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29 December 2023

How Japan’s wartime history haunts its popular culture

In two new blockbusters – Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron – Japanese filmmakers grapple with atomic bomb censorship and pacifism.

By Yo Zushi

At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, a US bombardier called Major Thomas Ferebee did what he later described as the “one big thing” he had accomplished in his life: he pressed a toggle onboard a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, releasing a single bomb over the skies of Hiroshima. It plummeted for less than 45 seconds before exploding with a flash so bright that it stunned the airmen on the plane. A dark cloud began to rise up on the horizon behind them. Some 60 per cent of the city’s built-up areas were toppled by the force of the blast or the flames that followed; tens of thousands died, most of them civilians.

When news of the world’s first atomic attack reached Tokyo, Yoshio Nishina, the physicist who had headed Japan’s aborted efforts to develop its own nuclear weapons, was dispatched to Hiroshima to investigate. He reported back to the office of the Japanese prime minister Kuniaki Koiso, “What I’ve seen so far is unspeakable. Tens of thousands dead. Bodies piled up everywhere. Sick, wounded, naked people wandering around in a daze.”

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