< 'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Eight months after premiering in the U.S., the Academy Award-winning movie "Oppenheimer" opened today in Japan. The film's topic is a sensitive one in Japan, where the atomic bombs that Oppenheimer helped to build killed some 200,000 people in 1945. NPR's Anthony Kuhn talked to moviegoers at the film's debut in the city of Nagasaki.

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: (Speaking Japanese).

ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: One of the most controversial points about the J. Robert Oppenheimer film is director Christopher Nolan's choice not to depict the carnage and the agony that the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but instead to focus on Oppenheimer. Housewife Tsuyuko Iwanai shared her thoughts as she exited the theater.

TSUYUKO IWANAI: (Speaking Japanese).

KUHN: "The film was only about the side that dropped the A-bomb," she says. "I wish they had included the side it was dropped on."

Moviegoer and Nagasaki resident Koichi Takeshita explained how he read Oppenheimer's face.

KOICHI TAKESHITA: (Through interpreter) The last look of Oppenheimer in the film was that of pain. It was a look of either regret because he was the person who made the A-bomb, or he didn't know what to do and was sad as tens of thousands of people died.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KUHN: The movie has little to say about Nagasaki. According to "American Prometheus," the book on which the movie was based, Oppenheimer said that he generally supported the U.S. government's decision to use the A-bomb, but he never understood the need to bomb Nagasaki after destroying Hiroshima. Oppenheimer himself visited Japan in 1960 but never went to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Some A-bomb survivors have seen the film. Among them is 80-year-old doctor Masao Tomonaga. He says that when he looked at the atomic bomb blast in the film, he saw himself.

MASAO TOMONAGA: Under that explosion, I was there. I was there in Nagasaki.

KUHN: He doesn't remember the bomb blast because he was only 2 years old at the time. His family later explained to him that he survived because his home was about a mile and a half from ground zero. He was asleep in bed when the bomb was dropped. The blast flattened his house, but he survived unscathed. Seeing the film helped him visualize it.

TOMONAGA: I was able to, for the first time, imagine my situation sleeping on a bed under the 600-meter-high explosion. So that was my first impression about the movie.

KUHN: Three days a week, Tomonaga cares for A-bomb survivors at this home run by the Catholic Church on the outskirts of Nagasaki. He's treated thousands of them, including 700 leukemia patients, which is his specialty. The average age of the home's 450 residents is in the mid-80s. Being an A-bomb survivor himself, Tomonaga says he'll eventually move in and spend the rest of his life here. Tomonaga says the director, Nolan, could have used actors to recreate the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, he says...

TOMONAGA: (Through interpreter) There are many still photos of bomb victims' charred bodies, so those could have been used. But I think the depiction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Oppenheimer's mind and through his words was successful, and it was a better way to make the movie appeal to viewers.

KUHN: Back at the theater, the last of the audience trickles out. The house was far from packed for the first show of the day, but Oppenheimer was important enough to pull in some folks who don't usually go to the movies, such as housewife Tsuyuko Iwanai.

IWANAI: (Speaking Japanese).

KUHN: "I came because things are going on in many places, such as Ukraine," she says. "And I feel nuclear weapons are more likely to be used these days."

Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Nagasaki, Japan.

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDWIG GORANSSON'S "CAN YOU FEEL THE MUSIC")

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