In Japan none of the two films that have become the cinematographic phenomenon of summer in a large part of the planet are still being projected: Barbie, starring the famous doll, will not hit the screens on August 11, while oppenheimer, which recreates the biography of the scientist considered “the father” of the atomic bomb, does not yet have a date because Japanese distributors usually wait a few months to launch Hollywood hits. But that does not prevent them from becoming the source of intense controversy in the country that began on social networks, has been heating up in the last week and reaches its peak this Sunday, when the 78th anniversary of the launch of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to be followed on Wednesday by that of Nagasaki.
The controversial memes that merge the image of Barbie with the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima are causing an intense debate in Japan about the Second World War and, as intellectuals and academics in various media are warning, reflect the emotional disconnection of the new generations with the nuclear holocaust. Social networks, radio or television programs and newspaper articles from all over Japan condemn the trivialization of images labeled with he hashtag #Barbenheimer due to the coincidence of both premieres in the West.
I can’t forgive it as a country damaged by the atomic bomb.
Will someone happily use the Holocaust or the Nazis for movies?
Will you write fan art?
It should be a big fuss.
Why is only Japan’s atomic bomb considered so slightly?#NoBarbenheimer pic.twitter.com/pxNjH6ZUI9— ニニ(RDC6参加予定) (@MadsStm1122) July 31, 2023
The Hiroshima mushroom, one of the iconic images of the 20th century, appears integrated into Barbie’s fuchsia universe in a meme compilation being made by a Japanese Twitter user identified as @okustet. In one of them, the doll advances through a pink plastic city that is blown to pieces by the atomic explosion. In another, the nuclear mushroom appears as the background of a romantic landscape that Barbie and Oppenheimer contemplate holding hands. The most grotesque and inconsiderate to the victims of the explosion shows a Barbie whose skin falls apart as she is watched by a mushroom-shaped nuclear monster. “Do Americans find this funny? I don’t understand it”, asks @okustet after explaining the origin of the memes.
A group of victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb has launched a campaign on social networks to ask the North American distributor of the film Barbie a public apology for endorsing a satirical meme of the explosion with the phrase “It will be a summer you will never forget.” Many users have joined the controversy with the hashtag #NoBarbenheimer, under which didactic comments, historical references and also challenging and insulting memes against the United States often appear. A Twitter account called @kakinamasu has posted a meme showing the Twin Towers in New York emitting magenta smoke, accompanied by a question in Japanese and English: “What do you think? This is what you do.”
Luli van der Does, a sociologist at the University of Hiroshima, considers that the trivialization of #Barbenheimer memes responds to the different way of teaching in the East and West the tragedy that divided the history of Japan in two: “Textbooks and educational systems around the world have presented Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply as stories of destruction and power. They never talk about what happened under the (atomic) cloud, because it’s not nice to see people burn to death with their eyes falling out of their sockets,” she explains. Let us remember that the bomb dropped on August 6, 1945 by the United States on Hiroshima caused at least the death of at least 140,000 people, in the first nuclear attack against civilians. Three days later it launched another on Nagasaki, where an estimated 74,000 people died.
The oblivion of the nuclear horror
“The lack of emotional connection with the consequences of the atomic bomb favors simplification,” warns Luli van der Does, who admits that the generational distance contributes to increasing the virality of #Barbenheimer. For bomb survivors, who have spent almost eight decades trying to raise awareness about the danger of atomic arsenals, it is “painful to see that young people have no idea of the atrocity of using nuclear weapons against humans,” she continues.
The sociologist also explains that in Japan, too, education about the consequences of the bombs is beginning to be “sanitized” and is becoming “less visceral.” For example, him Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum it has withdrawn some mannequins that very realistically showed the effects of the nuclear explosion on the human body, and in Japanese schools the reading of a manga entitled gene the barefoot (Hadashi no Gen), which crudely portrays the lives of the victims at the moments of the explosion.
The frivolity of the #Barbenhaimer memes is also attributed to the optimistic vision of nuclear energy that has been instilled in the United States, where the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were neutralized with the Atoms for Peace program, which since 1953 gave rise to the commercial use of atomic energy. Professor Takao Takahara, from Meiji Gakuin University, in a recent interview on the private channel TBS to explain the #Barbenheimer memes, referred to the widespread perception in the United States of the atomic bomb as the “winning weapon” that forced Japanese surrender in the Pacific War.
However, opposing the American vision is de rigueur in the Japanese political world, as confirmed in 2007 by the then Defense Minister, Fumio Kyuma, who had to resign after suggesting that the atomic bombings were “an inevitable way to put an end to the Second World War”. Kyuma contradicted the position of the victims, called the “irradiated” (hibakusha in Japanese), and their descendants that the use of nuclear weapons is never justified. In any case, Professor Van der Does believes that the #Barbenheimer is serving at least to put the atomic bomb back in the social conversation and can help remind us that nuclear weapons are capable of causing irreversible damage to human beings. “They are not a passing joke,” she recalls.
Every year, at the ceremonies on August 6 and 9 commemorating the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death toll from radioactivity is updated and messages are sent for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The renunciation of possessing, producing or importing nuclear weapons has been one of the pillars of Japanese pacifism proclaimed in the 1947 Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of an offensive army that participates in armed conflicts outside the archipelago.
However, Chinese expansionism in East Asia and the need to increase its army have been pushing the Japanese country towards a “proactive peace” policy whose objective is a gradual rearmament. Japan announced last December that it will double its military budget to 2% of GDP in the next four years. Since Japan’s military industry is almost non-existent, it would allocate a large part of its budget to buying weapons from the United States, its second largest trading partner after China and its first military ally in the world. Since the end of World War II, the United States has maintained military bases throughout the Japanese archipelago, where some 50,000 soldiers are stationed.
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