88,000 residents, many of them survivors, performing as extras.”

I wonder in how many induced PTSD. That term did not exist in the 1950s and maybe was not understood or at least appreciated.

It's been around a lot longer. We've called it Shell Shock, War Neurosis, Battle Fatigue and several other things. It's well documented. PTSD, imo, is just another layer of indirection when referring to trauma. It's name provides significantly less meaning than something like "shell shock" which gets right to the point of the matter. PTSD was certainly appreciated. Patton famously got a reaming from Eisenhower for how he treated shell shocked troops during the war.

"Shell shock" becomes a euphemism when you're talking about people traumatized by something other than artillery. PTSD is more general, and therefore more precise in the general case.

Euphemism means using softer words. Getting shellshock from a machine gun is not an euphemism

The context of this conversation is people who were traumatized by an atomic bomb. I think atomic bomb to artillery qualifies as such a softening.

And Post Traumatic STRESS Disorder isn't?

You got an atomic bomb dropped on you, experienced a literal apocalyptic sun consuming everything you loved first hand and all you (impersonal) can come up with is "stress"?

If you want to stay coherent then we should have made up a term specifically to tackle the world-ending experiences these people lived through.

Having known a few people with (war-induced) PTSD, I think stress disorder is a good description of their outward symptoms. However I think your perspective is valid and can see why you think this sounds diminishing.

It’s not “stress disorder”, it’s “disorder”. As in: “(Post-(traumatic stress)) Disorder”. Disorder that follows traumatic stress.

Regardless, PTSD is a terrible term because it's non-descriptive. It also makes it more difficult for a person to be empathetic to a sufferer of PTSD because it's not an on/off switch and more of a spectrum. A term like "shell shock" illustrates the actual trauma and enables people to be understand better why a person might act the way they do. It is often easier for a person with PTSD to describe themselves as a "victim of X" or "experienced Y" because the term is so disconnected from actual meaning. It belongs in medical textbooks, certainly, but in spoken language it's worthless. A perfect example of jargon.

That doesn’t really make sense. A victim of x doesn’t necessarily get PTSD from that. PTSD describes a specific set of symptoms that can occur after experiencing a traumatic experience.

Personally I think “post traumatic stress disorder” is more descriptive and accurate than “shell shock”. The person isn’t shocked, they’re traumatized. Also it turns out different things can make sense to people in different ways. Probably the term is less important than the understanding.

> The person isn’t shocked, they’re traumatized.

The terms "in shock" and "shocked" are not equivalent. The former means traumatized, while the latter means someone is extremely surprised.

Shell shock is just the outdated term for what we now recognize as combat-induced PTSD. Before that it was deemed cowardice or malingering.

George Carlin's take on the words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0

PTSD is more than a layer of indirection, it’s a bed for the current direction of research focused on trauma. Shell shock isn’t a good term for home abuse for example, but the current dogma is that similar neurological mechanisms underly these different kinds of trauma, thus joining them all under the term PTSD.

The benefit of this umbrella term is, or course, contingent on there actually existing such a universal neurological pattern of PTSD, which I don’t think can yet be decisively established.

Shellshock => Battle Fatigue => Operational Exhaustion => Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

https://www.thoughtco.com/soft-language-euphemism-1692111

I'm willing to bet it helped people come to terms with what happened more than it made things worse. Recontextualizing traumatic events in to a form you have control over is a powerful tool.

If anyone is interested in a documentary about the survivors of the atom bombs, I cannot recommend White Light/Black Rain strong enough. I believe it is streaming on HBO or whatever in the US.

It goes without saying that it is very graphic and not for the faint hearted.

Edit: here it is on YouTube

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C3ARusnC37o

Frankly, for all of the hand wringing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it pales in comparison to Japanese atrocities in China and many other places.

In stark contrast to Germany where every school kid learns about the millions killed in the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking and many, many more atrocities by Imperial Japan are routinely denied altogether in Japan.

When it comes to the U.S., I can say that I certainly learned about the bombings, it was presented as extremely morally ambiguous, our class held a debate over it, and I was shown pictures of atomic bomb victims in the textbooks I was given.

On youtube (paid): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L8YIS2DCVU

I'm imagining that coordinating 88,000 extras for the shoot had to be challenging.

I'm sure the title was truncated for length, but missing "screening in Tokyo" gives a very different impression of what the story is about.

I thought some new film was being made by Hollywood with 88,000 extras filming a scene tomorrow.

Ok, I've attempted to make it clearer

(submitted title was "'Phantom' A-bomb film 'Hiroshima,' with 88,000 extras, set for July 30" and yes HN's title limit is 80 chars so the full title wouldn't fit)

This is what Oppenheimer should’ve been about.

Not

SPOILERS

Mediocre politics, sex, boredom biopic.

The movie was based off a book, which was about Oppenheimer hence the title.

I thought it was amazing, sure some parts were a bit long.

Makes sense if the movie Hiroshima is more focused on Hiroshima than Oppenheimer.

A movie about Oppenheimer's life should be about... the immediate fallout of the bomb on the Japanese population?

I think his role in that overshadows the rest of his life.

I think he was a human with a rich multi-faceted life and this line of reasoning is exactly how we arrive in 2023 with people who, for instance, don't know about Columbus' genocides because "discovering America overshadowed the rest of his life so we didn't bother to cover it in school".

Yeah, no.

Better for a Columbus movie to focus on the genocides than his sex life, no?

A movie about Oppenheimer should’ve at least shown what haunted him and weight of his decisions, not one minute (!) of Oppenheimer watching some background video showing surprised face like on this video.

https://youtu.be/6pc0u-iqIDw

I disliked the anarchism erasure of portraying the Spanish civil war as a "communist party" cause (the authoritarian vanguardist type of communism that the movie focused on)

Good point, was it understood in the US as anarchism at the time, though?

Communism is an anarchist philosophy, at it's root. If it seems a bit weird because (IIRC) this historical dialectic goes:

- bourgeois revolution

- Workers revolution

- Bigger state

- Even bigger state

- Underpants gnomes

- Anarchist utopia

Only half joking... this is what turn of the last century communists believed.

As the saying goes, if everyone is part of the state, nobody is part of the state. At some scale, human organizations start to break down.

anarchists (well maybe except for insurrectionist anarchists) believe in communism as an outcome, but they most definitely do not agree with vanguardism as a means of achieving it. vanguardism is just a kind of elitist authoritarianism.

I would phrase it this way: (non-communist) anarchists believe in communal living as an outcome

Aware that this isn't historically accurate terminology but very few people will appreciate the nuances your definitions requires, as the modern meanings have diverged

>This is what Oppenheimer should’ve been about

The movie called "Oppenheimer" is mainly about Oppenheimer (shocking, right?), it's not about "the bomb", otherwise it would have been called "Trinity" or "Manhattan" or something.

If you want to see a movie about "the bomb" don't watch Oppenheimer.

> During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history.

Literally from the description of the movie.

It promised work of Oppenheimer and team of scientists working on the Manhattan project. Instead it’s a shitty avengers rip off where Oppenheimer assembles team of scientists without any substance and literally no focus on Manhattan project.

I expected to see at least the Imitation Game level movie, not subpar plot focused on sex and politics.

The film was fascinating, quite nuanced, and beautifully shot. It’s about people, their relationships, and the evolution of their worldviews much more than it was about a detonation.

"The bomb didnt beat Japan, Stalin did"

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

That garbage piece of writing completely ignores nearly 80 years of conventional history which includes first-hand account from the very Japanese council cited in the story.

Absolute joke content that doesn’t belong on a site like this.

What did the Japanese council say? Link me something to read!

Also, what do you mean by "a site like this?" Lmao

Would you mind pointing out what exactly is wrong in the article? Right now it isn't very clear what you take issue with. Most of what I've read about the surrender of Japan puts a lot of emphasis on the Soviet invasion, not only on the bombings, so I would be interested to know what you mean.

The article is from a respected foreign policy site, and makes a case that is well accepted by historians. You can say that the bombs were still justified(which I believe), but the attitude in these comments are borderline insane. Makes you think americans can't handle a little criticism without losing their mind.

Fascinating article. Website is awful though. Here's the article without auto-playing video, missing ads, page crashing, and paragraphs of text randomly jumping around the page: https://archive.ph/HkeMn

  >     Many Japanese soldiers were soon on their way home from their bases
  > around Japan and were beginning to crowd the trains and buses.  It was
  > difficult for some of them to understand the surrender.  Although most of
  > the Japanese army in the field was still unbeaten, it was stretched thin
  > all across Asia.  The string of horrendous losses at Leyte, Iwo Jima,
  > Saipan, and Okinawa and America's superior air power against the home
  > islands and the use of atomic weapons were evidence enough that the war
  > could not be won.  And then, of course, when the Soviet Union entered the
  > war against Japan after the Hiroshima bomb, there was great fear that our
  > old hypothetical enemy would take advantage of our weakened condition and
  > try to occupy us.  The Soviets seized the southern half of Sakhalin island
  > and four islands just north of Hokkaido - the closest one is in sight of
  > the Japanese mainland - and they still hold them today.  The United States
  > returned Okinawa, which they seized in 1945, to Japanese sovereignty in
  > 1972.
  >
  >     In 1945 the Russians stormed into Manchuria - our buffer against them
  > for so many years - when our forces were relatively small and weakened,
  > unable to defend against massive Russian armor.  There was chaos as
  > Japanese civilians and soldiers tried to escape from the Russians, but in
  > the end about five hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner
  > and sent to labor camps in Siberia and other places in the Soviet Union.
  > Some of them remained prisoners and virtual slave laborers for as long as
  > twelve years.
  >  ...
  > There are those who say to this day that the emperor's decision to
  > surrender was brought about almost as much by the fear of the Soviets - the
  > fear that they might invade the home islands or partition the country, as
  > had been done to Germany - as by the horrible events at Hiroshima and
  > Nagasaki.
  >
  > - MADE IN JAPAN AKIO MORITA and SONY (c) 1986  (any typos are mine)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1008101.Made_in_Japan

According to British historian Mark Felton:

"The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23 million of these were ethnic Chinese. It is a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust. In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. In Japan, it is government policy. But the evidence against the navy – precious little of which you will find in Japan itself – is damning."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#:~:text=....

Crimes all around. War is bad, actually?

> Crimes all around. War is bad, actually?

I'm not sure why this is in response to my comment, which speaks nothing of war crimes nor has anything resembling an accusatory tone, nor does it excuse Japan as innocent.

The excerpt in my comment was transcribed and posted because it speaks to the Soviet Union's entering the war in-context, relative to the atomic bombings, from a Japanese perspective.

Good point. I thought you were emphasizing the labor camp aspect of it.

Even if the Soviet Union had remained neutral, Japan would have certainly surrendered within a few more months after some more atomic bombs. No nation could possibly sustain a war effort while losing a major city every few weeks.

The article argues more than 50% of 66 cities were already destroyed by conventional bombs, and then we dropped the nukes. A full bombing run of 500 planes could equal about a quarter of a nuke, but with better targeting. According to the article.

I think using the bombs with the information the US had at the time was justified. From the information the US had, Japan had a quite credible claim that they would "never" surrender unconditionally, though lots of Japanese people and military units would surrender even if Japan itself officially did not, making it not literally "never". With nuclear bombs the US could have kept hitting them with increasing levels of force, probably not possible with conventional bombs. If the war had continued until 1950 most of inhabited Japan would have been destroyed, and the US would have won even without a single surrender.

It's incorrect, in that the Japanese didn't offer surrender until after the nuclear bombs.

This article sounds laughably insane to me, not a historian but hear me out anyway

Japan wanted to surrender:

> “But, in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that, although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1.”

Or maybe not ? Which is it ?

> “Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day.”

Japan’s leaders were worried about the divinity of the Emperor. Insane to believe these people inhabited the 20th century at the same time the Nuclear bomb was developed:

> “What if they decided to put the emperor—who was believed to be divine—on trial? What if they got rid of the emperor and changed the form of government entirely?”

They had their own nuclear program:

> Third, the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program.

The US (not Stalin) was having their way with Japan through the summer of 1945:

> In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.

Japan’s junta didn’t care about it’s citizens:

> Japan’s leaders consistently displayed disinterest in the city bombing that was wrecking their cities.

They should have been Mussolini’d along with the Emperor

AKA the find out stage:

> The Japanese were in a relatively difficult strategic situation. They were nearing the end of a war they were losing. Conditions were bad.

No shit sherlock - they couldn’t even project power beyond their island

But, they had two plans! How had the other plans been going so far ? Doesn’t matter:

You know shot is bad when you have two plans to surrender:

> They had two plans for getting better surrender terms; they had, in other words, two strategic options. The first was diplomatic. Japan had signed a five-year neutrality pact with the Soviets in April of 1941, which would expire in 1946. A group consisting mostly of civilian leaders and led by Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori hoped that Stalin…

OME You must have been truly desperate to come to Stalin for help in 1945

> The second plan was military.. They hoped to use Imperial Army ground troops to inflict high casualties on U.S. forces when they invaded.

Hope is not a strategy

> It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions.

Hmm where had we seen this before

> Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months.

Did they predict that they would lose their Navy and have two atomic bombs dropped on their home land ?

Anyways, we are supposed to believe that based on this timeline,

Aug 6 - Hiroshima Aug 8 - Stalin invades China Aug 9 - Nagasaki Aug 11 - Hirohito surrenders

after getting blown to pieces on their own home islands, with no Navy, Stalin invading China was somehow the final straw.

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