Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Universal has yet to announce a Japan release date for Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which opens everywhere else on 7.21.

Oppenheimer is the saga of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atom bomb and quoter of Vishnu’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

I don’t know if Japanese distributors are åntsy about screening Oppenheimer or not, but it’s obviously understandable if they are. 200,000 Japanese civilians died after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45, respectively. If I was a Japanese citizen and my great-grandfather had been incinerated in one of those blasts, I would have issues.

And yet, oddly, Oppenheimer reportedly doesn’t dramatize these attacks upon Japan. It’s only fair to ask why. The essence of Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy and the A-bomb terror itself, after all, manifested less in the 7.16.45 Trinity explosion than in the murder of 200,000 Japanese civilians the following month. The story is the story.

Posted on 5.10.23: We all understand that Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal 7.21) will primarily focus on the Manhattan Project and particularly J. Robert Oppenheimer‘s recruitment by the U.S. government in the early ’40s to run the Los Alamos Laboratory, which ultimately resulted in the climactic Trinity explosion — the first-ever nuclear blammo on 7.16.45.

We also know that the film will focus on the Oppenheimer security hearing of 1954, and how the mercurial physicist came under fire for allegedly harboring ambiguous or disloyal attitudes regarding the development of advanced nuclear devices, and how he was more or less broken by the scorn of this investigation.

I was thinking yesterday that it will seem strange if not anti-climactic if the dropping of atomic bombs upon the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (8.6.45) and Nagasaki (8.9.45) is not also dramatized. And yet the word around the campfire is that Nolan’s movie doesn’t depict the Japanese maelstroms.

We also understand that the Los Alamos team wasn’t diverse. To the best of my knowledge no people of color were involved. Will wokesters bitterly complain that Oppenheimer is unacceptably white and therefore racist, or will they exude smug satisfaction by saying “obviously this is what white people are best at…causing terrible death and destruction and mass murder,” etc.