In September 1960, 15 years after the nuclear disaster in Hiroshima y Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer traveled to Japan. The father of the atomic bomb did not set foot in either of the two cities bombed by the United States. he stayed in Tokio and in Osaka, where he had been invited to give some conferences. But what the physicist did do was hold a press conference for a small group of Japanese journalists, knowing that they were not going to be easy to answer the questions that would fall to him.
– “I would like to ask you, although the question may be a bit naive, to say a few words about your feelings on coming to Japan as the man responsible for the development of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
(Dressed in a suit and smoking his usual pipe, Oppenheimer smiled at the journalist, quickly answered that it was by no means a naive question and took a few seconds to reflect) “I don’t think coming to Japan has changed my sense of Anguish about my role in this whole part of the story. Nor has it made me fully regret my responsibility for the company’s technical success. It’s not that I don’t feel bad. It’s just that I don’t feel worse today than I did last night.
He 78th anniversary of the atomic bomb that launched the Enola Gay on Hiroshima, leaving 140,000 dead, has coincided with the boom world movie Christopher Nolan which addresses the figure of the American scientist who directed the Manhattan Project, the research and development plan for the first nuclear weapons, including Little boy and Fat Man, the bombs that fell on Japan, where Oppenheimer’s film curiously continues without a release date. premiere.
Too sensitive a film for Japanese audiences? Peter C. Pugsley, an expert on the Japanese big screen and Professor of Cinema at the University of Adelaide (Australia), does not think so. He recalls that there are many Japanese filmmakers who have explored what happened during the Second World War.